Rob Chilson - Refuge

Derec felt his knees shaking and was glad he wasn’t standing.

“What?” He’d missed some of what she’d been saying.

“Need a sample,” she repeated. “We can’t give you the vaccine if you have the disease, at least in its later stages.”

The Key to Perihelion affected the stomach like this: a sudden drop as one went from gravity to free-fall instantly. Derec nearly threw up. Gulping, he said, “Y-yes, Ma’am,” and held out his arm.

Disease!

The possibility had always been there, associating with Ariel. But it was obvious that what she had wasn’t easily contagious. She had only mentioned once, more or less directly, howshe had contracted her illness, as a warning to him. But that was the only time they had come close to more than accidental physical contact. Now that he thought about it, she had kept her distance, even when she had clearly wanted and needed to be hugged. His Spacer’s horror of disease had not been as greatly allayed as he had thought, he realized, shaky. The prophylactic treatment R. David had given them had reassured him, Ariel’s attitude and his worry over her had reassured him, and the heedlessness of youth…

His eyes must have mirrored some of his horror, for Dr. Li looked at him sharply and said, “Don’t worry! You’re obviously in a very early stage, if you have it at all. And we’re going to give you a thorough going-over, to make sure you aren’t coming down with something else.”

They did that for the next half hour. The Human Medical Team would have been faster. but no less thorough. he thought.

“Good, you’re totally free of disease, so far as we can tell,” said Dr. Powell. “Fortunately, your intestinal microorganisms are not markedly different from the Terrestrial strains, and there’s as yet nothing else to worry about. Dr. Li, the vaccine…”

“Incidentally, we detected antitoxins to Burundi’s in your system,” said Dr. Li. “You may have had a mild case of the fever earlier; it may even still be latent in your system. However, the vaccine will immunize you totally.”

“Uh-” said Derec, as a thought took him. “Have I been a carrier all this time?”

Uneasily, he visualized Ariel and himself spreading disease all over Rockliffe Station, where they had crashlanded after escaping the pirate Aranimas. Any human who subsequently entered the station might contract the disease

“Perhaps, but don’t worry about it. Amnemonic plague is misnamed; it isn’t a true plague. It’s not infectious at all, and only minimally contagious. You have to exchange actual body fluids; it’s commonly passed in sexual intercourse, or in contaminated blood supplies. And occasionally by poorly sterilized hypodermics, out on the Settler worlds where they have to reuse their needles.”

That was a relief. But it left a puzzle: how had Derec been exposed to the disease, if not from breathing the air around Ariel? Had he had it before he’d met her on Aranimas’s ship?

He must have. How else had he lost his memory? But how, then, had he survived? If amnemonic plague only affected the memory after passing the blood-brain barrier, and among Spacers was invariably fatal when it did

Again he had missed something.

“I said, your wife is almost certainly going to live. Here, catch him!”

Derec didn’t know who did what; his vision had momentarily blanked. When the light came back, he was sitting and there was a tingle in his arm; a stimulant spray. he thought vaguely. They were proffering a glass of orange juice to him-perfectly normal orange juice, just like the oranges of Aurora. He wondered how much it had cost to ship it here, then realized that they must have bought orange tree seedlings sometime in the past, and raised their own.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

They stood around and watched him intently.

“Is there something?”

“Yes,” said Dr. Li reluctantly. “I hope you’re up to this. It…may upset you.”

Derec took another swallow of the juice, marveling again that it could be so exactly like Auroran juice. “I’m braced,” he said. “Go ahead.”

“Amnemonic plague is well-named, though it’s no plague. Your wife is losing her memory, and at a progressive rate. By the time we’ve cured her, there won’t be much of it left.”

Derec lay on the hard, narrow bed and wondered what Wolruf and Mandelbrot were doing. Probably still sitting out around Kappa Whale in the Star Seeker, waiting, waiting. Of course, they could not readily get space charts without a human to front for them, though Mandelbrot might try. It would not be unusual for a robot to open communications. But if the other ship insisted on speaking to the owner-captain -Star Seekers were small ships; he couldn’t very well be far from the controls. For that matter, Derec was uncertain how well Mandelbrot could lie in such circumstances.

Well, there was nothing he could do for them. He couldn’t leave Earth, and if he could, he couldn’t leave Ariel here. And Ariel was now raving in delirium in the section hospital in Webster Groves Sector, City of Saint Louis. A long way, he gathered, from the nearest spaceport, near New York.

Derec wished for a drink. He wished for a light snack, cookies at least, and fresh hot coffee, even synthetic coffee. In the next room was a robot, ready to spring into action at his slightest word-almost. It was an Earthly robot, in an Earthly City. Derec could send R. David out, but there was no assurance it would return-and it would not be with food, for Derec didn’t rate meals in his own apartment. Damn Dr. Avery for not arranging for higher ratings.

But that would have been more conspicuous, he supposed.

Light from the door shone across the bed. “Time to arise, Mr. Avery,” said R. David.

“Yes, thank you, R. David.”

Derec groaned silently and sat up to sit for a moment with his elbows on his knees, chin in hands. In the short life that he could remember, it had been one crisis after another. All I want, he decided, is peace and quiet, a little establishment on some mountain brook in the boondocks of Aurora or Nexon, maybe, with just a couple of robots and a landing field only big enough for my own machine and one other. Maybe the Solarians had the right idea; they never saw anybody, and lived totally surrounded by robots.

No, he had decided. That wasn’t such a good idea, after all.

Earth turned inside out, he thought vaguely. No better than-

“Mr. Avery, are you well?”

“Yes, R. David. Merely depressed. I worry about Ariel.”

That, the robot could well understand.

“Yes, Mr. Avery. I-also worry about her. But the doctors report her condition good, do they not?”

“Yes, they did last night, R. David. What she’s like today-” He left it, somber, dressed carelessly, and tucked some equipment into the little bath satchel he had bought the day before.

Admonishing R. David rather hollowly not to worry, he set off for the Personal, returned to drop off the satchel when he had showered and washed his extra clothing, and departed for the section kitchen. This part of the trip was so routine now that he neither saw nor was seen by the policemen in the corridors and junctions; he no longer stood out like a stranger.

Breakfast was, as usual, good, but to him, tasteless. Listlessly, Derec ate it, not even interested in a fact he had finally deduced: it was neither synthetic nor natural, but both. It was made of living things and was therefore natural, but was made by an artificial process and was therefore synthetic. The basis of three-quarters of it was yeast.

He suspected that there might be a steady, if small, market for Earthly food yeasts in the Spacer worlds, if Spacers could overcome their sense of superiority long enough to try it. Granted, Spacer high cuisine had no equal on Earth that Derec had tasted, but Spacer ships were usually furnished with synthesizers. So much/or Spacer cuisine, he thought.