Oh-God had put up four dish’n’fan towers for collecting solar power and wind… maybe enough for his needs if he lived pinch-frugally, but I wouldn’t bet on it. For one thing, his tarted-up skimmer must take a lot of juice to recharge. Probably more than the dish’n’fans collected. And I’d never met a Freep who truly had a feel for living off the land — not in comparison to Ooloms, who could survive on leaves but never ate too much from any one tree for fear of making the forest look patchy.

I set the E. C. HAULING skimmer down in the only open area of the compound, right between the two domes. Thank God I didn’t hit anything — both domes were set to the same brush brown color as the ground, making it chancy in the fading light to distinguish them from clear, parkable dirt. It was quite the high fashion to build in-country homes that looked woodsy, at one with the soil. I doubted Oh-God cared about rusticana, but he’d still have to meet the expectations of his clients… big-city bumpkins looking for a genuine, authentic, nature-conscious hunting guide.

We got out of the skimmer, Tic, Festina and me. The twilight was quiet — no sign of Oh-God, though he must have heard us land. The E. C. HAULING van was definitely not a stealth vehicle.

"Odd," Festina murmured. "Where is he?" She looked around and gave the air a sniff. After yesterday’s flirtation with snow, Great St. Caspian had gone back to spring-thaw moist; there might be a touch of fog soon, now that the sun was going down.

"Maybe he’s hiding," I said in a low voice. "He wouldn’t recognize our vehicle, so he might have decided to play safe."

"Maybe." She didn’t sound convinced.

Tic rolled open both his ear-sheaths and stood still, listening. Festina and I held our breaths. After ten seconds, he shook his head. "Nothing. Except that you both have healthy-sounding hearts."

Festina stepped away from the skimmer so it wasn’t blocking her view of the yard. I did the same, angling off in a different direction. No sign of Oh-God; just the domes, the dirt, the trees.

"In exploring an alien planet," Festina said softly, "it’s a bad moment when you realize someone isn’t where he should be. Do you search around quietly, even though that might be wasting crucial time? Or do you shout and draw attention to yourself?"

"What do your Explorer textbooks say?" I asked.

"Same as always: damned if you do and damned if you don’t." She looked around once more. "Let’s try the quiet approach for a while. And watch each other’s backs."

Festina led us to the nearer of the two domes. "This is the garage," she whispered to us. "I’ve been here once before. Oh-God set the dome fields to recognize me as a friend." She placed her palm against the dome’s smooth brown surface, and murmured, "House-soul, attend. My name is Festina Ramos: garage access, please."

The dome field dimpled inward, opened a keyhole perforation, then dilated the hole to a gap wide enough for a person to step through. No light inside… just the spill of dusk through the doorway. "Maybe I should send you in first, Faye," Festina whispered. "If there’s danger, your Peacock will run to the rescue."

I took a step forward, but she stopped me. "That was a joke. Navy policy says Explorers always take the lead." Bumbler in one hand, stunner in the other, she slipped through the opening into the blackness. Glancing back over her shoulder, she murmured, "One of you keep watch at the door."

Tic got the jump on me, not to mention a sharp dig of his elbow as he bounced to the door first. "Vigil policy says novice proctors always take the watch," he told me. Then he and Festina disappeared into the dark.

For three minutes I strained my ears and eyes, reaching out to sense anything I should worry about. Nothing. I worried anyway. When I heard footsteps scuffing toward me from the blackness of the garage, my sight was well enough adjusted to make out the silhouettes of Festina and Tic.

"Anything?"

"No." They waited for me to move out of the doorway, then followed me into the yard. The garage’s dome field sealed itself shut behind us, as if an entrance had never existed.

"The house next," Festina said. Not that the other dome was big enough to deserve the name "house": it was only hut-sized, like my room back in Sallysweet River. The dome field dimpled open for Festina as easily as the garage…

…and there was Oh-God, lying flat on a cot. A cot with white sheets and white blankets, and his eyes were slack open, and his ear-sheaths, and the smell was the same as the Circus, the shit and the piss and the plague.

"Hey, Admiral," Oh-God said to Festina in a slurred voice. "I guess this is what ‘expendable’ means."

Shock. Struck motionless dumb. Yes, I’d been expecting the plague, fearing it, feeling its iciness back in the world… but looking at Oh-God this way still hit me like a punch in the gut. How long had it been since the last time I’d seen him? Three nights. And in that short time he’d gone from fumbly hands to this: slack arms, slack legs, slack face. Too fast, I thought. The plague shouldn’t work that fast.

My eye automatically began tracking down his body, doing the standard visual inspection of symptoms taught to me by Dads; grading the patient, how close to death? I didn’t get halfway through the quick once-over before I came up with an answer: damned close indeed. Time to get moving.

On the far side of the room stood a standard food-synthesizing system. "Tic," I said, "check the synthesizer. Make sure it’s linked to the world-soul’s recipe base. If it isn’t, hot-wire a connection. We need to be using the official Demoth formula for olive oil."

"Tried olive oil," Oh-God mumbled. "Doesn’t work."

"Not if your synthesizer uses Freep settings," I told him. "You need to download the Demoth database. Come on, Tic, move."

"My, my, Smallwood," he said, "who’s been imbibing alpha-female hormone?" But he glided across the room, and began to speak to the synthesizer in a low voice. If anyone could talk a witless little food processor into changing its formulas, Tic was our man.

Festina dropped to her knees beside Oh-God. "Don’t touch," the Freep said blurrily. "You might catch something."

"Humans are immune," she replied, laying her hand on his forehead. "Ouch," she murmured a moment later. "Got yourself a fever."

"A fever?" I said. "Pteromic Paralysis doesn’t cause fever."

"Tell that to my sweat glands," Oh-God grumbled.

"Considering how cold-blooded all Divian races are," Festina said, "he’s burning up."

I wanted to touch him, see for myself… but the Peacock would likely stop me. Better to take Festina’s word for it. "Did you catch this from Iranu?" I asked.

"Yeah, the pus-head. Why didn’t he tell me he was sick?"

"He probably didn’t know."

"He kept complaining his foot had fallen asleep. Wanted me to massage it for him." Oh-God drew a raggedy breath. "Pus-head."

Pus-heads indeed: both Iranu and Oh-God. For anyone on Demoth, mental alarm bells should clang like demons when someone’s foot "falls asleep" and won’t wake up. But they were both Freeps, and not alert to the possibility of plague. "When was this?" I asked. "When did you see Iranu?"

"A few months back," Oh-God answered. His speech had slurred up more, just in the time we’d been here. I’d never seen the paralysis move so unholy fast. "He hired me to give him a ride — on the hush — from Mummichog up to Sallysweet River."

Mummichog: flicking the link-seed told me Mummichog was a village on the equatorial coast of Argentia. A dormitory town for maintenance crews who worked the inland oil and gas pipelines. "What was Iranu doing in Mummichog?" I asked.

"Archaeology crap. That’s all he ever cared about. I’d driven him around before — he came to Demoth once or twice a year — and it was always ‘important archaeological sites.’ He said his old man used to play archaeologist on this planet too. Back before the plague."