The Patron Saint of Plagues

by Barth Anderson

  “Shaking?” Stark shouted back. He rarely understood his grandfather’s anachronisms. Or at least, he pretended not to.

  “Did you find something?” Grandfather asked from atop the Harvester, older, even, than the man driving it.

  The tractor wafted an enticing smell toward Stark: cut cover, a green and nourishing smell. Grandfather’s cover crops of choice were buckwheat and oats, and he’d just tilled a field of them into the dirt, where they would compost and enrich the soil. Grandfather also claimed it was a defense against gold mold. Strong soil. Strong plants. Fewer diseases.

  “Look, I hate to leave,” said Stark, smelling green buckwheat as his grandfather cut the engine. “We all just started, but I got to check in with Mum.”

  While the tractor gave a protracted cough as it tried to fall silent, a red asterisk lit before Stark’s eyes again. Red (as opposed to blue or yellow) usually meant that the Queen Mum was simply alerting him to an emergency. But when Stark blinked at this one to clear his vision, an URGENT was waiting for him. He’d be able to read it on the interface in his contact lens’s receiver, but he wouldn’t be able to save the message or respond to it. It was a one-time shot. Whoever sent this message was desperate and had formatted it so that Stark would receive it without having to use his “brain gear”—a high-ranking official in a major health organization in dire need of speaking with Stark directly. While his grandfather slid down from the tractor on slow, rickety knees, Stark read the message.

  Sunday 15 May URGENT, Attention Dr. Henry Stark, the Ministry of Well-being of the Holy Renaissance is not negotiating this outbreak with momentous etiquette.

  The message would only be available for a few moments, but he took the time to reread that. Even after a third read, the sentence still made no sense to him.

  Grandfather realized that Stark wasn’t paying attention to him. “What? Bad news?”

  Stark didn’t answer.

  Minister Alejandro bore into the kingdom two WHO virologists, but they are commencing on untrue discoveries. This dengue is not dengue. It is not allocated by small flying beasts. Please touch me as soon as possible. I am the unique man witnessing reality. Urgent. Dr. Pedro Muñoz.

  Stark pursed his lips, frustrated. The Central Command’s surveillance and response software was falling apart, obviously. “Look, I got to check in.”

  “I know that,” Grandfather said, slipping off his gloves.

  Stark gave a little astonished laugh. “How you know?”

  “You start blinking hard right after you get your bat signal,” said Grandfather, gloves in one hand, the other resting on his hip. “Plus, it’s the only time I actually see you look nervous about anything.”

  Stark smiled. He liked that, though he imagined it wasn’t the Code Red that made him look nervous. “Something else you should know,” said Stark.

  “Oh?”

  How to say it? Was it possible to break such news gently? This was a model farm in many ways, from its Land Reform cooperative structure to its success against vCaMV. In the corner of his eye, the infected plant fluttered like a green fire. Finally, he simply handed Grandfather the field press. “It all in here.”

  Grandfather took the press without opening it. “Why a doctor of your caliber, upon whom the whole world depends, elects to speak like a backwoods hick is beyond me. Whatever happened to the verb ‘to be,’ anyway?” he said in a sour voice.

  “It clumsy.”

  “‘It is all in here.’ Say it.”

  “‘It is all in here,’” Stark said in a grand English accent, slipping halfheartedly into their old banter. His eyes flitted to the field press. “I got to go.”

  He turned and ran up the gravel drive to the manor, feeling as though he’d activated the timer on a grenade and shoved it in his grandfather’s hands.

  Nissevalle Manor was a four-story mansion built with Land Reform earnings ten years ago, and it housed the fifty-three working members of the quop. The house stood on a small bluff overlooking the farm’s barns and sheds, the quilt of five-acre private fields, and the much larger, hundred-acre cooperative fields sprawling against the southern hill faces in this valley.

  Stark ran up the dirt road from the spinach field and past the penetrating stench of the poultry barn, then yanked open the back door. From the spiral staircase, he could smell the posture-straightening scent of bacon frying. Dalia the Kitchen Czarina was feeding the early crew down in the dining hall after their shift, and as he ascended the spiral staircase to the fourth floor, Stark could hear a friendly argument about milk prices in the first-floor buyer’s den, someone singing (badly) in a shower, the whine of the house pooch, an e-phone ringing on the second floor, the three Wheeler kids speaking in their imaginary language, a tractor’s sudden bleat from the barn, laughter, chimes, a dripping faucet.

