by Greg Egan
When she’d hung up the call, she sat on the concrete beside the payphone. There was only one conclusion that made any sense now, but trying to acknowledge it was like trying to take control of an optical illusion. The cube needed to evert; the vase needed to recede into the gap between two faces. All along, she’d been confusing figure and ground. But she’d been right to believe that the people who’d fled their families had been the ones affected by disease; her mistake had been to change her mind. Because she had fled for the very same reason.
Kate felt her whole body shaking, as if she’d just clawed her way back from a precipice. Michael and Reza weren’t suffering from any kind of illness. Beth, Chris and Emily were all in perfect health. And whatever she’d been afflicted with, herself, she had to believe that it could be treated. She had to cling to that hope, just as she had when the roles had appeared to be reversed.
She staggered to her feet. She thought of calling Reza, to set his mind at ease, but she was afraid that if she heard his voice everything might flip again.
As she walked toward the bus stop, she pictured herself back in the emergency department – where she should have remained, as Reza had beseeched her to, all those nights ago. But once she was admitted to hospital, once the psychiatrists and neurologists were debating the cause and extent of her delusions, how seriously would any of her colleagues treat her testimony? How much of what she had actually discovered would they believe?
How quickly would they act to protect the families who were marked for the same fate as Natalie’s?
She couldn’t take the risk that they’d ignore her. She couldn’t run away and hide in a hospital bed while the righteous army rose up against the hollow ones, and the true believers honored those they’d loved by granting them peace.
11
“I’ve been wondering about something,” Kate said. She was sitting with the other runaways: Linda, Gary, Suzanne and Ahmed, huddled in a circle away from the merely homeless, who were hostile or agnostic when it came to their cause. “Exactly where did this disease come from? And exactly how does it spread?”
“Does it matter?” Linda replied. “We know it’s spreading fast, whatever the route.”
But Suzanne was less dismissive. “It could be important. Did you have something in mind?”
Kate said, “My yard has a couple of fig trees, right at the back. And those fig trees are full of fruit bats. I don’t actually go down there and roll around in the guano, but our dog was doing that all the time.” She looked around the circle, hunting for any sign that this scenario, based on what she’d seen at Natalie’s house, might be describing a shared condition. “Remember the Hendra virus? It went from fruit bats to horses, then people. What if this is something like that – but with dogs instead of horses as the link?”
The group was silent for a while, then Ahmed said, “My dog was acting strangely for a couple of days before I left. But my wife had nothing to do with him; she wouldn’t even let him in the house.”
“Do you have fig trees?” Kate asked.
“No. But our neighbor does, and some of the branches hang over the fence.”
She waited, but no one else volunteered their own zoonotic risk profile. If the details didn’t match, why not say so?
Gary said, “In any case, we know it must be jumping straight from human to human now.”
Kate frowned. “What makes you so sure?”
“Because of the speed,” Linda interjected.
“But what exactly do we know about the speed?”
Linda was starting to lose patience. “My mother, in Sydney, was already affected the very same day my husband changed. I called her up to try to tell her something was wrong, and she was … gone.”
Kate nodded soberly. “It hit my sister, the same night as my husband and my son. But this morning…” She steeled herself, ready to find out the hard way if her own revelatory experience could sway anyone else. “I called a friend who’s been in America for the last two months—”
Everyone turned away from her to look across the warehouse floor, back toward the loading bay. A woman was approaching the circle. Her eyes were lowered, and she’d shaved her head, but as she crossed into the yellow light of the hurricane lamps, Kate recognized her by the shape of her face.
Her four companions rose to their feet, and Kate followed them. Each of them embraced Natalie in turn, and then Gary introduced her to Kate.
Kate shook her hand in silence. Natalie didn’t meet her gaze. The six of them sat on the tartan picnic blanket that Gary had spread on the concrete floor.
Natalie said, “It has to be tonight.”
“Are you sure?” Gary asked. “Once we tip our hand, there’ll be no going back. And I still think I can get more recruits. Rowan’s gone missing, but he might turn up—”
“No. We can’t wait any longer.” Natalie spoke calmly, but with a tone of authority. “We need to send a signal to all the people who are still unreachable. We need to let them know that they’re not alone, that there’s an army on their side, and an example they can follow.”
“I understand.” Gary looked around the circle. “Is everyone ready?”
Everyone but Kate nodded, but Kate saw Ahmed glance her way uncertainly. If she gave him more reason to doubt, there might be a chance that she could break the consensus.
She said, “Please, can I share a story with you? It will only take a minute.” Forget Emily and her voicemail. She needed to cut closer to home.
Gary looked to Natalie, then said, “Of course.”
“The night I left my family,” Kate began, “I was driving around for a long time, trying to decide what to do. Then I thought: I’ll go to my sister. She’ll help me, she’ll understand. I didn’t have my phone, so I couldn’t call her. But as I drove toward her house, as I got closer and closer, the more I thought about what would happen once I knocked on her door, the more certain I was that she’d already gone the way of my husband and my son. I knew she was exactly like them – without even seeing her, without even talking to her.
