Cloning! Systems replacement! The mortality rate for systems replacement was high. Besides, Old Catholics were prohibited from using cloned systems, though there were always backsliders who had a system cloned and confessed it later.
The doctor frowned at him. “Don’t get into a state, boy. I said not too serious. Some cuts and a bit of bruising on the brain. All that’s taken care of. Some nerve injury, his legs. That’s healing. All he needs to do is stay here and simmer quietly for a day or two more.” The slight, snub-nosed woman hovered over dials, twitching at them. Her plentiful dark hair was drawn back in a tight bun and her body appeared almost sexless in the flapping coat.
“You’ve got him sedated,” Tony commented.
“Machine sleep. He’s too nervous a type to leave conscious for long. He frets.”
That was one way of saying it, Tony thought with an ironic twist to his lips. Roderigo Yrarier frets. Or fumes. Or roars.
The doctor went on, “Your sister, now, that’s something else. Mind reconstruction, I wouldn’t doubt The Hippae have been at her.”
“You know about that!”
“Seen a bit of it when the bons come in with broken bones or bitten-off appendages. They don’t respond normally, so I tell them I’m testing their reflexes when I’m actually looking at their heads. Strangeness there, usually, though I’m not allowed to do anything about it. Not with the bons. They choose to keep their warps and twists, however strange it makes them.”
“We don’t want Stella twisted!”
“Didn’t think you did. Didn’t think so for a moment. May not be able to straighten her totally, though. There’s limits to what we can do.”
“Should we ship her out?”
“Well, young man, at the moment I’d say she’s safer here, warped or not, than she may be out there. You’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?”
“What do you mean?” He stared, unwilling to understand.
“Plague,” she said. ‘We’re getting a pretty good idea of what’s going on out there.”
“Do you know anything about it? What causes it? Do you know if there’s any here?”
“None here. That I can be almost sure of. Why didn’t you ask us medical people? Didn’t you think we’d be capable of doing anything? Me, for instance. I’ve got degrees in molecu-bio and virology from the University at Semling Prime. I studied immunology on Repentance. I could have been working on this.” She turned an open, curious face toward him. “The word is you’ve been trying to find out in secret.”
“It was secret,” he whispered. “To keep the Moldies from knowing. If they knew …”
She considered this, her face turning slowly white as she realized what he meant. “They’d bring it here? Purposely?”
“If they found out, yes. If they once knew.”
“My God, boy!” She laughed bitterly. “Everybody knows.”
16
Everyone knew, the doctor said, and it seemed she told only the truth. Everyone knew there was plague. Everyone knew there might be Moldies already on Grass. Everyone knew there was a trail half a mile wide out there in the grasses, ending next to the swamp forest, which all at once seemed a fragile and penetrable curtain rather than the impassable barrier they had always relied upon. Hysteria mounted as the talk gathered both volume and speculative intensity, here and there, about the town.
Among other topics was much discussion of whether Grass’s seeming immunity to plague meant anything. Foremost among those who thought it did was Dr. Bergrem She had seen one or two people arrive on ships with filthy gray lesions. After a week or two on Grass, they had departed cured. Once there had even been a man in a quarantine pod….
Roald Few challenged the doctor to explain herself. “You mean more than that the disease isn’t here, doctor. You mean it can’tcomehere. Something here prevents it?”
To which she nodded and said she thought so, in her experience, from what she’d seen, turning to Tony and Rillibee for their opinion.
“No, that isn’t it,” Tony told them wearily. “It isn’t that it can’t come here. It isn’t that no one gets it here. The disease started from here. Somehow. The foxen think.”