Hidden Empire

by Orson Scott Card

  But they didn't hear him, because the robbers were laughing and saying, "Good shot! Good shooting!" some in English and some in Yoruba, but none of them in Hausa.

  When he was done with firing, the soldier boss yelled again, but in English now, to be sure they all understood him. "Did you find anybody else and keep them alive? Did anybody get away? Tell the truth!"

  The robbers all swore that they had killed everybody, the villagers were all dead, nobody got away. Chinma got the insane idea of screaming at them that they were not as smart as they thought, he had gotten away. But he held his tongue.

  The soldier chief walked away, and as he did, he replaced the clip on his weapon. The robbers started heading back toward their trucks. Then the soldier boss turned around again and started firing, but this time at the robbers. Since the robbers were all armed, some of them tried to defend themselves. But there were other soldiers already in place to cut them down from the sides.

  Many of the bullets hit the trunk of the tree Chinma was clinging to, and he felt the sharp vibrations all the way up to his high branches.

  When all the robbers were dead, the soldier boss called one of his men—in Hausa that Chinma could not understand at all—but the order he gave became clear when the man fired a flamethrower at the corpses of the robbers. The flames kept coming out and coming out, and the burning bodies stank and the smoke came right up to where Chinma was and it was all he could do not to cough at the smoke and the stink.

  He was also afraid that the tree would catch on fire, forcing him to climb down and die, but there had been plenty of rain and the wood did not burn. The flamethrower soldier moved away and then set fire to every building in the village and every body lying on the ground.

  Then two more trucks came, not army trucks but flatbeds that each carried a bulldozer. The drivers of the bulldozers wore masks on their faces like the doctor and the nurse had worn. They drove their bulldozers through the village, knocking everything down and pushing all the bodies into the flames of the ruined houses. They worked for another half hour, piling dirt on top of the fires so everything was covered. They also knocked down three trees, but not the one Chinma was in.

  When the bulldozers were back on the flatbed trucks, the soldier boss held up a thick wad of naira and the bulldozer drivers came toward him. The soldier boss also waved to the drivers of the flatbed trucks and they got out of the cabs and came to him. When they were all in place, the soldier boss drew his pistol and shot them all.

  Chinma got pictures of them. And of the flamethrower soldier burning their bodies, too. Then soldiers got into the flatbed trucks and drove them away. Soldiers also drove away the army trucks and the robber trucks, but they left the family's truck burning.

  Chinma stayed in the tree all the rest of the day, and all that night, even though mosquitoes found him and for all he knew were infecting him with sleeping sickness and malaria and every other disease. Better to die of a disease than for the soldiers to realize he was still alive and come back for him.

  But they did not come back.

  Chinma didn't know how many pictures the camera could hold, but the next morning when he came down, carrying the camera and his money, parched with thirst and soaked with urine, he did not let himself go to the river and drink until he had taken pictures of the burned wreckage of the houses and the charred bodies that were still visible, especially the bodies of the bulldozer and flatbed truck drivers.

  Then he went to the hiding place of the notebook the scientist gave him, watching all the time for soldiers or robbers or anyone at all, but there was no one. He went back into the underbrush until he was not visible from any road, and sat for three hours, writing down everything that happened. He couldn't stop himself from writing, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, over and over, even though he knew it was not really his fault. He wasn't even sure what he was sorry for. Sometimes he was sorry for having brought the sickness to the village instead of dying quickly the way Ire had. Other times he was sorry that he had been up a tree instead of dying with the rest of his family.

  He knew that he was bad at writing. Everyone said he made the letters wrong and wrote them on top of one another or even went backward on the line, but he tried very hard to keep the words in order and leave spaces between them.

  When he was through writing, he put the notebook back in the plastic bag and tucked it inside the waist of his pants and pulled his shirt down over it. Then he began to walk.

