The Wellness Plague

II.

Mazio-Carr got him installed in the Murchisons’, a rambling building, or series of buildings, which had originally been a Freehold but now served as a boarding house for colony singles and young families. It was half-buried in the side of the central crater for protection from the storms which blew up from the jungle depths. High winds could do tremendous damage at one and a half standard atmospheres. Rey was shown to a comer room that was little more than a bed and a small desk with a horizontal slit window above each.

During dinner that night, he met his fellow roomers. Juanita Buergher-Murchison owned the house and ran it with the assistance of her daughter, Katarina, and her teenaged son, O’Donnel. Don was a good-looking boy with the reputation of being something of a Romeo. Dinner table conversation had it that he and Andrea Calley-Li, the governor’s youngest daughter, had been a hot item during Old Earth Days. But despite all the kidding, Don appeared to be friendly and hard-working, if not overly bright.

When not insisting that he take overly-generous portions of her cooking, Juanita wanted to know whether any more children had been kidnapped by the White People. Her eyes, as she asked the question, kept straying to her own children.

“None,” Rey assured her. “There are always rumors, but they are never confirmed.”

“Well, they wouldn’t be,” said a burly man with a mustache seated across from Rey. He introduced himself as Garrard Ryn-Rosenberger, a mechanic in charge of the robots which continually sanitized the cordon surrounding Far Edge. “After all, the government would just use the Public Safety laws to suppress that sort of news.”

Rey chewed a slice of lamb as he considered that, suddenly acutely aware that he had paid almost no attention to politics for the past three years. “I don’t think they could do that successfully,” he said after a moment. “Oh, they might try, but from what I’ve seen, the government really isn’t all that efficient. If more children were kidnapped, there would be a hue and cry that they would never be able to quiet.”

They seemed to accept that, yet for the rest of the evening Rey was aware that behind their questions was a lingering doubt that the satellite news feeds were telling them the whole story. Chandler and Linda Karatnycky-Sullum were newlyweds, both working two jobs in hopes of putting enough money together to establish their own freehold. Linda wanted to hear all about the Naturalers. Rey amused the whole table by relating how one had become deathly ill after sneaking though the cordon surrounding the Terraces to gorge on the fruits of a native bush. The Alienist poets had been especially harsh, comparing this to a reversion to bestiality.

“But, of course, the Alienists suffer from enough of their own contradictions,” Rey added. “Their incessant whining about how we can never be at home on this world is bad enough, even without declamations to the effect that the only completely free act is suicide.”

Chandler was more interested in the Technics. He confided to Rey that he had once dreamed of joining the Astronaut Corps, that he had wanted to help maintain the Ark for the day when it could be used to explore their solar system and, perhaps, even reclaim its heritage as a starship.

“From what I hear, the Technics have been coming up with grand plans to make the rest of the planet habitable,” he said.

Rey nodded cautiously. “There was some discussion of nudging an asteroid out of orbit and directing it so that it would impact in an uninhabited portion of the planet, the idea being that the explosion would blow off enough of the atmosphere to make the surface pressure approximately one atmosphere.”

“Then we wouldn’t be confined to mountain peaks any more,” Chandler said, his eyes shining.

“Quite so,” Rey agreed. “However, the Naturalers produced calculations demonstrating that any such impact would raise the temperature of the atmosphere by ten degrees. Only temporarily, to be sure, but long enough to destroy most of the oxygen-producing biosphere at the lower levels. Not to mention the fact that such an abrupt lowering of the atmospheric pressure would make our mountain colonies completely uninhabitable.”

He slept that night, listening to the wind whistling about the eaves. He dreamt that he had been taken to the most secret place on the planet, a Freehold basement where the Changeling, which had been exchanged for the Bainbridge boy, was kept. It talked of Alienists and Naturalers and Technics, its approximately human face contorted with an almost pathetic earnestness. Rey listened intently, but when he woke, all he could remember was a low growling, like that of a sick dog.

