by Nancy Kress
“Even badly, speaking several African languages is an achievement,” Spencer said. And then, “Maybe you can do this job after all. Whatever it is.”
Melanie said nothing. She’d been thinking just the opposite.
At sunrise she started, walking the short distance to the village, which looked serene in the delicate light. About four hundred people, Melanie estimated. Maybe four-fifty. Goats grazed outside the huts, which were a mix of timber and mud-and-wattle, with thatched roofs. Gardens held sweet potatoes, corn, cassavas. The women had already kindled the morning fires in the communal cooking area. Children fetched wood or water from a small river. They stopped cold to stare at a black woman in khakis, boots, and sun hat from Macy’s.
“Hello,” she said in Bantu, which made them all giggle. “Where is the house of ”—she consulted Spencer’s list of village family heads—“Kambidi Mabalo?”
More giggling, mouths hiding behind small black hands. God, they were adorable. She wondered how many were positive for sickle-cell trait.
“Please, Kambidi Mabalo?”
Finally one of the little boys said boldly, “He’s at his second wife’s house.”
“And where is that?”
He pointed to one of the largest structures and then suddenly they all fled, water sloshing from their buckets, giggling as they ran. Within two minutes, the entire village would know that a foreign woman was seeking Kambidi Mabalo.
The second wife let her in, listened silently to Melanie’s speech about being a colleague of Dr. Spencer’s, and inspected the gift Melanie had brought. This was an electric flashlight, purchased from Spencer. Melanie hadn’t been able to carry many goods into the country, but she had carried her checkbook. Spencer was leaving Yamdongi in a week; money was easier to transport than goods and always in short supply at Doctors Without Borders. Melanie had purchased a few of everything: flashlights, disposable razors, kitchen knives, dishes, clothing, even empty water bottles useful for carrying whatever liquids the villagers wanted carried. She was well prepared with guest gifts.
Kambidi’s second wife nodded and indicated Kambidi, who sat close nearby and had heard the entire exchange. Nonetheless, Melanie repeated it, from the necessary respect. Then came the ritual drinking of “tea,” after which she could finally get to work. Her Bantu was strong enough for this, but if she had to, she would switch to French.
“Elder Kambidi, have you ever had malaria?”
“Did your father ever have malaria? Was he very sick? Did he die? How about your father’s oldest sister? What is her name? Was it a very severe case? Now your father’s second-oldest sister …”
She was constructing a genetic chart. The method was crude, but blood tests were not practical here. Anyway, Mendel’s laws held as well here as anywhere else. With painstaking questioning, and then cross-questioning of the people named (if they were still alive), she would end up with a complete kinship chart for, she hoped, several generations. Bantu remembered their ancestors.
Sickle-cell trait was inherited. It protected against malaria, at least enough to mitigate its severity. By drawing the gene map of who had experienced a severe case of malaria, who a light case, and who none at all, even when an epidemic raged, Melanie hoped to determine who carried the sickle-cell trait.
Then she would graph that onto the list of people who had died of this last brief epidemic of malaria. “Much tertiary cerebral stroke, I rather suspect.” No kidding. If the epidemic that had “ended quite abruptly. … Odd, that …” had indeed been malaria reading, then the only mortalities would be to people carrying the sickle-cell trait.
“Now your mother, Elder Kambidi. Did she ever have malaria? Are you sure it was not the black sickness? What about her mother?”
Melanie talked to Kambidi Mabalo for two hours, and then to his second wife for another hour. People appeared at the door to gaze at her silently before vanishing again. The life of the household went on around her. She was taking a lot of these people’s time; she hoped the magic of Dr. Spencer’s name would keep everyone cooperative until she finished.
Certainly, Third World villagers had valid reasons not to cooperate with foreigners who said they were there to control malaria. Too often, the foreigners just didn’t have time to grasp the entire situation. When WHO had sprayed the houses of Malayan villages with DDT to eliminate Anopheles, it had worked. But it had also eliminated wasps that lived in the palm-frond roofs and ate caterpillars. The wasps died, the palm-frond-eating caterpillars flourished, and the roofs all fell down. WHO retreated hastily, helped along by roofless and angry Malayans.
