were scrambling madly, to find what disease suddenly ailed us. Reba could only work the ’scope if she held her hand over her right eye, the one which hurt her the most, but I helped her prep the sample for the electron ’scope in the ship’s lab. I was the only person lucid enough to kill one of the lab rats, without trying to end the life of a phantom rat standing off to one side....
I half-suspected what Reba was looking for, but I didn’t ask her any questions; I simply did as she asked, following her terse, pain-punctuated orders:
“Tubers...husk fruits...fat fruits...sam-samples...flat-grass...limp-vines...’lope if you can find one...no, no, forget it...dirt, bring dirt. Anything...and samples. Of the crew...blood. Everyone, blood—”
I almost blacked out near the pond—one of the ’lopes, I was too sick to tell who it was, was watching me in my agonies—but I found Reba’s samples. And I stood behind her, exposing the sample slides to ever-increasing magnification in millimeters, until:
“Finally...thought it was a virus...wrong...so stupid,” and she tried to pull her reddish curls in anger before I stayed her trembling icy hand.
It was a prion. Pleated, sticky sheets of deviant protein that had managed to change the proteins of every damn thing on the planet-foodstuffs, dirt, water. Almost invulnerable to enzymes, unlike normal proteins. And, inevitably fatal to whatever cells it invaded.
When our lab animals were exposed to foodstuffs contaminated by the prions, they initially showed no symptoms, but their autopsies revealed the damage wrought by the invading prions. These prions acted much like the Earth ones that contributed to the 1990s mad cow epidemic in Britain—once they were introduced via foodstuffs, the host animal was infected—with a slight difference: These rogue proteins, aberrations of a harmless protein usually found on the surface of mammalian cells (including brain cells), replicated at a somewhat slower pace than Earth-prions. Which meant, in turn, that we’d been unknowingly ingesting more and more prions, while they slowly migrated to our temporal arteries...and then began their work.
It took Reba over a week to learn all of this; a week of drinking only water, a week spent dizzy and cold-handed (even biofeedback, using temperature sensors attached to her fingertips didn’t help)...a week in which she obtained her first human for dissection.
I was the one who found Huoy. She’d broken into Elizabeth’s previous collection of antique surgical instruments, the ones Elizabeth couldn’t bear to leave behind, for fear of theft or mishandling back Earthside. Her great-great-great-grandfather had been a brain surgeon; those instruments had been purchased by him when the first wave of truly sophisticated lasers came into widespread use, and they’d been passed down from surgeon father to gynecologist daughter to osteopath son to....
And Huoy had used them to kill herself. She left a note, little more than a polite memo. She blamed herself for not preventing this, seeing that she’d predicted that the food was bad. I don’t know how she did it without anesthesia, but she’d tried to laser out the pain, the pain she’d somehow perceived as being inside her brain. Perhaps burning through her cheeks with the hand-held laser, until her face was as richly veined as a budding leaf had not dulled her pain, or the agony had entered her mind by then. Once she’d eliminated the trigeminal nerves and sections of the temporal artery, she’d picked up Elizabeth’s ancient but effective Smith-Peterson power drill, once used to drill burr holes in bone, and...and then she’d picked up the CO2 laser once more, somehow managed to rig the power supply to up the wattage, set the impact zone to wide dispersion, and then pointed that pair of carbon dioxide and helium lasers into her exposed brain....
The autopsy showed Huoy’s neurons clogged with prions. By that time, Reba was a wraith; deprived of even infected food, her stores of fat went quickly, faster than even I’d dreamed possible. And when she discovered, with my help when it came to reading the ’scope—her vision was filled with hallucinations she haltingly referred to as “exploding floaters”—that the alien prions bound up neurotransmitters (an enzyme) that only intelligent beings have. So, while the prions infected all living things that ingested them via foodstuffs, non-intelligent beings were least affected.
And, as the neurotransmitters were affected in each of us, we developed the crippling headaches...and the espers lost their ability to communicate. Which equaled the loss of self, an esper removed from esper contact was suddenly less than half a person, a more-than-emotional cripple. Cut off from their wordless communication, they lost their souls. And as the disease progressed in the others, and they lost esper contact with their fellows—which had apparently happened to Huoy, since no one knew what she was planning—it was worse for them than enduring the head pains. I had the migraines, too, which meant it was a shared thing, but losing their advantage over me was unthinkable, even for Reba....
Within the next week or so—by then, my blackouts came more frequently, and I lost track of time, since black-out prone Reba was no help when it came to figuring out how long I’d been out—we had another subject for the laser-scalpel. Elizabeth, having had her most obvious method of suicide deprived her by Huoy, chose an end worthy of Sir Walter Scott, or Shakespeare’s mad Ophelia. Jimmie and Neil discovered her floating in the same pond where Reba first took sick; that they hadn’t sensed what she was about to do pained both of them most.
I think that’s what made Neil pack it in, impaled himself on that crusher’s horns. None of us knew whether he’d thrown himself at the crusher, or it had charged him. It didn’t matter....
And Jimmie never smiled anymore; never tried to move past his own agony to brighten our days anymore, as he’d attempted to do in the previous few weeks. He helped Reba and me in the lab, and backed me up in convincing Reba that trying to capture a crusher, and killing it was no good, that it was impossible to try. The thing’s hide was too thick, its horns too deadly.
I remember him telling Reba, his voice distorted by the mixture of steroids and codeine he’d injected himself with on his own. “What good is it, Reba? They eat limp-vines; the limp-vines are full of prions. It’s a given—”
“’Lopes,” Reba slurred, her head lolling in an aimless pattern, “Why not...the ’lopes?”
“Killing them would only be cruel,” I began, but Reba tried to shake her head, mumbling, “’ozen brain...dead ’lope—”
“We did slides on what was left—remember the prions in there? You’d missed it earlier, but—”
Reba shook her head again; for the first time, I noticed that her eyes looked like dry spheres of discolored bone, set in nets of wrinkled mesh, and I remembered Elizabeth’s comment about the brown leathery heart—
“Noooo...why not the pain! Their brain...like ours. Nerves...the ’lope had...something like trigeminal nerve...why not this pain?”
The look on Reba’s face told me that admitting that the ’lopes she hated were like us, intelligent beings who might have been our near equals, was too much for her overstressed mind to handle. I was able to calm her more than I could’ve hoped for, stroking her matted hair and repeating the joke I made when she first lost her esper ability, saying, “Now we’re alike, babe...no more brain-juice getting in the way.”
She smiled weakly. “Now we’re going to be like the ’lopers, aren’t we?” She slumped over from the effort of talking so much.
The way I felt then, it wouldn’t have been so bad to be a ’lope, not so bad at all. No pain, anguish or jealousy, just primitive animal thoughts and a simple animal life. ’Lopes consumed husk-fruit and the yellow bitter-fruit without the slightest evidence of discomfort even though creatures with such brain capacity should’ve had headaches. The three of us doubted that the ’lopes had simply learned to live with the pain; after however many weeks we’d been ill, we’d yet to accustom ourselves to the cold hands, the tremors, the hypersensitivity to sound, light and odors, and never mind the pain—nor were they plagued with the hallucinations which affected our own ability to function (watching walls melt into writhing puddles, or seeing the sky flame with rotating patterns that defied geometry, symmetry, or logic...).
Reba