“Barth Anderson’s inventive viral emergency may be set in a speculative near-future of saints and cyborgs, but it has a persuasive real-world urgency. He nails the gritty essence of disease detection: frustration, exhaustion, obsession.”
—Maryn McKenna, author of Beating Back the Devil: On the Front Lines with the Disease Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service
This book is dedicated to Jack Anderson and Robin Barringer, consummate travelers of Mexico and two fine fathers who left before anyone was ready for them to go; Greg Thompson and his unflagging friendship; and especially to Lisa Stuart. This book is your hard work as much as it is mine. I treasure you, my love.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
If it takes a village to raise a kid, then it takes a couple villages and a scattering of tribes to write a novel. I absolutely must acknowledge and thank:
Clarion ’98, an exceptional group of writers and critics.
My two writers groups, who struggled through various iterations of this book: Karma Weasels (Paula Fleming, Manfred Gabriel, David J. Hoffman-Dachelet, Burke Kealey Kelly McCullough, Lyda Morehouse) and the Ratbastards (Christopher Barzak, Alan DeNiro, and Kristin Livdahl).
Also, James Patrick Kelly, who foresaw what the original short story might be, Mark Wicklund for Spanish language advice and careful editing, and Maureen McHugh for inspiration and friendship.
Jesse Vogel and Kristopher O’Higgins of Scribe Agency. This book wouldn’t have seen the light of day without them.
My editor, Juliet Ulman, a wise, wise woman.
Melissa Birch, Cindra Halm, Jim Handrigan, Jen Connell, Ian Handrigan, Rachael Hoffman-Dachelet, Midori Snyder, Jennette Turner, Amy and Hank Wicklund.
All the members of my far-ranging blood, step-, and in-law families. You are legion, and naming each of you would take a book in itself. But I must especially thank Bonnie Anderson, who never stopped believing in me, and Isaiah, who snapped my life into focus.
I’d like to acknowledge the major sources of my research: A Dancing Matrix by Robin Marantz Henig (Vintage Books), Immunology by Ivan Roitt, Jonathan Brostoff, and David Male (Gower Medical Publishing), and Holy Terrors: Latin American Women Perform by Diana Taylor and Roselyn Constantino (Duke University Press). Problems with my book’s various speculations should be traced to me, however, not these fine scholars.
PROLOGUE
WEDNESDAY, MAY 11. 7:56 P.M.
“I HIJACKED a live remote to Puebla,” said the voice behind the plastic pirate mask, its eye patch and gold teeth leering from the old-fashioned broadcast monitor. “So assuming my link stays hot for the next sixty seconds, we’ll go live to Sister Domenica at 8:00 P.M. sharp.”
Adjusting the antenna on the ancient set that they had picked up on the street, the man said, “Good?”
“Good.” Dolores grinned and shucked her bright yellow dress. “Pirate is still jabbering. We haven’t missed her.”
The man telescoped and untelescoped the antenna. He’d never seen such an old television, and the scientist in him wanted to examine it.
“While the uplink heats up,” Pirate said, “let me remind you that Sister Domenica will be at the Basilica this Sunday the fifteenth at 1:00 P.M. delivering a sermon on the pending Reconquest of Texas.”
“Where is Pirate?”
“Usually here in Ascensión,” Dolores said. “But he moves around Mexico depending on where he can steal uplinks. The servicio sagrado has been after him for years. It looks like we have a few minutes. Ven, macho.”
When he returned to bed, Dolores, hair smelling of oranges, crushed herself against him. She was a small, broad-hipped prostitute who wore cosmetics to lighten her complexion, but beneath it, she was a dark mestiza woman. That’s what had attracted him at the Italian restaurant where he’d found her smoking at the bar. She was like a butterfly under glass to him. “What’s your native background, chica?” he’d asked. “Nahua, yes?”
Dolores tapped her cigarette. Mestizos didn’t usually enjoy talking about their native roots, if they knew them at all. “Go to the euro zone, if you want a blanca.”
“I don’t want a white girl,” he said, noting the shape of her nose. Mestizo, sure—most in Mexico were—but he took great pride in being able to identify Indian stock. “Is your family from the Central Highlands? Michoacán, maybe?”
