Virus: The Day of Resurrection (52 page)

Everyone and everything; we’re done
, thought Yoshizumi. A terrible exhaustion assaulted his whole body, and standing up felt like an impossible feat. He searched around for a seat, sat down, and then suddenly the tears overflowed and came pouring down. The green lamp continued to burn without change. As he stared into it—the light like the eye of one of those gigantic reptiles—he tried to look back over those thirty-five busy years that had been his life.

And yet not a thing came to mind. The only thing that he could think of was that at the house in his hometown where everyone had died long ago, the magnolia tree by the side of that towering straw roof must be in bloom, its flowers big and white about now. After that, he gazed at Carter. One side of his face was illuminated faintly by that green light that glowed like some disembodied spirit. Yoshizumi wondered,
In a thousand years, or in two thousand, what will the archaeologists who dig up this underground chamber make of it?
In the ninth underground floor of ancient America’s former top official residence, they would find a skeleton wearing a military uniform, a skeleton in a diving suit with a bullet in his head, and another skeleton—this one belonging to an Asian—wearing the same kind of diving suit. How would they try to solve this mystery? However, he realized right away what was wrong with his line of thinking: there would likely be no humans—let alone archaeologists—left a thousand years from now. Antarctica was a few hours away from a nuclear attack; how many people there would survive?

As he was sitting still there in the darkness, it felt like the time was dragging on endlessly. When Yoshizumi checked his watch, he saw that not even ten minutes had passed since the missiles were launched.

Another thirty-five minutes.

Yoshizumi stood up. He had suddenly remembered the world outside and felt a desire to see the blue sky, the clouds, the sun, the green trees, and those beautiful, empty buildings one more time. With a childlike thrill in his heart, he wanted to walk around through the vacant city, watching as a solitary point of silver in the deep blue sky grew nearer and nearer. For what would almost certainly be the only time in his whole life, he wanted to see with his own eyes the moment when a nuclear missile struck. He didn’t know whether he could make it back to the surface by shimmying up the elevator cable, but he figured he might as well give it a try. On his way to the doorway, however, he tripped slightly over Carter’s body, and in that moment the hands folded over the dead man’s chest were upset and hit the floor with a soft thump. Yoshizumi, looking at him intently, spoke to him in a soft, gentle voice: “I think I’ll stay here after all, Carter.” Once more, he folded Carter’s hands on his chest. “It would be too lonely for you all alone in this darkness.”

After that, he sat back down in the chair again and turned out the light. Bathed in the light of that deathly green lamp, he crouched unmoving and waited.

RESURRECTION DAY

 I
n spring one year, on a white asphalt road that ran through the region of North America once known long ago as the state of South Carolina, a man walked southward. The man was wearing almost no clothing that was recognizable as such, his hair and beard had grown wild, and ragged strips of cloth were tied around his feet. The man was trudging along a national highway, both sides of which were covered in grass, without so much as a shadow of anything else moving on it for as far as the eye could see.

From time to time, the man would look up at the sun and murmur these words: “I’m going south …”

From time to time, the ruins of huge empty cities would appear along his way, but for some reason the man would not approach them. He usually camped out at night, eating fruit from trees whenever he became hungry. When he discovered a group of some strange species of rodent gathered fearlessly on the road, his actions were slow, but he at last caught one or two of them, cut them open with a large knife, and ate them. When he came to rivers, he would catch some fish after many hours’ labor and eat them live. When it rained, he would sleep in ruined buildings by the side of the road. Sometimes he would find canned goods in the buildings, but after staring at them for a long while, he would shake his head sadly and throw them away, seemingly ignorant of how to open them. At one point he wandered into the cul-de-sac that was Florida, and somehow by the height of summer the man had come to the outskirts of Texas. Here this man who was little more than skin and bones fell ill and suffered for a long time inside a house. When summer ended, the man murmured again: “I’m going south …”

His eyes looked as though they were delirious from fever, the color of sanity in them having faded long ago. Even so, he continued walking.

In winter of that year, he became so sick on the Isthmus of Panama that he nearly died. In the pain that assaulted him he gave free rein to his tears, with nothing save weak gasps escaping his lips.

