“I’ve been coughing,” Thane said. “It won’t stop.”
And virtually on cue she broke into a volley of rough, hacking rasps. On Hydros a cough might be as trivial a thing as it was anywhere else; but it might also be something serious. All the islanders knew that.
There was a parasitic waterborne fungus, usually found in northern temperate waters, which reproduced by infesting various forms of marine life with the spores that it released into the atmosphere in dense black clouds. A spore, when inhaled by some aquatic mammal as it came to the surface to breath, lodged in its host’s warm gullet and sprouted immediately, sending forth a dense tangle of bright red hyphae that had no difficulty penetrating lungs, intestines, stomach, even brain tissue. The host’s interior became a tightly packed mass of vivid scarlet wires. The wires were looking for the copper-based respiratory pigment, haemocyanin. Most of the sea creatures of Hydros had haemocyanin in their blood, which gave it a bluish colour. The fungus seemed to have some use for haemocyanin too.
Death by fungus infestation was slow and horrible. The host, bloated with gases excreted by the invader and floating helplessly, would eventually succumb, and soon after that the fungus would extrude its mature fruiting structure through an opening it had carved in the host’s abdomen. This was a globular woody mass that shortly would split apart to release the new generation of adult fungi, which in the course of time would produce fresh clouds of spores, and so the cycle went.
Killer-fungus spores were capable of taking root in human lungs, a situation of no value to either party: humans were unable to provide the fungus with the haemocyanin it desired and the fungus found it necessary to invade and consume every region of the host’s body during the course of its search, a useless expenditure of energy.
The first symptom of fungus infestation in a human was a cough that refused to go away.
“Let’s get a little information about you,” Lawler said. “And then we’ll check this thing out.”
He took a fresh records folder from a drawer and scrawled Sundira Thane’s name on it.
“Your age?” he asked.
“Thirty-one.”
“Birthplace?”
“Khamsilaine Island.”
He glanced up, “That’s on Hydros?”
“Yes,” she said, a little too irritably. “Of course.” Another siege of coughing took her. “You’ve never heard of Khamsilaine?” she asked, when she could speak again.
“There are a lot of islands. I don’t get around much. I’ve never heard of it, no. What sea does it move in?”
“The Azure.”
“The Azure,” Lawler said, marvelling. He had only the haziest idea where the Azure Sea might be. “Imagine that. You’ve really covered some territory, haven’t you?” She offered no reply. He said, after a moment, “You came here from Kentrup a little while back, is that right?”
“Yes.” More coughing.
“How long did you live there?”
“Three years.”
“And before that?”
“Eighteen months on Velmise. Two years on Shaktan. About a year on Simbalimak.” She looked at him coldly and said, “Simbalimak’s in the Azure Sea also.”
“I’ve heard of Simbalimak,” he said.
“Before that, Khamsilaine. So this is my sixth island.”
Lawler made a note of that.
“Ever married?”
“No.”
He noted that down too. The general distaste for marrying within one’s own island’s population had led to a custom of unofficial exogamy on Hydros. Single people looking to get married usually moved to some other island to find a mate. When a woman as attractive as Sundira Thane had done as much moving around as she had without ever marrying anyone, it meant either that she was very particular or else that she wasn’t looking at all.
Lawler suspected that she simply wasn’t looking. The only man he had noticed her spending time with, in her few months on Sorve, was Gabe Kinverson, the fisherman. The moody, untalkative, crag-faced Kinverson was strong and rugged and, Lawler supposed, interesting in an animal sort of way, but he wasn’t the kind of man that Lawler imagined a woman like Sundira Thane would want to marry, assuming that marriage was what she was after. And in any case Kinverson had never been the marrying sort himself.
“When did this coughing start?” he asked.
“Eight, ten days ago. Around the time of the last Night of Three Moons, I’d say.”
“You ever experience anything like it before?”
“No, never.”
“Fever, pains in the chest, chilly sensations?”
“No.”
“Does any sputum come up when you cough? Or blood?”
“Sputum? Fluid, do you mean? No, there hasn’t been any sort of—”
She went into yet another coughing fit, the worst one yet. Her eyes grew watery, her cheeks reddened, her whole body seemed to shake. Afterward she sat with her head bowed forward between her shoulders, looking weary and miserable.
Lawler waited for her to catch her breath.
She said finally, “We haven’t been in the latitudes where killer fungus grows. I keep telling myself that.”
“That doesn’t signify, you know. The spores travel thousands of kilometres on the wind.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“You don’t seriously think you’ve got killer fungus, do you?”
She looked up, almost glaring at him. “Do I know? I might be full of red wires from my chest to my toes, and how would I be able to tell? All I know is that I can’t stop coughing. You’re the one who can tell me why.”
“Maybe,” Lawler said. “Maybe not. But let’s have a look. Get your shirt off.”
He drew his stethoscope from a drawer.
It was a preposterously crude instrument, nothing more than a cylinder of sea-bamboo twenty centimetres long to which a pair of plastic earpieces at the ends of two flexible tubes had been affixed. Lawler had next to nothing in the way of modern medical equipment at his service, scarcely anything, in fact, that a doctor even of the twentieth or twenty-first centuries would have regarded as modern. He had to make do with primitive things, medieval equipment. An X-ray scan could have told him in a couple of seconds whether she had a fungus infestation. But where would he get an X-ray scanner? On Hydros there was so little contact with the greater universe beyond the sky, and no import-export trade whatever. They were lucky to have any medical equipment here at all. Or any doctors, even half-baked ones like him. The human settlement here was inherently impoverished. There were so few people, such a shallow reservoir of skills.
Stripped to the waist, she stood beside his examining table, watching him as he slipped the stethoscope’s collar around his neck. She was very slender, almost too thin; her arms were long, muscular the way a thin woman’s arms are muscular, with flat, hard little muscles; her breasts were small and high and far apart. Her features were compressed in the centre of her wide strong-boned face, small mouth, thin lips, narrow nose, cool grey eyes. Lawler wondered why he had thought she was attractive. Certainly there was nothing conventionally pretty about her. It’s the way she carries herself, he decided: the head thrust forward a little atop the long neck, the strong jaw out-thrust, the eyes quick, alert, busy. She seemed vigorous, even aggressive. To his surprise he found himself aroused by her, not because her body was half bare—there was nothing uncommon about nudity, partial or otherwise, on Sorve Island—but because of the vitality and strength she projected.
It was a long time since he had been involved in any way with any woman. These days the celibate life seemed ever so much the simplest way, free of pain and mess once you got past the initial feelings of isolation and bleakness, if you could, and he eventually had. He had never had much luck with liaisons, anyway. His one marriage, when he was twenty-three, had lasted less than a year. Everything that had followed had been fragmentary, casual, incidental. Pointless, really.