Lyköan considered Sun Shi’s words, thought he understood. “So does this mean I now have two sworn enemies?” He meant Pandavas and now this Other thing. “Isn’t ‘the enemy of my enemy’ supposed to be my friend?”
“Not always,” the old man chuckled. Somewhere deep within the jumbled intricacies of the infinite multiverse, another supposed truth had lost all meaning.
* * *
In the aftermath of what had been another utterly satisfying bit of intimate human interaction, in its own way as core-rattling as his most recent descent to the center of creation, a lovemaking sequence worthy of legend, like Zeus and Leda, Lyköan lay completely spent in Nora's arms. To hell with any tug humility might have exerted as he bathed in the throes of an exquisite afterglow, the experience had been soul searing. For some still unfathomable reason he had sought this out with wild abandon ever since the cosmic spiritual encounter of earlier in the day had ended. The ambiance of their luxurious Ayutt Haya suite had been absolutely perfect; the light, cool touch of sumptuous silken sheets; the dusk’s sultry tropical sunlight dancing pleasantly through the floor to twelve-foot-ceiling windows; all of it.
In the afterglow, Lyköan was feeling particularly comfortable, blissfully confident, almost courageous. Full of, what was the word? Gumption. Brave enough perhaps, to finally, at long last ― it had been an unbearably heavy burden for far too long ― reveal the complete and unadulterated truth about what had really transpired during his confinement in the Node. The appropriate opportunity had never presented itself before. Perhaps it never would. But for some unknown reason, he felt particularly courageous at the moment.
“What?” Nora asked, seeing to his clouded expression.
“This may not be the perfect moment sweetheart, but it has to come out sometime,” Lyköan began, then hesitated.
“What has to come out?” Nora asked.
“I haven't been entirely honest with you,” he began, swallowing hard, “haven't told you every sordid detail about myself; confessed that I am not at all the person you think I am. In fact, I am now, have always been, pretty much a complete fraud. If you were to peek under the hood, there's not even a hint of derring-do. No Captains Courageous or E C Gordon. Not even temporary, like Achilles. In fact, when I was given the opportunity, I proved myself capable of hopping for the tall grass like a goddamned cotton tail and was quite willing to sell out, at least abandon, everyone and everything I claim to hold dear, if it meant preserving my measly little life.”
“What are you talking about?” Nora asked. Although she had seen this look before she had never learned what it might portend.
“I never told you the whole truth about what happened during my sojourn in Pandavas’s basement lab. Not the really important part.”
“Well, no one’s stopping you now.”
They were both lying naked, almost nose to nose atop the bedcovers. Lyköan rose on one elbow and began to speak between shallow breaths.
“This life we live, that we find so ― maybe not comforting, but at least ― solid… well, Pandavas proved to me ― as much as anything so insanely counterintuitive can possibly be proven ― that it is nothing more than one of an infinite number of potentials ― not even potentials, but authentic realities that exist right alongside the one we are experiencing. And while we may think ― may in fact be, in some metaphysical sense, trapped in this one existence ― with every second that passes, an infinite number of other, just as real and concrete realities, are constantly being created. And in many of those realities we lead far different lives than in this single reality that only appears to hold us fast.”
“Okay, so much for the synopsis,” Nora agreed. “Even if I accept your screwy hypothesis ― you certainly seem to ― how does that make you a coward in our reality?”
“Because Pandavas let me visit one of these other ― uchronia was his word ― and in that other life, that other existence... things were ― I mean are ― different. Hell, Karen, my dead wife is still alive. The two of us are still living together in New York, apparently happy as clams.”
“Even if I take your word for all this,” Nora replied, for the moment willing to accept his admission of cowardly guilt, “that you honestly believe what you’re saying ― isn’t it also possible that Pandavas was manipulating you, somehow staging all of it to get what he wanted out of you?”
“Sure, anything’s possible,” Lyköan agreed, “but that's not the point. The point is, that when I was forced to choose between the alternatives ― well, discretion immediately became the better part of valor.”
“And that’s where you were when I burst in to rescue you ― to a fate worse than death?”
“No, it isn't like that at all. But if we can agree that life is no more than timing and position, this is my life now. I totally accept that. It's only that the experience forced me to question whether, at heart, I lack any sort of courage ― that I'm completely incapable of believing in something enough to actually risk my life to protect it.”
“Let me think about that,” Nora replied. “Hard to see how you had a reasonable alternative. But there is something that might help me ― only if you answer truthfully. Do you regret being rescued?”
He had already asked himself this question. “Maybe not in my own words, but someone else's...
Spring grasses o’er the meadow wave
Lushly in the breeze
’Til autumn do the seasons brave
Leaves shaking from the trees
Fear not for the future
Nor the terror that flies by night
While angels by thy light endure
And offer their delight.
I freely choose to cleave to thee
Cling to thee alone
Through Winter’s bite
As wild winds blow
And cold chills to the bone
In cast of hope and wisdom
As the Fates intend
I promise by this troth
To love thee sweetly
As completely
As spring grass loves the glen
Forsake the past
Be fixed at last
With thee my fortune spend.”
