New Decameron Six: Robert Silverberg (Patreon)

The Trouble with Sempoanga

By Robert Silverberg

When Helmet Schweid decided to go to Sempoanga for his holiday, he knew the risks, but of course he assumed they didn’t apply to him. “You’ll pick up a dose of zanjak and never get out of quarantine,” his friends told him. Helmet laughed. He was a careful man, especially with his body. He would avoid getting zanjak by avoiding going to bed with women who had zanjak: that was simple enough to manage, wasn’t it?

By common agreement Sempoanga was the most beautiful planet in the galaxy. See one sunrise on Sempoanga, everyone said, and you won’t care if you never see anything else anywhere. The trouble with Sempoanga was the dismal parasite its humanoid natives harbored. There was only one way to transmit that parasite—by making love. Since the natives of Sempoanga are a good deal less attractive to humans than its sunrises, it is not easy to understand how any human could ever have caught it, but somehow someone had, and it had adapted nicely to human bodies, thriving and multiplying and making itself remarkably contagious, and in the past few years a good many human visitors to Sempoanga had passed it around to one another, with horrendous results. Biologists were working on a cure and hoped they might see results in just a few more years. But meanwhile no one went home from Sempoanga without undergoing tests and if you caught zanjak, you stayed quarantined there indefinitely, because the parasite’s effect on the human reproductive system was so startling that the future of the entire species might be in jeopardy if it were allowed to spread to the other civilized worlds.

For his first few days on Sempoanga Helmut was so busy experiencing the gorgeous planet itself that he was in no danger of catching any kind of venereal disease, neither the old standbys nor the exotic local specialty. His own world, Waldemar, was a frosty place with a planetwide winter for three-quarters of the year, and on Sempoanga he erupted with great gusto into eternal tropical summer. From dawn to midnight he toured the wonders—Hargillin Falls, where the water is the color of red wine, and Stinivong Chute, a flawless mountain of obsidian at the edge of a lake of phosphorescent pink gas, and The Bubbles, where subterranean psychedelic vapors percolate upward through a shield of porous yellow rock with delightful effect. He ran naked through a grove of voluptuous ferns that wrapped him in their fleshy fronds. He swam in crystalline rivers, eye to eye with vast harmless turtles the size of small islands. And each night he staggered back to his hotel, wonderfully weary, to collapse into his solitary sleep-tube for a few hours.

But after those early greedy gulps of natural marvels, his normal social instincts reasserted themselves. On the fourth day he saw a striking-looking radium-blonde from one of the Rigel worlds at the gravity-ball court. She met his tentative grin with a dazzling one of her own and quickly agreed to have dinner with him. Everything was going beautifully until she excused herself for a moment late in the meal, and the waiter who was bringing the brandies paused to whisper to Helmut, “Watch out for that one. Zanjak.”

He was stunned. Was she trying to hide it from him, then? No, give her more credit than that: as they strolled through the garden under the light of the five moons she said, “I’d like to spend the night with you. But only if you’re already carrying. I am, you know.” So that was that. He walked her to her room and kissed her sadly and warmly goodnight, and trembled for a moment as her soft elegant body moved close against his; but he managed to escape without doing anything foolish.

The next night, sitting alone in the hotel cocktail lounge and beginning to feel more than lonely, he noticed another woman noticing him. She was dark-haired and long-legged and perhaps two or three years younger than he was. They exchanged glances and then smiles and he tapped his empty glass and she nodded and they rose and went to the bar and ritualistically bought each other drinks. Her name was Marbella and she had been on holiday here since last month, escaping from a collapsed six-group on the planet of Tlon. “The divorce is going to take years,” she told him. “It’s a universal-option planet, the six of us come from four different worlds and everybody’s home-world laws apply, some of the lawyers aren’t even human—”

“And you plan to hide out on Sempoanga until it’s all over?”

“Can you imagine a better place?”

“Except for—”

“Well, yes, there’s that. But every paradise has its little snake, after all.” Quickly she shifted topics. “I saw you this morning at the puff-glider field. You looked like you wanted to try it.”

