The Silk Code

by Paul Levinson

  John Lapp shook his head, sadly.

  “And I guess I made things worse by contacting her, spending the night with her—” I started saying.

  All three gave me a look.

  “—alone, on the couch,” I finished.

  “Yes, perhaps you did make things worse,” Lapp said. “Your style of investigation—Mo Buhler’s—can’t do any good here. These people will have you running around chasing your own tail. They’ll taunt you with vague suggestions of possibilities of what they’re up to, what they’ve been doing. They’ll give you just enough taste of truth to keep you interested. But when you look for proof, you’ll find you won’t know which end is up.”

  Which was a pretty good capsule summary of what I’d being feeling like. The truth was, events had cascaded so quickly in the less than 24 hours that I’d been in Pennsylvania, I hadn’t had a chance to launch any kind of normal investigation, Mo’s style, my style, or otherwise—

  “They introduced long-term allergen catalysts into our bloodstreams, our biosphere, years ago,” Lapp went on. “Everyone in this area has it. And once you do, you’re a sitting duck. When they want to kill you, they give you another catalyst, short-term, any one of a number of handy biological agents, and you’re dead within hours of a massive allergic attack to some innocent thing in your environment. So the two catalysts work together to kill you. Of course, neither one on its own is dangerous, shows up as suspicious on your blood tests, so that’s how they get away with it. And no one even notices the final innocent insult—no one is ordinarily allergic to an autumn leaf from a particular type of tree against your skin, or a certain kind of beetle on your finger. That’s why we developed the antidote to the first catalyst—it’s the only way we know of breaking the allergic cycle.”

  “Please, Phil, drink this.” Amos pushed the bottle on me again.

  “Any side effects I should know about? Like I’ll be dead of an allergic attack in a few hours?”

  “You’ll probably feel a little more irritable than usual for the next week,” Lapp said.

  I sighed. “What else is new.”

  Decisions… Even if I had the first catalyst, I could live the rest of my life without ever encountering the second. But no, I couldn’t go on being so vulnerable like that. I liked autumn leaves. But how did I know for sure that what Amos was offering me was the antidote, and not the second catalyst? I didn’t—not for sure—but wouldn’t Amos have tried to leave me in Mo’s house to burn if he’d wanted me dead? Decisions…

  I drank it down, and looked around the barn. Incredible scene of high Victorian science, like a 19th-century trade card I’d once seen for an apothecary. Fluttering butterflies and dragonflies, iridescent in the light… Enough to make my head spin. Then I realized it was spinning—was this some sort of reaction to the antidote? Jeez, or was the antidote the poison after all? No—the room wasn’t so much spinning, as the light, the fireflight, was flickering…in an oddly familiar way—

  Lapp was suddenly talking, fast, to Amos. “—see if you can stop that…” Lapp said.

  The flickering grew more powerful. Each burst of light felt like it was pressing against my stomach—

  A burly man approached, with a woman he was half escorting, half pulling along.

  “We found her lurking around outside—” he began.

  Sarah!

  “There’s a Mendel bomb here!” she shouted. “Please. You all have to leave.”

  Lapp looked desperately around the room, back at Sarah, and finally nodded. “She’s right,” he said and caught my eye. “There’s no time. We have to leave now.”

  He put his arm protectively around Laurie, and beckoned me to follow. The burly man started toward the door, with Sarah in tow. Everyone else was scurrying around, grabbing what netted cages they could.

  “No,” I said. “Wait.” An insight was just nibbling its way into my mind.

  “Doctor, please,” Lapp said. “We have to leave. Right now.”

  “No. You don’t,” I said. “I know how to stop the bomb.”

  Lapp shook his head firmly. “I assure you, we know of no remedy to stop this. We have perhaps seven, maybe eight minutes at most. We can rebuild the barn. Human lives we cannot rebuild.”

  “No,” I insisted. “You can’t just keep running like this from your enemies, letting them burn you out. You have incredible work going on here. I can stop the bomb.”

  Lapp stared at me.

