ViraVax (18 page)

The Colonel did not feel the violation or the guilt that he usually felt when faced with the fact of Project Labor. Right now he felt only anger, even though he himself had commanded similar operations once they had saddled him with ViraVax.

Project Labor had meant he was marked as a rabbit. They had thought he might run, defect, turn rogue. They knew he was Catholic, and they did not trust him to oversee an operation aimed at Catholics. He would not have supported this program aimed at any human being. He had been an old-fashioned soldier even when he was young, one who gave and valued loyalty.

Would they have done it if I’d fought them, or if I’d gone public?

It scalded him that they had been right about him. He was a good soldier, he kept his mouth shut. The results overburdened his loyalty.

Yolanda and El Indio’s youngest child, La Fey, was retarded. Many more retarded children born in Costa Brava these days, all trisomy twenty-one, Down syndrome. Project Labor did it, and even after he saw it implemented, the Colonel had kept quiet.

But now, how could he tell El Indio, or Yolanda? Easier to load the story anonymously onto the networks, addressed to the Church. That way he wouldn’t have to face anyone.

But now he had to face El Indio.

“I can’t tell you about that operation right now,” Rico said. “I wish I could. It does not threaten us here. I promise you that I will give you every detail when this is over.”

Rico swept his hand around the room, indicating the dozens of electronic communications devices that the guerrillas had moved into the room during the past hour. Other rooms and other condos were equally full.

“I guarantee you, if we get my boy and that girl out, I will give you enough information to keep all of this equipment busy for a long time to come. . . .”

“So,” El Indio challenged, “you would use your son as the hostage now. We lost eight good men to that drone. Now, you say,
if
we get your son back. . . .”

“Dammit,” Rico snapped, “you know what I mean. Whether we find him or not, whether we get him back or not, I will still load your system. I owe you that. I owe a lot of people that. But that is then and this is now.”

“You are not my enemy, Jabalí,” El Indio reassured him. “You are overtaxed, and in pain. You know I will help you in this, no matter what.”

Rico squeezed the bridge of his nose and rested his eyes for a moment. He breathed slowly, deeply, and relaxed himself. He wanted another drink but poured himself a coffee instead. He knew that he was headed into one of his hair-trigger moods, and it wouldn’t take much to detonate him.

“I know that,” Rico said with a sigh. “Thank you.”

Chapter 24

Each time Marte Chang left her quarters, a pair, then six, then a dozen round-faced, Asian-eyed, pear-shaped people pressed around her. They approached cautiously, patting one another and jabbering up their courage to touch her. The Innocents lived for touch, and their stubby fingers explored her hair and her skin. Only one of them, David, had noticed her Asian eyes, so similar to his own.

“Look!” David said when she climbed aboard his cart.

He pointed to her eyes, then to his own, and laughed.

“We’re almost the same,” he said.

“What do you mean ‘almost’?” Marte asked. “We’re both human, aren’t we?”

Marte had been curious for some time to see how the Innocents viewed themselves. Innocents were divided into classes, based on relative ability or disability, and David was definitely upper-class. He read maps and memorized all the topside routes. He exhibited no rocking behavior, no self-destructive tics that many of the Innocents suffered.

“We’re both human, aren’t we?” Marte repeated.

David contemplated her question for a moment, staring at a knot of workers gathering at their lockers. Then he smiled.

“Tongue?” he asked, and stuck his own out for inspection.

“What?” Marte said.

Her ear wasn’t tuned yet. Shirley had told her it would take time, but that had been nearly two months ago. Even when she heard a keyword from one of them, she had trouble unless it was in context.

“Don’t respond to the keyword unless it’s an emergency,” Shirley had told her. “We’re all supposed to encourage them to speak the whole idea out.”

“See your tongue?” David asked.

He grabbed his own by the tip and pulled it out of a big grin to show her.

Marte was taller than any of the Innocents, and when they looked up to her, their faces eager, hugging one another, she wanted to gather them up in her arms. She did not think about what was happening to them in Practical Medicine on Level Three, or in Mishwe’s lab on Level Five.

She stuck out her tongue and David squealed at the sight, at once amused at the spectacle and aware that there was a difference.

That was what the group pressed around her now was doing, laughing and sticking out their tongues. They pushed one another to get closer, but none of them clung to her, as they sometimes did. That was the hardest for her: she hated to let them go.

Marte shut her door against the gentle press of their bodies. She leaned her forehead against the cool steel and listened. They went about their version of small talk, which took a moment, no more, and they left.

Marte remembered the morning, after her glimpse at Level Five, when she had shouted at the Innocents around her. She had frightened them terribly, and they fell over one another, howling and crying, in a stampede of soft flesh and sobs.

