by John Varley
Afternoon was training time. Consulting the records Tik-Tok displayed on a screen, she got the younger dogs one at a time and put each of them through thirty minutes of leash work, up and down the Promenade, teaching them Heel, Sit, Stay, Down, Come according to their degree of progress and Tik-Tok’s rigorous schedules. The older dogs were taken to the Ring in groups, where they sat obediently in a line as she put them, one by one, through free-heeling paces.
Finally it was evening meals, which she hated. It was all human food.
“Eat your vegetables,” Tik-Tok would say. “Clean up your plate. People are starving in New Dresden.” It was usually green salads and yucky broccoli and beets and stuff like that. Tonight it was yellow squash, which Charlie liked about as much as a root canal. She gobbled up the hamburger patty and then dawdled over the squash until it was a yellowish mess all over her plate like baby shit. Half of it ended up on the table. Finally Tik-Tok relented and let her get back to her duties, which, in the evening, was grooming. She brushed each dog until the coats shone. Some of the dogs had already settled in for the night, and she had to wake them up.
At last, yawning, she made her way back to her room. She was pretty well plastered by then. Tik-Tok, who was used to it, made allowances and tried to jolly her out of what seemed a very black mood.
“There’s nothing wrong!” she shouted at one point, tears streaming from her eyes. Charlie could be an ugly drunk.
She staggered out to the Promenade Deck and lurched from wall to wall, but she never fell down. Ugly or not, she knew how to hold her liquor. It had been ages since it made her sick.
The elevator was in what had been a commercial zone. The empty shops gaped at her as she punched the button. She took another drink, and the door opened. She got in.
She hated this part. The elevator was rising up through a spoke, toward the hub of the wheel. She got lighter as the car went up, and the trip did funny things to the inner ear. She hung on to the hand rail until the car shuddered to a stop.
Now everything was fine. She was almost weightless up here. Weightlessness was great when you were drunk. When there was no gravity to worry about, your head didn’t spin—and if it did, it didn’t matter.
This was one part of the wheel where the dogs never went. They could never get used to falling, no matter how long they were kept up here. But Charlie was an expert in falling. When she got the blues she came up here and pressed her face to the huge ballroom window.
People were only a vague memory to Charlie. Her mother didn’t count. Though she visited every day, Mom was about as lively as V.I. Lenin. Sometimes Charlie wanted to be held so much it hurt. The dogs were good, they were warm, they licked her, they loved her . . . but they couldn’t hold her.
Tears leaked from her eyes, which was really a bitch in the ballroom, because tears could get huge in here. She wiped them away and looked out the window.
The moon was getting bigger again. She wondered what it meant. Maybe she would ask Tik-Tok.
She made it back as far as the Garden. Inside, the dogs were sleeping in a huddle. She knew she ought to get them back to their rooms, but she was far too drunk for that. And Tik-Tok couldn’t do a damn thing about it in here. He couldn’t see, and he couldn’t hear.
She lay down on the ground, curled up, and was asleep in seconds.
When she started to snore, the three or four dogs who had come over to watch her sleep licked her mouth until she stopped. Then they curled up beside her. Soon they were joined by others, until she slept in the middle of a blanket of dogs.
A crisis team had been assembled in the monitoring room when Bach arrived the next morning. They seemed to have been selected by Captain Hoeffer, and there were so many of them that there was not enough room for everyone to sit down. Bach led them to a conference room just down the hall, and everyone took a seat around the long table. Each seat was equipped with a computer display, and there was a large screen on the wall behind Hoeffer, at the head of the table. Bach took her place on his right, and across from her was Deputy Chief Zeiss, a man with a good reputation in the department. He made Bach very nervous. Hoeffer, on the other hand, seemed to relish his role. Since Zeiss seemed content to be an observer, Bach decided to sit back and speak only if called upon.
Noting that every seat was filled, and that what she assumed were assistants had pulled up chairs behind their principles, Bach wondered if this many people were really required for this project. Steiner, sitting at Bach’s right, leaned over and spoke quietly.
“Pick a time,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“I said pick a time. We’re running an office pool. If you come closest to the time security is broken, you win a hundred Marks.”
“Is ten minutes from now spoken for?”
They quieted when Hoeffer stood up to speak.
“Some of you have been working on this problem all night,” he said. “Others have been called in to give us your expertise in the matter. I’d like to welcome Deputy Chief Zeiss, representing the Mayor and the Chief of Police. Chief Zeiss, would you like to say a few words?”
Zeiss merely shook his head, which seemed to surprise Hoeffer. Bach knew he would never have passed up an opportunity like that, and probably couldn’t understand how anyone else could.
“Very well. We can start with Dr. Blume.”
Blume was a sour little man who affected wire-rimmed glasses and a cheap toupee over what must have been a completely bald head. Bach thought it odd that a medical man would wear such clumsy prosthetics, calling attention to problems that were no harder to cure than a hangnail. She idly called up his profile on her screen, and was surprised to learn he had a Nobel Prize.
“The subject is a female caucasoid, almost certainly Earthborn.”
On the wall behind Hoeffer and on Bach’s screen, tapes of the little girl and her dogs were being run.
