The White Plague

by Frank Herbert

  “No need of guns here,” Doheny said, getting stiffly to his feet. “Is there any more of that bread and cheese, Father?”

  “Enough for the night and the morrow,” Father Michael said.

  The boy came around from behind the fire and joined them. His clothing smelled of steamed wool.

  “O’Neill’s right,” the boy said, a pensive adult quality in his thin voice. “Guns and bombs make a crazy world and that’s not safe.”

  Madmen and children speak the truth, Doheny thought.

  “Precious Trinity, will we ever see a sane world?” Father Michael asked.

  “Where a man can tell his lies with impunity,” Doheny said.

  “That’s a cruel thing to say, Mister Doheny!”

  Doheny turned his head and listened to the wind soughing through the trees around the hut. The fire flickered in a draft that swept through the scanty poles. Shadow monsters danced upon the walls.

  “Cruel, yes,” Doheny said. “But change is often cruel and that’s what’s happening: change. We haven’t been living close enough to what our world’s doing.”

  “Close enough!” Father Michael was shocked. The killing! The savagery!

  “I believe I am a realist,” Doheny said. “Most people lived in a four-sided world with guardians at all the gates – doctors, preachers, lawyers, elected demagogues – to keep away the surprises of change.”

  “Then how is it this terrible plague surprised the guardians?” Father Michael demanded.

  “Because they got caught up in that world, too, a universe bounded by the weekly pay packet, the nightly television schedule, the annual holiday and an occasional dispensation of goodies and circus.”

  “I still don’t understand how it could happen,” Father Michael said, his voice barely above a whisper. He looked fearfully at John, who had walked to the door and stood peering out through a crack by the hinges.

  “Because we listened only to the rich Americans!” Doheny said.

  “I didn’t know you hated Americans,” Father Michael said.

  “Hate them? No, I envied them. But so few of them ever lived close to what the world’s doing!”

  “You keep saying that,” Father Michael protested. “What does it mean?”

  “It means the very poor who know they may starve. It means sailors and farmers and woodsmen who walk close to nature’s ever-ready disasters. It means the prophets who scourge themselves until they can see past the pain.”

  Father Michael looked at the boy, who stood listening to them, an avid expression on his face. The night sounds of wind and forest pressed close around them. What could John see through that crack by the door? It was only woods darkness out there.

  “The guardians were false guardians,” Doheny said, his voice low and thoughtful. “They said they would let only good surprises come through – packages from Father Christmas. Nothing would be allowed to disrupt the smooth world that the four-square inhabitants believed they possessed.”

  John turned and met Father Michael’s gaze. There was an odd look of alertness and wonder in John’s eyes, the priest thought.

  “Where are we?” John asked.

  “It’s a woodsman’s shelter,” Doheny said, not looking up from the fire.

  John focused on Doheny. “And who are you?”

  Doheny shook his head, still not looking at John, half lost in his own deep thoughts. “I’ve the name Fintan Craig Doheny and I’m no better guardian than any of the others.” He turned then and saw in the flickering firelight the strangely alert expression on John’s face.

  “How did we get here?” John asked.

  His voice low and hesitant, Doheny said: “We walked.”

  “That’s odd,” John said. “You sound Irish. Am I still in Ireland?”

  Doheny nodded.

  “I wonder where Mary and the twins are?” John said.

  Father Michael and Doheny looked at each other. The boy asked: “What’s happening?”

  Doheny shook a finger at him for silence.

  “I’m John Roe O’Neill,” John said. “I know that. Have I had… amnesia? No… that can’t be it. I seem to remember… things.”

  Doheny lifted himself on the balls of his feet, poised for any response to sudden violence from John.

  “Who brought me here?” John asked.

  “You were brought by John Garrech O’Donnell,” Father Michael said.

  John shot a startled look at the priest. “John… Garrech…” His eyes went wide with shock. He stepped back until he was pressed against the wall by the door. His gaze went from Doheny to Father Michael to the boy, lingering there, and they could all but see the memories whirl behind John’s eyes.

  Doheny raised a hand toward him.

  John’s mouth opened, a round hole in an agonized face. “No-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-!” It was an eerie wail from that open mouth. He took a step toward Doheny, who stiffened. John whirled then and hurled himself against the door, smashing it open.

  Before anyone could prevent it, John was outside, running and screaming, crashing through the trees.

  Doheny put out an arm to prevent Father Michael or the boy from following. “You couldn’t catch him. And even if you did…” He shook his head.

  They listened to the sounds from the darkness – the wailing screams, the thrashing of underbrush. It went on for a long time, fading away at last into the distance, at one with the wind in the trees.

  “Someone must find him,” Father Michael said. “Someone must give him shelter. The Madman’s a special charge upon us all and he should…”

  “Oh, shut up!” Doheny snapped. He went to the doorway and restored the door, propping it in position against the night. When he turned back to the fire, the boy was staring at him, listening to the faint sounds from the darkness. Could the youth’s young hearing still detect those screaming wails?

  “It’s the banshee,” the boy whispered.

