“Spar! Come on in,” I said. We had all thought my cousin Spartacus was immune to the changing, since he hadn’t caught it when other children did on several occasions when it was going around the village. But it was obvious now that she wasn’t.

Quarantine Cove

by Trismegistus Shandy

Part 1 of 3

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You have probably heard rumors about Quarantine Cove, about the curse we lie under, and about our strange customs; and perhaps you have heard speculation that we are danger to human civilization and must be destroyed. I do not deny that there is any danger, but I write to say that we in the valley you call Quarantine Cove are aware of it and the more responsible of us are doing our best to abate it — to keep ourselves thoroughly quarantined so that the curse will not spread beyond this valley. I write to plead for more time. A few more years, I think, and we may be able to solve our problems to our neighbors' satisfaction as well as our own.

Since it seems that many false rumors have spread about the nature of our curse and how it began, I think it right to begin by recounting this history. I was born in Fleecedale, later called Quarantine Cove, in the two hundred and tenth year of our freedom. Having a great love for the handful of books to be found in our village, and having no desire to be a herdsman all my life, I left Fleecedale at sixteen years of age and found work in Highmarket with Nabuco the scribe; a year later I married his daughter Moses. The troubles began in the two hundred and thirtieth year of our freedom, in the early summer — I no longer remember the exact date, unfortunately.

We were working in the scriptorium, my father-in-law reading aloud from the Epitome of Huckleberry Finn, and myself, my wife and my brother-in-law all making our copies of it, when there was a knock at the door. I was closer to the door than my brother-in-law, and though my wife was sitting closer still, she was also pregnant; so I got up to go answer the knock.

There was a young woman there, hardly more than a girl; she looked vaguely familiar, and I wondered for a moment if she might be someone I knew from Fleecedale who had grown up a lot since I had seen her last. She was dirty and looked tired; she wore a backpack, a quiver (with only two arrows in it), and a small bow.

“May I help you?” I asked.

“Toussaint, it’s me, Spartacus,” she said.

“Spar! Come on in,” I said. We had all thought my cousin Spartacus was immune to the changing, since he hadn’t caught it when other children did on several occasions when it was going around the village. But it was obvious now that she wasn’t. “Where are your parents?” I asked, looking up and down the street, which wasn’t very busy at that time of day. “How did you get here?”

“I walked,” she said; “I’m running away. Can I stay with you and Moses for a while? And can I have something to eat?”

“Running away?” I asked, leading her into the kitchen. “Why?”

“Pa will hardly speak to me now, and Ma is trying to arrange a marriage for me already. I’m not ready for that.”

“Because of the change? How long ago did it happen?”

“About six weeks. It really messed up Pa’s plans for me, not to mention my plans for me. And Ma was really pushing me to adjust to it all at once. It was easy for her, she changed so young she doesn’t remember being a boy...”

“Most people do,” I said. “I’m really sorry. This has to be really hard for you.”

“You have no idea.”

Actually, I did have more idea than most people; I was almost five when I caught the changing. Still, that’s very different from changing at fifteen.

“Listen, Spar,” I said, getting out some bread and cheese for her, “you’re welcome to stay with us for a while, but I think you should go back home sometime, or at least let your parents know you’re here with us. They’ll be worried about you.”

“Please, don’t make me go back! I’ll just run away somewhere else.”

“I won’t, but I’ll try to talk you into it.”

“That’s fair, if you don’t harp on it all the time. Once a day, maybe? I won’t be useless, I can help out in the scriptorium.”

“Then come on in as soon as you finish eating. I’m going to get back to work.”

When I got back to the scriptorium, there was a pause in the work as I explained about our new guest; but not a long one. Then I picked up a new sheet and started copying again once Nabuco got to the beginning of another section. I would finish copying the last section later. Half an hour later Spar came in and sat down by me; I pointed out where the fresh quills were, and she started trimming one, not very expertly. She started copying from Nabuco’s dictation soon after she had the quill shaped and inked, but when I looked over and saw her approaching the end of a page, I asked her to wait. I would find some cheaper paper later for her to practice on; her penmanship wasn’t up to producing books yet.