“So I thought: I’ll go to my friend Chris. He lived much farther away, but I trusted him. So I set off south, heading for his apartment, glad I still had someone I could turn to. And the same thing happened. I never arrived; I never saw him, I never heard his voice. But I was absolutely sure that he’d been hollowed out.
“What does that mean? Do I have some magical sense of who’s changed, that I can know that without even meeting them?”
Natalie said, “You made a guess, that’s all.” Her manner was growing brittle and defensive. She was an intelligent woman; she knew there was no intuition that could work like this, no presentiment that could be trusted in the absence of a single fact to guide it.
“But the feeling was so strong,” Kate insisted. “As strong as when I saw what my husband had become, lying beside me in my bed. I never let him speak, either. I just knew, because it was so clear to me. But now, if I’m honest with myself, I’m afraid that it wasn’t him who changed. I’m afraid—”
Natalie snapped. She started screaming, then she leaned over and began pummeling Kate with her fists. Linda and Ahmed took hold of her, pulling her back, but she kept shrieking and thrashing. Suzanne began sobbing, staring at Kate in horror, as if she’d just stabbed all five of her comrades through the heart.
Kate kept talking, sickened by the cruelty of what she was doing to a woman already annihilated by grief, but determined to finish the job for the sake of anyone still tempted to follow her.
She said, “I’m afraid I’m the one who changed. The dog dug around in the bat shit, then she got sick, and I let her lick my face. My face, not my husband’s, not my son’s. I thought they’d lost everything that made them human, but now I know that it was all in my head.”
12
“Surprise!” Reza called out from the far side of the visitor’s yard. He was holding a child in his arms.
Kate approached them warily. “Is that really him?” As
soon as the words slipped out, she wished she could take them back, but if Reza heard them as more than a figure of speech he did nothing to show it. “He’s grown so much,” she added.
“Yeah. I’m fattening him up for sumo school.” He smiled and held Michael out toward her.
Kate hesitated, afraid that after so long he wouldn’t recognize her. But he gazed placidly into her face, and offered no protest when she took him in her arms.
They sat together on one of the benches.
“That beard’s getting out of control,” she told Reza.
“Ah, but you love it, don’t you?”
“It helps.” The neurologist had suggested this trick, and it seemed to be working. The new Reza reminded her of the old one, just enough to invoke memories of him without raising her expectations too high, while she built a new set of responses to the way he looked now. Sometimes it felt wrong when she kissed him, like some sick game with twins, but if she had to choose between the old Reza being dead to her forever, or reincarnated in this imperfect look-alike, she’d settle for transmigration into a doppelgänger with a beard.
She turned to Michael, and he reached up and put a hand on her face. “Who is the most beautiful boy?” she asked. “Can you guess who that is?” He smiled, a little smugly, as if he knew he was being flattered simply from her tone. That seemed new, but she could love what was new. Everything that mattered most in his life was yet to come.
Reza put an arm around her shoulders, and she didn’t flinch.
“The last scan showed no inflammation,” she said. “And there’s no more trace of the virus in my CSF. So maybe another week. They’re still cautious; some of the others have had flare-ups.”
“I’m glad they’re cautious,” he said. “But we can’t wait to have you home.”
Kate bent down and kissed Michael three times in rapid succession. He cooed with delight and tugged at her hair. Nobody could tell her what the future held, for her or the seventeen others. “Capgras syndrome” was just a name for a cluster of symptoms that had been seen in half a dozen different diseases; it was not the means to divine a prognosis. But even if her raw perceptions of people had forever lost their power to evoke the emotional history that had once fleshed out their meaning, her love for her family had not been lost. She just had to find detours around the barriers, and dig tunnels to the deeper truth.
“How’s your father been?” she asked Reza.
“Oh, didn’t I tell you?”
“Tell me what?” Kate was worried for a moment, but Reza didn’t seem upset.
“This worked for him, too.” He stroked his beard. “He’s out of that fucking desert prison, back in Isfahan in the seventies. I don’t look like his father, but I can pass for one of his uncles, and apparently they got on pretty well. I told him he was staying in a posh hotel where the staff all liked practicing their English for the tourists.”
Kate began crying, but when she saw the effect on Michael she forced herself to stop.
“It’s all right,” Reza said. “He’s happy now. Everything’s going to be all right.”
SHADOW FLOCK
1
Natalie pointed down along the riverbank to a pair of sturdy-looking trees, a Bald Cypress and a Southern Live Oak, about fifty meters away. “They might be worth checking out.” She set off through the scrub, her six students following.
When they reached the trees, Natalie had Céline run a structural check, using the hand-held ground-penetrating radar to map the roots and the surrounding soil. The trees bore gray cobwebs of Spanish moss, but most of it was on the higher branches, out of harm’s way. Natalie had chosen the pair three months before, when she was planning the course; it was cheating, but the students wouldn’t have thanked her if they’d ended up spending a whole humid, mosquito-ridden day hunting for suitable pillars. In a real disaster you’d take whatever delays and hardship fate served up, but nobody was interested in that much verisimilitude in a training exercise.