  The cacophony of home.

  Stark’s fourth-floor room looked west over the members’ private fields. An afterthought of a cubbyhole in the unfinished, pinewood hall, it was icy in winter, broiling in summer, and Stark knew the quop had given it to him because nobody else wanted it.

  He didn’t complain. As a CDC administrator, Stark didn’t bring much to the daily workings of a farm. Sure, he was an intern, a weeder when he wasn’t sampling for vCaMV, but if he’d stayed here for the last twenty years instead of accepting the Junior League’s scholarship for college when he was eighteen, he would have been a coordinator with years of experience in the quop by now. His choice of rooms. A senior share at profit disbursement. But now he always had one foot planted in the outside world—in the Congo, or in the vast urban outbreaks that blossomed from Kazakhstan to Kirkuk. Stark knew that he was occupying a space that might better be filled by a farmer, so small as his room was, he was grateful that the quop was willing to house him at all.

  Stark opened his bedroom door and swung his canvas bag onto the floor, ready to grab his brain gear, park his rump in the rocking chair, and contact the Command Center’s satellite.

  But he stopped short, hand still on the doorknob, as he realized that someone was standing in the middle of his room. Half in surprise, half in greeting, Stark said, “Hey.”

  The stranger lifted his face, lit with a sudden flash of alarm. It was Earl, the new arrival from Baltimore—a big, strapping fellow with forearms the size of bread loaves. As their eyes met, Stark was about to step backwards into the hall, but Earl seemed more frightened of Stark. “Oh. Hello,” he said. “I—”

  “What going on?” said Stark. “Why you in my room?”

  “Pardon me, please,” said Earl, his bush of black hair bobbing as he took a step toward Stark and the door. “I think I in the wrong room.”

  Stark snorted in mockery. Everyone knew that new arrivals like Earl stayed with the nonmember interns in the first-floor dorm. With gold mold still wiping out farms every summer, even experienced field hands were lucky to get a membership here. “I think you knew you ain’t in the right room.” Stark’s eyes darted to his brain gear, still dangling like a rubber squid on his rocker. Then his eyes shifted to his desk, where all the discs and his memboard sat, just as he’d left them last night. His only valuables hadn’t been touched or taken. “What you want in here?”

  Earl looked honestly shocked and embarrassed. “Nothing. I promise. I—” He took a step toward Stark and the door.

  Stark blocked his way. “Come on. What you doin here? You didn’t steal nothing that I can—”

  “No. Search me if you like.” Earl raised his hands. “I ain’t no thief.”

  “Then what you want?”

  Earl’s face colored. “I met a girl. She told me she lived up on the fourth floor. I thought this was—”

  “You lie good,” Stark said. “But you lyin.” His fists clenched in anger—and fear, as he contemplated what this huge man could do to him if things got rough. “You looking for the head of Surveillance and Response, ain’t you. You reporting to someone overseas?”

  It wasn’t long, but Earl paus
ed and blinked, and Stark knew that he’d hit the mark. “No, this girl said—”

  “Well, you found me,” said Stark. He spread his hands and let them flop to his sides. “Now what? You obviously don’t want to interfere with me, or hurt me, or you’d a done it already. Might as well tell me who you’re with.”

  Earl sighed and apparently decided he was done with the act and done with Stark, shoving him aside with a hard sweep of his arm.

  “Go downstairs and pack up,” Stark shouted at Earl’s back, following him to the stairwell and yelling after the man as he ran down the steps. “Gonna see to it you get kicked out! Tonight!”

  Earl picked up speed, running downstairs, but then he stopped and stuck his head into the center of the spiral staircase, looking up at Stark. “You think that scares me? You think I some homeless farmer looking for a handout from your grampa?”

  “You the one runnin.”

  Earl grinned wolfishly up at him, and said, “I ain’t the first to get inside your room, Dr. Stark of the CDC.” Then he started trotting down the stairs again, saying, “And I won’t be the last.”

