Chapter One

CHINGKOW

 

SHARON 

"My brave little Sakari, who hides her fear so well, not even I can oft detect it, will you vow to me now?"

 

"Yes, beloved eKhain, I will vow to you."

 

Daktoy lay on the salpi, pale, breathing difficult. I needed to be strong and certain. He looked into my face which was supposed to be held in confidence and said;

 

"When I die, I want you to bury me on Zechia. I derive from Chateh District, near a river called Zarme. It was a house of brown stones and white stones, Nea opened the front door."

 

"I so vow."

 

"I have not concluded. There is more. And I ask you to vow."

 

"I will vow."

 

"After you bury me, commemorate me. Remember me as a Warrior, as eKhain, yet do not decry the intervals you protected me, the occasions you tended me as if I were a shazi. The occasion I asked you to kiss me. The moment I asked you to love me."

 

"I so vow."

 

"After you relive our life--conceal me in your sha. There are two paths; two options. The first...."

 

I'd gone on this tour of misery long enough; "Daktoy" I proclaim as if certain, "you will not die. Not from Chingkow."

 

"Please...let me complete..." he said with effort.

 

He was so ill, labouring for breath, I should let him make his speech... but I couldn't.

 

"You will not die."

 

"But this is Chingkow. And we die of it."

 

"Yes. But this cures it. This is what Scarmac used on Miunow to cure Chingkow. Quinine."

 

"How did you know?"

 

"I know human nature."

 

"I can not understand."

 

"Beloved, this was done before. Not exactly the same, but in essence the same. It was done in concentration camps, in Germany. In those days, the victims were Jews. Five hundred years later, the victims were ZerShaz. It is the same. It is unspeakable evil dressed in the clothing of science. You need not understand."

 

He looked at me and looked at me and blinked his eyes, cause he could not focus them. Sweat was coming off him and he was afraid. He had never experienced sickness in his life. I'm pretty sure most of the ZerShaz would say the same.

 

Seeing him lying there, I took off my boots and got into bed beside him and held him. He lay there, trying to fight the disease, but couldn't.

 

"Just relax. Don't worry. This is sickness. This is how it feels. You won't die."

 

"Shari--." He says, "I know--not believe, but--all in creation--you above all--truly, truly, I love you--."

 

"I know Daktoy, I know--."

 

His fever was climbing. I took the fur off him, removed his uniform, wiped him with a damp rag.
At first, he was there with me, but then, started to drift. Started to revert into what he was, before I met him; locked into himself, neither expecting nor permitting compassion, I watched him enclose into his torment, alone.

 

it was a hideous epiphany, but one I'd experienced before. I was not completely surprised, only hurt that even in extremis he could maintain his walls.

 

I heard sounds, covered him. It was Doctor Jill pushing in a scanner. She began to work it and although I probably could have, I just didn't have the energy.

 

I read the output--it wasn't hard. Everything--all his life signs were wrong. His respiration, his blood pressure, body temperature were all off the mean computed before injection.

 

"They are deathly afraid of disease." Jill tells me, as if I need to hear it. "The ZeSha are standing around the corridors in shock."

 

"Listen to me, Jill. I don't know how much he can take--before --that place--he could take every thing twice--but since then--his will--like, he don't really want to live anymore."

 

She looked at me as if she forgot my face. Then, trying to be superior, she not answered in her careful aristocratic voice.

 

"iKhyarm shouldn't have informed you how I felt about him."

 

"No, iKhyarm shouldn't have told him. I knew about it long time."

 

"You did? How?"

 

She seemed a giddy teenager. I wonder if she wasn't a virgin.

 

"No one would touch him with a ten foot pole. That's where I came into the story."

 

"Oh." She mumbled, searching me like adding and subtracting things in her mind but getting wrong answers. I guess I was feeling generous, for I tried to explain the facts of life to her.

 

"Daktoy can't understand why you could love him and what you mean by it, what you want. You understand? He figures the only time anyone cares if he lives or dies is when he's got use to them. He gets super suspicious when he can't immediately figure out the use."

 

"Why doesn't he trust me?"

 

Like I haven't just explained it.  "He don't trust nobody. Except me."

 

"And you?" She asks like she's not interested.

 

"I've been lucky. I never had to trust anyone. Any way, you go out--hear--leave us."