Martina’s practice was as varied as it was large. The first assignment she gave Rey was the thrice weekly first-aid course. It was conducted in the school before classes started in the morning. There were usually between five and twelve in the course. At first, Rey thought he had been given this task because Martina considered it drudgery and did not trust him with anything more complicated. He soon realized that it might be the most important part of the practice. The colonists on Far Edge were spread too far apart for even the two of them to be able to provide timely medical care in emergencies. So he taught everything from the Heimlich maneuver to CPR to setting broken bones to delivering babies.

Afterwards, there were patients. A large number of these had “women’s problems”: fertility had been a major concern since humanity had come to Skylandia, and the lack of a major satellite had distressed the menstrual cycles of every generation of women since then. There were drugs which could be used to regularize the cycles, and in households which included several women of child-bearing age, having only one of them on drugs was often enough to regularize them all by pheromone entraining.

Marty’s diagnoses and treatments clearly went beyond the guidelines established for practitioners, and were arguably even illegal. That they were necessary was beyond argument. The nearest actual doctor was in Jump Off; the nearest hospital, fifty kilometers beyond that in New Geneva. During the winter, all that distance was against the prevailing winds.

As Marty had warned him, a large proportion of his time was devoted to livestock problems. Sheep especially drew bloodbird attacks. Marty maintained two marrow machines with no other use than to continually produce fresh sheep blood to be used for transfusions. At least twice a week, Rey would find himself ministering to an exsanguinated sheep, its dirty fleece stained red at the punctures. Sometimes the bloodbird would still be attached, its ten-centimeter beak buried in the sheep’s flesh, its stomach distended as it gorged. Removing the bird was tricky. It could be killed easily enough, but the backward pointing barbs made it impossible to pull out without tearing a sizable chunk of flesh along with it.

Marty showed him a trick of breaking a bag of blood from the marrow machines over the beak at its entry to the wound. The beak closed in apparent disgust, disengaging most of the barbs. With one swift, fluid motion, Marty pulled out the beak and snapped the creature’s neck.

“Why does that work?” Rey asked.

Marty shrugged. “They don’t seem to like what comes out of the machines.” Her manner said that it was a useless question as long as it was effective.

“They’re stupid beasts,” she added. “If they had any brains, they would have realized a long time ago that we’re no good for them.” Except, of course, that a million years of evolution had taught the bloodbirds that anything of a certain size which moved was almost certainly good for them. They flew too high to be disturbed by alien scents. Human beings were recent interlopers; it would take the native fauna a while yet, perhaps aided by adolescents with homemade lasers, to associate this set of smells and colors with non-nourishing amino acids.

One week when he had seen more sheep than people, Rey found himself staring at his office data screen, wondering just how many of the creatures there could possibly be on Far Edge. The morning had been spent treating part of a flock owned by Freeholder Paabo Bhagwati. He connected with the municipal registry and had it display the extent of the Freehold. Another query brought up the size of Bhagwati’s flocks as of the last quarterly reporting period. Rey frowned at the number, surprised that it was so large. On a hunch, he called up the carrying capacity ratio established by the Ministry of Agriculture and plugged in the figures.

Marty had come back from lunch and was standing behind him, regarding his screen intently.

“Something’s wrong with the data base,” he explained. “Bhagwati claims to have almost twice as many sheep as his farm will support.”

“Maybe he’s inflated his figures to impress the bankers,” Martina suggested. She sounded distinctly unhappy. “As a general rule, the greater your collateral, the better your loan terms.”

Rey chewed his lip, thinking about that. “No,” he decided. “Any advantage would be more than offset by his higher tax rate. Besides, any bank would run the same sort of check, and would determine that he was overgrazing his land, which would make him a bad credit risk, in addition to being illegal per se.”

