ARIA

by Geoff Nelder

  “You said that to Gustav, once.”

  “The snitch,” Ryder said. “Anyway, do viruses die when the host dies? I mean are those bodies safe for us to handle without biohazard suits?”

  “Maybe, after, say, a day, but what else do they have? AIDS, hepatitis? There’s lots of blood and gore around, Ryder. I’d want to be suited up.”

  “Thanks. Always with the spot-on advice.”

  “Oui, save your soft-soaping for your new girlfriend,” she said, her eyebrow raised.

  Ryder didn’t know whether to interpret it as a good-luck-you’ll-need-it-look or as a remonstration for falling out with Teresa. As if it was his fault she’d fallen for Dr Cinzano Bianco. It must have been the latter because as his thoughts reached Antonio, she spoke again.

  “Pity that a first-class physician is locked up in the mine, n’est-ce pas?”

  Ryder agreed. After a little more thought, he tapped at his phone again.

  “Gustav, get the pickup after Brian’s been taken off it. Collect Abdul, Vlad, and Antonio’s space suits, a reel of barbed wire, shovels, and bring it all out here.”

  “Antonio’s suit?” said Gustav. “Is he...?”

  “No, it’s for me in case the disposable one I’m wearing falls apart. I can’t expect people to shovel that shit if I’m not prepared to do it myself.”

  STILL WEARING HIS PROTECTION SUIT but not trusting it entirely, Ryder examined the twisted gate. Most of the blast had passed harmlessly through the gaps in the bars. Enough, along with shrapnel, had hit the galvanised steel tubing, twisting the lower bars and breaking two. Putting his hand on the gate, he pulled and it scraped the gravel as it opened. It wouldn’t take much to do a temporary lock-up to deter casual wanderers—unless they too carried an arsenal in their hand luggage.

  He heard footsteps scraping the loose stones on the track round the bluff. He threw himself behind a rock to the right. His rifle was on the other side of the lane but he’d be in view if he went for it now. Salty sweat stinging his eyes, he whispered into his phone.

  “Abdul, Vlad, can either of you hear me?”

  The footsteps became louder and faster, accompanied by a shout. “Ryder, where are you?”

  “Damn,” Ryder shouted. “I thought you were more of that group. Bloody hell, I can feel my pulse going like the clappers.”

  Abdul held out his hand. “Oh dear, Ryder, we are so sorry. Shall we get you a chair, a cup of tea, biscuit...?”

  Ryder took his hand to haul himself up. “I suppose you did some extra exploring on that old Roman road?”

  “We saw an ancient signpost. If I was Dan, I would be saying how amazing that we’ve just walked a track others have walked for over two thousand years.”

  “So?” said Ryder, rubbing an elbow from his fall.

  Abdul grinned. “The route I used to do to my school in Al Wakrah, had been walked on for six thousand years.”

  “Hey, my friends,” Vlad said, “I come from an ancient village near Kiev that too goes back over six thousand years.”

  “I bet there is a two million-year old footpath in Olduvai Gorge,” said Ryder. “And how quick will all the paths crumble as Nature takes them back? As a young man interested in the environment, I always thought the human race would end by its own stupidity. Not so much blowing each other up, but by unleashing some pathogen or other without a cure. It never occurred to me it would come from space.”

  Abdul looked round at the grisly mess near the gate, and the two bodies a few metres farther down. “Bury or burn?”

  “Ironic, isn’t it?” said Ryder. “There are people dead all over the place out there, with no one in authority to organise disposal. Most rot where they fall. Animals will feast on some but not all. I swear I sometimes smell the putrid odour on wafts of air.”

  “I too, since walking around up here, not at the centre. We are lucky there,” Vlad said.

  “I don’t suppose you found a convenient hole in the ground when you had your ramble,” Ryder said. “No? There’s a farm down the lane. It will have somewhere to put these corpses so scavengers can’t get at them and passers-by won’t see them. Gustav has brought your suits.”

  To Ryder’s surprise, Dan disembarked from the passenger side wearing his suit and he saw Gustav wore Antonio’s suit.

  “I needed to come out from behind the computer, Ryder. You go back and handle those women; it’s your turn.”

