The Dark Between The Stars

FORTY-FOUR
ZOE ALAKIS

A private ship flew into the Pergamus system, disregarding the warning transmissions from the guardian stations. No one had invited the vessel, and the pilot refused to give his name. He demanded to speak with Zoe Alakis in person.

That was always a bad sign.

Her security ships scrambled from the orbital picket lines. Ground-based defenses tracked the incoming blip. From her sterile central dome, Zoe triggered the standard lockdown procedures that sealed her groundside facilities and Orbiting Research Spheres. Incineration protocols and complete data-wipes were placed on hair-trigger standby. She would not allow any of her work or stockpiles to get loose. With all the valuable—and often dangerous—medical specimens in her numerous laboratories, Zoe maintained enough security to drive off an army. They could handle one annoying intruder.

When Tom Rom appeared on her private screen, Zoe felt the sense of relief that he always brought. He had just returned from the Klikiss ruins on Eljiid with the royal jelly samples, and he remained on Pergamus, awaiting his next assignment. “Do I need to solve this problem, Zoe? I can chase away the ship—destroy it, if necessary. The cleanup would take extra work, but it’s still manageable.”

The fact that Tom Rom had offered Zoe the choice was in itself calming. “Not just yet. We don’t want to initiate an outside investigation. There’s no telling how many people knew this man was coming here.”

Tom Rom looked neither pleased nor disappointed. “I am here. Let me know what you need.”

Two security ships launched from orbit, while three other defenders rose from the surface to intercept the small ship. The stranger flitted around the satellite stations, dodging pursuit. He kept transmitting, sounding more desperate. “I need to speak to Zoe Alakis. My name is James Duggan. My wife is Andrea—Andrea Duggan. Maybe you’ve heard of her? She’s an artist, quite well known.” On the screen, his young face looked gaunt, and beard stubble covered his cheeks. “Dammit, why won’t you respond?”

“Mr. Duggan, you are not authorized here,” said one of her security pilots. “Pergamus is a private facility. If you do not depart immediately, we will consider you dangerous and defend ourselves with lethal force.”

Duggan’s eyes widened, but he was so determined that the threat barely made him flinch. “I just want to talk. I need to speak with Ms. Alakis.”

On the private channel, Tom Rom said, “I’m ready anytime, Zoe. Waiting.”

She hated how this intrusion would distract her researchers from their important work. She didn’t need to be reminded that Pergamus was vulnerable. “Let me try one more thing.” Zoe adjusted her chair, glanced at her reflection, then activated the transmit function. “Mr. Duggan, this is Zoe Alakis. I don’t know you. I don’t wish to speak with you. I don’t want you here. Please leave.”

Duggan leaned closer to the screen as intense as if no one else existed but the two of them. Zoe felt a chill. “I’ve got nowhere else to go,” he said. “You’re my only chance—my wife’s only chance. She has… she has Heidegger’s Syndrome, in its final stages.”

Zoe’s expression hardened. So that’s what it was. “If she’s in the final stages of Heidegger’s, then it is incurable. Go home. Be with your wife, comfort her.”

“She’s already nearly blind, the degeneration of the optic nerve was the worst for her. She’s an artist, a laser artist. She’s famous. You must’ve seen her work.”

“I don’t look at art, Mr. Duggan. I don’t leave Pergamus. We have too much work to do here.”

“It’s Heidegger’s! I know you’re researching it. I know you have a cure.”

“Heidegger’s Syndrome is incurable. You can read that anywhere.”

“You have a cure,” he insisted. “You can help my wife.”

“I could help a lot of people… and if I did, there would still be more who need it, and even more after that.” Her work was too important to let herself plunge into that quagmire.

The pathetic man had let himself and his wife fall into this trap. The universe was not a fair place, and it wasn’t her job to rectify injustices. She didn’t like him, didn’t like that he had intruded here, didn’t like how he assumed that after all her years of effort, all her expenses, all the trial and error, all the extreme measures she had taken in the pursuit of a cure for Heidegger’s, while her own father degenerated… that she would just give it to this man because he was sad and desperate? She felt no sympathy for him whatsoever.

“If I had a cure for Heidegger’s Syndrome, Mr. Duggan, then it would be my cure. I developed it. I tested it. I keep it. I don’t have to share.” No one had bothered to help when her father needed it. She had learned much about human nature.

“I can pay you,” Duggan said. “My wife can create original masterpieces if she gets her sight back.”

Zoe rolled her eyes. Even after intensive treatment, the chances of repairing the damage to the woman’s optic nerve were minuscule. And what use did Zoe have for artwork anyway? There were too many threats in the universe, too many germs, too many dangers to watch out for at every turn. She had no desire to cover up the risks with pretty pictures.

“You miss the point, Mr. Duggan. If you don’t leave now, I am within my rights to have Pergamus security destroy you. I have a full record of this conversation. You have been warned several times. You are trespassing.”

Duggan reeked of naïve disbelief. His voice was hoarse. “You’re not human. How can you do this?”

“You don’t know what I am, or what I’ve been through.”