“How is it done?” he asked. Helmut had watched hotel guests clambering into huge fungoid puff-balls, which immediately broke free of their moorings and went drifting out across golden Lake Mangalole in what looked like guided flight.

“Would you like me to teach you? It’s a matter of controlling the puffer’s hydrogen-synthesis. Stroke it one way and it gets more buoyant, another and it sinks. And you learn how to ride the thermals and all. Where did you say you were from?”

“Waldemar.”

“Brr,” she said. “Are you free for dinner tonight?”

He liked her forthright, aggressive ways. They arranged to meet for dinner and to try the puff-gliders in the morning. What might happen in between was left undiscussed, but once again Helmut found himself confronting the problem of zanjak. She had been here more than long enough to pick up an infection, and, coming out of a turbulent marriage, it was hardly likely that she had been chaste in this sensuous place. On the other hand, if she did carry the parasite, she would certainly tell him about it ahead of time, as the other woman had. There was bound to be an etiquette about such things.

Over dinner they spoke of her complex marriage and his simpler, but ultimately just as disastrous, one, and briefly of his work and hers and of his planet and hers, and then of the splendors of Sempoanga. He liked her very much. And the gleam in her eyes told him he was making the right impression.

When he invited her to his room, though, she turned him down—warmly and graciously and with what seemed like genuine regret, explaining that this was the last night of her five-day contraceptive holiday; she was fertile as a mink just now and feared giving way to temptation. She seemed sincere. “There’ll be other nights, you know,” she said, and her smile left him with no doubts.

In the morning they met at the puff glider field and she taught him quickly and expertly how to control the great organisms. Within an hour they were off and soaring. They crossed the lake, landed on the slopes of jag-toothed Mount Monolang for a lunch of sun-grilled fish and wineberries and ran laughing toward a glistening stream for a dip. Later, when they lay sunning themselves on shelves of glassy rock, he studied her bare body as surreptitiously as possible for signs of zanjak—some swelling around the thighs, perhaps, or maybe little puckered red marks below the navel, anything at all that seemed irregular. Nothing visible, at any rate. The pamphlet on zanjak that the hotel had thoughtfully left beside his bed had told him there were no external symptoms, but he was uneasy all the same.

It would have been simple enough to drift into lovemaking on this secluded hillside, but his uncertainties held him back, nor did she try to take the initiative. Eventually they dressed and resumed their glider-journey. They halted again to visit a village of natives—flat-faced warty creatures with furry mothlike antennae, so ugly that Helmut wondered what sort of tourist could have been desperate enough to catch the original parasite from one of them—and then in late afternoon, strolling hand in hand in fields of mildly aphrodisiac blossoms, they slipped into one of those low-toned, earnest, intimate conversations that only people who are about to become lovers engage in. “What a lovely day this has been,” she told him when they were heading back to the hotel.

That night she asked him to her room. Two themes marched through his mind as they undressed. One was his admiration for her beauty, her warmth and intelligence, her desirability. And the other was zanjak, zanjak, zanjak.

What to do? By dimmed light he came to her. He imagined himself saying, “Forgive me, Marbella, but I need to know. That terrible parasite—that monstrous disease—” And he could see her turning bleak and furious as he blurted his tactless questions, demanding icily whether he thought she were the sort of woman who might deliberately hide from him anything so ghastly and shoving him into the hall, slamming the door, screaming curses after him—

He faltered. She smiled. Her eyes were bright with desire and refusing her was absurd. He drew her into his arms.

They were inseparable, night and day, the rest of the week. He had no illusions: this was only a resort-planet romance, and when his time was up he would go back to Waldemar and that would be the end of it. But it was wondrous while it lasted. She was a fine companion, and she appeared to be altogether in love with him, sincerely and a little worrisomely so. He was already rehearsing the speech he was going to have to make after breaking the news to her that business responsibilities would not permit him to extend his Sempoangan holiday beyond the five days that remained.

