Danielle Thomas, Terrestra’s Head of Research,
stared at the screen in the information room of the Supercraft 701. The
dataserves on this vessel were almost as powerful as the ones in her own laboratory back on
Terrestra. It was just that some of the pictures weren’t quite so clear, and it
took just a little longer for some of the data to load. All this was just
making the work a little harder and she had a headache. She’d never had a
headache before and it was not a pleasant sensation.
‘I’d better go on diastics,’ she mumbled to herself. But she
didn’t want to leave the information room while she was so near to confirming
what she had suspected for some time now -that the disease which was beginning
to cripple Terrestra was exactly the same as the Starlight Fever which was
relatively common on Zandra. The main difference was that the Zandrians had a
natural immunity to the disease. There were few deaths caused by it on Zandra -
only the very young and the very old were usually affected and sometimes people
who were slightly weaker anyway.
She stretched and yawned. It was no good, she would have to
go and do something about this pain. Numbers were beginning to jump around
inside her head and the screen was beginning to blur. Her throat was rather dry.
Goodness, she
thought. I hope I’m not getting Starlight
Fever.
The name puzzled her. So far she had found no reason why it
had been called that.
No, she thought. My imagination must just be in overdrive. I
don’t have a fever.
Seconds later, she was back in her cabin. Because she was
such a senior figure, she had been given one of the very best on the craft. It
was furnished with the old materials - real glass in the shower cubicle, wooden
doors to the wardrobes, silk sheets and woollen blankets on the bed. Even at
home she enjoyed a more normal mixture of ripon, plastiglass and plastikholz,
the sturdy, pliable material from which most furniture was made. The lights
were low in the cabin and soft, relaxing music was coming from a hidden
dataserve.
She slotted her fingers into the diastic sensor and stared
at the screen. She was aware of the machine beginning to vibrate a little and
she could hear the water supply adjusting itself.
‘One hour’s sleep and half a litre at least of water
recommended,’ said the soft lilting voice of the monitor. She had chosen the
same archive voice she used on all of her other dataserves: Irish twenty-fifth
century. She always imagined the owner to be a young woman of about her age.
That voice had almost become a friend, which helped to compensate for the fact
that she couldn’t have many of her own. She had to work long hours, especially
now, and there was so much of her life that she had to keep secret, that it was
difficult to have human friends.
‘Okay, I get it,’ she replied to the dataserve.
She helped herself to a glass of water. She slipped off her
grey formal tunic and changed into sleepwear. That tunic too, was made of silk,
and seemed also to soothe away her tiredness. As soon as she climbed into bed,
the lights dimmed to blackness and the music became softer and softer until it,
too, stopped altogether. She lived in an intelligent apartment at home, but it
was nothing compared to this.
It only took her a few seconds to fall into a light,
dreamless sleep. When the communicator woke her up one hour later, she felt
fully refreshed.
The buzzer hadn’t startled her. It had been programmed to
start gently and gradually get louder. As soon as she was fully awake, she
replied to the machine.
‘Open audio only.’
‘Miz Thomas,’ said the voice of the Elder who had
accompanied them. ‘Are you going to return to the information room soon? I did
not want to move any of your files around. But I would like to talk about what
you have found out.’
Danielle sighed to herself. She knew that Razjosh was an
important part of this trip. But he always made her feel so uncomfortable. She
had the feeling that he didn’t trust her because she was so young. It had been
a great honour for her to be elected the youngest Head of Research ever. It had
two downsides. The isolation and the fact that nobody quite seemed to trust
you.
‘I’ll be there in ten minutes,’ she replied.
She dressed quickly. She checked her appearance in the large
real glass mirror in the apartment. She decided to wear her long hair in a tight
pleat. Maybe it would make her look a little older. Then she drew in her breath
and mumbled. ‘Here goes, then.’
And she hurried off towards the information room.
Razjosh was already there. He was sitting in one of the
comfisessels, his back to the door and facing the last screen which Danielle
had been looking at.
‘Good afternoon,’ said Danielle as confidently as she could.
‘Miz Thomas,’ replied Razjosh, standing up and bowing
slightly towards her. ‘I am so glad we can talk. I know how very hard you have
been working on this. I realise you must be tired. But I expect that you are
aware that I will need a full briefing before I can talk to the Zandrians about
what we know.’
Danielle’s mouth went dry. Her pulse was going faster than
normal. It was ridiculous being so nervous. She was the expert here. But there
was something about this old man which always disturbed her a bit. When he
looked at you, it was as if he could see everything you were thinking. The way
he stood so formally and the slightly different style of tunic he wore did not
help - neither did knowing that he was an Elder.
‘So, what have you found out?’ he said.