“
Aah. Aah.
”

In the spring of the following year, having somehow managed to cross the Panama Canal, the man was walking along the shore of what had once been called the nation of Colombia. It was there, however, that the long, rusted railways he often tracked ended, and even roads became difficult to recognize. The man lost his way in the Andes, going up again and then down again, and again suffering from illness. Along his way, ghost cities appeared one after another, and though he was greeted by innumerable sun-bleached skeletons, such things seemed not to hold the slightest interest for him. In autumn of the third year, the man stood on a hillside looking down on the great plain of the former Argentina, waving his arms at a flock of birds in flight. “I’m going south!” he shouted. He descended from the hills and stomped his foot on a grass-covered railroad rail. “I have friends in the south!”

The weather grew gradually cooler and finally cold. Yet nevertheless, the man continued walking south.

It was around the time when the ninth year, as counted from the Year of Calamity, was about to dawn. From the long peninsula of iced-over land at the far south, one small, rough, handmade sailboat put to sea and set sail for the north. Most of it had been put together from whatever lumber was on hand. Much of the hull was made of plywood; the rest used plastic boards. It had an auxiliary engine attached that looked like it wouldn’t be much use. Fifteen people boarded this boat. By a shocking stroke of luck, it had made it through the rough waves of the Cape Horn Current, and when it reached land, it dropped off seven people and a supply of foodstuffs. Then it turned around and departed for Antarctica once more. The seven people had a wireless radio with them, and with it they were able to communicate with the peninsula. No sooner had the new year begun than another boat—this one a little better than the first—came and dropped off ten people. The long winter came. Antarctica settled into hibernation, and these seventeen people walked hither and yon across the land.

In December of that year, three boats departed Antarctica and headed for the land. All at once, more than a hundred people made landfall. This little fleet made three round trips, bringing three hundred people to the land. On the third trip, there were young faces of boys and girls among them.

When a group of girls set foot on the shore, a strange figure happened to appear from the shadow of a boulder some ways off from the landing point. Everyone’s eyes went wide at the sight of that figure, and they stared at him in surprise. His hair and beard were both grown out as long as was probably possible, and dressed as he was in worn-out llama skins, like a caveman or a native of some undiscovered land, the people who had come from Antarctica were sure that he wasn’t one of them.

For a moment, the group of people and the strange, solitary man faced one another. Then from among the group a woman’s sharp cry arose.

“That’s Yoshizumi!”

The gray-haired old woman who set out running, stumbling toward him was Irma Auric. At that instant, all of the people saw clearly in that gaunt, grimy, bearded face some vestige of one of the four men who had left them seven years ago.

“Yoshizumi. Oh, Yoshizumi!” Irma held the head of the wild-haired, lice-infested man tightly to her bosom and cried out as tears moistened the deep wrinkles in her face. “You’re alive …
my son
 … it’s been six years … and the H-bombs and the germs didn’t kill you … Six years, and all the way from Washington …”

The man’s dirty face was wet with Irma’s tears. His eyes, too, overflowed with tears. Even so, the light that had been lost to them did not return. Instead, he could only cry out like a newborn, with Irma clutching him to her breast.

“Aaah … aaah …”

HENRI LOUIS DE LA TOUR’S LETTER

 Y
oshizumi lived. And not only that, he
walked
all the way from Washington, DC, to Rio Gallegos, at the southernmost tip of South America. How on earth did he ever do it? At the White House in Washington, he survived in the middle of that missile strike and then was infected with the
original
species
of Linskey nucleic acid bacteria and lived through that as well. It’s impossible, but the fact is that he’s right here with us now. Irma’s been taking care of him day and night and won’t leave his side. How in the world was he able to survive? “Could those mutant WA5PS germs I injected him with when we said our adieus on
Nereid
six years ago have had some immunological effect? Those mutant germs had only just been discovered seven years ago; their effect wasn’t nearly as powerful as the ones we have now. Still, that’s probably what happened. As for the missile, if we assume the one that struck Washington was a neutron bomb, as seventy percent of the ones that fell were, I can understand what must have happened. If he were nine stories underground beneath the White House at the moment the missile hit … he would have avoided being vaporized by the megaton hydrogen bomb, and he wouldn’t have been exposed to a deadly dose of radiation either. But as for the mental damage, it may be due to considerable neutron irradiation in his brain. If that’s the case, it would be a pity, as he’ll have no hope of recovery. And yet in the end, maybe that would be for the best.

