The fact that Tom Rom had offered Zoe the choice was in itself calming. “Not just yet. We don’t want to initiate an outside investigation. There’s no telling how many people knew this man was coming here.”
Tom Rom looked neither pleased nor disappointed. “I am here. Let me know what you need.”
Two security ships launched from orbit, while three other defenders rose from the surface to intercept the small ship. The stranger flitted around the satellite stations, dodging pursuit. He kept transmitting, sounding more desperate. “I need to speak to Zoe Alakis. My name is James Duggan. My wife is Andrea—Andrea Duggan. Maybe you’ve heard of her? She’s an artist, quite well known.” On the screen, his young face looked gaunt, and beard stubble covered his cheeks. “Dammit, why won’t you respond?”
“Mr. Duggan, you are not authorized here,” said one of her security pilots. “Pergamus is a private facility. If you do not depart immediately, we will consider you dangerous and defend ourselves with lethal force.”
Duggan’s eyes widened, but he was so determined that the threat barely made him flinch. “I just want to talk. I need to speak with Ms. Alakis.”
On the private channel, Tom Rom said, “I’m ready anytime, Zoe. Waiting.”
She hated how this intrusion would distract her researchers from their important work. She didn’t need to be reminded that Pergamus was vulnerable. “Let me try one more thing.” Zoe adjusted her chair, glanced at her reflection, then activated the transmit function. “Mr. Duggan, this is Zoe Alakis. I don’t know you. I don’t wish to speak with you. I don’t want you here. Please leave.”
Duggan leaned closer to the screen as intense as if no one else existed but the two of them. Zoe felt a chill. “I’ve got nowhere else to go,” he said. “You’re my only chance—my wife’s only chance. She has… she has Heidegger’s Syndrome, in its final stages.”
Zoe’s expression hardened. So that’s what it was. “If she’s in the final stages of Heidegger’s, then it is incurable. Go home. Be with your wife, comfort her.”
“She’s already nearly blind, the degeneration of the optic nerve was the worst for her. She’s an artist, a laser artist. She’s famous. You must’ve seen her work.”
“I don’t look at art, Mr. Duggan. I don’t leave Pergamus. We have too much work to do here.”
“It’s Heidegger’s! I know you’re researching it. I know you have a cure.”
“Heidegger’s Syndrome is incurable. You can read that anywhere.”
“You have a cure,” he insisted. “You can help my wife.”
“I could help a lot of people… and if I did, there would still be more who need it, and even more after that.” Her work was too important to let herself plunge into that quagmire.
The pathetic man had let himself and his wife fall into this trap. The universe was not a fair place, and it wasn’t her job to rectify injustices. She didn’t like him, didn’t like that he had intruded here, didn’t like how he assumed that after all her years of effort, all her expenses, all the trial and error, all the extreme measures she had taken in the pursuit of a cure for Heidegger’s, while her own father degenerated… that she would just give it to this man because he was sad and desperate? She felt no sympathy for him whatsoever.
“If I had a cure for Heidegger’s Syndrome, Mr. Duggan, then it would be my cure. I developed it. I tested it. I keep it. I don’t have to share.” No one had bothered to help when her father needed it. She had learned much about human nature.
“I can pay you,” Duggan said. “My wife can create original masterpieces if she gets her sight back.”
Zoe rolled her eyes. Even after intensive treatment, the chances of repairing the damage to the woman’s optic nerve were minuscule. And what use did Zoe have for artwork anyway? There were too many threats in the universe, too many germs, too many dangers to watch out for at every turn. She had no desire to cover up the risks with pretty pictures.
“You miss the point, Mr. Duggan. If you don’t leave now, I am within my rights to have Pergamus security destroy you. I have a full record of this conversation. You have been warned several times. You are trespassing.”
Duggan reeked of naïve disbelief. His voice was hoarse. “You’re not human. How can you do this?”
“You don’t know what I am, or what I’ve been through.”
She switched over to Tom Rom’s private channel. “Encourage him to depart with all due speed.” Then, as a last kindness she added, “But don’t harm him, don’t destroy his ship. Let him go back to his wife.”
After looking at her for a long moment, Tom Rom acknowledged and switched off. Zoe was sure he understood her justifications, though it had taken her a while to figure it out for herself.
James Duggan reminded Zoe of what she had been like years ago. At one time she had been desperate too, willing to do anything to cure her father as his Heidegger’s progressed on Vaconda. No one had rescued her then. In those last months, she had been forced to watch the awful worsening of his symptoms, even though Tom Rom had done his best to help…
For Adam Alakis, the course of the disease manifested differently from Andrea Duggan’s symptoms. His sympathetic nerves had suffered the worst damage, making it harder and harder for him to breathe, making his heart forget how to beat.
He lost the ability to control the muscles of his throat, so he couldn’t even swallow his food; Zoe had to hook him up to intravenous nutrient drips in the forest watchtower. Even when he did manage to breathe, he couldn’t control his voice. Unable to speak or write for the last few months, he communicated with his daughter only through longing, hopeless looks; his unexpressed thoughts piled up like drifts of old gray snow that refused to melt. She’d been nineteen.
Zoe refused to believe there was no cure for Heidegger’s. In their watchstation above the lichentree forests, with the droning symphony of insect songs and the trill of reptile-birds, she used to sit in the window enclosure. She propped her father in his comfortable chair, adjusted the nutrient drip, and let him stare out at the undulating lichentree colors. Tendrils of orchid vines broke off in strong breezes and drifted across the treetops before they dropped into the underbrush and tapped into other plant systems.
While her father faded, day by day over the course of five long years, Zoe made it her cause to understand everything known about Heidegger’s. The Alakis watchstation library had a wealth of medical records, as well as all the data the Vaconda teams had collected for decades on the pharmaceutical possibilities of native insects, flowers, spores, and poisonous saps.
Heidegger’s was a rare disease, with fewer than a thousand recorded cases across the Terran Hanseatic League. Zoe did discover several recent studies, and a medical research team on New Portugal that had made interesting progress. A few obscure research papers suggested promising data, but that research had never been pursued—Zoe didn’t know why. She found it maddening. If that research team had simply followed up with trials, they could have had a test treatment by now, something that Zoe’s ailing father could try.
She sent pleas to the research teams, begging them to release anything they had—unpublished studies, unverified experiments. But she was just a teenaged girl, and she received no response. At the time, the hydrogues had launched their war across the Spiral Arm, and the entire Hansa was in turmoil. Hydrogue warglobes were attacking numerous planets, the Ildiran Empire was reeling—and nobody cared about a lone biological researcher and his daughter on a small wilderness planet.