‘I’m almost completely certain that it is what they call Starlight
Fever,’ said Danielle. ‘The symptoms are exactly the same as the ones we see in
the Terrestrans, though not quite so severe. That often happens, of course,
when a disease goes from one people to another or from one species to another.’
‘I see,’ said Razjosh.
‘Look,’ said Danielle. She called up the screens which
showed the antibodies found on Kaleem and the ones which appeared on samples
from Zandrians
‘Zandrians came mainly from Terrestra. There are a few
native Zandrians also. The two races, both humanoid, are well integrated,’ she
continued, ‘which makes it a bit of a puzzle as to why Terrestrans haven’t
developed immunity after catching the disease. Apart from Kaleem, of course.’
‘Very interesting,’ said Razjosh. He was smiling at her now.
‘And they do have a vaccine,’ added Danielle. ‘But they only
give it to the very old, the very young and those people who have a weak immune
system.’
‘A little like with the influenza epidemics in the 20th
and 21st centuries?’ asked Razjosh.
‘A little,’ agreed Danielle. ‘Except that it doesn’t mutate
so much. Apart from this one time, when it’s apparently come to another planet.’
‘Carried by a Starlight Express perhaps?’ said Razjosh. ‘You
wouldn’t know about those, of course, - Golden Knowledge, but I think it might
be useful for you to know.’
Danielle’s nervousness had started to disappear. Now it came
back threefold. She was about to be given some of the Golden Knowledge. She
found it so hard to distinguish from Hidden Information – especially as her job
involved dealing with hard provable facts. How could she be certain of anything
anymore with these three sorts of information to refer to? And how could she be
certain that anything she found out wouldn’t put her in danger?
‘Starlight Expresses were the old local transporter ships
which used to go from planet to planet within solar systems,’ explained
Razjosh. ‘’Express is a bit of a misnomer - they were rather slow and
cumbersome, and it could take almost as long to get from Terrestra to Sedna as
it’s going to take us to get all of the way to Zandra. They were called ‘Starlight’
because all of the walls were made out of plastiglass and you had a good view
of the stars. They just went from planet to planet and you could get on and off
as you pleased. They were so frequent that you didn’t need to book.’
‘So I guess it could be crowded in them and people could mix
with all sorts of diseases they had no immunity to?’ asked Danielle. This
looked like a good explanation for the name of the disease. It didn’t explain,
though, how it was spreading on Terrestra. People still lived fairly isolated
from each other and the ban on movement had not stopped it.
‘Do you think that’s it then?’ asked Razjosh. ‘You don’t
look all that convinced.’
Danielle bit her lip.
‘It’s getting close to it, but it still doesn’t make
complete sense,’ she replied. There was still something bothering her about
this disease. It was not behaving like anything she had ever heard of before.
And she knew a lot about disease. That had been her specialism before she
became Head of Research. She had worked earlier at the medical centre,
fine-tuning the diastic processes. Why did the disease only exist now on
Zandra, and more recently on Terrestra?
Razjosh was staring at her. She began to feel uncomfortable
again. ‘Show me all that you know,’ he said.
Danielle called up a few files.
‘There, you see,’ she said, ‘it causes sickness, fever, sore
throat and delirium. Sometimes the
delirium can be so bad - usually only in the very old, the very young and the
infirm - that the victim goes into a deep coma. And occasionally, as in the
case of Maria Malkendy, the patient can go straight into a coma. This is very
rare in a healthy adult.’
‘And they vaccinate?’ asked Razjosh.
Danielle called up another file.
‘They only vaccinate those people who have a high risk of
becoming seriously ill from the disease,’ she said.
‘Do we know how they create the vaccine?’ asked Razjosh.
Danielle called up another file.
‘Using the disease itself, of course. But the other
ingredients are not known to us on Terrestra,’ she said. ‘And the vaccine is
not stable. They cannot manufacture and store vast quantities.’
‘Hmm, I see,’ said Razjosh. ‘I’m going to have my work cut
out, then. They probably won’t want to
let any of it go.’
Danielle suddenly felt dizzy. The room was beginning to sway
up and down. She grabbed the arms of the comfisessel.
‘Bring some water quickly,’ called Razjosh.
One of the Supercraft’s robots appeared immediately with a
glass of water.
‘Sir,’ it said, offering the glass to Razjosh.
‘It’s for Miz Thomas,’ said Razjosh.
The robot glided smoothly over to Danielle. It offered the
glass of water. She took it, her hand trembling slightly. Razjosh waved the
robot away and it glided quietly out of the information lounge.
Danielle took a sip of the cool water and immediately felt
better.
‘You have been working too hard, my dear,’ said the Elder. ‘There
is nothing more you can do now until we get there. And even then, you must let
me do most of the work. You should sit back now and enjoy the view, now that we
have come out of super-drive.’
