The moment replays in slow-mo. The leaves lying forgotten at her feet. The sun reflecting from the glass of the window opposite. The way she held up her hand and stared at the pattern of her doom. The terrible look of loss that touched her face as her faith collapsed at last.
For a moment fear had made him step back. Just a step. And she had faltered. But she was strong. ‘It’s too dangerous. I have to . . .’
What?
She looked around again. Where would she go? She looked towards him, trying to find the words that would make it possible to leave him.
And all the time he could not move. He felt the absence of breath in his lungs, and the exaggerated beating of his heart, as he watched her trying to leave him, trying to save him.
Then, strangely, the fear lifted and he stepped forward. One step, two. When he spoke his voice was calm.
‘There’s nowhere to go, Rona. There never was.’
And taking a breath he reached out, took her hand, and peeled off the glove. Then, placing her open palm against his cheek, he kissed her hard and held her for an endless moment.
Then he led her back inside the hut.
Now, kneeling in the dirt, he feels the wind on his skin, the itch of a tear as it tracks across his cheek. And he senses the throbbing of his torn and bleeding knuckles. He coughs silently and feels the pain of it in his chest and in the muscles of his neck.
Not long now . . .
Slowly Aaron Rodman stands. He looks up at the sky. The fear is gone. Even the anger is gone.
Then he turns and makes his way back inside the hut, where Rona waits for him. He closes the door gently behind him.
Presidential Complex
New Geneva (City Central)
20/1/203 Standard
CHARLIE’S STORY
I couldn’t believe it. They just sat there. Their world and all they held sacred was about to change forever, and they just sat there and listened to what he was saying, like what was going on had absolutely nothing to do with them.
There were twenty of the most respected minds from all the major fields of Research on Deucalion – more than four hundred years of major scientific achievement between them – and no one was willing to take a stand.
No one except Galen.
Tolbert, the President’s advisor on the committee, was on his feet at the end of the long table, leaning forward on his fists and staring down at Galen, who held his gaze and waited, calm and controlled, listening to the big man’s reply, showing no emotion at all. Which meant, of course, that Galen was as seething mad as I was.
‘We’ve run all the permutations and data frame models,’ Tolbert continued. ‘And even in the best-case scenario, according to the projections, almost everyone in the camp dies.’ The words were for the whole group, but he spoke directly to Galen. ‘You know that. Even at best, it’s a high-nineties mortality factor. That’s not our doing. It’s a fact. The difference is, in all scenarios but one, CRIOS escapes, and we all know what that means. The only option is total, immediate neutralisation of the entire camp. We’re out of choices.’
He looked up, including everyone at the table in a general plea. I thought Galen was about to speak, but he was biding his time. Tolbert went on.
‘Quarantine is no longer an alternative. The threat has to be removed.’
‘The threat?’ Now Galen slammed both hands down on the table in front of him. ‘Neutralisation? The last time I looked, the threat was eighteen thousand innocent people. Men, women and children. Living, breathing human beings. Eighteen thousand still surviving, out of the more than thirty we locked away in there. If you’re going to ask this committee to approve the murder of that many human beings, man, at least have the balls to use the word. People.’
He sat forward in his chair, his gaze locked onto Tolbert’s.
And I saw something I’ve never seen, before or since. Tolbert’s eyes went cold. Not angry. Not scared. Cold, like a reptile.
‘People . . .’ The word was slow and deliberate, and as cold as his look. Then he walked across to the huge, curved window and looked out. ‘You know what I see out there? People. Nine million in New G alone. And five in Edison, six in Elton, seven in Roma. That’s just the major centres. You’ve seen the epidemic projections – you developed some of them. Are you willing to risk that many lives on the off-chance that you can save a few lucky individuals? It’s time to cut the bleeding-heart crap and play the percentages.
‘Besides, no one’s asking for the committee’s approval.’ A telling pause. He turned back from the window and looked at me. ‘Last night, in a secret session, the combined houses approved a state of emergency. The whole thing is in the hands of a war-cabinet. Any decision relating to the outbreak will come directly from the President. And it will be executed by Security. From now on, the role of this committee is purely advisory.’
I was watching Galen. His hands gripped the arms of the wheelchair, and he stared at Tolbert with a depth of hatred that I’d never seen in his eyes before. But he said nothing. And I realised why.
For the first time since I’d known him, Galen Sibraa had no answers. And I suddenly understood that look. The hatred was directed at himself as much as Tolbert, at his total impotence in the face of the crisis.
What Tolbert was suggesting was totally unconscionable, but Galen had no alternative to offer. And the fact of it was tearing him apart.
When everyone was gone, I went to him. He was sitting staring out of the same window that Tolbert had looked out of a few minutes earlier. The sun was a few degrees above the skyline, but he wasn’t watching it fall. He was facing directly south.
Somewhere beyond the barrier of skyscrapers, beyond the flatlands and the mountains, lay the camp, and I knew he was picturing it in his mind. We’d been in contact with Jerome Hamita at the camp infirmary so often that we felt we knew the place, even though we’d never actually been there.
