"It looks like food poisoning." Antonio came back to the present, jerked his chin toward the doctor's station, and walked Michael away from the sight. "Hey, can we get those two taken care of please?" he called to Jimmy Coombs, one of the nurse practitioners, who was passing by with a pile of screen rolls in his hands. Jimmy nodded and Antonio continued gently herd-ing Michael away from the unpleasantness, something doctors got a lot of practice at, Michael was sure.

"Looks like?" said Michael, keeping his voice pitched low. He had no idea who was in the infirmary right now.

"They both came in about three o'clock complaining of fever and stomach cramps."

"I was notified."

Antonio nodded. "Symptoms got treated, and they got worse. Workup got done and by then we had a massive systemic in-fection." Antonio motioned him into the monitoring station. The place had so many different monitors and command boards, it looked like mission control for a major spaceport, and all the numbers and plots made about as much sense to Michael.

"The infection all but ate the broad-spectrum stabilizer we gave them while we were trying to isolate the bacteria and tai-lor an antibiotic to hit it," said Antonio. "There's only so much we can keep on ice around here."

He frowned at the cabinets across the hall as if he wanted to blame themfor what hap-pened. "We did find the bug and get the antibiotics into them, but it was too late."

"But it wasn't food poisoning?" pressed Michael. He was still reeling.

They were dead. Dead of a simple bug, something that should have been treatable in five minutes but wasn't. They had been good men, they had been idiots, they had been friends, they had been criminals.

They were dead.

"If it was food poisoning, where are the other patients?" An-tonio swept his hand out. "We've shut down the galley level, of course, and we're going through and doing a sanitary inspec-tion. You got the call on that too?"

Michael nodded.

"But nothing's turning up. We haven't got the autopsy yet, so I can't say for sure what they've been eating, but from what your people say, it wouldn't be anything that another couple hundred people hadn't swallowed." Antonio looked up at him. "Do you want me to say it?"

No, and I don't want to say it either. "You think they were poisoned."

Now Antonio nodded. His pockets bunched and wrinkled as he clenched his fists. "By someone who was very smart and very stupid."

Michael waited. Poisoned? Murdered? Who... but he knew who. It was the other person who had helped create the Discov-ery. They didn't want to be implicated, so they'd killed the men. God! This was not something that could happen. Not on Venera, not now. This was something out of the twentieth century.

"Smart because they were able to successfully cultivate a strain of bacteria we couldn't neutralize immediately. Stupid because in conditions like Venera's, where the food comes from limited production sources, there's never just two victims of a poisoning outbreak."

"How hard would it be to cook up this... bug?"

Antonio shrugged. "With access to a lab and a decent chem-istry and medical database and a strong stomach, not very.""Strong stomach?"

Antonio's smile was watery. "Even the unprepared food the galley sells has been sterilized eight ways to Sunday. The easi-est place to get bacteria from around here would be your own waste products."

Michael hung his head, torn between disgust and black humor. "I should have thought."

"No you shouldn't," Antonio assured him. "Holy God knows I didn't want to."

"Yeah." Michael lifted his gaze again. "Look, I'll need the au-topsy as soon as you can get it to me, okay?"

"Okay." Antonio glanced around at his monitors. "All this and we still haven't got the immortality programs up and run-ning. Grandma Helen know yet?"

"Not yet." She knew about the galley quarantine, of course, but not about the deaths. Mother Creation, she was already walking on the edge with the C.A.C. meeting coming up. What was this going to do to her? "I'll tell her." I don't want to, but I will.

"Okay," said Antonio gratefully. "Thanks."

Michael left to the soft sound of Antonio's voice readying his autopsy team to find out what exactly killed Derek and Kevin. He walked down the corridors without really seeing them. The main lights were dimming toward twilight. The base was on a twenty-four-hour Greenwich time cycle, and now it was late in the summer evening.

Someone had deliberately committed a murder. This was not a fight, not a horrified and angry somebody who didn't mean to do it, "I swear I didn't..." No. This somebody meant to do it. They had decided and planned and executed.

