He didn’t bother to tell her they hadn’t shown him to it. “Had to go to the Personal,” he said, not knowing if Earthers could mention the Personal so openly.
She got ideas, frowned, put something warm from her pocket against his head. Apparently his temperature was all right. “Very well. But come in here. The doctors will need to speak to you.”
Within ten minutes Dr. Li entered the room briskly, sat down, exhaled heavily. “She had us worried, but it was mostly exhaustion of the body’s resources. Starvation, to put it crudely. She must have been going on nerves and caffeine for weeks.”
“She hasn’t been eating well,” Derec admitted. He’d been blind not to see how little she’d been eating. “What does she have?”
“We’ll know for sure in a day; we’ve done a culture. But our best guess is amnemonic plague.”
“Ay…nuhmonic…?”
“From medieval mnemonic, meaning memory. Amnemonic means no memory. It’s a mutation of an old influenza virus, first reported on one of the Settler worlds-sometimes called Burundi’s Fever, after the discoverer.” She looked at him sharply, but clearly that name meant no more to Derec than the first.
“Will she-get better?”
Dr Li sighed. “When Burundi ‘s crosses the blood-brain barrier, it isn’t good. We’re giving her support-nourishment and so on-and antibiotics that eventually will cure the disease. Our anti-virals are fairly effective, except where the virus has crossed the blood-brain barrier. Antibodies will help a little,” and we’re administering them. We’ll be able to stop the infection in all but her brain within a day or two.”
Derec had the illusion that his chest had turned into a block of wood. His heart pushed once, hard, against its unyielding surroundings, and gave up. He felt it stop moving. “Her…brain?”
Dr. Li sighed and looked four hundred years old. “There’s hope. It’s by no means over. I do wish we’d gotten at her sooner…Well, try not to feel guilty; and I’m sorry if I made you feel worse. You couldn’t have known. All kids are heedless, think they’ll live forever…” She brooded on her capable hands for a moment. “Then you think she’ll live?”
“Let’s say, I have a good hope of it. Saul-Dr. Morovan -is a specialist on viruses and has treated amnemonic plague three times, twice successfully-and the third time was a patient whose disease had advanced much farther than your wife’s.”
Derec suspected that the symptoms of the other two had been much less advanced than Ariel’s, but said nothing. It was something, he acknowledged, that they knew the disease, had a cure for it, and had hope for her. Of course, he thought, we were fools-chauvinistic fools-to assume that the Spacer worlds were the only ones that knew anything about medicine. Who but Earth, incubator of virtually every disease known to mankind, would know more about medicine? Among the Spacer worlds, he supposed, amnemonic plague was invariably fatal when it crossed the blood-brain barrier…
Derec felt his knees shaking and was glad he wasn’t standing.
“What?” He’d missed some of what she’d been saying.
“Need a sample,” she repeated. “We can’t give you the vaccine if you have the disease, at least in its later stages.”
The Key to Perihelion affected the stomach like this: a sudden drop as one went from gravity to free-fall instantly. Derec nearly threw up. Gulping, he said, “Y-yes, Ma’am,” and held out his arm.
Disease!
The possibility had always been there, associating with Ariel. But it was obvious that what she had wasn’t easily contagious. She had only mentioned once, more or less directly, howshe had contracted her illness, as a warning to him. But that was the only time they had come close to more than accidental physical contact. Now that he thought about it, she had kept her distance, even when she had clearly wanted and needed to be hugged. His Spacer’s horror of disease had not been as greatly allayed as he had thought, he realized, shaky. The prophylactic treatment R. David had given them had reassured him, Ariel’s attitude and his worry over her had reassured him, and the heedlessness of youth…
His eyes must have mirrored some of his horror, for Dr. Li looked at him sharply and said, “Don’t worry! You’re obviously in a very early stage, if you have it at all. And we’re going to give you a thorough going-over, to make sure you aren’t coming down with something else.”
They did that for the next half hour. The Human Medical Team would have been faster. but no less thorough. he thought.
“Good, you’re totally free of disease, so far as we can tell,” said Dr. Powell. “Fortunately, your intestinal microorganisms are not markedly different from the Terrestrial strains, and there’s as yet nothing else to worry about. Dr. Li, the vaccine…”
“Incidentally, we detected antitoxins to Burundi’s in your system,” said Dr. Li. “You may have had a mild case of the fever earlier; it may even still be latent in your system. However, the vaccine will immunize you totally.”
“Uh-” said Derec, as a thought took him. “Have I been a carrier all this time?”
Uneasily, he visualized Ariel and himself spreading disease all over Rockliffe Station, where they had crashlanded after escaping the pirate Aranimas. Any human who subsequently entered the station might contract the disease
“Perhaps, but don’t worry about it. Amnemonic plague is misnamed; it isn’t a true plague. It’s not infectious at all, and only minimally contagious. You have to exchange actual body fluids; it’s commonly passed in sexual intercourse, or in contaminated blood supplies. And occasionally by poorly sterilized hypodermics, out on the Settler worlds where they have to reuse their needles.”
That was a relief. But it left a puzzle: how had Derec been exposed to the disease, if not from breathing the air around Ariel? Had he had it before he’d met her on Aranimas’s ship?
He must have. How else had he lost his memory? But how, then, had he survived? If amnemonic plague only affected the memory after passing the blood-brain barrier, and among Spacers was invariably fatal when it did
Again he had missed something.
“I said, your wife is almost certainly going to live. Here, catch him!”
Derec didn’t know who did what; his vision had momentarily blanked. When the light came back, he was sitting and there was a tingle in his arm; a stimulant spray. he thought vaguely. They were proffering a glass of orange juice to him-perfectly normal orange juice, just like the oranges of Aurora. He wondered how much it had cost to ship it here, then realized that they must have bought orange tree seedlings sometime in the past, and raised their own.
“Thank you,” he whispered.
They stood around and watched him intently.
“Is there something?”
“Yes,” said Dr. Li reluctantly. “I hope you’re up to this. It…may upset you.”
Derec took another swallow of the juice, marveling again that it could be so exactly like Auroran juice. “I’m braced,” he said. “Go ahead.”
“Amnemonic plague is well-named, though it’s no plague. Your wife is losing her memory, and at a progressive rate. By the time we’ve cured her, there won’t be much of it left.”
Chapter 10. The Key To Memory
Derec lay on the hard, narrow bed and wondered what Wolruf and Mandelbrot were doing. Probably still sitting out around Kappa Whale in the Star Seeker, waiting, waiting. Of course, they could not readily get space charts without a human to front for them, though Mandelbrot might try. It would not be unusual for a robot to open communications. But if the other ship insisted on speaking to the owner-captain -Star Seekers were small ships; he couldn’t very well be far from the controls. For that matter, Derec was uncertain how well Mandelbrot could lie in such circumstances.
Well, there was nothing he could do for them. He couldn’t leave Earth, and if he could, he couldn’t leave Ariel here. And Ariel was now raving in delirium in the section hospital in Webster Groves Sector, City of Saint Louis. A long way, he gathered, from the nearest spaceport, near New York.