Li found his voice breaking a bit as he spoke: “Your Excellency, I need to recommend severe and swift action.”
The president had been briefed on the outbreak in Shanxi. “What sort of action?”
“A … culling, Your Excellency.”
“Of birds?” That had been done several times now, and the president sounded irritated. “The Health Minister can authorize that.” His tone conveyed the unspoken words, There was no need to bother me.
Li shifted in his chair, leaning forward over his desktop. “No, no, not of birds. Or, rather, not just of birds.” He fell silent. Wasting the president’s time just wasn’t done, but he couldn’t go on — couldn’t give voice to this. For pity’s sake, he was a doctor! But, as his old surgery teacher used to say, sometimes you have to cut in order to cure…
“What, then?” demanded the president.
Li felt his heart pounding. At last he said, very softly, “People.”
There was more silence for a time. When the president’s voice came on again, it was quiet, reflective. “Are you sure?”
“I don’t think there’s any other way.”
Another long pause, then: “How would you do it?”
“An airborne chemical agent,” said Li, taking care with his words. The army had such things, designed for warfare, intended for use in foreign lands, but they would work just as well here. He would select a toxin that would break down in a matter of days; the contagion would be halted. “It will affect only those in the target area — two villages, a hospital, the surrounding lands.”
“And how many people are in the … target area?”
“No one is exactly sure; peasants often fall through the cracks of the census process.”
“Roughly,” said the president. “Round figures.”
Li looked down at the computer printouts, and the figures that had been underlined in red by Cho. He took a deep breath with his mouth then let it out through his nose. “Ten or eleven thousand.”
The president’s voice was thin, shocked. “Are you positive this needs to be done?”
Studying scenarios for containing plague outbreaks was one of the key mandates of the Department of Disease Control. There were established protocols, and Li knew he was following them properly. By reacting quickly, by cauterizing the wound before infection spread too far, they would actually be reducing the scope of the required eliminations. The evil, he knew, wasn’t in what he had told the president to do; the evil, if any, would have been delaying, even by a matter of days, calling for this solution.
He tried to keep his voice steady. “I believe so, Your Excellency.” He lowered his voice. “We, ah, don’t want another SARS.”
“Are you positive there’s no other way?”
“This isn’t regular H5N1,” said Li. “It’s a variant strain that passes directly from person to person. And it’s highly contagious.”
“Can’t we just throw a cordon around the area?”
Li leaned back in his chair now, and looked out at the neon signs of Beijing.
“The perimeter is too large, with too many mountain passes. We could never be sure that people weren’t getting out. You’d need something as impenetrable as the Great Wall, and it couldn’t be erected in time.”
The president’s voice — so assured on TV — sounded like that of a tired old man just now. “What’s the — what do you call it? — the mortality rate for this variant strain?”
“High.”
“How high?”
“Ninety percent, at least.”
“So almost all these people will die anyway?”
And that was the saving grace, Li knew; that was the only thing that was keeping him from choking on his own bile. “Yes.”
“Ten thousand…”
“To protect over a billion Chinese — and more abroad,” said Li.
The president fell quiet, and then, almost as if talking to himself, he said softly, “It’ll make June fourth look like a stroll in the sun.”
June fourth, 1989: the day the protesters were killed in Tiananmen Square. Li didn’t know if he was supposed to respond, but when the silence had again grown uncomfortably long he said what Party faithful were supposed to say:
“Nothing happened on that day.”
To Li’s surprise, the president made a snorting sound and then said, “We may be able to contain your bird-flu epidemic, Dr. Quan, but we must be sure there is no other outbreak in its wake.”
Li was lost. “Your Excellency?”
“You said we won’t be able to erect something like the Great Wall fast enough, and that’s true. But there is another wall, and that one we can strengthen…”
Chapter 6
LiveJournaclass="underline" The Calculass Zone
Title: Same Old Same Old
Date: Tuesday 18 September, 15:44 EST
Mood: Anxious
Location: Godzilla’s stomping ground
Music: Lee Amodeo, “Nothing To See Here, Move Along”
Well, the Mom and I are still here in Tokyo. I have a bandage over my left eye, and we’re waiting for the swelling — the edema, I should say — to go down, so that there’s no unnatural pressure on my optic nerve. Tomorrow, the bandage will come off and I should be able to see! :D
I’ve been trying to keep my spirits up, but the suspense is killing me. And my best material is bombing here! I referred to the retina, which gathers light, as “the catcher in the eye,” and nobody laughed; apparently they don’t have to read Salinger in Japan.
Anyway, check it: I’ve got this transceiver attached to my optic nerve, just behind my left eye. When it’s turned on, it’ll grab the signals my retina is putting out and transmit them to this little external computer pack I’m supposed to carry around, like, forever; I called it my eyePod, and at least that made Dr. Kuroda laugh. Anyway, the eyePod will reprocess the signals, correcting the errors in encoding, and then beam the corrected version to the implant, which will pass the information back to the optic nerve so it can continue on into that mysterious realm called — cue scary music — The Brain of Calculass!
Speaking of brains, I’m really enjoying the book I mentioned before: The Origin of Consciousness Yadda Yadda. And from it comes our Word of the Day(tm): Commissurotomy. No, that’s not the wise but ancient leader of the Jellicle tribe from Cats (still my fave musical!). Rather, it’s what they call it when they sever the corpus callosum, the bundle of nerve fibers that connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain — which, of course, are the two chambers of Jaynes’s bicameral mind…
Anyway, tomorrow we’ll find out if my own operation worked. Please post some encouraging comments here, folks — give me something to read while I wait for the moment of truth…
[And seekrit message to BG4: check your email, babe!]
China’s Paramount Leader and President replaced the ornate, gold-trimmed telephone handset into the cradle on his vast cherry-wood desk. He looked down the long length of his office, at the intricately carved wooden wall panels, beautiful tapestries, and glass display cases. A stick of sweet incense was burning on the sideboard.
The room was absolutely quiet. Finally, sure now of his decision, he shifted in his red-leather chair and touched the intercom button.
“Yes, Your Excellency?” said a female voice at once.
“Bring me the Changcheng Strategy document.”
There was a moment’s hesitation, then: “Right away.”