She switched over to Tom Rom’s private channel. “Encourage him to depart with all due speed.” Then, as a last kindness she added, “But don’t harm him, don’t destroy his ship. Let him go back to his wife.”

After looking at her for a long moment, Tom Rom acknowledged and switched off. Zoe was sure he understood her justifications, though it had taken her a while to figure it out for herself.

James Duggan reminded Zoe of what she had been like years ago. At one time she had been desperate too, willing to do anything to cure her father as his Heidegger’s progressed on Vaconda. No one had rescued her then. In those last months, she had been forced to watch the awful worsening of his symptoms, even though Tom Rom had done his best to help…

For Adam Alakis, the course of the disease manifested differently from Andrea Duggan’s symptoms. His sympathetic nerves had suffered the worst damage, making it harder and harder for him to breathe, making his heart forget how to beat.

He lost the ability to control the muscles of his throat, so he couldn’t even swallow his food; Zoe had to hook him up to intravenous nutrient drips in the forest watchtower. Even when he did manage to breathe, he couldn’t control his voice. Unable to speak or write for the last few months, he communicated with his daughter only through longing, hopeless looks; his unexpressed thoughts piled up like drifts of old gray snow that refused to melt. She’d been nineteen.

Zoe refused to believe there was no cure for Heidegger’s. In their watchstation above the lichentree forests, with the droning symphony of insect songs and the trill of reptile-birds, she used to sit in the window enclosure. She propped her father in his comfortable chair, adjusted the nutrient drip, and let him stare out at the undulating lichentree colors. Tendrils of orchid vines broke off in strong breezes and drifted across the treetops before they dropped into the underbrush and tapped into other plant systems.

While her father faded, day by day over the course of five long years, Zoe made it her cause to understand everything known about Heidegger’s. The Alakis watchstation library had a wealth of medical records, as well as all the data the Vaconda teams had collected for decades on the pharmaceutical possibilities of native insects, flowers, spores, and poisonous saps.

Heidegger’s was a rare disease, with fewer than a thousand recorded cases across the Terran Hanseatic League. Zoe did discover several recent studies, and a medical research team on New Portugal that had made interesting progress. A few obscure research papers suggested promising data, but that research had never been pursued—Zoe didn’t know why. She found it maddening. If that research team had simply followed up with trials, they could have had a test treatment by now, something that Zoe’s ailing father could try.

She sent pleas to the research teams, begging them to release anything they had—unpublished studies, unverified experiments. But she was just a teenaged girl, and she received no response. At the time, the hydrogues had launched their war across the Spiral Arm, and the entire Hansa was in turmoil. Hydrogue warglobes were attacking numerous planets, the Ildiran Empire was reeling—and nobody cared about a lone biological researcher and his daughter on a small wilderness planet.

As Adam’s health failed, Tom Rom dismissed the few remaining volunteers on Vaconda, who were glad to get away. But he stayed, as he always did. After Zoe told him about the abandoned Heidegger’s research she had found, Tom Rom looked at Adam, then gave a brisk nod to Zoe. “I’ll go find them, retrieve their data, and interview them to see if they can offer any hope.” He left the two alone in the watchstation.

Zoe wished she could take her father away to some kind of hospice, where he would receive the care he needed as his health failed, but Adam refused to leave Vaconda. With great effort he managed to make his answer clear: no. She knew his reasons. He had spent many years here, and his wife had died here. He knew full well that no one could help him—in fact, he seemed to accept that fact long before his daughter did.

Zoe was frightened and frustrated by her inability to do anything except care for him. How was it possible that human intelligence and science could be defeated by some mindless germ?

While they were alone in the vast planetary wilderness, she read aloud to her father, played his favorite music, talked about how she would find a cure for Heidegger’s Syndrome—and not stop there. She would cure many other medical conditions too. She waited for Tom Rom to come back from New Portugal.

He was gone for a month, and he returned at last with a disappointed expression and a pack of data that amounted to little. “There was not much progress, Zoe. The experiments were incomplete and inconclusive.”

Her voice cracked as she felt her last hopes slipping through her fingers. “So you spoke to the research teams, then? Did they run into some difficulties? Maybe we can work—”

“I brought you all the results they had,” Tom Rom said. “From early indications, I have no doubt that they could have developed a cure, or at least an effective treatment, but they never bothered to pursue it, because Heidegger’s is so rare. The work did not meet their cost-benefit requirements.”

Zoe was disgusted. “It shouldn’t be an either-or! They should find cures for everything.”

“They claimed they didn’t have enough resources. They had to pick and choose.” He narrowed his eyes. “It boils down to money. They work on whatever they can get funding for. Everyone else is out of luck.”

From his seat by the watchstation windows, Adam Alakis could hear the two of them, though he could not respond.

“It’s not fair.” Her throat felt raw, her face hot with rage.

Tom Rom hesitated a long moment, then wrapped his arm around her. He felt as sturdy as a tree. “You’re right, it’s not fair. Other people are selfish. They don’t care about you unless it benefits them somehow.”

Zoe watched her father who sat in his chair facing the sunset. As colors deepened in the sky and the taller lichentrees began blooming with the twilight, he was trembling. A single tear leaked out of the corner of his eye and trickled down his cheek.