“When you’re good, you’re good.” She seemed offended but clearly didn’t want him to slip away. Though nearly fifty her admirer was well dressed and distractingly handsome. Dolores smiled but frowned with her eyes. “I grew up in Pátzcuaro.”
A mazahua, probably. The man bought Dolores a drink and held her hand in both of his. She melted against him at the bar while he surreptitiously took her pulse, finding an athletic at-rest heart rate. “Princesa,” he said, looking her up and down, “you’re the girl for me.”
“OK. I’ll be your girl tonight,” Dolores whispered, “but I got to watch the nun while we do it. You can buy a cheap set on Reforma.”
With a furtive show of fingers they haggled on a price. Then the man pressed his lips to hers.
Finally. It was happening. In his wonder, the man heard a redemptive chorus, like Oedipus at Colonus, a thunderous fleet of angels taking wing in triumph.
“We’re on?” said Pirate, speaking to someone offscreen. “Thank God for US garbage satellites!”
Dolores felt so ripe and strong in his hands he couldn’t stop examining her body. He ran his fingertips along her throat, delicately tracing across the lymph nodes below her jaw—not yet swollen. “Are you hot, querida?”
“Oh, very hot for your pinga, papi, I want—”
He grabbed her chin, hard. “Don’t talk like that.” Before he could stop himself, he had her throat.
Dolores didn’t flinch, but her eyes were round over his clenching hand. “My fault, papi. My fault.” She touched the crucifix hanging around his neck. “I can see you’re a good Catholic.”
He was grateful that she noticed and softened into his physician voice, releasing his grip. “Do you have a fever, querida?”
Dolores blinked her lashes and smiled. “No, I’m very clean, I promise.”
“The link is hot!” Pirate said. “Let’s go live to Puebla, Mexico—just outside Ascensión—and the Convent of the Virgin of the Americas.”
Dolores broke away from him and stretched across the bed to turn up the volume.
The camera zoomed in close on a woman in her thirties, perhaps older. Her irises were ink-dark, and she had a big, horsy smile and barrettes holding back her hair. “Hail Mary, full of grace, Virgin of Guadalupe. Blessed art thou among women of the Americas. Blessed be the fruit of thy womb, Jesus the Conquistador.”
The man went tense with rage. He was old enough that he remembered when Ascensión was still called Mexico City, back when Jesus was a shepherd not a conqueror. Before the dictator and his vicious political machine, the Holy Renaissance, came to power. The man’s hand was again clenched in a fist, he noticed. He deliberately laid it flat on Dolores’s thigh. “Who is that woman?”
Dolores watched the television with lustful eyes. “Sister Domenica. Pirate discovered her.”
“Wipe our tears, Maria, and give us comfort and assistance. Bring us faith. Help us to believe.” Sister Domenica opened her eyes, and said, “Tonight, the woman in white came to me during vespers.”
Dolores crawled to the man over the bed. “That’s what she calls the Virgin Mary. The woman in white. The Virgin tells her things, shows her the future. Domenica predicted the eruption of Popocatépetl last year and now everyone listens to her.” She unbuttoned the man’s pants and tugged them down. “She’s ours. Our saint.”
While Dolores kissed her wa
y across his stomach, he stared into the nun’s potent gaze. She seemed to peer right into this room.
Dolores reached over him for the condom-spray from the nightstand, contraband that she insisted on using. “A Mexican saint,” said Dolores and spritzed his growing erection. She stroked him while the spray and the man hardened. “This nun is powerful. Look at her. It’s in her eyes. God chose her for us.”
“I’d just finished my prayers,” Sister Domenica said, “when the Virgin came out of the shadows in the chapel.”
Dolores swung a leg over his chest so they both faced the television. “She’s a prophetess. Look at her. Ah. Ah. She’s from Jesus Himself.”
With those words, the man removed the tiny cross from around his neck, hooking it on the nightstand’s drawer.
The nun tilted her chin and, speaking directly into the camera, said, “The woman in white told me something that every Mexican should know.”
