After that, it was reminiscence and good food. Silv made good her threat and called for a trio of care-takers. Praeis's aching arm was numbed and stitched up tightly. She'd tried to shoo her daughters into the yard, but they refused to leave. They stayed near her all afternoon, seldom straying out of reach of each other or her until the sleeping mats were unrolled.
As her daughters fell asleep, Praeis lay on the edge of the mat listening to their breathing and trying to understand what they must be feeling. This was all so new to them—the random, incomprehensible attacks, the constant readiness. She had grown up like this. It was nothing. She had nourished her soul-hate of the ’Esaph, contempt for the t'Ciereth, fear of the Porath, for years. She'd breathed it. She'd swum in it.
But her daughters had known them as friends and schoolmates. They'd known peace. How would she explain this to them? How would she comfort them?
And that's not all you're going to have to explain to them, is it?
inquired a voice in the back of her mind. Praeis squeezed her eyes shut and tried to will the voice away, but it would not go.
One inch at a time, Praeis slid off the mat. She stood and silently picked her way across the room to a patch of moonlight mat filtered through the slit window. With trembling hands, she unfastened her belly guard and looked down at herself.
Her pouch had been flat for some time now. She'd gotten used to that. She wasn't young anymore. Sometime in the last few days, though, it had shriveled. Unsupported, it hung in wrinkled folds almost halfway down her thighs. She tried to tighten her muscles. The folds spasmed a little in response.
She swallowed hard. Her ears and skin trembled. She sat on the floor and cautiously reached between her legs, and found where all the swelling had gone.
She closed her eyes.
Ancestors Mine. Ancestors Mine. I accept this. I accept this because it is the natural way of life. I will pass on my soul willingly, but oh, why so fast?
“Mother?” Theia whispered. Cloth rustled behind her.
“No, daughter …” A shadow fell across the moonlit floor, and Praeis knew it was too late.
“Ancestors Mine!” Theia flung herself against Praeis's back and clung there like an infant. “No! No! You can't be!” She buried her face in the folds of Praeis's back. “You can't!”
Bodies stirred all across the room. Another shadow got to its feet. “Theia? What is it?” Res padded across to them.
Ancestors help me.
Res saw her and gaped.
“Res, get my belly guard. Everything's good. We'll go outside. With me.” She stood up, holding on to Theia's arms, so Theia could dangle from her shoulders. As quickly as she could, she got outside. Res traded behind, holding her belly guard.
Fortunately, there was enough moonlight that she could lead them across the lawns away from the buildings.
“Res, give me my guard and help me with your sister.” She bent down and felt Res pry Theia's fingers apart, murmuring, “It's good, my Sister, come here to me, it's good.” Theia finally let go and collapsed into her sister's arms. She curled up as if seeking to bury herself in Res's pouch.
Praeis's hands trembled as she strapped her belly guard back on. She turned around.
Theia's fear had soaked into Res. Res bent over her sister, her back and shoulders rippling like a river in flood.
Praeis knelt and gathered them both in her arms. Their fear enveloped her. Her heart raced, and her skin quivered. She fought it down. She swallowed it, as she had swallowed their night terrors when they were little. But this went on far longer than those ever did.
Finally, Res was able to speak. “You're Changing.”
“Yes.” Praeis stroked her ears. “My second-mother Changed early, but my mother did not, so I hoped it had not carried through.”
Theia lifted her head. The streaks of tears down her face glistened in the moonlight. “I can't take any more, Mother. I can't. I want to go home.”
Guilt surged through her, and Praeis clamped brutally down on it. “Home or here, this would still be happening.”
“But not like this!”
“Yes, like this. And right now.” She tightened her hold on both of them. “The only difference is what's happening around us.”
Res's ears drooped so far the tips almost dragged her shoulders. “If we asked you to take us home now, would you?”
Praeis's heart froze. “Are you going to ask me, my own?”
Resaime combed her sister's ears. “No,” she said softly. “We're not. Are we, Theia?”
Theia lifted her trembling head. “What are we going to do?”
