Hooded Swan - The Paradise Game Part 14

"Friend?" he queried.

"Figure of speech," I said. And I left him to it. I did I get the shot, though. I really wasn't kidding about needing it.

Afterward, I went to talk to Johnny again, in the I hope that it would cheer me up. It didn't. Despite the stimu-shot washing benevolence and strength of mind I around in my veins, I found that the company of human beings made my mind contemplate nasty things.

It wasn't that I blamed anybody-certainly not. What Charlot said was quite true. The men who could destroy this world didn't dare not to, unless we found a way of defusing its artillery. Fair enough. You couldn't blame them. But on the other hand, it's things like that tend to make one cynical.

The worst thing of all, I think, was that I later came to the conclusion that the men who might-almost certainly would-have destroyed Pharos would have been wrong, in a way. The Pharos bugs wouldn't have destroyed the human race. We could have lived with them -and not just the one in ten or fifteen who never even got to stage two. After a while, even our guts might have stopped aching. We'd only have lost one in fifty right away-maybe one in ten in the final a.n.a.lysis. But even that runs to billions, I suppose. And there were only a lousy twelve hundred of us, plus a few thousand aliens. It all depends, I guess, on your economic theory.

Instead of talking to Johnny, I took a walk in Paradise. My att.i.tude to it had changed. Before, I had reacted adversely to it. Now I had to wear a plastic suit to go out in it, and had to decontaminate myself every time I came home from it; it wasn't Paradise anymore. It wasn't even beautiful.

Beauty, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder.

I'd just inherited another blind spot.

I met some of the aliens while I was out walking. They approached me fearlessly, just as curious, just as playful as they had been the day the first Caradoc ship landed on their world. I let them walk with me for a while.

I liked them.

19.

By the time I got back to the ship, the sickness had filed a claim on one more body-Eve Lapthorn.

This meant that of the seventeen people currently resident aboard the Hooded Swan only three-one of the Aegis girls, Nick delArco (the original wouldn't-hurt-a-fly-guy), and myself-remained unaffected.

That was a far, far better average than Caradoc was managing, however. They had about forty healthy people left to them- at least six of whom, it was strongly rumoured, were the company wh.o.r.es. Markoff had been hit, and so had most of his staff, but they refused to lie down. They couldn't afford to stop working.

I called to see Eve the moment I found out the thing had dug its claws into her. She wasn't in bed-just resting, with an expression of valiant cheerfulness that looked as if it had been painted on.

"Hi," I said. "What did you do?"

"Nothing," she replied.

"That's what they all say," I informed her, with mock jocularity. "It came apart in me 'ands. Honest, it's a plant. I never touched the stuff. You have a sudden urge to beat somebody up?"

"No," she said. "If I got angry with anyone, it was with myself."

"Bit of a drag," I said, "when you can't even fall out with yourself in private without being called upon to suffer. This is Paradise all right. You are hereby ordered to be happy. Or else. It's a hard life."

"Sure is," she agreed.

"Is that really what happened?" I asked, striking a more serious note. "You got angry with yourself?"

"I honestly don't know," she said. "It could be that. But I think it's probably because I've slowly got to hating this place."

I nodded sympathetic understanding. "It's a difficult place to love," I admitted.

"You seem to manage," she said.

"I don't love it," I a.s.sured her. "But I slowly stopped hating it, instead of the other way around."

She gave me a long, steady look that made me feel a fraction uncomfortable.

"Just how is it," she said, "that an irascible b.a.s.t.a.r.d like you, who reckons to hate the whole d.a.m.n universe, manages to hold this thing at arm's length, while the rest of us, one by one, let it into our systems?"

"I don't hate the whole universe," I said. "I just don't like it very much. I guess I just don't feel anything about it very much. Don't confuse me with Nick. He's holding this thing back with sheer goodness of heart. It's not getting to me because I haven't got a heart." She was still looking at me.

"Your bark must be one h.e.l.l of a lot worse than your bite," she said.

"Bite? I haven't got a bite. You know me-I'm too tiny to be a bother to anybody. I don't bite. I don't even bark, really. I just make noises."

She shook her head. "n.o.body's too tiny to bite," she said. "What do you think is putting the bite on all of us, right now? It's the little things that bite the hardest."

I spread my hands wide. "In that case," I said, "I have no excuses. I don't bite because I don't bite. It's no use trying to work out why this thing hasn't laid me prostrate or kicked me right out like poor Ullman.

