View from Ararat (12 page)

I shook my head.

‘These were ordinary elements – or, rather, ions and anions of ordinary elements. The crystallisation was what was unusual. All known crystalline forms are based on one of thirty-two possible symmetrical arrangements of the crystal's flat-plane surfaces.'

She paused again to make sure I was getting it. I smiled and she continued. ‘All known solids crystallise in basically the same way. Symmetrical, intersecting flat-plane structures. But these CRIOS crystals have curved surfaces – which is impossible.

‘Ordinary elements don't behave in extraordinary ways in any logical universe. And that's exactly what scared them.'

She scrolled through a few files as if she was refreshing her memory, but it was just an act. She was preparing her next point. Ordering it in her head.

‘The Crystal Death is different from any epidemic in history. Because it isn't a disease. It isn't even a poison. If you touch a crystal, it doesn't put something into your bloodstream that poisons your system or invades your cells. Nothing that complicated. All it does is to somehow pass on a tendency for certain elements in your body's chemical make-up to crystallise in a new and frightening way. Your bloodstream, your limbs and your organs quite literally turn to stone.'

She paused, but it wasn't for effect. After a single deep breath she went on. ‘But the really scary thing is, you don't have to come into contact with the original crystal. Every single microscopic crystal produced by the process becomes what's called a seed-crystal. Which means it carries the potential to pass on the crystallising tendency. So every time an infected victim touches anything at all, a trace is left behind – on a surface, a wall, an apple. Even on a piece of clothing.

‘Nothing is safe. Touch the contaminated object and it's passed on. It's called fomite transmission. According to the GHO reports, they tested it out in every way possible, and the only way to stop the transmission was to raise the temperature to just under 100 degrees Celsius. At that point, the crystallisation breaks down, and when the element is re-cooled, it seems to follow normal physical rules again. The tendency doesn't re-emerge.'

‘That's great . . . Isn't it?'

She shook her head again. ‘Not really. About the maximum you can heat a human being to before you kill them is just over 40 degrees. Of course, that doesn't mean there couldn't be some chemical solution that destroys the crystal or reverses the process without killing the patient. But where do you start looking?'

The troubled expression returned to her face. Now that the introductory lecture was over, whatever it was that had brought her here resurfaced. I waited.

‘Which brings us to Vesta.'

‘Vesta?'

‘It's the name of the containment procedure they used in Puerto Limon, half a century ago. They slapped a Level Seven security rating on it. Even Hansen couldn't crack it.'

‘And?'

‘Think about it. All the research on the CRIOS seed-crystals leads to dead ends. No one has a clue about this thing – where it comes from, how it could possibly happen, what to do about it. Nothing. Yet they can develop a “containment procedure” – not a cure – that “officially” controls the outbreak almost overnight. Doesn't that strike you as odd?'

‘Now you come to mention it, yes. I guess it does.'

As far as I was concerned, everything she was talking about was odd.

‘I decided to check up on a few things myself. Do you know what you get if you run a ROM-file search on “Puerto Limon”?'

I didn't. Kaz tapped a few keys and the data-scan retrieved one of her stored files. I read the screen over her shoulder. She'd already edited the read-out, so there was none of the usual historical/geographical background data, just the digest version. A couple of short paragraphs:

In recent times Puerto Limon is best known as the site of the worst act of politico-industrial terrorism of the post-Depression period. On the evening of May 10th, 2332, Earth standard, a high-yield thermal-fusion device was detonated near the JMMC ore-processing complex in Puerto Limon, completely destroying the complex and most of the company suburb of Callas. Over ten thousand people died in the conflagration that followed.

Evidence uncovered by the NBI and private Security operatives led to the arrest and conviction of a cell of Radical Anarchists [See: Popular Political Movements – 23rd/24th Century] led by Bonito ‘the Beast' Goncalves. Twenty-seven men and fourteen women were executed for the crime, though they never claimed responsibility and died protesting their innocence. The horrified public backlash destroyed the support-base of the once-powerful Neo-Anarchist cause in the South Americas.

For a moment neither of us spoke. Then she stood up and walked across to the window, looking out.

‘I looked up Vesta, too. Charlie told me it was a city in Costa Rica, not far from Puerto Limon – probably where they set up the control centre for the crisis. But there's another meaning.' She turned to face me. ‘Vesta was the Ancient Roman goddess of the hearth. Her temple was famous for the fire that always burned there.

‘Jules, the bastards knew there was only one thing that killed the Crystal. Heat. They nuked the whole place to make sure they obliterated it. Ten thousand people.' She snapped her fingers in the air. ‘Just like that. And they even had the balls to plant evidence, and shift the blame onto their political opponents. What kind of warped mentality . . .'