When Nabuco got to the end of that epitome, he said we would take a break before starting on the epitomes of Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective, which were much shorter — we weren’t sure if it was because the original books had been shorter or because the Founder who wrote the epitomes hadn’t re-read the books as many times and didn’t remember as many details. So Moses and Harriet (her brother, my brother-in-law) took the opportunity to greet Spar and ask her questions. Moses had met Spar when he was a boy, when she came to Fleecedale with me shortly before our marriage to meet my family, but Harriet hadn’t; he had never been to Fleecedale.

“So you just changed a few weeks ago?” he asked. “What was it like?”

“Horrible,” she said. “Fever and chills, and being hungry all the time, and going to the outhouse all the time, until I was too weak to walk that far and had to use the chamber pot; and aches and pains all over...”

“Did you get delirious too?” I asked. “I had vivid fever dreams when I was changing, and I think maybe waking hallucinations too. It’s hard to be sure.”

Spar looked at me. “You remember?”

“I was four, almost five when it happened. I have a few memories from when I was a girl, but I remember the changing itself very clearly indeed. Ma kept coming in every half hour or so to feed me and take out the chamber pot; I kept dozing off into a fever dream for a few minutes and then waking up to peek under the blanket and see how big the boy-thing had gotten.”

Moses shook her head. “I don’t remember it at all,” she said. “I was one and a half. Harriet was just a few months old when she changed, and he barely lived through it.” It was hard on babies, for sure. The rare adults who weren’t truly immune but didn’t catch it as children suffered more trauma from it when they finally got it, but they very rarely died of it, like babies often did. Moses didn’t mention her other baby brother, who didn’t live through his change.

“So what’s it like now?” Harriet asked. “Being a girl? I guess you can compare it to being a boy, can’t you?”

Spar seemed at a loss for words for a minute. “Annoying,” she finally said. “And the most annoying part is being asked that question all the time...”

I could tell that Spar didn’t really want to answer Harriet’s questions, so I asked her questions she could answer more comfortably, about what was going on back in Fleecedale. There had been a trader in the inn two weeks earlier who had recently passed through Fleecedale, but he didn’t have much news about my family, and I was hoping to get more from Spar. I hadn’t been back there since my marriage to Moses.

For several days Spar helped out with various tasks around the scriptorium other than copying books, and studied penmanship with me in the evenings. She got good at sharpening quills and mixing ink a lot faster than at writing, and we delegated those jobs to her. She spent a lot of time with Moses, asking her questions about being a woman that, perhaps, she hadn’t wanted to ask her Ma. I found various pretexts to get Harriet out of the house so Moses and Spar could be alone; I suspected that he was interested in Spar, and that she wasn’t anywhere near ready to have that kind of interest taken in her.

After copying epitomes of classic Earth novels for a few weeks, we turned to copying Wilberforce Ishige’s History of the Revolt. We had been at work for just an hour or two when Nabuco excused himself to go to the outhouse. I started to get up to go read aloud for Moses and Harriet to copy, but Spar got to the lectern first. She read confidently, only rarely hesitating over an archaic word or a difficult proper name. I sat right back down and kept copying, glancing at Moses with a smile. When Nabuco got back, he stood quietly in the back of the room listening, and watching us copy; then he got out another stack of paper, sat next to Harriet, and started copying. Spar kept reading through the passage where Ishige describes the experiments the Masters used to do on their human slaves, and suddenly couldn’t read any further.