The phone chimed. An eleven-year-old who had been playing outside the fence near the airport cliffs had fallen and suffered a compound fracture. Rey strapped a new filter over his nose and mouth and jumped into the office’s dragonfly flitter. It was the end of the day before he returned to the clinic. A VTOL stood on the landing pad across from the entrance. Rey recognized the markings of the Bhagwati Freehold. As he stepped out of the dragonfly, he saw Paabo Bhagwati walking toward him.

“Not another bloodbird attack?” Rey groaned, feeling exhausted.

Bhagwati permitted himself a miniscule smile. “No. I am not in need of your professional services. Rather, it appears that I am still in your debt. I have heard that you are perplexed about certain aspects of my freehold.”

Marty was standing in the doorway of the clinic, her face unreadable.

“I wasn’t meaning to pry—” Rey began.

Bhagwati shook his head. “Of course not. It is just that your intelligence is not confined to your work. Come with me. I shall make things clear.”

Rey glanced quickly at Marty. She nodded. He climbed into the cockpit of the VTOL and sat next to Bhagwati. It was a large craft, smaller only than the lumbering cargo carriers which were the backbone of trade among the colonies. Its hold smelled of hay and sheep and dirt. Bhagwati touched the controls and it surged up fifty meters, where it caught the easterlies. It seemed to Rey that Bhagwati, rather than pilot the craft, simply let the winds blow the VTOL across Far Edge to his freehold. He set it down in a pasture close to the cordon, an area Rey had never seen before.

He handed Rey paper booties to protect his shoes. “It is not really dangerous if you just walk through,” he explained apologetically, “but people do tend to get nervous.”

Rey tied the string above his ankles, then followed Bhagwati out of the VTOL. The freeholder headed down the slope and stepped without hesitation into the cordon.

Rey winced and forced himself to follow. He stepped carefully over the fluorescent orange plastic tubing which extended all along the cordon’s higher, inner edge. It was Ryn-Rosenberger’s job to make sure that the poison flowed at an even rate through that tubing, that it soaked through to the bedrock and extended the mandatory fifty meters width. This had caused problems in some colonies. Stripping the slopes bare of vegetation increased erosion, sometimes drastically. The cordon, which prevented the encroachment of native fauna, would seem to become a noose pulling ever tighter.

That was not the case here, however. The land sloped gently, not to a cliff as on the airport side, but to a ridge. Rey moved quickly, telling himself that the poison was dangerous to humans only in accumulated dosages. Even if the booties were to tear, what adhered to his soles should not be unsafe. As long as he did not fall and cut himself….

The cordon gave way raggedly to groucuh, which extended itself like grasping fingers into the surrounding sterility. Rey frowned and bent down to pull up a clump. Groucuh was only a contraction of “ground cover,” an all-purpose term for the smaller sort of natural flora; that is, what should be easily killed by the cordon poisons. Like most of his fellow humans, Rey had little idea what it was like. The one thing he did know, however, was that it was substantially different from Terrestrial grasses and grains.

In his hand he held a coiled mass of vegetation, in more shades of yellow and purple than he could count. It seemed to grow like an insane slinky toy. As far as he knew, it was like nothing which came from Earth.

Yet, inextricably tangled in this mass, were grass blades identical to those which grew in the inner quadrangle of the College of Apollo. They should not be able to grow in the same soils. They certainly should not be so intertwined as, say, lichen.

Bhagwati was waiting for him patiently. Rey dropped the clump, filing it away as a mystery to be examined if he ever had time.

Ahead of them rose what was, at this distance, clearly an artificial embankment. It was high enough to shield whatever was behind it from the view of anyone walking the cordon. Hearing the almost soporific bleating punctuated by a few barks, Rey realized he had no need to see what lay beyond.

Nonetheless, they both crested the rise and paused while Rey assessed the view. The ridge widened to the size of a small meadow. Low fences marked the beginning of the steep incline. A dog ran along one of the fences, yapping excitedly at sheep careless enough to wander too close.

“How many are there?” Rey asked.