Praeis sighed and rocked them all back and forth a little. “Tomorrow, I'm going to the hospital where Lynn's David works. Alone.” They both instantly opened their mouths to protest, but she shushed them gently. “It's a plague hospital, and you two will be no good to me or to each other if you become infected. I'll have him make sure I'm healthy otherwise, and work out how long I have left before my soul drops.” She leaned her cheek against the top of Resaime's head. “After that, we'll see.”
Neither one of them said anything.
“Are you cold, my loves?” asked Praeis. “Shall we go back inside?”
“I want to stay here for a while,” said Theia in a voice small enough to make Praeis's whole loosened soul ache.
“Then that's what we'll do.” Praeis shifted herself so her back was against a tree and she could pull both of them into her lap.
They stayed like that until her daughters fell asleep and Praeis was able to lead them, drowsy and unprotesting, back to the house.
Praeis walked through the doors of the hospital. The scent of disinfectant assailed her nostrils, and they pinched shut automatically.
The place was a warehouse. The single, long room had been hung with sterile sheets to make clear, temporary walls. Sisters and mothers wearing filter masks moved around the sheets, swabbing them down with whatever added the incredible stench to the air.
More sheets had been hung around individual beds, turning them into miniature tents. But that wasn't doing much good. The families of the patients worked their way under the sheets, lifting them up and breaking the sterile field.
The beds were surrounded by metal racks holding bags of saline solutions, blood, or other fluids Praeis didn't want to think about. Care-takers moved between the beds in teams. They worked with the fluids. They injected the patients. They gave the families pills and drink, or clean sheets and other supplies so they could tend their sick family members. The patients in their narrow beds coughed and retched and trembled, held down by straps as well as by family members. Some of them lay rigid as blocks of wood, dying of the paralysis that was the last stage of the plague.
Praeis knew calling the disaster that brought its victims to this place “the” plague was incorrect. That made it sound like there was just one virus to be tracked down and dealt with. In the wards of Crater Town, David had explained to her what the Humans had discovered. The plague wasn't one virus, or even one set of viruses. By now, it might very well be every virus on All-Cradle.
“As near as we can tell,” he'd said, leaning close to her and Jos, speaking in his low, steady voice. “Whatever the Octrel let loose was designed to attack the cell pores. Pores in cells are like pores in skin. They open and close as needed to transfer chemicals, waste materials, and so on.
“The original virus blocked the signals that tell the cell pores to close. If the cell pores don't close, one of the major keys to neurochemical regulation within the body is removed. That sets off a host of problems, the most dramatic of which is paralysis of the voluntary and involuntary muscles.”
“It freezes your heart.” She remembered how hard she'd squeezed down on Jos's hand as she spoke.
David had nodded. “Heart, respiratory system … You die because your body can't control itself anymore.” He paused. “That's only the beginning of the problem, however.
“We're sure the virus was supposed to die out when the infected population did. That's generally how these things are planned.” The look of distaste on his face was so intense, Praeis reached out instinctively to touch his knee. “But in this case, it didn't die out fast enough.
“Somewhere in here, the original virus met up with a wild virus. Somebody may have died in a pool of water, or some fecal matter got into a well, or somebody tried to evacuate aboard a boat and it met up with some rodents … There's a million possibilities. At any rate, our original virus got out into the ecosystem and met its cousins. They shook hands and exchanged genetic material. All of a sudden, viruses that have been no problem for millennia can run through a body in days, kill the host, and move on. The word from All-Cradle is that these
wunderkind
—” Praeis had looked at him, puzzled. “It's German, it means ‘wonder children.’ We've started calling the plague viruses WKVs. These WKVs are taking down everything mammalian on the planet.” He paused and shook his head, heavy irony creeping into his voice. “It will sort itself out. A certain percentage of any given population will probably prove to be immune, and they'll breed. In a hundred thousand years, the WKVs won't bother anybody any more than the normal strains do now. But I personally am not willing to wait that long.”
