Just a Couple of Days (14 page)

“I don't think you understand, Fountain. Unless you cooperate, you're now a breach of national security. That means you can be shot. Or better yet, just to make sure you don't talk about this to anyone, they could throw you into the tank with the rest of the guinea pigs.” Tynee paused a moment. “Just do your job. If you're so concerned about ethics, where's your work ethic?”

 

50
Any rationalization implies that the action doesn't flow from your values. Sophia's statement of yesterday recollected itself as the realization of my own greed emerged from the shadows, put its thumbs in its ears, and wagged its fingers and tongue at me. In defense of sacrificing commonsense ethics for self-interest, I've since tried to explain to Sophia in countless make-believe conversations that I would do good with the money. “I'll
be a benefactor,” I protested, “a philanthropist. Look at all the wealthy people who don't do good with their money.”

“Why do you think that is?” Sophia smiled patiently, persistent in her quixotic notions. “They don't get that money by doing right, by being nice. That's the nature of money. You can only collect it by hoarding it.”

“But who am I to say what others will do with my research?”

“First of all, it's
their
research. You're just a tool, an intellectual extension of their selfish intent. At what point are you prostituting yourself?” She executed a less-than-perfect pirouette, delightful nonetheless for its honesty of expression, like the raspy, cannabis-strained voice of a blues musician who can't quite hit all the notes but reaches for them with supreme confidence of spirit anyway. “Besides,” she balanced herself, “you already know what it's for.”

“But if I don't do it someone else will.”

“Most likely,” she granted, bowing graciously. “But at least it won't be you. You only have responsibility for your actions, for your decisions. Only you live inside your head. Only you have to confront your self-image.”

“Okay. So what if someone took something you wrote and used it to a negative end?”

“That sort of thing happens all the time,” she said with sad exasperation. Her smile faded like a flower closing in the face of the night, weary, guarded, but ready to smile once again at the slightest hint of sunshine, never failing to trust that the Earth will turn, as is its way. “Look at the Crusades, or the Inquisition. The Bible didn't cause that. The message was twisted to serve selfish interests. And besides, I have to be confident that my
intentions are good. Are yours, or are they selfish? Are you just looking for a license to be greedy?” I frowned, and she continued maternally. “Don't think this is some unique circumstance. This same situation plays itself out again and again every time an idealistic youth replaces their hope and their values with practicality, and an obsolete society convinces another generation that everything's working just fine.”

I rolled my eyes at her histrionics. “How am I responsible for the situation of the world? I'm just trying to do the best I can.”

“For the world or for yourself?” she replied, unoffended and compassionate. “Forgive me for sharing the hardships of ethical action with you. I know it would be easier to just do your job, watch TV, and not consider such things.” She reached forward and gave my forehead a gentle shove. “What was your first impulse in this situation?”

“Not to do it.”

“Well, there you are. That's Truth. Don't lie to yourself. Who do you think you're kidding, anyway? You don't respect people you lie to, and you don't respect people who lie to you. Look where you leave yourself. No matter which way you turn it, you'll have no self-respect. Of course you can make yourself cozy with creature comforts, but what kind of creature will you be?”

“Aha!” I exclaimed in my sixth or seventh rehearsal of this confabulation. “If I were to follow my instincts, I would have kissed you the moment I met you.” I congratulated myself on this reply, imaginary though it was. Sophia, however, wasn't the least bit flustered, or if she was, she immediately pretended not to be, quite like a feline in this regard.

“Perhaps you should have,” she said, “or at least let me know that you would have liked to. At least then the interaction
could have proceeded honestly and openly.” She winked at me. “I thought you were acting weird when we met. You only made yourself awkward by trying to suppress the truth.”

“So I should have kissed you?”

“Not at all,” she snickered. “There are other less intimate ways to express admiration and affection. A warm smile, a bow. To have actually kissed me would have only made me uncomfortable. So we have a qualification: Trust your instincts to the extent that you don't disturb others. Your example doesn't change what I'm saying.” Sophia leaned forward and kissed the top of my head as if tucking me in to bed. “Make the right decisions,” she counseled, a smile unfurling on her face like a frond after the final frost. With this straightforward wisdom, she disappeared from my imagination, but not before slipping me a dandelion for luck and sweet dreams.

