View from Ararat

by Caswell, Brian

  For a moment longer he stares at the corner, but she is gone. He turns and continues his solitary journey.

  At the entrance to the infirmary he goes through the complex ceremony of cleansing and changing.

  In the anteroom steaming jets of boiling water sear the outer layer of the suit. Twenty seconds is the optimum duration. Less and the effect is incomplete, more and you begin to cook.

  After that there is the ritual disrobing. The helmet, then the suit with its built-in boots and finally the gloves disappear down the chute into the incinerator, where a Celsius temperature of 1,000 degrees reduces it to vapour, which is drawn off into a holding tank and condensed. The suit is a masterpiece of design, and a tribute to the efficiency of Deuc technology. It can be donned in seconds, in case of emergency, and removed alone, without the necessity of touching the potentially contaminated outer skin.

  Inside, the crew is already on deck.

  Lomax and Cerruti are at the console, monitoring the vital stats on a bank of read-outs and vid-screens. Burke stands by the double-glazed window looking into the isolation ward, dictating quietly into the v-a pick-up of her punchboard, and Fromme sits staring at the ceiling, weaving a small glass stick in and out of the fingers of her right hand.

  There are tears streaming from her eyes. She’s losing it . . .

  Jerome Hamita almost gives in to the urge to comfort the young technician, but something keeps him from reaching out to her.

  In the end, what is the point? From the beginning they have been nothing but the deathwatch – witnesses to the inevitable, keeping records, monitoring the deterioration, easing the pain for as long as the drugs have any effect.

  Disposing of the remains.

  He turns towards the observation window and looks in at the rows of beds. A robot nurse tracks silently along between the beds, stops, turns on its tracks, and extends a telescopic scanner over one of the motionless bodies.

  After a few seconds Lomax says, to no one in particular. ‘We’ve lost bed seventy-seven.’

  He leans forward and touches a red button on the console. Activated by the single action, a process begins which they have seen so many times that no one bothers watching any more. The nurse tracks backwards and another machine approaches. In a single motion it sheathes the body and the thin mattress in a skin of plastic and lifts the load onto a stainless-steel tray, before reversing out through the sliding doors at the end of the ward. Beyond the doors are the incinerators, where the body from bed seventy-seven will be vaporised.

  In front of Lomax, and slightly to his left, the number seventy-seven flashes red on a screen for a few seconds, and beside it, a name: RIOS, Graçia Xaviera. Then the number ceases its flashing and the name blinks out of existence. He stares at the blank line on the screen. Bed seventy-seven is empty.

  She had a name, Lomax . . . Jerome frames the words, but does not speak them. They all have names . . . Thirty thousand souls. Thirty thousand living, breathing individuals, with their dreams and their fears. And we failed them . . .

  Already the politicians have begun distancing themselves from the fallout, portioning out the blame. What else could you expect? Over ten thousand deaths in the first two weeks, and no solution in sight to save the rest of the inmates of what is already being called the Death Camp.

  Not the kind of record that wins elections.

  And with the smug certainty that always comes after the event, the news networks are trotting out panels of ‘expert’ commentators, with their ideas for what should have been done in the first place – but absolutely no ideas for what should be done now.

  Lab tests show that the seed-crystals break down into their constituent elements in a few seconds at a little below 100 degrees Celsius – which gives some hope for decontamination procedures, but none for the treatment of infected individuals.

  Jerome turns to Burke who has returned to her seat at the console.

  ‘How many new admissions, Katie?’

  She looks up at him and shakes her head. ‘Just one since yesterday evening. They know there’s no hope. They’ve practically stopped coming. I guess they prefer to die in their homes.’

  ‘Where they survive just long enough to infect everyone else.’ Cerruti looks up from the console directly at Jerome. It is a challenge, part of the ongoing tension that has built in the control-centre. ‘It’d be more humane to put a laser to their heads and fry their poor doomed brains as soon as they showed the first symptoms. Then vaporise the remains as quickly as possible. What the hell are we doing here? Prolonging their agony, that’s all. I didn’t get into medicine to help run death row. I—’

  Jerome turns to face him, holding the younger man’s gaze with a glare that stops the flow of his words.

