The Best of Gregory Benford

by David G. Hartwell

  “Tell me something new.”

  Their ice van growled into view. It already had the sample sacks from the fogging above. Time to move a kilometer on and repeat the process.

  All so they could get into this valley and take their samples before these butchers with their bovine complacency could chop it down for cropland or grazing or just to make charcoal. But Todd did not let any of this into his face. Instead he told Cabrina to show the van where to go. Then he went over and spoke to several of the men in his halting Spanish. Smoothing the way. He made sure to stand close to them and speak in the private and respectful way that worked around here.

  Amy followed the rest of her team into the ward. It was the same as yesterday and the day before. All beds filled, patients on the floors, haggard faces, nurses looking as bad as the patients. The infection rate here was at least eighty percent of the population. These were just the cases which had made it to the hospital and then had the clout to get in.

  Freddie went through the list prepared by the hospital director. They were there to survey and take blood samples but the director seemed to think his visitors bore some cure. Or at least advice.

  “Fever, frequent coughing, swellings in the groin,” Freddie read, his long black hair getting in the way. He was French and found everything about this place a source of irritation. Amy did not blame him but it was not smart to show it. “Seven percent of cases display septic shock, indicating that the blood stream is directly infected.”

  “I hope these results will be of help to your researches,” the director said. He was a short man with a look that alternated between pleading and outright panic. Amy did her best to not look at him. His eyes were always asking, asking, and she had no answers.

  Freddie waved his clip board. “All is consistent with spread directly among humans by inhalation of infected respiratory droplets?”

  The director nodded rapidly. “But we cannot isolate the chain. It seems—”

  “Yes, yes, it is so everywhere. The incubation period of the infection is at least two weeks, though it can be up to a month. By that time the original source is impossible to stipulate.” Freddie rattled this off because he had said the same thing a dozen times already in Tanzania.

  Amy said mildly, “I note that you have not attempted to isolate the septic cases.”

  The director jerked as if reprimanded and went into an explanation, which did not matter to anyone but would make him feel better, she was sure. She asked for and received limbic fluids, mucus and blood samples from the deceased patients. The director wanted to talk to someone of higher authority and their international team filled that need. Not that it did any good. They had no vaccine, no real advice except to keep the patients cool and not to use sedation which would suppress their lung function. They told him this and then told his staff and then told him again because he just kept looking at them with those eyes. Then they went away.

  In the next town Amy got to a telephone and could hook up her modem. She got an uplink with only a half hour wait. They drove back into the capital city over dusty roads while she read the printouts.

  Summary View: This present plague is certainly a derived form of influenza. It is well known that the ‘flu’ virus undergoes ‘antigenic’ drifts—point mutations in the virus’s outer protein coat which can enhance the ability of the virus to attack the human immune system. New pandemic viruses emerge at unpredictable intervals on the order of decades, though the rate of shifts may be increasing. The present pathogenic outbreak, with its unusual two- to three-week incubation period, allows rapid spreading before populations can begin to take precautions—isolation, face masks, etc. Fatality rate is 3% in cases which do not recover within five days.

  Origin: The apparent derivation of this plague from southern Asia has been obscured by its rapid transmission to both Africa and South America. However, this Asian origin, recently unmasked by detailed hospital studies and demographics, verifies the suspicions of the United Nations Emergency Committee. Asia is the primary source of ‘flu’ outbreaks because of the high incidence there of ‘integrated farming’, which mingles fowl, pigs and fish close together. In Southeast Asia this has been an economic blessing, but a reverse-spin disaster for the North. Viruses from different species mix, recombining and undergoing gene reassortment at a rapid rate. Humans needs time to synthesize specific antibodies as a defense.

  Genetic aspects: Preliminary results suggest that this is a recombinant virus. Influenza has seven segments of RNA, and several seem to have been modified. Some correlations suggest close connection to the swine flu derived from pigs. This is a shift, not a simple drift. Some recombination has occurred from another reservoir population—but which? Apparently, some rural environment in southern China.