  But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

  Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

  To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

  Or set upon a golden bough to sing

  To lords and ladies of Byzantium

  Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

  – William Butler Yeats

  FATHER MICHAEL did not like living in England. He especially disliked being confined to Huddersfield, although it was an exciting place these days with important people from all over the world passing through to learn about the cure for the plague. He accepted Doheny’s reason for sending him to Huddersfield. Kate O’Gara Browder was an Irish national treasure and, more important, was sure to become a potent political implement.

  “The Woman in the Tank!”

  Father Michael thought her a rather silly young woman, but there was a tough core of self-determination in her, a thing Father Michael thought of as a “peasant quality.” There had been a fair amount of this quality in Father Michael’s own mother and he had recognized it immediately in Kate. She would be stubborn and even cruel where her own interests were involved. Give her a bit of power and she could become terrifying – unless her actions were leavened by a firm belief in God’s wrath.

  Doheny had said: “You will go to her to be her spiritual advisor, and that’s true enough. I know you for a good priest, Father. But you also will be there to see that she does nothing foolish that could be hurtful to Ireland. I do not trust the Brits.”

  “What could they possibly do?”

  “That’s for you to discover.”

  And here he was in the bosom of the Gall and had been for more than two months. As he walked across the campus toward his regular morning visit with Kate, Father Michael could feel the power of this place. A dangerous thing – yes. There were dangerous currents here – plots and strange devisings. He was glad he had come, even though he detested the British flavor of everything that happened here. His own motives for accepting Doheny’s assignment had begun with simple curiosity but had been hardened by the need to get T
he Boy out of Ireland.

  Father Michael still thought of the silent boy as The Boy, although the lad now said he could be called Sian. No last name. He refused to say anything about his family. It was as though The Boy had walled them off in some secret grave where only he could mourn.

  The Boy was determined to enter the priesthood. That was a consolation. Father Sian. He would be a strong priest, Father Michael thought. A compassionate priest. Perhaps even a cardinal someday… and the possibility of pope. There was that.

  Father Michael waited at a motor crossing for a long convoy to pass. It was going to be a sunny day, he thought. Hot, even. The convoy, he saw by the labels on the sides of the lorries, was part of the Wildlife Rescue Force. The telly was full of this good work – men shooting hypodermic darts into whales and porpoises and seals and wolves and bears and other creatures. It was a marvelous thing.

  Yes, The Boy was far better off here than in the unrest of Ireland with its Finn Sadal holdouts roaming the countryside. No doubt of the outcome now, though. The death of Kevin O’Donnell at the hands of the mob had robbed the Beach Boys of a mystical force. They had fought with brutal ferocity for a time but without any central guidance.

  The devil himself, Father Michael thought.

  It was not the United Nations assistance to the army that had beaten the Finn Sadal; it was when they lost the guiding hand of Satan. Kevin had been Satan personified.

  The convoy passed and Father Michael crossed the roadway, to be almost run down there by a speeding jeep that came careening around a corner and dashed off after the lorries, the driver shaking a fist and screaming at the black-clad priest in his path.

  Some things never change, Father Michael thought.

  But it was better that The Boy lived here now and was getting a fine education at the special school set up within the Huddersfield perimeter for selected students. They had accepted The Boy because he was Father Michael’s ward and Father Michael had official status as an envoy of the Irish state. Yes, a fine scientific education, which could be reinforced later by the Jesuits in some safe place like America.

  Sian was going to be important someday. Father Michael had begun to sense this that day on the road above the besieged castle when The Boy had taken John O’Neill’s hand and told the white lie to protect the poor man. Given the obvious things there must be in The Boy’s background urging him toward revenge, it had been a grand gesture, a true turning of the other cheek. Doheny had thought it merely clever and guileful but Father Michael had known better. It had been right.

  There were a great many people on the Huddersfield campus this morning, Father Michael noted. Rushing about, brushing past him. The place got more cluttered with people every day. Some of the passersby recognized Father Michael and nodded. Others smiled vaguely, knowing they had seen him somewhere.

  Y’ saw me right here, y’ Sassenach fools!

  Immediately, Father Michael put this thought down as unworthy of him. He must learn magnanimity from The Boy.

  Strange, the rumors and stories coming out of Ireland about O’Neill. He was seen here; he was seen there; but never a confirmation. ‘Twas said that people were putting out food and drink for him the way they had once done for the Little People. Ahhh, there was no accounting for Irish behavior. Look at the hero they were making of Brann McCrae and him with twenty-six of those young girls pregnant!

  “But he saved almost fifty Irish women!” they were saying. Saved! What good was it saving their flesh if their souls were lost? It was not as though McCrae were the only one who had saved women from the plague. They were saying it would be generations before all the stories were told of how women had been secreted and protected by their clever men. Not enough saved, though. But efforts would be made to bring them all back to God… even the poor girls at McCrae’s château. It had not been their doing. They had been caught by the troubled times.

  As he neared the Administration Building, where Kate and her husband were quartered, Father Michael saw the usual long line of men waiting to be threaded past the viewing window where Kate could be seen. Just to see a woman was a magnetic thing, so powerful that the authorities could not deny the demands. Too dangerous, they said. And what harm did it do?