Marte Chang let her own tears roll, now that her door latched behind her and she had tissues in hand. She knew it had been coming, tears for all those hundreds of thousands of betrayals perpetrated against innocent humans. Tears for herself, trapped here in something way over her head.

Destroying this facility won’t even be enough,
she thought.
In fact, we may need the facility to stop the spread of damage already done.

Dajaj Mishwe, the worst of the worst, probably would be spared just for access to his brain. She had done what Mariposa had asked: she had stirred things up, challenged Casey, siphoned off huge gulps of data. Casey seemed completely unintimidated by her queries, her accusations, and he went so far as to volunteer further information supporting her charges. The implication was clear.

He does not intend for me to leave.

Marte wiped her eyes and blew her nose, and saw that the wait-state display on her Sidekick had changed from a tiny holographic rainbow to a butterfly.

Mariposa!

Marte felt relief and a rush. Contact with the outside world had become her drug, as Shirley had warned. Now Marte readied her packet on Project Labor, a long tale of involuntary sterilization and insidious conception. Marte hated this part of the burst—the wait, the final two-minute countdown to transfer. Marte wanted it to be time for the Agency download the minute she found something new, and she was finding something new every minute.

“Go ahead,” Mariposa would say, “wish your life away.”

The butterfly began to wink off and on.

Yes!

Marte set her hands into the glove-like controls of her system. She keyed the protocols and waited.

Mariposa had set Marte up for her position inside ViraVax, which had been the black hole of information. Not only did nothing come out, but probes that went in were followed to their source. That source and its operator were destroyed, physically and completely.

From Mariposa’s coded instructions and protocols, Marte helped her weave a carrier resonance pathway into the dispatches between the Agency and Casey. During that time, Mariposa and Marte could converse in bursts, as the data was fed, or they could load and unload prepackaged cargo. Either way, their messages piggybacked on the data bursts flung between the Agency and ViraVax.

Marte prepared a packet of files and synopsis of her meeting with Casey to transmit to Mariposa, and did so when the butterfly’s wings began to flap. Simultaneously, her instruments indicated that she was receiving a similar load from Mariposa.

The load was a return on her inquiry about Mishwe. It did nothing to set her at ease.

Mishwe was born in Jerusalem twenty years sooner than she would have guessed. He saw four countries razed around him as a child. His father was an interpreter and middleman, and his mother a terrorist. Both died young. They left him in care of an uncle, who figured out how to get Mishwe’s inheritance without having Mishwe. The uncle signed him on with a Children of Eden boarding school.

“Though this was a politically and environmentally correct choice,” the load narrated, “certain cousins labeled it a contravention of their religion and beat the uncle to death with tire irons.”

The Children of Eden already had Mishwe, and his money.

Here the story ended with images of that painfully beautiful, dark-eyed boy. Marte knew all too well the peculiarities of the Gardeners’ beliefs. Photographs constituted graven images to the Children of Eden. Having a graven image made for oneself transgressed vanity and precipitated self-worship. One mirror was allowed per household, solely for grooming purposes, above the bathroom sink.

Mariposa had one of her best people inside the Records Department of the Children of Eden. Awards for Mishwe, certificates of intelligence, scholarships abounded, but no more pictures.

“Dajaj had always been a bright, intense child,” the load went on. Her screen displayed a file dramatization of a schoolroom among the Children of Eden. “He blossomed intellectually under their various testings and placements, but he never opened up as a person.”

It was obvious to Marte that Children of Eden became his parents. They nourished and purified his body, Temple of the Lord, and showed deep respect for his mind. This respect, by all appearances, was genuine.

If the Gardeners were his parents, then Calvin Casey was Grandfather. The PR people explained to Mishwe that he had received a scholarship, directly from Calvin Casey. They said that the great man, the Master himself, had saved Mishwe from certain death in the streets. At age seven, it’s unlikely that Mishwe knew any better, but it was good bonding material.

No one showed more devotion in his tenure at Eden Wood than Dajaj Mishwe. Besides tithes, the Gardeners gave the fruit of their mandatory recycling—paper, glass, plastic and metals. Once a week Mishwe reported to the sorthouse to bundle newspapers and magazines, and to prepare the glass and plastics for the weekly meltdown. Marte imagined that Dajaj loved this part, watching the pots of glass redden, twitch and liquefy. Before supper, he stacked the finished ingots for tally and shipping. Nothing was wasted, everything belonged to the Lord.

In Mishwe’s first term at second-level, the dean of science informed the headmaster that an inordinate number of laboratory animals died at the hands of his prize student. When challenged, Mishwe defended himself by stating simply, “I study the physiology of life. To accomplish that, things must die.”

The PR people hurried in to smooth things over, and Mishwe never made a public statement again.

Before he was seventeen, Dajaj Mishwe wrote illuminating papers on the moment of death, already having dispatched thousands of animals in his thirst for data. Animal shelters provided most of his victims, abandoned dogs and cats. Humans came soon enough.