 

"Tell me--how did you know about Miunow? Because you knew. You sent for me before you rescued him--you knew."

 

I glared at her. I hate it when people figure out what I don't want to admit, then put me in the position of having to tell them. I didn't want to acquaint her, but like I had to tell someone.

 

"I'm one of the conspirators of silence." I begin, break. can't pretend or tough it out. I tried to make it academic, knew she was checking it.  "I know what it is." I state, "I know what they do." No more. I held my jaw hard, wasn't going to cry in front her if I could help it nor give her any more data.

 

"And Scarmac's report?" She asks.

 

"I never bothered--I knew Connie studied under him--Connie Jarufsky--"

 

"I know her! She was my instructor at University!"

 

"I should have picked up earlier," I realise; "I should have checked before Scarmac's first major work."

 

"Why?"

 

She looked so stupid asking me this question.

 

"That's how it goes. First you do your research, then you publish."

 

I had a teacher who said it. Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it. Jill had this jerked up expression on her face, then realized I wasn't saying nursery rhymes.

 

Jill looked upon him, then at me. Her thoughts were loud, so she spoke them.

 

"When I saw him, in that Unit--on that ship--when he was rescued from Miunow, I don't know how I didn't run shrieking from the Chamber. I couldn't believe that in such a short time--so much--so much could be done to him--"

 

I quoted whatt the Defo said to me; "Twen-five of you minutes Missie and we turn danger crim-nal into useful worker. Fucking shits---!"

 

"You flew prison ships..." she realises.

 

I didn't want her to see me cry. She gave me a pitying look, or maybe it was supposed to be compassionate.  I sort of hated her for being innocent or beautiful or what. I sort of hated everything, everyone, life, myself, just wanting to know why I had to go through all this shit, do all this shit.

 

"Go..." I ordered. She nodded and went.

 

As a Rover, a Temporary Pilot, I got the worst jobs. Taking Schedule One Prisoners to the Concentration Camp of Miunow was one of them.

 

I looked at Daktoy lying there, having gone through so much in such a short time. And now this.
The only way to remove a chemical his torturers had used from his system was to inject him with a disease they called Chingkow, which was fatal. It was fatal because the ZerShaz didn't have a cure. Humans did. For what they called ChingKow we knew as Malaria.

 

In a time Jill was back with the scanner.

 

"Concentration .009." She tells me.

 

"It's leaving?" I ask.

 

"Yes. It's being passed out as sweat."

 

Then Daktoy was awake; "Shari--" He called.

 

"Yes, Baby--"

 

"Sabsa--water--"

 

I got him the pitcher and held it. He put his hands on it and also held it and drank it off. It was a two quart pitcher.  Then he lay back, closed his eyes.

 

"Golly--he's so sick--" I blurt.

 

"You understand, we have to wait--wait until the scanner reads zero, for even one molecule of it will reproduce itself within two hours."

 

"What kind of shit is it, that they used, this g-86a?"

 

"It's an organic glue. It was developed for use in wounds. The wound is coated with it, bleeding stopped, healing began. The drawback was that g-86a keeps reproducing. It gets into blood vessels, blocks them. One can keep clearing the vessels, as I have done on his legs. But the g-86a collects in the brain. It causes brain damage, then, of course death."

 

Daktoy moved in his sleep, we looked at him, and she said;  "I doubt it's used anymore--even--there--I think, I think they made a special--in his case--." She said softly.

 

Daktoy began to tremble, I covered him. He was, to me, like a lost child, who couldn't understand what was being done to him.

 

"Why did they hate him so much?" I cry, then cool it a bit. I can't be weak in front of her. "Me, I can understand. I'm a deliberate interference and I made myself available for the two minutes hate. But him--it was like---"

 

"He tried to avoid offending them at all times." She said so gently.

 

My eyes jumped to her face. She was a beautiful woman. Half Chinese, tall, with her night black hair. She met my eyes with her warm brown ones. "I went to Galteri--" She begins.

 

"You spoke to Mrs. McPherson?"

 

"She wouldn't speak to me. I spoke to Frank--his step brother--Frank told me that during their childhood, Daktoy often saved his life. I kept expecting at one point Frank, would feel something, if not love, then gratitude, if not gratitude, then just a compassionate toleration, but he felt nothing."