That's the way it goes. I can't tell you my secret."

"It's a bit late now, anyhow," she said regretfully.

"Take it easy," I said.

"It isn't easy," she told me.

"I know," I said.

But she didn't believe that. She didn't see how I could know. She didn't know how I was surviving untouched by the Paradise bug, but she was sure that because I was, I couldn't understand. I think she resented the fact that she'd caught it but I hadn't. She'd been a.s.sociating with the Aegis people-it was more or less inevitable that she'd pick up a little of their way of thinking. She saw this affair as a sort of testing ground-she thought that infection was a sign of weakness, of badness. A sort of stigma. I realised that she was jealous of me.

"They'll have the cure soon," I told her, but my voice was weak. Not because I didn't believe what I was saying-I was pretty sure they would have the cure soon. But because I knew it wasn't what she was thinking about. She thought that she ought to have been able to hold out.

It was a dangerous mood for her to be in.

"Look," I said, "I'll tell you why it hasn't got me. I've been cheating. I've been taking shots to keep my spirits floating. I had one earlier today-if I hadn't I'd be with you right now. If we'd thought there was any danger, we'd have given you shots too. But we thought you could hold out on your own. We had confidence in you."

Her eyes searched my face, looking for some traces of evidence that I was lying. I don't know what she expected to see.

"It would never have got Michael," she said levelly. I knew that was the core of the problem. That was the thought that was haunting her.

"It would have had him on the first day," I told her, and I wasn't saying it just to try to make her feel better. It was true. "Your brother was a great guy. He was as good a man as I've ever met. But he wasn't equipped for this sort of a fight. Your brother was br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with anger, just as he was br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with every other kind of emotion known to man. He couldn't have got by without it. He was what he was because he reacted to things, and his reactions were honest. He hadn't anything like the self-discipline that he would have needed to stay clear of this thing. It would have got him. Only stage one -just the aching gut and the runs, just to remind him, just to keep him in check. It wouldn't have killed him-he didn't have that much aggression in him. But he was only human."

"And you're not?"

I was frightened by the bitterness that was obvious in her voice.

"h.e.l.l," I said. "I don't know. Maybe not. But Nick's human. And you're human. n.o.body's going to start drawing any lines between you. h.e.l.l, Johnny's human. This bug doesn't mean a thing, in human terms.

That's what we all keep forgetting. It's alien, is this thing. It comes from outside."

"It's objective," she said.

"It's arbitrary," I corrected her. "This world is not Paradise-surely we've all realised that by now. It's not G.o.d's own heaven, set up to sort out the just from the unjust. That's not St. Peter's flaming sword that's nagging away at your gut. It's a disease. For G.o.d's sake, what does it matter whether your brother would have fallen ill here or not? He's dead, d.a.m.n it. Neither of us is him. Neither of us owes anything to him.

He didn't die because of me, and there's no need for you to try to be him because he did die. This is two years later. More than two years. We're on Pharos. It's nothing to do with him."

I needn't have gone on so long. The bitterness had already died in her. She knew that I was right.

"Shall I try to wheedle Charlot into giving you a shot?" I asked her. "We've got plenty, and that relief ship will probably bring a lot more. This tight rationing is only getting us into trouble."

"I'll be all right," she a.s.sured me.

"You'd better be," I said. "I'll never forgive you if you die."

And I meant that. I honestly don't know how much of the total conversation I had meant, but I certainly cared. The Paradise bug was making me care.

At this rate, I said to the wind, as we climbed back to the control room, I'll soon be caring enough to be hating this world along with the rest You must be doing one h.e.l.l of a job in there.

-Don't worry, he said. It's only a matter of time. I'm sure now. Dead certain. It's the echo currents in the autonomic nervous system. It has to be. They have the right simple patterns. They're amenable to observation-the life-system would have had to learn the patterns that correlated with aggressive behaviour, don't forget.

Learn? I queried.

-It didn't tailor this bug by intuition, he told me. Or telepathy. This life-system isn't sentient-just very highly organised. And very highly sensitive.

You aren't kidding, I said.

I settled myself into the cradle and I put the hood on. There was nothing I had to do at the control panel.

I just wanted to get a look at the universe in its proper perspective. I get separation anxiety if I can't look through a hood once in a while to rea.s.sure myself that what my senses tell me is by no means the whole story.

