View from Ararat

by Caswell, Brian

  Terry Eiken waits, but Müller has turned back to the window. Finally the young man asks the question.

  ‘What did he mean? Your grandfather . . .’

  After a few seconds Leon Müller speaks to his own reflection. ‘You know, you can see half the world from up here. But it’s still so very easy to lose track of it. I guess we never really learn.’

  He moves to pick up the sheets from the desk and glances at the opening paragraph of the most important speech he will make, in a lifetime filled with important speeches.

  ‘They won’t believe it, Terry. Not a damned word. And they’ll do whatever they think it’ll take to survive. No matter what we try to tell them to do.’

  Terry Eiken watches the wrinkled hands of the seventeenth President of the Republic of Deucalion, hands that have signed into being all of the most significant legislation of the past decade. He watches them as they drop the speech back onto the polished surface of the desk, and he notices how badly they are shaking.

  NATASSIA’S STORY

  In essence, the government plan was exactly the kind of plan you might expect from a group of career bureaucrats and politicians who didn’t have a clue what they were dealing with, or how they were supposed to fight it, then suddenly found themselves in the middle of a ‘worst-case scenario’ of planet-decimating proportions.

  Müller gave a well-prepared speech, accurately explaining the extent of the crisis facing all of us, while attempting to sound positive and in control. It was an A-grade performance.

  And no one listening was convinced for a moment.

  We were advised to stay in our homes, and to avoid congregating anywhere. This ‘voluntary’ quarantine was to remain in force until the government got procedures in place for feeding an entire population living under virtual house arrest, and finalised their plans for a safe evacuation of the entire metropolis of Edison, a city which overnight had become potentially lethal.

  Of course, half the population immediately ignored instructions and ran out into the streets trying to find someone who knew what was going on.

  Why would you expect anything else? We’d been kept in the dark for weeks, since the danger had first surfaced in the labs of Med-Research in Edison and the Pandora had arrived in the skies over New G.

  Just about everyone was watching the presidential address, so they all heard the instructions, but news of that magnitude doesn’t sink in just like that.

  Maybe in an ideal universe you can snap your fingers and everyone will instantly understand how serious the situation is.

  In reality, it was the classic reaction to impending death: people en masse going through all the inevitable stages – denial, anger and, finally, acceptance and adjustment.

  Unfortunately, denial and anger aren’t ideal emotions to occupy your attention when survival depends on a careful and logical analysis of the facts.

  To try to keep some kind of control of the situation, all traffic movements in and out of the city – whether by public or private transport – were temporarily suspended, and Security forces were deployed to enforce this and other decrees issued under the extraordinary presidential powers voted into existence a few hours earlier by a previously unpublicised Council-appointed ‘Emergency Cabinet’.

  I sat there with everyone on shift at Internet as Müller spoke, and I wasn’t surprised at what he was saying. I guess all those hours spent on the trail of the story outside Wieta had prepared me for the worst.

  Maybe it was the attitude of the Security people on isolation duty at the camp, or the occasional glimpse I’d managed to get of the inmates. I saw that angry resignation peculiar to people who were about to pay the ultimate price for someone else’s mistakes.

  Even the government’s official policy of stubborn silence had triggered warning signals somewhere deep in my newshound’s subconscious instinct.

  After all, this wasn’t Earth. For all its faults – and there were many – the key feature of Deucalion politics for the last century had been openness. After all those years of government imposed from afar, and the farce of the phony elections of 101, accountability has been built into the Constitution of 103. It might have been highly inconvenient for the politicians, but it had been the way of things on the planet.

  Until the arrival of the Crystal Death.

  So I was expecting something major. But in spite of all that, the magnitude of the news was far beyond anything I might have predicted. I sat there in silence with the others for I don’t know how long, until Gerry Sloane stood up.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘That’s it. I’m out of here.’ And he left the office.

  I never saw him again. But I did find his name a few months later on a long list of citizens killed trying to run the Security blockade around Edison in those early days of the crisis.

  By the time Müller had begun his speech, it was already too late to try to get out. Edison was tied up tighter than a drum.

  Not that it made much difference in the long run.

  On Earth they used to have a saying, which went, ‘There’s not much point locking the stable after the horse has bolted.’

  There were never any horses on Deucalion, but the essential logic of the advice still holds true. There were more than a thousand flyer movements – public and private – into and out of Edison every day, in the time before the arrival of the plague.

  That’s maybe thirty thousand individuals a day travelling the routes to the major cities and the small centres across the Great Continent, to points as diverse as the silver-mining towns of Asgard and Valhalla on the far-northern Argentine Peninsula and the new Research settlement of Sukoma in the far south.

  There were even one or two tourist-flyers heading for villages in Vaana.

  Research information released later indicated that in the two or three days before he was discovered, Rayston must have been contagious, even if he wasn’t feeling too bad. So he might have infected any number of people. They might not have come into contact with him directly, just been somewhere after him, and touched something he’d touched. And any one of them was a potential traveller.

