‘But even scientists make choices, Juliette,’ said Brigid, her eyes and Charlie’s locked together.
‘We’re going home,’ Brigid said to Juliette. ‘And we’re going to pretend we weren’t here tonight. We didn’t see a thing.’
‘No, that is not possible. Pas possible!’
‘Si. It’s very possible, Juliette. Come on. We’re leaving.’
In the corridor, Juliette pushed Brigid away.
‘What is this shit? We cannot allow it.’
Brigid took her face between her hands. ‘Listen to me. We must.’
‘Why? This is wrong, can’t you see that?’
‘She’s doing this for my mother.’ Brigid’s tears filled her eyes.
‘What?’
‘For my mother. She found the first cure for her. And she’s doing this for her, too. In her memory. We have to trust her, Juliette. Please.’
At sea, off the Capricornia coast
It was probably inevitable that they fucked again. The sensuous tilt and sway of the boat made it impossible not to.
At least, that’s how Charlie justified it.
She and Shadrack were below deck. The entertainingly named Turing was at the helm, steering them through the night and the ocean.
‘Shouldn’t we be getting some sleep?’ murmured Charlie as Shadrack kissed and licked her softly down her cheek and onto her neck. ‘We need our wits.’
‘I need you,’ he answered and ran his fingers along her inner thigh. She shuddered. So much desire for him, so long restrained.
‘Okay. Who needs wits?’ she answered.
They’d been there so many times, back in time. They knew each other’s moves, each other’s responses, but it was different now. They had been apart longer than they’d been together, they’d both had other partners, and they’d learnt new ways. They knew other people’s bodies and they knew themselves better. So of course it was different.
But that didn’t explain what Charlie was feeling now. It wasn’t just the sensation of Shadrack entering her, his heat and hardness within her. She was feeling him, being him. She felt her muscles squeezing him, felt the pressure around him. She was both cunt and cock. She was thrusting and receiving, pushing back, pushed against, pushed within.
‘Oh god,’ she cried. ‘No, no!’
‘Are you okay?’
‘Oh yes, oh Jesus, we’re coming, we’re coming …’
Because that is what was happening. She felt her orgasm, felt the spasms of her vagina against her penis, and she felt his orgasm, the hot pumping of his semen rushing through him, through her, into her, all at once in an impossible unity.
And just when it felt too much, it was.
Charlie fainted.
When she woke again, she was suffused with a double dose of post-coital languor. Shadrack was beside her, watching her, his head propped on his hand.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘How long was I out of it?’
‘Only a few minutes. Are you okay now?’
‘I haven’t stopped being okay. Whew,’ she muttered, getting up and digging around for her clothes, which seemed to have been thrown around the cabin. ‘Gives a whole new meaning to la petite mort.’
‘To what?’
‘Never mind. How far from Cairns are we?’ She stared out the porthole, as though the blackness outside would give an indication of where they were.
Shadrack checked the time. ‘Twenty minutes or so.’
Charlie nodded. The adrenaline of anticipation was starting to kick in. She felt wide awake now, hyper-aware, and it was hard to keep still.
‘So,’ said Shadrack. ‘That was pretty amazing.’
‘It was. I don’t know what would happen if we both had mirror-touch synaesthesia. Possibly the cosmos would explode.’
He smiled and moved over to join her as she pulled her T-shirt back on. ‘You know, ending our marriage was the stupidest thing we ever did.’
She raised an eyebrow at him. ‘We didn’t end our marriage, Shadrack. You were screwing half your undergraduates, I didn’t like it, and you left me. Remember?’
‘Yes, okay. I was an idiot. I didn’t know what mattered. But I do now.’
‘We’re not getting back together.’
‘Can’t we even talk about the possibility?’
‘No,’ she told him. ‘There’s no point. You killed whatever trust I could have in you. It’s not going to come back. I don’t even want it to.’
‘You’re trusting me now. You’re trusting me to do this with you.’ He gestured at their backpacks filled with canisters.
‘I’m trusting you with my life. Not with my emotions. Big difference.’
Shadrack fell silent and she located a shoe under a bench.
‘You can’t tell me that that meant nothing. That was the best sex we’ve ever had. It was the best sex anyone’s ever had.’
‘You know that was the Toxo, right? Hell, I probably wouldn’t even have done it with you if I weren’t infected.’
‘And would you be doing this?’ He gestured at the backpacks. ‘Would you be off to Capricornia to transmit the Toxo if you weren’t infected by it?’ There was anger and hurt in his voice.
She recoiled from him. ‘Screw you, Shadrack. I know exactly what I’m doing.’
There was a banging on the hatch above them, and Turing called down. ‘ETA is ten minutes.’
‘You’d better get dressed,’ Charlie told Shadrack.
Cairns, Republic of Capricornia
Turing’s team were as good as Shadrack had assured her. That was clear from the moment they reached the external door with its sensors and cameras. Shadrack’s iris and palm scans gave them entry, and Turing promised the cameras wouldn’t record them and the laser sensors wouldn’t register. The surveillance software was rewritten to show a previous night of no unexpected activity.
