"And that has something to do with the Spin itself?"
"Perhaps, but neither I nor the Martian on television know for sure."
"You're making fun of me."
"No."
"Yes you are. But that's all right. I know I'm ignorant. It's been years since I looked at a newspaper. There was always the risk of seeing your father's face, for one thing. And the only television I watch is afternoon drama. In afternoon drama there aren't any Martians. I guess I'm Rip van Winkle. I slept too long. And I don't much like the world I woke up to. The parts of it that aren't terrifying are—" She gestured at the TV. "Are ludicrous."
"We're all Rip van Winkle," Jason said gently. "We're all waiting to wake up."
* * * * *
Carol's mood improved in tandem with Jason's health and she began to take a livelier interest in his prognosis. I briefed her about his AMS, a disease that had not been formally diagnosed when Carol graduated from medical school, as a way to dodge questions about the treatment itself, an unspoken bargain which she seemed to understand and accept. The important thing was that Jason's ravaged skin was healing and the blood samples I sent to a lab in D.C. for testing showed drastically reduced neural plaque proteins.
She was still reluctant to talk about the Spin, however, and she looked unhappy when Jase and I discussed it in her presence. I thought again of the Housman poem Diane had taught me so many years ago: The infant child is not aware/He has been eaten by the bear.
Carol had been beset by several bears, some as large as the Spin and some as small as a molecule of ethanol. I think she might have envied the infant child.
* * * * *
Diane called (on my personal phone, not Carol's house phone) a few nights after Wun's U.N. appearance. I had retreated to my room and Carol was keeping the night watch. Rain had come and gone all November, and it was raining now, the bedroom window a fluid mirror of yellow light.
"You're at the Big House," Diane said.
"You talked to Carol?"
"I call her once a month. I'm a dutiful daughter. Sometimes she's sober enough to talk. What's wrong with Jason?"
"It's a long story," I said. "He's getting better. It's nothing to worry about."
"I hate it when people say that."
"I know. But it's true. There was a problem, but we fixed it"
"And that's all you can tell me."
"All for now. How are things with you and Simon?" Last time we talked she had mentioned legal trouble.
"Not too good," she said. "We're moving."
"Moving where?"
"Out of Phoenix, anyway. Away from the city. Jordan Tabernacle's been temporarily closed down—I thought maybe you'd heard about it."
"No," I said—why would I have heard about the financial troubles of a little southwest Tribulation church?—and we went on to discuss other matters, and Diane promised to update me once she and Simon had a new address. Sure, why not, what the hell.
But I did hear about Jordan Tabernacle the following night.
Uncharacteristically, Carol insisted on watching the late news. Jason was tired but alert and willing, so the three of us sat through forty minutes of international saber rattling and celebrity court cases. Some of this was interesting: there was an update on Wun Ngo Wen, who was in Belgium meeting with officials of the E.U., and good news from Uzbekistan, where the forward marine base had finally been relieved. Then there was a feature about CVWS and the Israeli dairy industry.
We watched dramatic pictures of culled cattle being bulldozed into mass graves and salted with lime. Five years ago the Japanese beef industry had been similarly devastated. Bovine or ungulate CVWS had broken out and been suppressed in a dozen countries from Brazil to Ethiopia. The human equivalent was treatable with modern antibiotics but remained a smoldering problem in third-world economies.
But Israeli dairy farmers ran strict protocols of sepsis and testing, so the outbreak there had been unexpected. Worse, the index case—the first infection—had been tracked to an unauthorized shipment of fertilized ova from the United States.
The shipment was back-traced to a Tribulationist charity called Word for the World, headquartered in an industrial park outside of Cincinnati, Ohio. Why was WftW smuggling cattle ova into Israel? Not, it turned out, for particularly charitable reasons. Investigators followed WftW's sponsors through a dozen blind holding companies to a consortium of Tribulationist and Dispensationalist churches and fringe political groups both large and small. One item of Biblical doctrine shared by these groups was drawn from Numbers (chapter nineteen) and inferred from other texts in Matthew and Timothy—namely, that the birth in Israel of a pure red heifer would signal the second coming of Jesus Christ and the beginning of His reign on Earth.
It was an old idea. Allied Jewish extremists believed the sacrifice of a red calf on the Temple Mount would mark the coming of the Messiah. There had been several "red calf" attacks on the Dome of the Rock in prior years, one of which had damaged the Al-Aqsa Mosque and nearly precipitated a regional war. The Israeli government had been doing its best to quash the movement but had only succeeded in driving it underground.
According to the news there were several WftW-sponsored dairy farms across the American Midwest and Southwest all quietly devoted to the business of hastening Armageddon. They had been attempting to breed a pure blood-red calf, presumably superior to the numerous disappointing heifers that had been presented as candidates over the last forty years.
These farms had systematically evaded federal inspections and feed protocols, to the point of concealing an outbreak of bovine CVWS that had crossed the border from Nogales. The infected ova produced breeding stock with plentiful genes for red-tinged coats, but when the calves themselves were born (at a WftW-linked dairy farm in the Negev) most died of respiratory distress at an early age. The corpses were quietly buried, but too late. The infection had spread to mature stock and a number of human farmhands.
It was an embarrassment for the U.S. administration. The FDA had already announced a policy review and Homeland Security was freezing WftW bank accounts and serving warrants on Tribulationist fund-raisers. On the news there were pictures of federal agents carrying boxed documents out of anonymous buildings and applying padlocks to the doors of obscure churches.
The news reader cited a few examples by name.
One of them was Jordan Tabernacle.
4X109 A. D.
Outside Padang we transferred from Nijon's ambulance to a private car with a Minang driver, who dropped us off—me, Ibu Ina, En—at a cartage compound on the coast highway. Five huge tin-roofed warehouses sat in a black gravel plain between conical piles of bulk cement under tarps and a corroded rail tanker idle on a siding. The main office was a low wooden building under a sign that read 'Bayur Forwarding' in English.
Bayur Forwarding, Ina said, was one of her ex-husband Jala's businesses, and it was Jala who met us in the reception room. He was a beefy, apple-cheeked man in a canary yellow business suit—he looked like a Toby jug dressed for the tropics. He and Ina embraced in the manner of the comfortably divorced, then Jala shook my hand and stooped to shake En's. Jala introduced me to his receptionists as "a palm oil importer from Suffolk," presumably in case she was quizzed by the New Reformasi. Then he escorted us to his seven-year-old fuel-cell BMW and we drove south toward Teluk Bayur, Jala and Ina up front, me and En in back.
Teluk Bayur—the big deepwater harbor south of the city of Padang—was where Jala had made all his money. Thirty years ago, he said, Teluk Bayur had been a sleepy Sumatran sand-mud basin with modest port services and a predictable trade in coal, crude palm oil, and fertilizer. Today, thanks to the economic boom of the nagari restoration and the population explosion of the Archway era, Teluk Bayur was a fully improved port basin with world-class quays and mooring, a huge storage complex, and so many modern conveniences that even Jala eventually lost interest in tallying up all the tugs, sheds, cranes and loaders by tonnage. "Jala is proud of Teluk Bayur," Ina said. "There's hardly a high official there he hasn't bribed."