Then one drowsy morning as they were lying in bed he felt a dismaying internal twitch, as if some tiny supple creature were trying to swim downsteam in his urethra.

He said nothing to her. But after breakfast he invented the need to put a call through to his firm on Waldemar and, in terror, got himself off to the hotel medical office, where a blandly unsympathetic doctor processed him through the diagnostat and told him he had zanjak. “You see those little red flecks in your urine? Just a couple of microns in diameter. They’re symptomatic. And this blood sample—it’s loaded with zanjak excreta.”

Helmut shivered. “I can’t have had it more than a couple of days. Perhaps because we’ve detected it so soon—”

“Sorry. It doesn’t work that way.”

“What do I do now?” he asked tonelessly.

The doctor was already tapping data into a terminal. “We put you on the master list, first. That slaps a hold on your passport. You know about the quarantine, don’t you? If your home world is covered by the covenant, your government will pay the expenses of transferring your funds and a certain quantity of your possessions to Sempoanga. You can live in the hotel as long as you can afford to, of course. After that, you’re entitled to a rent-free room at the Quarantine Center, which is on the southern continent in a very pleasant region where the fishing is said to be superb. You’ll be asked to take part in the various test programs for cures, but otherwise you’ll be left alone.”

“I don’t believe this,” Helmut muttered.

“These harsh measures are absolutely necessary, of course. You must realize that. The parasite has passed through your genitourinary tract and has taken up residence in your bloodstream, where it’s busy filling you with threadlike reproductive bodies known as microfilariae. Whenever you have sexual relations with a woman—or with another man, for that matter, or with any mammalian organism at all—you’ll inevitably transmit microfilariae. If the organism you infect is female, the microfilariae will travel in a few weeks to the ovaries, infiltrate unfertilized eggs and impose their own genetic material by a process we call pseudofertilization, causing the eggs to mature into hybrids, part zanjak and part host-species. What appears to be a normal pregnancy follows, though the term is only about twelve weeks in human hosts; offspring are born in litters, adapted quite cunningly to penetrate whatever ecosphere they find themselves in.”

“All right. Don’t tell me any more.”

“No need to. You see the picture. These things could take over the universe if they ever got beyond Sempoanga.”

“Then Sempoanga should be closed to interplanetary travel!”

“Ah, but this is a major resort area! Besides, the quarantine is one hundred percent effective. If only new tourists were not so careless or unethical as they seem to be, we would isolate all cases in a matter of weeks and after that—”

“I thought I was being careful!”

“Not careful enough, it seems.”

“And you? Don’t you worry about getting it?”

The doctor gave Helmut a scathing look. “When I was a small child, I learned quickly not to put my fingers into electrical sockets. I conduct my sexual activities with the same philosophy. Good morning, Mr. Schweid. I’ll have your quarantine documents sent round to your room when they’re ready.”

Numbed, staggering, Helmut wandered in a lurching dazed way over the hotel’s vast grounds, looking for Marbella. He felt unclean and outcast; he could not bear to look at any of the other guests who amiably greeted him as he went by; he yearned to thrust his fouled body into a vat of corrosive acid. Infected! Quarantined! Exiled, maybe forever, from his home! No. No. It went beyond all comprehension. That he, that precise and intelligent and meticulous man, with his insurance policies and his alarm systems and his annual medical checkups, should—should have—

He found her watching a game of body-tennis, caught her by the wrist from behind and whispered savagely, “I’ve got zanjak!”

She looked at him, startled. “Of course you do, love.”

“You say it so casually? You let me believe you were clean!”

“Yes. Certainly. I knew you were already infected, even if you didn’t. Since you apparently didn’t know it yourself then, you’d never have gone to bed with me if I admitted I was carrying. And I wanted you so much, love. I’d have told any kind of harmless little lie then for the sake of—”

“Wait a minute. What do you mean, you knew I was already carrying?”

“That blonde bitch from Rigel, the night before you and I met—I saw the two of you together at dinner. I had my eye on you even then, you know. And I could tell that that unscrupulous little tramp would conceal from you that she was carrying. When I saw you go off to her room with her, I knew you’d be joining the club.”

