Flesh and Blood (3 page)

H
e was looking at me when I woke up.

‘Hi,’ I said stupidly.

‘Hi, yourself.’ He looked pale, his face pinched from so many days on the drip, but otherwise himself. I opened my mind slightly.

His eyes opened wider. ‘Shit!’ Then on MindLink, ‘Is this what it’s like?’

‘Yes. No, much deeper, faster sometimes. Didn’t want to rush you.’

‘Shit,’ he said again, then thought at me. ‘I expected … I don’t know what I expected. Just words. But I’m … I’m thinking with you.’ He was panting now. ‘Dan — stop it please. I can’t take it. It’s too much. Much too much.’

I broke the Link. ‘You probably just need practice.’

‘Didn’t you?’

‘I was born like this! I learnt to Link at the same time I learnt to see or listen. I’ve no idea
how
I learnt. And the others learnt with me.’

‘The others … there are no others now.’

‘No. Just us.’ Once there had been many of us. But the others had been killed, except for Melanie, violently brainwiped, and Michael, who’d voluntarily had his ability removed so that he wouldn’t have to sacrifice his City career. And the babies, I thought.

‘Babies? What babies?’ The Link had been broken, but he must have caught an echo of it anyway.

‘Dr Meredith’s great-something-grandkids. She’s had them modified with our ability.’

‘You mean we’ll hear them think all the time too?’ The tone was distinctly uneasy.

I laughed. ‘No, of course not. It’s not like telepathy. We have to be connected through a computer Network, remember? And we can go into private MindLink, just as you’d scroll up data by yourself.’

‘I see. Dan?’

‘Yes?’

‘I felt something — you thought about babies but it wasn’t Dr Meredith’s grandchildren … It was something else.’

‘Neil …’ I didn’t know how to say it. We had lived together for two years but I still had no idea how he would react, either to the idea of a child or the fact that I’d gone ahead and had one made, modified and implanted while he was asleep.

I don’t know whether he MindLinked up the ghost of my emotion, or whether he simply read the news on my face. Neil and I had never known the mental world I’d shared with the Forest. We’d been Trees, separate and apart. Nonetheless, he knew me well. ‘Dan … Dan you didn’t …’

I nodded. ‘My egg. Sperm from your modified clone.’ I tried to read the emotions on his face, but they were too confused. I wasn’t even sure of my own emotions, much less his. Then suddenly his face cleared. His eyes blazed with a blinding joy.

‘Neil!’ It was Elaine, her Virtual presence suddenly appearing by the bed. ‘Oh Neil, Neil …’

Neil’s face grinned at her from his pillow.

‘Guess what?’ he said. ‘We’re going to have a baby.’

T
he Centaur was waiting for us at the house. It seemed right, somehow. The Centaur had been the first inhabitant of the utopia I’d met when I’d come here two years ago.

He looked much the same now: the shaggy brown horse half, the paler human, the face with its long, slightly furred forehead that looked both equine and human. He raised his tail as our floater approached. A pile of droppings fell onto the shaly ground.

I Linked the floater window open. ‘Hello,’ I said.

He grinned, showing wide yellow teeth. ‘Hello hello hello.’

It was impossible to tell if he was really greeting us, or just repeating what I’d said. But the grin was welcoming anyway. He raised his hand in a sort of salute, and galloped off into the trees as the floater landed by the house.

The house was waiting for us too.

It was a good house they’d found for me when they’d cast me out of the City. Old weathered stone that had sheltered many lives and accepted me as well.

I’d made changes in the past year, using a small part of the money accumulating in my City account, the royalties from my Virtual designs. There were new water tanks behind the house, and a membrane trickle-irrigation system sustained a garden that was no longer tangled and abandoned. Now roses and pineapple sage, jasmine and
wisteria bloomed, a lilypond where the centaurs sometimes drank, gleamed in the dappled light and a vegetable garden, walled with stone to keep the Wombat out, provided Realfood for our kitchen.