 

51
Ethical conduct is like parachuting. It's easier to daydream about it than to do it. Imagining it even gives me a thrill, a windblown rush of vicarious morality, a self-righteous confidence that I could do it if I really had to. However, in this situation, I had no parachute, nor even a plane, though I had no idea that an entire squadron was just beyond the horizon and heading my way. But having no real choice now, my conscience had no objections to pursuing my assignment. I was comfortable with the trusty conditional that I
would
have made the right decision, if only I could have.

After convincing myself thus and neutralizing any moral willies, I decided to learn what I could about the Pied Piper virus. My colleagues and family, none of whom I was particularly
close to, had been informed that I had taken a research sabbatical. I was thereby free to spend the next week reviewing volumes of existing data and research on the virus. I found myself an eager, if not drooling, pupil once I got started. It was far too captivating to stop, and any moments of guilt were immediately overwhelmed by the allure of seeing more. This was forbidden information, after all, and I felt like I was peeping through a keyhole while voluptuous secrets unveiled themselves, engorging me with uninhibited curiosity.

This is what I learned. The Pied Piper virus was so named because of its origin. A fossilized specimen of a previously unknown virus was extracted from corpses found in an anthropological dig covertly sponsored by the CPC in Hamelin, Germany (the alleged location of the Pied Piper's legendary parade in 1284). This provided the raw genetic material from which the Pied Piper virus was eventually engineered.

Finding the DNA fossil was not mere good fortune. Rather, it was precisely the goal of the excavation. Medical historians have argued that the Pied Piper myth has some basis in fact and may reflect an outbreak of an enigmatic medieval malady known as the Dancing Plague, or Saint Vitus' Dance. Apparently, the Dancing Plague swept through human populations in epidemic proportions with some regularity from the eleventh through the sixteenth centuries, especially in Germany. Its symptoms were widespread mania, furious dancing and raving, convulsive chorea, and irresistible hilarity. Hallucinations were also common, and in some cases dancers claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary or, less frequently, God. If this was the case, neither vision was particularly puritanical, as hordes of tranced-out dancers often overtook entire cities, sometimes engaging in orgiastic
revelry of bacchanalian proportions. Indeed, in Cologne in 1374, more than one thousand women reportedly became pregnant as a result of the Dancing Plague.

These hysterical processions of elemental humanity frequently continued for days, lasting until the afflicted finally collapsed in stark exhaustion or died as a result of their unrestrained recklessness. In one instance in Utrecht in 1278, over two hundred people perished when a mob of dancers tapped, twisted, hopped, and stomped on a bridge until it collapsed under the sheer force of their collective energy. When people survived these plagues of dance and debauchery, however, they awoke from their footsore slumber perfectly normal. Although doctors and priests of the day argued that the Dancing Plague was a form of demonic possession resulting from invalid baptisms performed by corrupt clergy, many survivors nevertheless claimed catharsis, and that they were healed of other ailments.

This healing aspect introduces some confusion between Saint Vitus' Dance and Saint John's Dance. Saint John's Dance was a healing dance performed on each solstice, with origins in European paganism. The Church designated Saint John's Day to coincide with the solstice as an effective method of assimilating the nature worshippers' beliefs into the pantheon of Christian saints. The mass insanity associated with the Dancing Plague was mistaken for epilepsy, and Saint John the Baptist was thus dubbed the protector of epileptics. This was all very fascinating to me, but the most astounding aspect was that the Saint John's Dance processions were led by (and I shudder to utter such a coincidence) a piper.

