by Peter Watts
Please, Sawyer thought. Don't hurt her. I'm sorry. I—
"You know, I bet you cheated," the machine mused. "I bet this pissy little larva shouldn't even be here. Ah well. Like I said before, you were right. About real people. They really do die all the time."
Please. Oh dear God give me strength, let me move, at least give me strength enough to beg—
Bright as the sun, a fiery proboscis licked down through the darkness and set Kayla alight.
The botfly turned and regarded Trevor Sawyer through a dark cyclopean eye, while his child screamed and blackened.
"Why, there goes one now," it remarked.
"For Mandelbrot," Desjardins whispered. "In memory."
He freed the botfly to return to its appointed rounds. It would not be able to answer any of the inevitable questions resulting from this night, even in the unlikely event that anyone could trace it back to the honeycombed residential warren at 1423-150 Cushing Skywalk. Even now it could only remember a routine patrol along its prescribed transect; that was all it would remember, until a navigational malfunction sent it on a suicidal corkscrew into the no-go zone around Sudbury's main static-field generator. There wouldn't be enough left afterwards to reconstruct so much as a lens cluster, let alone an event log.
As for the bodies themselves, even the most superficial investigation would reveal telling indications of Trevor Sawyer's resentment over his forcible conscription into the Health Corps, and previously-unsuspected family ties to the M&M regime recently risen to power in Ghana. Nobody would waste time asking questions after that; those associated with the Madonna's New Order were notorious for their efforts in bringing down the old one. With Sawyer's hospital clearance and medical expertise, the damage he could have done to the law-abiding members of the community was incalculable. Sudbury was better off without him, whether he'd been killed by his own or whether some vigilant 'lawbreaker, near or far, had tracked him to his lair and terminated his terrorist activities with extreme prejudice.
It wasn't as though these kind of surgical strikes didn't happen all the time. And if some 'lawbreaker was behind it, it was—by definition—all for the best.
One more item checked off the to-do list. Desjardins wrapped Mandelbrot in his t-shirt and headed outside, cradling the bloody bundle against his bare chest. He was drowning in a vortex of emotion; he was empty inside. He tried to resolve the paradox as he ascended to ground level.
Grief, of course, for the loss of a friend he'd had for almost ten years. Satisfaction for the price exacted in return. And yet—he had hoped for more than this grim sense of a debt restored. He had hoped for something more fulfilling. Joy, perhaps, at the sight of Trevor Sawyer watching his wife and child burn alive. Joy at the sight of Sawyer's own immolation, flesh crisping from the bones, eyeballs bursting like great gelatinous grubs boiled in their sockets, knowing even there at the end, feeling it all, he'd never even found the strength to whimper.
Joy eluded Desjardins. Granted he'd never felt it any of the other times he'd balanced the books, but he had hoped for more this time. Certainly, the cause had been more heartfelt. But still: only grief, and satisfaction, and—and something else, something he couldn't quite put his finger on...
He stepped outside. Pale morning light rose on all sides. Mandelbrot was growing cold and stiff in his arms.
He took a few steps and turned to look up at his castle. It loomed huge and dark and ominous against the brightening sky. Before Rio, a small city's worth of would-be saviors had labored there. Now it was all his.
Gratitude, he realized, astonished. That's what he felt. Gratitude for his own grief. He still loved. He could still feel, with all his heart. Until this night and this loss, he had never been completely sure.
Alice had been right all along. Sociopath was far too small a word to contain whatever it was he had become.
Perhaps he'd go and tell her, once he'd laid beloved Mandelbrot to rest.
DisArmor
Leave Cadavers Here Only
Unauthorized Disposal Will Be Prosecuted
N'AmAt/CSIRA Biohazards Statute 4023-A-25-sub5
It was a three-walled enclosure, open to the sky, south of the 184 just outside Ellsworth. The sign had been sprayed onto the inside of the rear wall; the smart paint cycled through a half dozen languages, holding on each for a few seconds in turn. Clarke and Ouellette stood at the open side, looking in.
