by Greg Egan
I grilled Mr Walker as gently as I could. His children’s movements for most of the week were like clockwork; the only time during the window of infection when they’d been anywhere but work or home was Thursday night. Both had been out until the early hours, Lisa visiting Paul, Ben visiting his girlfriend, Martha Amos. Whether the couples had gone anywhere, or stayed in, he wasn’t certain, but there wasn’t much happening locally on a weeknight, and they hadn’t mentioned driving out of town.
I phoned Martha Amos; she told me that she and Ben had been at her house, alone, until about two. Since she hadn’t been infected, presumably Ben had picked up the virus from his sister sometime later – and Lisa had either been infected by Paul that night, or vice versa.
According to Paul’s mother, he’d barely left the house all week, which made him an unlikely entry point. Statesville seemed to be making perfect sense: customer to Lisa in the store (Thursday afternoon), Lisa to Paul (Thursday night), Lisa to Ben (Friday morning). Next stop, I’d ask the store owner what she remembered about their out-of-town customers that day.
But then Ms Scott said, ‘Thursday night, Paul was over at the Walkers until late. That’s the only time he went out, that I can think of.’
‘He went to see Lisa? She didn’t come here?’
‘No. He left for the Walkers, about half-past eight.’
‘And they were just going to hang around the house? They had nothing special planned?’
‘Paul doesn’t have a lot of money, you know. They can’t afford to go out much – it’s not easy for them.’ She spoke in a relaxed, confiding tone, as if the relationship, with all its minor tribulations, had merely been put on hold. I hoped someone would be around to support her when the truth struck home in a couple of days.
I called at Martha Amos’s house. I hadn’t paid close enough attention to her when I’d phoned; I could see now that she was not in good shape.
I asked her, ‘Did Ben happen to tell you where his sister went with Paul Scott on Thursday night?’
She stared at me expressionlessly.
‘I’m sorry, I know this is intrusive, but no one else seems to know. If you can remember anything he said, it could be very helpful.’
Martha said, ‘He told me to say he was with me. I always covered for him. His father wouldn’t have … approved.’
‘Hang on. Ben wasn’t with you on Thursday night?’
‘I went with him a couple of times. But it’s not my kind of thing. The people are all right. The music’s shit, though.’
‘Where? Are you talking about some bar?’
‘No! The villages. Ben and Paul and Lisa went out to the villages, Thursday night.’ She suddenly focused on me properly, for the first time since I’d arrived; I think she’d finally realised that she hadn’t been making a lot of sense. ‘They hold ‘‘Events’’. Which are just dance parties, really. It’s no big deal. Only, Ben’s father would assume it’s all about drugs. Which it’s not.’ She put her face in her hands. ‘But that’s where they caught Silver Fire, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know.’
She was shaking; I reached across and touched her arm. She looked up at me and said wearily, ‘You know what hurts the most?’
‘What?’
‘I didn’t go with them. I keep thinking: If I’d gone, it would have been all right. They wouldn’t have caught it then. I would have kept them safe.’
She searched my face, as if for some hint as to what she might have done. I was hunting down Silver Fire, wasn’t I? I ought to have been able to tell her, precisely, how she could have warded off the curse: what magic she hadn’t performed, what sacrifice she hadn’t made.
And I’d seen this a thousand times before, but I still didn’t know what to say. All it took was the shock of grief to peel away the veneer of understanding: Life is not a morality play. Disease is just disease; it carries no hidden meaning. There are no gods we failed to appease, no elemental spirits we failed to bargain with. Every sane adult knew this, but the knowledge was still only skin deep. At some level, we still hadn’t swallowed the hardest-won truth of all: The universe is indifferent.
Martha hugged herself, rocking gently. ‘I know it’s crazy, thinking like that. But it still hurts.’