The two events I mentioned above, in Utrecht and Cologne, occurred around Saint John's Day. This has led some religious
scholars to suggest that the dance was actually a manifestation of reactionary paganism in a time of oppressive Christianity. In other words, newly immoral pagan rites could only exist legitimately under the guise of disease. There were, however, cases of the Dancing Plague that did not coincide with the solstice. In Zabera in 1418, a swarm of the dancing helpless were supposedly cured when they rushed into a chapel and fell down before an image of Saint Vitus sitting in a cauldron (it is rumored that he survived being boiled in molten lead). Thus did protection from the Dancing Plague become Saint Vitus' responsibility. In addition to this considerable task, good Saint Vitus is also the patron saint of Bohemia, as well as of actors and dancers, and is invoked to protect from dog attacks, snakebites, and oversleeping.

By whomever's appellation the saintly prance goes by, the purported causes were all incomplete. In addition to the already-mentioned explanations, the Dancing Plague is sometimes attributed to mass hysteria. This is tautological nonsense, and is akin to saying darkness causes night. A more intriguing explanation is that it was a reaction of the collective unconscious against the miserable realities of pestilence, crop failures, and famines, as well as the horror of the Black Death, a contemporary of the Dancing Plague known to have killed half the population of Europe and Asia. In such grim circumstances, as the theory goes, spontaneous outbursts of wild celebration would take hold of the population and sweep across the countryside as a sort of emotional release. This sounds plausible, and was probably involved at some level for some people, but there was also an organic cause.

Since the symptoms of the Dancing Plague seemed promising for incapacitation purposes, potential organic causes were
exhaustively researched by the CPC. In Italy and Arabia, where the phenomenon was called tarantism (after the town of Taranto in southern Italy), it was attributed to the bite of the Ly-cosa tarantula, which was thriving due to the deforestation of the Apulian region of Italy and its consequent hot and dry climate. This explanation, however, does not account for the massive scale the Dancing Plague sometimes achieved. Other theories argued that the widespread mental illness was due to ergot poisoning. Ergot is a fungus that grows on some grains, prevalent when the spring is especially wet. When consumed, it causes hallucinations and bizarre muscle spasms, induces abortions, and in those who are vitamin A deficient, makes their fingers and toes turn gangrenous and fall off. The ergot theory has also been invoked to explain the Salem witch trials. Both theories have some intrinsic validity. Compounds have been derived both from spider venom and a variety of fungi that can elicit muscle spasms and extreme mental confusion. As already mentioned, however, all of these compounds were eventually dismissed in the search for the ideal incapacitant.

The ideal incapacitant, of course, is the Pied Piper virus. As it turns out, the spider-bite theory was probably partially correct, insofar as the spider was the vector that introduced the virus into the human population. In any case, the virus that caused the Dancing Plague has undergone extensive renovation since the Middle Ages. In its unaltered form, it was not terribly infectious or chronic, and transmission was most likely blood borne. Hence, assuming an individual was exposed via a spider bite, the virus still required a further vector to reach epidemic dimensions. This most likely occurred through the local food or water supply. Consequently, dancing plagues in the Middle Ages
tended to have a limited range, sweeping across villages rather than across nations or continents. The largest estimate of those afflicted at one time was eleven hundred. Thus, while impressive in its incapacitating capabilities, from a military standpoint its contagion was inadequate.

Enter influenza, a virus whose virulence scoffs at all attempts to shield oneself. In terms of its sheer speed of transmission and the spine-sapping power of its grip, it is the superlative pestilential presence on our planet. Contagious by breath-borne droplets and via animals such as birds, the tiny influenza myxovirus is behind one of our planet's most horrific and awe-inspiring phenomena. Influenza epidemics trot the globe annually, and a few times a century a pandemic emerges that infects most, if not all, of the world's population at once. These blitzkriegs are possible because of the virus's characteristic genetic instability. Proteins on its shell undergo slow but constant genetic change, rendering any acquired immunity obsolete. Essentially, it becomes unrecognizable by our immune systems as soon as it puts on a new outfit, or even changes a single accessory.

Influenza was named by eighteenth-century Italians who blamed it on the
influence
of heavenly bodies. And indeed, there is a curious correlation between influenza pandemics and sunspot activity. Possibly, increased solar radiation from solar flares triggers mutations that rapidly transform the surface of the virus into something our immune systems haven't experienced. Thus, we get the flu again and again, immunological virgins every time.