So beautiful . . .
The crimson tinge is fading behind the line of peaks, and the crescents of the twin moons hang like empty parentheses in the darkening sky. Enclosing nothing.
From his duty-position, standing with his gun lowered, Pete Rayston watches the lonely figure standing there before the doorway, perhaps 30 metres away. He allows his gaze to stray to the dead man lying near the wall of the small hut inside the fence.
Bastards!
The man’s angry accusation echoes in his recollection.
I was clean. You killed me . . .
Unconsciously he scratches a small, annoying itch on the back of his left hand, and smears to invisibility the tiny drop of contaminated blood that landed there unfelt a few minutes earlier, when the impact of the flying rock drove it towards him from the damaged face of a doomed man.
When Pete Rayston looks back towards the infirmary at the end of the camp, Karol Wojcik, his friend, has disappeared inside.
PART THREE
LE DÉLUGE
No matter how much you feed a wolf,
he will always return to the forest.
Russian Proverb
Where no hope is left, is left no fear.
John Milton
15
The Sharing
Medical Centre
Carmody Island
Inland Sea (Eastern Region)
22/1/203 Standard
KAEBA
It is dawn. Kaeba is composing a Thoughtsong for them. She sits in the corner, curled up in a large offworlder chair, and explores the Songcolours, tasting the remembered emotions and echoing them, seeking the still-elusive tones and textures that will speak their essential truth.
It is Cael’s idea. The Song exists in the fabric of the events that form it. It sings its colour to the Songmaker, but softly.
– Songmaking, he says, is the capturing of whispers.
A Teller must come to understand the essence of the Song, and one who would aspire to the Telling, even one as talented as Kaeba, must learn. She must learn that there is more to understanding than mere remembering.
– To mimic the tones is to recreate the Song, but to truly understand them is to create it anew – each time, at each Telling. Only then can the Song survive, to live forever in the minds of the clan . . .
Cael’s words. The ancient lore of the Tellers.
. . . to create it anew.
She returns her attention to the echo of the unformed Song. And she recalls the moment of the birthing, when the pain of dying was driven out by the pain of being torn away from the warmth of the woman’s failing womb.
She remembers the instant when the faint blood-shadows became a sudden, searing light, blinding and burning through closed lids. She remembers the moment when the muted sounds of a world unknown, drowned for so long by the beat of blood, and the movement of rib and lung, exploded in a deafening chaos of light and painful sound.
The child, Juulius, lies staring up at the ceiling. He is two days old, but he is like no newborn ever known. For he has Shared. He has Shared in a way that even an Elokoi cub does not Share. He has experienced a meeting of minds so deep and powerful that the link may never be broken, except perhaps by death.
Beside the cot Loef keeps up his vigil, crouching on the floor of the ward, in the manner of his kind. His eyes are closed, but he is not asleep.
She looks towards him, then slowly slips inside . . .
Newman Plaza
Central Edison
22/1/203 Standard
INA
A sudden shove and she is sent stumbling towards the railing. Six floors below, the fountain in the mall changes colour, as the lighting display shifts into another of its random phases, but she is too angry to take much notice.
‘Hey you!’
Her words echo back from the shopfronts, but the man takes no notice. He staggers on, oblivious.
‘Bloody ether-heads.’ She mutters the words to herself and turns to leave, but her anger gets the better of her, and she changes direction abruptly, following him as he weaves away towards the moving footway.
Catching him, she tries again, grabbing his arm to spin him around.
‘Why don’t you watch where you’re going?’ she begins. ‘You could’ve . . .’
But the words run out, as he looks at her for the first time. Something in that look dissipates the anger, and a sudden fear ices through her chest.
He says nothing, trying instead to break free of her hold, but her fingers have locked in place. For in his eyes, behind the gleam of delirium, she has glimpsed his wordless terror.
‘Please . . .’ He falters. The word is a hoarse whisper. A warning. A desperate plea. ‘Get away from me.’
He reaches up to remove her hand, but thinks better of it, and pauses without making contact. His hand is almost rigid, more like a claw than a hand. He stares at it then back at her.
‘Don’t touch me . . . Get away. For God’s sake . . .’
For a moment longer their gazes remain locked. Then he coughs, a sudden chest-deep explosion, and she takes an involuntary step backwards. A second cough, and his hand is up to cover his mouth.
She watches as he stumbles away, but she does not see, as he does not see, the small drops of Crystal-clotted blood on the palm of his hand.
For a moment he loses his balance, and it seems as if he will fall, but at the last instant he reaches out and grasps the railing to steady himself, before continuing on his way.
Later, sitting on the Edison–Roma shuttle waiting for lift-off, she will recall his hunted look and the desperate fear behind his eyes.
And she will scratch at the tiny annoying itch on her cheek, where a small drop of saliva landed unnoticed barely an hour earlier.