  She looked up as they jounced past scrubby farmland. No natural forest or grassland remained; humans had turned all arable land to crops. Insatiable appetite, eating nature itself.

  Nobody visible. The superflu knocked everybody flat for at least three days, marvelously infective, and few felt like getting back to the fields right away. That would take another slice out of the food supply here. Behind the tide of illness would come some malnutrition. The U.N. would have to be ready for that, too.

  Not my job, though, she thought, and mused longingly of Todd.

  São Paulo. Earth Summit V, returning to South America for the first time since Summit I in the good old days of 1992. He was to give a talk about the program and then, by God, he’d be long gone.

  On the drive in he had seen kindergarten-age children dig through cow dung, looking for corn kernels the cows hadn’t digested. The usual colorful chaos laced with gray despair. Gangs of urchin thieves who didn’t know their own last names. Gutters as sewers. Families living in cardboard boxes. Babies found discarded in trash heaps.

  He had imagined that his grubby jeans and T-shirt made him look unremarkable, but desperation hones perceptions. The beggars were on him every chance. By now he had learned the trick which fended off the swarms of little urchins wanting Chicklets, the shadowy men with suitcases of silver jewelry, the women at traffic lights hawking bunches of roses. Natives didn’t get their windshields washed unless they wanted it, nor did they say ‘no’ a hundred times to accomplish the result. They just held up one finger and waggled it sideways, slowly. The pests magically dispersed. He had no idea what it meant, but it was so easy even a gringo could do it.

  His “interest zone” at Earth Summit V was in a hodge-podge of sweltering tents erected in an outdoor park. The grass was already beaten into gray, flat blades. Already there was a dispute between the North delegates, who wanted a uniform pledge of 75% reduction in use of pesticides. Activists from the poor South worried about hunger more than purity, so the proposal died. This didn’t stop anyone from dutifully signing the Earth Pledge which covered one whole wall in thick gray cardboard. After all, it wasn’t legally binding.

  Todd talked with a lot of the usual Northern crowd from the Nature Conservancy and World Wildlife Fund, who were major sponsors of BioSalvage. They were twittering about a Southern demand that everybody sign a “recognition of the historical, biological and cultural debt” the North owed the South. They roped him into it, because the background argument (in Spanish, so of course most of the condescending Northerners couldn’t read it) named BioSalvage as “arrogantly entering our countries and pushing fashionable environmentalism over the needs of the people.”

  Todd heard this in a soft drink bar, swatting away flies. Before he could respond, a spindly man in a sack shirt elbowed his way into the Northern group. “I know who you are, Mr. Russell. We do not let your ‘debt swap’ thievery go by.”

  BioSalvage had some funding from agreements which traded money owed to foreign banks for salvaging rights and local labor. He smiled at the stranger. “All negotiated, friend.”

  “The debt was contracted illegally!” The man slapped the yellow plastic table, spilling Coke.

  “By your government
s.”

  “By the criminals!—who then stole great sums.”

  Todd spread his hands, still smiling though it was getting harder. “Hey, I’m no banker.”

  “You are part of a plot to keep us down,” the man shot back.

  “By saving some species?”

  “You are killing them!”

  “Yeah, maybe a few days before your countrymen get around to it.”

  Two other men and a woman joined the irate man. Todd was with several Northerners and a woman from Costa Rica who worked for the Environmental Defense Fund. He tried to keep his tone civil and easy but people started breaking in and pretty soon the Southerners were into Harangue Mode and it went to hell. The Northerners rolled their eyes and the Southerners accused them in quick, staccato jabs of being arrogant, impatient, irritated when somebody couldn’t speak English, ready to walk out at the first sign of a long speech when there was so much to say after all.

  Todd eased away from the table. The Northerners used words like “pro-active” and “empowerment” and kept saying that before they were willing to discuss giving more grants they wanted accountability. They worried about corruption and got thin-lipped when told that they should give without being oppressors of the spirit by trying to manage the money. “Imperialista!” a Brazilian woman hissed, and Todd left.