“She displays no obvious abnormalities. In several shots she is nude, and clearly has not yet reached puberty. I estimate her age between seven and ten years old. There are small discrepancies in her behavior. Her movements are economical—except when playing. She accomplishes various hand-eye tasks with a maturity beyond her apparent years.” The doctor sat down abruptly.
It put Hoeffer off balance.
“Ah . . . that’s fine, doctor. But, if you recall, I just asked you to tell me how old she is, and if she’s healthy.”
“She appears to be eight. I said that.”
“Yes, but—”
“What do you want from me?” Blume said, suddenly angry. He glared around at many of the assembled experts. “There’s something badly wrong with that girl. I say she is eight. Fine! Any fool could see that. I say I can observe no health problems visually. For this, you need a doctor? Bring her to me, give me a few days, and I’ll give you six volumes on her health. But videotapes . . . ?” He trailed off, his silence as eloquent as his words.
“Thank you, Dr. Blume,” Hoeffer said. “As soon as—”
“I’ll tell you one thing, though,” Blume said, in a low, dangerous tone. “It is a disgrace to let that child drink liquor like that. The effects in later life will be terrible. I have seen large men in their thirties and forties who could not hold half as much as I saw her drink . . . in one day!” He glowered at Hoeffer for a moment. “I was sworn to silence. But I want to know who is responsible for this.”
Bach realized he didn’t know where the girl was. She wondered how many of the others in the room had been filled in, and how many were working only on their own part of the problem.
“It will be explained,” Zeiss said, quietly. Blume looked from Zeiss to Hoeffer, and back, then settled into his chair, not mollified but willing to wait.
“Thank you, Dr. Blume,” Hoeffer said again. “Next we’ll hear from . . . Ludmilla Rossnikova, representing the GMA Conglomerate.”
Terrific, thought Bach. He’s brought GMA into it. No doubt he swore Ms. Rossnikova to secrecy, and if he really thought
she would fail to mention it to her supervisor then he was even dumber than Bach had thought. She had worked for them once, long ago, and though she was just an employee she had learned something about them. GMA had its roots deep in twentieth-century Japanese industry. When you went to work on the executive level at GMA, you were set up for life. They expected, and received, loyalty that compared favorably with that demanded by the Mafia. Which meant that, by telling Rossnikova his “secret,” Hoeffer had insured that three hundred GMA execs knew about it three minutes later. They could be relied on to keep a secret, but only if it benefited GMA.
“The computer on Tango Charlie was a custom-designed array,” Rossnikova began. “That was the usual practice in those days, with BioLogic computers. It was designated the same as the station: BioLogic TC-38. It was one of the largest installations of its time.
“At the time of the disaster, when it was clear that everything had failed, the TC-38 was given its final instructions. Because of the danger, it was instructed to impose an interdiction zone around the station, which you’ll find described under the label Interdiction on your screens.”
Rossnikova paused while many of those present called up this information.
“To implement the zone, the TC-38 was given command of certain defensive weapons. These included ten bevawatt lasers . . . and other weapons which I have not been authorized to name or describe, other than to say they are at least as formidable as the lasers.”
Hoeffer looked annoyed, and was about to say something, but Zeiss stopped him with a gesture. Each understood that the lasers were enough in themselves.
“So while it is possible to destroy the station,” Rossnikova went on, “there is no chance of boarding it—assuming anyone would even want to try.”
Bach thought she could tell from the different expressions around the table which people knew the whole story and which knew only their part of it. A couple of the latter seemed ready to ask a question, but Hoeffer spoke first.
“How about canceling the computer’s instructions?” he said. “Have you tried that?”
“That’s been tried many times over the last few years, as this crisis got closer. We didn’t expect it to work, and it did not. Tango Charlie won’t accept a new program.”
“Oh my God,” Dr. Blume gasped. Bach saw that his normally florid face had paled. “Tango Charlie. She’s on Tango Charlie.”
“That’s right, Doctor,” said Hoeffer. “And we’re trying to figure out how to get her off. Dr. Wilhelm?”
Wilhelm was an older woman with the stocky build of the Earthborn. She rose, and looked down at some notes in her hand.
“Information’s under the label Neurotropic Agent X on your machines,” she muttered, then looked up at them. “But you needn’t bother. That’s about as far as we got, naming it. I’ll sum up what we know, but you don’t need an expert for this; there are no experts on Neuro-X.
“It broke out on August 9, thirty years ago next month. The initial report was five cases, one death. Symptoms were progressive paralysis, convulsions, loss of motor control, numbness.
“Tango Charlie was immediately quarantined as a standard procedure. An epidemiological team was dispatched from Atlanta, followed by another from New Dresden. All ships which had left Tango Charlie were ordered to return, except for one on its way to Mars and another already in parking orbit around Earth. The one in Earth orbit was forbidden to land.
“By the time the teams arrived, there were over a hundred reported cases, and six more deaths. Later symptoms included blindness and deafness. It progressed at different rates in different people, but it was always quite fast. Mean survival time from onset of symptoms was later determined to be forty-eight hours. Nobody lived longer than four days.