“You need a quote?” Nora asked.
“Never much of a poet on my own. Why, are you offended?”
“Not with you, not even with, who knows, is that Shelley?”
Lyköan shook his head.
“One of the other Romantics then ― Byron or Keats?”
“Hardly,” Lyköan chuckled. “But those are all good guesses. Actually, it’s Zim Dixon.”
“You’re kidding. I wouldn’t have thought that weasel was capable of what sounds so beautifully ‘period’. Are you sure he didn’t steal it?”
“Who knows?” Lyköan shrugged. “He has been known to filch a line or two in the past. But these lines come from a song that never made it commercially.”
“It is beautiful though. Like he had tapped into an earlier time.”
“Who knows? Maybe he did.”
“Since you’re so fond of quoting poets, I’ve got one for you.”
There’s nowhere you can be
That isn’t where you’re meant to be.
It's easy.
After the briefest reflection, Lyköan replied, “So, you can still accept me, even knowing I how much less than heroic I am? And I won’t be stepping on else’s shadow?”
“Stepping on whose shadow?”
“Beside my cowardly story, your dead husband looks like a beacon of courage.” His earlier confidence had evaporated. If he had doppelgänger existences, didn’t everyone?
“Of course not. That’s ridiculous.”
“You sure of that?” He still wasn't certain himself.
“Absolutely,” She replied, sidling closer. Speaking only slightly above a whisper, she admitted, “I have been for quite some time.” Pulling his face to hers, she opened her mouth into his.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Molecul
ar Virtuosity
It is time for the harvest. The schnitter drives with full course into the ripe seed.
Hans Scholl & Alexander Schmorell :
The 4th Handbill of the White Rose
Nora was alone in the lab. When Yin Yat Chen had left exhausted only a few minutes before, she had made Nora promise to wrap it up by three. For the fifth night in a row she would be locking up alone, and as had been true after every previous twenty-hour shift, she would feel exactly the same guilt as she turned off the lights.
In the background the radio was playing a frenetic Thai pop melody that echoed off the bare laboratory walls. Thoughts cycling wildly, her body was coursing with bioelectro-chemical stimuli, much like the thousands of experimental fast-breeding vaccine cultures incubating behind the electronically guarded door in the adjacent lab. Hermetically sealed in phalanxes of temperature-controlled stainless steel racks, this sea of tapered amber-colored vials, close to four thousand therapeutic doses, would be ready for human trials within days.
A similar culturing environment was being built at the CDC labs in Atlanta. French and Japanese counterparts had been authorized to breed vaccine their own cultures in similar facilities. Private industry had also been enlist for support. Aescugen, the biotech giant, was working with Sloan Kettering. Caduceuticals, a small San Francisco biotech start-up, was pursuing work on a slightly altered design. Both companies had been given unrestricted permission to breed cultures based on the Carmichael-Yin platform, augmenting and streamlining the process in any manner they considered advantageous.
Was this unfocused effort the best approach? Would even one of these slightly different processes succeed? It didn’t matter how success was achieved, even less who ultimately received the credit; all that mattered was that at least one of the pursuits led to a viable vaccine before the epidemic reached critical mass.
Let Egan worry about the metaphysics. Nora still didn’t know what to make of that aspect of the overall insanity, whether it was really important or not. Her focus was on the material world ― the hard science required to succeed in the only universe were she was comfortable, the one in which she walked and breathed, considered and experienced, the only universe that appeared capable of possessing the tangible proofs required of genuine existence. One existence was plenty, all her psyche could conceivably handle. There was purpose in what she was doing, reason for why she drove herself. She was doing this for Dana and Emily; for Diane and her family; for the memories of Jack Cummings, Ning Zhòngní, and especially for Marty. She was doing this for the whole damned human race with all its grand hopes and dreams, foibles and failures. That was more than enough motivation ― and responsibility.
She wasn’t sure she even half-believed the metaphysical angle anyway. Like many other aspects of her relationship with Egan, their independent pursuits had devolved, demarked, delineated down some seemingly foreordained, natural bifurcation. But one that worked beautifully. Nora had no desire to risk altering even a single detail.
Besides the Atlanta program, CDC had contracted for construction of similar fast-batch installations at Bethesda, Los Alamos, and Lawrence Livermore, all high security locations. Langley was undoubtedly working on a similar platform elsewhere, growing their own secret batches with national security in mind. But they weren’t talking.
Save the bureaucracy at all costs, she thought wryly. Heaven forbid the best of all possible governments be threatened. Who cares how many of the governed end up dead, as long as plenty of bureaucrats survive.
Nora had plied the Byzantine Washington labyrinth for most of her working life and understood it only too well. Like any living organism, its first concern was self-preservation. She also understood the strictures of science. No amount of money could guarantee success of any untested concept when the critical path was linear. One step had to prove the next. Only time would tell if they were proceeding down the correct path right now. But she welcomed anyone and everyone’s input, and had given them all the same information, an equal fighting chance, if only because they were all running out of time together.