“Yes, Sister. Tell us.” Dolores leaned back on her hands, arching her back as though offering her breasts to God, then slid herself onto the man with a sigh.
Without his crucifix, he felt overly aware of what was happening in the room, his every sense aflame. This prostitute was gasping, dying, a corpse astride his body. He let out a tortured groan.
The nun bowed her head over folded hands. “Because she loves us and cares about us, she begged God to allow her to tell me—to tell you this message. To warn mothers who love their children—”
The man clamped shut his eyes.
“Mexico,” murmured Sister Domenica, “is about to be tested.”
“Oh, God, that’s good,” said Dolores, grinding her hips with greater purpose now. Her body trembled hard and she shook her thick hair, filling the room with the smell of oranges and sweat.
“The woman in white told me that some will be strengthened by the test. But many, maybe millions, will be broken by it.”
As though stirred by this thought, Dolores’s patter stopped, her rhythm hitched. She leaned back, put a palm on his wide chest, and ground against him, as though grinding him and the prophecy into her. “Tested. Yeah. That’s good.”
Sister Domenica said, “This test, my friends, will come to Mexico in the form of a devastating plague.”
The man gripped Dolores’s wide hips. His body locked. He tried to open his eyes, tried to look at the television, but he shuddered hard.
How in the world could the nun know such a thing?
Groggy, he opened his eyes. The room had gone cool blue, Pirate’s uplink snuffed to snow. He climbed out of bed and slipped his crucifix over his head, kissing it quickly. After moving Dolores’s AZTECS, WE! jacket, he sat in the windowsill, and leaned his head of tight black curls against the window. The glass felt cold.
His room was on the uppermost floor, and from the window, he could see the volcanoes and mountains ringing the Valley of Mexico. All around him were the sparkling towers of La Alta, the gleaming spires that housed Ascensión’s wealthiest. Hovering outside his window, the belly of a cloud-board read, ¡VIVA EL RENACIMIENTO! “Long live the Renaissance!” A red-and-black swoop bus dove past his hotel window—probably taking rich Altadores down for a night of slumming in dusty, ground-level cantinas—below him, people jammed the wide sidewalks, while lanes glittered with bicycles. On La Reforma, the city’s largest artery, a river of cars endlessly flowed in ten shimmering lanes of traffic.
The valley was only sixty kilometers across but it groaned under a teeming and burgeoning population, one-third the size of the United States.
In the hotel’s narrow bed, Dolores moaned sleepily as she switched the channel and anxiously watched three men analyze the ramifications of another war with the US, which the dictator Emil Orbegón deemed inevitable now, as did the rival pope from Mexico, Cardinal de Veras. In the monitor’s strobe of light, she scratched her chin.
The man noted her movement and crept slowly toward her. He could see pustules forming around her mouth in tiny, red eruptions—surprising as first shoots in spring. Red flowers from my children, he thought, eyes crinkling in wonder at Dolores. How hot was she now? Were her glands swelling yet? Was her abdomen distending?
Out of the corner of her eye, Dolores caught him staring at her. She rolled on her back to look at him, and said, “My arms really hurt, papi.”
That, he’d anticipated. He nodded as though she were a herald arriving on stage to deliver an aria of armies in motion, navies aweigh. “Just sleep, then, princesa.”
Dolores rolled over, scratching at her chin and lips.
He stood and stared out the hotel window at the gleaming chains of traffic in the night sky.
“Don’t worry. I’m here,” he whispered to the overwhelmed Valley of Mexico. “I’m here to save you.”
SUNDAY, MAY 15. 11:00 A.M.
VCAMV.
Mottled gold on green, like the shimmer of foil or the gleam on a sheen of motor oil, the plant looked unhealthy from stalk to leaves. Systemic cell death. Vein clearing and branding, which appeared as dark varicose veins shooting across withered leaves. Classic.
“This ain’t happening,” Stark said.
He scanned up the row, looking for more infected spinach plants. His grandfather’s method of defense against vCaMV was to change up the varieties throughout the rows, planting no two plants of the same variety within ten feet of each other, which made for jagged, uneven growth and shaggy rows. Had the method broken down here? Stark could see the Bloomsdale spinaches, the Olympia, the Sailorman, de Wilde Savoy, and the Oklahoma Green, alternating through the rows. To outsiders, the seemingly haphazard plan looked like madness, but “gold mold,” as the array of variants of cauliflower mosaic virus was commonly called, had never appeared here.