Now he had to tell Philip and Angela, and he had to tell Helen. He had to tell the whole world, all the worlds, that Venera was spinning out of control, that the arrival of aliens had made the place crazy, but not in any of the ways people had feared since the possibility had been raised all those hundreds of years ago. There were no riots, no religious revivals, nobar-baric, tribal displays of aggression.

No. Just murder. This really had nothing to do with the aliens themselves. This had to do with petty, frightened humanity.

Michael stopped and rubbed his eyes. This was also nuts. Nuts. He had his work to do. He looked up, got his bearings, and headed for the staircase, the administrative level, and his desk.

It was midnight before he walked back through his own door. The light was still on. Jolynn sat on the sofa in front of the living room view screen, going over her endless series of teacher reports.

When she heard the door, she looked up and smiled, tired but beautiful.

"How twentieth is this?" she said as she swung her legs down so he could sit beside her. "The dutiful wife waiting for her husband to come home?"

Michael didn't answer. He took her in his arms and held her close. She returned the embrace, not speaking, just enveloping him with her warmth, her fragrance of soap and lilacs, and the strength of her presence.

"How bad is it?" she asked when he finally released her.

"Beyond bad." He pulled his cap off and tossed it on the end table. He told her about Derek and Kevin, dead in the infir-mary, how the sanitary checks in the galley had turned up nothing, how he'd had to seal their room, quiz the people on guard, write it all up, decide whom to assign to the investiga-tion, work out the announcement for general release into the base stream, and then go tell Helen.

"What did she say?" Jolynn asked.

Michael felt his jaw begin to shake. "That's the worst part. I'm not sure she heard me all that well. She was so... preoc-cupied with the C.A.C.

report." He ran both hands through his hair, pulling strands of it free from the ponytail and not caring. "She basically told me to handle it, and I'm not sure I can."

Jolynn said nothing."It's not that they're dead," he told her. "It's that they were murdered by one of us. A Veneran, maybe even a v-baby. We've never had anything worse than a bad bar fight, and that was ten years ago. People come here to be safe. People come back here to be safe, and now..." His throat closed around the sentence. "Now, when the greatest thing that has ever happened to humanity is happening to us, we're killing each other. How the hell did that happen, Jolynn?"

She took his hand in hers. "Because we're being human, and some of us aren't very good at that." She stroked the back of his hand with her palm, a gentle rhythm, distracting him from the swirl of his own thoughts with the touch of her warm skin. "If we give into the belief that we are somehow better than the general run of people, it's going to chew us up and spit us out. That belief kills something vital, because as soon as you start believing you're better, you have to start proving everybody else is inferior. It makes you crazy."

"How would you know?" he joked tiredly.

"When I was on Earth, I went to the Baghdad ruins. Did you?"

Michael shook his head. "But you told me about them." Through her memories he saw the rubble, the dust, the rats, and the starving dogs nosing around the dust-gray skulls. He smelled the empty smell of desert encroachment and heard her whisper, "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair."

"So I came back, to the world with the edges and the bound-aries and its own history and Grandma Helen to make sure we never went crazy like human beings are wont to do from time to time." She shook her head.

"Wrong again."

Michael let his head fall back until he was staring at the ceil-ing. "What do I do, Jolynn?"

"Your very best, my love," she said, enfolding him again in her arms.

"Your very best."

Chapter Fourteen

Ca'aed first became aware of the wrongness as an itch. A small nerve bundle at the base of one of its lower northwest sails (half-furled now to keep the course smooth and steady) itched, not painfully but persistently.

Ca'aed concentrated on the patch. The air around it tasted fine. A silent command sent a runner to the spot to ingest a few cells and compare them with the healthy patterns it held inside. Normally, Ca'aed would have just had the itch soothed by a caretaker, but times were dangerous now and caution was indicated.

Another itch, this one deep and nagging in Ca'aed's digestive veins. A small cramp formed around the itch.

