Lost Era 06_ Catalyst of Sorrows - Margaret Wander Bonanno [73]
On the odd chance anyone else from outside ever came to this backward world, Cinchona would count on Boralesh’s skepticism to conceal him. Renagans had heard tales of space travel, but weren’t sure if they believed them. There was no reason to explore, they reasoned. There was food enough for those who obeyed the laws, healers for when they were sick, wise ones to teach them that the stars were the home of the gods and deciders of man’s fate. If the occasional visitor happened along to tell them that beings like themselves also came from some of those stars, he was greeted with knowing smirks and “Oh, tell us another, stranger!”
So this particular stranger, running ahead of his own disgrace, had come to ground here when the power cells on his one-man ship had failed, hidden the ship in the hills, and walked into the nearest village purporting to be a healer from a far province. He had chosen the name Cinchona, and the healers’ guild, after asking a few questions to which he apparently gave satisfactory answers, had welcomed him, particularly since one of their own had a daughter who needed a husband.
For all Boralesh knew, Rigel was a faraway city on her own world, not a distant planet that was part of something called a Federation. Even if she had believed it, it wouldn’t have mattered as much as the fact that she was nearing the age where no man would want her. Cinchona had looked good in her eyes at the time, wherever this “Rigel” might be.
In fact, the Rigel system consisted of several habitable planets, though it was Rigel IV which had two claims to fame. One was the fact that its round-eared inhabitants appeared human, but the configuration of their internal organs, their heart rates, blood types, immunohistochemistry, were similar to those of Vulcans. In fact, only an expert could distinguish a Rigelian’s medscan from Vulcan or Romulan.
The second thing Rigel IV was noted for was the fever.
Rigelian infants were inoculated against it at birth, and in developing the vaccine for this elusive disease the physicians of Rigel V, who had long ago emigrated from Rigel IV for political reasons, had become some of the most renowned in the quadrant. But their former neighbors on Rigel IV were a different matter. Little more than pirates prior to Federation, they were ruled by a consortium of powerful families with a reputation for luring visitors to their world or the resorts on nearby Rigel II, slipping them the live virus, then offering a cure, for a price.
Cinchona knew this very well. His family had made their fortune this way until Federation membership put a stop to it, but by then the family wealth had been diversified into other things. And, yes, his family was wealthy. The “moneyless” economy of the Federation might be the norm everywhere within its borders, but on Rigel IV they still used currency. Succeeding generations of the old pirate families were expected to go legitimate, to send their offspring to the universities on Rigel V and elsewhere and stop dealing in bootleg medicines.
“Set the groundwork for you,” his father had said on the day Cinchona left for medical school. “Did everything I could short of going to class for you. Can’t do that. Too old. They won’t let me. Get out there and achieve something.”
Well, he’d tried, and failed. He was in fact the dullest of his father’s children, and only generous gifts to his teachers had seen him through school. But he was the eldest, and carried the family name, and this brought with it certain obligations, and those certain obligations had pushed him in directions that almost brought his career down around him before it began.