The grated floor was crusted with old lime, cracked and scaling like a dried-up desert lake bed. It was obviously years since it had been replenished. Four bodies lay on that substrate. One had been carefully set to rest with its arms folded across its chest; it was bloated and black, squirming with maggots beneath a nimbus of flies. The other three were desiccated and disarrayed, like clumps of leaves strewn about and abandoned by a strong wind. Limbs and one head were missing.
Ouellette gestured at the sign. "They actually gave a damn back in the old days. People would end up in jail for burying their loved ones in the back rose garden. Endangering the public health." She grunted, remembering. "They couldn't stop ßehemoth. They couldn't stop the coattail plagues. But at least they could lock up some poor old woman who hadn't wanted to see her dead husband go up in flames."
Clarke smiled faintly. "People like to feel, what's the word..."
"Proactive," Ouellette suggested.
"That's it."
Ouellette nodded. "To give them their due, though, it was a problem back then. There were a lot more bodies lying around—they were stacked up to your shoulder, even out here. For a while, cholera was killing more people than ßehemoth."
Clarke eyed the structure. "Why stick it way out here?"
Ouellette shrugged. "They had them everywhere."
Clarke stepped into the enclosure. Ouellette put a restraining hand on her shoulder. "You better stick with the older ones. There's no end to the things you could catch off that fresh one."
Clarke shrugged off the hand. "What about you?"
"I'm broad-spectrumed up to here. There's not much that can get me."
The doctor approached the cadaver from upwind, for all the good it did; the light breeze wasn't nearly enough to dispel the stench. Clarke, keeping the greater distance, fought the urge to gag and closed on her own assignment of body parts. She held out her can of steriwrap like a crucifix and pressed the stud; the wizened, one-legged body at her feet glistened as the aerosol laminate hardened on its surface.
"These are actually in pretty good shape," Ouellette remarked, spraying down her own corpse. "Not so long ago you had to check twice a week if you wanted to find a leg bone connected to a knee bone. Scavengers had a field day." She was spraying it on thick, Clarke noted without surprise. She might be immune to whatever diseases festered in that body, but it still wasn't going to be any treat to carry it around.
"So what changed?" Clarke asked.
"No more scavengers."
Clarke rolled the mummified remains with her foot and sprayed down the other side. The wrap hardened in seconds. She scooped the shrouded body into her arms. It was like carrying a loose bundle of firewood. The steriwrap squeaked faintly against her diveskin.
"Just feed it into Miri," Ouellette told her, still spraying. "I've already changed the settings."
The MI's tongue stuck out to starboard. Crinkly silver foil lined its throat. Clarke set the remains on the pallet; the tongue began to retract as soon as the weight had settled. Miri swallowed and closed her mouth.
"Do I have to do anything?" Clarke called.
"Nope. She knows the difference between a live body and a dead one."
A deep, almost subsonic hum sounded briefly from within the MI.
Ouellette dragged a humanoid cocoon from the compound. Its bloated features had vanished entirely under layers of fibrous plastic, as though Ouellette were some monstrous spider given to gift-wrapping prey. The surface of the shroud was peppered with the bodies of trapped insects, half-embedded. They twitched, dying, against their con
straints.
Clarke reached out to give Ouellette a hand. Something sloshed faintly as the weight shifted between them. Miri opened her mouth—empty again—and belched hot, dusty breath into Clarke's face. The tongue extended as though from some enormous, insatiable baby bird.
"Can your skin breathe in that thing?" Ouellette asked over Miri's second helping.
"What, my diveskin?"
"Your real skin. Can it breathe under all that copolymer?"
"Copolymer's pretty much what I've worn for the past five years. Hasn't killed me yet."
"It can't be good for you, though. It was designed to keep you alive in the deep sea; I can't imagine it's healthy to wear it in an atmosphere all the time."
"Don't see why not." Clarke shrugged. "It breathes, it thermoregulates. Keeps me nice and homeostatic."
