“She thought Ken Argon was poisoning her. So she poisoned him back.”

  “She’s venomous?” asked Andrew.

  “Only at need. He had her in a jar. He sprayed her with something that made her feel very sick.”

  Dabeet shook his head. “He was working on a cure for feline toxoplasmosis.”

  “I know,” said Great Mother. “He told me. I knew he had this one here. He understood that if I joined with this one, I would also become infected and die, and in all likelihood I would spread the cat sickness to the others. The whole family.”

  “So he was trying to cure it before you joined with it,” said Andrew.

  Dabeet looked for anything written. There was a notebook. There were several vials with dry stains and dried-up residue in the bottom. Maybe the notebook had some information about what Ken was trying. The formula he had devised for curing the parasite of toxoplasmosis.

  But the pages were blank. Knowing Ken, Dabeet realized that he would write things down only if the treatment worked.

  “It was painful, what Ken sprayed onto your companion?” asked Dabeet.

  “It felt like an agonizing death,” said Great Mother, answering Dabeet at last.

  “Is she still in pain?” asked Dabeet. “Obviously she didn’t die.”

  “The pain is gone,” said Great Mother. “She was starving and drying out. She tried to guess which would kill her first. The nutrient solution was very rich at first, but for the past seventeen days it has been nothing but water, and not enough of that.”

  “Nobody knew that the nutrient solution was exhausted,” said Dabeet. “Nobody knew there was anything alive in here.”

  “Did Ken’s formula work?” asked Andrew.

  “Did it cure her toxoplasmosis?”

  “No,” said Great Mother. “She isn’t actively sick; she doesn’t have symptoms. But the disease forms cysts inside the body, and those are wakening now and spreading throughout my body. I will soon die.”

  Only then did Dabeet realize that the llop had come here, if not expecting to die, then . . . then hoping to reconnect with the parasite that gave her a voice, even if it killed her.

  “Do you have a way to record my song?” asked Great Mother. “I would like to sing it in our native language. I will start by telling you the meanings of a few words, and then you can learn the rest of my language from the songs I sing before I die.”

  “Can’t you tell us if—” Andrew began.

  “This is the last of her kind,” said Great Mother. “We will never have voices again. O Speaker for the Dead, please let me sing my own death, the death of my people.”

  “We’ll leave now,” said Dabeet. “All humans will withdraw from—”

  “Too late,” said Great Mother. “Now we’re no longer wise. If you want to leave, go. But not until you have killed all the cats. Don’t leave this world of ours to the cats.”

  “Sing,” said Valentine, setting down her recorder. “This can hear you and record you for twenty hours.”

  “I will be dead long before that,” said Great Mother.

  “Do you want us to stay?” asked Valentine. “So you have someone to sing to?”

  “No,” said Great Mother. “I will sing to my people. Take this recording and play it to them. Play it every day. Maybe some of them will understand even without companions. Maybe some of them will learn our language.”

  “Let’s go,” said Andrew.

  Immediately Valentine headed for the door.

  Dabeet knew he should go. Yet this had been so fleeting, so impossible, so sudden. He wanted to know everything, yet he knew that she didn’t have time to answer his questions. She had a hope, still—the hope that her songs would waken something in the minds of her . . . of her people. How dare he even think of interfering.

  She began to sing in a language made of highly articulated yips and growls, sighs and whispers, with rhythm and pitch in patterns that bespoke a kind of music, though nothing like anything Dabeet had ever heard.

  Andrew took him by the arm and led him from the room.

  Andrew palmed the door closed.

  “With all the cameras off,” said Dabeet, “how will we know when she is through?”

  “Don’t you know how quickly toxoplasmosis works on living creatures on this world?” asked Andrew. “It was in the reports.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Dabeet. “She has only a few hours.”

  “And then what?” asked Valentine. “Do they have a death ritual of some kind? A funeral? A burial?”