  “Very well,” Ryder said. “Now, don’t forget there are two bodies besides the three here and—”

  “Ryder,” Dan said, lifting Megan’s bike out of the pickup. “Here is your transport back. Let us get on with it.”

  “Right,” said Ryder, who hadn’t ridden a bike for years and didn’t want to show himself up. The first heavy spots of a shower splattered the rocks. “With luck, you’ll get drenched.”

  “It’ll save us having to wash the road down,” Abdul said. They all waved Ryder off as he, on the bike, wobbled round the bend.

  EVEN THOUGH HE NEEDED A SHOWER, fresh clothes, and a strong cup of tea, Ryder kept his suit on to see Brian. The roof collapse left the first 150 metres intact, which meant it had power and was dry. They’d set up an area near the roof collapse where Brian slept, with a camera keeping watch. Laurette, suited up, had just checked on his condition when Ryder entered the mine.

  “He’ll pull through,” she said. “The bleeding has stopped and all his vital signs are normal.”

  “Great, and?”

  “Un peu confused but most knife victims are traumatised. We’ll know better when he’s had a long sleep. Ryder, was it necessary to kill those people before finding out if they were infected?”

  “Laurette, they were memory confused. We had little opportunity to ask them for biological samples or to fill in a questionnaire. If Brian has it, we made the right choice.”

  Wednesday 23 September 2015:

  Anafon, breakfast.

  AFTER ALL THAT ENERGY EXPENDITURE, Ryder should have slept well the night of the action, but he couldn’t. The gunfire and grenade must have been heard in the local village, and the nearest town, although the valleys and mountain sides played acoustic tricks so maybe not. He’d spent an hour with Derek examining the flying drone camera shots of the nearest village.

  “There,” said Derek, using the cursor to point at a shape in a doorway, another at a window, and a definite human couple crossing the A55 dual carriage at the coast.

  But several corpses littered the lanes, fields, and a car park. Many house doors were open and windows smashed.

  “Not the quaint tourist honeypot it used to be,” said Ryder, before scanning the other cameras and checking the status of sensors. The cameras with Antonio showed him cooking pasta on a camping stove. The sensors in there indicated nothing unusual, making them wonder what the micro-earthquake tremor was all about. Brian’s camera showed him asleep. Vital signs showed an eighty-beats-per-minute pulse and raised, but not dangerous, blood pressure.

  “The ISS crew did a fine job clearing the bodies,” Derek said. “I did a midnight shift check out there. The rain washed most of the blood away too, so I hope no one is drinking the stream water in the village this morning.”

  Bronwyn brought them both steaming mugs of black coffee and toast.

  “Thanks,” Ryder said, wondering if she’d spat in it. A horrible thought, but he’d heard from Teresa that she blamed him for her Brian’s contact with the infected outsider. “He’s had a good sleep.”

  Bronwyn, red-eyed, nodded.

  “I did try to stop him,” Ryder continued, but with regret since it sounded as if he was shifting the blame. “What I mean is—”

  “Ryder,” she said, in her Welsh lilt. “What’s done is done. If he hadn’t stopped that bugger, we’d all be ill now, wouldn’t we?” Tears welled up once more. Ryder put down his mug and hugged her. Derek made it a group hug, with tears of his own.

  “One of my friends, Manuel, in the States, found having the basics written on a pad he
lped him each morning,” Ryder said.

  “I know. Teresa’s already done one on the computer. It’s been printed and waiting beside him now.”

  After Bronwyn left them, Ryder said, “I’m not number one round here, then.”

  “Ryder, I was your boss for years. Unpopularity comes with the territory. To be honest, Brian is lost to us now. From my old personal-management viewpoint, he’s a waste of our resources and energy. Of course, he is still our friend and cannot be deserted—”

  “Unless it comes to an issue of his survival put against all of the rest of us,” Ryder said, knowing he could be frank with Derek.

  “Quite. But we should be more concerned about Antonio.”

  “I thought I hid my feelings about Antonio rather well.”

  “No, you haven’t, and I wasn’t thinking about your green-eyed monster. We know a shockwave emanated from the case, yet the tremor was probably not intended to harm anything. So I’ve expected a condition change in the man who triggered it.”