"In water, Laurie. Air has completely different properties. If nothing else, I bet you've got a Vitamin K deficiency."
"I'm fine," Clarke said neutrally..
The MI hummed contentedly.
"If you say so," Ouellette said at last.
Miri gaped for more.
They plotted their course by derelict road signs and inboard maps. Ouellette steadfastly refused to go online. Clarke had to wonder at the stops marked along their route. Belfast? Camden? Freeport? They'd barely been dots on a map even before the world ended: why not go to Bangor, just a few klicks to the north? That was where the people would be.
"Not any more," Ouellette said, raising her voice above a frenetic orchestral seesaw she’d attributed to some Russian maniac called Prokofiev.
"Why not?"
"Cities are the graveyard of Mankind." It had the ring of a quote. "There was this threshold, I don't remember what it was exactly. Some magic number of people per hectare. Any urban center was way up on the wrong side of it. Something like ßehemoth, set loose in a high-density urban area—not to mention all the ancillary pathogens that hitched a ride in its wake—it takes off like a brush fire. One person sneezes, a hundred get sick. Germs love crowds."
"But small towns were okay?"
"Well, not okay, obviously. But things didn't spread as fast—the spread's still going on, actually. The towns were small and seasonal, and the areas in between were pretty much owned by the whitecaps." Ouellette gestured at the withering foliage scrolling past the windshield. "This was all privately owned. Rich old rs and Ks who didn't mingle, had good medical. They're gone now too, of course."
Gone to Atlantis, Clarke surmised. Some of them, anyway.
"So the big cities had exactly two choices when Firewitch came calling," Ouellette continued. "They could either throw up the barricades and the static-field generators, or they could implode. A lot of them couldn't afford generators, so they imploded by default. I haven't been to Bangor since fifty-three. For all I know they never even cleaned up the bodies."
They got their first live customers at Bucksport.
They pulled off the main drag at about two a.m., next to a Red Cross Calvin cycler with a worrisome yellow telltale winking from its panel. Ouellette examined it by the light of an obsolete billboard, running on stored solar, that worked ceaselessly to sell them on the benefits of smart cloth and dietary proglottids.
"Needs restocking." She climbed back into Miri and called up a menu.
"I thought they got everything they needed from the air," Clarke said. That's what photosynthesis was, after all—she'd been amazed to discover how many complex molecules were nothing more than various combinations of nitrogen, carbon, and oh-two.
"Not trace elements." Ouellette grabbed a cellulose cartridge, its compartments filled with red and ochre paste, from the dispensing slot. "This one's low on iron and potassium."
The billboard was still hawking its nonexistent wares the next morning when Clarke squeezed herself into Miri's toilet cubicle. When she came out again, two silhouettes were plastered against the windshield.
She stepped carefully over Ouellette and climbed up between the bucket seats. Two Hindian boys—one maybe six, the other verging on adolescence—stared in at her. She leaned forward and stared back. Two pairs of dark eyes widened in surprise; the younger boy emitted a tiny yelp. The next second both had scampered away.
"It's your eyes," Ouellette said behind her.
Clarke turned. The doctor was sitting up, hugging the back of the driver's seat from behind. She blinked, gummy-eyed in the morning light.
"And the suit," she continued. "Seriously, Laurie, you look like some kind of cut-rate zombie in that get-up." She reached behind her and tapped the locker in the rear wall. "You could always borrow something of mine."
She was getting used to her alias. Ouellette's unsolicited advice was another matter.
A half-dozen people were already lined up when they climbed out into daylight. Ouellette smiled at them as she strode around to the back of the vehicle and lifted the awning. Clarke followed, still sleepy; Miri's mouths opened as she passed. The throat's silver lining had withdrawn, exposing a grid of sensor heads studding the cylindrical wall behind.
Icons and telltales flickered across the panel on Miri's backside. Ouellette played them with absent-minded expertise, her eyes on the accumulating patients. "Everybody's standing, nobody's bleeding. And no obvious cases of ßehemoth. Good start."
