As a result of this information Wat was visited by a team of scientists who took him to a quickly improvised quarantine hospital and laboratory on top of Ben Nevis. Before they isolated the nanomechanism, however, its target became obvious. In Dryhope house the powerplant started gulping and wheezing, the stem grew grey and blotchy, lost its transparency and power to synthesize anything, and finally began crumbling into powder from the summit down. A few hours later this plague struck homes of nearly all who had been close to Wat or close to people close to him. All over the world centres of light, heat, and nourishment died. Knowledge unique to these districts — music, stories and local records — only survived now in memories of the living and a few old books that were mainly read by gangrels. Meanwhile biologists discovered that, though quarantine would reduce the speed of the plague’s spread, it could never be finally eliminated. Animals could carry the virus, and windblown dust from withering powerplants.
Yet the worldwide panic and collapse into barbarism expected by the plotters never came, partly because wrist communicators did not depend on local power supplies so everyone stayed in the intelligence network. No military action to quarantine homes was suggested or needed. Infected families quarantined themselves. The uninfected raised their powerplant food production to a maximum while reducing what they ate to the minimum, leaving a surplus which was airlifted and dropped to deprived families. Since this could only be a temporary measure while the virus spread further, and since some time would pass before a plague resistant powerplant could be bred, men put their military discipline into planting crops, building wind and watermills to provide local energy supplies, building and manning fishing fleets — luckily the oceans were as throng with life as in prehistoric times, since for over a century only sportsmen had fished them. The enthusiasm with which men turned to such work looked like thankfulness for a world where women required their labour. The Council for War Regulation in Geneva had extended its moratorium on war games for the foreseeable future, pointing out that folk who enjoyed these had plenty of recordings to watch, yet public eye replays of these records were no longer popular.
“Warfare now seems a fatuous way of passing the time,” said the former commander of the East Anglian Alliance who now commanded a North Sea trawler, “Obviously our lives were so valueless then that we wanted to lose them. I’m glad the biology mandarins are developing a plague-resistant powerplant but in future I think women should use it as an auxiliary source of necessities — enough to keep them independent of us, not enough to make us dependent on them. I don’t know how family life will be reshaped by the present emergency — I hear that monogamous crofting communities of husbands and wives have started in Ireland and the Scottish west. It may not be a bad thing. Whatever the future holds it looks like containing less killing. I suspect that what some gurus now call the early modern period was just another bit of bloody history which spared the women and children. It’s a funny thing, but since the plague erupted nobody has died except of old age and unforeseeable accident. Those plotters deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.”
When Meg Mountbenger’s fellow plotters were shown proof of their guilt they readily admitted it. One said, “We dislike modern life so wanted to make it exciting. We thought this required killing a lot of people, but everyone who has swatted a fly or poisoned a rat knows it is no crime to destroy inconvenient lives. You find us inconvenient — make your own lives exciting by having us gassed, electrocuted, guillotined, garrotted or hanged. Or revive the old English punishment for treason. Hang us by the neck, cut us down while still alive, rip out our intestines, burn them in front of our eyes, hack off our limbs and genitals. Tapes of the event will be replayed for centuries.”
They refused to be accepted singly into families or co-operative satellites where they would receive the friendly, careful attention due to the immature. They asked for a habitat of their own and were given a station on Titan where they could only maintain their lives by working so co-operatively that their children (should they have any) could not be corrupted by antisocial examples. Through years during which the effects of the plague were being mastered this station remained a stubbornly silent part of the intelligence network, receiving information from it but returning none. Then one day they suddenly entered a music channel as a song group called The Plagues. In harsh discordant voices they mocked every aspect of modern life they thought stale, smug and stupid. They were popular with children. Adults thought their broadcasts were signs of returning sanity. If Napoleon’s poetic ambitions or Hitler’s artistic ones had been attended to and encouraged they would have done less damage.
So, the old ladies’ speedy discovery of the Puddock Plot probably stopped mankind reverting to historic barbarism.
Page 152.
There was hatred in what she did with me last night but nothing calculating, nothing political. It’s a miracle that she’s needed me all these years.
Meg Mountbenger had a rare, quick, energetic nature, slow to develop and held back from emotional maturity by a childhood sense of unattractive loneliness, maybe because her mother had weaned her too soon, maybe because her dad was a gangrel. Only aunts and grandmothers knew who her father was, but it may have influenced them into treating her like the outsider she became. When five years old she grew so devoted to a girl friend from Mountbenger that she insisted on going to live there, perhaps thinking she would be more popular than at Dryhope. Her later furtive visits to Dryhope suggest she was disappointed. Always on the edge of family life she recognized Wat as one of the same sort. Unluckily Wat, like most males, wanted girls who were his opposite and treated her with the disdain he had learned from Kittock.
Like all intelligence networks the grannies could make mistakes. Before Haldane died too many old ladies thought talented malcontents were best occupied turning remote space stations into worlds of their own. From the age of twelve Meg Mountbenger had wished to work in a cloud circus. Instead the grannies deflected her to K20, making that unhealthy concentration of egoists even less stable.
Like all those working on K20 she was immediately enrolled as an immortal. At that time the damaging effects of rejuvenation on the young was only suspected and Haldane, oscillating between a boyish fifty-eight and sixty-five, looked forward to an eternity of exploiting bright young people. For them work with the great satellite designer seemed heaven, at first. They worshipped him as young Italian artists worshipped Michelangelo, imitated him as young German Protestants imitated Luther.
Meg’s work and membership of Haldane’s harem may have made her happy until rejuvenation restored her adolescence. Losing seven years of sensory experience causes an emotional void in old and young alike, but hurts the young most because they have poignant memories of a recent-seeming but remote past. Meg’s obsession with Wat returned. It was worse for being with a man who had forgotten her, grew worse still after her second rejuvenation. She was thirty now and the awkward young lad she remembered rejecting her three years earlier (seventeen years in communal time) was now a famous hero in a world more intricate and beautifully varied than any Isaiah Haldane could create, a world which still housed the greatest number of people in the universe.
By this time most of Haldane’s team were sick of him and life on K20. Someone smashed his head in a way which made repairs impractical; the rest refused to inform on the killer. More grief would have followed if humanity had not dispensed with elaborate laws and police forces. The open intelligence network knew Haldane had been a brilliant but selfish man who had made good things in his hundred and six years but had begun to repeat himself so could only impress the young. His former colleagues were advised to let twenty-one years pass before they rejuvenated again; this would make them less impatient with the elderly. All but five found work on other satellites or the moon. Meg and four others asked the Global and Interplanetary Council for Age Regulation Sitting in Lhasa for permission to work on earth. This was granted when they promised to stop rejuvenating. It was a promise they gave but meant to break.