  He took a long walk down littered streets rank with garbage.

  Megacities. Humanity growing by a hundred million fresh souls per year, with disease and disorder in ample attendance. Twenty-nine megacities now with more than ten million population. Twenty-five in the “developing” world—only nobody was developing any more. Tokyo topped the list, as always, at 36 million. São Paulo was coming up fast on the outside with 34 million. Lagos, Nigeria, which nobody ever thought about, festered with 17 million despite the multitudes lost to AIDS.

  He kicked a can and shrugged off beggars. A man with sores drooling down his face approached but Todd did not dare give him a bill. Uncomfortably he wagged his finger. Indifference was far safer.

  Megacities spawned the return of microbes that had toppled empires down through history. Cholera, the old foe. New antibiotic-resistant strains. Cysticercosis, a tapeworm that invades the brain, caught from eating vegetables grown in the city’s effluent. Half the world’s urban population had at least one skin rash per year.

  And big cities demand standardized, easily transported foods. Farmers respond with monocrops, which are more vulnerable to pests and disease and drought. Cities preyed on the cropland and forests which sustain them. Plywood apartment walls in Nagasaki chewed up Borneo’s woodlands.

  When he reached his hotel room—bare concrete, tin sink in the room, john down the hall—he found a light blinking on the satellite comm. He located the São Paulo nexus and got a fast-print letter on his private number. It was from Amy and he read it eagerly, the gray walls around him forgotten.

  I’m pretty sure friend Freddie is now catching holy hell for not being on top of this superflu faster. There’s a pattern, he says. Check out the media feeding frenzy, if you have the time. Use my access codes onto SciNet, too. I’m more worried about Zambia, our next destination. Taking no recognition of U.N. warnings, both sides violating the ceasefire. We’ll have armed escorts. Not much use against a virus! All our programs are going slowly, with locals dropping like flies.

  The sweetness of her seemed to swarm up into his nostrils then, blotting out the disinfectant smell from the cracked linoleum. He could see her electric black hair tumbling like rolling smoke about her shoulders, spilling onto her full breasts in yellow candle light. After a tough day he would lift her onto him, setting her astride his muscular arch. The hair wreathed them both, making a humid space that was theirs only, musk-rich and silent. She could bounce and stroke and coax from him the tensions of time, and later they would have dark rum laced with lemon. Her eyes could widen with comic rapt amazement, go slit-thin with anger, become suddenly womanly as they reflected the serenity of the languid candle flame.

  Remember to dodge the electronic media blood hounds. Sniffers and lickers, I call ’em. Freddie handles them for us, but I’m paranoid—seeing insults spelled out in my alphabet soup.

  Remember that I love you. Remember to see Kuipers if you get sick! See you in two weeks—so very long!

  His gray computer screen held a WorldNet news item, letters shimmering. Todd’s program had fished it out of the torrent of news, and it confirmed the worst of his fears. He used her code-keys to gain entry and global search/scan found all the hot buzz:

  SUPERFLU EPIDEMIC WIDENS. SECRETARY-GENERAL CALLS FOR AIR TRAVEL BAN. DISEASE CONTROL CENTER TRACING VECTOR CARRIERS.

  (AP) A world-sweeping contagion has now leaped from Asia to Africa and on to South America. Simultaneous outbreaks in Cairo, Johannesburg, Mexico City and Buenos Aires confirmed fears that the infection is spreading most rapidly through air travelers. Whole cities have been struck silent and prostrated as a majority of inhabitants succumb within a few days.

  Secretary-General Imu-kurumba called for a total ban on international passenger air travel until the virus is better understood. Airlines have logged a sharp rise in ticket sales in affected regions, apparently from those fleeing.