  He walked first to the nearest Ayere-speaking village, but exactly the same thing had happened there. He took a few more pictures and wrote a little more in the notebook. He did not bother going to any of the other Ayere villages. He knew now what the government had done. They were all Muslims and Hausas and stupid—even if they figured out that the safest villages in all of Nigeria were the Ayere villages, since the disease had passed through them first and was gone, they didn't care.They wanted to kill the Ayere, whether to stop the plague or punish them for starting it, and because they had never cared about the non-Muslims and non-Hausas, except to make sure they did their jobs, paid their taxes, and kept their mouths shut, they did not hesitate—they killed every Ayere.

  Except one.

  He made his way through the brush beside the highway, only coming out onto the road in order to use its bridges to cross streams or go over deep gullies. It took him till well after dark before he got to Ilorin, but that was fine with him, he did not want to come there in daylight.

  Chinma did not know where to go or whom to talk to. Anybody might be working for the government. And he had no idea where to find the scientists from the World Health Organization.

  So he curled up behind rusty oil barrels near the railway station and slept the rest of the night. Maybe the oil fumes kept the mosquitoes away, because he wasn't bitten any more that night, but he did wake up with a slight headache.

  By daylight, he could see that Ilorin was like a ghost town. He did not know that there was a complete curfew; there was no one on the streets to tell him. Every now and then he heard a vehicle, but he always hid himself, and that was the right thing to do, because the only cars and trucks belonged to the army. The soldiers were all wearing doctors' masks.

  I hope a monkey sneezes on you, thought Chinma. I hope a monkey bites you, every one of you.

  Finally, he came to a huge tent that covered a parking lot, and saw people in white hazard suits going in and out. Scientists. He could trust the scientists.

  But there might also be soldiers, so he found a route that kept him mostly out of sight until he could make a short dash to the tent and then slide under the edge of it instead of going through the big door.

  He came up behind a stack of metal boxes that were marked with strange words in English. They might be medicines. They might be food. Chinma was very hungry, and thirsty again, too, and he knew that he smelled very bad. But he had his camera and his notebook and he had to give it to someone who wouldn't just destroy it.

  So he crept out from behind the boxes and looked around. People were bustling all over, and inside the tent many of them were not wearing hazard suits, though everyone had doctors' masks on. Chinma saw that most of the faces were black, which meant they were probably Nigerians and might or might not be in the pay of the government. But there were white faces, too, and when he saw a white man sitting at a computer, typing, he made his way toward him, pulling out the bag containing the camera and the notebook and the pencil.

  The man looked at him and then jumped a little, startled.

  Chinma held out the plastic bag. "I have pictures for the computer," he said in his best English.

  "How the hell did you get in here?" demanded the man.

  "Pictures for the computer," said Chinma.

  "Are you out of your mind?" the man said. "Are you trying to infect everybody?"

  "I was already sick and I'm better now," said Chinma.

  "A survivor?" asked the man.

  Chinma didn't know that English word. "I have pic
tures for the computer."

  The man reached for the bag, then jerked his hand away. He got up, walked a few paces away, and came back pulling rubber gloves onto his hands. Then he took the bag, which by now Chinma had opened.

  The man took out the camera, looked at it, and then rummaged in a box on the floor under the table until he came up with a cord, which he attached to the computer and to the camera.

  Chinma was shaking as he watched the man type and move the computer mouse and type again.

  And then the pictures came up onto the screen, tiny pictures, lots of them.

  "They are very small," said Chinma.

  "These are just thumbnails," said the white man. He moved the mouse and clicked it and one picture filled the screen. It was a picture of two of Chinma's sisters, lying dead on the ground.

  "Aw, kid, don't you know? We've got a hundred thousand dead people, we don't need pictures of more."

  Chinma was puzzled for a moment. Had the soldiers killed so many?

  Then he realized—the man hadn't seen the bullet wounds. He thought they were dead of the monkey sickness.

  "Guns," said Chinma. He pantomimed holding an automatic weapon. "Huh-huh-huh-huh-huh-huh," he said, like the sound of the gun.