  It harms Kate, Father Michael thought. Just showing herself was bringing about changes in the woman that Father Michael feared. Was this the thing Doheny had warned against?

  Father Michael made his way past the waiting men, hearing the bits of conversations:

  “She’s a pretty thing, I hear.”

  “And with a baby at her breast.”

  Father Michael saw resentment in the faces of the men he passed. They knew he had a right to push ahead, but there was a jealous awareness here that he could go in and talk to Kate, even touch her.

  The line of men wound in a long serpentine up the stairs inside the building. Father Michael ignored the stairs and went to the lift at the center of the long corridor. The guard at the lift opened the door for Father Michael and punched the button for the top floor.

  Father Birney Cavanagh was waiting outside the lift as Father Michael emerged on the top floor. There was no getting around the man and Father Michael was forced to stop.

  “Ahh, there you are, Father Michael. I’ve been waiting for you.”

  Where had the Brits found this priest? Father Michael wondered. Oh, Cavanagh was a Catholic priest, right enough. That had been confirmed. But he had been too long with the Gall. He even spoke with the accents of an Old Etonian.

  “What is it you want?” Father Michael demanded. “Just a word or two, Father.” Cavanagh took Father Michael’s arm and almost forced him into a corner beyond the lift.

  Father Michael stared down at the other priest. Cavanagh was a cherubic little man with pale cheeks. There was an insecurity in his blue eyes, which seemed always to be looking for an avenue of escape. Did he ever comb that gray hair? Father Michael wondered. It always seemed to have just come through a whirlwind.

  “A good Irishman,” he claimed to be. And wasn’t he out of St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, the same as Father Michael?

  Had he gone through the troubles there? Father Michael had inquired, seeking to trap the man in a lie.

  “No. I was sent out ten years before.” And that had proved to be true enough.

  But Cavanagh was seeing Kate and talking to her. And Father Michael did not like the mood of the woman when Cavanagh had gone. The man was thick with the papal envoy who had come over from Philadelphia, too, and Father Michael did not like what he heard about that. There was talk of an accommodation with “the demands of these changing times.” Father Michael knew what that meant: backsliding! Nothing good would come of it. There might even be a new schism. How could anyone respect a Catholic Church with its administrative seat in America? Things would not get back to normal until Rome was restored.

  “You cannot go in to Kate just now,” Father Cavanagh was saying, his eyes avoiding Father Michael’s. “She has an important visitor.”

  “Who is it now?”

  “The admiral over all the Barrier Command, the one who saved her by permitting the channel passage.”

  “God saved her!” Father Michael protested.

  “Of that there is no doubt,” Cavanagh agreed. “But it was the admiral’s command that gave her passage.”

  “The channel would have parted if God had wanted it,” Father Michael said.

  “I agree,” Cavanagh said, “but the admiral has his powers and we cannot disturb him just now. It’s for her own good, I assure you.”

  “Why is he seeing her?” Father Michael demanded.

  “As to that, I’m not at liberty to say.”

  Father Michael put down a surge of anger. He knew Cavanagh sensed it, because the man released Father Michael’s arm and stepped back defensively.

  “What is happening in there?” Father Michael asked, keeping his voice under careful control.

  “There’s guards on the door and you’ll not
be permitted to enter,” Cavanagh said. “I promise you, there’s no harm coming to her.”

  Father Michael sensed truth in Cavanagh’s words and wondered if it would be right to force the issue. I am an envoy of the Irish state! But that had its strictures, too. An envoy must behave with proper decorum. He sensed Doheny’s fears coming true. That silly woman was famous all over the world. “The Woman in the Tank!” Something about her had caught the public fancy. It was the press doing it, of course! All of those sensational stories. And the baby being born during the storm of the channel crossing.

  “When will I be permitted to see her?” Father Michael asked.

  “Perhaps this afternoon sometime. Would you care to wait in my quarters, Father. They’ve given me digs just down the corridor here.”

  Father Michael felt a hollow hardness in his stomach. Something bad was happening and he was to be kept out of it. Well, he would fight! Before he could speak, though, three armed naval officers came down the corridor, their attention on him. Father Michael knew then that he was to be a prisoner and these were his guards.

  Our world undermines at its peril the individual’s own sense of worth, that force at the root of human strength. This is our survival we undermine, our ability to deal with challenge. It is an inborn capacity without which there can be no humanity.

  – Fintan Craig Doheny

  KATE LIKED to sit by the window of her new room on the top floor of Huddersfield’s Administration Building when she nursed her baby. She knew the big mirror across from her was actually a window permitting the lines of men passing in the outside corridor to peer in at her. She had only to look up into the mirror to see what the passing viewers saw. She found it odd that she felt no embarrassment to know men watched her suckling Gilla at her breast.

  What a beautiful infant Gilla was becoming – the way her feet kicked, the wrinkles smoothing out, the look of alertness beginning to appear in her eyes. She was going to have red hair, fine and silky the way Kate’s own mother’s hair had been. How precious this infant was!