to a minimum, and his brain soothed, relaxed, nearly torpid.
He half-opened his eyes, under the age-yellowed canister that held him isolated from the world, and the world safe from him.
“Harriet?”
“I’m here, Ullimus.”
“We are on Harvest?”
“Landed and awaiting your instructions.” His instructions had long since been announced; this was a courtesy. He knew it. His lips moved in a smile.
“Thank you, Harriet. I expect to die, finally. Who knows, perhaps death will come as a blessed relief?” But he did not truly believe that. He held hope within him like a small flame.
“Come, cats,” I cried through a focused speaker system to the waiting mausers, motionless in the afternoon sunlight. “Take us the rest of the way to your mistress.”
* * * *
“He doesn’t look very well,” said Gloriana Avid disdainfully. She peered down into the yellowed shell. “He looks disgusting. Has he been sick?”
“Hello, Ms. Avid,” the Landgrave said, and his voice was faint and thready but amplified by the speakers. “I apologize for my appearance.”
She jumped, even with her bad foot.
“Can he hear me?”
“He hears you, Madame,” said Daisy, who stood beside the horizontal pod covered from toes to pointed ears in a containment garment. “He has been ill. He has been sicker than anyone who has not yet died.”
Glory drew back fastidiously. “I hope it’s not catching.”
A grating, coughing laugh came from the speakers. “Oh, my dear, I rather fear it is. It is more catching than anything you have ever heard of. But I hope…” His voice fell away. After a moment, as his eyes filled with tears, he said, “I hope you might have the cure for what ails me.”
“I? I? What is this nonsense? Am I a mountebank, a country witch? I assure you, sirrah, I have no medical training. Look, I think you’d better go back where you came from. What are you doing here, anyway?” She was pettish, and her voice grated nearly as raspingly as the Landgrave’s. “I didn’t order you.”
“Madam,” said the fierce cat, Daisy, “I invited Ullimus Wong here to Harvest for your mutual benefit.”
I watched, agog. He was a person, but a cat. What right had a cat to speak thus to one like Glory Avid, queen of Harvest? She took another step back.
“You invited him? I don’t know you, sir. What’s your name? Oh, wait, you’re the mauser with the ludicrous—” When she broke off, I knew that the cat must have given her the look that within a few years would electrify and shake the whole galaxy. Many would bow down before it, trembling; others would run in the streets, weeping with maddened emotion, tearing at their clothes, fouling themselves publicly in fits of overwrought emotion. “You’re Daisy.”
The cat nodded curtly. To an assistant, also wrapped in molecular sheathing, he said, “Bring in the mud.”
Standing carefully back against a wall, the human nurse shrieked, “Mud?”
A construction lifter came through the triple doors, settled beside the adiabatic pod. It sloshed, heavily.
“Open the pod door, Harriet,” Daisy ordered me. What could I do? The titanium and diamondoid shell split down its central seam and opened like a rusty flower.
Ullimus Wong lay blinking, naked, entubed, in all his ghastly affliction. I withdrew his tubes, patted the entry points with antibiotic unguents, sealed them.
Faintly, through her covered mouth, Glory said, “Now that’s not nice.”
“Hose in the loam,” Daisy said calmly.
I watched in disbelief. I had expected the unexpected, the far-fetched, the newly-contrived, but not this.
A metal snout eased forth from the industrial lifter, found the cavity within the pod, settled gently inches from the Landgrave’s poor pustular feet. With a coughing chug, mud sloshed into the pod.
“You’ll drown him!” shrieked the nurse, and flung herself at the hose. A cat lady caught her effortlessly, swung her aside, pinned her to the wall.
The rich dark loam, alive with red worms and millions, billions of bacteria, slurped around the Landgrave’s near-corpse, covered him in a dark sea to his very chin.
“Enough,” said Daisy. “Stop.” He stepped close, took a sharp instrument from a pouch in his garment, slashed a foul abscess on Ullimus Wong’s right cheek. Yellow pus oozed forth, and a little blood. The mauser scraped the exudant into a vial, capped it, double-sealed it, placed it with extreme care into a containment vessel held for him by his lieutenant. “Remove this to safe storage,” he said.
I watched as the cat person carried away, out of the protected space, a sample of the vicious molecular virus that had infected the Landgrave after it murdered billions of humans in the last, or latest, desperate conflict that blazed through the galaxy. The sample was inactivated, nulled, or he’d have been truly dead a thousand years before—but what once was dead may be sparked again to life. Vide the Landgrave himself, up from the ice. A high-pitched noise came from my speakers. Daisy ignored it.
He crossed the room and found Gloriana Avid, fertility goddess of the world of Harvest, found her shrunk back but not cowering. She had been betrayed thrice, and knew rejection, knew suffering, but nobody had ever raised a hand against her.
Daisy raised his hand. He did not strike her. Seizing her by the thick black lovely hair above the scruff of her neck, he dragged her to the edge of the mud-filled, mud-caked pod. My Landgrave stared up in terror, choking as mud ran up his cheeks and entered his mouth and nostrils. With one hand, easily, Daisy pulled Glory to the side of the adiabatic pod and with the other he lifted the Landgrave’s ruined head, yellow and mold-greenish and warty with his ancient disease.
“Kiss him,” the cat said.
Speechless with revulsion, Glory shook her head against his grip, pulled back with all her strength.
“Kiss his lips,” said the warrior mauser. “Open his mouth with yours, place your tongue against his, dribble your spittle into his throat.”
“Ee-ewww,” shrieked Gloriana. “Gross!”
But her face was pressed downward despite her will. The lips of the ill man and the broken woman met, writhed, his sealed against the mud and hers in abject disgust. Holding her tightly by the hair, Daisy pinched her nostrils. Finally, gasping for breath, the Landgrave opened his mouth as she, choked, opened hers. The magic of her thirty-two generations of primed proteins entered him with her gasping, runny mucus.
It entered his body like a proud, upright host of warriors mounted on great war steeds, banners lifted, flying and brave, in the dawn light of battle, the warriors crying the name of their cause. It is a strained figure, perhaps, but that is how I saw it, how Death saw the entry of Glory’s forces into that field of contest, my master’s body. In an endless hour, or day, or month, I watched the forces pitted against each other, tiny machines swarming with their