Adjusting his straw fedora to block the sun, Stark knelt and clipped a small leaf from the young spinach and slipped it into his field press.
“May 15,” he said to the press, as it sighed nitrogen, enclosed the sample, and consulted with the NIA satellite.
A moment later, the field press confirmed the obvious. vCaMV was here, on this farm, the place he grew up.
He stood and looked across Nissevalle Valley. The greenhouses had been emptied of sprouts, and fields were planted and primed for summer storms and sun. For nearly two decades, farms from Alberta to Chihuahua had battled seasonal vCaMV outbreaks for meager yields. Gold mold was known to sweep through whole regions in a single season, like a slow-motion prairie fire. But it had never come to Nissevalle. This quop was poised for another very profitable year, and losing shares now would be a disaster. Spinach rippled with passes of May breeze, and so did the corn, low and fluttering. Field hands in hats like Stark’s weaved through the young crops as tillers dogged behind, maneuvering through the tomatoes on preprogrammed weeding missions. The idyllic haze of Nissevalle Farm suddenly looked like so much rot.
“Jesus,” he whispered. “It really here.”
After eighteen years away from this farm, Henry David Stark was still getting himself apace with death’s routine visits here. It was one thing to behold it in a hot zone, or an anonymous hospital, but another entirely to see death pass between the paddocks and hay barns of his childhood. Yesterday morning in the creamery, loud with lowing and meowing and the mechanical gasp of milkers, a heavy-headed cow swung her face away from bright headlights shooting suddenly through the dawn’s fog and stepped backwards with a stomping hoof, catching a small kitten unawares. Stark had cried out, trying to scare the cat from danger. But blink. Gone. Then, last night in the goat barn, Stark watched as three kids, slick with blood, slid out of their nanny’s body, but without so much as a kick, or even a breath. Stark was surprised how such small passings troubled him, after what he’d seen in, say, China’s Borna outbreak. But he’d left the CDC’s Special Pathogens Unit to take charge of its Surveillance and Response Central Command two years ago, in order to distance himself from death’s rhythms. In bringing the Central Command (that is, himself) to the co-op farm last January, it was
inevitable that he’d synchronize himself with death—yet again.
The biggest rhythm of all, however, was the one that pounded straight to the brink—the farm’s end. It was always there, that deadly rhythm—hail, a tornado, financial ruin—but as a boy, he never listened to it. Standing over the dying spinach plant, Stark felt that countless days on a farm could never make it ordinary.
As he began thumbing information about the spinach’s variety and location into the field press, a stylized, red asterisk appeared before his eyes, eclipsing the LED display and his fingertips.
Bad timing.
His impulse was to shout across the spinach field to his grandfather, who was just now returning from disking up the green manure field on his International. But the field hands would hear, and most of them had lost their own farms to vCaMV. Yelling that he’d found gold mold would be like shouting fire in a burn ward. Instead, he took off his hat and waved it over his head.
The red asterisk pulsed across his vision again. Congo’s yellow fever, probably. Maybe the vaccination program’s net hadn’t been cast wide enough, and Queen Mum was alerting him to the need for more stockpiles. Stark glanced at the field hands working their way toward the spinach fields. On a quop farm like this one, everyone was judged by their work. It had always been that way, even from Stark’s childhood, when he couldn’t wait to get out of the Junior League gardens and show that he could work with the adults. Even with the CDC calling for him, Stark didn’t like leaving the field so soon after entering it.
Grandfather pulled up on the International Harvester he called Methuselah. A tall man, sturdy as a two-by-four, Grandfather’s skin was so dark he seemed made of wood—and thanks to the krono he’d received in his forties, he looked half his ninety-one years. “What’s shaking?” he said over the blatting engine, hands resting on the steering wheel. His heavy work gloves looked absurd with such skinny wrists sticking out of them.
The Patron Saint of Plagues Page 1