Worry stroked Ca'aed's mind. What caretakers were in that area?

Ca'aed felt and Ca'aed looked.

"Indenture T'elen," said Ca'aed. "A review of the digestive veins near you. There is a break in flow."

T'elen was responsive and competent. She bore her inden-ture well.

Ca'aed tried to take care of its indentures, make their servitude easy, but some could not flow with their service. It understood, but it needed indentured and free people to live, as the people needed their city. All had to work together. Life served life.

Ca'aed watched T'elen as she located the swelling in the vein. T'elen smelled it carefully, touched it gently, checked with the interior antibodies, injected an anti-inflammatory, which eased the cramp but not the itch, and removed some cells and antibodies from the needle into a microcosm of her own design. Ca'aed knew T'elen hoped to make some promises based on the new microcosms to shorten her inden-ture and felt strangely pleased that its discomfort might help prove their worth.

A sharp spark of pain cut through Ca'aed's primary thoughts. The city isolated the spot. One of the sensor roots that tasted and tested the canopy to find the best harvest points. A blister swelled painfully on the outer skin, squeezing the pores closed and pinching the delicate papillae.

Worry pressed harder against Ca'aed's consciousness. It pulled out from several conversations with citizens and speak-ers and put as much ofthe traffic on its own behavior as it could. Ca'aed withdrew its thoughts into its own body that stretched across miles of wind and tried to understand what was happening.

Muscles contracted smoothly, hearts circulated the gases and chemicals, timed the electrical pulses, intestines filtered wastes, its own and its peoples, veins guided potentiated and unpotentiated neurochemical flows, and pores regulated diffusion. All good, all smooth, all as it should be, except there, and there and there...

Ca'aed looked out onto the body of Gaith behind its quar-antine blankets, and worry blossomed into fear.

Ca'aed found its chief engineer in the refresher of his private home with D'cle, who was one of Ca'aed's adopted citizens and the chiefs companion-wife.

Another cramp, this one along a muscle for one of the upper southwest stabilizers. The muscle contracted involuntarily and the stabilizer wavered.

"Engineer T'gen," said Ca'aed through his headset. "Alert. I am ill. I repeat, I am..."

Pain! It lanced up the sensor roots, straight into Ca'aed's pri-mary cortex. Blisters, dozens of them, popping out of the skin like a burning fungus. Pain, wrongness, illness, pain...

The pain ebbed for a moment, and Ca'aed was aware that T'gen was calling all the engineers and indentures via their headsets. Ca'aed mustered its resources and tracked them down, circulating the call with its own voices. It routed images of the affected areas to the research houses and tracked the response. T'gen flew fast into the deep crevices and chambers near the center of Ca'aed's body, where the main antibody generators lay. The required varieties were not getting re-leased; new growth might have to be facilitated.

Below, indentureds and engineers numbed the pained roots and began treating the blisters with steroid compounds. Relief blew through Ca'aed and opened its mind up again. It was able to alert the surrounding traffic that there would be interrup-tions, that all should return to the home ports. It found the dis-trict speakers, let them know what was happeningand that it was all being attended to, but alerted them to keep in contact with the city and each other. Ca'aed set some of its voices in reserve, just for the speakers.

Now, inventory the position and health of the sails and stabi-lizers.

Along with waste disposal, those were key to comfort of the Kan Ca'aed.

They were near a living highland cluster, and pockets of warm air would cause unpredictable currents ne-cessitating thousands of small adjustments, and everything had to be in health.

Ca'aed felt the first patch of gray rot blossom on its skin, and it took all the strength of centuries for the city not to scream.

Vee yawned hugely as she stepped, dried and dressed, out of the shower cubicle. A mug of opaque black tea appeared in front of her. The mug was attached to a hand, which had an arm, on the end of which was Josh.

"My hero," she said fervently. Grasping the mug in both hands she took a huge gulp, almost scalding her tongue. "Ahhh," she sighed blissfully. "Is she out there?"