Icily he said, “I didn’t sleep with her, Marbella.”

“What? But I was sure—”

“You were, were you?” He laughed bitterly. “I walked her home and she told me she was a carrier and I kissed her goodnight and went away. You can’t catch it from a kiss, can you? Can you?”

“No,” she said in a very small voice.

“So you knowingly and shamelessly gave me a hideous incurable disease because you had decided I had been dumb enough to sleep with someone who was carrying it. I guess you were right about that, in a way.”

She turned away, looking stricken. “Helmut, please—if you knew how sorry I am—”

“No sorrier than I am. Do you realize I’m quarantined here, and maybe for life?”

She shrugged. “Well, yes. So am I. There are worse places to spend one’s life.”

“I ought to kill you!”

She began to tremble. “I suppose I’d deserve it. Oh, Helmut—I was so completely fascinated by you—I didn’t want to take the slightest risk of losing you. I should have waited until the infection I thought you got from her had showed itself. Then it wouldn’t have mattered. But I couldn’t wait—I tried, I couldn’t—and I figured that we’d fall in love and by the time your zanjak showed it would be all right for me to admit that I had it, too.”

He was silent a long moment. Then he said, “Maybe you figured that even if I didn’t have it, you’d give it to me, by way of making absolutely sure I’d be stuck here on Sempoanga?”

“No. I swear it.” There was shock and horror in her eyes. “You have to believe me, Helmut!”

“I could really kill you now,” he said, and for an instant he thought he would. But instead he turned and fled, running in long loping, crazy strides, across the field of octopus palms and down a garden of electric orchids that flashed indignant lights at him and rang their bells, and through a swamp of warm sticky mud filled with little furry snakes, and up the side of Stinivong Chute, thinking he might throw himself over the edge. But halfway up he yielded to exhaustion and fell to the ground and lay there panting and gasping for what seemed like hours. When he returned to his room at dusk, there was a thick packet of documents beside his bed—his responsibilities and rights under the quarantine, how to transfer assets from his home world, pros and cons of applying for Sempoangan citizenship, and much more. He skimmed it quickly and tossed it aside before he was midway through. Thinking about such things was impossible now. He closed his eyes and pressed his face against his pillow, and suddenly scenes from Waldemar burned in his mind: the Great Glacier at Christmas, the ice-yacht races, the warm well-lit tunnels of his city, his snug dome-roofed home, his last night in it with Elissa, his trim little office with the rows of communicator panels—

He would never see any of that again, and it was all so stupid, so impossibly dumb, that he could not believe it.

He could not go to the dining room for dinner that evening. He ordered a meal from room service but left it untouched and nibbled a little of it the next morning after a night of loathsome dreams. That day he wandered at random, alone, getting used to what had happened to him. It was a magnificent day, the sky pink and soft, the flame-trees glowing, but it was all lost on him now. Even though this place might be paradise, he was condemned to dwell in it, and paradise on that basis was not very different from hell.

For two days he haunted the hotel grounds like his own ghost, speaking to no one. He didn’t see Marbella again until the third evening after the zanjak had emerged in him. To break free of his depression he had gone to the cocktail lounge, and she was there, alone, apparently brooding. She brightened when he appeared, but he glared coldly at her and went past, to the bar. A newcomer was sitting there by herself, an attractive fragile-looking woman with large dark eyes and frosted auburn hair. Deliberately, maliciously, Helmut made a point of picking her up in front of Marbella. Her name was Sinuise; she came from a planet called Donegal; like so many others here, she was trying to forget a bad marriage. When they left the cocktail lounge together, Helmut could feel Marbella’s eyes on him and it was like being skewered with hard radiation.

