Lost Era 06_ Catalyst of Sorrows - Margaret Wander Bonanno [72]
“It’s good,” Zetha said as if stating the obvious, wiping her plate inelegantly with her fingers to get the last of the tomato sauce. “Is there more?”
“Don’t know where she puts it!” Sisko marveled, doling out a second helping and watching her attack that with equal gusto. “If you’re going to eat with your fingers planetside, no one will ever mistake you for a Vulcan.”
“I’ll remember that,” Zetha said with her mouth full. “But where I come from, when there’s food, you eat it.”
Sisko still wasn’t sure he believed she had simply been plucked off the streets of the Romulan capital and sent to them on a mission of mercy. He intended to have a little chat with Tuvok on that very subject when Zetha was out of earshot. Assuming Zetha was ever out of earshot; she seemed to be everywhere on the small ship except where he’d denied her access, mostly following Selar around like a puppy, setting up petri dishes, sterilizing instruments, tidying the lab. For now-
“Where did you-?” he began, but just then Uhura’s voice interrupted him.
“Dr. McCoy’s identified our mad scientist,” she said, shimmering into being, flanked by Crusher and McCoy. “It may not help us much, but it’s a start.”
It had begun by accident, like the discovery of penicillin. Every schoolchild knows how Sir Alexander Fleming, in a bout of bachelor carelessness, went on holiday and left an uncovered dish of deadly staph bacteria lying about, only to find blue mold, no doubt migrated from someone’s unfinished lunch left equally carelessly in a wastebin, claiming its turf here and there on the surface of the dish and driving the bacteria back wherever it touched. But where Fleming’s random chance led to a cure that had saved millions, the man the Renagans knew as Cinchona had stumbled upon the power to kill as many and more.
It wasn’t what he’d wanted. Following the rout at the Medical Academy-disgraced, family ties severed, his career in shambles-he had wanted only retreat, anonymity, to disappear into the proverbial black hole and never emerge. The family had settled a small fortune on him on condition he go away, at least for a while. He wouldn’t need to work at anything. He didn’t like work; it was being pushed into it that had gotten him into trouble in the first place.
But the healer’s daughter Boralesh had attached herself to him, and, yes, the child born soon after the wedding was undeniably his-he’d done the tests to prove it, but how was he to have known the custom here?- visiting him with thoughts of retreating further, but where? Aside from the fact that Boralesh’s kin would hunt him down and drag him back, even if he could get his small ship started again, emigration inside the Zone was not the easiest thing for someone with his past, even for a Rigelian.
“Rigel? I have never heard of this place,” Boralesh said, dewy-eyed with innocence (or was it cold-eyed with ulterior motive?), the night they met beneath the stars and she began to lay her snares for him with scents gathered from the levora flowers. “Where is it?”
“Far away, but not far enough” was all he would tell her. “My family is important there. Too important. I needed to strike out on my own, to prove myself.”
Boralesh knew about family, or thought she did. She had accepted his story at the time, even though a dozen years and three more children later, he had in fact proven himself to be little more than a teller of tall tales and a fair rider of the local sedraz, saddled or bareback, winning prizes that cluttered the sideboard in the best parlor and gave the children something to brag about at school.
Oh, and in recent years there was his “laboratory,” which was the name he had given to the cave in the foothills where she had spied on him and watched his strange rituals. He would go there early in the morning and return after dark, but never say anything about what he did there. Boralesh half-wondered if it was a woman, and not work at all, which drew him away every day. Still, unless it was