Danielle wanted to protest that she was all right now, that
really she should try to find out a little more about the vaccine they would
have to plead for. But already the old man
was commanding the files to shut down and the screens to retract. One by
one, they lifted up to the ceiling. The information lounge was transformed into
an observation deck.
‘At least we stay conscious when we slow down,’ said
Razjosh.
Danielle could only hold her breath as she saw the view. She
had not realised it would be quite like this. Of course, she had not been able
to work whilst they were taking off - every passenger had been strapped onto
their seats. But she had been so petrified that she hadn’t dared to open her
eyes. It was so unheard of, for Terrestrans to leave Terrestra. Who was driving
the Supercraft? The inhabitants of Terrestra were never meant to leave their
planet, nor would they normally have any reason to want to. So who got to learn
how to manoeuvre one of these things? And if it was someone from another
planet, how and when did we communicate with them? Would they also be dangerous
and disease-ridden to a Terrestran? And on top of all that, she was scared of
normal flying within the confines of Terrestra’s atmosphere anyway. She had sat
with her eyes closed, and her hands gripping the sides of the armrest. The
craft had gone into super-drive and as she had been warned, she blacked-out.
Once she came to, they were speeding away from Western Sector 3. She had made
her way to the information lounge and already one of the craft’s robots was
sorting out her files. She just had a
quick glimpse through one of the plastiglass windows before it was covered in
data from her research. Soon she was absorbed in her work, the fear forgotten.
This time she was not afraid and the nervousness she had
felt in front of Razjosh was also dissolving. She could only stare at the
universe she saw through the window. It had been one thing looking up at the
stars at night through Terrestra’s atmosphere. This was something else, though.
The stars were more than twinkling. You could almost see the exchange of gases
and the flow of the nuclear reaction which gave the stars their energy. The
dark was even darker and the lights were even brighter. It looked more as if
the planets and stars were gently gliding past them than as if they were
hurtling through space at thousands of light years per minute.
‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ said Razjosh.
Danielle couldn’t speak. She just about managed to nod her
head.
‘We sometimes forget exactly where we are,’ said Razjosh.
Both of them sat in silence and stared at the planets and
stars outside.
There was suddenly a huge noise. Danielle found herself
gripping the sides of her chair again.
The planets and the stars seemed to have stopped moving. One
planet at the side of them seemed to be getting large.
‘There she is,’ said Razjosh. ‘That’s Zandra.’
Danielle watched as they came closer to what at first looked
just a grey mass. Soon she could not see the sky beyond the planet. Its smooth
surface gradually began to look like orange peel, and then she began to see
real features on it - mountains, rivers, lakes. The grey turned to brown, green
and blue. It didn’t really look so very different from how she would expect
Terrestra to look from a spacecraft.
‘All passengers to safety decks,’ said one of the craft’s
electronic voices.
Danielle’s legs were shaking as she made her way to her
landing seat and strapped herself in. She closed her eyes and waited for the
thud that would signal they had landed. Few of the other passengers were speaking,
and those who did were chattering more excitedly, more nervously than usual.
Was everyone perhaps as scared as she was?
When the bump did come, it was actually very gentle, almost
unnoticeable. Before she even realised they had in fact landed, the crew of the
Supercraft were issuing instructions for disembarkation.
‘Well, are you ready for this?’ asked Razjosh. He was
standing, his arm held out towards the exit.
No she wasn’t. No way was she ready for this. This was
completely crazy. Yet she had to do it. It was part of her job after all.
Danielle pulled herself to her feet. She felt heavy. It was
almost painful to put one foot in front of the other. It was more than just
Zandra’s natural gravity which was a little stronger than Terrestra’s and considerably
stronger than the Supercraft’s though.
She just did not want to face these people from a different culture.
‘You really don’t need to worry,’ said Razjosh. ‘I’m the
diplomat here. You just have to make a good job of presenting the facts. And we
know you will.’
She tried to respond to his encouraging smile.
Razjosh turned and started to walk away. She followed him
out of the safety seat lounge, along the
corridor and down the exit ramp.
They were waiting there, the five Zandrians.
Danielle’s first impression was that they were very
different from Terrestrans. They seemed taller. One of them had pale brown
skin. The others were white and two of them had the same colour hair as white Terrestrans.
One had very pale yellow hair, and another red-brown, rust-like hair. Their
tunics were slightly shorter than Terrestran ones.
Her second impression was that the Zandrians were very like
Terrestrans. They had two legs, they did wear tunics and the salute they made
to Razjosh was as understandable as any Terrestran greeting.
She watched, gob-smacked, as Razjosh returned the salute as
if he had been doing it all his life and then spoke to them in words she could
not understand, but which they clearly did.
She remembered what she had come here to do and, despite the
warm Zandrian sun, she shivered.
