I thought of none of those things. I just stared at him and thought of murder.
“I’ll bet,” he said, making another fold, “that if you think back far enough, you’ll remember that people were always coming to you with poems and paintings and photographs and asking what you thought of them. Because people with the mutations subconsciously recognise the people without them and realise they can give an objective valuation. I don’t know why that happens. Pheromones, maybe. Or body language. Hard to see how it could have evolved, but there you go. Nature, eh?”
“Is there a cure?”
He shook his head, then stopped himself. “Well, yes, theoretically. Gene therapy to repair the mutation introduced by the virus, but it’s tricky and you don’t want to release it into the population until you’re sure how it’ll work in the wild.”
“Like you did.”
“I was as sure as I could be.” He finished whatever he had been doing to the sheet of paper and held it up between his finger and thumb, a ridged little pill of paper the size of a pea and the shape of a grain of rice. “It could take years to develop the right gene therapy, and in six months nobody will care any more. The world’s going to be full of artists, Jarek.” He grinned at me and relaxed his thumb and forefinger, and the pill of paper sprang gently open as its fibres were released and it bloomed into the figure of an armoured knight on horseback, all rendered in fabulously-complex folds. Brave new world. “What do you think?”
“What’s going to happen to the people who aren’t affected by the virus?” I said.
He looked a little cross. “You could always become critics,” he said, gesturing with the origami knight. “What do you think?”
Marcin’s trial was held in camera and the details were never made public. What else I know comes from patient work down the years, from favours called in and contacts made, from hundreds of manuscripts read and plays watched and arias listened to in return for snippets of information.
The original purpose of the virus had been for occupational therapy — it was meant to be used on accident victims and the survivors of serious trauma, making them want to take part in creative activities as part of their recovery. Paint medication. Medication that makes you want to paint.
But viruses are fiddly things to work with and you can’t always get them to do quite what you want, and by the time Marcin and his colleagues stepped back and looked at what they had created they realised it was incredibly virulent. A doctor infecting a trauma patient with it would wind up infected himself, as would nurses and other nurses and other doctors and other patients and their families and people on public transport… and so on.
Marcin’s team decided it was just too contagious to release and they put it away and went off to think about what to do next. But Marcin — and I can’t know this for sure but in my imagination it’s the only way it could have happened — Marcin didn’t go away. He stood and looked at the jar or the vial or the box or whatever the hell they locked the virus up in, and he tipped his head to one side and he saw possibilities.
The lab Marcin worked in was very well-designed. It was, actually, impossible for someone to infect themselves, by accident or deliberately, without setting off alarms, but you can have the best security system in the world and it’s still only built by people, and nothing built by people is ever perfect.
He got the virus out of the lab by infecting himself, then he took a holiday. In a lock-up garage in Ghent, which he’d kitted out with equipment bought from various medical and scientific supply houses around Europe, he isolated the virus from his blood. Then while he was still contagious, he set off on a five-day tour of Europe’s major airports.
He shook a lot of hands and bought a lot of airport coffee with coins and banknotes liberally smeared with his sweat. He sneezed on a lot of duty-free bottles of perfume and alcohol and squeezed a lot of those fluffy toys you get in airport gift shops and checked a lot of souvenir T-shirts to see if they were his size. I’ve seen some of the security video of him at Heathrow and Schiphol and Orly, and when you look at it all together it’s rather comical, until you remember what he was doing.
He was very sly; he knew a small percentage of infected people would present with flu symptoms, so he timed his five-day excursion so that the symptoms would be lost in the general seasonal flu. In the Southern Hemisphere, outside flu season, they caused brief alarm but nothing more.
Finally, not infectious any more, he returned to Ghent, where he started to manufacture clocks as another way to spread the virus. A member of the Belgian Secret Service said they had no idea how many clocks he’d finally been able to make, but checking back with the suppliers who sold him his raw materials the number could have been in the tens of thousands. By the time they finally caught up with him in Biarritz, it was already too late.
And one thing Marcin said was absolutely right. By the time I had assembled the full story, nobody cared any more. Virtually everyone on Earth had been exposed to the virus.
And by then I was on the road. The trickle of people wanting my opinion of their work, by word of mouth or pheromones or body language or God only knows what else — had become a torrent. I was besieged at home. I was getting letters and emails and phone calls from people all over Europe, promising me unholy riches if I’d only come and see their play or read their book or sit through their operetta.
The only way to stay sane, I thought, was to go to them.
Sometimes, we bump into each other. In Eindhoven or Alençon or Cologne or Madrid or one of the little towns in between. You’ll be sitting in the restaurant of another free hotel, eating another free meal, and you’ll raise your head and there across the dining room you’ll see someone else with weary, haunted eyes from too many hours watching the roads unwind, too many hours spent giving their honest opinion of oil paintings and watercolours and sculptures and happenings and films in too many genres to list properly. And they’ll raise their head too and your eyes will meet, and you’ll nod to each other.
Surprisingly often, that’s as far as it gets. You’ll nod to each other, then go back to your meals, there in the dining room with walls covered with execrable oil paintings done by the manager or the waitress, and you’ll go back to your rooms afterward, and in the morning you’ll tell the manager or the waitress what you think of their paintings. And then you’ll leave, separately, without ever having exchanged a word.
Sometimes, though, we do speak. In Basle I met an English girl named Caroline, who had been a bond trader in London, back in the days before her friends started bringing their drawings into the office and asking her what she thought of them.
Caroline and I travelled together for a while. We drove down into Italy, visited Florence, where she told me about Stendhal Syndrome, a condition which apparently affects visitors to the city, the sheer beauty of the place simply overwhelming them, making them giddy. Neither of us experienced any symptoms, which I thought pretty much said it all.
In Turin, we had an argument over the relative merits of an enormous landscaped garden in the grounds of a villa belonging to a man who was rumoured to be a Capo di tutti capi. He had apparently abandoned his other activities in order to concentrate on his garden. I thought the result was utterly laughable, a fatal collision of styles from ancient Rome to Capability Brown. Caroline was entranced. Later, at our hotel, we argued violently, and the next morning Caroline drove off in a brand-new Mercedes provided by the alleged Capo. I found a Peugeot dealer who was composing enormous, bombastic rock operas. I told him his latest magnum opus was marvellous, and left in a new car. I sometimes check out Caroline’s blog, where she delights in spreading poison and lies about me.