Lost Era 06_ Catalyst of Sorrows - Margaret Wander Bonanno [74]
Chapter 11
“A squinty-eyed nonentity named Thamnos,” McCoy announced, presenting the Three Graces, as he’d taken to calling the trio of Uhura, Crusher, and Selar, with the last-known image of their prime suspect, a pink-faced humanoid with a lipless mouth and a permanently furrowed brow that seemed to plead Take me seriously! “First name Crofter, though he never uses it. Thinks just being a Thamnos is glory enough. A mediocre clinician whose prior history includes a series of lackluster assistanceships in one lab or another. I overlooked him as a suspect initially because I was looking for some evil genius. Thamnos may be evil, but he’s no genius.”
“Thamnos?” Selar recognized the name. “Of the Rigelian family?”
“The same,” McCoy said. “They all but run Rigel IV. Some of ‘em are clever, but this one’s about as smart as a box of rocks. Rumor has it his father endowed a new lab at the best med school on Rigel V just so they’d pass him through, and he was still in the bottom tenth of his class. Then in the tradition of the old Orion pirate families, Daddy paid for a new library, and suddenly Thamnos the Younger is styling himself a researcher. Published a few not-very-original papers on Rigelian fever, then dropped off the radar some years ago after he tried to publish a paper on Bendii Syndrome using someone else’s data….”
If he listened hard enough, Thamnos could still hear them jeering at him. Anyone who thought medical conferences were genteel gatherings of the thought leaders in research and new techniques, convening to exchange ideas and learn new things, had obviously never been to one. Cutthroats, ready to pounce on every datum and analyze it to the subquark level, then call it into question, they had done everything but throw rotten fruit at him.
He had paid someone to lift the data for his Bendii research from other sources, assuming those sources were sufficiently obscure so that no one would notice. Having slept through his neurology courses and cribbed the exams, he hadn’t understood enough of the material to doctor it sufficiently to avoid charges of plagiarism, and he had been caught.
And fled the conference, the planet, the Federation in disgrace, some highly virulent Rigelian fever cultures in his baggage.
He’d taken the cultures with him from the family’s private stock when he left home almost as an afterthought; he did not at the time even know why. Officially they did not exist, but the old Rigel families still had their secrets. A wild thought occurred to him afterwards that he might have released the R-virus into the air ducts or slipped it into the cocktail-hour punch and taken out every non-Rigelian at the conference. Too bad, really.
Because he was of the First Families of Rigel, he had his own private ship, and no need to go through transporters or sensors or baggage checks. Which, from what he heard from his sources these days (amid the equipment he had scavenged from his ship and installed in his cave laboratory was a surprisingly powerful transmitter, its signals uncrossed by others, since Renagans no more believed in radio than they did in space travel), was no longer the case. The disease he had created (yes, he, the family idiot, had done this!) was changing the rules. Not so much as a microbe could pass the filtration systems now.
Too late! Thamnos/Cinchona thought almost gleefully, his own internal laughter drowning out the voices of his accusers, at least for a little while. The seeds are already in place, the damage already done. Soon you’ll come to me for your answers, and there will be no jeering then!
He had escaped a universe which knew him as a buffoon, some subconscious survival instinct smarter than he was telling him: Take the fever with you! and he did, changing his name, hiding his ship, and blending in on Renaga. Random chance, perhaps, or maybe something more. Because on Renaga, there was hilopon. And that made all the difference.
It was a naturally occurring bacterium in the soil that the natives had used as a folk cure for as long as they could remember,