* * *
I spent the rest of the day trying to find someone who could tell me more about Thursday night’s ‘Event’ (such as where, exactly, it had taken place; there were at least four possibilities within a twenty-kilometre radius). I had no luck, though; it seemed microvillage culture was very much a minority taste, and Statesville’s only three enthusiasts were now incommunicado. Drugs weren’t the issue with most of the people I talked to; they just seemed to think the villagers were boring tech-heads with appalling taste in music.
Another night, another motel. It was beginning to feel like old times.
Mike Clayton had gone dancing, somewhere, on the Tuesday night. Out in the villages? Presumably he hadn’t travelled quite this far, but an unknown person – a tourist, maybe – might easily have been at both Events: Tuesday night near Greensboro, Thursday night near Statesville. If this was true, it would narrow down the possibilities considerably – at least compared with the number of people who’d simply passed through the towns themselves.
I pored over road maps for a while, trying to decide which village would be easiest to add to the next day’s itinerary. I’d searched the directories for some kind of ‘microvillage nightlife’ web site – in vain, but that didn’t mean anything. The address had no doubt made its way, by electronic diffusion, to everyone who was genuinely interested; and whichever village I went to, half a dozen people were sure to know all about the Events.
I climbed into bed around midnight, but then reached for my notepad again, to check with Ariadne. Silver Fire had made the big time: video fiction. There was a reference in the latest episode of NBC’s ‘hit sci-fi drama’, Mutilated Mystic Empaths in N-Space.
I’d heard of the series, but never watched it before, so I quickly scanned the pilot. ‘Don’t you know the first law of astronavigation! Ask a computer to solve equations in 17-dimensional hyper-geometry … and its rigid, deterministic, linear mind would shatter like a diamond dropped into a black hole! Only twin telepathic Buddhist nuns, with seventh-dan black belts in karate, and enough self-discipline to hack their own legs from their bodies, could ever hope to master the intuitive skills required to navigate the treacherous quantum fluctuations of N-space and rescue that stranded fleet!’
‘My God, Captain, you’re right – but where will we find … ?’
MME was set in the twenty-second century, but the Silver Fire reference was no clumsy anachronism. Our heroines miscalculate a difficult trans-galactic jump (breathing the wrong way during the recitation of a crucial mantra), and end up in present-day San Francisco. There, a small boy and his dog, on the run from Mafia hitmen, help them repair a vital component in their Tantric Energy Source. After humiliating the assassins with a perfectly choreographed display of legless martial arts amid the scaffolding of a high-rise construction site, they track down the boy’s mother to a hospital, where she turns out to be infected with Silver Fire.
The camera angles here grow coy. The few glimpses of actual flesh are sanitised fantasies: glowing ivory, smooth and dry.
The boy (whose recently slaughtered accountant-for-the-mob father concealed the truth from him) bursts into tears when he sees her.
But the MMEs are philosophical: ‘These well-meaning doctors and nurses will tell you that your Mom has suffered a terrible fate – but in time, the truth will be understood by all. Silver Fire is the closest we can come, in this world, to the Ecstasy of Unbeing. You observe only the frozen shell of her body, but inside, in the realm of shunyata, a great and wonderful transformation is at work.’
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
Boy dries tears, theme music soars, dog jumps up and licks everyone’s faces. Cathartic laughter all round.
(Except, of course, fro
m the mother.)
* * *
The next day, I had appointments in two small towns further along the highway. The first patient was a divorced forty-five-year-old man, a technician at a textile factory. Neither his brother nor his colleagues could offer me much help; for all they knew, he could have driven to a different town (or village) every single night during the period in question.
In the next town, a couple in their mid-thirties and their eight-year-old daughter had died. The symptoms must have hit all three more or less simultaneously – and escalated more rapidly than usual – because no one had managed to call for help.
The woman’s sister told me without hesitation, ‘Friday night, they would have gone out to the villages. That’s what they usually did.’
‘And they would have taken their daughter?’
