Its Hour Come Round Read online

  The bus ground to a halt at last in a kind of central plaza surrounded by the odd mushroom shapes that indicated the entrances to underground shelters, some of them as much as a mile away through tunnels into the nearby mountains. Interspersed among them were older structures, many of them rickety-looking stilt-houses, incongruous in a land now so obviously devoid of water.

  As McCoy stepped down from the bus and stretched out the crick in his back, he noticed a group of teens loitering in the central plaza around an assortment of patched-together vehicles that appeared to be part motorcycle, part skateboard, part skimmer. Staring boldly at the Dinpayav doctor for a moment or two, they scrambled onto their vehicles and left the plaza in a roar of badly tuned machinery and a cloud of dust.

  Beside McCoy, Sorodel looked rueful.

  “Our wild ones,” she explained. “Some of our children are still afraid to play out under the sky. Others roam the land as if wondering why it betrayed them. There was a time when we were one with the rhythm of climate and weather. I wonder if we will ever recapture that? As for the wild ones, they are just on the cusp of the age where our young people begin to die of this withering disease. One can hardly blame them for mistrusting us.”

  “Do you suppose some of them would trust us enough to give me tissue samples?” McCoy wondered. “I’d need them to compare with the sick, with mature adults, children….”

  “We will try,” Sorodel said. “But first we must make you comfortable. You’ll stay with us as our guest. We have plenty of room. My husband Ejo is Leader. He and my grandson Chimeji and I are all that are left of the family. My daughter and her husband were among the first to die of the disease….”

  When the Pulse came, Ejo had been standing at the mouth of one of the underground shelters, making sure his people got to safety before he sealed the entrance behind him. He had not been quite quick enough, and a brilliant flash of lightning had both scarred and blinded him. The livid scars across his face and running down his long neck only accentuated the stark whiteness of the cataracts obscuring his almond-shaped eyes, and McCoy’s surgeon’s fingers itched to do an intervention on either the scarring or the cataracts or both. But when Ejo had been offered the choice of ocular implants, he had refused.

  “I see more this way,” he explained with a chuckle in the back of his throat. “Yes, call me a crazy old man, but I can form a mental image of you, Doctor, from your voice, from the sound of your boots on my parlor floor, from the way you look around the room, assessing the many excellent pieces of tribal pottery you see displayed here.”

  Found out, McCoy stopped fidgeting.

  “I see also,” Ejo said with a benevolent smile, “that you have come to learn what killed my daughter and my son-in-law and so many more of our young people before it kills them all.”

  “I certainly intend to try,” McCoy said.

  The first thing he did was visit the temporary hospital units set up in tents outside the little town’s main building when the wards had overflowed. New construction was everywhere in this part of the world, mostly replacing housing that had been destroyed either by the ferocious winds accompanying the Pulse or by the crushing weight of the snows that followed, but a new hospital complex was also being built just across the plaza from the old one.

  “We are not quite sure what to do,” Ejo explained. “This is our warm season, and the tents are adequate for now. But given the usual course of the illness, these citizens will not live to see the cold season. If all of our young people die, are we mad to keep building?”

  McCoy, having just come from seeing the rows upon rows of cots set up in the bright airy tents, and the silent, wizened forms and vacant stares of the victims, tried to sound more optimistic than he felt.

  “We’ll find the answer to this thing, I promise you. For now, I’ve instructed your medical staff to keep doing what they’re doing, making the ill as comfortable as they can while I get to work.”

  While he waited for a lab to be set up according to his specifications, McCoy got in touch with Rajhemda’la.

  “Are there reports of anything similar in other regions?” he asked.

  “Negative, McCoy. I have completed the global survey, and run your specific algorithm beneath it so as not to arouse suspicion. This thing you are investigating appears to be a localized phenomenon.”

  “Then likely it’s not related to the Pulse, unless it’s something specific to Nehdi physiology. But I’ll test for it anyway. I hope you don’t mind my leaving you in the lurch like that.”