  ‘Firstly, Cerruti, if they are showing symptoms, then they’ve already infected everyone else in their hut. That’s a ninety-nine-point-nine per cent certifiable fact. Maybe we should have isolated each individual family from the beginning. Locked them in their huts and fed them through a trapdoor until we were sure what was happening. Maybe it would have slowed the spread. But we didn’t, and it’s too late now to worry about what we should have done. Christ, no one really believed there was a problem. We’re just lucky that someone pushed hard enough to isolate them from the rest of the population.

  ‘Secondly, I don’t know about you, but I didn’t go into medicine to play God. One or two patients are holding their own. The little girl in bed seventeen has been in here for six days and she’s still alive. That’s at least twice as long as any one else has survived. Why is that? Can she fight it off somehow? At this point I don’t know, and neither do you. But fry her brain and you’ll never know.

  ‘What the hell do you think we’re doing here, Cerruti? We’re the god-damned deathwatch. We rob the dying of their secrets. We care for them – as much as we can – and we gather the data. There are hundreds of people out there searching for a cure, and the more they know about this thing, the more chance they have of finding one. We may not be able to save the victims, but we may help discover something that can save the others. Do you have something better to do with your time? Because if you do, get the hell out of here and do it!’

  Carmody Island

  Inland Sea (Eastern Region)

  19/1/203 Standard

  JULES’S STORY

  I opened the door and she was standing there, soaked to the skin from the rain.

  ‘Can I come in?’

  Dumb question. I’m sitting alone on a rainy night trying to figure out whether to watch something boring on the tube, or go back to the work I didn’t want to do in the first place, when Kaz Chandros arrives like an angel on my doorstep, looking even better wet than she does when she isn’t soaked to the skin, and asking if she can come in.

  What would I be likely to say? Look, I’ll have to think about it. No. I don’t think so.

  A few minutes in the air-drier and she was back to normal, except for the hunted look behind her eyes.

  ‘OK,’ I said, ‘spill it.’

  ‘Spill what?’ She was stalling, which confirmed my earlier assessment. This wasn’t a social call.

  Still, beggars can’t be choosers.

  ‘Spill whatever it is that’s on your mind. I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but you didn’t come here because you suddenly realised how incredibly attractive I am, and developed an overwhelming desire to run to my home in the rain and rip my clothes off . . . Did you?’

  She smiled. ‘Maybe later.’

  But her smile faded – a little too quickly.

  ‘Where’s your workstation?’

  ‘In the other room . . .’ Suddenly I was looking at her back as she headed in the direction I’d indicated. ‘What is it?’

  ‘The end of the world as we know it.’ Already she was punching in her access-code, and muttering references into the v-a pick-u
p. And the screen was flashing through the nominated files. She talked to me as she worked.

  ‘Charlie downloaded all her information on Crystal Death to the med-centre data frame, and I’ve spent the last few days digging through it.’

  No news there. The whole project was an open secret on the island. Half the kids had already accessed the files, and there were probably more than a dozen bedroom research programs going on as we were speaking.

  ‘And?’

  She turned to me. ‘What do you know about Vesta?’

  I must have looked blank, because she shook her head, mentally back-tracking. She tried again.

  ‘You know about the origin of CRIOS?’ I nodded. ‘Good. Well, the theory is that it was taken back to Earth in a load of ore from Ganymede – one of the moons of Jupiter. The first outbreak was in the ore-processing plant at Puerto Limon in Costa Rica.’

  I nodded again. So far, so good.

  ‘But they don’t think it originated on Ganymede. Or even in Earth’s solar system.’ She paused, but I had nothing to say.

  She went on. ‘The first victim was a Security operative called Ruiz, Carlos Ruiz. His job was to patrol the ore-storage yards – specifically, ore from the Ganymede operations. Anyway, when he died and the epidemic began spreading, they went through his things looking for clues and found a kind of black crystal, which they packed up with the rest of his stuff and sent off to the GHO in New York. And when they analysed it, it scared the shit out of them.’

  ‘And do we know why?’

  ‘Because, chemically, it contained nothing unusual – calcium, iron, potassium, manganese, a few trace elements – but for some reason it was completely crystallised. And in an entirely unknown way. By all our laws of chemistry and physics, it was totally impossible. It simply couldn’t exist.’

  ‘And that scared them?’

  ‘Too right it scared them. Don’t you see?’

  Of course I didn’t see.

  It’s not that I’m all that dense. But my specialties are history and literature. Ask me anything about the politics in the lead-up to the Revolution, or great screenplays of the first and second centuries, and I’ll talk your ear off, but science . . .

  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 pointle
ss, 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.