Someone who traveled to that land of death for our sake—for Antarctica’s sake—who lived filled with anger because he failed to complete his mission—if someone like that were to learn after all that in the end
not a single Soviet missile had been aimed at Antarctica
—what kind of thoughts would assail him? If one thinks it over calmly, the Soviet Union can’t have been such an unreasonable nation. It was just—we didn’t have so much as a scrap of information, so we were frightened by the phantom of a possibility. Those men who volunteered to go to that dead land and die for the sake of that minute danger, what should we think of them?

Even so, what a bizarre irony that seventy percent of the missiles launched by both sides were neutron bombs! Neutron bombs were nuclear weapons that kill the people without destroying the infrastructure. They’d been called the apotheosis of immoral weaponry. They allow armies to capture strategic facilities and weapons, instead of conquering rubble and ruin. They’re ‘refined nuclear weapons’ that don’t create the ‘ashes of death’ that would envelop the entire world—allied camps included—in the destruction. To think that they would save us from the plague of Linskey nucleic acids that had covered the whole world.

Radiation from the neutron bomb detonations mutated the Linskey nucleic acids. Or to put it differently, in order to make mutants of the host bacteria WA5PS themselves, it was necessary from the start to irradiate them with enough high-energy neutrons to destroy every living thing on Earth. We had a pretty good idea of that much seven years ago. For bacteria to be this resistant to radiation, perhaps it wasn’t a terrestrial species at all; maybe it was something originally from outer space. Of course, seventeen or eighteen years ago, bacteria were discovered living inside uranium ore in Yugoslavia, so it might have had a terrestrial origin after all. In either case, if you bombard WA5PS with neutrons, a percentage of the germs that survive will have become de la Tour variants, and the Linksey nucleic acid metamorphic viruses that can be extracted from them by way of a simple stimulus will consume the original strain and the de la Tour variants alike with incredible energy.

With this understanding, I finally created the de la Tour vaccine a few years back (which strictly speaking isn’t a vaccine; the replication of mutant germs is being suppressed in equilibrium). In nature, however, high-energy neutrons simply don’t exist, so I never imagined that something like this would happen. The de la Tour vaccine is difficult to make, and inoculation is uncertain. Also, there are practically no animals in Antarctica to experiment on. It took three years to finally make enough for twenty people. How my heart trembled with unease when the first seventeen people inoculated with the de la Tour vaccine departed, heading out to set foot on South American soil for the first time in the decade since the Year of Calamity! And then, according to reports from the first research team by way of wireless,
land-based mammals
had recovered in South America, and even in the air near the soil where WA5PS inorganically replicates, the original strain was not found. Imagine my surprise when I learned that instead, they had only been able to determine the presence of harmless variants that bore an astonishing resemblance to the ones I had made.

But when I think about it, it’s all a very stupid story. It does no good to talk about this now, but if I had been thinking just a little, I should have been able to see the analogies to this kind of situation. If I had done that, even though it might surely have been too early to return to the temperate zone—

If there’s any time when a large number of high-energy neutrons are released outside the walls of a reactor, it’s in the explosion of a nuclear weapon—especially the explosion of a neutron bomb. A neutron bomb releases fourteen to seventeen times as many neutrons as an H-bomb. Extremely fast, of course … If this happened, then WA5PS would be eradicated via neutron irradiation due to thousands of neutron bomb detonations on the continents of both the Old and New World, where human beings had already died out. And with the irradiation of the WA5PS, wouldn’t a large number of de la Tour variants be created, unleashing viruses that would consume and destroy the WA5PS? The reproductive power of the de la Tour variants is considerably greater than that of the original strain, so might it not be the ironic case that the new strain at this point drove the original strain of the germ to extinction? It’s a common thing for mutants to be stronger than their progenitors. This is all in the realm of analogy, and there’s no way whatsoever to confirm it, but if this is true, there’s no greater irony.

Why? Although A. Linskey, that great benefactor of Antarctican epidemiology, declined to point it out himself, the idea that WA5PS was originally developed for germ warfare is something frequently suggested by soldiers who heard his broadcast. If this is true, it means that medical science—which was originally created to save people from death and disease—drove our three and a half billion member species to the brink of extinction, and then afterward, nuclear missiles—which were created for no purpose other than the annihilation of mankind—ironically saved the human race.