 

"You people of this world, I don't understand you, Jah know. I can't understand you. My neighbors, they might of been the bottom of the barrel.I mean anything you want to say about them--you can...but ..."

 

"Your world, Sharon, did not spend two hundred years fighting a war, losing relatives, colonies, suffering hardship. Your world did not confront an unknowable enemy with a culture that made the slightest disrespect grounds to wipe out an entire village--."

 

Jill seated herself so gracefully on a side chair, folded her hands across her lap; spoke. "When MacPherson rescued him there was a segment of the population that said that he should be put to death. Daktoy and MacPherson both, actually."

 

I don't remember reading this, or remembering it, if I had.

 

"It took the intercession of various groups--religious and otherwise to prevent it. On Galteri, there was a small riot--and fortunately or un-fortunately they were military people, able to be courts martialed or transferred."

 

She wet her lips, then glared into my eyes. "If my mother had dared to infer that Reggie wasn't a big lustful monster who raped her, she would have been killed."

 

"He was only five years old--" I nearly shout at Jillian.

 

"It didn't matter." She replies calmly. "They would have killed him if he were an infant in arms. If they had gotten to him, even though he was just a child, they would have killed him."

 

We looked at him lying there. I brushed his hair from his face. And so softly, I suppose I wasn't meant to hear, she muses, "You're not what I thought--"

 

"You mean the---'primitive creature who clung to the only sentient being she considered to have compassion for her,'--who reverted to her--'violent atavistic past' and became a 'homicidal 'dangerous psychopath' --has suddenly turned into a human being?"

 

"You read the reports about you?"

 

"Of course. Made good reading."

 

"In a way, Sharon, I would have expected you to--"

 

"Flounder at the bottom of the barrel somewhere--yeah."

 

She examines me as I study her, then, share something; "Terrans, today's humans, aren't real. They don't live here and now, they live on computer. They don't look and see what is in front of them, they let the computer do it. You understand? Me, I live here and now. I only use a computer to look up something, not to tell me what to think."

 

How would she understand? She was one of them. She looked at me as if maybe there was something she wanted to say, but didn't. She left the chamber.

 

Why had I spoken to her as if we shared commonality? As if her hopeless, overly belated love for him, the him she didn't have a prayer of knowing, gave us some connection? Was I so starved for companionship I would relate to anyone?

 

I looked at Daktoy. Like malaria, it wasn't the fever or the chills that killed, it was the exhaustion such caused. He started to come back and he saw me, and was aware.

 

"What did she report?"

 

"The chemical is leaving your system."

 

"I require the sani--"

 

"I'll get the bedpan--" I go into the sani and return. He pissed about a quart. I didn't empty the pan, I figured that the doctor would want it to test.

 

As I was coming back to the bed I felt dizzy. There was a buzzing in my ears and in my back teeth and joints I felt pain. And I knew, I had it. I had it, and there would be an epidemic on this ship.

 

I staggered to the vents, turned down the pressure, so that anything would fly in, not out, then, just before falling on the bed, I went to the com and summoned Jill. I heard Daktoy calling me, but it sounded like a memory. Then I felt him touch me.

 

"I don't feel so good--" I say.

 

"Shari--!" He called, holding me.

 

I lay in his arms, feeling the disease taking over. Wanting to sleep, but Jill entered.

 

"I've got it!" I croak. "It's airborne!"

 

"I'll inject you--"

 

"No! Synthesize more, first. He'll die of it--I won't."

 

"How do you know?"

 

"Don't you see, I'm sick? But not as sick as him? Don't risk his life--"

 

"I wouldn't--" She informs in no uncertain terms. "There are three doses--." I feel a jab, then roll into sleep.

Chapter Two

NURSEWORK

 

JILL CHIN SEE

 

I sat beside the salpi upon which eDapktchoy and Sharon lay and began to record.

 

As a doctor, as a scientist, I have been taught to record my findings. For an ugly moment, I felt in Miunow with Scarmac; for they had left records; records similar to mine.

 

They had studied this disease, they had watched ZerShaziemn sicken and die. They had the antidote, as did I. And they waited, as I

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 18.10.2021
ISBN: 978-3-7487-9730-2

Alle Rechte vorbehalten