There were changes inside as well. More books, bought on the antique market CityNet, and bright rugs on the polished wooden floors, found at a utopia up the coast that Ophelia had told me about.

Ophelia. I hadn’t told anyone at Black Stump that I was having my power restored. How can you say, ‘Guess what? My mind can now whirl 1000 times faster than yours,’ to your friends?

But I’d tell them about the baby. Soon.

There was food waiting for us in the kitchen, just as it had been waiting for me when I had first come here, hurt and alone, two years ago. A loaf of bread, still warm and wrapped in a tea towel, fresh eggs, a roast chicken in the fridge, its stuffing oozing out in the slightly charred, non-perfect way that no Virtual could get quite right — even mine. A fruitcake, Neil’s favourite chocolate chip biscuits with peanuts in them, an apple pie. Elaine must have spent all yesterday baking.

I got Neil settled on the sofa (he refused to go to bed), called Theo and Elaine to say we’d arrived (it was incredibly good to hands-free Link again, to use my mind to set the parameters instead of my fingers to type in commands), set water onto ultrawave for the tea I’d serve them when they got here.

I had just heard the putter of the dikdik over the hill when the faint chime of a call coming in sounded in my head.

I shoved it onto message mode. Another chime sounded an emergency override.

I hesitated. I didn’t want to speak to anyone now. I wanted to sit with the people I loved and talk about the future, the incredibly bright future. I wanted to watch Theo and Elaine’s faces as we discussed baby names, baby plans. I wanted to glory in their emotions and my own.

On the other hand it might be Dr Meredith with a medical warning, symptoms to watch out for. Or a call for Elaine. As the utopia’s Meditech she was constantly on call. Perhaps there had been an accident.

Now my ability had been restored I no longer had to watch a screen to see the faces of those who called me. I could simply shut my eyes, or even multitask and see the image in my mind while I did other things.

Not handle boiling water though. I sat down at the kitchen table and let the call take over.

It was Michael.

Once my lover, then my enemy when I believed he had betrayed the Forest to further his career in City Admin, and now, perhaps, my friend, though I wondered sometimes if the remnants of a closeness such as ours could really be called friendship.

He didn’t say hello. We’d never had to use a verbal form of greeting in the old days. He just looked at me for a few seconds then said, ‘Did it work?’

My skin went cold. I sat back slowly, to give myself time to think. ‘Did what work?’

‘Restoration.’

I stared at him. ‘Has the City been spying on me?’ And what action would they take against me, I wondered, now I’d had a Proclaimed ability restored. What action might they take against Dr Meredith and the others at the Clinic; against Neil if they knew he had been modified too.

‘Stop panicking,’ said Michael. Even without MindLink Michael knew me well. ‘The City knows nothing about it. Yet.’

‘Yet?’

Michael sighed. He looked even paler than Neil, I realised, as though he hadn’t slept for days or eaten either. ‘I guessed what you were going to do,’ he said. ‘Then when I couldn’t get through to you for a month I was sure of it. Worried though. I didn’t expect it to take so long. Were there problems?’

So he didn’t know about Neil, or where I’d had the operation performed. ‘No,’ I said carefully. ‘They just wanted to make sure everything was all right.’

‘Then it was successful?’

I nodded.

‘Thank goodness.’ He closed his eyes, as though the weight of thankfulness was too heavy for them to stay open.

‘It was a fairly minor procedure,’ I said.

He opened his eyes. ‘Yes, I know.’

I didn’t ask how he knew. As one of the City’s most senior Administrators Michael had access to any data he wanted.

Should I tell Michael about Neil’s modification? I trusted Michael now — more or less — but he was still City. It was none of his business, no reason for him to know. And there was always the chance he might let information slip … ‘You must come out to dinner again,’ I was saying automatically, when suddenly he cut in.

‘NO.’

