Far less officially, he was there to meet and collaborate with Effenberg sympathisers, the pure seeking to overthrow the New Zealand government and align with Capricornia.
And not at all officially, he had sought and received political asylum. The New Zealand Effenberg conspirators were even now being arrested and charged with terrorism offences.
‘What’s changed, Seth?’
Charlie couldn’t endure listening. This was her work they were exploiting. Her work had built Capricornia. Without her cure, Effenberg would not have been able to build his regime and equally vile dictatorships across the world couldn’t have found their power. She’d been trying to stop extinctions, to do good science, and she had indeed succeeded, but the price … the price made her want to vomit.
Those babies dying would be written into her flesh for the rest of her days.
‘I don’t expect people to understand how I could have tolerated it all. I hardly understand it myself.’ Seth was saying.
‘You got that, buddy,’ said Shadrack.
‘Incredible,’ responded Juliette.
Charlie couldn’t even bring herself to speak.
Seth talked about the changes in him since the infection. He lost God and he lost faith in many things he’d always taken for granted. He became suspicious of those around him, suspicious of his family. He began to spy, seeking anything that could undermine the reality he was expected to believe. That’s when he’d found his father’s medical records: records he’d given Brigid.
‘I have them here,’ said Brigid, holding up some printed sheets of paper. ‘Can you tell us what they say?’
Seth paused, then went on. ‘He is infected too. Was infected all along. Years ago, before Capricornia. Before he even became Premier of Queensland. All that stuff about protecting the pure against the unclean. He was just exploiting it. He didn’t care. He just wanted power, and pretending to be shot just helped him get it. He used everyone. He used us all.’ Seth’s face was distorted with fury, his mouth twisting down with disgust.
‘Do you know what symptoms he had? Synaesthesia? Or anything else?’
‘Nothing, as far as I know. But if he had, he wouldn’t have said.’
‘That hypocritical piece of shit!’ Juliette was outraged.
‘Nothing that man does surprises me,’ said Shadrack
Brigid spoke gently. ‘Seth, you know many people will have a lot of trouble believing you, and there’ll be even more who won’t want to believe you, because of the enormity of what you’re saying. What do you say to those in Capricornia who will see it as being the result of the Plague, the ravings of a person deluded by brain infection?’
‘Just look at that video. Look at that and tell me it’s right.’ He was crying now, roughly pushing the tears off his cheek with the back of his hand. ‘It’s not right. None of it’s right.’
Brigid was winding up her broadcast, telling her audience that she would upload the raw footage from the hospital CCTV, along with the documents Seth had given her, to her website.
‘To those of you in Capricornia, I know I’m urging you to take a great risk. If the Effenberg regime discovers you with these, you are in danger. This, though, is the time you need to ask yourself: which side of history do you want to be on?
‘I’m Brigid Bayliss. Thank you, and good night.’
The image on the smartwall faded, and Shadrack, Charlie and Juliette sat back, reeling.
‘She is so brave,’ murmured Juliette, standing. ‘So brave.’ She headed up the stairs, taking them two at a time.
Charlie leant back on the sofa.
‘How are you going?’ asked Shadrack. ‘You’re pretty damned brave too, you know.’
She shook her head. She didn’t want to hear that. ‘The Effenberg family business. So it seems Seth was with the Resistance?’
‘Part of a resistance, anyway. I don’t know if the people I’ve been working with were collaborating with the Kiwis. Look, can I get you anything? Tea, coffee, something to eat?’
She knew he was trying to help, trying to get close. Right now, though, she didn’t want it. Too much to process. Too much of everything.
‘We should all probably eat something. I’ll go and see what Brigid and Juliette want.’
The door to the attic was open so Charlie walked straight in, but her question about food toppings didn’t make it from her brain to her tongue. Juliette. Brigid. Kissing. Really kissing. Before she had time to think about what it meant, her body responded. She felt their lips, softer than any man’s, the smoothness of their skin, felt their hot breath, felt the pressure of their breasts and bellies, the pushing of Brigid’s thigh between Juliette’s. The heat rushed through her body and heaved like a tide in her loins. What was this? She wasn’t gay. Even now, she wasn’t desiring them, she was … feeling them. She was being them.