  “Not for those that die of the cat disease,” said Andrew. “It’s in the reports. They shun the bodies, for fear of picking up the cysts from the corpse. They eat nothing that dies of cat disease.”

  “We really should have found a solution to the toxoplasmosis problem centuries ago,” said Valentine.

  “We did,” said Dabeet. “We made it a high crime to bring any cat into space.”

  “So a colony of criminals arrived with their cats,” said Valentine.

  “Such a terrible chance that this is where they came,” said Dabeet.

  “I think we need to find a virus that seeks out and kills the Toxoplasma gondii,” said Valentine.

  “Or a virus that kills only cats,” said Dabeet. “That’s the one we need. Because even without toxoplasmosis, the cats have killed off dozens of species of small animals just for the fun of it.”

  “How many of the people here have caught the parasite?” asked Andrew.

  “We check everybody every three months,” said Dabeet. “Nobody has it.”

  Andrew and Valentine said nothing.

  “I’ll use my authority to compel everybody to be tested here, by E.S. personnel, instead of by local medical technicians,” said Dabeet.

  “Would they really conceal infections?” asked Valentine.

  “Toxoplasmosis isn’t usually dangerous to humans,” said Dabeet. “But it does predispose us to be kind to cats.”

  “Are people still bringing in cat skins for the bounty?” asked Andrew.

  “As many as ever,” said Dabeet.

  “But nowhere near fast enough to keep up with feline population growth?” asked Andrew.

  “Nothing can keep up with feline population growth,” said Valentine.

  “How will the people react to the decision to deny the colony continuing status?” asked Andrew.

  Dabeet didn’t want to answer. But he owed the truth to this speaker for the dead. “They will have their continuing status,” he said. “We will also continue our efforts to exterminate the cats and perhaps Toxoplasma gondii. And the llop will have a vast reserve of choice habitat that will be theirs forever.”

  “Until Catalunya becomes an independent world and makes their own laws,” said Valentine.

  “That’s possible,” said Dabeet, “though I’ll recommend that Starways Congress never grant independence without a firm guarantee—”

  “Firm guarantees will become worthless as soon as the side with all the power decides that the llop are dangerous wild animals,” said Valentine.

  “She drew the picture,” said Andrew. “She came here to find her companion. She gave her life for her people. How can you say that the llop aren’t sentient?”

  “Because they aren’t,” said Dabeet. “Not with all the companions dead. We’ll search for more. On an island somewhere, perhaps. It’s not impossible. Or a genetically related species that we might be able to alter for them. We’ll try. But I was sent here with clear instructions.”

  “To discover that the llop are not sentient and Ken Argon was a loon,” said Valentine.

  “Yes,” said Dabeet.

  “I think you don’t want me to speak the death of Ken Argon,” said Andrew.

  “Yes, I do,” said Dabeet. “For me. For my staff. Some of them, anyway. But not for the people of Tarragona.”

  “Some of them might change their minds,” said Valentine. “If they knew the truth.”

  “No,” said Dabeet. “They’ll blame the pirates and the cats and say, ‘Why should we pay for their crimes? The damage was already done before we got here. A tragic disease, not of our causing, not of our bringing. Tragedy is no reason we should give up this beautiful world,’ they’ll say. Ken Argon was a renegat, a traitor, the enemy.”

  Andrew and Valentine nodded as if the same puppeteer were moving their heads.

  “I’m glad you came,” said Dabeet. “I had to know. Even though I also knew what the E.S. wanted the outcome to be. Soon they would have replaced me and sent someone more obedient. Perhaps my replacement is already on his way.”

  “He is,” said Andrew.

  Dabeet smiled ruefully. “Andrew, do you really know who my father was?”

  Andrew shook his head. Though whether that meant “No, I don’t know” or “No, I won’t answer you,” Dabeet had no way of knowing.

  “Andrew,” said Dabeet. “Don’t speakers for the dead fearlessly say what no one wants to hear, as long as it’s true?”