Half a block behind the billboard, the two children Clarke had surprised pulled a middle-aged woman into sight around the corner of a long-defunct restaurant. She moved at her own pace, resisting her children as though they were eager dogs straining to slip the leash. Further down the road, picking his way across scattered debris and asphalt-cracking clumps of grass, a man limped forward on a cane.
"We just got here," Clarke murmured.
"Yup. Usually I blast the music for a couple of minutes, just to let people know. But a lot of the time it isn't even necessary."
Clarke panned the street. A dozen now, at least. "Somebody really spread the word."
"And that," Ouellette told her, "is how we're going to win."
Bucksport was one of Ouellette's regular stops. The locals knew her, or at least knew of her. She knew them, and ministered unto them as she always had, her omnipresent music playing softly in the background. The sick and the injured passed like boluses of food through Miri's humming depths; sometimes the passage would take only moments, and Ouellette would be waiting at the other side with a derm or injection, or some viral countervector to be snorted like an antique alkaloid. Other times the patients would linger inside while the MI knitted their bones back together, or spliced torn ligaments, or burned out malignancies with bursts of focused microwaves. Occasionally the problem was so obvious that Ouellette could diagnose it with a glance, and cure it with a shot and a word of advice.
Clarke helped when she could, which was rarely; Miri maintained its own inventories, and Ouellette had little need of Clarke's limited expertise in fish bites. Ouellette taught her some basics on the fly and let her triage the line-up. Even that wasn't entirely successful. The rules were easy enough but some of the younger ferals recoiled at Clarke's appearance: the strange black skin that seemed to ripple when you weren't quite looking; the little outcroppings of machinery from flesh; the glassy, featureless eyes that both looked at you and didn't, that belonged not so much to a human being as to some unconvincing robot imposter.
Eventually Clarke contented herself with the adults, and gave them vital tips while they waited their turn. There was, after all, more to dispense than medical attention. Now, there were instructions.
Now, there was a plan.
Wait for the missiles, she told them. Watch the starbursts; track the fragments as they fall, find them on the ground. This is what you look for; this is what it is. Take whatever samples you can—soil in mason jars, rags swept through aerosol clouds at ground zero, anything. A teaspoon-full might be enough. A tin can, half full, could be a windfall. Whatever you can get, however you can get it.
Be fast: the lifters may be coming. Grab what you
can and run. Get away from the impact zone, hide from the flamethrowers any way you can. Tell others, tell everyone; spread the word and the method. But no radio. No networks, no fiberop, no wireless. The ether will fuck you up the ass if you let it; trust only to word-of-mouth.
Find us at Freeport, or Rumford, or places between. Come back to us: bring us what you have.
There may be hope.
Augusta made her skin crawl. Literally.
They approached from the east, just before midnight, along the 202. Taka took them off the main drag in favor of a gravel road a short ways down the gentle slope of the Kennebec River valley. They parked on a ridge that overlooked the shallow topography below.
Everything this side of the river had been abandoned; almost everything on the far side had been, too. The bright core that remained huddled amidst a diffuse spread of dark, empty ruins left over from the good old days. Its nimbus reflected off the cloud bank overhead, turned the whole tableau to grainy, high-contrast black-and-white.
Faint gooseflesh rippled along Clarke's arms and nape. Even her diveskin seemed to be, well, shivering, a sensation so subtle it hovered on the threshold of imagination.
"Feel that?" Ouellette said.
Clarke nodded.
"Static-field generator. We're just on the outer edge of the field."
"So it gets worse inside?"
"Not right inside, of course. The field's directed outward. But yeah, the closer you get to the perimeter, the more your hair stands on end. Once you're inside you don't feel it. Not that way, at least. There are other effects."
"Like what?"
"Tumors." Ouellette shrugged. "Better than the alternative, I guess."
A cheek-to-jowl cluster of lights and architecture rose against the dark, its outlines suggesting the contours of a crude, pixelated dome. The new Augusta was obviously squeezing every cubic centimeter it could out of the safe zone. "We going in there?" Clarke asked.