  “But Antonio has not changed.”

  “We don’t know that for sure, do we, Ryder? All the vital signs we measure are within normality, but we’ve made a monumental blunder in our planning.”

  “I can’t claim to be infallible. I was a documentary maker with space expertise. We had to make urgent preparations. For all we knew, there was a use-by date on the case.”

  “Calm down, Ryder, I’m not blaming anyone. If we start pointing fingers to apportion blame in this extraordinary situation, our arms would get interlocked. What I refer to is that we are not monitoring his memory functions. I’ve done psychometric studies at uni. We’ve relied on him telling us how his memory is, but we should have done a battery of word, number, shape, and concept-recall tests to compare before and after the case being opened.”

  “Of course. How stupid of me to overlook it.”

  “You know the next step?” Derek said.

  “After a week or so, he needs to be exposed to ARIA to see if he is immune.”

  “Right. Did he know this?”

  “Of course he did,” Ryder said. “Surely? Why else be exposed?”

  Bronwyn passed them on her way back to see Brian. Ryder and Derek hadn’t noticed the monitor showing Brian reading the information sheet Teresa had typed up for him.

  “Give him our best wishes, Bronwyn,” Ryder said. “Take no chances. You’re more helpful to him as a fully-functioning person than an amnesiac yourself.”

  “And more useful to you.”

  AN HOUR LATER, Antonio thumbed up at the camera and at Derek’s request gave a perfect account of what happened the previous day, indicating no lapse of memory.

  Bronwyn returned to the refectory from the mine and threw her air cylinder on the floor in front of Ryder and Dan. “Why don’t we have any compressed-air-making-equipment here? We’ve nearly run out of it.” Sobbing, she slumped in a seat at the table.

  Laurette came in behind her. “Brian has no memory of last month. I hoped it might be attributable to trauma, but non. We have only one hour compressed air for our biohazard suits.”

  Dan whispered to Ryder. “We have some in our spacesuit packs.”

  “No, Dan. We might need them for more than visiting the sick. But it can’t be that difficult replacing compressed air for those cylinders, can it? I’ll ask Gustav.”

  “We’re missing a trick here, Ryder,” Dan said.

  “I know. We’re supposed to eliminate the ARIA-infected person, even if it’s one of us. The risks are too great.”

  “No. I mean we should put Brian in with Antonio. Two reasons. It would be useful to know if Antonio is now immune to ARIA and to see if exposure to the case has any effect on Brian’s memory loss.”

  Ryder felt annoyed for not thinking of it himself yet, while sipping an orange juice, was relieved Derek had. “Of course. How?”

  Derek picked up his coffee and then put it down as if he couldn’t drink and think. “Yeah, the natives around here are getting restless.”

  “I don’t think we’ll have any problem with the pro-Brian group since he hasn’t anything to lose with this development. But Teresa will go ballistic when I tell her we’re going to give Antonio an infected visitor.”

  “Surely not,” Dan said. “It’s what he volunteered for. Finding out the secrets of the second case.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. Teresa will be so cool about it.”

  ABDUL AND JENA BUILT A VALVE with a bicycle inner tube and a car-tyre foot pump, which worked well to put thirty minutes of breathable air, tasting of rubber, into the small air tanks on the biohazard suits. Vlad and Abdul walked Brian up the mountain and down into the shaft to greet Antonio.

  Ryder thought it best to keep quiet with the others in the IT lab eagerly awaiting developments. Antonio refused to wear protective gear and helped Brian to his only easy chair: a padded deckchair belonging to Brian in the first place. The doctor, glad to practise medicine once more, soon had Brian’s dressings off.

  “Ciao! Buona, you’ve come to my surgery, Brian. This needs stitches and, guardi quello! I don’t like this. Looks like septicaemia. Have you witches given him Amoxycillin-14? I’ll give him some out of my box anyway.”

  “Qu’est que ce?” Laurette said. “Septicaemia cannot be diagnosed yet. If his wound is infected, it’d take another three days for symptoms to show. Regardez, the monitor is showing Brian’s temperature to be normal. He’d have hot flushes and really feel ill.”