I looked, almost reflexively, for the relief ship from New Alexandria, but she wasn't anywhere in the system. She wasn't due for a day or two yet. In any event, I decided, I wasn't mad keen on seeing her. If what Charlot said was true, medical supplies might not be the only kind of relief she was carrying.

I began checking through the stages in the call circuit. Merani was still manning the equipment at the camp, taking shifts with a couple of other men-the camp still had a relatively high proportion of healthy individuals. The mysterious Powell, whom I'd never seen, was still periodically involved at the town end, but he was ill. The town had decided that communications didn't have the priority to demand healthy personnel. The army still maintained a separate link in the circuit, despite the fact that it was only a hundred yards across the field. Military pride and protocol, I presumed. They, too, were using sick men to man that particular station.

There were no more deaths to report, and few more casualties. Everything had settled into an almost-equilibrium. We were used to the situation by now. Discipline in the army's ranks was, however, reported to be very slack indeed. After this, some said, this particular arm of the Caradoc organisation would never function with military efficiency again. There was open conjecture as to whether the pacifists generated by the experience would revert to type the moment their guts stopped aching, and it was generally and cynically agreed that they probably would. But on the other hand, the consensus of opinion was that every man on Pharos would have been taught a permanent lesson in self-restraint and consideration, and that that in itself was sufficient to impair military psychology.

To a certain extent, that was a nice thought.

It led on, in fact, to lots of other nice thoughts. We had already considered what this disease could do to the galaxy if it got loose and went on the rampage. But there was a wholly different picture which emerged from the ideas about what this thing would mean to the galaxy if it could be harnessed and controlled. I didn't like to get too far ahead of events, but it did occur to me that these viruses were a great deal more valuable than the worms we had found in the caves of Rhapsody. They had great potential. Even my limited imagination was quite able to see that in the hands of New Alexandria and New Rome the Pharos viruses could change the face of civilisation.

It was a bit of a pity, I thought, that if we did find a cure, and a way of controlling these things, that the Caradoc Company would have it too.

20.

The relief ship from New Alexandria arrived on the eighth day after the warning. It was not alone.

Tracking it into the system was an armed ship from New Rome.

The newcomers weren't mad keen to be angels of mercy. They were apparently prepared to spend a good long while in orbit ascertaining the exact position on the ground. They wanted everything we knew and everything we thought, and to think about it themselves as well.

There was trouble almost from the first minute, when they were told that Charlot wouldn't talk to them himself and that Markoff could spare no one. Nick talked to them to begin with, having been briefed to a certain extent by Charlot, but Merani soon took over the main burden of reportage with occasional interjections from the other points on the open ground circuit. The men in the sky weren't happy about it, but several of the on-planet people were only too willing to tell them that if they wanted more details, then they were perfectly ent.i.tled to come down and have a look for themselves.

Eventually, after some hours of listening, talking, and thinking, several of them decided to do just that.

They brought a boat down from the New Alexandrian ship. Once they were down, they wanted to see Charlot, and they weren't going to take "no" for an answer. Eventually, Nick and I had to lead them to Markoff's headquarters.

Everything therein was deathly quiet. Every time I had been in that particular copter previously the place had been a hive of activity-everybody had been doing something, not necessarily in a hurry, but in a way that suggested they were fully occupied and not to be interrupted. Not this time. All was still.

Markoff was sitting down, Charlot was reclining in one of the beds. There were not many other people in evidence, and those who were in the centre of operations were obviously just waiting.

I didn't get a chance to exchange more than a few words with Charlot before I had to leave him to the relief team. But a few words sufficed.

"You've got it?" I said.

He nodded.

"How long before we know?"

"An hour."

"You tried it on yourself?" I asked.

He smiled-the first time I'd seen him smile in weeks. "Among others," he said. "I'm too old not to be expendable."

I knew that wasn't the reason. He thought he had a cure. When t.i.tus Charlot thought he was right, he was willing to back himself. All the way.

The New Alexandrians took over, but he was in no mood to let them call the tune. These might be pretty big men on the Library world, but there was no one who outranked Charlot, and he wasn't about to concede any sort of authority to them in this matter. I stood around and listened to him while he browbeat them and threw the relevant information at them as if he were hurling spears. Watching him, I knew we were safe. He was in command of the situation. It would go the way he wanted it to go.