The emphasis shocked me. Michael had come to dinner before. ‘Why not? Is it something to do with my restoration?’

‘No. Nothing like that. Dan, this is important. Very important. It’s the reason I’ve been trying to get hold of you for the past month.’

‘I’m listening,’ I said quietly.

‘There’s a new epidemic in the City. A bad one.’

‘An epidemic? But there’s been nothing on any of the newsNets.’

‘No. We’re keeping it quiet for as long as possible.’

I nodded. It made sense. Ever since the Declines the fear of new plagues had been part of the background of our lives. ‘What sort of epidemic?’

‘Influenza type. Para-influenza v895, to be exact. High fever, quick onset. Death can be within hours of the first symptoms. A long incubation — about twenty-one days.’

‘Which means it spreads all the faster.’

‘Exactly. People pass it on before they realise they’re infected. They’re already calling it the new plague.’ His voice indicated his distaste for the emotive word.

Most City offices and apartments had self-contained heating and cooling systems, a precaution from the epidemics of the Declines when infections spread throughout the City within days via air-conditioning. And there was much less person-to-person contact in the City now than in the old days; most people worked and often played via Virtual. Only the most intimate social contacts were Realife. But that was still enough contact for an epidemic to spread.

‘What’s the survival rate?’

‘About 10 per cent,’ said Michael flatly.

I blinked. Even the Black Death had a higher survival rate than that, if the stricken had been nursed and given water so they didn’t die of thirst. ‘That’s bad.’

‘Exactly. Death is due to kidney or heart failure. Most deaths occur within a few hours of the fever appearing. If the victim has a clone in stasis that we can use for repair and maintenance, then the survival rate goes up to 27 per cent.’

Most Citysiders kept a clone of themselves in case of medical need. But few people in the Outlands had access to that sort of medical technology.

‘Any sign of a cure? Or a vaccine?’

‘They’re working on it,’ said Michael dryly. ‘I gather there are several promising leads. That may mean they’ll find a cure next week or a vaccine in twenty years’ time.’

‘Any idea where it started?’ Michael shrugged. Most new plagues are zoonoses — bird and animal diseases that mutate and pass on to humans. I nodded. The City had been largely animal free since the cat flu epidemic that had spread to humans too. Animals were strictly Outlands creatures now. Like me. It’s probably been carried in by visiting workers or — just possibly — by rats or insects in food shipments.

Michael sighed. ‘We don’t even know where the first contact in the City was. Thirty-six cases were reported at once, with no work or lifestyle connections between them. There have been 116 deaths, eighteen survivals. The infection rate is dropping fast though, since we put controls into place.’

‘So what are you doing about it?’

‘All non-essential person-to-person contacts are forbidden; temperature screening at all public doorways; compulsory blood tests every two days to try to pick it up early in the incubation. It seems to have been confined to the City so far. We’re trying to keep it that way. No-one allowed in or out. We’ve admitted that there is a health
problem; we had to. Information about the real death toll’s limited to Medical and Admin RankTwo and above.’

‘But you’re telling me …’

‘Exactly. For two reasons. First, because I don’t agree with all the rest of the Admin look on this, there’s no guarantee we can keep this contained forever. All it would need would be one infected person to leave the City and the epidemic would spread. It mightn’t even be a person. We have no idea yet how this plague is passed on — water, air, a pet pigeon might escape and carry it on its fleas … who knows. So tell your Meditech and don’t let anyone, or any animal, near your ’topia. If they do get in, keep them quarantined.’

I thought of the centaurs galloping through the bush, and the Water Sprites down at the beach I’d made last year, of the roos who came down to the dams to drink, the uncounted visitors who sauntered into the community for the Sunday music afternoons, or for Elaine to sew on an amputated finger or give regeneration boosters or simply for a cup of tea with friends.

Could any of that be halted?

Michael might be asking the impossible. But there was no point telling him that.

