Sometimes people died from other causes, too. They were a young population, there on Newmanhome, and deaths were rare. But they happened. Drowning. Accident. Even once or twice the great scandal of a murder and suicide in a quarrel. But Newmanhome was benign to its colonists. Certainly people wore out early from hard work, and there were always those handicapped older ones who had come out of cryonic suspension with a kind of freezer-burn that slowed them down, or limited their abilities, but otherwise people were pretty healthy. The only diseases they encountered were the ones they had brought with them, and years of selection, therapy, and prophylaxis had kept those diseases few.
Until the first week of Winter in the thirty-ninth Newmanhome year of the colony.
There was no warning of trouble.
The harvest was the most bountiful yet in the grain fields of South Continent. Viktor and his first mate, Alice Begstine, had had a good time while the ship was loading. They had borrowed a rolligon and gone exploring in South Continent's high country, beyond the farm lands. The ship's cook, who was one of Alice's other part-time lovers, had elected to stay ashore that trip, so she and Viktor bunked together on the voyage, enjoying it, too—though Viktor still secretly fantasized about Marie-Claude sharing his bed. They even, halfway home, saw a Von Neumann nautilus swimming sturdily toward their port beside them, to turn itself in. It was one of the first to have accumulated enough metal to trigger its return reflexes. It looked to have at least fifty chambers, each one bigger than the one before it in its spiral shell. "It's got to be a ten-tonner," Alice guessed. Viktor couldn't doubt it. Ten tons of valuable heavy metal soaked up from the thermal springs at the bottom of Great Ocean—what was the point of mining, when you could send the roving Von Neumann automata out to do the job for you? And the holds bulging with grain. And the colony growing. And new lands being explored—why, things were really going splendidly!
So they thought, right up to the moment of landing at Homeport.
As Viktor's ship slid gently in to mate with the floating dock he saw his father standing there, waiting for him.
That was a surprise. As he finished the docking drill, Viktor saw with a critical eye that his father was freshly shaved, but his hair was shaggy; he wore a clean, pressed blouse, but the cuffs of his pants were mud stained, though the streets were dry. Viktor easily read the meaning of the signs.
His father had been drinking again.
The ship was lashed to the floating dock. The huge snout of the grain pipe swung over the deck, slipped down through the open hold, and began snuffling up the cargo. Viktor picked up his kit bag, slung it over his shoulder, and swung himself down to the dock. His father, standing right where he landed, said at once, "Your mother's sick."
Just like that. No "Hello, son," or even, "I've got some bad news for you." Just "Your mother's sick," and a thumb jerked to the waiting tandem bike.
Amelia Sorricaine-Memel was sick, all right. The first thing the doctors told him, as gently as they could—but they had very little time to be gentle or considerate just then—was that they were pretty sure she was dying.
It wasn't pneumonia or emphysema or the flu. It was something the surveyors had brought back from Continent Delta, way on the other side of the planet, just really being explored for the first time.
What they brought back was a mold. It had thrived there as a parasite on some of the warm algal organisms of the tidal flats, but it had found a new home in human lungs. For the algae of the littoral it was a benign enough parasite. All it did was slow down their growth a little. For humans it was worse. It killed.
Viktor's mother lived seventeen painful hours after he reached her bedside. She was wheezing and strangling for breath the whole time, even when they put a mask over her face to give her oxygen, even when they put her in a hyperbaric chamber under enough pressure to force the oxygen into her lungs. Even when they drenched the air she breathed with antifungals strong enough to threaten her life.
Probably the antifungals did threaten it. They probably took it, in fact, because when she died her face was pink again, instead of the cadaver blue of oxygen starvation. But she was just as dead.
Amelia Sorricaine-Memel wasn't the only one to die. Twenty-eight hundred of the colonists died in sixty days, just under half the population of Newmanhome, before the frantic biologists discovered—not a cure, no, but an antifungal agent that, sopped onto a gauze mask, killed the spores before they could get into the respiratory system. The agent smelled like rotting manure, but that was a small enough price to pay for the survival of human life on Newmanhome.
It wasn't just human life that was at risk. All the carefully bred and preserved livestock—fish excepted, actually, but all the sheep, goats, cattle, dogs, horses, deer—had to be forcibly fitted with halters and masks of their own. They all fought it, but they survived—
All but the cats.
No one could make a cat leave a wet gauze mask in place over its mouth and nose. They maintained the cat tradition to the extinction of the species: the cat who has no master and acknowledges no law but its own, even if it dies for it. Die they did.
When Viktor got back to his parents' home he pushed open the door and stopped.
The place reeked of stale beer and vomit. His father was sprawled beside the bed, snoring raggedly, impossible to wake. He had fouled himself, and there were stains of urine and vomit on bed and floor. He had taken his artificial leg off and lay with it clasped in his arms, like a beloved woman.
It was not the first time Viktor had seen his father drunk, but it was a long way the worst. Viktor would not have believed that he could have felt such hatred for the old man. He did not fear that his father was dying. He almost wished it were true. He set his kit bag down on the table, pushing aside empty bottles, and stood over the drunken man, listening objectively to the rattling, choking sounds of the snores.
You dirty old bastard, he thought.
A shadow from the doorway made him turn, and there was Billy Stockbridge peering in, his mother behind him.
Even at that moment Viktor felt a tingling shock in his groin at the sight of Marie-Claude. She had cut her hair short since the last time he had seen her, and there was a certain soft thickening of the flesh under her chin that he didn't remember seeing before. She was wearing a short, thin dress that did nothing to flatter her—the kind housewives put on to clean their kitchens—and she was carrying a bucket and a mop.
Even with the hideous antifungal mask, she was very beautiful.
"Viktor," she said, "I didn't know you were here. I'm sorry about your mother."
"But we've got to get your dad to the hospital," Billy added.
"They've got more important things to do than looking after drunks," Viktor said contemptuously—and was startled to see the quick flare of anger that twisted Billy Stockbridge's face. But it was his mother who spoke, already by Pal Sorricaine's side, lifting an eyelid with her thumb, feeling his sweating forehead.
"Viktor. Your father isn't just drunk. He's got acute alcohol poisoning. He could die. Help Billy get him to the hospital."
What Viktor would not have done for his father he could not refuse Marie-Claude. He pulled a blanket off his parents' bed and rolled the old man into it. Billy helped, glowering. The filth was already staining the blanket as Viktor picked Pal Sorricaine up and threw him over his shoulder. The filth didn't matter. It was only one more insult added to the rancor that was already overflowing. "I'll be back," he said, and carried his father out the door, Billy Stockbridge trailing glowering behind.