  Earl’s words hit Stark like a pan in the face, and he backed down the hall to his bedroom as if a ghost had floated up the spiral stairs at him. Stark had known this day would come. He knew he would eventually bump into one of the spooks sent by God knows who to monitor his location, activity, field of research. Victoria told him—when he’d moved Surveillance and Response from the CDC headquarters in Atlanta—that the world’s various intelligence services would have to come looking for him, just to know, just to have it on record where the head of Surveillance and Response was “secretly” located.

  But even with that warning, even knowing that Earl would leave before Stark could explain to the quop that he was a spy, he still felt invaded, vulnerable. He slipped back into his room and shut the door, chest heaving in breathless fright. “When the last time you got accessed?” Stark said, turning to ask the memboard.

  Its display lit and the first notes of Bach’s third Brandenburg Concerto chimed. “Eleven-fifteen this morning,” it told him.

  So Earl had turned it on. “And when you last logged off?”

  “Eleven-seventeen.”

  Ten minutes ago. Stark went to his desk and examined his memboard, but nothing had been opened. As far as Stark could tell, Earl had simply turned it on, looked, and turned it off. Not that it mattered, really, since Stark had nothing worth spying on. If Earl had been sent by a foreign power, all he could tell them was that Stark was working on a joint project between the CDC and the National Institutes of Agronomy and that Stark’s grandfather was a hell of a farmer. Perhaps Stark’s work on gold mold was of interest abroad, but he doubted it. Though nine years of continuous outbreaks made it a crippling problem, gold mold was a uniquely American phenomenon.

  Stark walked over to his rocker, examined his brain gear—nothing missing. Nothing sabotaged that he could see.

  His adrenaline still coursing, Stark reminded himself that he had far more important things to worry about than boys playing spy.

  Then he walked to his door and slipped the little hook lock into its eye. For the first time in his life, as a boy or a grown man, Stark had locked the door of his quop room.

  STARK PICKED UP his brain gear, as most people in the house called his computer hardware, fidgeted with the tags, then stuck them to the skin over his right eyebrow, and slipped the goggles over his eyes. He sat down in his rocker and, when settled, uttered a single word. “Go.”

  A hundred kilometers above the Galapagos Islands, the CDC’s Command Center satellite heard Stark’s voice. His specs thrummed and the fiber-optic thread that encircled his contact lenses ignited to life. His optic nerve was tricked to the will of the AI on that satellite, and a screen seemed to appear against the bare north wall of Stark’s room. SURVEILLANCE/RESPONSE CENTRAL COMMAND, it read. Below the seals of the CDC and World Health Organization, came the warning, PREPARE FOR G-SCAN.

  Stark waited for the AI to identify him. The generic interface read Stark’s genome and vanished, then Queen Mum intoned in her cool English accent, “Dr. Stark, were you able to read the urgent message from Mexico’s Zapata Hospital?”

  He took a deep breath. Getting connected like this caused a mild dopamine flush, which helped counter the last shudders of adrenaline from finding Earl in his room. “I read it,” Stark said, “but it got mistranslated. Know why?”

  There was a slight pause. With most of the CDC’s funding coming from the European Union, the AI’s Norwegian engineers had anticipated that a European epidemiologist would head the Central Command, so the AI’s English was British. After two years, the rinky-dink AI still had a hard time with Stark’s Mississippi River accent. “Multiple translations through various postal AIs mangled it, to be sure,” Queen Mum said. “It arrived via a Namibian server. The message is gone, but the path it took to reach you is still available.”

  “That doctor wanted me to contact him soon as possible.”

  “Not advisable.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  Looking for the Urgent’s path among his notes, Stark scanned the incoming reports, a collation of information from 158 WHO country offices, 190 Ministries of Health, 200 WHO Collaborating Centers, eighty sentinel “Listening Posts,” 190 disease control centers, and from various mednets around the planet. This list was his “row to hoe,” a filtered list of sites and events over which he and the Queen Mum maintained a diligent watch:

  Health Impact of Earthquake in Sino-Jakarta

  Control and Surveillance of Communicable Disease among Texas Refugees

  Influenza. Cairo, Pan-Islamic Federation

  vCaMV. Monocropping farms, USA

  Dengue Fever. Ascensión, Holy Republic of Mexico

  Chagas Disease. Venezuela, Holy Republic of Mexico

  Cholera. Volgograd, Russo-Islamic DMZ

  HIV. Sino-Sydney

  Dengue Fever. Ascensión, Holy Republic of Mexico

  “Queen Mum, why didn’t you filter out the redundant Mexican report?”

