“Rigel? I have never heard of this place,” Boralesh said, dewy-eyed with innocence (or was it cold-eyed with ulterior motive?), the night they met beneath the stars and she began to lay her snares for him with scents gathered from the levoraflowers. “Where is it?”

“Far away, but not far enough” was all he would tell her. “My family is important there. Too important. I needed to strike out on my own, to prove myself.”

Boralesh knew about family, or thought she did. She had accepted his story at the time, even though a dozen years and three more children later, he had in fact proven himself to be little more than a teller of tall tales and a fair rider of the local sedraz,saddled or bareback, winning prizes that cluttered the sideboard in the best parlor and gave the children something to brag about at school.

Oh, and in recent years there was his “laboratory,” which was the name he had given to the cave in the foothills where she had spied on him and watched his strange rituals. He would go there early in the morning and return after dark, but never say anything about what he did there. Boralesh half-wondered if it was a woman, and not work at all, which drew him away every day. Still, unless it was a woman from the next town distant, Boralesh would have known who she was. The laboratory, or whatever it truly was, maybe only a private cave to retreat to when the children’s voices were too much for him, got him out of her way during the day, and for that reason alone, it was worth it. Even if there was also a woman involved, she told herself, only half-believing it, even as she only half-believed in this place called Rigel.

On the odd chance anyone else from outside ever came to this backward world, Cinchona would count on Boralesh’s skepticism to conceal him. Renagans had heard tales of space travel, but weren’t sure if they believed them. There was no reason to explore, they reasoned. There was food enough for those who obeyed the laws, healers for when they were sick, wise ones to teach them that the stars were the home of the gods and deciders of man’s fate. If the occasional visitor happened along to tell them that beings like themselves also came from some of those stars, he was greeted with knowing smirks and “Oh, tell us another, stranger!”

So this particular stranger, running ahead of his own disgrace, had come to ground here when the power cells on his one-man ship had failed, hidden the ship in the hills, and walked into the nearest village purporting to be a healer from a far province. He had chosen the name Cinchona, and the healers’ guild, after asking a few questions to which he apparently gave satisfactory answers, had welcomed him, particularly since one of their own had a daughter who needed a husband.

For all Boralesh knew, Rigel was a faraway city on her own world, not a distant planet that was part of something called a Federation. Even if she had believed it, it wouldn’t have mattered as much as the fact that she was nearing the age where no man would want her. Cinchona had looked good in her eyes at the time, wherever this “Rigel” might be.

In fact, the Rigel system consisted of several habitable planets, though it was Rigel IV which had two claims to fame. One was the fact that its round-eared inhabitants appeared human, but the configuration of their internal organs, their heart rates, blood types, immunohistochemistry, were similar to those of Vulcans. In fact, only an expert could distinguish a Rigelian’s medscan from Vulcan or Romulan.

The second thing Rigel IV was noted for was the fever.

Rigelian infants were inoculated against it at birth, and in developing the vaccine for this elusive disease the physicians of Rigel V, who had long ago emigrated from Rigel IV for political reasons, had become some of the most renowned in the quadrant. But their former neighbors on Rigel IV were a different matter. Little more than pirates prior to Federation, they were ruled by a consortium of powerful families with a reputation for luring visitors to their world or the resorts on nearby Rigel II, slipping them the live virus, then offering a cure, for a price.

Cinchona knew this very well. His family had made their fortune this way until Federation membership put a stop to it, but by then the family wealth had been diversified into other things. And, yes, his family was wealthy. The “moneyless” economy of the Federation might be the norm everywhere within its borders, but on Rigel IV they still used currency. Succeeding generations of the old pirate families were expected to go legitimate, to send their offspring to the universities on Rigel V and elsewhere and stop dealing in bootleg medicines.

“Set the groundwork for you,” his father had said on the day Cinchona left for medical school. “Did everything I could short of going to class for you. Can’t do that. Too old. They won’t let me. Get out there and achieve something.”

Well, he’d tried, and failed. He was in fact the dullest of his father’s children, and only generous gifts to his teachers had seen him through school. But he was the eldest, and carried the family name, and this brought with it certain obligations, and those certain obligations had pushed him in directions that almost brought his career down around him before it began.

Chapter 11

“A squinty-eyed nonentity named Thamnos,” McCoy announced, presenting the Three Graces, as he’d taken to calling the trio of Uhura, Crusher, and Selar, with the last-known image of their prime suspect, a pink-faced humanoid with a lipless mouth and a permanently furrowed brow that seemed to plead Take me seriously!“First name Crofter, though he never uses it. Thinks just being a Thamnos is glory enough. A mediocre clinician whose prior history includes a series of lackluster assistanceships in one lab or another. I overlooked him as a suspect initially because I was looking for some evil genius. Thamnos may be evil, but he’s no genius.”

“Thamnos?” Selar recognized the name. “Of the Rigelian family?”

“The same,” McCoy said. “They all but run Rigel IV. Some of ’em are clever, but this one’s about as smart as a box of rocks. Rumor has it his father endowed a new lab at the best med school on Rigel V just so they’d pass him through, and he was still in the bottom tenth of his class. Then in the tradition of the old Orion pirate families, Daddy paid for a new library, and suddenly Thamnos the Younger is styling himself a researcher. Published a few not-very-original papers on Rigelian fever, then dropped off the radar some years ago after he tried to publish a paper on Bendii Syndrome using someone else’s data….”

If he listened hard enough, Thamnos could still hear them jeering at him. Anyone who thought medical conferences were genteel gatherings of the thought leaders in research and new techniques, convening to exchange ideas and learn new things, had obviously never been to one. Cutthroats, ready to pounce on every datum and analyze it to the subquark level, then call it into question, they had done everything but throw rotten fruit at him.

He had paid someone to lift the data for his Bendii research from other sources, assuming those sources were sufficiently obscure so that no one would notice. Having slept through his neurology courses and cribbed the exams, he hadn’t understood enough of the material to doctor it sufficiently to avoid charges of plagiarism, and he had been caught.