Ina Franck will never know his name, or understand what killed her, but as she looks out of the window at the busy flyer-port of Edison, she will understand instinctively that she has looked into the eyes of a dead man.
Then, as the flyer rises from the landing-pad, she will look back from the window, glance at her watch and think of her family at home in Roma, just a short flight away. And the memory of the man will fade from her mind.
And later still, as the flight attendant, her attention already on the second leg of the trip to Elton, reaches across to place a drink on the tray-table in front of her, their hands will touch.
Just slightly. Just for a moment.
But for some things, a moment is more than long enough.
Carmody Island
Inland Sea (Eastern Region)
23/1/203 Standard
JULES’S STORY
Kaz squeezed my hand from behind, and I turned to face her.
‘All quiet?’ She looked past me into the ward as she spoke.
‘As a mouse,’ I replied.
You wouldn’t expect anything else. For the past three days Loef hadn’t moved from beside the cot in the I-C, and most of the time Kaeba was there too. But it was fascinating to watch, all the same. There was a subtle change in both of them when they were near the child – an intensifying of their normal . . . Elokoiness. And don’t ask me to explain that, because there is no explanation.
At times I tried to enter the communion, the way I’d always done with Loef, but there was a barrier. It was not a conscious one. He would never consciously exclude me – we were brothers. But the barrier was there just the same. He had moved beyond me, to a place where I couldn’t follow.
The Linking between the two of them was totally different from anything Loef and I had managed to achieve.
It was deeper and more complete – a connection of souls that drew them down beyond the mere conscious world to something more essential. I was pretty sure that Kaeba could tap into it – mainly because sometimes, when she was in the room, I lost contact with her too
. But she couldn’t explain it to me, when I talked to her later.
– They are growing, she told me once. Soon, Juuls . . . Have patience. The child must learn. Loef must learn. Cael says I must try to Sing it, so that others will understand, because I was there at the birthing. But . . . I cannot find the truecolours for the Telling. Not yet. Perhaps today they will come . . . Perhaps tomorrow . . .
Kaz moved away from the viewing window, and punched an entry into the ’board she was carrying, then placed it on the console.
Inside the I-C, Kaeba shifted in her chair and scratched behind her ear. Then she settled back into her original position.
‘Charlie called earlier.’
Kaz was talking. I dragged my attention away from the scene on the other side of the glass.
‘News?’ I probably didn’t sound particularly hopeful. If there was any news of importance, it would have been the first thing she brought up.
‘Not really. Just checking in. She sounded tired, but . . .’
I watched her. She was smiling slightly.
‘But?’
‘Happy. She’s moved in with Galen.’
For a moment I was floored. ‘You mean . . .’
‘I mean “moved in”, co-habitation. Last night.’
‘Just like that?’
‘What do you mean, “just like that”? They’ve known each other forever.’
I didn’t exactly know what I meant. But I’d started to dig a hole and I couldn’t get out of it. ‘I know, but . . . I mean, he’s . . .’ I looked down at my legs. ‘You know . . .’
‘What? A genius? She’s not all that stupid herself.’
She was pushing my buttons and she knew it. Kaz never did let me get away with much.
‘That’s not what I’m talking about and you know it.’
‘What then?’
‘You know what! He can’t walk. He’s paralysed from the waist down. What kind of life . . .’
I trailed off, partly because of the look that crossed her face, but mainly because I suddenly realised what I was sounding like.
Of course, it was too late.
‘You shit.’ She stepped up and stared into my eyes. ‘Who died and made you God?’
Suddenly I was a microbe under her microscope. Squirming.
‘I didn’t mean—’ I began, but I didn’t get any further.
‘Of course you did! “Some of my best friends are cripples. I just wouldn’t want my sister to marry one.” Christ, Jules. I expected a bit better from you. He’s clever, he’s funny and he loves her. So, what is it? The sex? Because if that’s as much value as you place on a relationship, you can—’
This time I cut in.
‘I’m sorry, alright? I wasn’t thinking. I’m happy for them.’
She looked at me for a moment, like she was deciding whether I was worth the effort of a reply.
Before she decided, a chime rang on her console. Incoming. She held my gaze for a moment longer, then turned towards the screen.
‘Answer,’ she said, in the general directon of the v-a pick-up.
I was watching her back. She was standing between me and the screen, so I didn’t see who was calling, but I recognised the voice.
Charlie.
‘Karen,’ she began, then paused, and something in the way she said that one word made me step around to where I could see her. ‘It’s happened. It just came through. We have an outbreak in Edison. CRIOS has escaped.’
I saw Kaz lean forward using the console for support. I wanted to reach out, to give her my support, but I was frozen to the spot. I couldn’t move.
16
Locking the Gate
NATASSIA’S STORY
There comes a moment in every disaster when things slip beyond the point of no return – when all the preventive solutions are rendered useless and momentum takes over.
For the human community on Deucalion, that moment was reached somewhere in the days before the twenty-third, and, like most pivotal happenings in history, it had passed virtually undetected.