He was questioned, in his ninth year at Eden Wood, over the death of a seventh-year female, but he was never arrested. Gel was found on the body, of a type for and on the sites of EKG and EEG electrodes. Puncture wounds were found, too, where core samples had been taken of right thigh muscle and tibia, and blood from the left femoral artery. One group of locals blamed the murder on alien scientists from a UFO scout ship. That was as close as they got to Dajaj Mishwe.

On each of Mishwe’s three unsuccessful missions for the Church, bodies with similar wounds were found in the nearby communities. He was recalled by the Church, then assigned to serve out his two years as a missionary for the brand-new research component of ViraVax. Mission work became a standard recruiting practice for ViraVax. From the very beginning, ViraVax preferred brilliant, malleable loners from among their own ranks, young men who bonded with their mission team for life.

No non-Gardener who accepted a ViraVax contract has ever been seen alive again,
Marte recalled.

Casey’s offer of permanent employment looked frightening, indeed.

“Because of his high intellect,” the load revealed, “Mishwe has always selected environments and conditions that offered him privacy and a ready supply of animals. He’s the kind of psychotic who would walk into a feed store with a tennis racket under his arm and buy a bucket of baby chicks to go.”

This last was live, but on a burst-delay and encrypted.

Marte had no time to reply before the Agency briefing ended, their pathway severed behind it. The visual went blank for a moment, and the rainbow motif returned.

Marte was shocked when Mishwe’s face filled her monitor. The camera pulled back, and he stood in the neutral zone between the transport station and her Level Two labs.

Mishwe was no longer allowed to intimidate her in person, so he had to settle for electronic methods.

“So now we are both confined to our areas,” he said. “There is much to be done in this lab, and you have curtailed my freedom to accomplish my projects. Your scurrying about and your tattling backfired on you, so now two of us are working under unnecessary limitations. This will not do.”

“You frighten me,” she said, finding it easier to admit to his image than to his face. “I cannot work if I’m afraid to be alone with you, or to encounter you in the hallways. You would harm me, given the opportunity, wouldn’t you?”

Mishwe did not laugh, but a dry wheeze escaped his throat and he shook his head.

“Harm you?” Mishwe’s emphasis was on the “harm,” not the “you.”

“You misrepresent me, Dr. Chang. I might study you to death, but to
harm
you . . . no, not harm for the sake of harm.”

“You should be locked up.”

Mishwe cracked the first genuine smile she’d seen from him.

“You are seeing how I belong here,” Dajaj said. “We are fellow prisoners in the grasp of science.”

“You don’t belong anywhere.” Marte’s voice was a bare whisper, a rasp on stone in the dark. “And I’ve got a contract, I’m no prisoner.”

“No?” Dajaj smiled, and shook his head. “Try to leave. Especially now, after your. . . revelations to Dr. Casey. You don’t belong anywhere. I belong here. I’m perfect here. I can live forever here.”

The sickness in her stomach did not come from the danger, from Mishwe’s perfect smile. It came from the truth. She belonged nowhere, to no one, and Dajaj Mishwe did. If she stayed here, even to fight him, she might become him. She had nowhere to go; he had only to bide his time. Mishwe, Casey, Shirley . . . none of them expected her to leave ViraVax alive.

They would channel her where they wanted, take what she put out, milk her for more, then sell her to the slaughterhouse where Dajaj Mishwe was chief butcher. They had known all along that, one way or another, she would be here
forever.

I cannot look away from his eyes,
she thought.
I
must not be seen to run.

She smiled, though her stomach churned again, then smiled wider.

“I may not belong anywhere, but I’m where I belong because I’m here,” she said.

“Zen shit,” he said. “Chill.”

Mishwe’s calm, contemplative exterior contrasted greatly to his usual frenetic self. Marte thought that he looked like one of his iguanas in the wet morning grass, cooled down enough to slow even an eyeblink to languor.

Yet Mishwe was no reptile. He stood, solid and quiet and unbowed, with his back to one of the positive-pressure intakes for the lab’s air supply. The slight breeze fanned the air nearly to flame around him. She imagined the heat from his body to be unbearable, and the passageway narrow.

Twice before in their encounters in the passageways he had thrown off a transitory, tangible heat that forced her back a step. Just as quickly, it had died. Now Mishwe rubbed his arms as though to warm them and stepped out of the viewer without so much as a nod. He was more subdued than she’d ever seen him.

Somebody tossed some water on his campfire,
she thought.

She shuddered to think what Mishwe could have done, in the light of what the load revealed, that made him this contrite, penitent and subdued. Then she sighed, screwed up her courage and started her plan—find her way out of “lab arrest,” determine what had the facility in such an uproar and get the hell out of ViraVax any way she could.