He and Sinuise dined and danced and drifted toward the evening’s inevitable conclusion. In the casino he spotted Marbella again, watching them somberly from a distance. “Come,” he said to the woman from Donegal. “Let’s go for a walk.” He slipped his arm over her shoulder. She was delicate and lovely and beyond doubt she was hungry for warmth and closeness, and he knew that he need only ask and she would go to his room with him. But as they strolled down the leafy paths he knew he could not do it. To carry his revenge on Marbella to the point of giving zanjak to an unsuspecting woman—no. No.

Under the rustling fronds of a limberwillow tree, he kissed her long and lovingly, and when he released her he said, “It’s been a beautiful evening, Sinuise.”

“Yes. For me also.”

“Perhaps we’ll go puff gliding tomorrow.”

“I’d like that. But—tonight—I thought—”

“I can’t. Not with you, I have zanjak , you know. And unless you’ve already got it also—”

Her face seemed to crumple. The great dark eyes swam with tears. He took her hand lightly, but a convulsive quiver of disappointment and anguish ran through her, and she pulled away and fled from him, sobbing.

“I’m sorry,” he called after her. “More than you can imagine!”

Marbella was still in the casino, still alone. She looked astonished that he had returned. He shot her a venomous look and headed for the gravity-dice table, and in fifteen minutes managed to lose half the money he was carrying. He thought of lovely little Sinuise alone in her bed. He thought of Helmut Schweid, infested by bizarre alien organisms. He thought of Marbella, her energy, her passionate little cries, her quick wit and sly humor. Perhaps she was telling the truth, he thought bleakly. Perhaps she genuinely thought I had picked up a dose from the blonde from Rigel.

Besides, what choice do I have now?

Slowly, wearily, he made his way across the huge room. Marbella was playing five-chip cargo in a reckless way. He watched her lose her stake. Then he lightly touched her arm.

“You win,” he said.

They stayed together at the hotel another eight days, and then, because his money was gone and he would not take any from her, they moved to the Quarantine Center. It was, he quickly discovered, just as beautiful as the hotel, with glorious natural features every bit as strange and wonderful. They shared a small cabin and spent their days swimming and fishing and their nights making love. Over the next ten weeks Marbella’s breasts grew heavy and her belly began to swell; but when her time came she would not go to the Quarantine Center hospital. Instead she bore her Sempoangan young behind the cabin, a litter of sleek little creatures like tiny green otters, ten or fifteen of them that came sliding out of her without effort. Helmut dug a pit and shoveled them all in, and after she had rested for an hour or so they went down to the beach to watch the translucent waves lapping against the azure sand. He thought of the snows of Waldemar, and of his home there, his lovers, his friends, and it all seemed terribly long ago and more than a million light-years far away.

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"So many plagues," he says, and sighs.

"But that one isn't real," Maya  says. "Icky, but not real. Hard to believe people were that silly. And it would have been even ickier from her point of view, ewww."

"Not real, but based on herpes, as he says in the introduction. And syphilis spread like that at the very beginning of the sixteenth century. Syphilis, AIDS -- and then ones that spread by contagion like this one, the Black Death, the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic, the plague of Justinian -- human history is full of them."

"It's scary."

"It's really scary. But humanity always pulls through. Almost all Europeans are genetically immune to the Black Death now. And we know so much more. We think those tourists on Sempoanga are idiots sticking their fingers into light sockets like the doctor says. We sequenced this virus in eight days, and soon we'll have a vaccine. We know how to wash our hands. And quarantine works, and here we are self-isolating in the magic library. It's not so bad." He grins, and Maya nods. The cat has come back and is curled up asleep on one of the empty chairs.

"What shall we read now?" she asks. "Do we have another one about plague?"

"How about this?" he suggests, picking one up from the table. "Ship of State by Maya Chhabra."

'Maya?" she asks, surprised.

"Lots of people are called Maya, because it's such a great name." He grins at her. 

"What's your name?" she asks, suddenly realising she doesn't know.

"I have a different name for every story," he says. "You can give me a name if you want."

"But what's your real name?"

"I don't know," he admits. "Look, let's read this story. And I hope there's something good to eat in it! I didn't bother with the restaurant food on Sempoanga."