As the words trailed off, I moved across to stand behind her. She was shaking her head in disbelief. Tentatively I put my arms around her, and slowly she sank towards me.

I felt her body relax, and I was about to say something comforting and pointless, but she spoke again.

‘I have to go there.'

‘Where?'

My mind was still back on Earth, at Puerto Limon, watching the flames.

‘To the camp. There's only a couple of volunteer doctors there, and a few technicians. For all those people—'

‘No!'

I stepped back and turned her to face me. She stared at me in surprise and . . . I couldn't read the other emotion I saw there, but it might have been disappointment.

I tried again. ‘Look at the data, for Christ's sake! One hundred per cent contagious and fatal. It's suicide to go there.'

There was so much I wanted to say, but she just looked at me. And with that one look, the arguments evaporated. I knew her reputation. When Kaz Chandros made up her mind, nothing changed it. Not Hoskins, not the Island Council, not a thermo-nuclear explosion.

She wasn't asking for my approval. She was stating a fact.

‘It's not suicide. Not with the proper precautions. But I can't just sit here and do nothing.'

‘What about the research?' I shot one last bolt. ‘Maybe you could . . .'

But it was useless. I trailed off, and she touched my cheek.

‘I'm a doctor. It's what I chose to do. I do research, but I'm not a Researcher like Charlie. I can't detach myself from the physical the way she can. I need to be hands on. Doing something. I can't just sit back and analyse data while real people are dying.'

I looked down, away from her face, and found myself staring at her hands. Delicate, yet strong. Long, thin fingers, nails cut short for surgery. No jewellery.

She was speaking again – almost a whisper. ‘I know what I'm doing, Jules. I don't need anyone's permission. But right now, I really don't want to be alone. Hold me?'

She slid her arms around my waist, and I drew her towards me, kissing her hair gently.

We stood in silence for a very long time, while the rain streaked the glass and the wind moved the trees outside the window.

12

Into the Maelstrom

Carmody Island

Inland Sea (Eastern Region)

20/1/203 Standard

KAZ'S STORY

When the pager went off, we'd just got to sleep. Jules had his arm around me, and there was no way I could get up without waking him. So I didn't try.

‘I have to go,' I said, sliding out onto the cold floor. ‘Emergency.'

‘Want me to come?' he asked, but I shook my head.

‘Nothing you can do. Go back to sleep.'

But he didn't roll over. He lay there staring at me as I got dressed. Then he spoke.

‘This is never going to happen again, is it?'

‘What do you mean?' I asked. For a moment I didn't understand the question.

My mind was on the pager message. Inge Hyams was slipping away from us, and that wasn't something I could allow to happen without a fight.

‘I mean,' he went on, ‘tonight. What happened. It's never going to happen again.'

I stopped dressing and looked at him. He seemed . . . I don't know, resigned.

And I realised he was right.

A rainy night, the horror of what was about to overtake us, a moment of self-doubt.

And Jules. Safe, warm and willing to help me block out the fear.

I remembered his touch, his gentle caress, the care he took. I remembered crying afterwards, and holding him, and how he whispered me gently into sleep.

He loved me. I knew that. I'd known it for a long time. And I suppose that's why he saw through me, even before I saw through myself.

He deserved more than I could offer him. He deserved to be loved back.

‘No,' I said finally. ‘It'll never happen again.'

He looked at me for a moment longer, then smiled sadly and shrugged, a small movement of his shoulders.

‘They need you,' he said. ‘You'd better go.'

For a moment I held his gaze, then I reached down for my shoes.

When I looked back, he was lying with his face towards the wall.

The pager sounded again as I was headed for the door.

Carmody Island

Inland Sea (Eastern Region)

20/1/203 Standard

KAEBA

01:29:15
. She wakes with a start and looks across to where Loef is already sitting up on his bed-platform. He returns her look, and his thought-tone grows in her mind.

–
You felt it?

– Loef, he is dying. Can we not . . .?
But her question remains unfinished, as she sees suddenly into his intentions.

Before the discussion can continue, the wave of fear swells again inside her mind, as powerful as anything she has ever experienced. Unfiltered emotion. Human pain. Alien thoughts.

But pure. Uncontaminated by the alien speechwords. For this mind has never known the sound of speech. Nor anything but the rhythmical swell of heart and blood. And the unknown world as a distant rumble. Never until this moment, when that life-rhythm suddenly slows, and the pain grows unbearable.

–
Come
. . .