Now, at this moment, Yamdongi was grateful to Médecins Sans Frontières. But gratitude could wither quickly under the strong hot relentless sun.
Gratitude held. After a week of so much questioning that Melanie grew hoarse, she had her answers.
She also had mosquito samples. She’d paid the village boys one makuta for each live Anopheles, giving them homemade killing jars furnished with carbon tetrachloride from Spencer’s stores. She’d also paid them for live larvae, which she’d killed by the simple method of letting the aquatic creatures dry out. The boys took to this with wild enthusiasm. When she had two huge piles of specimens, she’d finally had to call in her hunters, who were dejected that the great adventure was over.
Melanie picked through the insects, choosing the best preserved. That was all she could do in Congo. The African malaria carrier was Anopheles gambiae, not the American A. quadrimaculatus, but the Plasmodium falciparum parasite was the same. No way to tell if these particular mosquitoes carried malaria until the samples were analyzed in Atlanta.
But the specimens were secondary, the genealogy charts were what mattered.
There were seven hundred highly inbred people on Melanie’s chart, some living and some dead. From their personal histories of illness, an estimated 17 percent carried the sickle-cell trait, but not the double gene that resulted in full-blown sickle-cell anemia. In this harsh environment, the latter seldom survived long enough to reproduce. Of the people who had died in the latest malaria epidemic, plus the few who had survived it, every single one stood in a position on the chart to have inherited sickle-cell trait from their parents. Without blood tests on the dead, of course, there was no way to be sure that they had inherited sickle-cell trait. But they certainly could have. And most of the people untouched by the recent plague stood in a position where they could not have inherited sickle-cell trait.
It had been here. In Yamdongi. Malaria reading had been here, and it had vanished with the same abruptness that the U.S. Army had brought to Maryland through the most efficient disease-control methods in the world.
But there had been no efficient disease-control methods in Yamdongi. She had questioned everyone closely about this, especially the children. Congolese children, like children everywhere, explored everything. They ran through the forest, poked into strange objects, talked to strangers even when warned not to. The children Melanie talked to, sweetening her questions with various small gifts, had all said the same thing. No strangers in Yamdongi during the sickness, except hospital people. No soldiers spraying in the forest (she’d illustrated “spraying” with an old disinfectant bottle filled with water). No powder floating on the waters. Nothing new given to the villagers to put in their houses.
The malaria mini-epidemic in Yamdongi had not been stopped by conventional disease-control measures. So how had it been stopped?
By whom?
And why?
Melanie lay awake most of her last night in Yamdongi, worrying the data. Maybe there was another way to explain it. She looked at alternate scenarios, finally forced to reject each one because of some major misfit with the facts. No, there was only one explanation that fit the data.
Whoever had loosed malaria reading in Maryland had also loosed it here. And then had stopped it abruptly.
A double test—control and variable? But both outbreaks of malaria contained the same variable: this malarial
parasite colonized cells with sickled hemoglobin. The diseases were identical, at least as far as she knew now. Maybe the CDC analysis would show differences.
A double test to see if one epidemic could be ended, while the other ran its course? But someone had ended both epidemics, with the same abruptness.
A laboratory escape? Mosquitoes, after all, could fly out easily, and you’d only need a few escapees. Under the right conditions, the disease would spread quickly. But two identical lab escapes on two continents six thousand miles apart? Not likely.
So what? A practice run at genocide on two different populations, African and American—the two largest Negroid populations in the world.
By whom?
For what terrible purpose?
She tossed on the hard bed, under her mosquito netting, until after dawn. Then she got dressed, finished packing, and said good-bye to Brian Spencer and Sebo Masemo. Things had turned cool between her and the young British doctor. Professional courtesy demanded that she share the results of her work with him. But she couldn’t. Not this. Not yet.
“Got what you wanted, then, Dr. Anderson?”
“Yes. And thank you again for your hospitality.”
