“Because it’s tropical?” asked Rigg.
“I don’t know why, though that may be part of it. Some of the diseases are vectored through biting insects, some of them through other mammals. Some originated in animals that thrive in this climate. None of the diseases depend on microbes native to Garden. Nothing smaller than a facemask or a mantle has yet jumped the barrier between the biotas of Earth and of Garden.”
“So you don’t want me to go there because you’re afraid I might die?”
“I’m reasonably sure you would die.”
“How sure?”
“Your odds of survival are about one in fifty. But that’s a guess, since you’d be the first visitor from outside the wallfold since I last visited there about ten thousand years ago, give or take.”
“Did you get sick?”
“Almost died. And the really interesting diseases hadn’t started up yet. This is the incubator of hellish death, Rigg. If it weren’t for the Wall, diseases from Janefold would sweep across the world, killing half each time.”
“Then why is there anyone left there at all?” asked Rigg.
“They’ve built up resistance. Not individually. But each time a new plague comes up, the only survivors are those with natural defenses. The deadly disease that almost killed me is now no more than an itchy rash and a case of sniffles—to the Janefolders. But if it got out of the wallfold, it would probably have the twenty percent kill rate that it had when I caught it.”
Rigg thought about this. “If they have resistance to disease, then why is their life expectancy so low?”
“They develop resistance to each disease. But the newer the disease, the more people it kills with each resurgence. And some of them mutate, so that people who lived through one iteration have no defense, or little defense, against its successor.”
“I hate to be offensive, but this makes me wonder what’s hiding there. What you don’t want me to see.”
“What’s hiding there is death, and what I don’t want you to see is the inside of your coffin lid.”
“So you keep me out of Janefold with a threat of plagues. What will be the excuse the next time you want me not to visit a place? Earthquakes? Really bad weather? Ill-behaved children?”
“This is how the world works,” said Ram Odin. “It happened on Earth. There were a couple of places that spawned plagues that covered the world, because trade routes connected them to everybody. But there were other places that were cut off. The Americas didn’t spawn a lot of diseases because population density never got that high, and because there weren’t a lot of primates to incubate diseases that would be particularly apt to kill humans. When people from Eurasia landed there, those worldwide diseases, in combination, had a killoff of about ninety percent of the locals.”
“I read about that.”
“Africa was the opposite. It was isolated, too—not a lot of trade, because traders had to cross oceans and deserts. Sick people tended to die before they could spread the diseases to the rest of the world. But when Europeans got there, if they went ashore for a week they simply didn’t come back. If they went ashore for a day, they came back to their ship and infected everybody else and some ships were found drifting, with a one hundred percent killoff.”
“And you’re saying the Wall has protected the rest of the world from Janefold. If I visit there—”
“It would be miraculous if you didn’t catch something incurable and highly contagious. And here’s the problem. You can’t go back in time and change it because you’ll have the disease in you already.”
“I also have the facemask.”
“So you’ll have much keener awareness of your symptoms and be able to track the progress of your disease quite clearly, as you die.”
“The facemask doesn’t help keep me healthy?”
“It helps keep you robust,” said Ram Odin. “It doesn’t filter out diseases that your immune system can’t cope with, because it can only detect disease agents from Earthborn biology if your body senses them.”
“Yet people live there.”
“If they make it through childhood, then they tend to have lives of normal length. Childhood is when disease weeds out the weak and selects for those who adapt well, whose bodies resist. The longer the disease has been around, the more children live through it. But there are some diseases that are less than a thousand years old, and those are still taking a lot of children. So at birth, half the life expectancy. But if you live to adulthood, then the survivors have normal lives.”
“Do they have larger families?”
“Some cultures within Janefold do, some don’t. Some don’t bond with their children until they’re older. Some break their hearts loving all their children from the start. Some regions and tribes avoid large concentrations of people. Some keep their children isolated. Some deliberately allow their children to get exposed to everything—I suppose to end the suspense. Some villages, some tribes routinely burn down the houses of families who have a few key symptoms—open sores all over the body, bleeding from eyes, nostrils, and ears, blood in sneezes and coughs, that sort of thing.”
“Burn them down with the people inside.”
“That’s the point.”