She took a step backwards and must have made a sound that the two women heard. They looked at her, flushed, their eyes heavy with passion.
‘Sorry. Sorry,’ she muttered. ‘But hey, you two … um, great! Really. Great!’
She withdrew onto the spiral staircase, bewildered by her body’s response. Downstairs, she pretended that they’d asked for pizza. It seemed a good guess. She gave the order to Grandfather, told him to put on Miles Davis’s ‘Kind of Blue’, and Shadrack refilled her glass. The music intruded and irritated (it was orange, oddly enough) and she turned it off again. They reclaimed the sofa, and she took a deep breath, trying to contextualise what she’d just experienced.
The last few days had left her unable to trust her senses. The synaesthesia was a revelation, but she confessed to herself a degree of disappointment. It wasn’t anything like Richard had described. It wasn’t transcendent. It was just colours where there oughtn’t be colours, and sometimes they were simply annoying. But other forms seemed to be developing. She’d noticed, running her hands on the coarsely woven kitchen dishcloth earlier, that a smell of mint had filled the air. If she put her fingers through her hair, she was sure she smelt a faint whiff of vanilla. From what she knew of the research, synaesthesiac responses with T. pestis took their time in settling in. So maybe it would change. Then again, Richard was an artist – he was musical. Perhaps his innate abilities heightened his response. She felt a throb of envy.
‘Jesus fucking Christ!’
Ow! She sat up at Shadrack’s cry, grabbing her wrist. Goblin was skulking away and Shadrack was holding his arm in the same spot.
‘What happened?’
‘Bloody dog bit me!’ He held his arm out, and three red marks had formed below his thumb joint. Goblin didn’t have much left in the way of teeth.
‘Did you do something to him?’
‘No! I was just giving him a pat.’ His tone was more wounded than his arm.
‘He’s got arthritis,’ said Charlie. ‘He gets defensive. Let me look.’
He held his wrist out towards her and she absently rubbed her own in sympathy. But it wasn’t sympathy. She realised she was feeling it. Feeling his wound on her arm.
‘Shadrack, indulge me a second. Can you slap your face?’
‘What?’
‘Just do it.’
He did. He slapped his right cheek. Facing him, she felt the burn on her own left cheek. She gasped.
Shadrack frowned, realisation hitting him. ‘You felt it.’
She nodded.
‘Mirror-touch synaesthesia. You’ve got mirror-touch synaesthesia. That is so rare. Wow, this is great, Charlie.’
They spent the next ten minutes before the pizzas arrived experimenting. If he sat beside her, and scratched his left ankle, she felt it on her left. If he did the same while they sat opposite each other, she felt it on her right. He pulled his hair. She felt it. He stubbed his toe. She felt it. He burst into laughter and she didn’t – but it was an effort not to.
‘I have documented pretty much every form of synaesthesia out there, but this is the first time I’ve met yours. This is so cool.’ He w
as gazing at her with fascination. It felt partly like the old days when they marvelled about science together and partly like she was a specimen.
Charlie wasn’t so convinced it was ‘cool’. She wasn’t sure that feeling what others felt, their senses competing with hers, was anything good at all. Her already tired head swam with a vagueness about where her body ended and others’ began. She didn’t enjoy the idea of having to try to differentiate between the two. Not tonight, maybe not ever.
She only ate a little. Her appetite had gone. Brigid and Juliette didn’t come down for the pizza they hadn’t ordered, so Charlie put it in the fridge. Shadrack turned the news on and when she returned from the kitchen he was engrossed.
‘Demonstrations in Cairns,’ he told her. ‘The webcast got through to enough people.’
She couldn’t take in any more. ‘I need to sleep,’ she said.