  Thirty thousand people per day for two or three days travelling to every inhabited part of Deucalion. Sixty or ninety thousand possible carriers, spreading out across the face of the planet. This meant that in a matter of days the number of potential threats worldwide was already in the millions. What real hope was there of stopping the spread of the thing?

  Maybe none. But as long as there were no reports of outbreaks beyond Edison, containment was the only option: a blockade with orders to shoot to kill, and voluntary curfew in all other population centres to reduce the risk if the horse had indeed bolted.

  If Sloane had waited a few days, he could probably have walked out of Edison unopposed, but by that stage there was literally nowhere to go.

  Quarantine Camp, Old Wieta Reserve

  Edison Sector (East Central)

  26/1/203 Standard

  KAZ’S STORY

  When I finally made it inside the camp infirmary, Jerome Hamita was standing staring at one of the monitors. There were a couple of other people, a man and a woman, sitting at different consoles at the other end of the room. They looked up as I entered, but neither of them said anything.

  I stood there waiting for him to notice me. He wasn’t much older than me. Twenty-five, twenty-six, maybe. But there was a stoop in his shoulders, as if he was carrying a weight that was too heavy for one man. And he’d been carrying it for far too long.

  ‘She’s still alive, you know.’

  He was still facing the monitor, but I sensed he was speaking to me. I walked across and stood beside him. On the screen was the image of a little girl lying unconscious on a bed that was too big for her.

  The read-out at the bottom of the monitor read:

  Bed 17 – I.D. unknown [Day 20].

&n
bsp; ‘Twenty days and she hasn’t died yet. She’s about the only thing in this whole place that gives me hope.’

  He turned to face me. ‘Funny, isn’t it? A couple of months ago a six-year-old girl in a coma would have been a tragedy. Now, here, she’s the one small sign of hope.’ He held out a welcoming hand. ‘I’m Jerome Hamita. And you must be Karen.’

  I reached out and shook his hand. ‘Kaz to my friends.’

  He smiled. ‘We’re all friends around here. What you see is absolutely all you get. Over there is Katie. She answers to Burke, if you’re the formal type. And next to her, that’s Lomax, who has a first name, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone use it. You picked a good time to come, Kar . . . Kaz. Fromme hasn’t been here for a week, so we don’t expect her back, and Cerruti just quit. Decided it was a waste of time here, seeing as how no one ever gets out alive. And as we’re all doomed anyway, he’s opted for a more comfortable place to die.’

  He looked back at the little girl on the monitor.

  ‘Maybe he’s right. Who knows?’

  ‘Then why are you here?’ I asked. ‘Can’t you think of somewhere else to be?’

  He looked at me, and I could sense the serious answer forming, but then he forced a smile.

  ‘What, and miss out on the great retirement benefits?’

  I could see he was making an effort not to scare off the new recruit.

  I moved across to the console. ‘Where do I start?’

  He smiled. ‘Watch out, guys, we’ve got a keen one.’

  ‘That’ll wear off,’ Katie Burke put in, and I noticed Lomax smile and shake his head.

  They all looked exhausted, but there was a subdued camaraderie in the room, a shared understanding that reminded me of the med-centre on Carmody.

  But on Carmody you could go into a room and touch a patient. And on Carmody, with very few exceptions, that patient was likely to recover.

  ‘Are you familiar with the Cyrax remote?’

  Jerome had moved across to stand beside me, all business, like turning on a switch. And I got a sudden sense of the man.

  The banter was a front, a throwback to a time before the Crystal, when patients responded to treatment and life went on. Then, there had been time for humour. But that time was gone. Laughter was the first casualty to die in the infirmary of the Wieta holding camp.

  Jerome Hamita was totally focused on his calling. Every death that occurred on the other side of the double-glazing that separated us from the ward was a personal failure. He was glad I’d come, but there would be no gratitude, no matter how long the hours, no matter how great the sacrifices. No matter what.

  I had chosen to help to try to stem the tide. And I would share in his responsibility for every failure.

  Fine. I could be a bit like that myself.

  I looked at the system console. It was vaguely familiar. We’d gone through the principles of isolation ward medicine during one of the early semesters of pre-med, but it was never high on my list of priorities.

  ‘I’ve seen it,’ I began, ‘but it’ll take a few days for me to familiarise myself with the operational—’

  ‘Take as long as you like,’ he interrupted. ‘Up to three hours. If you need to know anything, ask Katie.’

  He moved back to the monitor, looked at the image of the little girl for a few seconds longer, then tapped a button and watched a data-file scroll slowly up. I didn’t look at the detail, because at that moment Katie Burke came across to where I was standing.

  ‘He likes you,’ she whispered.

  ‘Yeah?’ I replied. ‘And how do you work that out?’

  ‘He gave you three hours. He’s not normally that generous. Just sit down, orient yourself, and if you need anything give a yell.’

  I smiled a thank you, and she turned to go back to her console.

  ‘It’s good to have you aboard,’ she said.

  ‘It’s good to be here,’ I replied. And somehow, in spite of everything, it was more than just the polite, expected response.

