TEN
All life functions are the product of the interaction between thermodynamics and chemistry.
- Introduction, Elementary Biological Systems, 18th Edition
Wind Blossom woke with a start. There was danger. Danger to dragons. No, she told herself, pushing herself upright on her cot with one arm, I was dreaming. She dropped her feet off the bed and sat up, her bare feet resting on the cold wooden slats that lined the tent floor. Her body complained more fiercely than usual; she was still aching from the cold and the rain.
I’m just extrapolating from the fire-lizard to the dragons, she told herself. Which is logical.
She thought back over the past several weeks.
The fight to save Tieran’s precious fire-lizard had taken over seventeen days, even with the last of the antibiotics.
The infection was so severe that Wind Blossom was tempted to destroy the specimen of green ooze she’d collected for fear of infecting others with it. As it was, she ordered the dead fire-lizard’s carcass dissolved in boiling nitric acid-and she seriously considered ordering the same for the living fire-lizard.
In the end she’d destroyed neither the surviving fire-lizard nor the specimen. Under the microscope, she’d managed to identify a vast array of antibodies in the green sputum. Unfortunately, she hadn’t been able to go much further than that. If the technicians had still been alive to operate the equipment, she could have dried samples sufficiently to put them under an electron microscope, if there’d been one still working.
Better yet, if even more advanced technology were still available, and they’d managed to complete their microbial survey, Wind Blossom could have employed computerized micro-arrays to assay the genetic material of the microbes found in the sputum and search for one matching previously known infectious bacteria with similar characteristics. But the sad truth was that the first Threadfall had occurred at Landing long before they had acquired an understanding of Pernese ecosystems.
As it was, Wind Blossom got more useful information by observing the living fire-lizard’s response to the general-purpose antibiotic.
It took more than four days, using a maximum body-weight dose, for the fire-lizard’s lungs to stop showing signs of distress. She continued the antibiotic until it ran out-still not certain that she’d managed to knock out all of the infection.
She had only a vague idea of what had caused the fire-lizard’s infection. Repeated but guarded requests for any signs of unusual behaviors in fire-lizards had turned up nothing. Unbelievably, it seemed that only these two fire-lizards had acquired the new illness.
While she was busy coordinating the establishment of their quarantine-including the acquisition of this tent from Lord Mendin, who was much put out when later informed that the tent and everything in it would have to be burned once the quarantine was lifted-Janir and Emorra had been busy answering questions from the four corners of Pern. A prime concern was controlling the curiosity of uninfected fire-lizards. They had to be directed to come to either the College or Fort Hold-not the Drum Tower.
The Drum Tower’s watch-after the tower itself had been disinfected thoroughly with hot ammonia-had been strengthened to provide continuous coverage of the place set aside for the tent, which housed Wind Blossom, Emorra, Tieran, Kassa, and their fire-lizard patient.
Rain beat down upon the tent. The interior was dimly lit by glows. Through the flap at the front of the tent, Wind Blossom could see that it was getting lighter outside, and she guessed dawn would come in a few more hours.
Tieran was sleeping oddly, one arm gently draped over a bulge in his blanket-the fire-lizard.
Kassa, who had the current watch, gave Wind Blossom a nod, then returned to her brooding by the stove. In their time together, Wind Blossom had come to respect the young woman and to understand that Kassa had been willing to look beyond Tieran’s disfigurement to the young man beneath the surface.
Emorra started in her sleep, and her eyes opened. Catching sight of her upright mother, she wearily sat up in her own cot.
“Are you all right, Mother?”
Wind Blossom waved a hand dismissively. “I’m fine,” she said. “The fire-lizard is probably also fine.” She gestured toward the lump in Tieran’s blanket.
“Then why are you up?” Emorra asked, a touch acerbically.
Kassa turned from her place at the fire to follow their conversation attentively.
“I had a dream,” Wind Blossom confessed. “A nightmare, really.”
Kassa looked up at Wind Blossom expectantly.
“Dragons?” Emorra asked, her body going tense.
“Something wrong with dragons?” Kassa repeated. “I dreamed that, too.”
When the others looked at her, she shrugged. “Daydreamed, really. I was awake, staring into the fire.”
“It-the dream-felt odd, it startled me awake,” Emorra confessed.
Wind Blossom sighed. “It was nothing,” she decided. “We are all worried, especially now that the little brown seems to have recovered. It’s natural.”
Emorra gave her a skeptical look.
“I’ve never had a dream like this before,” Kassa said. “My dreams aren’t as vivid as this.”
“It’s probably just nerves,” Emorra said. “We are not sleeping in our usual quarters.”
“Maybe,” Kassa allowed.
“I, for one, will rest easier when we discover the owner of the fire-lizards,” Emorra said.
Early on, Wind Blossom, Emorra, and Tieran had examined the brown fire-lizard and noted with admiration the carefully reset break in its wing. It was obvious from that alone that these two fire-lizards belonged to someone. Tieran insisted on keeping the brightly decorated bead harness that the fire-lizard had worn, convinced that it was vital to identifying the owner.
The harness had been sterilized in boiling water for over thirty minutes and would be sterilized once more before Wind Blossom ended the quarantine.
“Go back to sleep, Mother,” Emorra said, lying back down on her bed. “It’s not yet dawn and the weather looks no better than yesterday.”
In consultation with Janir, Emorra, and Mendin, Wind Blossom had decided that the quarantine could end when the fire-lizard showed no signs of illness for more than a week, and when the weather was good enough to burn their encampment. She hoped it would be a warm day, because the final decontamination treatment promised to be a chilly affair.
Wind Blossom had informed the others in quarantine of it the week before, so they had had plenty of time to get over their shock. She had arranged with Janir to get them a mild acid solution. When they were ready for the final decontamination, they would strip, remove all body hair, leave the tent, and scrub each other with the acid solution.
The acid would instantly turn the oils of their skin into soap and kill any germs on their bodies. It would be a very chilling process, and Emorra had argued against that treatment for her mother, but Wind Blossom had been adamant.
“So we’re all going to be standing around out there naked as the day we were born?” Kassa had squawked.
“What about the fire-lizard?” Tieran asked.
“You’ll have to explain to him that we’ll need to do the same thing to him, too,” Wind Blossom said.
“If you tell him that he’ll get an extra treat after we’re done, and especially oiled as well, maybe he’ll stand for it,” Emorra suggested.