Olmayne looked bewildered and irritated as they plucked at her robes. “What are they saying, Tomis? I can’t get through their damnable Aguptan accents!”
“They want us to help,” I said. I listened to their shouts. “In their village,” I told Olmayne, “there is an outbreak of the crystallization disease. They wish us to seek the mercies of the Will upon the sufferers.”
Olmayne drew back. I imagined the disdainful wince behind her mask. She flicked out her hands, trying to keep the children from touching her. To me she said, “We can’t go there!”
“We must.”
“We’re in a hurry! Jorslem’s crowded; I don’t want to waste time in some dreary village.”
“They need us, Olmayne.”
“Are we Surgeons?”
“We are Pilgrims,” I said quietly. “The benefits we gain from that carry certain obligations. If we are entitled to the hospitality of all we meet, we must also place our souls at the free disposal of the humble. Come.”
“I won’t go!”
“How will that sound in Jorslem, when you give an accounting of yourself, Olmayne?”
“It’s a hideous disease. What if we get it?”
“Is that what troubles you? Trust in the Will! How can you expect renewal if your soul is so deficient in grace?”
“May you rot, Tomis,” she said in a low voice. “When did you become so pious? You’re doing this deliberately, because of what I said to you by Land Bridge. In a stupid moment I taunted you, and now you’re willing to expose us both to a ghastly affliction for your revenge. Don’t do it, Tomis!”
I ignored her accusation. “The children are growing agitated, Olmayne. Will you wait here for me, or will you go on to the next village and wait in the hostelry there?”
“Don’t leave me alone in the middle of nowhere!”
“I have to go to the sick ones,” I said.
In the end she accompanied me—I think not out of any suddenly conceived desire to be of help, but rather out of fear that her selfish refusal might somehow be held against her in Jorslem. We came shortly to the village, which was small and decayed, for Agupt lies in a terrible hot sleep and changes little with the millennia. The contrast with the busy cities farther to the south in Afreek—cities that prosper on the output of luxuries from their great Manufactories—is vast.
Shivering with heat, we followed the children to the houses of sickness.
The crystallization disease is an unlovely gift from the stars. Not many afflictions of outworlders affect the Earth-born; but from the worlds of the Spear came this ailment, carried by alien tourists, and the disease has settled among us. If it had come during the glorious days of the Second Cycle we might have eradicated it in a day; but our skills are dulled now, and no year has been without its outbreak. Olmayne was plainly terrified as we entered the first of the clay huts where the victims were kept.
There is no hope for one who has contracted this disease. One merely hopes that the healthy will be spared; and fortunately it is not a highly contagious disease. It works insidiously, transmitted in an unknown way, often failing to pass from husband to wife and leaping instead to the far side of a city, to another land entirely, perhaps. The first symptom is a scaliness of the skin; itch, flakes upon the clothing, inflammation. There follows a weakness in the bones as the calcium is dissolved. One grows limp and rubbery, but this is still an early phase. Soon the outer tissues harden. Thick, opaque membranes form on the surface of the eyes; the nostrils may close and seal; the skin grows coarse and pebbled. In this phase prophecy is common. The sufferer partakes of the skills of a Somnambulist, and utters oracles. The soul may wander, separating from the body for hours at a time, although the life-processes continue. Next, within twenty days after the onset of the disease, the crystallization occurs. While the skeletal structure dissolves, the skin splits and cracks, forming shining crystals in rigid geometrical patterns. The victim is quite beautiful at this time and takes on the appearance of a replica of himself in precious gems. The crystals glow with rich inner lights, violet and green and red; their sharp facets adopt new alignments from hour to hour; the slightest illumination in the room causes the sufferer to give off brilliant glittering reflections that dazzle and delight the eye. All this time the internal body is changing, as if some strange chrysalis is forming. Miraculously the organs sustain life throughout every transformation, although in the crystalline phase the victim is no longer able to communicate with others and possibly is unaware of the changes in himself. Ultimately the metamorphosis reaches the vital organs, and the process fails. The alien infestation is unable to reshape those organs without killing its host. The crisis is swift: a brief convulsion, a final discharge of energy along the nervous system of the crystallized one, and there is a quick arching of the body, accompanied by the delicate tinkling sounds of shivering glass, and then all is over. On the planet to which this is native, crystallization is not a disease but an actual metamorphosis, the result of thousands of years of evolution toward a symbiotic relationship. Unfortunately, among the Earthborn, the evolutionary preparation did not take place, and the agent of change invariably brings its subject to a fatal outcome.
Since the process is irreversible, Olmayne and I could do nothing of real value here except offer consolation to these ignorant and frightened people. I saw at once that the disease had seized this village some time ago. There were people in all stages, from the first rash to the ultimate crystallization. They were arranged in the hut according to the intensity of their infestation. To my left was a somber row of new victims, fully conscious and morbidly scratching their arms as they contemplated the horrors that awaited them. Along the rear wall were five pallets on which lay villagers in the coarse-skinned and prophetic phase. To my right were those in varying degrees of crystallization, and up front, the diadem of the lot, was one who clearly was in his last hours of life. His body, encrusted with false emeralds and rubies and opals, shimmered in almost painful beauty; he scarcely moved; within that shell of wondrous color he was lost in some dream of ecstasy, finding at the end of his days more passion, more delight, than he could ever have known in all his harsh peasant years.
Olmayne shied back from the door.
“It’s horrible,” she whispered. “I won’t go in!”
“We must. We are under an obligation.”
“I never wanted to be a Pilgrim!”
“You wanted atonement,” I reminded her. “It must be earned.”
“We’ll catch the disease!”
“The Will ean reach us anywhere to infect us with this, Olmayne. It strikes at random. The danger is no greater for us inside this building than it is in Perris.”
“Why, then, are so many in this one village smitten?”
“This village has earned the displeasure of the Will.”
“How neatly you serve up the mysticism, Tomis,” she said bitterly. “I misjudged you. I thought you were a sensible man. This fatalism of yours is ugly.”
“I watched my world conquered,” I said. “I beheld the Prince of Roum destroyed. Calamities breed such attitudes as I now have. Let us go in, Olmayne.”
We entered, Olmayne still reluctant. Now fear assailed me, but I concealed it. I had been almost smug in my piety while arguing with the lovely Rememberer woman who was my companion, but I could not deny the sudden seething of fright.
I forced myself to be tranquil.
There are redemptions and redemptions, I told myself. If this disease is to be the source of mine, I will abide by the Will.
Perhaps Olmayne came to some such decision too, as we went in, or maybe her own sense of the dramatic forced her into the unwanted role of the lady of mercy. She made the rounds with me. We passed from pallet to pallet, heads bowed, starstones in our hands. We said words. We smiled when the newly sick begged for reassurance. We offered prayers. Olmayne paused before one girl in the secondary phase, whose eyes already were filming over with horny tissue, and knelt and touched her starstone to the girl’s scaly cheek. The girl spoke in oracles, but unhappily not in any language we understood.