Chapter 30
Double-Mouth was seething with barely concealed jealousy.
(Like Tom Cruise is seething with barely concealed Scientology?)
Neither of her two personalities could stand the mounting popularity of Darc and Shara. Double-Mouth had been the prettiest woman of the Eksako tribe for several years - a position now threatened by the newcomer.
("Mirror, mirror on the wall, who has the prettiest boils of them all?")
The face on Double-Mouth's back egged her on: We must destroy them now, now, before the white-haired one can threaten me. Give them the Plague!
([Gremlin voice] "And give me Halliburton shares!")
Double-Mouth had already tried that - with no visible result. She had now summoned the hatred to go even further and risk the personal wrath of Claw.
(Darc Trek II: The Wrath of Claw.)
She spread incessant, malicious gossip among the other villagers, claiming that Shara was drawing the attention of their men.
This was partly true, so the message took hold.
("She lures away your husbands with her wicked one mouth!")
Darc's and Shara's safety was hanging by a thread, and any minor provocation might result in disaster...
("Tonight's top headline: Leper village mistakenly bombed.")
("Ooo, look how big and rusty that syringe is! I bet it's gonna hurt like hell...")
It was early afternoon in the deserts of Amrica - late night in Castilia, where Dohan had already taken off on a long flight across the Atlantic.
(After he left all his bottles and tools at the airport.)
Darc carefully took a fine instrument from his belongings and picked a miniscule slice of skin from Claw's distorted left hand.
("Whoops! Uh, can somebody pick up that finger for me?")
Claw was rigid, but controlled. With another instrument, Darc sampled a few drops of blood from Claw's arm.
("There's a brave mutant... here, let me kiss the boo-boo and make it go away...")
That done, he climbed into the elevator, and retreated back up to the cliff shelf to study the samples. Shara trailed closely behind him, and the grotesque-faced Up-Mouth guarded them both all the way.
([Growling voice] "I'm behind you all the way!")
Up-Mouth was well aware of the threatening glances the villagers were giving the newcomers - and he had invested some personal trust in Darc's powers to heal him.
One day, Up-Mouth thought, he would speak without pain - or his children would.
("There will be a sensible Immigration Bill! I have complete faith in Congress!")
("And peel me another grape, will ya?")
Though he had placed his stool and table outdoors, sunlight receded early in the narrow canyon.
("How does sunlight 'recede'?" - "It runs away from the Earth really really fast.")
The hours passed all too quickly, and Darc's eyes grew tired from peeking into his tiny microscopes and analyzing tools. At a respectful distance, Up-Mouth stood watching them as he had been doing all day.
(Say, what's that puddle around his feet?)
Darc's equipment, given to him by Mechao, was partly archaic, partly advanced beyond his wildest dreams.
("Why, this pocket-sized cyclotron even has a cup-holder!")
This applied especially to the miniaturized, 100-year-old hand-crafted microscope he was using.
(That went PING!)
Darc could discern crystallized strands of DNA molecules as sharply as if they were a man in the street, projected onto the microscope's tiny peephole.
(You mean, a man in the street is shaped exactly like a bunch of DNA?)
But the light with which to illuminate the microscope controls had to come from a smoking grease lamp, and the table was not quite steady at all times.
(There's no pleasing some people...)
Shara edged closer, careful not to bump into the hunching scientist.
"Now it's starting to work," he said to himself.
(That's what she said!)
"What is?" Shara asked.
(Actually, that's what she really said.)
Darc showed her a sheet of thick paper, no larger than his two hands, lined with handwritten columns.
("My income-tax form from 1999... they're still nagging me to send it in!")
Each column contained a dot of pre-prepared chemicals, which took on certain colors when they reacted with certain parts of the human genome. He had diluted and mashed the cell samples from Claw, and soaked the prepared paper in it.
("You're soaking in it.")
The paper was, in effect, a miniature laboratory. From the resulting colors, Darc could decipher if any key genes were missing or improperly structured.
(Another paper served as his miniature bathroom.)
He slowly compared the test paper with the color chart provided by Mechao, frowning and blinking in the waning sunlight. Finally, he looked up and stretched his aching limbs.
(*SNAP* *CRACKLE* *POP*)
"Damn!" he said, brushing bushy white hair back from his forehead.
("Where can you get a decent haircut in this place?")
"This test can't find anything odd about Claw's genes. If I'm reading this sample correctly, there should be nothing wrong with him - or with any of the Lepers."
("Apart from their boils, lumps and horrible deformities, that is.")
Shara was dumbfounded. "What does that mean? They are Lepers, aren't they?"
("Is that a rhetorical question?")
"Yes... but why? All this time, I've been asking myself: is it inherited or an infection?
(Scientists believe that Paris Hilton's IQ was inherited.)
The smaller deformities might be caused by some kind of virus or bacteria - as long as they start early, in the womb. But there are Lepers whose skeletons are so twisted, that it must be something wrong from the very beginning - when the fetus started to form."
(Stop this vicious badmouthing of Simon Cowell!)
"Why not both?" Shara said without thinking; this was pure magic to her.
Darc sighed, and replied: "Because there is one piece of evidence that indicates a non-genetic disease: every new Leper child has a completely unique deformity. The children have their parents' eye and hair color, and skin... but their bodies are all twisted up in different ways."