“Perfect,” Céline declared, smiling slightly, probably guessing that the result was due to something more than just a shrewd judgment made from a distance.
Natalie asked Mike to send a drone with a surveying module across to the opposite bank. The quadrocopter required no supervision for such a simple task, but it was up to Mike to tell it which trees to target first, and the two best candidates – a pair of sturdy oaks – were impossible to miss. The way things were going they stood a good chance of being back in New Orleans before sunset.
With their four pillars chosen, it was time to settle on a construction strategy. They had three quads to work with, and more than enough cable, but the Tchefuncte River was about a hundred and thirty meters wide here. A single spool of cable held a hundred meters, and that was as much weight as each backpack-sized quad could carry.
Josh raised his notepad to seek software advice, but Natalie stopped him. “Would it kill you to spend five minutes thinking?”
“We’re going to need to do some kind of mid-air splice,” he said. “I just wanted to check what knots are available, and which would be strongest.”
“Why splicing?” Natalie pressed him.
He raised his hands and held them a short distance apart. “Cable.” Then he increased the separation. “River.”
Augusto said, “What about loops?” He hooked two fingers together and strained against the join. “Wouldn’t that be stronger?”
Josh snorted. “And halve the effective length? We’d need three spools to bridge the gap then, and you’d still need to splice the second loop to the third.”
“Not if we pre-form the middle loop ourselves,” Augusto replied. “Fuse the ends, here on the ground. That’s got to be better than any mid-air splice. Or easier to check, and easier to fix.”
Natalie looked around the group for objections. “Everyone agree? Then we need to make a flight plan.”
They assembled the steps from a library of maneuvers, then prepared the cable for the first crossing. The heat was becoming enervating, and Natalie had to fight the urge to sit in the shade and bark orders. Down in Haiti she’d never cared about being comfortable, but it was harder to stay motivated when all that was at stake were a few kids’ grades in one minor elective.
“I think we’re ready,” Céline declared, a little nervous, a little excited.
Natalie said, “Be my guest.”
Céline tapped the screen of her notepad and the first quad whirred into life, rising up from the riverbank and tilting a little as it moved toward the cypress.
With cable dangling, the drone made three vertical loops around the tree’s lowest branch, wrapping it in a short helix. Then it circumnavigated the trunk twice, once close-in, then a second time in a long ellipse that left cable hanging slackly from the branch. It circled back, dropped beneath the branch and flew straight through the loop. It repeated the maneuver then headed away, keeping the spool clamped until it had pulled the knot tight.
As the first drone moved out over the glistening water, the second one was already ahead of it, and the third was drawing close to the matching tree on the far side of the river. Natalie glanced at the students, gratified by the tension on their faces: success here was not a fait accompli. Céline’s hand hovered above her notepad; if the drones struck an unforeseen problem – and failed to recover gracefully on their own – it would be her job to intervene manually.
When the second drone had traveled some forty meters from the riverbank it began ascending, unwinding cable as it went to leave a hanging streamer marking its trail. From this distance the shiny blue line of polymer was indistinguishable from the kind its companion was dispensing, but then the drone suddenly stopped climbing, clamped the spool, and accelerated downward. The single blue line revealed its double-stranded nature, spreading out into a heart-shaped loop. The first drone shot through the heart then doubled back, hooking the two cables together, then the second one pulled out of its dive and continued across the river. The pierced heart always stru
ck Natalie as surreal – the kind of thing that serenading cartoon birds would form with streamers for Snow White in the woods.
Harriet, usually the quietest of the group, uttered an involuntary, admiring expletive.
The third drone had finished hitching itself to the tree on the opposite bank, and was flying across the water for its own rendezvous. Natalie strained her eyes as the second drone went into reverse, again separating the paired cables so its companion could slip through and form the link. Then the second drone released the loop completely and headed back to the riverbank, its job done. The third went off to mimic the first, tying its loose end to the tree where it had started.
They repeated the whole exercise three more times, giving the bridge two hand-ropes and two deck supports, before breaking for lunch. As Natalie was unwrapping the sandwiches she’d brought, a dark blur the size of her thumb buzzed past her face and alighted on her forearm. Instinctively, she moved to flick it off, but then she realized that it was not a living insect: it was a small Toshiba dragonfly, its four wings iridescent with photovoltaic coatings. Whether it was mapping the forest, monitoring wildlife, or just serving as a communications node, the last thing she’d want to do was damage it. The machine should not have landed on anything but vegetation, but no one’s programming was perfect. She watched it as it sat motionless in the patch of sunlight falling on her skin, then it ascended suddenly and flew off out of sight.
In the afternoon, the team gave their bridge a rudimentary woven deck. Each of the students took turns donning a life-jacket and hard-hat before walking across the swaying structure and back, whooping with a mixture of elation at their accomplishment and adrenaline as they confronted its fragility.
“And now we have to take it apart,” Natalie announced, prepared for the predictable groans and pleas. “No arguments!” she said firmly. “Pretty as it is, it would only take a party of five or six hikers to break it, and if they ended up dashing their brains out in the shallows that would be enough to bankrupt the university and send us all to prison.”