‘He’s wrong, Galen . . .’ I began, but he turned to me and the expression on his face stopped my words.
‘Is he?’ He looked out of the window again, and I watched his eyes reflected in the glass. When he continued, he was speaking as much to himself as to me. ‘Is he wrong, or has the situation moved beyond our old ideas of right and wrong? Shit, Charlie, maybe the only way is to play the percentages.’
He touched my face with the back of his fingers, then let his hand drop. When he went on, his voice was quiet, little more than a whisper.
‘I couldn’t think of anything to say. He stood there suggesting mass murder, and I couldn’t think of a single logical response.’
This wasn’t Galen talking – the kid who had turned a childhood accident and a broken back into a badge of honour, forcing his way to the top of his field and dragging me along with him, the idealist who had almost single-handedly talked the Deucalion government into accepting the quarantine compromise in the first place. I’d never seen Galen give up. Or back down.
Until now.
I crouched down beside him until my eyes were level with his, and forced him to look at me. I needed to break him out of it. If he lost it now, I wasn’t sure I could cope.
‘Remember, what Parmantier used to say? Not everything that looks like shit and smells like shit has to be shit. There has to be another way. And it’s up to us to find it. If we let them nuke the camp, we might be safer, but we’ll have lost something in the process, that we’ll never be able to get back.’
‘Something that’s worth tens of millions of lives?’
I didn’t have an answer. At the Academy, I’d never paid much attention in the Research Ethics units. I always figured I could trust myself to know how to jump when the crisis arrived. Well, the crisis had arrived, and I was standing frozen on the clifftop. So was Galen.
In fact, the only ones who seemed to be sure of themselves were the politicians – who probably h
adn’t attended an Ethics class in their collective lives.
Later we sat in my unit. He sipped a cup of Ocra tea and looked across at me.
‘If I put you in a room,’ he said, ‘with a totally innocent person – say a newborn child – and told you that in order to live you had to kill that child – put a pulse-laser to its head and fire – could you do it? Would it be right, or even justifiable, to save one life – yours – at the expense of someone else’s, just because you had the power to do it?’
I shrugged. ‘Of course not.’
‘Of course? There’s no “of course” here, it’s a hypothetical. But OK, one on one, there’s no justification to choose yourself over someone else, all things being equal. But say they weren’t equal. Say there was only a slim chance that that child was going to survive the week. Would that change things?’
I didn’t answer. I didn’t even shake my head. There was no need. Besides, he wasn’t finished.
‘Let’s go a step further. Would it change things if we put three or four more people into that room. One innocent death to save five lives.
‘Of course . . . No, it wouldn’t.’
He was leading me by the nose, and I couldn’t escape it.
‘Five for one? Sounds like pretty reasonable odds to me. What about a hundred to one?’
‘It makes no difference,’ I snapped. ‘If it’s wrong, it’s wrong.’
He was waiting for more. I tried again.
‘It isn’t really a hundred lives for one. It’s one life for one, a hundred times. Each of those people is making the decision to save him or herself at the expense of the victim. “I live, the child dies”, so there’s no difference.’
‘There’s no difference if each one makes the decision. But what if the decision is made for them? What if they don’t even know it’s being made?’
‘It still doesn’t make it acceptable. No one has the right—’
‘Says you.’
‘Says me.’
He looked at me and placed the empty cup on the low coffee table beside him.
‘Sometimes it’s not that easy. I think there might be a few million people who’d disagree with you.’
‘And you?’ I asked.
He didn’t answer. He was staring at me and swallowing hard.
‘Sleep with me?’ he whispered.
It was so sudden that I didn’t know what to say. I could feel my mouth hanging open.
He reached out and touched my hand. ‘Nothing has to happen.’
I looked down at his useless legs, then back up at his face. He was reading my eyes, but I don’t know what he saw there. I didn’t know what to feel. He removed his hand and sat back in his chair, prepared for my rejection, but trying again anyway.
‘I just want to feel what it’s like to wake up next to you.’
I reached over and touched him, running my fingertips over his face. Then I leaned forward and kissed him. And I knew.
I stood up and walked towards the bedroom. At the doorway I stopped and looked back. ‘I get the right side.’
He smiled and thumbed the control on the chair. I turned away.
I could hear the hum of the motor approaching as I made my way inside.
Quarantine Camp, Old Wieta Reserve
Edison Sector (East Central)
20/1/203 Standard
KAROL
It is evening. Karol Wojcik stands where he has stood, off and on, for the past three hours since the shift-change brought him in aboard the Security shuttle from Edison. He is staring at the wire of the fence, and at the empty camp beyond.
It looks so desolate now. But of course, it is not as empty as it looks. Inside the huts the living hide, the dead decay. And he has his orders. His is the job of maintaining the status quo.
Not that there’s a whole lot to do. Not any more.
In the early days there were crowds of people milling around inside the fences, begging to be set free.
‘Look at me, I’m not infected. Let me out . . .’
‘I can pay. I’ve got money invested . . .’