Once inside, they didn’t talk. It wasn’t an instruction, just an instinct. The three figures with three backpacks made their silent way along corridors, down stairs, and across overhead walkways above dimly humming pumps and low lights.
Charlie felt her every sense enhanced. Her vision seemed sharper, her hearing more acute, her touch more finely tuned. She could even smell a faint scent of machine oil. She wondered if this was just her own intense focus on their task, or if it was being amplified by the others’ responses. Was she drawing on their perceptions as part of her synaesthesia? She had no time to interrogate that idea, though, because Turing held up a hand telling them to halt.
They’d reached another door with sensors. At Turing’s nod, Shadrack stared into the iris scan.
No response. The indicator glowed an unwavering red.
Charlie felt everyone’s stress levels rise with the clenching of muscles in her chest. She forced her breathing to be steady.
Shadrack tried again. He stood in front of the scan, not blinking.
After an eternity, a click. The light turned green. His palm print registered and they were in.
As Turing pulled the door open, the sound of rushing water infused the air around them. They walked out onto a platform and below them was a river. The water supply of Cairns. If their timing was right, the other teams across Capricornia were now at the pumping stations of major cities, each with their backpacks, each with their canisters. Each with their thousands of oocysts, ready to be released. Labs across the world would now have the program and be synthesising their own stocks.
Turing led them down the metal steps to the walkway next to the torrent. This was the point beyond water treatment, beyond fluoridation, beyond chlorination. The oocysts were coated with a short-term protection against chemical damage that would be dissolved once they were sufficiently distant for the toxicity to have diminished.
This was the moment. He gestured for them to remove their backpacks.
As Shadrack peeled his off, he caught Charlie’s eye. She smiled at him. ‘We did it,’ she whispered.
‘Marry me,’ he said.
She frowned, but couldn’t restrain a grin. He was incorrigible.
They opened the backpacks, revealing the canisters. As one, they lifted them, opened them, poured them, and dropped them into the swirling waters.
The canisters roiled in the currents and were washed rapidly out of sight.
It was done.
They didn’t feel so constrained to silence now as they retraced their tracks. Of course, they didn’t speak, but they felt less concern about the noise of their footsteps. It wasn’t till they were outside the building without incident, though, that they felt they could really relax. Shadrack and Charlie embraced in triumph.
‘Who’d have thought it, huh? Back in Introductory Biology?’
She laughed. So many years, so many changes.
But Turing was in no mood for sentiment. ‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘It’s not over till we’re back on the boat.’
So they disengaged and set off down the pathway.
And were illuminated by the blinding lights of four drones, circling without sound, just above them.
‘Shit,’ hissed Shadrack.
‘Run!’ yelled Turing.
They did, and the drones kept an easy pace.
As they sprinted towards their car, they saw a CSSA guard loom out of the shadows.
‘Halt!’ he screamed.
‘Come on!’ It was Turing, urging them forth.
Two flashes and two booms crashed around them.
Shadrack fell. His hands flew to his gut and he bellowed.
‘No!’ cried Charlie and then she realised she’d been hit too.
Pain shot through her as she fell to the ground. She’d been hit in the belly and rolled over in agony.
Another shot. This time the flash was from another direction. She raised her head and saw it came from Turing. She hadn’t known he was armed.
The CSSA guard was down. Turing approached him and kicked his weapon out of the way, before checking for more.
Then he went to Shadrack.
‘Leave me, check Charlie,’ gasped Shadrack. Even in the gloom, Charlie could see the slick of blood forming beneath him. He was bleeding heavily, too heavily.
‘Fuck, man,’ said Turing. He walked over to Charlie and bent down, his face bleak and pale.
‘Show me,’ he said to her, and he gently lifted her hands from her wound.
He pulled up her jumper.
‘No,’ she cried, resisting, knowing she had to staunch the blood.
‘Charlie, you’re not hit.’
She groaned in pain.
‘Charlie? Look.’
He cradled her head, tilting it so she could see her belly, white in the streetlight. No wound. No blood. But she knew. Her eyes were wrong. She was right.
‘You have to get up!’
‘No, no …’ Her agony was too great, holding up her head impossible. She felt the blood pouring from her in gushes. It was something arterial that had been punctured, and she knew that losing this much blood was the end. She couldn’t survive this.
‘Come on, we’ve got to go,’ urged Turing, pulling on her arm.
‘Leave me,’ she moaned. She looked across at Shadrack. He was still now, floating in the lake of his own blood. She felt her own consciousness ebbing away.
‘But you’re fine, come with me, we can make it!’
Footsteps, running. Coming closer.
‘Jesus. I have to go …’ Turing’s voice was fading. ‘I’m sorry, Charlie. I’m sorry.’
EPILOGUE
Der Mensch kann tun was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will.
[Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.]
Arthur Schopenhauer,
‘Über die Freiheit des menschlichen Willens’, 1836
36.
Sydney
I am finally interviewing Jack Effenberg, a quarter of a century after he promised me the one-on-one. I suppose by now he’s given up on any chance of redeeming himself for posterity. He knows that whatever I write about him, it won’t be flattering, although that won’t matter to him now.
He is dying.
