“Fifty bucks—take it or leave it—for her new communications number.”
Caliban took it, and smiled. “Bad guess. She has no new number, no new account.”
I said numbly, “That’s all. Thank you.”
Caliban mimed astonishment at this unwarranted courtesy, and blew me a parting kiss. “Call again. And remember, petitioner: data wants to be free!”
Why Kyoto? The only connection I could think of was Yasuko Nishide. Meaning what? She’d still planned to cover the Einstein Conference, after all—but with a rival profile of a rival theorist? And the only reason she wasn’t yet on Stateless was Nishide’s illness?
Why the communications blackout, though? Kuwale’s grim unspoken conclusion made no sense. Why would biotech interests want to harm Sarah Knight, if she’d shown every sign of abandoning Violet Mosala for another—thoroughly apolitical—physicist?
People began to cross the lobby, talking excitedly. I looked up. The auditorium down the corridor was emptying. Mosala and Helen Wu emerged together; I met up with them.
Mosala was beaming. “Andrew! You missed all the fun! Serge Bischoff just released a new algorithm which is going to save me days of computer time!”
Wu frowned and corrected her. “Save all of us days, please!”
“Of course.” Mosala stage-whispered to me, “Helen still doesn’t realize that she’s on my side, whether she likes it or not.” She added, “I have a summary of the lecture, if you want to see it?”
I said tonelessly, “No.” I realized how blunt that sounded, but I felt so spaced out, so disconnected, that I really didn’t care. Mosala gave me a curious look, more concerned than angry.
Wu left us. I asked Mosala, “Have you heard any more about Nishide?”
“Ah.” She became serious. “It seems he’s not going to make it to the conference, after all. His secretary contacted the organizers; he’s had to be hospitalized. It’s pneumonia again.” She added sadly, “If this keeps up… I don’t know. He may retire altogether.”
I closed my eyes; the floor began to tilt. A distant voice asked, “Are you all right? Andrew?” I pictured my face, glowing white hot.
I opened my eyes. And I thought I finally understood what was happening.
I said, “Can I talk to you? Please?”
“Of course.”
Sweat began running down my cheeks. “Don’t lose your temper. Just hear me out.”
Mosala leant forward, frowning. She hesitated, then put a hand on my forehead. “You’re burning up. You need to see a doctor, straight away.”
I screamed at her hoarsely, “Just listen! Listen to me!”
People around us were staring. Mosala opened her mouth, outraged, ready to put me in my place—but then she changed her mind. “Go ahead. I'm listening.”
“You need blood tests, a full… micropathology report… everything. You’re asymptomatic, now, but… however you feel… do it… there’s no way of knowing what the incubation period might be.” I was dripping sweat, and swaying on my feet; every breath felt like a lungful of fire. “What did you think they were going to do? Send in a hit squad with machine guns? I doubt… I wasn’t meant to get sick… at all… but the thing must have mutated on the way. Keyed to your genome… but the lock fell off, en route.” I laughed. “In my blood. In my brain.”
I sagged, and dropped to my knees. A convulsion passed through my whole body, like a peristaltic spasm trying to squeeze the flesh right out of my skin. People around me were shouting, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. I struggled to lift my head—but when I succeeded, briefly, black and purple bruises flowered across my vision.
I stopped fighting it. I closed my eyes and lay down on the cool, welcoming tiles.
In the hospital ward, for a long time, I paid no attention to my surroundings. I thrashed about in a knot of sweat-soaked sheets, and let the world remain mercifully out of focus. I sought no information from the people around me; in my delirium, I believed I had all the answers:
Ned Landers was behind everything. When we met, he’d infected me with one of his secret viruses. And now, because I’d traveled so far to escape it… although Helen Wu had proved that the whole world was nothing but a loop, and everything led back to the same point… now I was coming down with Landers’ secret weapon against Violet Mosala, Andrew Worth, and all his other enemies.
I was coming down with Distress.
A tall Fijian man dressed in white poked a drip into my elbow. I tried to shake it out; he held me still. I muttered triumphantly, “Don’t you know there’s no point? There’s no cure!” Distress was nowhere near as bad as I’d imagined; I wasn’t screaming like the woman in Miami, was I?
I was nauseous and feverish—but I felt sure that I was headed for some form of beautiful, painless oblivion. I smiled up at the man. “I'm gone forever now! I’ve gone away!”
He said, “I don’t think so. I think you’ve been there, and you’re coming back.”
I shook my head defiantly, but then cried out in surprise and pain. My bowels had gone into spasm, and I was emptying them, uncontrollably, into a pan I hadn’t even noticed beneath me. I tried to stop. I couldn’t. But it wasn’t the incontinence that horrified me, as much as the… consistency. This wasn’t diarrhea; it was water.
The motion stopped eventually, but I kept shuddering. I pleaded for an explanation. “What’s happening to me?”
“You have cholera. Drug-resistant cholera. We can control the fever, and keep you hydrated—but the disease is going to have to run its course. So you’re in for a long haul.”
19
As the first wave of delirium subsided, I tried to assess my position dispassionately, to arm myself with the facts. I was not an infant, I was not old. I was not suffering from malnutrition, parasite infestation, an impaired immune system, or any other complicating factor. I was in the care of qualified people. My condition was being monitored constantly by sophisticated machines. I told myself that I was not going to die. Fever and nausea, absent in “classical” cholera, meant that I had the Mexico City biotype—first seen in the aftermath of the quake of ’15, long since distributed globally. It entered the bloodstream as well as the gut, producing a wider range of symptoms, a greater risk to health. Nevertheless, millions of people survived it every year—often in much worse circumstances: without antipyritics to control the fever, without intravenous electrolytes, without any antibiotics at all—making drug resistance academic. In the largest metropolitan hospitals, in Santiago or Bombay, the particular strain of Vibrio cholerae could be sequenced completely, and a de novo drug designed and synthesized in a matter of hours. Most people who contracted the disease, though, had no prospect whatsoever of receiving this luxurious miracle cure. They simply lived through the rise and fall of the bacterial empire inside them. They rode it out.
I could do the same.
There was only one small flaw in this clear-eyed, optimistic scenario:
Most people had no reason to suspect that their guts were full of a genetic weapon which had detonated one step short of its target. Engineered to mimic a natural strain of cholera as closely as possible—but engineered to push the envelope of plausible symptoms far enough to kill a healthy, twenty-seven-year-old woman, receiving the best care that Stateless could provide.