Chapter 5

Deilen Koru wouldn't have thought complete silence an appropriate response to this situation, but then again, he wouldn't have imagined this particular situation at all likely in the first place. How often, in all the histories of the world, has a man climbed into bed and found an unknown young woman in his room? One glance at the lady, even in the poor light and heavy shadows, told Deilen she was beautiful. Her deep blue eyes drew him in and he had a rather difficult time focusing his mind. The end result was that he said not a word and stared on in dumb fixation.

But what in common society on Telamar might have seemed downright rude, did not seem to phase the girl. She stood from her waiting place and returned Deilen's gaze with soft, pleasant, smiling eyes that disarmed him completely. She wore a simple white shirt and brown skirt just shorter than knee length, with a rough sort of waistcoat loosely tied around her chest and a longer, half cut robe which fell around her calves without restricting her steps in front. But denoting native dress, her waist was uncovered by either shirt or dress, her top rather more low cut than anything a shop in Telamar might sell, and she wore no shoes. Her hair however, in what seemed blatant defiance of native tradition, was let completely down, cascading past her shoulders in long, black, wave-like curls.

Deilen took it all in, as if he were in a dream. She of course noticed the pronounced effect she had on him, clasped her hands in front of her, and stood stock still, waiting kindly for a response. Through several long-in-passing seconds, she waited, while the capacity to think had yet to dawn on Deilen. But when the spark of consciousness leaped into his eyes, she dipped a knee (of rather fine proportions, color, and texture, as Deilen would relate later) and introduced herself in a broken English with the musical intonations the natives couldn't avoid adding to the language. When she finished, with another slight dip of the knee, Deilen had never been so pleased. In fact, his emotional state seemed to come with the price of a short-term memory wipe, so that several more seconds with rather more similarities to decades than to actual seconds themselves, passed in silence.

“You are Doctor Koru, aren't you?” she asked again, almost as if speaking to a shy child, reminding and reinforcing the fact he or she already knew the answer to the question and that the risks of speaking were few and the rewards far more bountiful.

Deilen opened and closed his mouth several times before actually saying anything, but when words did come, they came in the form of partial questions, not answers. “How did...? Why do...? Should I...? Are you...?” But speech, even in unreasonable form, seemed to jump-start his system and, after a brief reprieve from stuttered, rapid-fire questions, Deilen Koru collected himself and replied legitimately: “Yes, I am Deilen Koru, and I work at Triroads Medical Research Facility. But who are you? And why are you in my bedroom?”

“I apologize to surprise you, but what I hear on you from my others is that you knew how to help me. My name is Lo'ru and I am your humble servant, if you will take from me sickness and hurt. Will you? Please?”

Her brutal honetsy gripped Deilen right in the middle of his being; every detail of his circumstance that might have told him to escort her kindly to the door, tell her never to return, and report the event to local security forces faded away. Instead, he asked her, “You have been infected?”

A small smile crossed her lips. “Yes.”

“And why do you think that?”

“I know for long time I am broken; since I was little girl. Something is not right, in me. I know.”

“You mean you have been sick for years?” Deilen asked, intrigued, though a flare of skepticism flew into his mind.

“Yes, many years. But you can make me one again?”

“Listen, all of the cases I've seen have occurred only in the past few months. If you have been sick for much longer, I'm inclined to think you have a different illness from the current outbreak. This means you would need to see a regular licensed physician, and not me.”

“But you are one working, making broken ones better. No?” she asked with a twinge of desperation.

“I am. I do not believe that you are infected in the same way as the others...”

“Do you know nothing of this sickness? Shai'ri hil a nah? Do you see anything?” The small outburst sent a shiver through Deilen; a small splinter had been driven into his professional pride. He wasn't sure from what this woman was suffering, but it couldn't possibly be the CLP2 strain. The first case had been reported less than four months ago—it was a shining new suspect on the long and hunted list of human ailments. Even inspection of past cases that might have been precursors or predecessors of CLP2 seemed so distant from the nature of the disease that it took more faith than evidence to believe so. The whole reason the committee had been formed was because the IMAC had declared the new strain to be wholly unlike anything in the known medical world, and yet similar in many ways to an increasing amount of illnesses. That this native woman could have known about the disease for years, even been it's victim, before the first colonization attempts ten years ago, was simply ludicrous to Deilen.