I still have questions, though. Part of me doesn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing that, but it isn’t enough to stop me.
As I wait for him to be brought into the interview room, I think of all the changes in the world since he’s been inside. It’s a truism that people in prison are frozen in history, and of course the rate of change increases with the years, but in the decade or so since his trial the world has transformed in ways I doubt he’d be able to grasp – the usual feedback loop of society and technology spurring each other on. But there was also the tipping point when a critical mass of humanity had contracted Charlie’s mutated parasite and nothing could be the same again. When the focus of technology changed and it was wrested from the fist of the Ayn Rand libertarianism of Silicon Valley and nestled into the bosom of communitarianism. When we shifted from capitalism to a new ideal of social wellbeing and rewarded work that produced value rather than fulfilling economic abstractions. When we incorporated other species into our circles of concern.
How could Effenberg ever comprehend the changes wrought by Charlie’s gift sweeping across the world? Sweeping across our consciousness? Could a man like him, devoid of empathy, even conceive of a humanity with that trait at its core?
When he is finally wheeled in and positioned on the other side of the interview table, I’m shocked by how he’s aged. Where once he was jowly and puffy, his skin is now grey and papery and hangs off him. His cheekbones carve shadows into his face. What is left of his hair is white and in tufts on his discoloured scalp. He has a portable oxygen tank attached to his wheelchair and a thin plastic tube winds its way to his nostrils. I remember that while convicted criminals are of course given the same quality healthcare as everyone else, they are denied anti-ageing stem cell treatments. Even the benevolent Republic of Australia has to draw the line somewhere.
What haven’t changed are his eyes. They crinkle with amusement at seeing me. ‘It’s our Girl Reporter,’ he wheezes.
‘Hello, Jack,’ I say.
The guard leaves us and I take out my notes. I glance at them, then abandon them. As if I need them. ‘I’m recording this, okay?’
‘Good of you to ask,’ he says. ‘Okay, go on. I have no secrets, not any more.’
‘There’s a quote from Seneca that’s often occurred to me when I think about you and about your government. Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful. Is that how you saw the Song of Light? As a means to an end?’
He laughs. ‘No beating around the bush with you, is there?’
I wait.
‘To be honest – and I am always honest these days, Brigid Bayliss, because there are so few other pleasures in life left to me – I think religion used me as much as I used it.’
‘Your wife, you mean?’
‘Hmm. She knew what she was doing.’
‘Oh please. You’re not going to paint her as some sort of Lady Macbeth, manipulating you for her own ends? I thought you just said you were being honest. I saw you preaching. I saw you invoking God to justify what you did.’
He shrugs. ‘It wasn’t entirely cynical. I didn’t believe in the god, but I believed in the message.’
‘You invented the message. All the talk of the pure and the unclean.’
‘Most of that was Marion’s. She was very good at that sort of thing.’ His expression is one of fond reminiscence.
‘Do you ever hear from her? Are you in touch?’
‘Nah, ’fraid not. I wasn’t too taken by her behaviour by the end, you know. I suppose she’s still in Alabama?’
Marion and her closest advisors escaped from Capricornia just as the regime fell. She had funds offshore and a route lined up to disappear them all – though not Jack, who was no longer any use to her – into the Confederate Federation of America. It remains one of the few holdouts, even now.
‘No idea,’ I lie.
‘But none of that’s why you’re here, is it?’
‘Why do you think I’m here?’
‘To ask about the scientist. Charlie Zinn.’
Of course it is. I have to know.
‘Well?’ he says. ‘Ask.’
It isn’t easy to keep the emotion off my face. ‘How did she die?’
I know from Effenberg’s trial for crimes against humanity that official records of Charlie ceased about a month after her arrest. Her body was never found, but the rumour was that she had died under torture. Throughout his trial he never spoke of it, no matter how the questions were phrased. I watched him, sick with rage, sick with vengeance.
He gazes at me, and for that long moment I think he’ll say nothing. Then he sucks his teeth, sucks in oxygen through the nasal tube, and shrugs. ‘Yes, okay. Yes, I killed her.’
I freeze ‘Right …’ I manage.
‘I mean, she was already in a pretty bad way. I’d had my people use various methods to persuade her to talk, to tell us how she made the new parasite. That’s all she had to do. Tell us how it worked, and how to kill it. She could have had anything – a lab, staff, the works. Freedom.
‘I guess she was in a weakened state by the time I joined the interrogation. I just hit her, that’s all. Just once. Must have been the angle, or something. I don’t know. But there we were. She was dead, and so was any chance of stopping what she’d unleashed. The cure, she called it, did you know that? Not the Cure to stop the Plague. This was the second cure, she said. The cure to stop me.
‘So I had her body cremated. There were only a few guards who knew what happened and I had them silenced. And cremated after her. No evidence. No confession. They had enough to get on with, anyway, the prosecutors, when they finally came.’
I know I have to hold it in, not let him see how his words are ripping my being from its mooring, but I guess I’m not doing as good a job as I think.
‘Tell me something, Girl Reporter.’
I look at him, and that old Effenberg twinkle is in his eyes.
The Second Cure Page 37