"Not at all," I admitted. "Our cuisine tends toward cod cheeks, potatoes, and kidney pie."

"Oh but in fancy restaurants," the attendant said, "in the fancy restaurants… well, in fancy restaurants you still get cod cheeks, but they’ve got a parsley garnish."

"Hmmph." Festina glared at the midget beaker of oil she was supposed to swallow. "On Agua, we understood olive oil. Good olive oil. Fried in it, poured it over salads, dripped it into every batter, made olive bread… and our synthesizers never produced crap with this aftertaste. If you ask me, your recipe database has a bug in it. And you unenlightened clods don’t know olive oil well enough to tell the difference."

All right, Festina-girl, those are fighting words. I reached out with my link-seed up to the North Orbital Terminus, to the ships docked there. Greetings in the name of Xe. Might I converse with a ship-soul not native to Demoth?

A dozen yes’s — not the spoken sound of ship computers saying, "Yes," but an amiable knowledge of ships willing to talk. Xe’s name opened doors… something to think about another time.

I want to compare your recipe for olive oil with the one used by Demoth’s world-soul. Is that acceptable?

More yes’s — I wasn’t asking for confidential information, was I? Every ore-hauler and passenger liner in orbit had its synthesizer database programmed from its home planet; and the planetary databases themselves would have been initialized from the master one on New Earth, official reference point for synthesizers throughout the Technocracy. On a staple like olive oil, the databases should all agree. Then I could rag on Festina she was just being a baby. That our olive oil was the same as everyone else’s, down to the last molecule, and let’s have no more of this "Agua cooks better than Demoth" malarkey.

Download and compare, I ordered our own world-soul. A pause. From the world-soul. Not for processing but for something else. I got the queerest impression the world-soul was deciding whether to lie to me… like when you catch kids making a mess, and you can see on their faces, they’re wondering if they can fib their way out.

Then the responses on the comparison. Different. Different. Different.

The Demoth formula for olive oil didn’t match a single ship in orbit.

Holy Mother of God.

Quick comparisons: the foreign ships all agreed with each other. Demoth was the odd recipe out. It had unexpected extra ingredients, several long-chain organic molecules the world-soul claimed were not indexed in the biochem database.

Lord thundering Jesus.

Sometime since Homo saps came to Demoth — since human foods got added to the Oolom computer banks — the recipe for olive oil had been corrupted. Or reprogrammed. And our ways of cooking used so little olive oil, no one had ever raised a fuss.

Coincidence? Not blessed likely.

Access backup archives, I ordered the world-soul. The yearly backups we took of all standard databases. Find the year our olive-oil recipe deviated from initial settings.

The answer came back bolt-fast… too quick for the world-soul to have loaded and checked the off-line backups. It already knew the answer.

The change came the year of the plague.

What caused the change? I asked.

The answer appeared in my head, almost as if it’d been spoken aloud in cover-your-ass computerese.

The database was reprogrammed by a user with sufficient permissions to make the modification. Dr. Henry Smallwood.

I left Festina without spilling a word of what I’d just learned. One mumbly good night, then I scuttled off toward the isolation room that held my assigned bed. Me thinking all the while.

Dads was a humble country doctor. He didn’t have permissions to tamper with standard databases. That took passwords, retinal identification, secondary confirmation from government authorities, oversight by a team of programmers and biochemists. Synthesizer recipes had diamond-hard security, tighter than any other data on the planet… because if a fumble-fingered programmer accidentally changed the formula for sugar into strychnine, you could kill a million people in the time it took to make supper.

But.

Suppose the world-soul was telling the truth. That somehow, twenty-seven years ago, Dads had reprogrammed the formula for olive oil. Changed it to include something extra, with the teeny aftertaste Festina noticed.

Something that cured the plague.

So when synthesizers all over the world produced olive oil, they manufactured the cure.

And olive oil got chosen specifically because our cooking never used it. If it changed, no one local would notice the difference.

My father hadn’t tripped over a cure. Somehow, he’d imposed a new medicine on the world.

Wow. Way to go, Dads.

And I believed it, pure as gospel. It felt like the truth… even if it didn’t make sense.

With thoughts jumbling as I entered my room, I nearly didn’t notice there was already someone lying on my bed.

"Hi," said Lynn. She picked up a bottle from the nightstand. "Fancy some wine?"

"The family drew lots," Lynn explained as she poured. "Who would keep poor Faye company in quarantine? I won."

"You always win when I’m not there to watch you."

"Not always. Only when I want to." Now that we’d gone all respectable, my other spouses seemed to forget Lynn was a dab hand at picking pockets back in Sallysweet River. Show-off stuff, not actual theft — she’d lift someone’s wallet, then give it back. "Oh, you dropped this." She learned to do it to impress me, at a time when I was only ready to laugh at rudeness. Lynn was still precious good at sleight of hand and could cut to the ace of spades in any deck… or draw the short straw whenever she felt like it.

"So how are you doing?" she asked.

"Uninfected, thanks. Which means you got lucky. How could you be so witless, sneaking into hospital when I might have the plague?"

"How do you know I sneaked in?"

I just gave her a look.

"Fine, I sneaked in." She handed me a glass, filled with what smelled like a nice ice wine. My favorite. "We figured you’d need company."

"You wanted to check up on me."

"Of course. We worry."

I held up my glass in a toast. She did too, then we both took a sip. Lovely stuff… which I know is not the proper way to describe wine, but I leave that "Impulsive, with overtones of blackberry" talk to Winston. He was the one who made the wine we were drinking; in the bad old days, Winston brewed a wicked bathtub gin.

"So how’s it going?" Lynn asked.

"The plague’s back, I’ve got a pocket universe following me around, and my father was not what he seemed. How was your day?"

"Vicki washed the cat in the toilet."

"You win." I took another sip of wine.

"How was it, going back to Sallysweet River?" Lynn asked after a while. "Appalling? Cathartic?"

"Easy in, easy out," I answered.

"Ahh, Faye, the story of your life." Lynn smiled. "You’ll have to do better than that when you see Angie. She’s rare keen on this birthwater-angst business. Why not practice your evasions on me?"

"Well, if you want evasions…" I spun around to get comfortable on the bed. Since Lynn’s lap was there, I laid my head on it. "The tourist stuff gave me dry heaves. I lived in fear people would recognize me, but they didn’t. And I avoided all the old places, except the ones that aren’t there anymore."

She stroked my hair. "Last time I visited, the stores were full of your father’s picture. What did you think of that?"

"I think you’re trying to drive me into a Freudian episode."

"You have so many episodes, dear one, how do you expect me to keep track?"