There'd been a gleam in his eye and an edge to his voice as he spoke. That was what had warmed her to him. A lot of the Human doctors and researchers seemed to regard the virus, viruses, killing the colony as an interesting riddle. David treated it as an enemy, a very smart enemy to be studied and thwarted using every possible method.
But not in time to save her sister Shorie, and not in time to save her sister Jos, and not in time to save her four smallest daughters, who all lay in one bed, crying and shaking and dying of pure pain.
“Sister, are you ill? Do you need to register?” A concerned voice broke Praeis out of her memories. “Are you looking for family?”
A pair of sisters faced her, with their ears tilted forward and quivering a little, although whether it was from concern or simple weariness, Praeis couldn't tell. Filter masks covered their faces and rubber gloves covered their hands up to their elbows. Their overalls were cheap and obviously meant to be worn for a short time and then disposed of, possibly burned.
Praeis's skin shook from her shoulders to her ankles. “No, no, thank you. I am looking for a Human care-taker, Dr. David Zelotes. I am Praeis Shin t'Theria, representative of the Queens-of-All.”
The sisters looked at each other in astonishment. Praeis wondered how long it had been since a Queens’ representative had walked in here. A spasm of anger crossed her shoulders.
“She will be in the laboratory,” said the broader of the two. “I will take you. My sister must stay on patrol.”
“Of course.” Praeis dipped her ears. “The Ancestors alone cannot watch our sisters.”
Praeis followed the care-taker through a side door that led to a white corridor smelling of warmth and yet more disinfectant. This was a Human-constructed section of the budding. It had the seamless look of something grown rather than something built. They passed a number of small, windowed laboratories on the right-hand side. Inside the labs, Humans wearing white overalls over their clean-suits wielded pipettes and needles over glass eggs of culture media, filter dishes of layered ceramics, and even old-fashioned microscopes they must have appropriated from the larger hospital.
In the last lab, David, his clean-suit covered by the loose, blue tunic and trousers that seemed to be the traditional uniform of Human doctors, stared at a portable screen displaying what looked like a fuzzy cluster of fat, grey-and-white springs. The care-taker tapped on the window and David jerked around. He saw Praeis, waved, and held up one finger.
Praeis watched him type something on his keypad. Res and Theia had not asked why she wanted to see David rather than a t'Therian care-taker, and she was glad. She did not want to have to tell them it was because David, with his Human reserve, could be counted on not to talk about what he saw.
In the lab, David picked up a couple of the glass eggs and carried them over to a storage locker, placed them inside, and latched the door firmly shut.
“Praeis Shin t'Theria,” said David as he stepped through the laboratory door and shut it behind himself. “Lynn said you might be able to come by to lend us a hand.”
“I'll see what I can do, but I also need your help,” said Praeis.
David nodded. “I can't let you in the lab, but we've rigged an examination room over here.” He gestured up the corridor.
The care-taker left them, and David led Praeis down to the end of the corridor.
“I had no idea it was this bad,” said Praeis softly.
David shook his head ruefully. “You should have seen it when we got here. God,” his voice dropped to a harsh whisper. He opened the door to the examining room and stood aside for her to enter.
The office was bigger and more comfortable than she had imagined it would be. It was obviously a t'Therian construction with Human conveniences laid over top. Fiber-optic bundles made veins on the white-plaster walls. The examining table was wide enough for two of her. The instrument stands were held to the side with C-clamps. Everything was scrupulously clean. In fact, the jobber in the corner was still humming, so it probably had just finished from the last patient.
“It wasn't neglect that ran this place down, it was death.” David climbed up on a stool between the examining table and the comm station. “The trained care-takers had all died. When we got here, we found family members, arms-sisters, students, an incredible array of people, trying to learn on the fly out of books or from medical instructors, what instructors there were left. It wasn't that no one was willing to try, it's that there was no one left who knew what to do.” His voice shook and he stopped. “As it is, you've seen what a mess it is out there. Bioverse isn't willing to let anything major wait to get us a proper facility going. They say they're all going to be relocated within the week, why waste time and resources on a building down here?” She saw a familiar gleam in his eye. “We're working on persuading them otherwise.”