  “OK, how’s this,” I said. “You clear out of here with your friends. No problem. I’ll take care of this with my science and then we’ll talk about it, all right? But let me get on with it already.”

  Lapp signaled the last of his people to leave. He squinted at the flickering fireflies. They were much more distinct now, as if the metamorphosis into bomb mode had coarsened the nature of the mesh.

  He turned to me. “I’ll stay here with you. I’ll give you two minutes and then I’m yanking you out of here. What does your science have to offer?”

  “Nothing all that advanced,” I said, and pulled my little halogen flashlight out of my pocket. “Those are fireflies, right? If they’ve retained anything of the characteristics of the family Lampyridae I know about, then they make their light only in the absence of daylight, when the day has waned—they’re nocturnal. During the day, bathed in daylight, they’re just like any other damn beetle. Well, this should make the necessary adjustment.” I turned up the flashlight to its fullest daylight setting, and shone it straight at the center of the swirling starlight fountain, which now had a much harsher tone, like an ugly light over an autopsy table. I focused my halogen on the souped-up fireflies for a minute and longer. Nothing happened. The swirling continued. The harsh part of their light got stronger.

  “Doctor, we can’t stay here any longer,” Lapp prodded.

  I sighed, closed my eyes, and opened them. The halogen flashlight should have worked—it should have put out the light of least some of the fireflies, then more, disrupting their syncopated overlapping pattern of flashing. I stared hard at the fountain. My eyes were tired. I couldn’t see the flies as clearly as I could a few moments ago…

  No…of course!

  I couldn’t see as clearly because the light was getting dimmer!

  There was no doubt about it now. The whole barn seemed to be flickering in and out, the continuous light effect had broken down, and each time the light came back, it did so a little more weakly… I kept my halogen trained on the flies. It was soon the only light in the barn.

  Lapp’s hand was on my shoulder. “We’re in your debt, Doctor. I almost made the fool’s mistake of closing my mind to a source of knowledge I didn’t understand—a fool’s mistake, as I say, because if I don’t understand it, then how can I know it’s not valuable?”

  “Plato’s Meno Paradox,” I said.

  “What?”

  “You need some knowledge to recognize knowledge, so where does the first knowledge come from?” I smiled. “Wisdom from an old Western-style philosopher—I frequently consult him—though actually he probably had more in common with you.”

  Lapp nodded. “Thank you for giving us this knowledge of the firefly, that we knew all along ourselves but didn’t realize. The Mendel bombs won’t be such a threat to us now—once we notice their special flicker, all we’ll need to do is flood the area with daylight. Plain daylight. Sometimes we won’t even need your flashlight to do it—daylight is after all just out there, naturally for the asking, a good deal of the time.”

  “And in the evenings, you can use the flashlight—it’s battery operated, no strings attached to central electric companies,” I said. “See? I’ve picked up a few things about your culture after all.”

  Lapp smiled. “I believe you have, Doctor.”

  BUT I KNEW there was a lot more I needed to learn—about John Lapp and Amos Stoltzfus—about their enemies, who would no doubt come up with other diabolical breedings of weapons. No one ever gets complete victory in these things. But
at least the scourge of Mendel bombs would be reduced. I’d given Lapp a kind of laser defense for these pyro-flies—imperfect, no doubt, but certainly a lot better than nothing.

  As for Sarah Fischer, who could tell. She’d come back to the barn to warn us, she’d said. She couldn’t take the killing anymore. She said she had nothing directly to do with Mo’s or Joseph’s—her father’s—deaths, that she could no longer be any part of a community that did such things. She had started telling me about the allergens—the irritation ones—because she wanted the world to know. I wanted to believe her. But, for all I knew, she had planted that Mendel bomb in Lapp’s barn herself, and was just thinking quickly on her feet after she got caught.

  I’d thought of calling the Pennsylvania police, having them take her into custody, but what was the point? I had no evidence on her whatsoever. Even if she had set the Mendel bomb in John Lapp’s barn, what could I do about that anyway? Have her arrested for setting a bomb made of incendiary flies I’d been able to defuse by shining my flashlight—a bomb that Lapp’s people were unwilling in any way to even acknowledge to the outside world, let alone testify about in court? No thank you—I’ve been laughed out of court enough times as is already.