“No need to mention it,” he said stiffly. “Good journey.”
She climbed onto the Catholic mission’s Land Rover, which was driven by the same Bantu singing the same dated rock for eight bone-jarring hours. After one night at the mission, she flew back to Kisangani and then Kinshasa. In N’Djili Airport, before her flight to Washington, customs officials tore apart her valises, her handbag, her money belt. It didn’t matter. The genealogy charts were just so much foreign gobbledygook. And the intent, corrupt officials were looking for something to tax or confiscate or exact a bribe for. They never suspected that between the double layers of Melanie’s long, loose, bright-cotton dress were sewn, each in a separate tiny cloth bag, a hundred dead Anopheles gambiae, plus a few dead larvae. The specimens would stay there until she’d passed through customs in the United States.
She hadn’t seen a newspaper in ten days. The plane had yesterday’s Washington Post. For the first time all summer, malaria reading was not on the front page, which brimmed with yet another sex scandal of yet another congressman. It wasn’t until page four that she found even a related story,. and then it was only poll results. The confidence of the American people in the FBI, the poll said, had dropped drastically due to both the mistaken arrest of Michael Sean Donohue and the unfruitful failure to arrest anybody else for causing the epidemic.
Melanie put the newspaper on the empty seat beside her. She was exhausted. But she didn’t dare sleep; she might crush the layer of insects that justified her, haunted her, swathed her like an invisible shroud.
Interim
The adjunct professor stopped by the faculty room to pick up his mail. Colleagues sitting at the broad center table nodded and went on with their discussion. Beyond the window, the incoming freshmen, who were here for a four-day summer orientation to the strange rigors of college, trailed nervously after an upperclassman, who waved at buildings with giddy confidence.
The mail was the usual. Notice of a faculty meeting. A required paper three months late, accompanied by a desperate plea from the student author citing dire stress and enormous regret. Flyers about a book sale, a blood drive, and a library display. And a small envelope from the professor’s insurance company.
He ripped it open. As an adjunct, a gypsy scholar who taught a few courses at a great many places, he carried his own health insurance. It cost him a few thousand a year in exchange for assurance that he would not end up dying in his sister’s crowded apartment untended by anyone who could dispense pain-easing medication.
Dear Dr. Marlin Scott:
We regret to inform you that your health insurance policy with this company (Policy #4873 ) is canceled as of August 31 due to a previously undisclosed preexisting condition: namely, sickle-cell trait You will recall that your original policy required complete disclosure of all preexisting conditions.
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to call your policy representative, Sandra Scott at the number below.
The professor read the form letter twice. A form letter—that meant the bastards were sending them out in batches. Dumping whoever they wanted, including blacks too poor and too unschooled to know the maneuver was illegal.
The professor’s eyes gleamed. He loved a good fight. With proper research, this one could be a doozie. Class-action material.
Carefully he folded the letter and put it in his briefcase.
Sixteen
CIA association with Fort Detrick involved the Special Operations Division of that facility. This division was responsible for developing special applications for biological warfare agents and toxins. … Only two or three Agency officers at any time were cleared for access to Fort Detrick activities.
—William Colby, CIA Director, testifying before Congress, 1975
* * *
Cavanaugh liked bars, but not bars like this one. A good bar should have a selection of drinks, both basic and exotic. A TV tuned to sports; but a discreet TV, over the bar, not too loud. Local people of different ages, including some pretty women. Maybe a pool table. Quick service, light sandwiches, a clean men’s room, and a bartender who observed things and was articulate enough to report them accurately to interested inquirers, such as, for instance, FBI agents. That was what made a good bar.
The Bull Shift was nothing like that. Behind the bar a huge TV screen blasted baseball and car racing at the decibel level of a jackhammer. Any air space left was filled with bells from the pinball machine and waves of whiny country and western. The menu consisted of greasy chicken wings and greasier french fries. The men, all between twenty and forty, wore identical jeans and cowboy boots. The women looked like whores look everywhere. The bartender, who said “Huh?” when he asked for a vodka and tonic, was a busty redhead almost wearing a turquoise blouse and tangerine shorts. Cavanaugh suspected that if she’d ever overheard anything of interest, it had been dissolved by the fumes from her hairspray. He didn’t even want to think about the men’s room.