“I’ll take over here,” I said, and went to the lectern. “You don’t have to stay and listen,” I said quietly to Spar. She shook her head vigorously, holding back tears, and sat down next to Moses — where I had been. Moses squeezed her hand as I read through the passage about the experiments that were the precursor of the changing sickness. At first the spell wasn’t made contagious; the Masters were apparently just fooling around with human biology, and were surprised at the psychological reactions they got from their slaves when their sex was changed. They remembered that later, during the revolt, when they were inventing diseases to leave behind as revenge on their rebellious slaves.

Eventually, I talked Spar into going back to Fleecedale with me to at least talk to her parents. I wanted to see them too, and my own parents especially; I promised her I would bring her back with me to Highmarket if her parents didn’t seem penitent enough for the way they’d been treating her before she ran away.

I talked with Nabuco and put together a set of books we thought might sell in Fleecedale — mostly short ones, as probably nobody there could afford the long ones. I also brought along Lincoln Quindlen’s Gulliver’s Travels, a new copy I was making, and plenty of blank paper, ink and quills, so I could work on the copy while staying in Fleecedale. (Some think it a travesty of the Epitome of Gulliver’s Travels; it’s true he leaves out the Laputa chapter entirely, and he draws parallels between the Brobdingnagians and our old Masters, which could not have been intended by its ancient author. But I like it, and I never understood the Laputa chapter in the epitome anyway. And I don’t agree with the notion that an expansion should try to reconstruct the Earth novel from vague memories of which the epitome was made; that’s impossible, and the attempts to do so just make the expansions opaque to modern readers.)

We packed the wagon with the books, scribal supplies, several days' worth of food and wine, and our weapons: her bow and some new arrows I’d bought for her, and my short sword, in case of bandits on the road. I promised Moses I would be back long before the baby was due, and kissed her for a long time; then Spar and I hitched up our draftbeast, got into the wagon and set off Fleecedale.

The first few miles of our road were inside the warding spell that protects Highmarket; then we passed the marker stone, and we were outside, with most of a day to travel before we reached the warding around Songtown. We were alert, but nothing untoward happened that day. We slept at an inn in Songtown, and set off the next morning down the much less frequented road toward Fleecedale.

We had gone several miles down this road when we met a man on foot coming the other way.

“Watch out,” he said, “some people have seen a Master skulking around in the waste between the warded places.”

When he had passed us, Spar asked me nervously, “Should we turn back?”

“We should be safe enough,” I said, “we have a warding on the wagon. And probably it wasn’t really a Master those people think they saw. There hasn’t been a verified sighting in decades.”

“Maybe because the people who’ve seen one since then didn’t live to tell anybody?”

There hadn’t been much traffic on this road out of Songtown, but after we had gotten a few miles past the next village, Bluegate, and the farms surrounding it, we met nobody at all for hours. We were going up into the long valley that Fleecedale shares its name with. For strategic reasons the houses and barns of Fleecedale are way back in a cove of the valley, with steep hills around them on three sides, and the warding covers not only the village but the tops of the hills, so if the Masters come back they can’t get close enough that way to look down on it. There’s also a double fence along the hills and across the neck of the cove, to keep out human outlaws. I was whistling, thinking that just a little while after sunset I would see the rest of my family for the first time in almost two years. Spar didn’t look anywhere near so happy, though.

Then a shadowy something came out of the woods beside the road and loomed before us. Our draftbeast stopped in its tracks for a moment, and then fell over — asleep? dead? I wasn’t sure.

Spar drew an arrow and let fly at the Master; a good shot, but it bounced off of some invisible wall. She took aim again, and hit the wall again this time right before the thing’s face.

“Don’t waste any more arrows. Just stay calm,” I told her, “it can’t hurt us as long as we stay in the wagon.”

I was wrong. It couldn’t touch us directly, as it discovered when it advanced on us and suddenly stopped a foot away from the wagon. But it was resourceful. It backed away, picked up a branch fallen from a tree beside the road, and held it for a minute; then the branch burst into flames. It tossed the branch into the wagon. We scrambled to smother the fire and toss the branch out onto the road.