  A passing black woman saw him and immediately rushed toward him. "What are you doing!" she shouted. "Trying to infect Dr. Wangerin?" And then she turned to Dr. Wangerin. "This tent has been contaminated and your president's quarantine now makes it impossible for you to leave!"

  "The boy's all right," said the white man—Dr. Wangerin. "He already had the nictovirus and he hasn't contaminated anything. What I'm looking at now is something very different. Acute lead poisoning."

  He clicked again and a new picture came up. This time it was a picture of the soldier with the flamethrower setting fire to the bodies of the robbers.

  The Nigerian woman's eyes got big and she began to move away.

  "Stop right there," said Dr. Wangerin. "Where do you think you're going?"

  "She tells the government about the pictures," said Chinma.

  The woman shook her head and put out her hands as if to ward off Chinma's words.

  "The government pay her to tell on you," said Chinma. Any Nigerian would know this, from the way she was acting. But of course the white people would have no idea.

  "Sit down!" said Dr. Wangerin to the Nigerian woman. Looking terrified, she obeyed. "Security!" he shouted.

  Within a few moments she was in handcuffs and in the custody of two white men with pistols. Meanwhile, the light-haired security man noticed Chinma, and despite Dr. Wangerin's assurances, he seemed very angry with the dark-haired one.

  "Never mind the boy," said Dr. Wangerin.

  "Complete mission failure," said the light-haired gunman to his companion.

  "Your mission now is Dr. Bekaba," said Wangerin. "She doesn't leave this place until I say so."

  "We have to turn her over to the authorities," said the dark-haired security man. "Those are the conditions of our work here."

  "Yes," said Dr. Wangerin. "But not for one hour. Got it? She talks to no one, and no Nigerian comes anywhere near me for one hour. Then you can turn her over to the police—which is probably who she's working for anyway."

  "The police shoot her," said Chinma.

  "What?" asked Dr. Wangerin. "She's their spy."

  Chinma shrugged. A spy who got caught by Americans would simply be shot, and then they'd pretend she was working for some rebel group instead of the government. Why didn't these white people understand how things worked in Nigeria?

  Dr. Wangerin turned back to the pictures, showing them now to the men with guns.

  "It's mass murder," whispered the light-haired gunman.

  Dr. Wangerin did something and the computer did something and then he detached a little square thing from his computer and handed it to one of the men with guns. "Get out of this country immediately and take this with you."

  "The next plane leaves in—"

  "The next plane leaves when I say it does. It has to leave before we turn this woman loose. Do you understand?"

  "Of course," said the light-haired gunman. "But can't you just email it?"

  "I'm going to try that as soon as you're in the air and gone," said Dr. Wangerin. "We don't know how closely they monitor what we send on the internet, though. So as soon as I start transmitting, they might arrest us all and take our computers."

  The woman spoke up. "They will shoot the boy immediately."

  The three white men looked at her.

  "Please take him and me out of the country with you or we are both dead."

  Dr. Wangerin started to explain to her. "We can't take Nigerians to America without visas, it would be—"

  The light-haired gunman interrupted him. "I think these pictures will make a clear case that this boy needs immediate political asylum. It's within my authority to bring him in to a military base. Dr. Bekaba is another matter. As a Nigerian government spy, we can't take her. But if we consider her this boy's guardian, we can't leave without her."

  "She was going to turn him in," said Dr. Wangerin acidly.

  "The boy is right," she said. "If I stay here, I'm dead. I will not harm the boy."

  Dr. Wangerin rolled his eyes. "Do you think I'm stupid? If you had a way to do it, you'd kill him right now."

  "I would not," she said. "I'm a scientist!"

  "You're a spy working for a bunch of thugs."

  "We're all spies, if they tell us to be spies," Dr. Bekaba said. "Or else they kill our families. I'm not a spy by choice."

  Chinma could understand English much better than he spoke it, and he had gotten the idea that they were going to take him out of Nigeria.

