Hidden Empire

by Orson Scott Card

  Cecily could probably have made him go to his room, but she couldn't have made him sleep, and he would never forgive her for it. But she could go with him.

  That's why she was in the room when Cole came in. He was shuffling along weakly, leaning against the wall. He was the last of the jeesh to get the fever, and it had only come on him today. But Cecily knew that he had been wracked with coughing—some of the men had even broken their own ribs with coughing, especially the more muscular among them—and that now his headache was fierce. He must have been told what condition Cat was in—perhaps Mark himself informed him earlier in the day—and as soon as Mark saw him come through the door, he got up from his chair and helped Cole to come and sit beside Cat.

  Cole was wearing his breathing mask—it was a regulation he insisted on, because even if all the soldiers were infected, their caregivers were not, and men in the sneezing and coughing stage should keep their sputum to themselves. He said nothing to Cat, but he held his hand and bowed his head and closed his eyes for a while, so Cecily assumed he was praying, though perhaps he was only remembering. It had been Cat who went with Cole into Aldo Verus's cavern fortress in Washington State. Cecily knew what it meant to Reuben when he had been in combat with a man who truly had his back—a man to be relied on in a fight. She could only assume that Cole felt the same way about Cat.

  Cecily brought a chair for Mark to sit on the other side of Cat's bed—a cot, really, everything Army issue and flown in when the university was first converted to military use. Then she went over and sat on the floor between Arty and Babe, because they were the only ones awake and watching the scene. She held their hands, which they seemed to appreciate. That was when they whispered to her about Mark being a good man.

  It was about ten at night when Cat stopped breathing. It didn't bring a silence to the room—Drew and Mingo were both snoring and rasping too loudly for Cat's lack of breath to make much difference, and Benny and Arty were still in the savage coughing phase, and that noise, too, continued at frequent intervals.

  But Cat's chest stopped moving.

  Mark leaned closer—he had never seen death before, could not be sure, would still cling to hope. Cecily reached across Cat's body and cupped her hand behind his neck. "Oh, Mark," she said, "I'm so sorry."

  Mark buried his face in his hands. Cole held out a shaky hand and rested it on Mark's head for a while. Then he started to get up from the chair. And failed.

  "I'm so weak," he whispered to her. "I'm sorry, can you help me?"

  Mark needed her and she didn't want to leave him. But every soldier on this base needed Cole. So she helped him get up and walk to the door. He was so weak that she knew she would have to help him all the way back to his quarters.

  Mark stayed with Cat's body. Behind them, she could hear Arty say, softly, "Good-bye, Cat." Benny added, "God bless," and then went into a coughing fit.

  Out in the corridor, Cecily talked softly as she helped support Cole's weight. "From what Mark tells me, the others are all staying hydrated and I think Cat may be the only one we lose. I hope so."

  Cole only nodded.

  "What about you?" she asked. "Are you being too macho to take your meds and drink? Getting up to come down here was crazy enough."

  "Mark and Chinma boss me around," he said.

  She knew that he understood that keeping himself alive was his primary duty right now. The Pentagon had asked him if he needed to be relieved, but he told them that there was no reason to bring in anybody else to be infected, he had good support from the caregivers group and enough soldiers were still functioning to keep the base going.

  This last had been a lie, which he candidly admitted to Cecily after sending the message. Only a quarter of the soldiers were still in the coughing, prefever stage—they were able to perform some of their duties, but not all, and not well. He discussed it with Cecily because he needed to know how long it would take for the survivors to be back on duty.

  "Limited clerical duty? Maybe three or four days after the fever breaks, if they've stayed fed and hydrated. Combat? Probably two months or longer."

  Cole had chuckled at that.

  "What's so funny?" she asked.

  "These guys are special ops, every one of them," said Cole. "Bet you they report themselves fit for combat as soon as they can stand up without falling over."

  "But you won't send them on missions," Cecily said.

  "We'll assess our ability to carry out our mission when the time comes," said Cole.

  Now, walking down the corridor with him, Cecily knew that having the disease himself must be changing his view of combat readiness. The nictovirus had brought down Cat Black, and Cole himself must be able to feel how weak and unsteady he was at the beginning of the fever stage. At the end of it, if he lived, he'd be far weaker. There'd be no jaunts down the hall for quite a while after that.

  Cecily got him to his room. "I just want you to know," she said, "that Reuben would have been proud of the way you've led his jeesh."

  Cole coughed, long and hard, wincing with every spasm.

  She waited for the coughing to end. "Did I imagine it, or in the midst of your coughing did you actually say 'Bullshit'?"

  He lay down on his cot. "I'm not their leader."

  "After all your missions together, with you in command—"

  "I'm their commander in combat and that's it," said Cole.

  Even in his weakness, the anger was palpable. "What is it?" she said. "I thought you loved these guys."

  "I did," said Cole. "I do."

  "Then what's wrong?"

  "They're crazy now," said Cole. "They won't say it outright, but they have some insane belief that anything that goes wrong in the world is Torrent's fault."

  "The President?"

  "Yes," said Cole.

  She knew there was more to it than that, but she wasn't going to push. He'd tell her what he thought she should know.