"As always." Josh waved toward the front window. There was the holotank and the People's display device, which Vee had come to think of as "the holobubble." Next to them, wait-ing patiently on her perches, sat T'sha.

At first, D'seun had spoken to them, along with T'sha. The ambassadors were always accompanied by at least three others who were all called "engineers" and seemed to be responsible for looking after the kite and the translators, as well as making sure their imagers were holding up.

After the third day, however, it had just been T'sha.

Where are the others? Vee had asked the first time she'd woken up and T'sha had been out there alone.

A compromise has been reached, T'sha said. D'seun has left me with the translators while he returns to speak to our... wait... colleagues. T'sha still had to pause frequently to argue with her translator on interpretation.

At first, Vee thought T'sha had meant that figuratively, but now she knewbetter. The things controlling the holobubble were, in some way, alive.

Why did you need to compromise on that? Vee had asked.

T'sha had inflated, just a little, a gesture Vee had come to learn meant a mild emotion, such as annoyance. A full inflation was full emotion, such as anger or happiness. Vee wondered if they played poker on Home.

It is politics, T'sha had told her, and I think I should not dis-cuss that yet.

You have politics too, do you? asked Vee.

Yes, we decidedly have politics too.

I'm sorry.

T'sha deflated, sinking, and causing her crest to flutter around her wings. So am I.

T'sha's engineers had rigged her what Vee understood was their version of a tent-a couple of balloons floating up near the cloud line, where T'sha was most comfortable. They were held in place by long brown tethers that appeared to have rooted themselves to the ground.

It turned out that the People didn't sleep. Every few hours, T'sha would vanish to "refresh," a physical activity that Vee couldn't quite make out but seemed to combine meditation and afternoon tea. Each trip took about an hour. Except for that, T'sha was always there and ready to talk.

Mostly it was Vee who talked back. They talked about T'sha's older brother, who seemed to be either a contracts lawyer or a court recorder, and about her little sisters, who were still in school. They talked about Vee's five siblings, and her parents and grandparents back home, and about the costs and problems of caring for a family, especially when you were the one with the most resources. They talked about marriage as a basis for the family structure, and it turned out T'sha was ex-pecting to have several marriages arranged for her all at once, which Vee found delightfully practical. She had a hard time ex-plaining courtship, romance, love, and individual, serial monogamy. T'sha thought it sounded like a lot of work.They talked about seeing the stars, which T'sha had done only once in her life. She was fascinated to hear about living in a world where you could see them every night. They talked about cities, and Vee was stunned to hear T'sha speak about hers with the same words she used to talk about her family or her future lovers, until Vee remembered and quoted some old Sandburg poems about Chicago and New York. T'sha was fas-cinated by the poetry, and soon Vee was reading her Keats, Angelou, Shakespeare, Dickenson, and all the haiku she could dredge up. In return, T'sha told Vee stories of the ancient Teacher-Kings and riddles that had no answers, to which Vee replied with some Lewis Carroll and then had to explain what ravens and writing desks actually were...

And on and on and on. They showed each other pictures of their worlds like proud grandparents showing off images of the latest addition to the family. Thanks to Josh putting himself through serious sleep deprivation, the humans had added two new lasers to their projector and they now had full color capa-bilities. T'sha asked Vee to show her things that were beautiful, and Vee did her best-great buildings, fine statues, forests, the Grand Canyon, and then she found that many times she had to explain what was beautiful about them.

T'sha showed her Ca'aed, the canopy, the clouds thick with things that might have been fish and might have been birds, and Vee did not have to be taught that these were beautiful.

For everything she learned, Vee was left with a thousand more questions. It felt like the only thing she knew for sure was that she liked this winged person who flew through a world that would kill Vee dead, and still had brothers and sis-ters and a home she loved, and a wicked sense of humor.

It was dizzying. It was magnificent. It was exhausting. Vee slept like the dead at the end of her shifts and was only vaguely aware of what else was going on in the scarab.