There was also a mechanical bull ride.
Studying the room from his stool at the far end of the bar, Cavanaugh spotted three possibles. A group of five men at a table, two men talking to two women by the far wall, and two more men playing pool. All had the short hair, clean fingernails, and ineffable wariness-plus-cockiness that went with a certain kind of low-ranking member of secret organizations. Not that that meant they were necessarily with a CIA dirty-tricks unit. In the last week, Cavanaugh had checked out a lot of men in a lot of bars surrounding Fort Detrick. He was getting sick of devoting his nights to semidrunks and his days to scouring southern Maryland for a cheap apartment that would allow a dog and that in no way reminded him of Judy.
Cavanaugh finished his beer and strolled casually toward the jukebox. He figured he better start with the two men chatting up the two women before all four struck their deal and disappeared.
He studied the music selection, which appeared to have been chosen forty years ago: Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline, Jim Reeves, Loretta Lynn. Ninety seconds into eavesdropping, one of the hookers said pointedly, “Let’s move on, boys, away from the cop.” She was pretty good, Cavanaugh thought. Sharp. She’d make a better agent than, say, Seton.
And anyway he’d heard enough. Both men had spoken. Neither had matched the voice on Melanie’s tapes, which Cavanaugh had listened to over and over. That was the other thing he did with his days. Memorize a racist voice and a psycholinguistic profile:
THE SPEAKER IS A CAUCASIAN MALE BETWEEN THE AGES OF THIRTY-FIVE AND FORTY-FIVE. HE HOLDS AT LEAST A B.S. DEGREE (PROBABLY NOT A B.A.), BUT NOT A GRADUATE DEGREE. HE IS FROM GEORGIA ORIGINALLY, BUT HAS SPENT SIGNIFICANT TIME IN NEW ENGLAND WITHIN THE LAST FIVE YEARS. HE IS EXCITED BY WHAT HE IS SAYING, BOTH EMOTIONALLY AND SEXUALLY. HE IS PROBABLY NEITHER MARRIED NOR LIVING WITH A WOMAN. THE SPEAKER IDENTIFIES WI
TH TRADITION AND STRUCTURE, THE MORE STRUCTURED THE BETTER, AS A DEFENSE AGAINST A VERY CHAOTIC INNER SELF. HE FEARS ANYTHING THAT SEEMS TO HIM TO THREATEN THAT TRADITION AND STRUCTURE. BECAUSE HE FEARS BEING ALONE, HE MOST LIKELY SPENDS TIME AWAY FROM HIS JOB SURROUNDED BY LIKE-MINDED INDIVIDUALS. HE MAY PARTY A LOT. … TAPE #2: INDOORS. AMPLIFICATION REVEALS A VIDEO GAME, PINBALL MACHINE, CLINKING GLASSES, AND A GREAT MANY INDISTINGUISHABLE CONVERSATIONS. SETTING IS EITHER A BAR OR A LARGE PRIVATE PARTY.
TAPE #3: PROBABLY SAME SETTING AS TAPE #2, BUT WITH FEWER PEOPLE PRESENT.
Cavanaugh moved on to the next group of forty-year-old Caucasian males partying hard with like-minded individuals in their traditional place with clinking glasses and a pinball machine. This was the group of five men at one table. Only three were talking; the other two concentrated on drinking. Cavanaugh found excuses to linger so long beside the table that the noisiest guy started giving him the go-away-you-fairy-or-I’ll-smash-your-face look. Fortunately, before this could happen, the two silent men ordered more beer. Both had Texas accents.
The two men playing pool were talkative enough, but neither one was the voice on Melanie’s tapes.
Discouraged, Cavanaugh left the Bull Shift for his car. The humid night settled around him like damp, itchy wool. So far he’d tried thirty-four bars, an average of six-point-eight per night, rounded off. One more bar would bring it to a clean seven.