  “The reports are not identical,” said Queen Mum, “and therefore not redundant.”

  “Who filed them?”

  “One is the Urgent you read from Zapata Hospital in Ascensión, Mexico. The other is from the Holy Renaissance’s Central Command.”

  Helping Mexico with dengue was like helping Amsterdam with the clap. His inclination was to pass this off to the Special Pathogens net, or even the Tropical Disease Task Force. “Show me Mexico’s Central Command report, then.”

  15 May, ’61, Zapata Hospital in Ascensión DF reports an outbreak of dengue fever. Twelve patients, three fatalities. All twelve patients reside in central, lower Ascensión. With the rainy season beginning, Mexico’s Ministry of Health is taking steps to fumigate for Aedes aegypti. Our own Special Pathogens Branch has been alerted to the outbreak. Dr. Miguel Cristóbal, National Institute’s Central Command, Holy Republic of Mexico.

  Vanilla. Three deaths were considerable for dengue, but not catastrophic. “So who sent the Urgent, the one about the flying beasts?”

  “Dr. Pedro Muñoz, Staff Epidemiologist, Zapata Hospital.”

  Stark swore. “A staff doctor figured out how to send me an Urgent?” He didn’t have a copy of the message anymore, only a record that he’d been contacted, but the odd Urgent still thrummed in his thoughts:

  Minister Alejandro bore into the kingdom two WHO virologists, but they are commencing on untrue discoveries.

  This dengue is not dengue.

  I am the unique man witnessing reality. Pedro Muñoz.

  In retrospect, the message was obviously unauthorized—a scary gambit on this fellow Muñoz’s part if Mexico’s notorious servicio sagrado ever traced it to him. But Stark imagined he would do the same if he thought the powers-that-be were commencing on untrue discoveries. He couldn’t help but admire Muñoz for it. “Which WHO physicians in Mexico on the dengue case?”

  “Dr. Jacqu
es Girard and Dr. Claire du Monde filed reports from Ascensión yesterday.” She pronounced the names in pitch-perfect French, just as she had properly pronounced the Spanish name Ascensión with four, precise syllables.

  Stark knew the names Girard and du Monde. Good reputations. No problem there. Muñoz mentioned Minister Alejandro in his Urgent. Diego Alejandro was a fellow student of Stark’s in Oaxaca—a neighborhood vato who had gone on to become a beloved professor at Las Universidades Unidos de Oaxaca and a frequent volunteer in Mexico’s emergency epidemic teams. Though Diego was the Minister of Health now, a bureaucrat in the murky church-state of Mexico’s Holy Renaissance, perhaps he still had enough vato in him to tell Stark what was really happening in Ascensión. “Mum, find a private phone or message service for Minister Diego Alejandro, please.”

  “Finding the Minister of Health will require maneuvering around Mexico’s satellite embargo on the US—a violation of international law.”

  “You the tool for the job, Mum. Go.”

  While a rectangle of sunlight slid across his bedroom floor, Queen Mum tried Stark’s CDC override codes. All of them had been blocked, so Queen Mum tried an old medical hotline established before the rise of the Holy Renaissance some thirty years ago. The Mexican AIs that were enforcing the satellite embargo adjusted and severed her line. Mum did manage one connection to the Central Command in Mexico’s National Institute of Health, but the Command’s AI was so fast that Stark received the Holy Republic’s entire embargo document (all forty-thousand words) before he could say “Buenas tardes.”

  Finally, Queen Mum found a path into Mexico through the World Health Organization’s AI in Copenhagen linked to the Holy Republic of Quebec.

  “I altered our code so that we appear to be a vaccine supply company,” said Queen Mum. “This violates twelve paragraphs of the embargo.”