  Besides, though she had long suppressed them in order to work with the man, she had suspicions along those same lines herself. So had Cole, once.

  "Cat did this to me," said Cole.

  "Did what?" she asked.

  "Infected me."

  She didn't want to argue with him, but how could he know?

  As if he heard her skepticism, he said, "He sneezed in my face."

  "But it must have been an accident," she said.

  "He leaned into my face to sneeze," said Cole. "And he admitted it. They all admitted it. They got themselves infected on purpose, and since nobody wears masks around here, inside the base, they probably infected everyone else."

  "They were the breach of the quarantine? On purpose?"

  "They think Torrent's quarantine will fail. They think he expects it to fail, wants it to fail. So they exposed themselves and all of us to the nictovirus so that whoever lived would be immune. There'd be a team of soldiers who had already had the disease and wouldn't get it again."

  Cecily thought about it. "It makes a perverse kind of sense. Except for the ones who die."

  "They're soldiers. They thought of it as an acceptable attrition rate. Especially since they think every other army in the world will go through the same thing."

  "So your group here will be the first company of immune soldiers in the army."

  "That's the plan. If you can call it a plan. Russian roulette with half the chambers full."

  Cecily thought about it some more. "You think they were wrong."

  "They were damn well wrong to infect everybody, especially me, without asking me first."

  "Come on, Cole," said Cecily. "You know you could never have given that order."

  He glumly conceded the point by not responding.

  "Are you still angry at Cat?" she asked.

  He shook his head and then winced at the pain the movement caused him. "He's the best off," he said.

  "What do you mean?" she said. "If the others live—"

  "Whether they live or die, that's in the hands of God. And M
ark. And all you Christians," said Cole.

  "So what did you mean by that? Cat being the best off?"

  He almost answered. But then he gave a weak little wave of his hand. "Go back to your son. He needs you more than I do. I'm sorry I dragged you away from him."

  And as she left his quarters, he said, "You were crazy to come here, crazy to bring Mark."

  She stopped in the doorway. "I know," she said.

  "God bless you for it," said Cole.

  Two days later, Mingo's fever broke, and it seemed likely that Babe and Drew were also about to make it over the hump and start the slow recovery. They were still as weak as babies.

  Meanwhile, Arty and Benny were now in the full crisis of fever, and so was Cole. So were most of the soldiers on the base, since they had been infected at nearly the same time.

  Cecily couldn't believe that some of the caregivers complained about how many resources the soldiers were using up. "We came here for the Nigerians, not to take care of soldiers," one man said. "We're not camp followers."

  Cecily didn't answer him as she wanted to. She merely waited for a few beats of silence, in which everyone else seemed a little embarrassed for him; or perhaps they were all expecting her response to be harsh.

  Instead she merely said, "They're sick, they're children of God, and they're here," she said. "You aren't on the base rotation, are you?"

  The man admitted he was not.

  "Then it doesn't affect you," she said.

  "There are thousands of people out there that we haven't gotten to yet," insisted the man, perhaps not realizing how every word stabbed her to the heart. "And they'll die without our reaching them because this base is taking up so many of our people."

  "Those people out in the city," said Cecily, managing to keep her voice calm, "have families, most of them, and they're taking care of one another. We're all these men and women in uniform have. I hope you don't think that because they volunteered to serve their country in uniform, they are somehow undeserving of God's love and our help."

  That was as close as she came to rebuking him, but he wasn't a complete fool—he understood what she was saying and he kept his thoughts to himself from then on, at least around her.

  In the city, by necessity the dead were being taken to mass graves, and though the burial squads made some effort to keep a record of the names, many bodies were picked up from the street with no way of finding out the names. On the base, however, the soldiers were all known, all placed in body bags and carried to a tent at the edge of campus. The Navy sent choppers and soldiers in hazmat suits to carry them back to the ships for blood samples, then flew them back to the States to be sealed in coffins and returned to their families. That was where Cat's body went, along with the other American soldiers who died in the first wave.

  By now they had enough soldiers who had passed the fever stage to have some idea of what kind of difference the care they were getting would make. Four were dead, and twenty-nine had passed through the fever and seemed likely to recover. If they did in fact get well, then it looked like there might be a twelve percent mortality rate. That was a vast improvement over the death rate when people didn't get this treatment. Even though it was only preliminary, Cecily wrote to the President that he could safely call the caregiving operation a success, and every effort should be made to get the word out, worldwide, about the treatments they were using. It could save lives in African countries where the nictovirus was just entering. And everywhere else, if the quarantine failed.

  If this epidemic did spread beyond Africa, and most people were able to get decent care from their families and medications from their governments or health care systems, the treatment they had devised—based on Aunt Margaret's interpretation of Chinma's account of the disease—might well save a billion and a half lives, or more.

  It was two days after Cat died that the talk radio host showed up in the military plane. Cecily had been warned that he was coming, but she assumed he would watch the offloading of supplies and the loading up of bodies, maybe talk to a couple of caregivers—the ones who had the time to talk to him, which meant the least effective or experienced ones—and then he'd go home.

