Yunupur was right: Freep corpses weren’t normally so flaccid.
"Are you saying…" Cheticamp began.
"Nonsense!" Tic interrupted. "The plague didn’t affect Freeps."
"Diseases have a way of adapting," Festina said grimly.
"Oh bosh!" Yunupur rippled with laughter. Or at least his gliders gave a little shimmy. "Let’s not turn melodramatic, shall we? There’s an old maxim from medical schooclass="underline" when you hear hoofbeats, assume it’s a leaner, not some alien beast like a horse. If this poor chump is dead without a mark on him, he was probably just poisoned. Or he overdosed on something. Or he had a garden-variety heart attack, or a stroke, or he choked on an ort bone. There hasn’t been a single case of the dreaded scourge since the epidemic itself."
"Let me touch him," I said. "I know the feel of slack muscles. I remember fierce clearly."
"Look, Mom-Faye, if you’re truly worried, I’ll tell the autopsy lab to put some muscle tissue under the microscope…"
"No!" I snapped. "We have to know now, before you take the body back to the city. If it’s carrying a new strain of the plague — one that affects other species besides Ooloms…"
"Then we isolate the deceased in a sterile body bag and take the usual precautions at the lab," Yunupur said. "It’s not like we handle any corpse sloppily."
"I want to touch it. I want to know now."
"You won’t know," Yunupur told me. "You can’t diagnose just by touch. Anyway, it’s been twenty-seven years since you’ve seen a plague victim… and those were all Ooloms, with a completely different musculature than Freeps…"
"Let her touch the corpse," Tic said quietly. "Why not?"
Yunupur looked to Cheticamp. The police captain shrugged. "Where’s the harm?"
"There’s harm if she gets upset over nothing," Yunupur muttered. "I’ve heard stories about our Mom-Faye." But he pulled out a clean pair of protective gloves and tossed them to me.
I put them on fast, trying not to think why I was doing this. Another freckles-and-scalpel thing? My chance to catch the plague, if this was a strain that affected more than Ooloms?
A bit of that. But I genuinely wanted to know; and I was convinced I would recognize the feel of the plague. The aura of the disease, as well the queer sloppiness of a slack muscle. I knew the enemy. I’d massaged and kneaded and rubbed down… carried unmoving bodies, alive and dead…
I’d know. I was harsh certain I’d know. One squeeze of Iranu’s biceps, or his chest, or the limp muscles of his face…
His eyes hung wide-open and his mouth too. Like Zillif’s face on the roof of my dome, so long ago.
I knelt. I reached toward the dead man’s arm.
A peacock tube erupted out of nowhere, and suddenly my hand was on the other side of the room.
WATER-OWLS
Something you don’t see every day.
The peacock thingy had materialized and swallowed my hand like a snake… and there at the other end of the tube, fifteen meters across the chamber, was my own plastic-gloved hand protruding from the field of rippling color.
I wiggled my fingers. Which is to say I felt the wiggling down at the end of my arm, except that the wiggling happened fifteen meters away.
Long-distance finger action. Rife with possibilities, that. Or was I just giddy with surprise/shock/bloody damned amazement?
I pulled my hand back. The fingers disappeared from the far end of the tube, and my hand was back attached to my wrist as if it had never gone wandering elsewhere.
The peacock tube winked out of existence. Job done.
Silence. Then Festina let out her breath in a whoosh. "Do you know how many laws of physics you just broke? You can’t be half-in/half-out of a Sperm-tail. They just don’t work like that."
"Maybe you never asked the right way," Tic suggested.
She glared.
Warily, I reached toward the corpse again. The peacock tube shimmered back into existence, and pulled its same hand-swallowing routine. This time its tail wafted down the tunnel and out of sight. I don’t know how far the tube went, but I could feel a gusty breeze pushing against my gloved fingers.
I pulled back. Bye-bye, peacock thingy. It vanished to wherever a deus ex machina hangs out between emergencies.
"This may be a rash hypothesis," Tic said, "but I think the Peacock doesn’t want Smallwood touching the corpse… as if there’s some risk involved. And if it’s risky for her, perhaps it’s risky for everyone."
"Yeah," Yunupur agreed, scuttling back a few paces. "Maybe we should think about this for a while."
I didn’t need to think. Whatever the Peacock was, I trusted its instincts. It wanted to keep me safe from something, and that "something" was likely contagious.
The plague was back.
Yunupur had disinfectant in his tote pack. We made him use it all, soaking his arms up to the shoulder and bathing his gliders too — anything that had come close to the corpse. Then Cheticamp ordered everybody out of the mine till a full Medical Threat Team could fly in.
When Cheticamp radioed for the team, he told them to bring plenty of olive oil.
Outside, it felt colder than before: that stiff wind I’d felt. (Had the Peacock really tubed my hand all the way to the surface?) The sky had turned wintry — chalk white, melancholy, sullen. A sky full of snow, and ready to dump it on our heads.
Cheticamp took Yunupur and the ScrambleTacs off to the police skimmers… either to discuss Iranu’s death, or to start making contingency plans if we really were facing a plague outbreak. Tic went with them to play scrutineer. I suppose I should’ve gone too, but I didn’t. Tough.
Instead, Festina and I hiked down to the shore of Lake Vascho. Neither of us spoke as we walked. We both seemed to have a fondness for quiet.
The wind died. The snow came. Big white flakes sifting down onto the lakeshore. They settled onto the sand, the trees, my hair… Festina’s hair… her eyelashes…
She looked at me looking at her. I pretended I’d been staring at the lake beyond her.
Hard to believe it was the middle of the day. Close to noon, but the clouds were clotted so thick, the world seemed two-thirds to twilight. Everything had got muted down gray. If the wind picked up, started swirling the snow around, we’d have trouble seeing our way back to the skimmer. But why should I worry about getting lost in a blizzard? The Peacock would save me, wouldn’t it? I’m too tired to think about that, I said to myself. Which would have been a good enough excuse to let my old brain coast away from confronting the issue. Didn’t work now. My link-seed’s cruel inability to shut anything out.
Po turzijeff. Kalaff. Not maidservant. Daughter.
Scary enough to knock the breath out of you.
Festina’s voice broke into my thoughts. "What are those things out there? In the ice."
We were standing hard on the edge of the lake — where the sand ran up against the lid of ice covering the water. The things Festina had seen were dark blobs as big as my fist: water-owl eggs, laid in the fall, incubated/frozen all winter long, but due to hatch in another few days, after the ice was gone. The owls were ugly as sin when newborn, slimy oversize tadpoles — nothing a bit like birds. They needed three more months to mature out of their amphibious stage; then they finally became little hoot-fowl, hunting rodents on land and small fish in the water. I started to tell all this to Festina; but the second she found out she was looking at eggs, she got a happy-crazed look in her eye.
"Eggs?" she said. "I collect eggs! I’ve got…" She stopped herself. "I have a collection," she went on, now trying to sound offhanded and only managing stiff. "A collection I could talk about for hours and bore you completely to tears."