She opened her mouth to reply, but then froze and just stared at me, mortified, as if I was blaming her sister for recklessly exposing the child to some unspeakable danger. There were photographs of all three on the mantelpiece behind her. This woman had discovered their disintegrating bodies.
I said gently, ‘No place is safer than any other. It only looks that way in hindsight. They could have caught Silver Fire anywhere at all – and I’m just trying to trace the path of the infection, after the event.’
She nodded slowly. ‘They always took Phoebe. She loved the villages; she had friends in most of them.’
‘Do you know which village they went to, that night?’
‘I think it was Herodotus.’
Out in the car, I found it on the map. It wasn’t much further from the highway than the one I’d chosen purely for convenience; I could probably drive out there and still make it to the next motel by a civilised hour.
I clicked on the tiny dot; the information window told me: Herodotus, Catawba County. Population 106, established 2004.
I said, ‘More.’
The map said, ‘That’s all.’
* * *
Solar panels, twin satellite dishes, vegetable gardens, water tanks, boxy prefabricated buildings … there was no single component of the village which couldn’t have been found on almost any large rural property. It was only seeing all of them thrown together in the middle of the countryside that was startling. Herodotus resembled nothing so much as a twentieth-century artist’s impression of a pioneering settlement on some Earth-like – but definitely alien – planet.
A major exception was the car park, discreetly hidden behind the huge banks of photovoltaic cells. With only a bus and two other cars, there was room for maybe a hundred more vehicles. Visitors were clearly welcome in Herodotus; there wasn’t even a meter to feed.
Despite the prefabs, there was no army-camp feel to the layout; the buildings obeyed some symmetry I couldn’t quite parse, clustered around a central square, but they certainly weren’t lined up in rows like quonset huts. As I entered the square, I could see a basketball game in progress in a court off to one side; teenagers playing, and younger children watching. It was the only obvious sign of life. I approached, feeling a bit like a trespasser, even if this was as much a public space as the main street of any ordinary town.
I stood by the other spectators and watched the game for a while. None of the children spoke to me, but it didn’t feel like I was being actively snubbed. The teams were mixed-sex, and play was intense but good-natured. The kids were Anglo-, African-, Chinese-American. I’d heard rumours that certain villages were ‘effectively segregated’ – whatever that meant – but it might well have been nothing but propaganda.
The microvillage movement had stirred some controversy when it started, but the lifestyle wasn’t exactly radical. A hundred or so people – who would have worked from their homes in towns or cities anyway – pooled their resources and bought some cheap land out in the country, making up for the lack of amenities with a few state-of-the-art technological fixes. Residents were just as likely to be stockbrokers as artists or musicians and, though any characterisation was bound to be unfair, most villages were definitely closer to yuppie sanctuaries than anarchist communes.
I couldn’t have faced the physical isolation, myself – and no amount of bandwidth would have compensated – but if the people here were happy, all power to them. I was ready to concede that in fifty years’ time, living in Queens would be looked on as infinitely more perverse and inexplicable than living in a place like Herodotus.
A young girl, six or seven years old, tapped my arm.
I smiled down at her. ‘Hello.’
She said, ‘Are you on the trail of happiness?’
Before I could ask her what she meant, someone called out, ‘Hello there!’
I turned; it was a woman – in her mid-twenties, I guessed – shielding her eyes from the sun. She approached, smiling, and offered me her hand.
‘I’m Sally Grant.’
‘Claire Booth.’
‘You’re a bit early for the Event. It doesn’t start until nine-thirty.’
‘I—’
‘So if you want a meal at my place, you’d be welcome.’
I hesitated. ‘That’s very kind of you.’
‘Ten dollars sound fair? That’s what I’d charge if I opened the cafeteria – only there were no bookings tonight, so I won’t be.’
I nodded.
‘Well, drop in around seven. I’m number twenty-three.’
‘Thank you. Thank you very much.’
