The Wellness Plague

I.

“Why are you traveling to Far Edge?” the pilot asked.

Reynolds Morrill Landers kept his eyes glued to the window, unable to turn away from the empty immensity outside. Wind rushed across the Sunbird’s metal skin, which seemed no thicker than foil With each gust of wind, with each course adjustment, the whole craft creaked and groaned in protest. Above, wispy clouds of ice crystals broke the sunlight into muted rainbows. Below them lay layer after layer of clouds. You could look down through the gaps, sometimes all the way down to the lush darkness of the world jungle that was the floor of Skylandia.

Fear of heights, he told himself, was an absurd emotion on a world where humans could live only on mountain tops. In the past, though, he had always had solid rock beneath his feet. Now there were only struts and metal skin and absurdly long glider wings, their dark topsides drinking in sunlight and converting it to electricity for the lifting fans. An experimental craft whose pilot was a girl no older than he had been when he had been first admitted to the College of Apollo, who could fly legally only because her craft did not exist in the registry of vessels requiring certification.

Belatedly, he realized that Regan Lee was still waiting for his answer.

“Research,” he said. “I’m a medical master. The local practitioner has been sending some interesting reports to the College of. Apollo in the Terraces. I’m here to see what I can make of them.”

“Really?” Regan asked. “The people of Far Edge seem pretty healthy to me.”

“Well, that’s the problem,” Rey said, almost apologetically. “In some ways they appear to be too healthy.” She looked at him skeptically. “Do you have allergies?” he asked.

Her laugh was high-pitched and musical. “Who doesn’t? That’s the reason I learned to fly. Up here I’m not battling headaches or fighting for breath.”

“Right,” Rey agreed. “Most of our communicable diseases burned up with the rest of Earth, and our population densities have been low enough to keep new ones from generating. But ever since our great grandparents landed on Far Edge, we have been plagued by allergies. Despite the cordons surrounding the colonies, dust and pollens still blow up from the jungle below. Since we never evolved with these, it’s no wonder we react to them. About twenty deaths a year can be traced back to some sort of allergic reaction. Even without the deaths, there are hundreds of thousands of man-hours lost.

“Except on Far Edge. Since it has the lowest elevation of any of the colonies, it should have the worst allergy problems. The records show that it did when it was first settled. Then, gradually, the incidences decline. The local practitioner eventually recognized what was happening and mentioned it as an aside in her reports. I queried her a few months ago, but she has no idea of the cause. I thought that if I could find out, it would make a good enough paper for my doctorate.”

Not to mention that if he were able to formulate a general treatment based upon what he discovered, he would probably be a moderately rich man for the rest of his life.

The craft lurched suddenly. Rey clenched the armrests, wondering if the struts were screeching in a different key. Regan was tacking across contrary wind streams, fighting the seasonal easterlies which made Far Edge inaccessible to cargo zeppelins. Noting his concern, Regan said “Just a little clear air turbulence. If you had your visor on, it wouldn’t take you by surprise.”

Her own visor masked the upper half of her face. A confusion of bright yellow lines played across its inner surface, totally obscuring her eyes. His visor was hooked onto the arm rest. He had worn it for the first ten minutes of the flight. Air currents had been given form and color. With it, he could tell their extent, their speed and direction relative to the Sunbird. Thermals boiled upwards, suddenly visible elevators which might carry them most of the way to their destination with hardly a touch of the craft’s solar-powered fans. At the touch of a button, while the left side of the visor continued to display the winds in whatever direction you were looking, the right side would provide a satellite weather map of the pressure gradients and frontal systems in their flight path.

Information overload. Without Regan’s training, there was just too much data displayed for him to comprehend it all. More than that, it obscured what he could appreciate. When he took it off, he saw mountain peaks near the horizon which seemed to be floating on a sea of clouds. The Sun fell behind them. High in the gathering dusk, the bright moving dot that was the Ark appeared orbiting outside Skylandia’s shadow, a reminder of all their ancestors had lost, a promise of what they might one day achieve again.

He had never seen much of the sky while studying at the College of Apollo. Studies forced you into a sort of tunnel vision during the day. At night, the bulk of the main mountain blocked out half the sky, while path lighting washed out much of the rest. It was as if the Terraces had decided to ignore as much of the planet as possible.

If so, they had made an unpardonable mistake. Hanging in the middle of the sky, Rey could almost wish himself a Naturaler, sustaining himself solely on the untouched beauty of the planet.

“Do you often fly out this far?” he asked, feeling a twinge of envy.

