She is still herself. Her face is full of the awareness of what is happening to her. The scaly stuff is growing on one side of her head and there are patches of raw skin there where someone tried to just abrade it away until she bled, only to find that it sprouted from the wounds just as readily. A few of those glinting black beads are scattered along the line of her cheekbone. Sense organs, but not actually eyes, I think. I am wondering if the controlling force actually perceives the physical world as we do, even vicariously through its minions.
My systems throw up another gout of errors, like a half-drowned man coughing up the last lungful of water, then start doing their job. I can detect that electromagnetic signature, just like before. It comes from nowhere, goes nowhere. If I step back there is no sign of it, impossible to intercept, just . . . there at the point of infection. Like hearing the sound from an open door as you pass it. My mind hooks on to that idea. An open door . . . to where, though? And this is impossible. This is not how the electromagnetic spectrum works. You can’t just have a signal that appears at its destination point without travelling through the intervening space from its origination. I don’t know what we’re dealing with here.
But I know about how it does what it does. I kneel by Esha, seeing her eyes track me. Tears trickle down her cheek, and I see a whip-like filament grope towards them from the scabbed infection.
“Do it,” she gets out. “I asked Lynesse, but she wouldn’t. But you will, won’t you? You don’t feel like we feel. You can’t regret.”
“I will later,” I tell her. “There are a great many things I will regret later, and perhaps forever. But right now I don’t have to feel.”
“Then do it, please,” she says, and closes her eyes hard, gritting her teeth.
I do it. I extend the field my systems generate until it encompasses her.
A ripple passes across the patch of corruption growing on her, and I see dozens of hair-thin arms stretch from between the scales and wave about blindly as though reaching for something. I get my instruments out, but I fear my hands are not going to be steady enough for the work. I have limited reserves of physical energy, given the prodigious self-repair efforts currently underway.
“Lyn, Allwer, come here.” I give them my multitool, demonstrating how it can be adjusted from one shape to another, a task they pick up more swiftly than I did the first time I had to use it. “Remove the infestation from her, as carefully as you can.”
It comes off more easily than I’d thought, and I think that I am interfering not just with the communications signal but also with some interaction between the parasite and its substrate. Even so, it is an hour’s hard work to pry everything off Esha’s face, and then attend to the other patches of it on her body, that I can track down from its frustrated attempts to reconnect. Esha will bear the scars forever, more from the removal than the actual infection, but I honestly don’t think she’ll care.
In the end I let down the field again and wait to see if I detect any of the demon’s ethereal chatter. Only silence, blessed silence. I pronounce her cured, and then reinstate the field strongly enough to cover all four of us, setting up a battery of subsystems to maintain it no matter what.
I’m very tired, after that, and sit down on the blanket, back against the fallen tree. There is a long silence, and eventually I open my eyes to find all three of them staring at me.
“What?” I ask, somewhat irritably.
“I owe you my life,” says Esha simply. “I need to repay that debt. How does one do that, with one such as you?” Almost peevish. Because, in saving her, I’ve cut through all manner of traditions that are trying to reattach around the mess I’ve made, just like the demon-infection. And, because I’m not a part of their world, their ways can’t accommodate me and there will be a social scar forever from my meddling.
“Just . . . I’ve done too much already, interfered too much. Just . . . say thanks, or something.” I wave a hand vaguely.
“I will find a way,” Esha insists. I can see it’s going to eat at her. Better that than other things.
“If you were a chirurgeon, I would give you honours in my mother’s name, patronage, property,” Lyn says. “You saved my closest friend.” As Esha’s patron she’s equally bound, and equally awkward.
“Look, Lyn,” and again that flinch, and on the back of my musing I realise why. We are not friends, and I’ve been taking liberties without realising. “Lynesse Fourth Daughter,” I tell her formally, “I am going to tell you something else that I have no proper words for in this language. I was sent to watch your people, and see how you lived, so that my people could learn about you. Sent by my people, who are long gone now, so that I may as well be the last of the Elder Race, as you call me. I was sent to watch and not act. To watch you sicken, to watch you make war; to watch you die so that I could learn your funerary practices. To watch and never interfere, in case I contaminated you with my own superior culture. And I bent the rules a bit, when you had problems that originated with relics from older days. I told myself it wasn’t really contamination when I was removing other outside influences. I was very good at weaselling out of the rules.” And all put into her language as best I can, and have I communicated the precise connotations of “weaselling” to someone who doesn’t know what a weasel is? “And now I’ve taken matters entirely too far. You couldn’t know, but the greatest danger you were ever in just now came from me, because if I had died, or even if it appeared that I was going to die, then . . .” And how do I tell her about the satellite in its eternal orbit out beyond the edge of the atmosphere? “Then fire from heaven, Lynesse. Just to stop you getting hold of my body.” She doesn’t understand, but that’s probably for the best. I am only now, at the wrong end of three centuries after loss of contact, beginning to realise just how broken my own superior culture actually was. They set us here to make exhaustive anthropological notes on the fall of every sparrow. But not to catch a single one of them. To know, but very emphatically not to care.
Lyn kneels down beside me, though still with a definite distance. “You have earned the right to call me Lyn, if you wish.” It is a huge concession and one that she is frightened about making. I search my records and recollections, and I guess that in normal social situations this would be an open door to greater intimacy in the future, letting me across some invisible but crucial threshold. And she is scared of me and what I might do without that door between us, and I can’t honestly say that she is wrong to be, because I am a mess, and when the DCS lifts, who knows what I’ll feel? Not to mention that getting on the equivalent of first-name terms with one of the locals is also absolutely against contamination procedures. And so obviously I should say no. That would be the rational DCS-prompted choice.
But the word doesn’t actually come out, and I nod instead and say nothing, and apparently that is acceptance enough, because an extra spark of fear lights in her eyes and stays there. She is the princess from the stories who has made a promise to a wizard, and knows that it will be collected on. And I am that wizard, and don’t know what I might do when I am not (or when I am more) myself.