  But he didn't. Instead, he showed up with a microphone in his hand and a recorder in a shoulder bag and accosted her as she was leaving a house where she had helped a family deal with a child who had just started bleeding.

  He started to introduce himself. "Hi, I'm Rusty Humphries from Talk Radio Network, and—"

  His smile, his glibness, they made her angry, and she walked past him, saying, "I know who you are."

  Doggedly he pursued her along the street.

  "Everyone back at the University of Calabar said that you were in charge."

  "They were wrong," she said.

  He kept following. She walked faster. So did he. She couldn't go any faster without running, so apparently she was going to have to be rude. She stopped and faced him. "Look, Mr. Humphries."

  He held the mike up to her mouth.

  She pulled it out of his hand and dropped it on the ground.

  "Hey," he said. "That's a fifteen-hundred-dollar microphone."

  "What we're doing here isn't about ratings or selling airtime or whipping people up into a frenzy," she said.

  "I know what you're really here for," said Humphries.

  Oh, he was going to go speculating about her motive, was he? "And what is that?"

  "You're here because you believe these are children of God and you have a responsibility to help them."

  She was not really prepared for him to take them seriously. "That's right," she said. "And talking to you doesn't further that cause."

  "I think it does," said Humphries. "And here's why. I have millions of listeners to my radio show every day. You need meds and water bottles and food and that takes money. You also need more volunteers. So we need to show people all over America that you're not a bunch of Christian kooks who went off to Africa to die, like those wacko liberals who went to Baghdad to try to stop us from bombing there. I want to let them hear your voice, hear you talk about what you're doing, let them feel what it's like to experience this disease. Because you know and I know that sooner or later, everybody in the world is going to have to deal with this."

  Cecily bent over and picked up the microphone and dropped it into his shoulder bag. "I'm not in charge, Mr. Humphries. I'm just a caregiver who had to tell a family that their eight-year-old firstborn son is going to die, in spite of the best care they and we could give him. I have more houses to visit and more work to do, but I wish you well with your radio show, which is more than I would have said five minutes ago, so I guess you made your point."

  "Thank you," said Humphries. "That was great. It will really help me get the message across."

  "What, your fifteen-hundred-dollar microphone picked it up, even though it's in your bag?"

  "No," said Humphries smiling, "but the five-thousand-dollar microphone did." He pointed to a tiny mike clipped to the front of his shirt. "I know who you are, and who your husband was, and even though I'm not a Catholic and I don't have a vote on who is and isn't made a saint, I sure think you're the kind of American citizen I hope my daughters grow up to be. God bless you, Cecily Malich."

  And with that he walked away.

  Persistent devil, she thought. The last thing she wanted was publicity for herself personally, and maybe she could make a big stink about it and make him not put it on the air. But then, here he was on the street in Calabar, with a terrifying disease all around him, wearing no face mask, and he didn't seem to be doing anything more than trying to get word back to America about just what this disease was and how to treat it and how important it was to fight it here in Africa. So Humphries was doing exactly what she had asked President Torrent to do—let the world know how to save as many lives as possible.

  Later that same day, she was heading for a poor neighborhood not far from the Big Qua River northeast of the university, when a dilapidated flatbed t
ruck came barreling into town along the I.B.B. Road, which became the Ikang highway just beyond the airport. When the driver saw Cecily and her companion, Alice, a young housewife from Lynchburg, he brought the truck to a shuddering stop and leapt out of the cab. He was old enough to have mostly-white hair, but he was still big and strong and both women stepped back a little as he rushed toward them.

  "Mma Slessor?" he shouted. "American Christians help monkey sickness?"

  "Yes," said Cecily. "That's why we're here. We have medications if your family has the nictovirus—"

  "No, no, we have plenty, very good, now you listen: In Aking, I make a delivery, and trucks come in. Army trucks."

  "The Nigerian army?" she asked.

  He shook his head. "No no no, Arab-looking, Sudan men, Egypt men? They speak language I don't know, they come and scream at people and shoot in the air and take food and fill up gas. They say, Calabar, Calabar, so I know they come here."

  "Soldiers coming here?"

  "Six trucks," he said. "I go to my truck, I drive slow out of town so they don't care about me, and then come here as fast as I can."

  "Do you have room for us in your truck? Can you take us to the university, so I can warn the American soldiers there?"

  "American soldiers have monkey sickness, don't let anybody in. But they let you in."

  "Yes," said Cecily. "They will indeed."

  As they started up the road, Cecily asked him about himself. The language barrier was too great to learn more than the fact that he was a short-haul trucker, his family lived mostly in the countryside but also in Calabar, and the Calabar portion of the family had come through the monkey sickness with only two deaths. Out of fifteen people, Cecily figured that was a merciful total, and certainly so did he. "Other families kaput kpata kpata," he said, pidgin for wiped out. "Others half die. Only two quench in our family because of the Americans. I don't let them kill you!"

  Apparently the Americans hadn't taught his family enough, because he hadn't had the disease yet—and wasn't wearing a mask. But she could hardly complain, since his gratitude for their caregiving had prompted him to bring an early warning so the soldiers would not be taken by surprise.