The Face of the Waters by Robert Silverberg
3
As he drew near his vaargh Lawler saw that a woman with long, straight dark hair was waiting for him outside. A patient, he supposed. She was facing away from him and he wasn't sure who she was. At least four women on Sorve had hair like that.
There were thirty vaarghs in the group where Lawler lived, and another sixty or so, not all of them inhabited, down near the tip of the island. They were irregular grey structures, asymmetrical but roughly pyramidal in shape, hollow within, twice the height of a tall man and tapering to a blunt drooping point. Near their summits they were pierced with window-like openings, angled outward so that rain would enter only in the most driving of storms, and then with difficulty. Some kind of thick, rugged cellulose, puckered and coarse-something drawn from the sea; where else but from the sea?-was what they had been made from, evidently very long ago. The stuff was remarkably solid and durable. If you struck a vaargh with a stick, it rang like a metal bell. The first settlers had found them already here when they arrived and had put them to use as temporary housing; but that had been more than a hundred years before, and the islanders were still living in them. Nobody knew why they were here. There were clusters of vaarghs on nearly every island: the abandoned nests, perhaps, of some extinct creature that once had shared the islands with the Gillies. The Gillies lived in dwellings of an entirely different nature, casual seaweed shelters that they discarded and replaced every few weeks, whereas these things seemed as close to imperishable as anything was on this watery world. "What are they?" the early settlers had asked, and the Gillies had replied, simply, "They are vaarghs." What "vaarghs" meant was anybody's guess. Communicating with the Gillies, even now, was a haphazard business.
When Lawler came closer he saw that the woman waiting for him was Sundira Thane. Like the priest, she too was a newcomer to Sorve, a tall, serious young woman who had arrived from Kentrup Island a few months before as a passenger aboard one of Delagard's ships. Her profession was maintenance and repair-boats, nets, equipment, anything-but her real field of interest seemed to be the Hydrans. Lawler had heard she was an expert on their culture, their biology, all aspects of their life.
"Am I too early?" she asked.
"Not if you don't think you are. Come in." The entrance to Lawler's vaargh was a low triangular gash in the wall, like a doorway for gnomes. He crouched and shuffled through it. She came crouching and shuffling after him. She was nearly as tall as he was. She seemed tense, withdrawn, preoccupied.
Pale morning light came slanting into the vaargh. At ground level thin partitions made of the same material as the exterior divided it into three rooms, each small and sharp-angled-his medical office, his bedchamber, and an antechamber that he used as a sitting-room.
It was still only about seven in the morning. Lawler was getting hungry. Breakfast would have to wait a while longer, he realized. But he casually shook a few drops of numbweed tincture into a mug, added a little water, and sipped it as though it were nothing but some medicine he prescribed for his own use every morning. In a way it was. Lawler gave her a quick guilty look. She wasn't paying any attention at all to what he was doing, though. She was looking at his little collection of artifacts from Earth. Everyone who came here did. Gingerly she ran her finger along the jagged edge of the little orange-and-black potsherd, then looked back questioningly over her shoulder at Lawler. He smiled. "It came from a place called Greece," he said. "A very famous place on Earth very long ago."
The drug's powerful alkaloids had completed their swift circuit of his bloodstream almost at once and entered his brain. He felt the tensions of the dawn encounters ebbing from his spirit.
"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
"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.
The little flurry of endocrine excitement passed quickly. In a moment he was professional again. Dr Lawler making an examination.
He said, "Open your mouth, very very wide."
"There isn't all that much to open."
"Well, do your best."
She gaped at him. He had a little tube with a light on it, something handed down to him by his father; the tiny battery had to be recharged every few days. He put it down her throat and peered through it.
"Am I full of red wires?" she asked, when he withdrew it.
"Doesn't look that way. All I see is a little soreness in the vicinity of the epiglottis, nothing very unusual."
"What's the epiglottis?"
"The flap that guards your glottis. Don't worry about it."
He put the stethoscope's end against her sternum and listened.
"Can you hear the wires growing in there?"
"Shh."
Lawler moved the cylinder slowly around in the hard, flat area between her breasts, listening to her heart, and then out along the rib cage.
"I'm trying to pick up audible evidence of inflammation of the pericardium," he told her, "which is the sac surrounding the heart. I'm also listening for the sounds produced in the air tubes and sacs of your lungs. Take a deep breath and hold it. Try not to cough."
Instantly, unsurprisingly, she began to cough. Lawler held the stethoscope to her as the coughing went on and on. Any information was information. Eventually the coughing stopped, leaving her red-faced and weary again.
