View from Ararat (11 page)

I had him trapped and he knew it.

‘Shit, Charlie. You already know what I'd do. Who am I, by the way?'

‘Stanley Hendriks,' I replied. And paused.

‘
The
Stanley Hendriks?
Genetic Hybrids and Agricultural Self-Sufficiency. That
Stanley Hendriks?'

‘The same. Hendriks and a group of scientists managed to smuggle most of the Icarus children and their surrogate families aboard a C-ship to Deucalion, right under the noses of Security. And Hendriks came with them, just to keep an eye on their development. You won't find any records – he carefully deleted them over the years. And he set up Carmody as an Icaran refuge just before the Revolution, when it looked like someone had discovered them and they were being secretly and systematically killed. At the same time he siphoned off Research Funds to establish the labs and Research units on the island – trying to find a solution to a premature-aging phenomenon associated with the children's hybrid genetic structure.

‘So Carmody Island—'

‘Is an Icaran settlement. There are hundreds of Icaran families scattered around the different towns and cities, but the kids are sent to Carmody for an education – and to learn about their heritage and how to cope with their unique abilities. They harness their powers and learn Elokoi philosophy and history from visiting Tellers. They are part-Elokoi, after all, and they can develop a rudimentary understanding of the thought-tones, if they're trained.

‘So you see, Galen, Carmody's the perfect place. It's too far away to be in direct danger of contamination. It has a fully equipped laboratory complex geared to medical and genetic analysis and linked to every data frame and Research establishment on the planet. And it has an intelligent, disciplined and well-educated population, with experience in all the experimental techniques necessary to develop a sustainable containment strategy. Any questions?'

He looked at me for a long time.

‘Only one . . . Can you read my mind?'

I returned the stare, then let out the breath I'd been holding.

‘Only if you give me permission. It's part of the etiquette they teach us as children, on the island.'

‘Then how come you told me? If you didn't read my mind, you couldn't be sure which way I'd jump. Isn't it supposed to be top-secret?'

I moved around to stand next to him and took hold of his hand.

‘Trust. I've put up with you for seven years, Galen. I think I know you well enough by now.'

He withdrew his hand and thumbed the chair control so that he was facing me. ‘You have permission,' he said. ‘What am I thinking right now?'

For a moment I stared directly into his eyes, and then I felt the tears begin.

Kneeling down, I looked up at him. ‘I know you do, you idiot. I've known since the beginning.'

And then I kissed him.

Finally.

11

The Dead and the Dying

Quarantine Camp, Old Wieta Reserve

Edison Sector (East Central)

18/1/203 Standard

JEROME

Jerome Hamita places a thumbnail-sized electronic beacon on the door of the silent hut.

Inside, a family of four lies dead – husband and wife wrapped in each other's arms, with two small kids lying together in a tiny cot. At a glance you might think they were just sleeping, until you looked at their skin, and at the dead man's staring eyes.

The tiny beacon marks the site for destruction. Every third night, an armed Security team moves through the camp, protected by isolation suits, and sets small incendiary devices on all the marked huts. From the windows of the infirmary he has watched the sudden flames rising into the night sky. It is useless, like spitting in the eye of the devil, but anything is better than inaction.

So once every few days he follows the paths of the camp, marking the huts and attempting the impossible task of counting the dead.

It is voluntary. Everything in the camp is. The others who remain in the relative safety of the infirmary control-centre say nothing about his excursions. What could they possibly say that would mean anything?

There is more than enough death within that managed environment, without facing the fatal chaos of the camp itself, where the Crystal spreads like a cancer, malignant and uncontrolled.

Enough
. . . He draws on a lifetime of discipline and forces the thought away, unwilling to move in that direction. Control is precarious already.

Time to head back . . .

He moves slowly along the almost-deserted roadway between the silent huts. It is no more than a wide alley, really. He pauses and watches a young woman creeping along close to the wall of the hut opposite. She is trying to keep as much distance between them as is humanly possible, without actually touching the potentially deadly surface of the wall itself.

Surreptitiously he unclips the strap securing the weapon in his holster, but she is no threat.

And suddenly the realisation strikes that what he desperately wants to do is cross the road and stand in front of her, take off his glove, hold out his hand and introduce himself.

Anything to show her that he has no fear of her.

But fear has become a two-way street. As desperate as his need may be, within the fences of the Wieta camp, fear is the only logical response. For them both. The Crystal Death is invisible, and its touch is painless.

At first.

It is the reason the streets are empty and the huts are full – some with the fearful, some with the dead and the dying.

He stops and watches the woman.

She passes, refusing even to raise her eyes and glance in his direction. No surprise.