  "Can I have my notebook?" he asked.

  "Is this evidence?" asked Dr. Wangerin, holding it up.

  "I write everything."

  Dr. Wangerin turned to the dark-haired gunman. "Then get this scanned and I'll send it as a PDF first, before the pictures."

  "I write in my language," said Chinma.

  Dr. Wangerin looked at him for a long moment. "What language is that?"

  "Ayere," said Chinma.

  Dr. Wangerin turned to the woman. "Do you speak Ayere?"

  She shook her head. "Nobody speaks Ayere. Just a few thousand people in a half-dozen villages north of here."

  "All dead," said Chinma.

  Dr. Wangerin looked at him, then glanced back at the pictures. "The Ayere-speakers—that's where the nictovirus first appeared, wasn't it?"

  Chinma had figured out that nictovirus was the English word for monkey sickness. "I get sick first," said Chinma. "Monkey spit on me." But he knew spit wasn't the right word. So he pretended to sneeze.

  Immediately the others recoiled from him as if he had just set off a flamethrower.

  "No, no, not sick!" said Chinma. "I show you monkey! Monkey do this." And he faked another sneeze, but not so realistically this time.

  "You mean 'sneeze,'" said the light-haired gunman.

  Dr. Wangerin looked at him now with a kind of awe. "You were—you were the first person infected?"

  "Monkey bite my brother Ire," said Chinma. "Monkey … sneeze me."

  " 'Ire' was the name of the first victim of the aggressive form of the disease," said Dr. Wangerin. "I think the disease nexus just walked into our tent."

  "That is why they kill my village," said Chinma. "I writed it in my notebook."

  "I believe him," said Dr. Bekaba. "Of course they'd kill all the Ayere-speaking people. To punish them for starting this plague."

  "So nobody can read his language except the boy himself?" asked the light-haired gunman.

  Dr. Bekaba shook her head. "There are language experts in some of the universities here."

  "Are there any in the United States?"

  "I wouldn't know," she said. "Probably. Specialists in obscure African languages. And the boy doesn't speak English well enough to translate it himself. But he speaks Yoruba, don't you, boy?"


  Chinma nodded.

  "I speak Yoruba, like everybody around here," she said. "He can translate it into Yoruba and I'll render it in English. On the plane."

  "Under close supervision and wearing the handcuffs every moment," said Dr. Wangerin.

  Chinma thought Dr. Wangerin was very smart.

  So did Dr. Bekaba. "As soon as I'm gone, they'll kill my family."

  "We know your address. Will all your family be at home?" asked Dr. Wangerin.

  "Yes, everybody's at home, because of the curfew," she said.

  "I'll send an ambulance for them," said Dr. Wangerin. "We'll tell the authorities that we have reason to believe your family has been infected but we need to study them while still alive to observe the course of the disease. So they'll let us bring them here."

  Dr. Bekaba nodded.

  "We'll have to lie to your family, too," said Dr. Wangerin. "Until you're all in the air and out of here."

  She nodded again.

  Dr.Wangerin turned to Chinma. "You did the right thing, young man. These pictures—I think they'll bring down the Nigerian government."

  "I think they'll start a civil war," said the light-haired gunman.

  "How did you get a camera?" asked Dr.Wangerin.

  Chinma turned to Dr. Bekaba and explained to her in Yoruba about the Nigerian scientist who rode with him out to see the trees where he had caught the monkeys. "I never knew his name," he said.

  Dr. Bekaba translated for Dr. Wangerin, who nodded. "The other nexus," he said. "Now we know he didn't get a second, new infection from the monkeys out in the bush, he got it from this boy."

  It took a moment, and then Chinma understood. The Nigerian scientist who gave him the notebook was dead.

  He burst into tears. The scientist had been good to him. And Chinma had infected him, just like Father and all the others who died. In a way, even the villagers killed by the robbers and the army had died from Chinma's infection, too.