The day had left her with no more resources to draw upon, and when she went to lie down alone in the bed she’d shared with Richard for so many years she was without the energy to give him a moment’s thought. But when she heard Goblin padding into the room, she helped him up to join her and take up the empty space. She smiled at the expression on his face, his pure doggy amazement at this stroke of staggering luck. He rotated a couple of times, then flopped next to her, his head against her hand.
‘I’ve missed you, you gorgeous mutt,’ she told him. He licked her fingers to tell her it was reciprocated.
Sleep wouldn’t come, despite or perhaps because of her tiredness. Goblin was snoring softly and she envied him. Her head was buzzing and she couldn’t shut it up, so instead of getting frustrated by insomnia she caught up on the news through her smartspecs. Capricornia was now the focus of not only the regional but also the international sites. Covert footage was leaking out of demonstrations, riots, burning buildings, crowds being subdued with gas and reports of mass arrests. Martial law had been proclaimed, along with a dusk-to-dawn curfew. Penalties for taking audio or video recordings of unrest were immense, but it didn’t seem to have stopped a flood of material reaching news outlets beyond Capricornian borders.
She flipped through her subscriptions and found one live streaming footage of a boy, young, maybe around ten, talking direct to camera. He was crying. His parents had gone out after the broadcast to find his sister, who had been caught up in a demonstration, and they hadn’t come home. He was too scared to go outside, not knowing what was there. He was talking into the ether, lost and frightened, voicing his fears.
It hit her in the solar plexus, winding her, gutting her. She wrenched off her smartspecs and tried to breathe. She wasn’t just empathising with his pain. She was literally feeling it, feeling like a small lost child from whom all certainty had been snatched, feeling his terror and sadness and abandonment. This was so much more than her sensations earlier when she’d been a mirror to Shadrack’s. This was not just feeling the physical sensations of another. This was feeling their emotions. She was being their being.
An alert from her vocomm drew her attention back and she put the specs on. Breaking news. Capricornia’s internet had been shut down. A complete blackout within its borders. They were isolated. She flipped back to the live stream of the boy. Nothing, just blackness. If he was still talking, no one was hearing him.
She took her glasses off again, slowly, and put them on the charge mat on the bedside table. Goblin whimpered quietly in his sleep, his hind leg twitching as he ran in a dream as he no longer could in life.
The realisation of what she must do came to her calmly. There was no question. She simply knew.
She got out of bed, put on her dressing gown, and went to wake Shadrack.
Cairns and the hinterland, Republic of Capricornia
The city was on fire and Tricia was lost.
Her usual route home took her along Exodus Drive, but it was blocked at Ruth Road by a mob overturning cars and smashing windows. Flames were shooting up from a bus, and she put her car in reverse and backed up until she could turn into a side street. That side street took her to another, then another, and soon she had no idea where she was. Streetlights were out and her vocomm was dead. She pulled over and dug in her handbag for her tablet. No connection. And, of course, no paper map.
Someone started hammering on her bonnet, and she looked up and shrieked. It was someone in a balaclava, his eyes insane in the holes in the wool. Trembling, she hit the horn and reversed, losing him. There was a thud and she winced. Then she took off, trying to keep control of the wheel and of her breathing. Another turn and she hit another blockade and heard a splattering of gunfire. She spun the wheel and managed to do a U-turn.
Almost immediately, a CSSA tank appeared in front of her, its flashing lights hard against the night. Two officers in full defensive gear piled out of the vehicle and approached her, weapons drawn. Every instinct told her to take off, but instead she opened the car window.
One of them pulled up his black mask. ‘There is a curfew, ma’am. You shouldn’t be here.’ He looked at her as though she were a dotty old grandmother.
‘I have a curfew dispensation. To get home. A dispensation from the Daughters, from the Office of the Mother of Light.’ With a shaking hand she handed him her ID. He scanned it and his attitude transformed.
‘You shouldn’t be here, Mrs Townsend. It’s too dangerous.’
‘We thought I’d be okay …’
‘The situation is deteriorating.’ He looked again at her ID scan results. ‘It’s just not safe for you to get home to Trinity. I can arrange for you to be escorted back to the Effenberg compound.’