  “Scientific curiosity is a powerful hunger,” Rajhemda’la said sagaciously. Did McCoy only imagine he heard live gagh squirming in the background? “Besides, your replacement, this Tuvok, is quite…efficient,” she added with what might have been a giggle.

  Satisfied that he’d done his diplomatic best, McCoy went to work.

  It took him a while to familiarize himself with Payav medical equipment, particularly since what the Nehdi had available predated the Pulse by a decade or two and was not in the best condition. He wished Sulu hadn’t had to leave so soon, and that he hadn’t gotten trapped babysitting Rajhemda’la for the first few days, or he might have cadged some of the top-of-the-line equipment from Excelsior’s sickbay.

  “Not the first time I’ve had to make do,” he muttered, fiddling with the focus on what passed for an electron microscope in this time and place. That thought took him on a trip down Memory Lane to the hundreds of worlds and thousands of seemingly undecodable pathogens he had studied and, in some cases, cured in his career. A good thing, too, because suddenly what he was looking at under the microscope began to make sense in context.

  “Now what does this remind me of?” he asked of no one in particular as a sequence of peculiar-looking nucleotides swam across his field of vision. The terms “suppression of nucleotides” and “life prolongation” echoed in his ears, spoken in Jim’s voice. McCoy’s eyes blurred; he blinked and sat back away from the microscope. “Of course…Miri’s planet…”

  There the problem had been a group of scientists tampering with ways to make humans live virtually forever, aging on an average of one month per hundred years. Their serum had become contaminated with a virus which killed off the entire adult population, leaving only the children, children who were centuries old by the time Enterprise discovered them, responding to a distress beacon the adults had left behind hundreds of years before.

  All of the humans in the landing party had contracted the virus, and it had been up to McCoy to isolate the virus and develop a cure, all the while fighting the raging fever that was consuming him. Racing against time, he’d done the only thing he could: hoped that the formula he’d concocted was the right one, and injected himself.

  Jim had never forgiven him for that one.

  Just as he wasn’t about to forgive Jim for running headlong into danger on the Enterprise-B.

  Shaking those thoughts out of his head, McCoy focused on the situation at hand. Here he was facing the opposite problem from the life prolongation project on Miri’s world. In this case it appeared as if someone had programmed a particular sequence of nucleotides—found, as nearly as he could tell by having run comparative samples, only in Payav of Nehdi ancestry—to overpopulate and destroy other cells. The result was that those who were infected aged rapidly, on the order of a decade per month, and died of old age while still nominally in early adulthood.

  Well, at least now he knew what he was looking for. And having arrived at that conclusion, he discovered he was not alone.

  Nehdi medical personnel were too overworked tending to the dying to lend him a hand. Just as well, since he always did his best work in solitude and quiet. But he found himself being observed by the large, liquid eyes of a rather small Payav.

  “Dinpayav doctor,” the little boy observed.

  “That would be me. Dr. Leonard McCoy.” He held out his hands in the Nehdi version of the traditional Payav greeting. “And you would be?”

  “Chi
meji elPrahno.”

  “Sorodel and Ejo’s grandson. You weren’t at the house when I arrived.”

  “School,” the boy said. He seemed to be able to communicate with as few words as possible.

  “Chimeji—that’s a mouthful. Any objection if I call you Chimmy?”

  The boy shrugged, his way of saying it didn’t matter. McCoy guessed him to be about seven or eight years old in human terms. He was clearly curious about what the “Dinpayav doctor” was up to.

  “Ever look into a microscope?” McCoy asked. The boy made a negative gesture. “Well then, past time you did. Come on up here and have a peek.”

  From that day on he and Chimmy were inseparable. McCoy made sure the boy was protected from anything that could be a potential pathogen, mostly had him cleaning up and acting as a runner to the medical personnel in the tents, but he also showed him things as he went along. Just as Jim had trained Miri, he realized, seeing the hero worship in Chimmy’s eyes. It was there wherever they were, either in the lab or in the evenings during dinner at his grandparents’ house. The only time the boy made a fuss was when his grandmother packed him off for bed instead of letting him follow McCoy back to the lab for a late-night shift.