“Lo'ru, it simply isn't possible for you to be infected with the disease I am researching; I do not doubt you have a sickness, it just isn't the one I know about. If you were to go to the clinic tomorrow, a normal physician will help identify what is wrong with you and will help fix you...”

“But it is! I prayed Ja'te twenty times; I climbed Lin Sha and added flag to shannah pole; I threw dust over my green sea and followed here. I suffer as my brothers, as my sisters, as my fathers and mothers—those you help! You must help me; what I have you can take away. Will you?” Her blue eyes pleaded directly with his soul—yet his mind still had control over his voice.

“Listen: even if you were infected, we don't have a cure yet, I cannot help you get better yet. Not until we figure out how it works and how to counteract it. But you must go to the clinic tomorrow; here, take this,” Deilen said, fishing one of his cards from a pocket of his pants on the end of his bed. “Give this to the nurse and they'll know not to charge you for your visit. I can do that much for you.”

Although she took the thin metallic device, her eyes did not look to his. She seemed to want to say something more, but simply stood in the silence, fingering the triangular business card. “Now, if you please, I need to get to sleep,” Deilen prodded. After a few moments, she turned slowly about on a heel and slipped away into the shadows. Only a small, ringing click signified her departure, and Deilen, wearied by the encounter, sighed and crawled beneath his sheets to let sleep overtake his consciousness.

But every time he closed his eyes, he found he couldn't escape the gaze of those mysterious blue eyes—they denied everything he asserted: he had acted in his best power to help her, he had given her more than any other citizen of Telamar might have in the case of finding a trespassing native begging services, he hadn't reported the crime to the authorities. What more could he have done?

That, however, was just the question that those haunting eyes asked him. How much had he risked? He lost a few minutes of sleep to conversation and some unspent “family” reserve medical credit. She had such vision in him, and he had turned her upside down and dropped her to the gravity of fate, with nothing more than a fancy balloon to distract her from the fall. What would happen tomorrow? She would enter, have an examination, discover what exactly was wrong, and consign herself to “labor swap” for the medications prescribed. And for the cost of a semi-healthy continued bodily existence, she would forfeit everything to cover her debt.

Or, she might realize this and never enter the clinic on account of personal freedom. She might last another year with whatever ailment she had, but complications would undoubtedly arise. What final months might she spend bitterly cursing her fate, surrounded in the darkness of the Resorts, and become easy prey for a wild young native man, or any of the beasts that might wander in from the green sea of grass for a daring raid of the streets. What life was this?

But how she had taken the disappointment! The more he mused on her reaction, the more his gut churned and the more his mind praised her discipline. His bedroom was the final destination of a long and arduous sprint to life and hope she had made. How she had come to know of him, to have found a way into his apartment, to have waited patiently for him to notice her—all this to be denied, offered a cheap replacement for real assistance only to clear a guilty conscious, and then to walk away with but a few polite words of protest, words of a foreign language, even! How terrible he had been to her—but how nobly she took her fall; how gracefully she had grabbed his little balloon and stepped off the edge.

Deilen shook the sheets from himself and rubbed his face with his hands—the same hands that had shooed her from his presence, had driven her to darkness. Why was he the one with the access cards and citizen tags and protected rights and preferential treatment? Why did he have power over the life of a girl such as this? And why did he juggle it so freely, toss it aside so easily, as if it weren't worth the disturbance of a few minutes of sleep?

And what if she were infected? What if she had one of the earliest forms of the CLP2 strain—what if she had survived so long because her body had learned to fight it somehow? Perhaps there were a weakness in the disease she had managed to exploit for years, while the more recent versions of the disease obliterated their patients within the span of a couple months? Certainly all this was possible—why shouldn't it be? He had thrown perhaps his best clue to this disease right out his front door without any stitch of hope.

Those blue eyes peered back at him from the mirror, from the ceiling, from the folds of the comforter—Deilen shivered and stood. He paced short, unsure steps, as his mind raged against itself. Going after her was daft, he told himself. But to stay in this room was to embrace a torment as maddening as the gates of hell itself. He shook his head and muttered to himself as he found his slippers, walked from his bedroom to find his jacket. Upon patting the pocket for his keys and hearing their indicative jingle, Deilen Koru threw open his door, braced himself against the wind, and called out hoarsely the name, Lo'ru.

But the cold winds carried no answer.