“Not very, but you have to remember that Sunbird is still in its testing phase,” Regan answered. “Last month was the first time I’ve ever flown to Far Edge. Picked up a cargo of kids going to the Old Earth Days Ball at the Terraces. Their parents didn’t have the money to rent or the clout to commandeer a VTOL. Had a hold full of Rhett Butlers and Scarlet O’Haras in absurd dresses.”

Perhaps it was his imagination, but there seemed to be a trace of wistfulness in her voice, as if she could see herself in something less practical than aviator’s overalls.

She spotted Far Edge an hour later. While she talked to ground control about wind speeds, he peered out his window, vainly searching for their destination. From the maps he had studied, he remembered that there should be a central crater serving as a reservoir. Below that would be two smaller craters, partially filled in so that they could grow rice. The mine entrances would probably not be visible. On the other hand, he should be able to see the orange groves which clung to the south side of the mountain. In the Terraces, only the rich could afford the arboretum-grown oranges.

“Over there,” Regan said, pointing. “About four o’clock.”

Twin handgrips controlled wing attitude. She twisted them now and the wings mimicked her movements, spilling air. Sunbird banked, losing altitude. Suddenly, a wedge of land appeared below them which seemed to plunge through the cloud deck like an ancient ocean ship through high seas. Regan brought the craft around in order to land into the wind. Unfortunately, that also meant heading straight over the cliff, trying to land in an area designed for VTOLs and zeppelin moorings.

Light dimmed suddenly as they fell into the clouds. Rey strained for a glimpse of the ground. It appeared suddenly, less than four meters below them. Just ahead, the earth dropped away to jagged nothingness.

Regan pulled on the grips and twisted. Obediently, the wings tilted to vertical, cupping the wind. Forward motion stopped abruptly. The Sunbird dropped like an elevator whose cable had been cut. Lifting fans roared to life. Sudden deceleration pressed Rey down into his seat.

The pressure eased, the noise of the fans decreased and then whispered away into silence. To his surprise, Rey realized that they were on the ground. They were not going to crash after all.

Regan was grinning at him.

“What would have happened if we had missed the pad?” he asked, feeling obscurely defensive.

“I would have brought us around for another approach,” she answered.

“So we were never in any real danger.”

She cocked her head, as if considering this thought for the first time. “Well, I don’t suppose I would go that far. Wind gusts along the cliff face tend to be strong and erratic. I would hate to have caught a wing on the rocks.”

“Right,” he said.

Following Regan’s example, Rey pulled the latch at his side. The wall fell outward to the ground, becoming a makeshift gangway. He took two unsteady steps and hopped to the ground. A warm fog was blowing up from the cliff edge. More than once, older acquaintances in the Terraces had described the odor of the world jungle as an affluvium of rottenness, as if the entire world were decaying. This was not at all like that. It was a smell of openness, accented by traces of spice and mint.

Rey reached out to steady himself on the Sunbird, his sense of balance deceived by the gusting fog. His nasal passages were already beginning to close off. He reached for the box of antihistamines he kept in his shirt pocket.

Figures loomed out of the dimness. Rey turned on them quickly. Luckily, nobody could see the flush of embarrassment which immediately followed. Even in the gloom, he could see that none of them had the star-burst manes of the White People. If the White People actually existed. It had been nearly five years since the Bainbridge child had been stolen and a Changeling left in his place. Efforts to retrieve the child had been thwarted by the planet itself as much as by his captors, who had come to be known as the White People. Their existence was officially denied. Rumor and a rapidly growing folklore had mushroomed to fill the gaps.

Regan had already opened the cargo hold and was lifting out packages to the ground crew. Rey went to help her. As he placed the last of the boxes onto a hand trolley which, like the people, seemed to have just materialized out of the mist, he became aware of someone standing nearby, examining him.

“Dr. Morrill-Landers?” A woman’s alto voice, low and hoarse. The way she pronounced his name made it sound like “mer-landers.” So much, he thought, for all the families struggling to preserve the old names and lineages. Human laziness warred and won against the ever-increasing number of syllables.

“Not yet,” he said, straightening and offering his hand. “Medical Master only. You must be Practitioner Mazio-Carr.”

She shook his hand absently. Martina Mazio-Carr was a big-boned woman, with hands as rough as her voice. “I asked for a full doctor. Can you tell me why they sent you?”

The irritation was not directed at him, Rey realized, but at the bureaucracy of the Terraces. “I have no idea,” he said mildly. “The fact is, though, that nobody sent me. I came to do research.”

“Research?” The concept seemed to astound her. “Much time you will have for that. There are the sick to be taken care of.”

Rey located his duffel bag and shouldered it. “Really? I was told people here were unusually healthy on Far Edge.”

“Were you indeed?” she asked. “Well, there may be something to that. I’m not talking about people. I’m talking about the livestock.”