  And Lapp said his people had some sort of humane program for people like Sarah—help her find her own people and roots again. She was a woman without community now. Shunned by all parties. The worst thing that could happen to someone of Sarah’s upbringing. It was good that John Lapp and Amos Stoltzfus were willing to give her a second chance—offer her a lamp of hope, maybe the real meaning of the Mendelian lamp, as Lapp had aptly put it.

  I rolled my window down to pay the George Washington Bridge toll. It felt good to finally be back in my own beat-up car again, I had to admit. Corinne was off with the girls to resettle in California. I’d said a few words about Mo at his funeral, and now his little family was safely on a plane out West. I couldn’t say I’d brought his murderers to justice, but at least I’d put a little crimp in their operation. Laurie had kissed Amos goodbye, and promised she’d come back and see him, certainly for Christmas…

  “Thanks, Chief.” I took the receipt and the change. I felt so good to be back I almost told him to keep the change. I left the window rolled down. The air had its customary musky aroma—the belches of industry, the exhaust fumes of even EPA-clean cars still leaving their olfactory mark. Damn, and didn’t it feel good to breathe it in. Better than the sweet air of Pennsylvania, and all the hidden allergens and catalysts it might be carrying. It had killed both Joseph and Mo. They’d been primed with the slow-acting catalyst years ago. Then the second catalyst had been introduced, and whoosh…some inconsequential something in their surroundings had lit the last short fuse. Just as likely a stray firefly of a certain type that had buzzed at their ankles, or landed on their arm, as anything else. Joseph’s barn had been lit by them. The lamp was likely the other thing Mo had wanted to show me. There were likely one or two fireflies that had gotten into our car on the farm, and danced unseen around our feet as we drove to Philadelphia that evening… A beetle for me, an assassin for Mo…

  I smashed a small brown moth against the inside of my windshield.

  The virtue of New York, some pundit on the police force once had said, is that you can usually see your killers coming. Give me the soot and pollution, the crush of too many people and cars in a hurry, even the mugger on the street. I’ll take my chances.

  I unconsciously slipped my wallet out of my pocket. This thinking about muggers must have made me nervous about my money. It was a fine wallet—made from that same special plant and silk weave as Laurie’s handbag. John Lapp had given it to me as a little present—to remember Joseph’s work by. For a few months, at least, I’d be able to better see how much money I was spending.

  Well, it was good to have a bit more light in the world—even if it, like the contents it illuminated, was ever-fleeting…

  PART

  TWO

  THE

  TOCHARIAN

  CHARIOT

  TWO

  TARIM BASIN, ON THE SILK ROAD,

  CIRCA A.D. 750

  A man of forty and a man of fourteen sat on a hill overlooking a river that some called the Tarim, near a settlement that would someday be called Aksu in a province known as Xinjiang.

  “So the T’angs no longer have their secret,” the fourteen-year-old said. “Soon the whole world will know how to make their precious silk.”

  The older man, who was the younger’s father, frowned. “Secrets come and go. All that really matters are the realities they contain.”

  “You take no pleasure that we have finally broken the Eastern hold?”

  “They never had that hold in the first place. There are things about silk—”

  A third man, age sixteen, came running up to them. “Father, Gwellyn, there’s a dead singer down by the river.”

  The three walked quickly, without words. All knew there was no point talking about the singer, until they actually saw the body.

  The older man gasped when he saw it. Skin, parched with age, over thickset bones. Eyes mossy green, framed by brows that protruded like cliffs, and the withered remnants of half-closed lids… “Yes. He was a singer.”

  “How long has he been dead?” Gwellyn, the fourteen-year-old, asked.

  “A very long time,” the father answered.

  “Was he a maker too?” Allyn, the sixteen-year-old, asked.

  “Impossible to tell just by looking at his corpse.”