Already Loef is sliding from the platform, heading for the door.

She rushes to join him, and together they make their way out into the pre-dawn dark.

–
This way
. . .

Her instruction is unnecessary. The pain, the fear, is like a beacon in the darkness.

As they approach the island's small medical centre, the baby's wordless terror floods over them a third time, drawing them on, desperately. Insistently . . .

Med-centre

Carmody Island

Inland Sea (Eastern Region)

20/1/203 Standard

KAZ'S STORY

On the bed Inge Hyams was lying motionless, the way she had for over a month, her bandaged head held rigid by the metal frame encasing it.

Her breathing was the steady, mechanical hiss of the respirator, her heartbeat was a small, efficient, negative-pressure reflex-pump. Machines filtered her blood and monitored her life-signs. Tubes delivered sustenance and removed waste. But for all its advances, there was nothing medical science could do to reverse the kind of injuries she had sustained, and the machines round the bed achieved squat, except to stave off the inevitable.

The fall had done too much damage. Unlike the cells of the limbs or the other organs, the delicate complexity of brain tissue or spinal cord can't be regenerated in cloning tanks. In every real sense, Inge Hyams was dead. She had been dead from the moment she was brought in from where they'd found her, bleeding and broken, at the base of that sickening drop.

Under the circumstances, even the faint life-signs discovered in ER were amazing. But then came the discovery of the child growing inside her. A child who still lived and moved . . .

That the tiny child had survived for so long was a miracle – if you believed in such things, which I didn't. But the miracle was rapidly going sour.

I studied the read-out on the body scan and shook my head. I was just twenty-one. I was out of my depth, and sinking.

And I was desperate.

Wendy, the nurse, must have read my feelings. She put an experienced hand on my shoulder.

‘You can't do it, Kaz. It's barely eighteen weeks, and it has too much going against it. It'll never survive the shock of a caesarean. Look, it's not your fault. You've done everything humanly possible.'

For a few seconds we looked at each other. Then I broke.

I'd had enough – Charlie, the outbreak, the thing with Jules . . . and now this. It wasn't Wendy's fault. She just happened to be in the firing line.

‘He's a
child
, for Christ's sake, not an “it”! And I haven't worked this hard for this long to let him die now.'

She didn't blink. ‘Okay, “he”. But you can't change the facts. He's too young, and he's too weak and unstable. Kaz, I know they've saved them younger, but not under these conditions. Look at the foetal distress levels. Take him now and the shock will kill him before we can even get him on life support. This isn't Edison Central Paediatrics. We don't have the back-up. Without the mother to incubate him, we're screwed. Maybe if we tried—'

‘We've tried everything already. Look at the read-out. Her vital functions are failing. And the placental blood-flow is forty points below critical. He's borderline oxygen-deficient already. If we don't do it now, he'll die anyway. And I'm not going to let it happen without a fight.'

The anger dissipated as fast as it had arrived, but now it was replaced by a stubborn determination. She nodded reluctantly, and I looked back towards the figure on the bed, steeling myself for what was to come.

It was hopeless and we both knew it, but there wasn't a choice. A caesarean was a one-in-a-million shot. Waiting around for the child to die was no shot at all.

I sensed the door sliding open behind me and I turned. Loef and Kaeba were standing maybe three or four metres away looking up at me.

‘What . . .?' I began, but the presence that grew in my mind drove away all thought of speech.

Loef. And he was as desperate as me.

–
The child is afraid. We must take away the fear or he will die. His pain is great . . .

He moved towards the bed, his eyes still focused on mine.

–
I can help . . .

For a moment I hesitated, but only for a moment. Somehow I trusted him. I nodded and Loef approached the motionless body where it lay on the bed. It was high off the floor, and he climbed up onto a chair to gain the height he needed.

Then he reached out both hands and placed them on the comatose woman's distended abdomen.

I moved up behind him and whispered, ‘I have to take him immediately. In a few minutes he will be dead if I don't.'

Without looking towards me, the young Elokoi nodded, in human fashion.

–
I know this. So I must prepare him. He is scared. But he must not fear. And he must not feel the pain, or he . . . he cannot survive. I must . . . find . . . I . . . must . . . I . . .

Suddenly he was falling from the chair, rolling limply in the air, and landing hard on his back, his eyes staring, his long fingers clenching and unclenching in a spasm of pain and fear.

I froze momentarily at the suddenness of it, but before I could bend to assist him Kaeba moved between us.

–
Quickly. He has taken the child's pain. And his fear. You must do it now. With speed. Please. He cannot bear it long . . .

She placed her hands on her kinbrother's head, closing her eyes. She sent nothing more.