We managed to put out three of those fires, but the Master kept throwing burning branches at us faster than we could handle them. Finally the wagon caught fire, apparently from branches the Master had thrown under the wagon’s wheels, and we scrambled out to make a run for it. I grabbed the bag of books, and Spar grabbed a bag of food.

“If we have to leave the wagon, run back along the road a bit, then duck into the woods,” I had told her a few moments earlier, as I threw out the first burning stick. We started to do that, but we had only run ten or fifteen yards when we suddenly stopped and stood still. Not only could I not move, but I was starting to have a hard time remembering why I wanted to run.

Then the Master came round the burning wagon and stood in front of us again.

The strange thing was that I wasn’t frightened. I was hardly feeling anything. I didn’t expect anything in particular to happen, and for a few minutes nothing did. The Master just stood there, looking at us, I suppose, though with those compound eyes it was impossible to be sure. Then it started waving all of its arms in a complicated series of gestures, and speaking in the old language. I could understand a fair number of the words, but the grammar of it is beyond human capacity; our ancestors learned a simplified version of it when they were captured as slaves, and passed it on to their children even after the revolt, because it was the only language they all had in common. “Commerce... soul.... transmission... colors... confusion...” were some of the words I picked out, or thought I did.

Then it came to a stop, and vanished. There one moment, and not there the next. But it was quite a while before the lethargy left me and I could move again. It wore off for Spar first, and she shook my arm and waved her hands in front of my staring eyes for a minute or two, asking me in increasing panic if I was all right, before I could finally answer her.

“I don’t know if we’re all right yet,” I said. “But we can’t go on to Fleecedale.” The wagon had burned up, badly charring the draftbeast, which was dead now if it wasn’t before; but fortunately the fire hadn’t spread to the woods.

“Why not?”

“I think the Master just put a curse on us. We don’t know what it does yet, and more importantly we don’t know if it’s contagious — like the changing, or the forgetting. We’ve got to go off somewhere by ourselves until we know what happened.”

“Where?”

“What about the hunting lodge up back of the village? Nobody’s using it this time of year, are they?”

“No... I expect not.”

We tried to salvage some more food from the burnt-out wagon, but it was no use. We cleared the wreck and the dead draftbeast from the road, so it wouldn’t be a hazard if anyone came along going fast (not likely in these parts, but not impossible), and then we left the road, walking uphill through the woods.

It took us until after sunset to reach the hunting lodge. Normally nobody used it except in the winter, when they might get caught by sudden snow far from the village. In better weather one would always want to spend the night in range of the the village warding spell. There were six beds, and a cabinet containing two jars of crystallized honey, a box of completely dried-out raisins, and a jar of extra oil for the lamps. We would soon have to start hunting and foraging.

It was so frustrating to be so close to Fleecedale and not be able to tell anyone we were there. I was deeply afraid that the curse the Master put on us might be fatal, but I tried not to let on to Spar. If it was, the best thing we could do for our friends and kinfolks was to stay right here and die alone, and hope that the curse wasn’t still contagious when our bodies were discovered. Maybe better still if we died outside of the lodge, so animals would find and scavenge our bodies before people from Fleecedale did.

“How are we going to find out if this curse is contagious or hereditary or what?” Spar asked me as we put our things away in the cabinet. We had cut up a few fairly straight branches on our way here and were shaping them into arrows.

“We can’t tell, as long as it’s just us. We’ll just have to wait it out. If someone comes along, we’ll try to warn them off from a distance, and if we can’t, we’ll have to make them stay here in quarantine with us. Then if they catch it, we’ll know it’s contagious and we need to stay here until it wears off. And if they don’t, we’ll know it’s probably hereditary — the Masters almost never waste their time cursing just one or two people — and we should avoid having any children.”

Any more children, in my case. Would I ever see my son or daughter, or their mother?

“Depending on what ‘it’ is, I guess...” Spar said. “We still don’t know that.”

We went to bed still not knowing, but we found out first thing next morning.