Hasty manufacture of as many doses as possible just as the TAI-2 pandemic began circling the globe, if it turned out to be a viable vaccine, might provide buffer enough to rescue civilization. But it couldn’t possibly arrive before millions had died. In the last two days, confirmed outbreaks had been reported in Beijing and Osaka. Unconfirmed whispers of martial law and summary executions were following in the footsteps of refugees fleeing mainland China. The Thai government refused to comment on persistent rumors that dozens of people had fallen ill right here in Bangkok.
Minutes later, as she was exiting the darkened compound alone, hurrying to the waiting taxi beneath the feeble sliver of a waning moon, she permitted herself another brief reflection. It had been ten days since touching down on the Suvarnahbumi tarmac. In some respects the days had flown by like the flutter of wings.
But, by an equally indefinable measure, the slow-machines had held the hands of time at bay. She had been able to reach the girls by phone to let everyone, including the CDC, know where she had resurfaced and that, at least for now, she was safe. That had been a blessing. CDC had happily sent replacements for the WHO scientists still quarantined in Vietnam. Many of those eager faces were familiar and she was grateful for their speedy arrival. Without their help, flash incubation would still be an untested concept. The kernel of the process had been extrapolated from her stolen Innovac data. How ironically fitting.
The cab she had called the instant her hands were free of the Stoyner box was parked at the curb, waiting to whisk her back to the Ayutt Haya ― less than fifteen minutes away at this lightly trafficked hour. Once in the back seat and on her way, she fell into a delicious waking dream of the sweet embraces awaiting her return ― even at three in the morning. It would be wonderful to get close to him again, be able to cradle one another, express and respond as physiology and nature intended. She longed for that otherworldly distraction with its magical ability to compensate for every blow this callous universe could deliver, slake its utter heartlessness and soothe the buffeting turmoil. Even as she yearned for its refuge, she knew it was no lasting solution. But that only made her want it more.
* * *
Jimmy was a veritable fountain of information, if you knew how to fish between the lines of his halting pidgin English. Lyköan could think of no better location for sifting through those lines this morning than where they had agreed to meet, one of the chaotic hallways of the Ministry of Health. Standing against one wall, jostled and elbowed by the sweep of the developing emergency, two outsiders were hardly noticed.
His face shining like polished copper, Jimmy peered out from under the brim of a green-felt porkpie. The shimmer of gasoline on black water reflecting from the iridescent indigo hatband was almost too painful for Lyköan to bear. Averting his gaze, he looked out into the crowded hallway, thinking: Christ, this guy never disappoints.
Since returning to Thailand he had spent hours at Sun Shi’s feet learning to interpret and use these strange new insights to his advantage, although he still found the unnatural perceptions painful and unnerving. How long would he go on lamenting the simple and staid world he had lost?
Who needs a blinding verdigris barrage to recognize this little twerp is lying? Or the progression of shells within shells of the current conversation. All of them dirty. All of them just as obvious.
“No. No,” Jimmy replied unconvincingly. “Virus confined to southern provinces. City safe.”
Right. “And the rumors that people are dying in Klong Toey?” The lower class neighborhood was less than four miles away.
“Unconfirmed. Food poisoning perhaps?” Jimmy suggested helpfully.
“Sure.”
“It happens.” The rigid smile was fixed as stone.
Am I being that obvious? Good. “What were you able to learn about the Innovac assets? Is the ministry investigating?”
Primrose and Innovac had acqui
red at least seven additional small corporate entities during the previous year and they in turn owned dozens of others. Without the government’s help it would take weeks and an army of motivated gumshoes to unravel the complex business associations and investigate them thoroughly. Gordon, of course, could have identified every one off the top of his head, but Gordon too had disappeared.
If we could locate Gordon we could... Hell, if it were only that simple…
“Ministry say infection threat most important,” Jimmy explained. “Innovac now low priority.” He had drawn out the word ‘l-o-w’ with deep inflection.
“Uh-huh,” Lyköan nodded.
Why was the government stonewalling like this? The answer lay in another equally difficult question. Why did any rapacious autocratic state ever feel compelled to do what it did? Self-preservation. If the populace ever got wind of the ugly, underlying truth, there would not be enough gallows in the entire country to fill the demand. What was the Ministry of Health trying to protect? Or whom? If Lyköan’s suspicions were correct, the better question was why?
“Ministry opened WHO laboratory at UN request. How much more can they do?”
“Nothing they don’t care to.”
Fremont and the US ambassador had pulled out all the stops to get that much. Even so, it had taken three days of President to Prime Minister wrangling and the threat of leaking the existence of Thai-based and US-sponsored terror suspect prison camps before the doors were finally thrown open to the WHO and the CDC.
“Isn’t the government at all interested in finding out if Primrose-Innovac had a hand in any of this? They were sure quick to jump on the WHO when they thought it might be involved.”
The SONG of SHIVA Page 40