  “We do,” said Andrew. “But Dabeet, my friend, you are not dead.”

  2018

  A Town Divided by Christmas

  1

  When Spunky was invited to a meeting in The Professor’s office, she didn’t know what to expect. She had taken two classes from him, but she didn’t major in genetics or even in a biological field—she was an economics post-doc, shopping for a tenured faculty position somewhere on planet Earth, preferably a place with flush toilets, clean water, and a good internet connection.

  It didn’t ease her confusion when she arrived at The Professor’s office at the same time as Elyon Dewey. She knew him because everyone did. Elyon was that most tragic of personality types: The relentless extrovert with zero social skills. However, he did happen to be a brilliant post-doc in genetics, and he had already co-published two journal articles with The Professor.

  “Do you have any idea what this meeting is about?” Spunky asked Elyon.

  “It can’t be important,” said Elyon.

  Spunky took a moment to process this. “You reach that conclusion because an economist was invited to the meeting?”

  “Well,” said Elyon, whose attempt to phrase things nicely was indistinguishable from condescension, “it can’t be about science.”

  “But it can be dismal,” said Spunky, knowing that the reference to economics as “the dismal science” would sail right past Oblivious Elyon.

  He smiled as if he understood what she had said and got the joke. She might have believed it if there hadn’t been a furtiveness in his eyes.

  Elyon opened the door and stuck his head in.

  “Elyon,” said The Professor from inside his office. “Did you forget our conversation about knocking?”

  Spunky was more than a little pleased to hear Elyon getting called on the carpet. She didn’t hate him, she was simply glad to know that despite The Professor’s apparent worship of Elyon’s intellect—two journal articles?—he knew how annoying Elyon could be.

  “How convenient,” said The Professor. “You arrived together.”

  To Spunky, this was a sign that the Professor had something in mind for the two of them, and that meant that either Spunky would do what The Professor “suggested,” or she would have to hie herself back to the economics department to deal with all the one-up-manship and status wars. From what she now knew about economists, if you weren’t one of the handful of elite practitioners who were respected by the ivory-tower faculty of the University of Chicago, then it didn’t matter what you researched, discovered, or thought up—you would never actually exist in the field.

  The truth was that Spunky had already cut bait with the Econites because she was tired of fending off the suitors who thought that because she was an economist, she would get all turned on by some grad student who told her all his plans to work in finance and make his first hundred million by the time he was thirty or twenty-eight or whatever number sounded magical to him.

  None of them ever bothered to find out whether she cared about money—she was in economics, after all! And it was especially offensive that not one of them ever supposed that perhaps she, also an Econ Ph.D., would reach her first hundred million before any of them.

  So now she had thrown in with The Professor, who had begun as a physicist of some note, then drifted into genetics when the Human Genome Project was just beginning. Now he was the beacon of interdisciplinarity, which meant he almost had to make room for a “genetic economist,” as Spunky once called herself, as a joke.

  It was the scientific equivalent of declaring herself to be homeless.

  And thus, as a homeless Ph.D., she had to come begging at the table of People With Grants, until she somehow tripped and fell into tenure somewhere. Right now The Professor was the likeliest PWG in her life, so here she was sitting beside Elyon in The Professor’s office, waiting to hear her doom.

  “I admired and appreciated Dr. Spunk’s work on genetically isolated populations in the United States—”

  “That was just her dissertation,” said Elyon dismissively, as if research done for a dissertation could not possibly contain any usable results.

  The Professor continued as if Elyon had not spoken. “I have been given a grant for a proposal I created, derived from Dr. Spunk’s work. It seems only right to involve Dr. Spunk in that well-funded project. In fact, I am making her the lead post-doc.”

  Spunky was unsurprised that in the unspeakably unfair world of academic science, she, who had conceived and executed the entire project, was now supposed to be grateful to be included in a project designed to exploit her results. She knew the game well enough by now to respond with, “Thank you,” and then wonder how many more humiliating hoops she would have to jump through before somebody offered her an actual J.O.B.