For a few seconds I stared at the pair. Then the years of discipline took over and I turned to Wendy. ‘Let's do it.'

As I spoke, I moved towards the bed and began the preparations. My left foot depressed a pedal and the bed was suddenly isolated behind creolite screens which glided up out of the floor all around.

The subdued overhead glow-lights were enhanced by a bank of blinding incandescents focused on the bed, and the whole area was bathed in the slightly orange aura of a sterilisation field, to ensure it was free of all potential infectious threats.

A robot assistant tracked in through a panel in one of the screens, on its tray an ordered selection of shining instruments. I looked across at Wendy. ‘Ready?'

She nodded slightly but said nothing. She had already pulled away the thin gown which covered the woman on the bed.

‘Laser.' I spoke the order to the robot, and held out my hand, palm up, feeling the slight slap as the instrument was placed firmly in my grasp. Thumbing the control, I watched the thin, red line of light as I directed it in a careful arc across the tight skin. There was a wisp of smoke and the slightest smell of burning, and then the skin began to open . . .

LOEF

. . . down inside there is nothing but fear. And the pain.

Physical, all-consuming. Searing his nerve-endings and burning across his very sense of being like a flame. Suddenly the wordless, uncomprehending terror, so seemingly powerful outside, is amplified a thousand times. It digs dark claws into his soul, tearing at his core of self, and he is trapped within the storm of raging, unformed thoughts. A chaos of timeless, alien instincts that surge wordlessly, insistently, and tell of flowing blood-rivers and warm salt-ocean swells and huge-leafed ancient trees. And of the deep, primeval hunger to survive.

He is buffeted. Floating, falling, sinking through a universe of time and memory. Of race. Of species. Of a world far-gone. Forgone.

Sinking. Spiralling downwards.

Down towards the distant centre. Falling.

Falling

Spiralling and falling.

A lifetime/A moment . . .

And then the sudden emptiness, the soul-deep visceral silence. The eye of the maelstrom.

In that measureless instant, floating without motion, disembodied, beyond reason and time, with the terrors and the drives and the rivers of instinct flowing, revolving around him, he is opened.

Finally he understands.

With invisible arms he reaches out from that single point of soul to embrace the unembraceable and draw it to himself.

–
I know you . . .
he whispers/he shouts. And he waits . . .

A moment/An eternity.

–
I know you . . .
the reply comes back.

Not shouted. Not whispered. Not an empty echo of his call, but an answer. It swells from beyond him and within him. It courses through him like blood.

–
I know you.

–
I know you.

–
I know . . .

JULES'S STORY

And that was it.

I like to think that all those days spent burrowing through my intimate secrets had somehow helped prepare him for what happened in that operating room, but in the end I think it was just Loef. It was what made him special – that quality I'd sensed back in Al-Tiina all those months earlier.

I guess what surprised me was that it happened so quickly. But isn't that what they say? All the truly great events are accidents – a unique, unpredictable series of coincidences that change forever the way things will be.

Kaz took the baby just in time. Within an hour Inge Hyams was gone. But the baby was safe in the tech-womb, connected to the life support, monitored, and calm. At some point during the operation the foetal distress reading had suddenly levelled off, and according to Kaz that was the deciding factor.

We buried Inge in the island graveyard. There were no relatives. Her mother and father were dead and she had no brothers or sisters. We didn't even know who the baby's father was, and no one came forward to claim him.

So Kaz named him Julius.

It was a popular choice for a name, but I don't think many people understood the significance of it. That's what comes from losing your sense of history.

I didn't see much of Loef for the next couple of months. While the rest of the world was falling down around our ears, he spent just about every waking moment – and most of the sleeping ones – in the I-C ward, just sitting beside the child. I visited him at times, but there wasn't a whole lot of point. He hardly knew I was there. It was like his whole concentration was focused, absorbed, by his communion with the child.

Kaeba too. When she wasn't with Cael, studying the Thoughtsongs, she was seated beside Loef. Sharing.

I felt almost cheated that I couldn't be part of what was happening in that hospital room. I'd been left behind as they began their journey along a road I wasn't equipped to travel.

First Kaz, then Loef.

It's funny. You go through your whole life, independent, fulfilled, completely satisfied with your lot, with who you are and the direction you have chosen, then suddenly it isn't enough. For a brief moment you taste something different, you allow it inside your defences, and suddenly you want more. But though it floats there, tantalisingly close, it might as well be a universe away. And part of you knows it.

I stood there in the doorway and watched them. And I knew that I was witnessing Deucalion's future. The future of my race.