Mike buried his hands in his face for a moment. He remembered taking his little sister on walks. He remembered her big brown eyes and trusting hugs. A bird chirped, and a gentle breeze brought the incongruous scent of plumeria. Dena had loved flowers.
Mike glared up at Shanks. “Go on.” Get the information, he told himself. Then kill the bastard.
Shanks looked as if he would cry. “She told me not to worry, kissed me, and while she kissed me she took my gun. Then she grinned at me and started walking backward. Back to the fire.
“I tried to come after her, but she shot at the ground in front of me. Then she threw the gun down and walked into the fire herself with her arms raised up like this.” Shanks lifted his arms, opened them as if in some kind of religious ecstasy, and shook. “Crazy! Everyone was crazy! I couldn’t fix it without her. It wasn’t my fault!” he sobbed, looking spent.
Mike thought about the fire, the beautiful fire. Sis, was it so good? So good that you would forgo everything else that might ever happen to you for that one ultimate experience? He imagined Dena saying, It was wonderful, Mike. It was OK. It was all I ever needed.
Time to make my move, Mike told himself. Easy does it, don’t do anything threatening. Lose Shanks and we lose our hope for a cure and a planet. “You look like you could use a shower and a good meal…”
Shanks jumped up in an agitated way, seeming to struggle with himself. “I’ve told you all I can!”
Not by a long shot, Mike thought. He struggled to keep his hands down. “Please take it easy, we…”
“No!” Shanks suddenly turned and headed for the brush before Mike could stop him.
Ian burst out of the trees. “Hold it!” he yelled, gun in his hand.
Shanks screamed and tried to find cover, but the brush in the forest wasn’t dense enough to cover him completely. Ian stood still and raised the gun steadily. He tracked for a moment, then Mike heard the electric snap of its discharge and the round flew to its target.
Shanks gasped, fell to his knees and, at last, began to weep with abandon.
“You all right, Mike?” Ian asked.
No, Mike was not all right, but he took a deep breath. “Yeah,” he said.
They made their way to Shanks, hoisted the now inert biologist on their shoulders, and carried him back to the settlement.
Mike went to the infirmary for an exam. He had it now himself, he was sure—another data point.
“Any luck?” he asked Nadine.
Nadine nodded. “The Cochran people checked out as much of Shanks’s story as they could. It’s accurate as far as it goes. Working back from the autopsies, I think I’ve found a retrovirus. I don’t know what it does yet, but there’s DNA in these people that doesn’t belong there and it matches some new DNA in me, too.”
“How does it spread?”
“Probably by anything that gets past the skin. A cough, a shared glass, sex. I’ll order increased hygiene and abstinence. We’ve all been exposed already, but it may take repeated exposures. I wonder how it starts if no one is infected to begin with—what’s the vector?”
Mike scratched his head. “People that get bitten by caterpillars get it.”
“If it’s a caterpillar virus, how can it affect people?” Nadine asked. “There are three of them in the data base, but none of them affects people, according to their description.”
“According to genetic design descriptions, the caterpillars don’t bite, either. What about mutations?”
“That’s two mutations, Mike, and each of them a hell of a mutation!” She pursed her lips. “Shanks might have made the caterpillars bite, and the virus may have mutated. Or the caterpillar virus may do nothing more dangerous than cause a wart—and then all the craziness is caused by something else.”
“He knows more than he’s told us. I’m sure of it. He might have made this retrovirus and shielded himself while it did its work. Is your virus in the springtimers?”
“How would I know that?” Nadine snapped. “I just found it in the human victims!”
“Sorry. Nadine…” He reached for her and she fell against him. She’d lost a lot of weight, he noticed, and felt as if she were made of paper. He held her for one minute, for two. “Just asking. We had the Yeager collect the one that bit me.”
“Then I’d better get back to work,” Nadine said and made a short, rueful laugh. “But, Mike?”
“Yes?”
“If I have to go, I’d rather it were fire than overwork.”
Mike put a hand on her shoulder and dug his nails in, just a bit.
She smiled, with the hint of a tear in her eye, then brushed his cheek with her lips.
Morning came early for Mike, long before Epsilon Eridani rose. Astronomer Kay Singh had found Sean Peterson, their ecologist. Singh had reacted coolly and quickly, calling Ian and Nadine. They and the robots got him into the autodoc still alive.
Mike saw the man in the infirmary and was headed back to the settlement when he ran into Ian. Ian was carrying a Wendy flower with a chrysalis.
“How?”
“He tore his flesh with a scrap of metal in a clearing out of sight of the overheads and then lay down where the crows would finish the job. It would have worked except that that was just the kind of place Kay likes to put her sky-scanners. He was still conscious; we had to trank him. He was quite put out with us, you know—begged us to leave him alone.”
Mike tried not to think about it, unsuccessfully. To surrender yourself, piece by piece. To savor each tear, each cut…
“Mike?”
“Ian, we all have it. It’s just a matter of time.”
Ian studied Mike for a moment, then cleared his throat. “Well. We put our hope in the medical staff, then, don’t we?”
A chill went through Mike. Of his ten people, Mike realized, two were already dead, one was badly injured, and at least two of the remainder were showing bad signs: Nadine and himself.
“At any rate,” Ian continued, “I will lay odds that this—” he pointed to the chrysalis, “—is a springtimer chrysalis, and not something else. So in a few days, I’ll wager the air will be full of what comes out of these things.”
“Isn’t it a little early? It’s only been fourteen standard years.”
“Bloody right, Mike, but that’s seventeen seasonal cycles here. The flowers are so pretty. Can hardly help but pick them, can you?—Get a little high out of it when the little bugger bites you, no? And each bite adds a little more of whatever it is—a bloody positive feedback loop.”
Mike looked at him. “You too?”
Ian looked grim, but said, simply, “You know, it’s curiously hard to admit, even after all that. Well. I’m handling it rather well so far, aren’t I?”
Mike nodded. “Let’s get some of these pupae back to Nadine. We need to find a cure for this.”
“While we still want to,” Ian remarked, softly. He looked away, toward the hills. “If we can’t find a cure, we just might still save the planet by getting rid of the bloody things, right?”
“Right,” Mike nodded. Even if it couldn’t do his crew any good now. “Yeager, what did they do about bugs before genetic engineering?”
“There are chemicals that are significantly more toxic to insects than other things. They will hurt the ecology generally, however.”