Ten minutes later, a CCSA officer was sitting in her driver’s seat and she sat next to him, while another vehicle followed them back up the winding road to the estate. Tricia wanted nothing more than to be in her own home, the windows and doors locked against the world outside, and far, far away from the violence. But that wasn’t going to happen tonight. As the road rose above the city, she looked back and saw patchworks of darkness where there were normally brightly lit buildings, streetlights, illuminated hoardings. The night was punctuated by fires and explosions every few blocks. Tricia had never seen anything like it, but knew it was reflecting the shattering in the very heart of Capricornia tonight, the shattering in her own heart.
As the vehicles were allowed entrance through the security gates, her vocomm returned to life. The emergency transmission burst into her ear, a soothing voice that didn’t calm her at all, talking about the curfew and the suppression of the rioters. Now that there was a net blackout, the organisers couldn’t communicate, and law enforcement was subduing the troublemakers. Order was expected to be restored within hours. But the lie was exposed immediately. The official transmission was interrupted by another voice, breaking through. ‘This is the Resistance. Take to the streets. The Effenberg government is collapsing. Take to the streets. We will take back our country. We will be free …’ The voice faded out again, the government announcer returned. It was a battle for the ears of the people.
The CSSA deposited her at the front door of the Effenberg mansion and her iris scan gave her admittance. After the brutality of the city it was silent inside the vast hallway, the only sound her heels clipping on the floorboards. She was surprised to see it was only nine-thirty. It felt like she’d been roaming the city all night, but it had only been two hours since she’d left work for home. The news of Brigid Bayliss’s broadcast had spread through the building – crazy rumours about Jack Effenburg – and she’d sought out Marion without success, panicked, seeking guidance. She’d guessed that the Effenbergs were together somewhere, working on damage control. As the other staff had fled for home, she had too, and they assured each other it would be safe once security had okayed them travelling.
Now she thought about her immediate needs. She had to find somewhere to spend the night. One of the guest suites. She supposed she should eat but had no appetite. Automatic lighting gently waxed and waned as she made her way along the guest corrid
or. She’d still seen no one, thankfully. She was drained. Worst of all would be to encounter Jack Effenberg. How could she even look him in the eye? What if the rumours were true?
Her vocomm sounded in her ear. A call. From Marion. Tricia was tempted to pretend she hadn’t heard it, to pull off her vocomm and stuff it in her handbag. What was the point? There was no hope, no reason to bother with anything. She didn’t, though. Of course she didn’t. This was Marion.
‘Hello?’
‘Tricia. I saw you were back. I see you, in fact, on the security camera.’
Tricia looked up. The cameras were everywhere.
‘I tried to go home, but they brought me back.’
‘Good. It’s too dangerous out there. Can you come to my suite?’
Tricia hoped her reluctance wasn’t too obvious when she said, after the briefest of pauses, ‘Yes. Yes, of course.’
As she walked through the building towards Marion, she listened to the state news. It was a denouncement of Brigid, describing her as an unrepentant lesbian, impure and wicked. She was now wanted as an enemy of the state. Her fault. Her fault. She’d let her go. She would be punished. She deserved to be punished.
Seth Effenberg was, the voice sadly revealed, ill – a result of infection with the Plague.
Then the resistance intruded again, stealing the broadcast. It told of Effenberg. He was not what everyone thought. It told of medical experiments. Experiments on babies … Despite knowing Marion was waiting for her, Tricia paused. Then she stopped. Then she sat on a hall chair. She listened.
Marion was reclining on a lounge, her shoes kicked off onto the floor. Tricia wasn’t sure, but it looked like whisky in the glass she was holding. Marion looked up and saw her, then got up and came to the doorway. Tricia flinched, expecting those eyes, those furious eyes to burn into her own, but no. Marion’s arms wrapped around her and her chin embedded in her shoulder. ‘Oh Tricia, Tricia. What a horrible mess.’
Tricia was bewildered. A mess? This was not a mess. It was a disaster and it was an atrocity. An atrocity the Effenbergs were responsible for.
The Second Cure Page 35