Hidden Empire - Kevin J. Anderson [115]
He had promised Vao'sh that he would write up a personal account of the Crenna plague, memorializing the victims who had suffered through blindness and isolation before death. He had lived through the epidemic, had watched it strike down the workers and singers, the two kiths most susceptible to the disease.
It would take him a long time to gain perspective, but Dio'sh promised himself that he would keep alive the stories of bravery and sacrifice. The Crenna Designate, a son of the Mage-Imperator, had tended the sick himself, despite warnings from the medical kithmen. They had advised him to take a ship to where he would be safe, but the Designate had stayed in his colony town. His death had severed the focal point of thism, leaving all the Ildirans on Crenna to shudder in the emptiness.
Dio'sh had documented the stories of other Crenna residents and heroes, recording the victims' lives as they would have wanted to be memorialized. But he had already written as much as he could bear about those experiences. Now he had other work to do.
Vao'sh had warned Dio'sh against spending too much time in the alcoves studying and reading. He claimed that it was a waste of time to absorb so much tangential apocrypha. "Any rememberer who holes up by himself is not remembering for any purpose."
Dio'sh had reassured his comrade. "I will come back, Vao'sh. But the best way for me to heal is to have time to assess everything I have experienced."
Already, the younger rememberer had discovered a notation in one of the Earth encyclopedias obtained from human merchants—a reference to a disease called cholera that spread easily from human to human when they lived in close quarters. Or the bubonic plague, typhoid fever, AIDS. But the blindness plague was much worse.
Under the reassuring glow of wall-mounted blazers, he sat surrounded by scrolls and square-cut documents. The ancient records, coated with flexible preservation layers and sealed in permanent storage vaults, had remained untouched for centuries. Dio'sh felt like a brave explorer as he moved his fingers above the symbols, careful not to damage the ancient items.
Here in the archives, he had become obsessed with studying other plagues. He had searched through records and datafiles to discover whether similar diseases had ever struck the Ildirans. Had epidemics wiped out other splinter colonies, like Crenna? He needed to know. He couldn't remember such a major event in the Saga of Seven Suns, but could even a rememberer grasp all the secondary story lines contained in millennia of history?
He knew one dark tale that many rememberers were reluctant to speak, because of its great tragedy. Thousands of years in the past, at the beginning of recorded history, a firefever had swept through Mijistra. That fever had proved particularly deadly for the rememberer kith, with the result that every historian in the Ildiran capital had been wiped out.
So many deaths during an early phase of assembling and recording the Saga of Seven Suns, before all stanzas had been written down, meant that an entire portion of the epic had been lost forever. Thanks to the firefever, all prior history remained a blank spot in Ildiran memory—much to the dismay of the rememberers. Because of that fundamental loss, Ildirans no longer could trace their history back to the dawn of civilization. Many imaginative tale spinners had created fictitious adventures to fill the gap. But Dio'sh understood that such tales weren't real and could not truly fill the void.
After much time deep in the archives, Dio'sh had dug out all of the records written at approximately the time of