I sat on a bench in the village square, shaded from the sunset by the hall in front of me, listening to the cries from the basketball court. I knew I should have told Ms Grant straight away what I was doing here; shown her my ID, asked the questions I was permitted to ask, and left. But mightn’t I learn more by staying to watch the Event? Informally? Even a few crude first-hand observations of the demographics of this unmodelled contact between the villagers and the other local populations might be useful – and though the carrier was obviously long gone, this was still a chance to get a very rough profile of the kind of person I was looking for.
Uneasily, I came to a decision. There was no reason not to stay for the party and no need to make the villagers anxious and defensive by telling them why I was here.
* * *
From the inside, the Grants’ house looked more like a spacious, modern apartment than a factory-built box which had been delivered on the back of a truck to the middle of nowhere. I’d been unconsciously expecting the clutter of a mobile home, with too many mod cons per cubic metre to leave room to breathe, but I’d misjudged the scale completely.
Sally’s husband, Oliver, was an architect. She edited travel guides by day; the cafeteria was a sideline. They were founding residents, originally from Raleigh; there were still only a handful of later arrivals. Herodotus, they explained, was self-sufficient in (vegetarian) staple foods, but there were regular deliveries of all the imports any small town relied on. They both made occasional trips to Greensboro, or interstate, but their routine work was pure telecommuting.
‘And when you’re not on holidays, Claire?’
‘I’m an administrator at Columbia.’
‘That must be fascinating.’ It certainly turned out to be a good choice; my hosts changed the subject back to themselves immediately.
I asked Sally, ‘So what clinched the move for you? Raleigh’s not exactly the crime capital of the nation.’ I found it hard to believe that the real-estate prices could have driven them out, either.
She replied without hesitation, ‘Spiritual criteria, Claire.’
I blinked.
Oliver laughed pleasantly. ‘It’s all right, you haven’t come to the wrong place!’ He turned to his wife. ‘Did you see her face? You’d think she’d stumbled onto some enclave of Mormons or Baptists!’
Sally explained, apologetically, ‘I meant the word in its broadest sense, of course: an understanding that we need to resensitise ourselves to the moral dimensions of the world around us.’
That left me none the wiser, but she was clearly
expecting a sympathetic response. I said tentatively, ‘And you think … living in a small community like this makes your civic responsibilities clearer, more readily apparent?’
Now Sally was bemused. ‘Well … yes, I suppose it does. But that’s just politics, really, isn’t it? Not spirituality. I meant …’ She raised her hands, and beamed at me. ‘I just meant the reason you’re here, yourself! We came to Herodotus to find – for a lifetime – what you’ve come here to find for a few hours, yourself!’
* * *
I heard the other cars begin to arrive while I sat drinking coffee with Sally in the living room. Oliver had excused himself for an urgent meeting with a construction manager in Tokyo. I passed the time with small-talk about Alex and Laura, and my Worst Ever New York Experience horror stories – some of which were true. It wasn’t a lack of curiosity that kept me from probing Sally about the Event, I was just afraid of alerting her to the fact that I had no idea what I’d let myself in for. When she left me for a minute, I scanned the room – without rising from my chair – for any sign of what she might have come here to find for a lifetime. All I had time to take in were a few CD covers, the half-dozen visible ones on a large rotating rack. Most looked like modern music/video, from bands I’d never heard of. There was one familiar title, though: James Springer’s The Cyber Sutras.
By the time the three of us crossed the square and approached the village hall – a barn-like structure, resembling a very large cargo container – I was quite tense. There were thirty or forty people in the square, most but not all in their late teens or early twenties, dressed in the kind of diverse mock-casual clothing that might have been seen outside any nightclub in the country. So what was I afraid was going to happen? Just because Ben Walker couldn’t tell his father about it, and Mike Clayton couldn’t tell his mother, didn’t mean I’d wandered into some southern remake of Twin Peaks. Maybe bored kids just snuck out to the villages to pop hallucinogens at dance parties – my own youth resurrected before my eyes, with safer drugs and better light shows.