View from Ararat

by Caswell, Brian

  Not that you can really blame them. At least there is adventure in the yards. And what is there for them to do in the cramped rat-holes the company calls houses? Callas is a cesspit. A pool of cheap labour that can be drawn upon when required, and left to fester if the market is slow.

  He runs his hands down the neat lines of his uniform. What most of them out there would give for his job. No sweating their souls away in the deafening roar of the crushing mills or the murderous heat of the separation plant. No sleepless nights wondering when they might get the call for a day’s work, or where they are going to find food for the next day’s meal.

  He stands in the alley between the towering piles of alien rock and watches the sun dropping behind the huge buildings of the separation plant.

  And in the orange glow that lights the yard he catches the reflection at the base of a pile a few metres away.

  Slowly he makes his way across to where it lies, shining among the jagged fragments of ore like a nugget of black glass, and bends to pick it up. It feels strangely cool in his hand, and when he holds it up to the dying sun the orange light shines faintly through it. Blood-red . . .

  Suddenly the two-way on his belt crackles into life. He slips the strange rock into his hip pocket and unclips the communicator.

  Holding the view-screen up to his face, he thumbs the switch.

  Rodriguez’s face appears. He is eating, as usual, and he speaks a single word through a mouthful of what looks like some kind of half-chewed pasta.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well what?’ Carlos dislikes his superior’s abrupt tone almost as much as his lack of manners.

  ‘Well, are we being attacked by ore-pirates or urban terrorists, or are the rats just getting bigger?’

  ‘Just kids. Nothing to worry about. They were playing wargames in the new Ganymede Horizon stockpile. I’m heading back now.’

  He thumbs the communicator switch without bothering with the formal sign-off. The fat toad will probably say something when he gets back to the Security office, but Carlos is past caring what Rodriguez thinks.

  Two more months and he will be gone. Four years of saving every credit, and he has built up enough for the passage. His mind is made up. His place on the C-ship is booked. Deucalion is the future. There is nothing on Earth worth sticking around for.

  He smiles as he walks back towards the main complex, planning what he will say to Rodriguez on the day he finally quits.

  It is then that he catches sight of the coat. It is red, with a collar of black satin . . . Obviously a cast-off from one of the richer families in Puerto Limon proper. Many of the women from the company precinct help keep food on the table by cleaning the houses of the company execs in suburbs like Medina or Serena. Sometimes as a bonus they might be given outgrown or out-of-fashion clothing, for themselves or their children.

  It is not uncommon to see a child of Callas playing in the street in a pair of designer leggings or a coat like this one – which seems so laughably out of place in the grinding poverty of the place, until you realise how important it is to its young owner.

  He picks up the coat thoughtfully and walks towards the break in the fence where the two young children disappeared.

  Once there, he folds the coat carefully, smoothing the black collar with the palm of his hand. Then he places it gently on the ground outside the fence and turns back towards the Security compound.

  In his pocket he can feel the weight of the strange stone, and the coolness he felt earlier lies against his thigh. But he does not take it out. He whistles softly to himself as he walks towards the sunset, and scratches the slight itch that is beginning on his right palm.

  He remembers his old grandmother’s superstition. An itching palm means money. One hand predicts wealth, the other loss.

  Which hand means wealth? He can’t remember.

  It doesn’t matter. In two months’ time nothing on Earth will matter. Ever again.

  He resumes his whistling. He is happy. For the first time in his twenty-eight years of life he has hope. That much he knows for certain.

  What he does not know, cannot know, as he scratches his palm again, is that he will never see Deucalion. Nor will he even see the ship.

  For though he walks and whistles and watches the sun setting behind the buildings, Carlos Ruiz is already a dead man . . .

  2

  Containment Procedures

  (Extracts from the works of RJ Tolhurst transcribed to Archive Disk with the author’s permission, 12/14/165 Standard. Used with permission of her estate.)

  From: Footprints on the Threshold of Eternity – An Informal History of Human Extraterrestrial Exploration (Chapter Two)

  . . . The importance of the warp-shuttles in the establishment of Deucalion has been well documented.

