“Love isn’t the word, but it’s all we have. Love without desire.” Cross reached up to wipe her perfectly manicured fingers beneath her eyes. “I’ve never told anybody. Someone like Robert would have used it against me.”
“But it’s the truth,” Kaye said.
“No, it isn’t,” Cross said peevishly. “It’s a personal experience. It was real to you and to me, but that doesn’t get us anywhere in this old, cruel world. That same vision might have compelled someone else to burn old women as witches or kill Englishmen, like Joan of Arc. Cranking up the old Inquisition.”
“I don’t think so,” Kaye said.
“How do you know the butchers and murderers didn’t get a message?”
Kaye had to admit that she did not.
Cross said, “I’ve spent so much of my time trying to forget, just so I could do the work I had to do to get where I wanted to be. Sometimes it was cruel work, stepping on other folks’s dreams. And whenever I remembered, it just crushed me again. Because I knew this thing, it, He, would never punish me, no matter what I did or how I misbehaved. Not just forgiveness—no judgment. Only love. He can’t be real,” Cross said. “What He said and what He did doesn’t make any sense.”
“He felt real to me,” Kaye said.
“Did you ever hear what happened to Thomas Aquinas?” Cross asked.
Kaye shook her head.
“The most admired theologian of all. Furiously adept thinker, logical beyond all measure—and pretty hard to read nowadays. But smart, no doubt about it, and a young fellow when he made his mark. Student of Albertus Magnus. Defender of Aristotle in the Church. He wrote big thick tracts. Admired throughout Christendom, and still revered as a thinker to this day. On the morning of December 6, 1273, he was saying Mass in Naples. He was older, about my age. Right in the middle of the sermon, he just stopped speaking, and stared at nothing. Or stared at everything. I imagine he must have gawped like a fish.” Cross’s expression was quizzical, distant.
“He stopped writing, dictating, stopped contributing to the Summa, his life’s work. And when he was pressed to explain why he had stopped, he said, ‘I can do no more; such things have been revealed to me that all I have written seems as straw, and I now await the end of my life.’ He died a few months later.” Cross snorted. “No wonder Aquinas was brought up short, the poor bastard. I know a hierarchy when I see one. I’m little better than a wriggly worm in a pond compared to what touched me. I wouldn’t dare try to tell God how to behave.” She smiled. “Yes, dear, I can be humble.” Cross patted Kaye’s hand. “And that’s that. You’re fired. You’ve done all you need to do, for now, at my company.”
“What about Jackson?” Kaye asked.
“He’s limited, but he’s still useful, and there’s still important work for him to do. I’ll have Lars watch over him.”
“Jackson doesn’t understand,” Kaye said.
“If you mean he’s narrowly focused, that’s just what I need right now. He’ll cross all the t’s and dot all the i’s, trying to prove he’s right. Good for him.”
“But he’ll get it wrong.”
“Then he’ll do it thoroughly.” Cross was adamant. “Robert’s problem was familiar to Aquinas. He called it ignorantia affectata, cultivated ignorance.”
“God should touch him,” Kaye said bitterly, and then flushed in embarrassment, as if that were any kind of punishment.
Cross considered this seriously for a moment. “I’m surprised God touched me,” she said. “I’d be shocked if He wanted to have anything to do with Robert.”
35
NEW MEXICO
Inside the silver tent were eight single wide mobile home trailers, sitting up on blocks on a wrinkled and patched gray plastic floor and surrounded, at a distance of thirty feet, by a circle of transparent plastic panels topped with razor wire. The trailers did not look in the least comfortable or friendly.
Dicken tried to orient himself in the general gloomy light that seeped through the silver tent. They had entered on the western side. North, then, was where a small Emergency Action van was parked, the same van that had presumably brought Helen Fremont from Arizona. South of the mobile homes and the wall of plastic and razor wire, a small maze of tables and lab benches had been set up and stocked with standard medical and lab diagnostic equipment.
A few klieg lights mounted on long steel poles supplemented the dim sunlight.
Dicken saw no one else under the tent.
“We don’t have a team in place yet,” Flynn said. “She just came down sick this morning.”
“Is there a phone connection in the trailer, an intercom, a bullhorn, anything?”
Flynn shook her head. “We’re still putting it together.”
“Goddamnit, she’s alone in there?”
Turner nodded.
“For how long?”
“Since this morning,” Flynn said. “I went in and tried to do an exam. She refused, but I took some pictures, and of course, there’s the video. We’re running tests on the waste line fluid and the air, but the equipment here isn’t familiar to me. I didn’t trust it, so I took the samples over to the primate lab. They’re still being run.”
“Does Jurie know she’s ill?” Dicken asked.
“We called him,” Turner said.
“Did he give any instructions?”
“He said to leave her alone. Let nobody in until we were sure.”
“But Maggie went in.”
“I had to,” Flynn said. “She looked so scared.”
“You were in a suit?”
“Of course.”
Dicken swung about on his stiff leg and leaned his head to one side, biting his cheek to keep his opinions to himself. He was furious.
Flynn would not meet his eyes. “It’s procedure. All tests done under Level 3 conditions.”
“Well, we sure as hell follow the goddamned rules, don’t we?” Dicken said. “Haven’t you at least asked her to come out and have a doctor inspect her?”
“She won’t come out,” Turner said. “We have video cameras tracking her. She’s in the bedroom. She’s just lying there.”
“Dandy,” Dicken said. “What in hell do you want me to do?”
“We have the pictures,” Flynn said, and took her data phone from her pocket.
“Show me,” Dicken said.
She brought up a succession of five pictures on the phone’s screen. Dicken saw a young SHEVA girl with dark brown hair, pale blue eyes with yellow specks, thin features but prominent cheekbones, pale skin. The girl looked like a frightened cat, her eyes searching the unseen corners, refusing even in her misery to be intimidated.
Dicken could tell the girl was exhibiting no obvious signs of Shiver—no lesions on her skinny arms, no scarlet cingulated markings on her neck. A live update chart butted in at the conclusion of the slide show and displayed a temperature of 102.
“Remote temperature sensing?”
Flynn nodded.
“You said her viral titers were high.”
“She cut herself getting into the van. They had been instructed not to draw blood, but they sequestered the stain and we took a sample under controlled conditions. That’s why the van is still here. She’s producing HERV.”
“Of course she is. She’s pregnant. She doesn’t present any of the necessary symptoms,” he said. “What makes you think it’s Shiver?”
“Dr. Jurie said it might be.”
“Jurie isn’t here, and you are.”
“But she’s pregnant,” Turner said, scowling, as if that explained their concern.