"Sorry," she said. "It was like when you said, Don't cough, that it was a signal of some kind to my brain and I-"
She began to cough again.
"Easy," he said. "Easy."
This time the attack was shorter. He listened, nodded, listened again. Everything sounded normal.
But he had never had a case of killer-fungus infestation to handle. All Lawler knew about it was what he had heard from his father long ago or learned by talking to doctors on other islands. Would the stethoscope really be able to tell him, he wondered, what might or might not have taken up residence in her lungs?
"Turn around," he said.
He listened to the sounds of her back. He had her raise her arms and pressed his fingers against her sides, feeling for alien growths. She wriggled as though he were tickling her. He drew a blood sample from her arm, and sent her behind the screen in the corner of the room to give him a urine specimen. Lawler had a microscope of sorts, which Sweyner the toolmaker had fashioned for him. It had no more resolution than a toy, but perhaps if there were something living within her he would be able to see it anyway.
He knew so little, really.
His patients were a daily reproach to his skills. Much of the time he simply had to bluff his way. His medical knowledge was a feeble mix of hand-me-downs from his eminent father, desperate guesswork, and hard-won experience, gradually accumulated at his patients' expense. Lawler had been only halfway through his medical education when his father died and he, at not quite twenty, found himself doctor to the island of Sorve. Nowhere on Hydros was there real medical training to be had, or anything that could remotely be considered a modern medical instrument, or any medicines other than those he could compound himself out of marine lifeforms, imagination, and prayers. In his late and great father's time some charitable organization on Sunrise had dropped packages of medical supplies once in a while, but the packages were few and far between and they had to be shared among many islands. And they had stopped coming long ago. The inhabited galaxy was very large; nobody thought much about the people living on Hydros any more. Lawler did his best, but his best often wasn't good enough. When he had the chance, he consulted with doctors on other islands, hoping to learn something from them. Their medical skills were just as muddy as his, but he had learned that sometimes by exchanging ignorances with them he could generate a little spark of understanding. Sometimes.
"You can put your shirt back on," Lawler said.
"Is it the fungus, do you think?"
"All it is is a nervous cough," he told her. He had the blood sample on the glass slide, now, and was peering at it through the single eyepiece. What was that, red on red? Could they be scarlet mycelial fibres coiling through the crimson haze? No. No. A trick of the eye. This was normal blood. "You're perfectly all right," he said, looking up. She was still bare-breasted, her shirt over her skinny arm, frozen in suspense. Her expression was a suspicious one. "Why do you need to think you've got a horrible disease?" Lawler asked. "All it is is a cough."
"I need to think I don't have a horrible disease. That's why I came to you.
"Well, you don't." He hoped to God he was right. There was no real reason to think he wasn't.
He watched her as she dressed, and found himself wondering whether there might actually be something going on between her and Gabe Kinverson. Lawler, who had little interest in island gossip, hadn't considered that possibility before, and, considering it now, he was startled to observe how uncomfortable he was with it.
He said, "Have you been under any unusual stress lately?"
"Not that I'm aware of, no."
"Working too hard? Sleeping badly? Love affair that isn't going well?"
She shot him a peculiar look. "No. On all three."
"Well, sometimes we get stressed out and we don't even notice it. The stress becomes built in, part of our routine. What I'm saying is that I think this is a nervous cough."
"That's all?" She sounded disappointed.
"You want it to be a killer-fungus infestation? All right, it's a killer-fungus infestation. When you reach the stage where the wiry red threads are coming out your ears, cover your head in a sack so you don't upset your neighbours. They might think they were at risk, otherwise. But of course they won't be, not until you begin giving off spores, and that'll come much later."
She laughed. "I didn't know you were such a comedian."
"I'm not." Lawler took her hand in his, wondering whether he was trying to be provocative or simply being avuncular, his Good Old Doc Lawler persona. "Listen," he said, "I can't find anything wrong with you physically. So the odds are the cough is just a nervous habit you picked up somehow. Once you start doing it, you irritate the throat linings, the mucosa and such, and the cough starts feeding on itself and gets worse and worse. Eventually it'll go away on its own, but eventually can be a long time. What I'm going to give you is a neural damper, a tranquillizer drug, something to calm your cough reflex down long enough to let the mechanical irritation subside, so that you'll stop sending cough signals to yourself."
That came as a surprise to him too, that he would share the numbweed with her. He had never said a word about it to anyone, let alone prescribed it for a patient. But giving her the drug seemed to be the right thing to do. He had enough to spare.