POOR
PROGNOSIS
Maddy visits John
regularly in hospital. At first it’s a combination of natural
compassion and edgy guilt; John is pretty much alone on this
continent of lies, being both socially and occupationally isolated,
and Maddy can convince herself that she’s helping him feel in
touch, motivating him to recover. Later on it’s a necessity of
work—she’s keeping the lab going, even feeding the squirming white
horror in the earth-filled glass jar, in John’s absence—and partly
boredom. It’s not as if Bob’s at home much. His work assignments
frequently take him to new construction sites up and down the
coast. When he is home they frequently argue into the small hours,
picking at the scabs on their relationship with the sullen
pinch-faced resentment of a couple fifty years gone in despair at
the wrongness of their shared direction. So she escapes by visiting
John and tells herself that she’s doing it to keep his spirits up
as he learns to use his prostheses.
“You shouldn’t blame
yourself,” he tells her one afternoon when he notices her staring.
“If you hadn’t been around, I’d be dead. Neither of us was to
know.”
“Well.” Maddy winces
as he sits up, then raises the tongs to his face to nudge the
grippers apart before reaching for the water glass. “That
won’t”—she changes direction in midsentence—“make it easier to
cope.”
“We’re all going to
have to cope,” he says gnomically, before relaxing back against the
stack of pillows. He’s a lot better now than he was when he first
arrived, delirious with his hand swollen and blackening, but the
aftereffects of the mock-termite venom have weakened him in other
ways. “I want to know why those things don’t live closer to the
coast. I mean, if they did, we’d never have bothered with the
place. After the first landing, that is.” He frowns. “If you can
ask at the crown surveyor’s office if there are any relevant
records, that would help.”
“The crown surveyor’s
not very helpful.” That’s an understatement. The crown surveyor is
some kind of throwback; last time she went to his office to ask
about maps of the northeast plateau he’d asked her whether her
husband approved of her running around like this. “Maybe when
you’re out of here.” She moves her chair closer to the side of the
bed.
“Dr. Smythe says next
week, possibly Monday or Tuesday.” John sounds frustrated. “The
pins and needles are still there.” It’s not just his right hand,
lopped off below the elbow and replaced with a crude affair of
padding and spring steel; the venom spread and some of his toes had
to be amputated. He was having seizures when Maddy reached the
hospital, four hours after he was bitten. She knows she saved his
life, that if he’d gone out alone, he’d almost certainly have been
killed, so why does she feel so bad about it?
“You’re getting
better,” Maddy insists, covering his left hand with her own.
“You’ll see.” She smiles encouragingly.
“I wish—” For a
moment John looks at her; then he shakes his head minutely and
sighs. He grips her hand with his fingers. They feel weak, and she
can feel them trembling with the effort. “Leave Johnson”—the
surveyor—“to me. I need to prepare an urgent report on the
mock-termites before anyone else goes poking them.”
“How much of a
problem do you think they’re going to be?”
“Deadly.” He closes
his eyes for a few seconds, then opens them again. “We’ve got to
map their population distribution. And tell the governor-general’s
office. I counted twelve mounds in roughly an acre, but that was a
rough sample, and you can’t extrapolate from it. We also need to
learn whether they’ve got any unusual swarming behaviors—like army
ants, for example, or bees. Then we can start investigating whether
any of our insecticides work on them. If the governor wants to
start spinning out satellite towns next year, he’s going to need to
know what to expect. Otherwise, people are going to get hurt.”
Or killed, Maddy adds
silently.
John is very lucky to
be alive: Dr. Smythe compared his condition to a patient he’d once
seen who’d been bitten by a rattler, and that was the result of a
single bite by a small one. If the continental
interior is full of the things, what are we going to do?
Maddy wonders.
“Have you seen any
sign of her majesty feeding?” John asks, breaking into her train of
thought.
Maddy shivers.
“Turtle tree leaves go down well,” she says quietly. “And she’s
given birth to two workers since we’ve had her. They chew the
leaves to mulch, then regurgitate it for her.”
“Oh, really? Do they
deliver straight into her mandibles?”
Maddy squeezes her
eyes tight. This is the bit she was really hoping John wouldn’t ask
her about. “No,” she says faintly.
“Really?” He sounds
curious.
“I think you’d better
see for yourself.” Because there’s no way in hell that Maddy is
going to tell him about the crude wooden spoons the mock-termite
workers have been crafting from the turtle tree branches, or the
feeding ritual, and what they did to the bumbler fly that got into
the mock-termite pen through the chicken-wire screen.
He’ll just have to
see for himself.