  “You left us with eleven American communities, between five thousand and twenty thousand in population, where the retention rate has been highest across five generations, and with the highest rate of return.”

  “That sounds like finance,” said Elyon.

  “But in this case,” said The Professor . . . and then he gestured to Spunky to explain.

  This was such a delicious moment, to actually get to explain something to the king of condescension himself. “In this case we’re referring to natives of the community who leave for education, military, or employment, but then return before the birth of a second child, so their children remain in the community gene pool.”

  Elyon narrowed his eyes. “Surely you’re not going to expect me to spend time on something as trivial as inbreeding. The verdict is in—it’s bad and we’re against it.”

  “This isn’t an inbreeding study,” said The Professor. “It’s something much more subtle. It’ll require a gee-woz.”

  The term he pronounced “gee-woz” was an acronym: “Genome-Wide Association Study,” or GWAS. Both of them knew the word well, because it was the ultimate research fishing expedition. The idea was to run hundreds or thousands of complete genomes through a massive computer data search, looking for correlations of genetic markers. Such studies had helped identify some of the many markers for cystic fibrosis, and Spunky knew of dozens of GWAS projects already in progress.

  But they were all medical, looking for genetic factors associated with susceptibility to certain diseases.

  “So it is inbreeding,” said Elyon.

  “So it is not inbreeding,” said The Professor cheerfully. “Dr. Spunk, perhaps you can tell our skeptical friend what we might find in the genomes of people who live in one of your genetic isolates.”

  “Near-isolates,” Spunky corrected him. “There are no true isolates in North America . . .”

  The Professor nodded and waved a hand in acquiescence.

  Spunky realized that this was a test. She had done the research identifying almost a dozen near-isolates, communities with minimal intake of genomes originating elsewhere, but had she thought deeply about what might be discovered?

  She had. She proceeded to spend about ten minutes describing things she had thought of. Finally she reached the one that made The Professor lean forward in his chair. “It’s possible that there’s a ‘homebody marker,’ one or more genes linked with a tendency to remain in the native community or return to it.”

  “A xenophobia gene,” said Elyon.

  “Absolutely not,” said Spunky. “This study excluded communities that have a history of persecuting move-ins, and deliberately includes several communities with a high percentage of people who left and returned. It’s the returning that makes me think we might find a homebody marker, if it exists.”

  “They can’t hack life in the big city so they run home,” said Elyon.

  “With that attitude,” said Spunky to The Professor, “how can we possibly find anything?”

  The Professor held up a hand to calm her. “His attitude won’t matter because he won’t be meeting anybody,” he said. “He’ll be the one doing the genome analyses.”

  “So you expect me to do data entry?” asked Elyon, as if he were being assigned to latrine duty in the dysentery ward.

  “That will be part of your duty,” said The Professor, “though I recommend that you use the quick and easy chip method that takes very nearly no time at all.”

  “Well of course I’d use the—”

  Again The Professor talked over him. “Elyon will be available to help you take samples in large-number situations, but you’ll be trained in taking uncontaminated samples in one-on-one interviews,” said The Professor.

  Spunky understood. “Because people in these towns are likely to be suspicious of strangers.”

  “We sent out mailers and emails to selected people in every town you listed in your dissertation,” said The Professor. “We’re sending you to the town with the highest favorable response rate.”

  “Which is?” asked Spunky.

  “Good Shepherd, North Carolina,” said The Professor.

  “Sounds insanely religious,” said Elyon.

  “And which religion does not sound insane to you?” asked The Professor.

  “Atheism,” said Elyon.

  “So in case you’re wondering why I’m keeping your contact with our subjects to a minimum,” said the Professor, “please keep this conversation in mind. These are people from the Carolina hill country—the Appalachian Mountains, to be precise.”