“Both medical teams immediately came down with it, as did a third, and a fourth team. All of them came down with it, each and every person. The first two teams had been using class three isolation techniques. It didn’t matter. The third team stepped up the precautions to class two. Same result. Very quickly we had been forced into class one procedures—which involves isolation as total as we can get it: no physical contact whatsoever, no sharing of air supplies, all air to the investigators filtered through a sterilizing environment. They still got it. Six patients and some tissue samples were sent to a class one installation two hundred miles from New Dresden, and more patients were sent, with class one precautions, to a hospital ship close to Charlie. Everyone at both facilities came down with it. We almost sent a couple of patients to Atlanta.”
She paused, looking down and rubbing her forehead. No one said anything.
“I was in charge,” she said, quietly. “I can’t take credit for not shipping anyone to Atlanta. We were going to . . . and suddenly there wasn’t anybody left on Charlie to load patients aboard. All dead or dying.
“We backed off. Bear in mind this all happened in five days. What we had to show for those five days was a major space station with all aboard dead, three ships full of dead people, and an epidemiological research facility here on Luna full of dead people.
“After that, politicians began making most of the decisions—but I advised them. The two nearby ships were landed by robot control at the infected research station. The derelict ship going to Mars was . . . I think it’s still classified, but what the hell? It was blown up with a nuclear weapon. Then we started looking into what was left. The station here was easiest. There was one cardinal rule: nothing that went into that station was to come out. Robot crawlers brought in remote manipulators and experimental animals. Most of the animals died. Neuro-X killed most mammals: monkeys, rats, cats—”
“Dogs?” Bach asked. Wilhelm glanced at her.
“It didn’t kill all the dogs. Half of the ones we sent in lived.”
“Did you know that there were dogs alive on Charlie?”
“No. The interdiction was already set up by then. Charlie Station was impossible to land, and too close and too visible to nuke, because that would violate about a dozen corporate treaties. And there seemed no reason not to just leave it there. We had our samples isolated here at the Lunar station. We decided to work with that, and forget about Charlie.”
“Thank you, Doctor.”
“As I was saying, it was by far the most virulent organism we had ever seen. It seemed to have a taste for all sorts of neural tissue, in almost every mammal.
“The teams that went in never had time to learn anything. They were all disabled too quickly, and just as quickly they were dead. We didn’t find out much, either . . . for a variety of reasons. My guess is it was a virus, simply because we would certainly have seen anything larger almost immediately. But we never did see it. It was fast getting in—we don’t know how it was vectored, but the only reliable shield was several miles of vacuum—and once it got in, I suspect it worked changes on genetic material of the host, setting up a secondary agent which I’m almost sure we isolated . . . and then it went away and hid very well. It was still in the host, in some form, it had to be, but we think its active life in the nervous system was on the order of one hour. But by then it had already done its damage. It set the system against itself, and the host was consumed in about two days.”
Wilhelm had grown increasingly animated. A few times Bach thought she was about to get incoherent. It was clear the nightmare of Neuro-X had not diminished for her with the passage of thirty years. But now she made an effort to slow down again.
“The other remarkable thing about it was, of course, its infectiousness. Nothing I’ve ever seen was so persistent in evading our best attempts at keeping it isolated. Add that to its mortality rate, which, at the time, seemed to be one hundred percent . . . and you have the second great reason why we learned so little about it.”
“What was the first?” Hoeffer asked. Wilhelm glared at him.
“The difficulty of investigating such a subtle process of infection by remote control.”
“Ah, of course.”
“The other t
hing was simply fear. Too many people had died for there to be any hope of hushing it up. I don’t know if anyone tried. I’m sure those of you who were old enough remember the uproar. So the public debate was loud and long, and the pressure for extreme measures was intense . . . and, I should add, not unjustified. The argument was simple. Everyone who got it was dead. I believe that if those patients had been sent to Atlanta, everyone on Earth would have died. Therefore . . . what was the point of taking a chance by keeping it alive and studying it?”
Dr. Blume cleared his throat, and Wilhelm looked at him.
“As I recall, Doctor,” he said, “there were two reasons raised. One was the abstract one of scientific knowledge. Though there might be no point in studying Neuro-X since no one was afflicted with it, we might learn something by the study itself.”
“Point taken,” Wilhelm said, “and no argument.”
“And the second was, we never found out where Neuro-X came from . . . There were rumors it was a biological warfare agent.” He looked at Rossnikova, as if asking her what comment GMA might want to make about that. Rossnikova said nothing. “But most people felt it was a spontaneous mutation. There have been several instances of that in the high-radiation environment of a space station. And if it happened once, what’s to prevent it from happening again?”
“Again, you’ll get no argument from me. In fact, I supported both those positions when the question was being debated.” Wilhelm grimaced, then looked right at Blume. “But the fact is, I didn’t support them very hard, and when the Lunar station was sterilized, I felt a lot better.”
Blume was nodding.
“I’ll admit it. I felt better, too.”
“And if Neuro-X were to show up again,” she went on, quietly, “my advice would be to sterilize immediately. Even if it meant losing a city.”