The Draco Tavern - Larry Niven [37]
She shook her head. “Invader. I came here to keep it confined.”
Confined. Invader. Bacteriologist. A murky truth congealed: I didn’t have the flu. Some alien disease had come with the Chirpsithra ship. I started to say something to Jehaneh, tried to stop myself, and found my thoughts running away like water.
The Wahartht leapt to the table, then the wall. He scuttled toward an upper window, his thirty-six fingers finding purchase where there was none. Jehaneh reached into her purse.
In that moment’s distraction I turned to run... wondered what I was doing ... and every muscle locked in terror. Not even my scream could get out. The God-damned flu was thinking with my brain!
Jehaneh aimed her purse. The Wahartht fell, stunned. I saw it all from the comer of my eye. I couldn’t turn my head to watch.
Jehaneh reached forward and turned off my translator. She spoke into her own. “Bring them in.”
I couldn’t lift my arms. Escape was impossible: the host was fighting me. My head was beating like a big drum.
Sfillirrath’s long, fragile arms set a cap of metal mesh on my head. She spoke into her own translator. It was a Chirp make, crudely rewired. I heard, but not with my ears and not in any language of Earth, ~For your life, you must speak.~
I chose not to answer.
Two armored men took charge of the Wahartht. One took his breather and dropped it in a bag and sealed it, and set another on his face.
Gail and Herman came in. They bent above me, looking worried. Gail said, “Rick? You’re very sick. We were too, but they cured us—”
“Don’t agree to anything!” Herman said fiercely. “Not unless you want to make medical history!”
Sfillirrath spoke. -See you these humans. You took them for hosts some days ago, you and your Wahartht pawn. Your colonies bred too fast for their health. In another day they would have killed them, but human defenders acted first. Most of your colonies on the ship are dead too. How did you reward a Wahartht, to make him betray so many?~
I said, not with my voice, ~Simulate mating. The drug he takes to tranquilize depression does not leave him alert and happy. I do.~
~And what fool would assume that sapient beings cannot fight bacterial invasion? It may be you are not truly sapient.~
Stung, I answered, ~Am a star-traveling species. Hold many worlds.~
~Your number in the host is?~
~Currently ten to the ninth operators, one entity. Operators are not sapient, not me.~
~Breed to ten times as many, entity becomes smarter?~
~Only a little.~
~But too many for host. Rick Schumann would die. Kill host, is that intelligent?~
The voice in my mind asked, ~Fool, do you expect intelligence to stop an entity from breeding?~ I thought that was a funny remark, so I added, “Ask any elected official.” My voice was an inaudible whisper.
Gail said, “Rick, the Chirp liner is still near the Moon. The point was to get all the tourists into closed cycle life support and not start a panic on Earth. There’s a sapient microscopic life-form loose. This rogue Wahartht has been leaning over our drinks with his breather on, distributing the bacterium as a powder, in encysted form. Normally it spreads as a, um, a social disease. Under proper circumstances it is a civilized entity, not especially trustworthy but it can be held to contracts. But as a disease it could ravage the Earth.”
I could barely blink.
“We can make treaties with sapient clusters of the bacterium. That’s you. Some species can’t tolerate it at all, and some clusters won’t negotiate. Some aliens won’t volunteer as carriers, either. Herman and me, we would have. Hell, we’re grad students! But there wasn’t time. They rushed us to the Medical facility and shot us full of sulfa drugs.”
Sfillirrath had gone on talking. ~There is a chemical approach to halt your cell division. Antibiotics would kill you entirely, as they have killed your other colonies. Which will you have?~
I felt terror from both sides of my mind. ~If my operators do not fission, still they die. When the numbers drop enough, I am gone. You would make me mortal!~
~Give you empathy