  I chanced the keyboard, keying in the ward monitor. An old man was lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling. His face was without hope, fighting the pain inside, clenching and unclenching his right fist, while his left arm lay stiff and motionless on the bed beside him.

  In yellow lettering across the bottom of the image, the I.D. caption read:

  Bed 40 – Elias Karampoulos, 57 years 3 months (Standard) [Day 2].

  ‘Bed forty-three’s failing.’ Lomax made the comment almost to himself.

  17

  The Martyrs of Wieta

  Roosevelt Foothills

  Edison Sector (South)

  26/1/203 Standard

  RAMÓN’S STORY

  Capyjou and Reyjaa. After the best part of a month living in the Elokoi historycave, keeping out of sight behind our shield of bushes or avoiding the occasional patrol, we’d exhausted all the possible variations of the only two native sources of food available to us. The truth is, it didn’t matter how you cooked them, they still tasted like . . . Capyjou and Reyjaa.

  Reyjaa is a little like sugar beet, except tougher and quite bitter. To soften it, the Elokoi boil it with Naassiar, which is an aromatic leafy plant you can pick up just about anywhere on the flatlands. But it just happens to be deadly poisonous to humans.

  Reyjaa isn’t too appetising on its own. It’s fibrous and hard to chew, and it tends to swell painfully in your stomach if you drink too much water with it. But at least it has a vaguely sweet taste, which is more than can be said for Capyjou, which isn’t vaguely anything.

  Élita had learned about Deucalion’s few edible native plants during her eight-year period of compulsive intimacy with the Pandora’s edu-files. And it gave her great satisfaction to point out to her big brother that he owed it to his ‘weird’ little sister, and her obsessions, every time he ate anything out there in the wilds of Deucalion and lived to talk about it.

  I replied that after weeks of indigestion and diarrhoea, and wanting to throw up after every meal, I wasn’t sure exactly what I owed her. But I was only joking. At least we were alive, which is more than was true for over half the inmates of the camp.

  Every few days I would sneak back to spy on what was happening there. The first couple of times we all went, but the effect of looking helplessly down on the scene from the wooded rise to the southwest of the boundary fence was just too devastating, especially for Maija.

  Both her parents and her baby brother were in the camp, and there was nothing she could do to save them from what was happening in there.

  I knew how she felt. Sometimes from my hiding place above the camp I tried to pick out our hut, and I tried to convince myself that I could see Nelson or Graçia, that they were still alive and well, but I couldn’t. I was too far away. And I couldn’t help Maija either.

  Sometimes at night, when she thought I was asleep, I would hear her sobbing quietly. Then I’d reach out and try to comfort her, but I knew it wasn’t working.

  Once Élita moved across to where she was lying next to me and put an arm around her. ‘Things will work out,’ she began, but Maija shook her head.

  ‘They’re dead, ’Lita. I know it. I just wish . . .’

  But the words faltered. What could you say, cut off, trapped outside as they were trapped inside? If it weren’t for the two of us, I think she would have risked the guns of the guards and whatever horrors might have been waiting for her inside the fences of the camp, just to be back with her family. But there was really no choice. Fate had chosen for us, and we were at the mercy of whatever moved it.

  Besides, like I said, at least we were alive.

  Tremayne’s Fall

  Overlooking the Wieta Quarantine Camp

  Edison Sector (South)

  26/1/203 Standard

  RAMÓN

 
The heat beats down on his back, and the ragged shirt provides little protection as he lies full length, staring with disbelief down at the camp. For the first time since the arrival of the Security blockade, the ring of armed men looks thin and vulnerable.

  And more significantly perhaps, the air of discipline which has marked their presence has disintegrated during the days since he last looked down on them.

  He raises the ’scope and trains it first on one face, then on another, trying to gauge the altered mood of the watchers.

  They stand or sit listlessly, hardly glancing at the fence they are there to keep secure, their guns held loosely in indifferent hands or hanging from shoulder-slung straps. And their number has shrunk considerably.

  He looks towards the buildings of the camp, watching for movement in the lanes between the buildings. For people trapped so long in a nightmare of death and despair, the weakened Security cordon must seem like a last chance at life.

  Finally he sees it. A tight group of men, maybe twenty or twenty-five of them, congregates in one of the wider laneways, gesturing and shouting demands towards the guards on the other side of the fence.

  The Security force seems leaderless. For a long time nothing happens on the outside. Then, as if in response to some unspoken order, the depleted cordon seems to shrink towards the source of the disturbance, and as the group of inmates masses to make a move towards the wire, a few guns are raised to the ‘ready’ position. As if in response, the rest of the dispirited force seems suddenly galvanised.

  One of the Security operatives steps forward to address the protesters, though his body language shows no sense of authority or confidence. Through the ’scope, on full magnification, he looks young. The sweat shows on his face and he wipes it with a shaking hand.

  From his position on top of the rise, Ramón can hear nothing of what the man is shouting, but it is clear that it has little effect on the group inside the fence. They spread out to form a single line, arms folded, facing the guards defiantly.

  Then, from between the buildings inside the camp, a lone figure makes his way towards the line of protesters. He moves with determination, his gaze fixed beyond the wire.