Shara understood less and less, and this worried her; her insides felt upset, and she wondered if it was the Plague or just her nerves.
"What is this 'D-N-A', Darc? Can you read it... like a book?"
(DNA: It's Mother Nature's own Da Vinci Code!)
Darc scratched himself, turned, and held Shara in his arms - not tenderly, but like a man clutching a tree as a storm approaches.
(Tying his waist to the trunk, carving his name into the bark for rescue workers to identify his body...)
He explained to her, like he once used to lecture his two children: "All living things are made up of cells - very small bodies. Each cell contains two sets of instructions in the form of DNA: one for how to keep the single cell alive, and another set that tells the cell how to relate to the other cells in the body.
("And when a Y chromosone loves an X chromosome very much...")
"When the fetus takes its proper shape in the womb, the mother's body sends commands which activate the second set of instructions. And so, as the fetus cells multiply into more cells, they also assume separate roles; some cells decide to become the head, other cells begin to form a heart, and so on.
("Some cells become deadbeat dads, other cells move into a trailer...")
"In my student days, we experimented with changing these genes on flies and tiny fishes. Witchdoctors, you'd call us. If the right control gene was damaged at an early stage, the shape of the fly or the fish would get all mixed up: the head would be placed on the tail, or you'd get a fly with tails at both ends, and so on..."
("We crossed a fly with an elephant. Man, you should've seen that thing crash through windows!")
Shara said, again spontaneously: "But I haven't seen Lepers with the heads on their behinds... or with two behinds and no head... I would have noticed that!"
Darc nodded, rocking Shara in his arms: "I know, I know." He paused. "Then again, when we created those kinds of deformed fishes or flies, they were dead before they hatched..."
He suddenly grinned; the light of inspiration changed his sunburned face.
(Sunscreen Factor X - protecting your skin against the light of inspiration!)
"Yes... that's it! We don't see Lepers with two behinds and no head - because those were naturally aborted from the womb long before they were born, or stillborn! The Plague might be hereditary after all!"
"Does that explain how Claw got those lumps on his skull?"
("And why politicians get re-elected?")
"It explains his hand; the bones in his skeleton are simply grown wrong. Claw must have been that way since he was born. But his lumps... I don't know. They are different..." Darc turned glum for a few moments. They stood holding each other, as the air grew colder. "What was that you said earlier?" he asked absent-mindedly.
"What?"
("I said, WHAT WAS THAT YOU...")
"You asked: 'Why not both?'"
(Because a menage รก trois wouldn't work.)
Shara frowned for a moment; then her memory caught up.
"I meant... why not both an infection and an inherited disease? Why just one or the other? Do you mean that one can't have both?"
("Choose the money... or the Mystery Box!")
Darc shook his head; he could have kicked himself for not seeing it before.
"Of course! I love you, Shara!"
He kissed her hard on the mouth, then pushed her away and sat down, leafing through his notebook.
("Now where did I put those notes about Eskimo kissing customs...?")
Darc talked exaltedly to himself, thinking out loud:
("Bla bla sex, bla bla golf, bla bla sex...")
"One set of deformities inherited to the control genes... plus another set of deformities that spread by touch. And everyone believes the legend that if you touch a Leper, your children also become deformed! And since all Lepers were forced together from the beginning, nobody saw any difference! That's why the Plague was never cured or went away by itself! There were two Plagues - or dozens of them, what do I know!"
(Indeed.)
Shara slowly began to realize the meaning of Darc's ranting.
("Get away from me you maniac, waaah!")
"Do you mean," she asked anxiously, "that we could still become deformed by... touching them?"
"Yes," he said quickly, then froze. "There might still be time. First of all, I must find the virus or germ, or whatever, that spreads by touch."
(Washing your hands might be a good idea, too...)
Shara bit her lip; the fear returned in her.
"If... if we are tainted by touch, how soon will it show?"
(Oh, I'd say about two chapters ahead.)
Darc looked up from his instruments again, and was saddened by the beautiful sight of Shara, standing in the last gleaming of twilight, looking at him with her large dark eyes. He would never forgive himself if this wonderful woman were ruined.
(Then don't hang around her for another ten years, buddy!)
Briefly, he wondered if he was in love with her - then he shook off the thought, because it might complicate his work.
([Trailer voice] "Thief. Gladiator. Jerk.")
Darc moved his instruments indoors, and received more lamps from Up-Mouth to see with. Finding an unknown germ was not easy, when you did not know what to look for.
(He searched all night for a wall socket compatible with those European lamps.)
With trembling hands, Darc took a few samples from himself and compared them with those from Claw. This work took a few hours, and he once paused to relax his eyes.
(Yes, folks, you only need to blink once an hour!)
He swallowed some aspirin from the medical supplies in the pockets of his cloak, and continued the search.
(He accidentally choked on pocket lint, and died. The End.)
DARC AGES (c)A.R.Yngve 1995, 2000, 2004. All rights reserved. May not be copied without permission.
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A.R.Yngve
The MSTing Of
DARC AGES
Book 2 1/2: The Smell Of Fear
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(When baseball players take too many steroids their chromosomes grow THIS big...)
On the fifth day since his arrival, Darc started taking tissue and blood samples from the tribe. Claw volunteered first, though Double-Mouth tried to discourage him.
"Could you hold that lamp closer, Shara?" Darc asked.
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