“About five hundred in this meadow,” Bhagwati said. “Nearly four hundred each in the two beyond. You can’t see them from here because they are about fifty meters lower.”

Rey looked down at his feet. The grass-groucuh was thick and springy, coiling up above his ankles. “It’s amazing that the groucuh doesn’t just crowd out the grass. And that you can feed this many sheep on what grass manages to survive.”

Naturalers to the contrary, the first generation had conclusively demonstrated that Skylandia’s biochemistry was too different for it to be nourishing to anything which had evolved on Earth.

Bhagwati shrugged. “I did not have nukes,” he said, almost apologetically. “At first, I feared my incomplete clearing would doom my efforts. As you see, they did not. I am told the fleece of these animals makes wool cloth especially prized, even on the Terraces.”

Rey looked around at the meadow and beyond. It was such a clear day that he would have been able to see all the way down to the world jungle, had advancing night not already cloaked it in shadow. On the far horizon, a line of clouds was growing that looked as dark and solid as the planet’s crust.

“Why?”

It was really two questions. Bhag-wati answered the first.

“Far Edge was cleared because there were getting to be too many people in the other colonies. The Terraces took nearly a decade to establish the colony, pleading lack of resources. By the time it was declared safe for habitation, the number of those who had signed up for emigration had nearly doubled. It seemed good politics to accommodate all. Only, the size of the plots was then too small for economic viability. Many failed, like the Murchisons. Most others, like the Karatnycky-Sullums, have no realistic chance of success.

“I did not want to fail. I saw this land, just beyond the cordon. I thought, if I had just a little more, I would be able to survive. So I planted grasses, and moved sheep across the cordon. Some went hungry, and I was very afraid. But then others started to thrive, and soon the whole herd was doing well.”

“Nobody has noticed this from the air?” Rey asked.

“The airfield is at the opposite end of Far Edge,” Bhagwati answered, “and much of the time fog covers the land.”

“But the satellite photographs!” Rey insisted.

Bhagwati shrugged. “They do not look so different from the surrounding lands. In the Terraces, where they study those pictures, they know nothing can lie out here, so they do not look closely.”

“Why are you showing me this?” Rey asked. He was acutely conscious that there were only the two of them out there, that only one other person knew where he was. He knew enough to ruin Bhagwati, both legally and financially. If he were to be pushed over the side, he would probably never be found.

Bhagwati nodded, as if aware of his thoughts. He stood apart from Rey, hands down at his side, as if trying to demonstrate his harmlessness.

“You were asking intelligent questions,” Bhagwati said. “If I did not answer them, you might raise them with your friends on the Terraces. The government might feel forced to do something were this brought to its attention.”

“They can run the numbers as well as I can,” Rey objected.

“They have chosen not to,” Bhagwati answered. “Or if they have, they have dismissed the result as business puffery.”

“It would have been much simpler if you had reported only your herds within the cordon,” Rey said, exasperation giving an edge to his voice.

“That would have been a lie,” Bhagwati said simply. “I owe the taxes on my true wealth. Anything else would cheat my neighbors and my friends. Also, I think that at some point, someone would wonder how I could maintain my cash flow from such a small resource base. I have broken one law. That is enough.”

The wind freshened. Even through his allergy mask, it seemed to bring up scents from the jungle far below, odors at once disturbing and enticing.

Bhagwati waited patiently.

“All right,” Rey said at last. “I am not going to turn you in to the proctos.” And that may be the end of any hope of ever obtaining a doctorate, if they ever catch you and decide that I was a co-conspirator.

“As far as I can tell, what you are doing has resulted in no damage to the agriculture or the health of the colony. I suppose if this violation is considered serious, it is a matter for Mr. Ryn-Rosenbeiger and his superiors.”

Bhagwati flashed a smile as dazzling as the setting sun. “Thank you,” he said, bobbing his head slightly. “Let us go back now. I believe a storm is coming.”