  Chimmy’s face was solemn, and he rarely spoke. On the third day he asked McCoy the question uppermost in his mind.

  “My parents died. Will I die, too?”

  McCoy let one hand rest on the small, bald head. “Not if I can help it, son.”

  “It’s a type of progeria,” he explained, watching the look of wonder on the boy’s face as he studied the tissue samples under the microscope. “You see, many cells in your body replace themselves. New cells replicate, old ones die. That’s what makes you grow, for one thing. But this disease disrupted that somehow, and that’s why some of the cells are dying without being replaced. All we have to do is figure out why.”

  “Is that all?” Sorodel said from the doorway.

  She managed to check in on McCoy at least once a day, and sometimes she was able to assist him for a few hours. He’d been impressed with her knowledge of basic medicine.

  “Science and religion are one with us,” she had explained. “And so many died in the wake of the Pulse that many of us have had to do two or even three jobs. Then, when we started to lose our young people, our Middle Generation…”

  Today she was all business. “What have you found?” she asked as Chimmy silently beckoned her over to the microscope to see for herself.

  “It’s what we haven’t found,” McCoy said, trying not to sound too frustrated. “First we have to rule out what it isn’t. Since every one of the victims was a child or adolescent when the Pulse hit, it’s necessary to rule out anything in the combination of assaults on their immune systems while they were still growing which could have triggered a cascade.”

  Sorodel looked thoughtful. “What is the likelihood of that, Doctor?”

  “Well, the good news is, this phenomenon hasn’t evidenced itself in any other group of Payav…so far. If it hasn’t in over twenty years, it’s probably not going to. So my hunch is it’s a local phenomenon, either environmental, genetic, or a combination of both. And I need to be as thorough as time allows.”

  CHAPTER

  6

  Time might allow, but rumor didn’t. McCoy’s departure from vosTraal had not gone unnoticed, and someone from the news media had been curious about where he was going and why. It wasn’t long before the rumor that something was killing the Nehdi made its way to the ears of the press and, through them, to the councillors at the Summit.

  It had taken them a twelveday to finalize the seating plan, rearrange living quarters, see to everyone’s dietary needs, make certain every councillor had a chance to air his or her particular laundry list of grievances—in writing, per Raya’s order—against the Federation, the Klingons, or both, and finally allow Spock to present the offer on the table: what would be entailed if the Payav voted “yes” on membership, and what would happen if they voted “no.”

  Not surprisingly, discussion of the latter alternative had taken up a great deal of time and energy. Only when the last of the fears regarding the possibility of intervention, interference, nannying, “keeping us dependent on your handouts,” and even invasion and conquest had been tirelessly addressed down to the last jot and tittle had the councillors been prepared to proceed.

  This day’s meeting was to have been taken up with each of the councillors’ making a brief speech outlining his or her reasons for or against joining the Federation. But Raya was still in the corridor making her way to the meeting room when the uproar assailed her.

  “It’s the resurgence of the old feud between the Nehdi and the Alangabi,” someone was saying.

  “Who?” someone else demanded. “Until today, I’d never heard of either of them.”

  “Not surprisingly. There can’t be more than a few thousand members of each tribe….”

  “‘Tribes’? They still refer to themselves as ‘tribes’? Well, that explains it.”

  “Explains what? There were two laureates in the sciences from Ayanava. And you can’t tell me you’ve never heard of the performance artist Rhilnam?”

  “How do we know it even has anything to do with the two tribes?” a third party interjected. “None of this was talked about until the Dinpayav doctor arrived. How do we know it isn’t a plot on the part of the Federation to keep us dependent on them? Very convenient, if you ask me!”