‘And secondly?’

‘We need your help.’

T
he last time Michael had asked for my help I’d nearly been ripped to death by a werewolf. I took a deep breath.

‘How?’ I said.

Michael sighed again. ‘You know how. You can scroll through data faster than anyone alive. We need your abilities.’

‘Even if they are Proclaimed?’

‘As of 10.00 this morning the Proclamation is lifted. You’re free to enter the City at will.’ He gave a half-smile. ‘But don’t, at the moment. You’re too valuable to risk.’

I thought of the modified child I was carrying. ‘Permanently lifted?’

‘You know I can’t guarantee that. Proclamations can be issued again. But it’s not a temporary suspension. I can promise you that at least.’

‘I see,’ I said slowly. ‘But Michael — I can scroll through data but it won’t mean much more than if you set to consider for an automated search. I don’t have medical training.’

‘We don’t expect you to come up with a cure. We need you to monitor the OutlandNets.’

‘I thought you’d already be doing that.’

Michael nodded. ‘Of course. We like to know what’s going on. But the thing is fast. The first sign probably won’t be someone announcing on the Net: “Hey, guys, the plague’s here.” It might be more subtle — fewer kids
on a SchoolNet suddenly, coffee shipments that don’t arrive. You don’t just have the ability to sort through data quickly. You know how to make connections.’

I didn’t argue. It was true.

Michael frowned, as though he were trying to concentrate through weariness. ‘We need to find out where it started. If we can find the original animal host — if there is one — they may have some natural immunity. And if we can tap into that it may help enormously in making a vaccine.’

No worries, I thought. Track down a vampire, investigate a clan of werewolves, locate the source of a new plague. Just ask good old Danielle …

‘Michael, you need Melanie. She’s the one with medical training.’

‘I would like nothing better than to have Mel back. For many reasons. But I can’t.’

‘Michael, is this Link secure?’

‘Yes,’ he said immediately.

‘Maybe Mel can be restored. The doctor who restored me is good.’

‘No one is that good,’ said Michael.

‘She is,’ I insisted. ‘Good enough to give our Mod to Neil too. If she can brain splice Neil for something as complex as that, I’ll bet she might be able to help Mel too.’

Michael stared. ‘Neil? You mean it actually worked?’

‘It worked.’ I hesitated. Neil still found it uncomfortable — even unbearably so — to Link with me for more than a fraction of a second. He hadn’t even tried to match his mind to a computer Net. ‘Well, partly at least.’

‘I had no idea,’ Michael said slowly, ‘that anyone was doing work of that calibre in the Outlands.’

I grinned without humour. ‘They’ve made very sure you hadn’t. It’s nice to know the City isn’t all powerful. Mel has a Norm clone. Maybe that clone can be used to repair the mindwipe damage. It’s worth a try.’

‘It would be,’ he said, ‘except for one thing. Mel is in the City. We might spread the infection taking her out.’

I thought of Dr Meredith’s ‘boys’ — perhaps one would take the risk, would be prepared to go to the City and work there. And perhaps … I had a sudden vision of a new Forest: me and Neil and Michael and Mel, our minds all Linked together, almost like the old days.

‘Perhaps you could be restored too,’ I added.

‘Me?’

‘If it could be done with me, it could be done with you.’

He was silent. I could almost feel the way his mind would be working behind the blank mask. We had been so close, once upon a time. Then he said, ‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because the City needs me. I can’t take off — what, one month, two? while there’s a crisis. Or take the risk that it may not work either.’

‘But you’d be all the more capable of handling a crisis if you had your old abilities back.’ I held out the ultimate temptation. ‘With abilities like that you’d reach the top that much sooner.’

The ghost of a grin. Yes, I knew Michael, but he knew me. ‘And what if we’re Proclaimed all over again? Maybe when this is over, sweetheart I’ll think about it. Meanwhile, monitor what you can. And take care.’

The screen went blank.