According to Security records released later, they found him wandering disorientated and in terrible pain along one of the main pedestrian malls in the centre of Edison. His name was Peter Anthony Rayston, and he was a Security operative working on the isolation detail outside Wieta. The two guards who found him thought he was drunk or drugged. He was delirious, stumbling from one support to the next, struggling to hold himself erect and mumbling incoherently.
Within three days both the guards were dead, too, but by that stage the news was out. There were outbreaks in most suburbs and the whole city was in a state of panic.
Piecing things together afterwards from the transcripts of the guards’ incident reports, it was pretty clear that by the time anyone was aware of what was wrong, it was already impossible to work out exactly where in the city Rayston had been wandering. Within minutes of being picked up he had lapsed into a coma from which he did not regain consciousness.
Of course, no one knew anything about Pete Rayston or the danger he represented until it was far too late. The government’s ‘need to know’ policy meant that the population was totally unprepared for what was about to hit them, and being unprepared meant that the panic following the eventual revelation was far worse than it might have been if they’d been kept informed from the beginning.
Or was it? Knowing earlier might have made for a more orderly evacuation of the affected areas, but what was the point? This was Deucalion. Outside the settled areas of the major cities it was one of the most desolate places that humans had ever tried to inhabit. There weren’t a whole lot of places to escape to.
Especially as no other community on the planet was about to accept refugees under such conditions.
I was working the city desk that week. Forsythe was on holidays somewhere up Elton way, visiting his children, and I was filling in. So I was at the console when the announcement came in. President Müller would be making an address to the nation at five o’clock.
There was no word on what the subject would be, but I had a strange premonition that it wasn’t to announce that he’d been swapped at birth with someone named Renos Kohl.
Presidential Complex
New Geneva (City Central)
23/1/203 Standard
TERRY
‘It’s not going to work, you know.’ Leon Müller, the seventeenth President of the Republic of Deucalion stands in front of the full-length mirror and studies his appearance, brushing at an imagined mark on the lapel of his jacket. ‘They’re going to freak out, no matter what spin we try to put on it. They all know about Wieta, or they think they do, thanks to that bitch on Internet, and when they find out how bad it’s going to get, we’ll be lucky to escape with our skins, let alone get re-elected.’
Behind him, Terry Eiken, his aide, shakes his head and looks away, silently tasting the words he would like to say.
Re-elected! In a month they could all be dead, and no one even bothered to mention the danger to them until it was too late to do anything about it. When the ship’s going down, and there aren’t any lifeboats, who gives a flying crap who’s in charge? Why shouldn’t they freak?
But the words remain unspoken. What would be the point of speaking? In the end, none of this is Müller’s fault, and you really can’t blame a politician for being . . . a politician. He’s egotistical, a power-junkie and a blow-hard, but in the scheme of things, considering his profession, he’s a halfway decent human being, caught in an impossible situation. Under the circumstances, can you really blame anyone for clinging to the familiar habits?
And at least the new crisis has removed the terrible obligation to make a decision about the people in the camp itself. For days Tolbert and his crew have been pushing the old man to sign the ‘containment’ order. And for days he has been resisting their pr
essure, praying for a miracle to lift the burden of responsibility from him. Now the decision has been taken out of his hands.
But it is small comfort in the face of what is to come.
In his hands Terry holds the text of the presidential address – a carefully constructed piece of positive-spin double-talk, designed to sugar-coat the fact that no one has a clue what to do.
And the old man is right. It won’t work. No one’s going to buy the rhetoric, when the bottom line is that in a full-blown epidemic their chances of survival are roughly the same as a mosquito in a fusion-furnace.
The old man is talking again. The young aide places the speech on the desk and turns to listen. At times like this Müller seems almost human – not the successful politician, not the great orator selling ideas and phrases created for him by a phalanx of spin doctors and highly paid speechwriters.
In private he is just a man. And he is tired.
And suddenly reminiscent.
‘My grandfather was one of Denny Woods’s small group of revolutionaries during Gaston’s phony presidency. He was barely eighteen. He put up anti-Gaston posters all around New G, right under the noses of the Security guards, and sat down in solidarity with the Elokoi at the end of the Long March, when they filled the streets surrounding these offices.
‘They say that when Gaston looked out of these windows, down on that huge, silent crowd, he knew it was the beginning of the end. My grandfather lived for another sixty years after that day, but that was his proudest moment.’
Müller looks back from the window. It is like he is expecting a reply.
Receiving none, he continues. ‘When I was first elected to the Council . . . What was I? Twenty-six? I remember he called to congratulate me. But he told me not to let it go to my head, that I had just scored the only job in the world where you have thirty million bosses, and no matter what good you do, no one will ever remember anything but your mistakes. Then he said something that I didn’t really understand until years later. “The Elokoi have a saying”, he said. “A clan without a history is like the howling of wind in the leaves of the Ocra”.’
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