I heard the smile come back into his voice, I heard my own pain coming back to me. "In your case there is one aggressive, virulent parasite species among the others. They gouge the minerals from your skin, reshape it more to their liking, and dump their waste into your circulatory system. The radiation problem is the newest phenomenon. This, too, is not so troublesome by itself. But it is a warning that the situation is deteriorating and could get much worse."

I think I felt them, really felt them, these tiny and prolific parasites that did what they pleased with my body, without so much as a kiss or a thank you, disfiguring me, plundering my vital organs.

The Doctor had more bad news. "They're hell to get rid of."

"Why do you suppose this isn't making me feel any better?"

He's a smart Doctor. He ignored my anxious impertinence.

"You see, usually the competition for survival is enough to keep any one parasite from subduing the rest, and at the same time overcome natural obstacles to existence. Your host body establishes limits. But these parasites blast through limits. Whatever treatment the medics could provide you, the parasites are able to discern and defeat."

His voice looked me straight in the eye. I caught my breath as best I could and damned the bugs that had done this to me.

"You have humans."

Except for what he had told me, I had no concept of the word. But there was a tragedy in his voice when he said it, enough to send a shudder all through my body. I cried, dropping a sudden storm into my South Pacific that raged on for days.

He had more bad news.

"They are spreading. What they have done to your skin is build massive colonies, where they conduct their microscopic business, and scratched all up and down your land masses with roads and plumbing. They use radioactive materials to power these cities—and to fight one another.

"If we can't defeat them, it's possible that the best treatment is to let the disease defeat itself with its own belligerence. You would be battered with radiation, and if you think you're uncomfortable now, you'll find it sheer misery for the brief time the battle should last. But..."

For all the long wait, for the horrors I could imagine, none of it compared to how I loathed these filthy microorganisms that drained me, beat me, choked me and trashed my hide, so aggressive they could be destroyed only by themselves. I felt unclean.

"But there is no guarantee that they will completely obliterate each other. Many of them could lurk about after the battle." There was an urgent tone under that placid voice, something that suggested this was more important than any individual patient who was, in the end, expendable. I heard his eyes. They sounded afraid. "We have to stop them. Now." Once more I trembled, sending mountain ranges quaking in my northern hemisphere.

"We have evidence that their infestation has touched your moon. This, too, is not yet a problem. But the fact that they have the capability to spread themselves beyond your body is serious. There are six billion of them. Once they spread, these humans could infect your moon and eventually the planets beyond."

His voice carried a message beneath the words: the cure would be uncomfortable. "Their extraordinary adaptability is a problem. But they are more fragile creatures than even they suspect. They absolutely depend on your climate being reasonably steady, on the air you give them and the solar energy you absorb. If you keep up your tremors you'll make them uncomfortable, and maybe even get rid of a few million. Standard treatments for reducing your oxygen level take a few thousand years just to set up, and that's enough time for them to find a way to stymie us."