  “What should we do with him?” Gwellyn asked.

  “Burn him. Then grind up his bones and spread the dust to the wind, as the laws prescribe,” the father answered.

  “Should we tell anyone about this, or—” Allyn persisted.

  “No. Just do as I instructed.”

  Gwellyn rankled. “It doesn’t seem right just to destroy all trace of him, without even telling anyone, as if he never existed.”

  “That’s the very reason we must do this,” the father replied.

  GWELLYN LOOKED AT his face in the river, muddy red first blush of beard on ancient silt of a similar color. His blue, deep-set eyes were lighter than the water, but heavier now with the burden they carried. He could still see the singer, first stretched out by the water here, as he had been found, then burned, charred, ground into dust, as his father had commanded.

  “Legend says the singers looked like us, before they died.” Allyn had joined him at the river, and had guessed what was still very much on Gwellyn’s mind. Likely because it was still on Allyn’s.

  “And the sorcerer of death gave them their brutish appearance?” Gwellyn asked.

  “Father says sorcerers are for children,” Allyn replied. “He says men of reason look for explanations in the natural world. I suppose he got this idea from the Philosopher.”

  “From Aristotle? From the Byzantine teachings?”

  “Yes,” Allyn replied. “You know the texts—Father keeps them next to his favorite spices.”

  Gwellyn nodded. “He wants me to continue with the lessons—so I can read those teachings for myself.” Gwellyn sighed. “Comes from being a Shaman’s son. You’ve read those teachings already. Do they speak of singers and their changes after death?”

  “No,” Allyn said. “The Byzantine writings speak of the need to find explanations in natural causes, in the world at hand.”

  “Ah, I see,” Gwellyn said. “So what does Father think are the natural causes for the singers and the way they look in death?”

  “Father says it’s an illness,” Allyn replied. “Except it is deeper than just an illness, and it’s very old, and it will still be alive long after we are gone.”

  Gwellyn’s brows furrowed. “I never thought of an illness as alive.”

  “Well, they are in some way tied to life,” Allyn said. “Our livestock get sick, fruit trees get sick, we get sick, but rocks and tents do not.”

  “Are we sick with this…this illness now?”

&nb
sp; “No one knows,” Allyn said. “Perhaps we are. There’s an idea—very ancient, Father told me—that everyone has illness. And the difference between those who get sick and those who do not is that the healthy ones have also an illness of illness that preys upon the illness, renders the illness lifeless so it can do us no harm.”

  “This second illness is our friend,” Gwellyn mused, “like a dog who stops a wilder animal from attacking us in the night.”

  “Yes.”

  “But how do we know which is which?” Gwellyn asked. “How can we try to keep out one and welcome the other? Where do we find illness when it isn’t already within us?”

  “The legends say everywhere. In the food we eat, the air we breathe, the women we love.”

  “Women?” For the first time Gwellyn smiled, because making love was still a thrill to him that far outweighed any thought of illness, even one which might cause death. His smile deepened, as he attached a specific face and body, one which he had seen just last week, to the general prospect of making love.

  “Yes,” Allyn replied, smiling a bit too. “And we them. The legends say we are all brothers and sisters in illness.”

  Gwellyn nodded, but he was thinking more of Daralyn’s face and body than his sisters’…

  Allyn continued anyway. “Some of the legends say that our seed can do more than one thing, that sometimes it can leave evil inscriptions in the souls of women it may come to know.”

  DARALYN WAS A woman Gwellyn had very much enjoyed coming to know, and in fact was still enjoying.

  Despite her name, Daralyn was not entirely of Gwellyn’s people. Though she had muddy red hair, her eyes were almond, and their color an iridescent edge closer to brown than blue. Her maternal grandfather and perhaps others in her line had come from the Land of Silk. She had high intelligence, noble bearing—altogether fit, Gwellyn’s father had concluded, to educate his son, five years younger than she, in some of the world’s ways.

  They lay in each other’s arms, her legs still wrapped yet relaxed around his waist, after a third round of love making.