Suddenly there was a knock on the outer air-lock door.

At the time that all these troop movements were under way, at the same time that great armadas of matte-black starships were tearing holes in the time and space continuum of the cosmos, at the precise moment when the Church’s Grand Inquisitor was sent packing to Shrike-ridden Mars and the CEO of the Pax Mercantilus was traveling alone to a secret rendezvous in deep space with a nonhuman interlocutor, I was lying helpless in bed with a tremendous pain in my back and belly.

Pain is an interesting and off-putting thing.

Few if any things in life concentrate our attention so completely and terribly, and few things are more boring to listen to or read about.

This pain was all-absorbing. I was amazed by the relentless, mind-controlling quality of it. During the hours of agony that I had already endured and was yet to endure, I attempted to concentrate on my surroundings, to think of other things, to interact with the people around me, even to do simple multiplication tables in my head, but the pain flowed into all the compartments of my consciousness like molten steel into the fissures on a cracked crucible.

These things I was dimly aware of at the time: that I had been on a world my comlog had identified as Vitus-Gray-Balianus B and in the process of dipping water from a well when the pain had felled me; that a woman swathed in a blue robe, her toenails visibly blue in her open sandals as I lay writhing in the dust, had called others in blue robes and gowns and these people had carried me to the adobe house where I continued battling the pain in a soft bed; that there were several other people in the house—another woman in a blue gown and head scarf, a younger man who wore a blue robe and turban, at least two children, also dressed in blue; and that these generous people not only put up with my moaned apologies and less articulate moans as I curled and uncurled in pain, but constantly spoke to me, patted me, placed wet compresses on my forehead, removed my boots and socks and vest, and generally continued whispering reassurances in their soft dialect as I tried to fight to keep my dignity against the onslaught of agony in my back and abdomen. It was several hours after they brought me to their home—the blue sky had faded to rose evening outside the window—when the woman who had found me near the well said, “Citizen, we have asked the local missionary priest for help and he has gone for the doctor at the Pax base at Bombasino. For some reason, the Pax skimmers and other aircraft are all busy now, so the priest and the doctor… if the doctor comes… must travel fifty pulls down the river, but with luck they should be here before sunrise.”

I did not know how long a pull was or how much time it would take to travel fifty, or even how long the night was on this world, but the thought that there might be an end point to my agony was enough to bring tears to my eyes. Nonetheless, I whispered, “Please, ma’am, no Pax doctor.”

The woman set cool fingers against my brow.

“We must. There is no longer a medic here in Lock Lamonde. We are afraid you might die without medical help.” I moaned and rolled away. The pain roiled through me like a hot wire being pulled through too-narrow capillaries. I realized that a Pax doctor would know immediately that I was from offworld, would report me to the Pax police or military—if the “missionary priest” had not already done so—and that I was all but certain to be interrogated and detained. My mission for Aenea was ending early and in failure. When the old poet, Martin Silenus, had sent me on this odyssey four and a half standard years earlier, he had drunk a champagne toast to me—“To heroes.” If only he had known how far from reality that toast had been. Perhaps he had.

The night passed with glacial slowness. Several times the two women looked in on me and at other times the children, in blue gowns that may have been sleeping apparel, peered in from the darkened hallway. They wore no headdress then and I saw that the girl had blond hair worn much the way Aenea had when we first met, when she was almost twelve and I twenty-eight standard. The little boy—younger than the girl I assumed to be his sister—looked especially pale; his head was shaved quite bald. Each time he looked in, his fingers fluttered at me in a shy wave. Between rolls of pain, I would feebly wave back, but each time I opened my eyes to look again, the child would be gone.

Sunrise came and went without a doctor. Hopelessness surged in me like an outgoing tide. I could not resist this terrible pain another hour.

I knew instinctively that if the kind people in this household had any painkiller, they would have long since given it to me. I had spent the night trying to think of anything I had brought with me in the kayak, but the only medicine in my stowed kit was disinfectant and some aspirin. I knew that the latter would do nothing against this tidal wave of pain. I decided that I could hold out another ten minutes. They had removed my comlog bracelet and set it within sight on an adobe ledge near the bed, but I had not thought to measure the hours of the night with it. Now I struggled to reach it, the pain twisting in me like a hot wire, and slipped the bracelet back on my wrist. I whispered to the ship’s AI in it: “Is the biomonitor function still activated?”

“Yes,” said the bracelet.

“Am I dying?”

“Life signs are not critical,” said the ship in its usual flat tones. “But you appear to be in shock. Blood pressure is…” It continued to rattle off technical information until I told it to shut up.

“Have you figured out what’s doing this to me?” I gasped. Waves of nausea followed the pain.

I had long since vomited anything in my stomach, but the retching doubled me over.

“It is not inconsistent with an appendicitis attack,” said the comlog.

“Appendicitis…” Those useless artifacts had long since been gene-tailored out of humanity. “Do I have an appendix?” I whispered to the bracelet. With the sunrise had come the rustle of robes in the quiet house and several visits from the women.

“Negative,” said the comlog. “It would be very unlikely, unless you are a genetic sport. The odds against that would be…”

“Silence,” I hissed. The two women in blue robes bustled in with another woman, taller, thinner, obviously offworld-born. She wore a dark jumpsuit with the cross-and-caduceus patch of the Pax Fleet Medical Corps on her left shoulder.

“I’m Dr. Molina,” said the woman, unpacking a small black valise. “All the base skimmers are on war-game maneuvers and I had to come by fitzboat with the young man who fetched me.” She set one sticky diagnostic patch on my bare chest and another on my belly. “And don’t flatter yourself that I came all this way for you… one of the base skimmers crashed near Keroa Tambat, eighty klicks south of here, and I have to tend to the injured Pax crew while they wait for medevac. Nothing serious, just bruises and a broken leg. They didn’t want to pull a skimmer out of the games just for that.” She removed a palm-sized device from the valise and checked to see that it was receiving from the patches. “And if you’re one of those Mercantilus spacers who jumped ship at the port a few weeks ago,” she continued, “don’t get any ideas about robbing me for drugs or money. I’m traveling with two security guards and they’re right outside.”

She slipped earphones on. “Now what’s wrong with you, young man?”

I shook my head, gritting my teeth against the surge of pain that was ripping through my back at that second. When I could, I said, “I don’t know, Doctor… my back… and nausea…”

She ignored me while checking the palm device. Suddenly she leaned over and probed my abdomen on the left side. “Does that hurt?”

I almost screamed. “Yes,” I said when I could speak.