  Apart from the key part they played in the original discovery process, and their essential role in the interplanetary transportation of those raw materials and manufactured goods that could survive the bizarre time relativities of DiBortelli physics, they proved to be an incredibly efficient communication device. Information, news, gossip, key economic data – anything that could be stored on piezolaminate-disk or in a casserite-cell – could be transmitted from Earth to Deucalion or back in about twelve months, instead of the decades required by conventional radio-transmission-beam techniques.

  Without such relatively swift communications, any notion of trade or coordination between the distant planets would have been laughable. Imagine negotiating export contracts with a century-long turnaround in any information exchange. And this was, of course, the primary function of the large bulk of communications carried in the data frames of the warp-shuttles.

  But the social importance of the exchanges between artists and writers on the different worlds, or the scientists and Researchers in facilities separated by thirty-four light-years of uninhabited space, can never be overestimated.

  The ‘warp’ was the bridge between two slowly diverging cultures . . .

  Medical Research Facility

  Edison (Southwest)

  Deucalion

  21/14/202 Standard

  CHARLIE’S STORY

  ‘CRIOS?’ Galen was almost shouting – which he was prone to do on those rare occasions when he didn’t understand something. And he sure as hell didn’t understand this.

  ‘What the hell is CRIOS? This report reads like an epidemiologist’s nightmare. Something totally new, that spreads like wildfire, turns your organs and circulatory system to stone, and kills you in a couple of days. But they didn’t even bother to mention it? Shit, Charlie. What were they thinking?’

  I looked up at him and turned my seat around on its swivel. Sometimes in quiet moments he would apologise to me for having to put up with his moods – but usually not until some time afterwards.

  When he was revved up he wasn’t usually aware of it. I guess he had a kind of tunnel vision. It comes with the territory in most branches of Research, but especially in medical. I guess the stakes are higher.

  And you could say he was revved up at that moment.

  Revved up nothing. He was spitting mad.

  ‘How could they fail to inform us? I mean, of all the dumb, stupid . . . Don’t they have procedures for this kind of thing on Earth? Look at the date on this memo. For God’s sake, Charlie. This report is forty years old. Something as serious as this, and they never even bothered letting us know.’

  I just shook my head. I knew how he was feeling. I’d gone through pretty much the same thing about half an hour earlier. I stood behind his wheelchair and began massaging his shoulders. They were almost rigid.

  ‘I get the feeling we wouldn’t know even now if they had their way,’ I began. ‘The memo was slipped in, hidden on an embedded file, among the ROM transcriptions that Professor Hansen sent me from Earth on the last warp-shuttle. You remember, the on
es of the keynote speeches from the World Epidemiology Conference? It wasn’t mentioned in the file-manifest, and Benjamin didn’t make any note of it when he downloaded them. It only appeared when I logged on, so it was obviously meant for me, and you can bet it wasn’t an accident. You know Hansen – he’s a whole lot like you. Something like this would definitely set him off.’

  Galen laughed, but his shoulders had begun to relax a little. He was always like that. High-octane explosion, quick recovery.

  I went on. ‘My guess is, Hansen had just come across this by accident. Poor old fart probably had a major coronary on the spot. This would be his way of telling us without getting himself canned.’

  I took my hands from his shoulders and moved around in front of him. ‘Look, Galen, I wouldn’t worry too much. Whatever this CRIOS is . . . was, it couldn’t have amounted to all that much. I mean, forty years. If they hadn’t controlled it, we’d have heard something.’

  He looked up at me. ‘You’ve seen the report, Charlie. It didn’t sound like they had too much control to me. Besides, what makes you think we would have heard? Look . . .’

  Punching up the cover-page, he pointed to the source information.