  The Center for Disease Control is reportedly attempting to correlate outbreaks with specific travelers, in an effort to pinpoint the source. Officials declined to confirm this extraordinary move, however.

  He suspected that somebody at the CDC was behind this leak, but it might mean something more. More ominously, what point was there in tracing individuals? CDC was moving fast. This thing was a wildfire. And Amy was right in the middle of it.

  He sat a long time at a fly-specked Formica table, staring at the remains of his lunch, a chipped blue plate holding rice and beans and a gnawed crescent of green tortilla. Todd felt the old swirl of emotions, unleashed as though they had lain in waiting all this time. Incoherent, disconnected images propelled him down musty corridors of self. Words formed on his lips but evaporated before spoken.

  She hated autopsies. Freddie had told her to check this one, and the smell was enough to make her pass out. Slow fans churned at one end of the tiny morgue. Only the examining table was well lit. Its gutters ran with viscous, reeking fluids.

  The slim black woman on the table was expertly “unzipped”—carved down from neck to pelvis, organs neatly extracted and lying across her chest and legs. Glistening tubes and lumpy vitals, so clean and smooth they seemed to be manufactured.

  “A most interesting characteristic of these cases,” the coroner went on in a serene voice that floated in the chilly room. He picked up an elongated gray sac. “The fallopians. Swollen, discolored. The ova sac is distended, you will be seeing here. And red.”

  Amy said, “Her records show very high temperatures. Could this be—”

  “Being the cause of death, this temperature, yes. The contagion invaded the lower abdomen, however, causing further discomfort.”

  “So this is another variation on the, uh, superflu?”

  “I think yes.” The coroner elegantly opened the abdomen further and showed off kidneys and liver. “Here too, some swelling. But not as bad as in the reproductive organs.”

  Amy wanted desperately to get out of this place. Its cloying smells layered the air. Two local doctors stood beside her, watching her face more than the body. They were well-dressed men in their fifties and obviously had never seen a woman in a position of significance in their profession. She asked, “What percentage of your terminal cases display this?”

  “About three quarters,” the coroner said.

  “In men and women alike?” Amy asked.

  “Yes, though for the women these effects are more prominent.”

  “Well, thank you for your help.” She nodded to them and left. The two doctors followed her. When she reached the street her driver was standing beside the car with two soldiers. Three more soldiers got out of a big jeep and one of the doctors said, “You are please to
come.”

  There wasn’t much to do about it. Nobody was interested in listening to her assertion that she was protected by the Zambia-U.N. terms. They escorted her to a low, squat building on the outskirts of town. As they marched her inside she remarked that the place looked like a bunker. The officer with her replied mildly that it was.

  General Movotubo wore crisp fatigues and introduced himself formally. He invited her to sit in a well-decorated office without windows. Coffee? Good. Biscuit? Very good. “And so you will be telling now what? That this disease is the product of my enemies.”

  “I am here as a United Nations—”

  “Yes yes, but the truth, it must come out. The Landuokoma, they have brought this disease here, is this not so?”

  “We don’t know how it got here.” She tried to understand the expressions which flitted across the heavy-set man’s face, which was shiny with nervous sweat.

  “Then you cannot say that the Landuokoma did not bring it, this is right?”

  Amy stood up. General Movotubo was shorter than her and she recognized now his expression: a look of caged fear. “Listen, staying holed up in here isn’t going to protect you against superflu. Not if your personnel go in and out, anyway.”

  “Then I will go to the countryside! The people will understand. They will see that the Landuokoma caused me to do so.”

  She started for the door. “Believe me, neither I nor the U.N. cares what you say to your newspapers. Just let me go.”

  There was a crowd outside the bunker. They did not retreat when she emerged and she had to push and shove her way to her car. The driver sat inside, petrified. But nobody tried to stop them. The faces beyond the window glass were filled with stark dread, not anger.

  She linked onto WorldNet back at the hotel. The serene liquid crystal screen blotted out the awareness of the bleak streets beyond the grand marble columns of the foyer.