And later there were the individuals, sneaking from the shadows when it grew dark, seeking out a single sympathetic face, whispering through the wire.
‘Do you want me? You could have me. I’d do anything. Just let me out. I could be good to you. I’m not sick. Look at me . . .’
At first he had watched them, fascinated. Repulsed. Then he had stared right through them, giving them no sign that he even heard. Finally he had looked the other way, unable to face the empty despair in their eyes.
In the end they had stopped trying.
There had been escape attempts, of course, but there were no weapons inside the camp. And the fences were strong. A few fatalities and the attempts had ceased.
Now, standing there looking in, he is nothing more than a member of the deathwatch. If there was ever going to be a solution for the inmates of the Wieta Camp, it would all be over already.
In the shadows beyond the fence he catches a sudden movement. His hands tense on the weapon he is holding, but he does not raise it. He watches, his breathing shallow, his shoulders tense.
A man appears, stumbling into the blaze from the lighting towers, and shading his eyes with his upraised arm. He is maybe thirty years old, thick-set and strong, and weaving towards them. At first he looks drunk, but there is no alcohol left in the camp. At least, no one thinks there is.
Besides, it isn’t drunkenness that makes his step unsteady. He is dragging his near-useless left leg behind him as he makes his way towards them. As he approaches the fence, his eyes are wide and crazy.
Karol looks away.
Beside him, Pete Rayston slips the safety off and raises his pulse-rifle to ‘ready’.
‘Bastards!’
The man yells the words and grips the wire of the fence so hard it draws blood. But Karol does not see. He is staring at the clouds above the camp, blood-red in the dying light.
‘It wasn’t my fault,’ the man’s voice continues. ‘I was clean, damn it. I didn’t have it. You bastards . . . You killed me.’
The sky is bleeding sunset over the distant Ranges. So beautiful. So desolate.
‘Bastards!’
He doesn’t see the man bend down and pick something up. He doesn’t see him take a few awkward steps away from the fence and draw back his arm. He doesn’t sense the small rock, arcing over the high fence towards him.
‘Karol! Look out!’ Pete’s voice startles him.
He tears his gaze away from the mountains and catches the movement in the corner of his eye. But it is too late to avoid it. Before the fact of it can register, the rock strikes him on the cheek, splitting the skin and drawing blood. It hits the ground and skitters off across the rocky surface, while a huge pain swells suddenly in his face.
The man has rushed at the thin barrier in a desperate attempt to scale the wire, but before he can drag his useless leg up off the ground, a single blast from a pulse-rifle throws him screaming away from the fence. Then there is silence. He lies, unmoving, a smoking shape in the shadow of one of the buildings.
Slowly Pete Rayston lowers his weapon. He looks away from the dead man and towards his friend.
Gingerly Karol touches his cheek, and the tip of his finger comes away wet and tinged with red.
‘Shit.’ Peter whispers the word and takes a step backwards. ‘Karol, he hit you.’
Part of Karol’s mind registers the pointless redundancy of the statement, but it is not his friend’s words that sends the shaft of fear through him. It is the expression that accompanies them. A mixture of horror and terrible pity.
It is then that the significance of what has happened dawns. The sudden sharp pain in his cheek. The look on Pete Rayston’s face. That horrified stare.
He tears his gaze a
way, but the same dread is reflected in the eyes of the man beside him, a new recruit, who just minutes before was sharing a joke with him.
Suddenly the gap that has grown between them is immeasurably wider than the few short metres of rocky ground.
‘Captain!’ the man shouts. ‘Captain . . .’ His mouth continues working, but no more words come. Words are unnecessary.
Within seconds Karol is surrounded by a ring of armed men – his friends, fellow Security operatives – all with their weapons raised, pointed at him.
Captain Mallory appears and steps into the silent ring. No words. He tosses a bundle across the space between them. It lands at Karol’s feet.
For a few seconds he stares down at it. He knows what it is, of course. They have been through the drill often enough in training. Slowly he reaches down to pick up the isolation-suit and begins to pull it on.
Moments later someone carries a small canister from the command post and holds it out at arm’s length, pointing it towards him. He makes no attempt to avoid the jet of flame that leaps across the few metres to engulf him. He closes his eyes tightly, and feels the temperature as it starts to seep in through the protective skin of the suit.
Then it is over. The circle parts to allow him through, and he walks away towards the infirmary entrance at the far end of the camp. For a moment he looked back. The circle remains intact, and the man with the canister is carefully and methodically playing the yellow flame across the earth, searing a wide circle in the vicinity of where the rock landed.
This is procedure. Any contact and the victim must be isolated for ten days, under the observation of the medical staff in the infirmary, until it is clear that no contamination has taken place.
Ten days.
The period is meaningless. In a quarter of that time he will be dead. He knows it with the kind of certainty that drives away all fear. And all hope.
The wound on his cheek has stopped bleeding already, but the telltale itch has begun in the flesh around it. Just before he enters the infection-lock of the isolation ward, he stops and looks out towards the mountains for the last time.
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