As soon as the general was gone, al-Tusi let out the breath he had been holding, and he hastened back to the table. With barely restrained urgency, he began sorting through the papers arranged around the urghan.
Where is it? It has to be here.
His fingers lit upon the parchment. He was surprised at the memories a simple touch evoked, but he tucked the nostalgia away, along with the roll, which disappeared into the folds of his robes.
Let Guo have the urghan; without this, he will never begin to grasp its true importance.
But securing the parchment brought him scant comfort. The Book was nowhere to be found.
He searched every document in the room, and when he was done, he searched the other observatories and reading rooms. Over the days that followed, he would inspect every scrap of paper or parchment that Guo’s soldiers had not destroyed — setting aside more than four hundred thousand unique documents — but the one book he sought most continued to elude to him.
There was a simple explanation, of course. The Book, that singular, irreplaceable chronicle of the experiments conducted at the Prime…the tome that, quite literally, contained within its pages, the secrets of life itself…was gone.
Destroyed.
Pitched into the Tigris like so much waste.
At first, al-Tusi was inconsolable, but as the days and weeks passed, he realized that perhaps his father had been right about such things. Allah had seen fit to remove the knowledge from the world.
The Caliph had tried to use the discovery as a weapon of war. No doubt, men like Hulagu and Guo would have attempted to do the same, and if they had somehow succeeded…
Al-Tusi didn’t want to contemplate what that might mean.
Perhaps it was best that the Book was gone.
Inshallah
Katherine Geller stared at the endless emerald-green tea plants covering the distant hills, with a mixture of nostalgia and contempt. She was a coffee drinker and had been since her late teens, imbibing mug after mug of the beverage, sweet but without milk, as she studied and crammed to get through her university courses, and subsequently her PhD in Biology, along with Masters degrees in molecular biology, organic chemistry and epidemiology, respectively. Coffee was a drink she associated with ambition and the drive to succeed; tea just made her think of Richard.
They’d been good for each other, even if they hadn’t been terribly successful as a couple. Richard had also been driven to succeed, and with the nearly limitless resources of his inheritance, his only limiting factor was the scope of his vision. She had helped him articulate his grandiose schemes, and he in turn had opened doors for her that she hadn’t even known existed. They had pushed each other to new heights, competed with and dared each other, and in the end, extended their reach well beyond what either of them had thought possible to grasp. Perhaps because their personalities were so much alike, the intimate relationship that had started it all — which they both recognized from the outset as nothing more than a diversion — had withered on the vine. Not surprisingly, they were both better for it. He had gone on to pursue his ambitions, and she had returned to her true passion: research.
They were still close. His company was discreetly funding her current endeavor. She called every day on the Qualcomm satellite phone he had insisted she take along, but their conversations rarely evoked any kind of emotional response. The sight of the hills covered in tea however, reminded her of the god-awful fresh-cut peppermint tea that he was always trying to get her to drink, and that took her to more intimate places in her mind.
“Dr. Geller!”
Katherine shook her head to clear away the memories of her former lover. She turned toward the person shouting her name. Bradley Stafford, one of her graduate students and her chief research assistant, was hastening in her direction, waving a sheet of paper she knew would contain the raw data from the latest batch of samples. If Stafford’s enthusiasm was any indication, the news was good. She took the report with a patient smile, and gave it a cursory once-over.
Good news indeed — excellent in fact.
“We found him, didn’t we?” asked Stafford. “Patient Zero.”
Katherine cast him a reproving glance. “We’re just collecting samples, Brad. We’ve got half a dozen more sites to visit before we can even begin parsing the data.”
Although her statement was accurate, she had a more compelling reason to be hesitant about declaring victory. In a lower voice, she added: “The last thing we need right now is for Han to get all excited and shut us down.”
Dr. Han Li was their official liaison with the Chinese Ministry of Health, or to be more precise, their government-appointed babysitter. Although Katherine’s team nominally had the full support and cooperation of the Ministry, implicit in that agreement was the expectation that they would find nothing to upset the status quo, and certainly nothing that might reinforce the idea that the People’s Republic of China was the birthplace of catastrophic infectious diseases. The Ministry had granted them access to archaeological sites in Yunnan Province only in hopes they might find clues that would lead them elsewhere, perhaps to India or one of the other hypothesized origination sites for the pandemic.
Katherine didn’t want Han to know all the evidence pointed to the unarguable conclusion that the most devastating outbreak in the history of the world had begun right here in Western China.
Bradley wasn’t wrong; they were closing in on Patient Zero — the source of the Black Death.
The Black Death.
The name wasn’t just dramatic hyperbole. The outward symptoms of the plague that had swept across the known world during the fourteenth century were black pustules on the skin and a darkening of the fingernails as the tissue underneath began to necrotize. There was debate about how many had died from the plague, which reached its peak between 1348 and 1350, but it was generally believed that the pandemic had killed half the world’s population. Estimates of the death toll ranged from 75 million to 200 million, making it even deadlier than the Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918. Katherine imagined that the survivors must have felt like they were living through the tribulation prophesied in the Bible: “Then two shall be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left.”
In the big picture of infectious disease, the Black Death was a statistical anomaly — a flash fire that had done a lot of damage in the short term, and then more or less burned itself out.
The strangest thing about the Black Death was that no one was really sure what it was. Common wisdom held that the plague organism was Yersinia pestis—the bacteria responsible for bubonic and pneumonic plague — which had jumped from rodent populations to humans through flea bites. Forensic evidence tied the bacterium to the Black Death, but some historians believed the evidence had been misread. Many of those who contracted the plague lived in climates where transmission by flea bites would have been extremely unlikely. Some scientists — and Katherine was among their number — believed that bubonic plague was coincidental with the actual cause of death, or that the agent responsible was either a unique strain of Yersinia or something that worked in tandem with the plague bacterium to enhance its lethality.
Katherine’s team was trying to identify the original source of the pandemic, to find its earliest victims and hopefully to gather samples of DNA from the plague organism that would provide a definitive answer. But unlike viruses, which were really nothing more than chains of protein that could remain dormant for years or even centuries, bacteria were living cells that needed sustenance. When an infected person died, the bacteria in their body died soon after and began to degrade. Sometimes though, traces of bacterial DNA remained in the bones and teeth of victims long dead — traces that could be extracted in the mobile laboratory and sent off for analysis using a satellite Internet connection.