No one looks at you any more . . .

It is the new fact of life in the camp. No one looks at anyone, as if to make eye contact is to open yourself to the horror of contagion.

Unclean!
The age-old cry of the leper. Ring the bell, shout out the compulsory warning.
Stay away, protect yourself . . . Unclean!

And though the street is silent, though the fear remains unspoken, you can read it in the language of the curved back and the hurried glance.

He watches as the woman disappears around the corner, and he wonders why she risks being out in the open. Food, perhaps, or water. Nothing but hunger or thirst is important enough to drag people from the relative safety of their self-imposed prisons.

He feels the sweat running down his back, and the skin on his gloved hands is clammy in the 40-degree humidity. Even the visor of his helmet is beginning to steam up. But anything less than total cover is tantamount to suicide.

For a moment longer he stares at the corner, but she is gone. He turns and continues his solitary journey.

At the entrance to the infirmary he goes through the complex ceremony of cleansing and changing.

In the anteroom steaming jets of boiling water sear the outer layer of the suit. Twenty seconds is the optimum duration. Less and the effect is incomplete, more and you begin to cook.

After that there is the ritual disrobing. The helmet, then the suit with its built-in boots and finally the gloves disappear down the chute into the incinerator, where a Celsius temperature of 1,000 degrees reduces it to vapour, which is drawn off into a holding tank and condensed. The suit is a masterpiece of design, and a tribute to the efficiency of Deuc technology. It can be donned in seconds, in case of emergency, and removed alone, without the necessity of touching the potentially contaminated outer skin.

Inside, the crew is already on deck.

Lomax and Cerruti are at the console, monitoring the vital stats on a bank of read-outs and vid-screens. Burke stands by the double-glazed window looking into the isolation ward, dictating quietly into the v-a pick-up of her punchboard, and Fromme sits staring at the ceiling, weaving a small glass stick in and out of the fingers of her right hand.

There are tears streaming from her eyes.
She's losing it . . .

Jerome Hamita almost gives in to the urge to comfort the young technician, but something keeps him from reaching out to her.

In the end, what is the point? From the beginning they have been nothing but the deathwatch – witnesses to the inevitable, keeping records, monitoring the deterioration, easing the pain for as long as the drugs have any effect.

Disposing of the remains.

He turns towards the observation window and looks in at the rows of beds. A robot nurse tracks silently along between the beds, stops, turns on its tracks, and extends a telescopic scanner over one of the motionless bodies.

After a few seconds Lomax says, to no one in particular. ‘We've lost bed seventy-seven.'

He leans forward and touches a red button on the console. Activated by the single action, a process begins which they have seen so many times that no one bothers watching any more. The nurse tracks backwards and another machine approaches. In a single motion it sheathes the body and the thin mattress in a skin of plastic and lifts the load onto a stainless-steel tray, before reversing out through the sliding doors at the end of the ward. Beyond the doors are the incinerators, where the body from bed seventy-seven will be vaporised.

In front of Lomax, and slightly to his left, the number seventy-seven flashes red on a screen for a few seconds, and beside it, a name: RIOS, Gra
ç
ia Xaviera. Then the number ceases its flashing and the name blinks out of existence. He stares at the blank line on the screen. Bed seventy-seven is empty.

She had a name, Lomax
. . . Jerome frames the words, but does not speak them.
They all have names
. . . Thirty thousand souls. Thirty thousand living, breathing individuals, with their dreams and their fears.
And we failed them . . .

Already the politicians have begun distancing themselves from the fallout, portioning out the blame. What else could you expect? Over ten thousand deaths in the first two weeks, and no solution in sight to save the rest of the inmates of what is already being called the Death Camp.

Not the kind of record that wins elections.

And with the smug certainty that always comes after the event, the news networks are trotting out panels of ‘expert' commentators, with their ideas for what should have been done in the first place – but absolutely no ideas for what should be done now.

Lab tests show that the seed-crystals break down into their constituent elements in a few seconds at a little below 100 degrees Celsius – which gives some hope for decontamination procedures, but none for the treatment of infected individuals.

Jerome turns to Burke who has returned to her seat at the console.

‘How many new admissions, Katie?'

She looks up at him and shakes her head. ‘Just one since yesterday evening. They know there's no hope. They've practically stopped coming. I guess they prefer to die in their homes.'

‘Where they survive just long enough to infect everyone else.' Cerruti looks up from the console directly at Jerome. It is a challenge, part of the ongoing tension that has built in the control-centre. ‘It'd be more humane to put a laser to their heads and fry their poor doomed brains as soon as they showed the first symptoms. Then vaporise the remains as quickly as possible. What the hell are we doing here? Prolonging their agony, that's all. I didn't get into medicine to help run death row. I—'

Jerome turns to face him, holding the younger man's gaze with a glare that stops the flow of his words.