If these things are factual, there’s no longer anything else left to say. In the face of fate’s irony, amid these overwhelmingly bizarre circumstances, I have a bad feeling in my chest, as if all that was solid has melted into air. In the end, humanity was nothing more than a speck of dust that the universe decided to toy with. To human beings, with our short life spans, the history of our prosperity seemed eternal, and our destruction instantaneous. But weren’t both of these things like two sides of a single frame of film to the universe at large?

This understanding certainly doesn’t render the human spirit powerless. An understanding of the transience of the destinies bestowed on “matter,” “nature,” and even “space” is oddly enough humanity’s most human aspect. Not the things of the vulgar world, but “human existence,” which is clearly distinct from the overwhelming “material existence.” Does it not make the form of the spirit so much more clear? And when it becomes clear that the human spirit is destined for confrontation with matter and battle against coincidence—when it becomes the common knowledge of the age that the opponents we must face are not our fellow human beings, then that will put an end to every family quarrel between human beings, won’t it? And in place of those quarrels, the solidarity we need to confront the material universe will at last be achieved. And wouldn’t this put an end to all of humanity’s schemes for making others suffer, for hurting them, for killing them, and for returning them to mere matter? At the very least, may this understanding become universal while “the world” still exists!

Is it only through an eternity of harsh trial and error that we can learn anything? I say that now, but perhaps the reason I’m writing these notes now is for that time in the far distant future when humanity will again possess the prosperity it did in the days before the Great Calamity. People easily forget their suffering once it passes. The understanding that has become universal among a handful of Antarcticans we may be able to pass on through several of the generations to come—they’ll be living in hard times, after all. However, when a generation comes along that enjoys a lull in these difficulties, the travails of earlier generations will be easily forgotten. When you think about it, we too had gone through this time and again, experiencing a number of terrible wars in the years before the Great Calamity—that superficial battle they called “the war to end all wars” had to be fought a second time, after all.

However, humans can pass on their reminiscences to their descendants and communicate their memories to them. In the hands of someone with talent, vivid facts can be recreated, and through them the understanding of the Antarcticans can be transmitted into the future. This we absolutely must do, so our descendants will not drown themselves in prosperity and vulgarity, lose sight of the lessons of the loss of three and half billion people, and repeat the same foolishness.

Today, at the southern tip of South America, we have our first village—our first city. Now that I think about it, this is the tenth full year since that disaster. Tomorrow, an exploration party including myself will depart northward for the interior. This will be the very first day of the resurrection of humanity in its original birthplace—the Continent of Land—since all humanity, save those exiled to the Continent of Ice, had been wiped out. First day though it may be, it is not yet Resurrection Day. Even among the fauna, humanity has fallen to the state of an overwhelmingly outnumbered species. Its former population of 3.5 billion has dropped to a little more than ten thousand. In order to preserve the race, reproduction takes precedence over all else. Human beings are, for humanity, both the alpha and the omega. If the world of ten years ago could see our societal apparatus putting the preservation and growth of the species first, they’d likely fall over from the shock.

I wonder, however, when humanity’s “Resurrection Day” will truly arrive. Though five thousand years of accumulated civilization were wiped out in one fell swoop, we are certainly still in a much more advantageous position than the people of the Paleolithic era were. All of the facilities of the dead world still remain as they were, and we also have our educations. But it will take a terribly long period of time to reclaim the kind of energy and prosperity we had before the Calamity. Even if we can recover the facilities and the machines, the number of people left to run them is insufficient to the point of insignificance. Moreover, all manner of unknown dangers—disease being first and foremost—are lying in wait for us on the road ahead, and as humans increase in number the human heart will also become dangerous again. How long will it take for humanity to again fill the earth as it did in the days before that great disaster?

No, the world we revive must not be like the one before the Great Calamity. We must not resurrect the gods of envy, the gods of hatred and vengeance. But still, we cannot foretell the future. We may have to go on repeating the stochastic workings of this very inefficient process, wherein only after a near-infinite number of clashes between fellow human beings can that thing we call “intellect” begin to take on the trappings of universal reason. We are the ones who have the first responsibility for making these detours a little shorter.

Tomorrow morning, we head north. We have to breathe life back into the country of the dead. The road north runs far into the distance, and our Resurrection Day is even farther. And the tale of that day does not belong to our generation.