  “And I suppose the dozens of dead even before the doctor arrived were prearranged as well?”

  “Then it’s a cover-up! We know there were several governments conducting similar experiments….”

  “What if the disease spreads to other regions?”

  “What if there is no disease, just a ploy on the part of the Nehdi to qualify for more aid than their neighbors?”

  “It could be the beginning of a pandemic…. All of our lives could be in danger!”

  Deliberately, Raya walked away. She would make no comment, officially or unofficially. Let the reporters talk to the councillors and the councillors talk to the reporters in an endless loop. If it wasn’t this it would be something else. She had more important things to do.

  Entering the Summit chamber, she made her way to the head of the table. By now the entire room was abuzz with rumor. Raya looked to Spock and Azetbur, observing silently, and made a helpless gesture. As she reached for the gavel, Spock shook his head slightly.

  “I would recommend you let them get it out of their system,” he suggested. “When they have exhausted themselves, you can make an official statement.”

  Raya sighed. “You realize that could take days?”

  “Indeed.”

  Raya continued to hold the gavel, but did not bring it down just yet. “I draw the line if they start throwing things,” she said wryly.

  “It’s all over,” Uhura reported to McCoy from a remote outpost in a region lush with tropical vegetation, exotic animals, and pristine rivers full of rapids and cataracts that she thought would make a wonderful tourist spot, as she intended to tell its people once she got them on the grid. “Don’t be surprised if—”

  “—if every time I leave the lab I’m accosted by reporters?” McCoy interjected. “Too late. They’re as plentiful as mosquitoes in August.”

  It was a slight exaggeration. Perhaps a half dozen had braved the journey over the mountains on the bus to find out what the Dinpayav doctor knew and when he knew it, but what they lacked in numbers they made up for in persistence.

  “Just what I need—reporters camped on my doorstep, being in the spotlight when I’m trying to get some work done! Pity you had to be so efficient in getting the global grid up and running.”

  “Well, I’ve still got a few more stops to make,” Uhura said, ignoring the implication that she’d done it just to annoy him. “What about you? Any progress on this mystery disease?”

  “I can tell you what it is,” McCoy said. “Got the mechanism of action
figured out—it performs really well under a microscope. As for what’s causing it or how to stop it…”

  The breakthrough had come that very afternoon.

  “Tsk, tsk, tsk, will you look at that?” he’d said, and since he was hogging the microscope, Sorodel wasn’t sure if McCoy was talking to her or to himself. “I’ve never seen a gene sequence literally unravel before my eyes before. Have a look at this.”

  As McCoy put another sample in the scope field, Sorodel did have a look. What she saw at first distinguished itself as a chain of molecules wrapped around itself like the fibers of a rope, loose at either end, but tightly wound at the center. As she watched, one end of a single sequence began to unwind until the two strands separated and floated apart. Within seconds, they had disintegrated, vanished into nothing, even as their companion twinned strands began to do the same. Sorodel stepped back suddenly, shaken by what she’d seen.

  “There’s your culprit,” McCoy stated grimly. “Now it’s just a matter of figuring out why it’s doing that, and how to either stop it or reprogram that gene sequence to rewind itself.”

  “Oh, is that all?” Sorodel mused, catching some of his cynicism.

  “Well, no one said it would be easy. Meanwhile, there are several ways to reverse the condition in those who’ve already developed it, but the damnable thing is, I can’t figure out where it’s coming from. If it is a gene mutation, it should have cropped up over millennia, not a couple of years, not without a big boost from something environmental. I’ll need volunteers to check air samples, water, soil samples, vegetation….”

  Nothing would be accomplished in the Zamestaad that day. With much pounding of the gavel, Raya finally convinced them all to go home. There was no putting the genie of rumor back into the bottle, and she doubted that by now there was a single Payav on the grid who hadn’t heard this one. Despairing of doing anything further with the councillors, she exerted her clout and called a press conference, demanding that every reporter and stringer in vosTraal meet with her at once.