‘Firstly, Cerruti, if they are showing symptoms, then they've already infected everyone else in their hut. That's a ninety-nine-point-nine per cent certifiable fact. Maybe we should have isolated each individual family from the beginning. Locked them in their huts and fed them through a trapdoor until we were sure what was happening. Maybe it would have slowed the spread. But we didn't, and it's too late now to worry about what we should have done. Christ, no one really believed there
was
a problem. We're just lucky that someone pushed hard enough to isolate them from the rest of the population.

‘Secondly, I don't know about you, but I didn't go into medicine to play God. One or two patients are holding their own. The little girl in bed seventeen has been in here for six days and she's still alive. That's at least twice as long as any one else has survived. Why
is
that? Can she fight it off somehow? At this point I don't know, and neither do you. But fry her brain and you'll never know.

‘What the hell do you
think
we're doing here, Cerruti? We're the god-damned deathwatch. We rob the dying of their secrets. We care for them – as much as we can – and we gather the data. There are hundreds of people out there searching for a cure, and the more they know about this thing, the more chance they have of finding one. We may not be able to save the victims, but we may help discover something that can save the others. Do you have something better to do with your time? Because if you do, get the hell out of here and do it!'

Carmody Island

Inland Sea (Eastern Region)

19/1/203 Standard

JULES'S STORY

I opened the door and she was standing there, soaked to the skin from the rain.

‘Can I come in?'

Dumb question. I'm sitting alone on a rainy night trying to figure out whether to watch something boring on the tube, or go back to the work I didn't want to do in the first place, when Kaz Chandros arrives like an angel on my doorstep, looking even better wet than she does when she isn't soaked to the skin, and asking if she can come in.

What would I be likely to say?
Look, I'll have to think about it.
No. I don't
think
so.

A few minutes in the air-drier and she was back to normal, except for the hunted look behind her eyes.

‘OK,' I said, ‘spill it.'

‘Spill what?' She was stalling, which confirmed my earlier assessment. This wasn't a social call.

Still, beggars can't be choosers.

‘Spill whatever it is that's on your mind. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but you didn't come here because you suddenly realised how incredibly attractive I am, and developed an overwhelming desire to run to my home in the rain and rip my clothes off . . .
Did
you?'

She smiled. ‘Maybe later.'

But her smile faded – a little too quickly.

‘Where's your workstation?'

‘In the other room . . .' Suddenly I was looking at her back as she headed in the direction I'd indicated. ‘What is it?'

‘The end of the world as we know it.' Already she was punching in her access-code, and muttering references into the v-a pick-up. And the screen was flashing through the nominated files. She talked to me as she worked.

‘Charlie downloaded all her information on Crystal Death to the med-centre data frame, and I've spent the last few days digging through it.'

No news there. The whole project was an open secret on the island. Half the kids had already accessed the files, and there were probably more than a dozen bedroom research programs going on as we were speaking.

‘
An
d
?'

She turned to me. ‘What do you know about Vesta?'

I must have looked blank, because she shook her head, mentally back-tracking. She tried again.

‘You know about the origin of CRIOS?' I nodded. ‘Good. Well, the theory is that it was taken back to Earth in a load of ore from Ganymede – one of the moons of Jupiter. The first outbreak was in the ore-processing plant at Puerto Limon in Costa Rica.'

I nodded again. So far, so good.

‘But they don't think it originated on Ganymede. Or even in Earth's solar system.' She paused, but I had nothing to say.

She went on. ‘The first victim was a Security operative called Ruiz, Carlos Ruiz. His job was to patrol the ore-storage yards – specifically, ore from the Ganymede operations. Anyway, when he died and the epidemic began spreading, they went through his things looking for clues and found a kind of black crystal, which they packed up with the rest of his stuff and sent off to the GHO in New York. And when they analysed it, it scared the shit out of them.'

‘And do we know why?'

‘Because, chemically, it contained nothing unusual – calcium, iron, potassium, manganese, a few trace elements – but for some reason it was completely crystallised. And in an entirely unknown way. By all our laws of chemistry and physics, it was totally impossible. It simply couldn't exist.'

‘And that scared them?'

‘Too right it scared them. Don't you see?'

Of course I didn't see.

It's not that I'm all that dense. But my specialties are history and literature. Ask me anything about the politics in the lead-up to the Revolution, or great screenplays of the first and second centuries, and I'll talk your ear off, but science . . .