  * * *

  GLOBAL HEALTH ORGANISATION

  Confidential Memorandum

  (punishment code # 23/511 applies for any breach)

  * * *

  PROJECT:

  CRIOS

  STATUS:

  ALPHA (LEVEL FIVE CLEARANCE – NTK)

  SITE OF DATA-SOURCE:

  GHO CENTRE FOR COMMUNICABLE DISEASE CONTROL, NEW YORK, ATLANTIC/NORTHWEST SECTOR

  FILE ORIGINATION DATE:

  23/6/2332

  TOPIC:

  A DESCRIPTION OF THE POSSIBLE ORIGINS AND SYMPTOMS ASSOCIATED WITH COSTA RICAN ISOMORPHOUS OSSIFICATION SYNDROME (CRIOS), ALSO KNOWN AS ‘CRYSTAL DEATH’

  RELATED DATA:

  # CLINICAL CRYSTALLOGRAPHY

  # DISEASES OF EXTRATERRESTRIAL/UNKNOWN ORIGIN

  # ELECTRON MICROSCOPE STUDIES OF CRIOS SEED-CRYSTAL SAMPLES

  # HAEMATOLOGY (cf: ECCENTRIC BLOOD PATHOLOGY)

  # INORGANIC CONTAMINANTS – TREATMENT REGIMENS

  # QUARANTINE PROCEDURES – INCURABLE/FATAL INFECTIOUS DISEASES

  # SUGGESTED METHODS FOR CONTROL OF ANY FUTURE CRIOS OUTBREAK

  * * *

  ‘And?’ I still didn’t get it. I never did have his eye for detail. Not that kind of detail.

  ‘And they slapped a Level Five clearance on it. And not just a Level Five. See there . . . NTK.’ He tapped the screen. ‘Need To Know . . . Not just a Level Five, but only those Level Fives who absolutely had to find out about it. How Hansen got hold of it I can only guess.’

  ‘But that doesn’t alter the fact that it was written forty years ago, Galen.’ I was making a real effort to sound positive. It was a reflex. My way of trying to balance his natural pessimism. Galen always said it’s one of the reasons we made such a good team.

  ‘Think about it,’ I went on. ‘In all this time there’s been no word of any epidemic of – what did they call it? – “Crystal Death”. So doesn’t that tell you something?’

  He knew what I was getting at, but I could tell that something wasn’t sitting right. He frowned and looked back at the screen, as if the cause of his unease might be flashing there in huge red letters.

  It wasn’t.

  I walked around and stood in front of his chair, before I went on.

  ‘What it tells me is that it didn’t get loose. That whatever this CRIOS was, the containment measures must have worked. Otherwise there’s no way they could ever have kept it secret. It would have been all over the networks, and we’d have heard about it on the next warp-shuttle. Which, incidentally, would have arrived on Deucalion about twenty years before either of us was born.’

  It was a sensible argument. At least, it was the comforting one. I mean, they must have controlled it, or . . . Well, the possibilities didn’t bear thinking about.

  I changed tack. ‘Want some Ocra?’ After years of working with him, I knew his addictions as well as I knew my own. He nodded without removing his gaze from the screen.

  As I left the room to brew his tea, he leaned forward towards the console and began reading the report again.

  Two minutes later I was back.

  ‘What’s “Vesta”?’ He asked the question before I was halfway through the door.

  I placed one mug on the tray-arm of his chair, took a quick sip from the other, and looked at the report. I’d skimmed it earlier, but with Galen skimming wasn’t nearly good enough. I’d learned not to answer any query off the cuff. He could be cutting – even with me – if he was in overdrive, like he was at the moment, and you tried to ad lib.

  I started at the top of the screen.

  * * *

  INCUBATION PERIOD: Undetermined. Victims demonstrate rapid and irreversible deterioration from the onset of major symptoms, but no data is currently available on the period between contact with CRIOS seed-crystal and initial pathological changes.

  ‘Seed-crystal.’ What the hell did they mean by ‘seed-crystal’?

  ORIGIN OF INFECTION: First reported case: (Carlos Ruiz, 28 [Earth standard], Hispanic) Security operative, JMMC ore-processing facility, Puerto Limon, Costa Rica. Admitted, comatose, to JMMC plant med-centre, 23:09, 2/5/32, symptoms initially diagnosed as allergic/anaphylactic shock, erratic pulse, cyanosis, muscular rigidity. Zero response to adrenalin/antihistamine treatment. Unprecendented blood pathology – high-level, unexplained crystallisation of plasma, blood-calcium, red and white corpuscles. Zero response to anticoagulants. Progressive organ failure. Pronounced dead 01:04, 3/5/32.