  “Laurette,” Dan said. “I don’t think it’s you. He hasn’t had enough doctoring to do for a while, that’s all.”

  “I hope he isn’t getting my Brian as worried as he’s getting me,” Bronwyn said, whose red hair had its silver strands multiply overnight. She tapped the console mike switch. “Brian, how are you, love?”

  “Are you cooking kippers in here, Doc? It’s still bleeding, isn’t it? Bit chilly.”

  Gustav leant forward. “Is he rambling or just giving an experience-to-speech account?”

  Jena said, “Childhood smells is an early symptom of ARIA.”

  “Brian loves kippers,” Bronwyn said. “We have them all the time.”

  “No you don’t,” Megan said.

  “Time you went to bed, lady,” Bronwyn said.

  “Just out of interest, when was the last time?” Dan said. “And what are kippers?”

  “Smoked herring. We last ate them on holiday in the Isle of Man. Famous for them, you know.”

  “Auntie, you haven’t been there for three years.”

  SATURDAY 26 SEPTEMBER 2015

  “Good news and bad news. Which do you want first?” Antonio said to Laurette at her early morning shift. She’d already called Derek to sort out an IT problem. The frequent gales and heavy Snowdonia rainfall played havoc with cables and connections.

  “Good news, Antonio. Leave the bad for someone else’s shift.”

  “In my opinion and from memory tests I subjected him to, Brian had not lost any more of his memory since the three days he came in here.”

  “That’s incredibly good news. Fantastic, and because of the case.”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “What do you mean?” Laurette said. “What wouldn’t you say?”

  “The halt in Brian’s retrograde memory loss might be due to his exposure to the case. Or it might be due to my exposure days before. In other words, I have something, undetectable by our feeble sensors, which stunned the ARIA in Brian.”

  Jena had come in and overheard. “Antonio, I don’t suppose Brian has recovered any of his lost memory.”

  “You remember, Jena, he came in here within forty-eight hours of him catching ARIA and he was ill, confused. He had lost two months. But he remembered new information. Each morning until today, he woke up, saw the mine walls, and screamed.”

  Jena looked puzzled. “Antonio, I can understand why an ill person would wake up in there, think he’s in hell and scream, but why not today?”

  Antonio said, “B
rian died in the night.”

  THE SHOCKING NEWS UPSET EVERYONE EXCEPT ANTONIO. Ryder found Scary Jena at a computer, adding to a diary of every notable event. Not a book as such, but a multimedia event. The first images of the case, movie files of their landing at Hawarden, and the fight at the gate, which Ryder didn’t want to review. Weird art by Megan, songs by Bronwyn and Brian, and poetry from Vlad—in Russian.

  “Sorry to interrupt you, Jena,” Ryder said.

  “You’re the first ever to interrupt me with this journal, I will make a note of it.”

  He sat on a stool and gave her a chocolate bar from his secret store. “Jena, you know him well. What do you make of Antonio?”

  “I don’t know him that well. What are you implying?”

  Ryder stood, shocked. “I didn’t mean anything sordid, for God’s sake!”

  “And why shouldn’t we have been? Are you saying there’s something wrong with me?”

  Ryder’s face heated. “No. Of course not. I can’t win here can I? Can we start over?” He didn’t know whether to sit again or walk away.

  “Ryder, you are so easy. Sit. How can I resist teasing you? How can I resist you? Oh, you want to know about Antonio. Yes, he’s cracked, hasn’t he? Is that what you wanted to know?”

  Ryder, relieved, made himself comfortable—just—on the stool and waited for elaboration. He dared not prompt in case it became a trampoline for more verbal gymnastics. He didn’t have to wait long. Once Jena’s spring wound up, off she went.

  “Highly intelligent, but self-effacing, dry sense of humour, and teased everyone a little. That’s how he was before he turned into an unbearable asshole.”

  “That’s what I thought. Of course, having lost your family then volunteering for a suicide mission would unhinge most people.”

  “Ryder, we’ve all lost family, though one of the reasons Antonio volunteered was because he wasn’t close to any of his: wiped out in a Naples riot while we orbited.”