  Twenty new cases reported by 5/5/32 – all in Puerto Limon facility (eight from Security and twelve from crushing mills, but none reported initially from separation plant). 100% fatal within thirty-six to fifty-four hours. Infection-transmission mode unknown in initial investigation phase; airborne spores suspected.

  GHO notified, 3/5/32. Blood samples, pathology and post-mortem data forwarded by Security courier to GHO New York Centre for Communicable Disease Control, 4/5/32.

  Quarantine measures (Code Amber: Suspected communicable pathogen of extraterrestrial origin) initiated, 14:30, 4/5/32. Immediate emergency JMMC Security blockade of facility, company precinct of Callas and surrounding company-controlled common land. Medical centre and processing plant hermetically isolated. Contagion rate within facility complex 99+% by 8/5/32. Further outbreak reported in Callas 7/5/32.

  Under orders from GHO, upgraded quarantine measures (Code Red: Confirmed presence of pathogen of extraterrestrial origin – virulent/malignant) initiated 9/5/32. Containment procedure ‘Vesta’ ordered 10/5/32. Immediate execution. Outbreak officially controlled 11/5/32.

  * * *

  One day from the GHO containment order to ‘Outbreak officially controlled’. I closed my eyes and tried to fathom it. I couldn’t. Or rather, I don’t think I really wanted to.

  ‘So what’s “Vesta”?’ Galen repeated the question as I finished reading.

  ‘Beats me.’ I was standing behind his chair, reading the screen over his shoulder. Moving across to my own console, I touched the ROM icon on the screen and leaned towards the v-a pick-up.

  ‘Vesta. VESTA.’

  I didn’t normally spell things out, but the voice-recog was playing up, and I didn’t want it to bring up ‘fester’ or ‘festa’ or whatever else it might think it heard. I added ‘Cross-ref on “Old Earth”, and “containment procedures”, slash “disease”, slash “epidemics”.’

  There were a couple of references, but neither of them were of any use. I summarised the results for him.

  ‘It’s a town in Costa Rica, about 40 clicks from the processing plant, and it’s the name of an Ancient Greek goddess they probably named it after. Maybe they
used the town as a control centre for the blockade and the containment. I mean, they wouldn’t want to draw too much attention by organising things in Puerto Limon itself. Not if they were trying to keep it under wraps.’ I shrugged my shoulders, and moved back to stand beside the wheelchair. ‘Otherwise, I wouldn’t have a clue. It must have been an internal Security codename. There’s no ref on file of any official containment procedure by that name.’

  ‘No,’ he replied. ‘Well, there wouldn’t be, would there? Pretty bloody effective, whatever it is.’ He spoke the words more to himself than me as he reached for his ‘fix’.

  I took another sip too.

  But suddenly I had the feeling that a cup of Ocra tea wasn’t going to be enough to settle the butterflies that were beginning to flex their wings in my stomach.

  Forty years ago . . .

  That was what the date on the report said.

  2332ad on Earth. 153as here on Deucalion.

  Which was exactly the year when the next three approaching C-ships took off on their long, sub-light journey to the new world. Our world.

  And the first one was due within the month . . .

  3

  Destiny

  Al-Tiina Village

  Wieta Clan Lands, Vaana

  24/14/202 Standard

  LOEF

  Kaeba has climbed too high. As usual.

  He feels her sudden fear like a jolt in the chest, as the realisation of danger grows in the young one’s heart.

  – Breathe slowly. Swallow your fear. Fear is your enemy, Kaeba.

  He makes his way across the open space behind the communal meeting place, sending to her, soothing her anxiety, as he closes the distance between them.

  – Find a strong branch and hold tightly. I am almost with you . . .

  A few moments later he stands beneath the spreading shadows of the huge Balaan, and touches the wrinkled armour of its bark, breathing in its essence.