The Patron Saint of Plagues

by Barth Anderson

  Whether or not Muñoz’s theory about hemorrhagic fever held water, the fact that Diego Alejandro had classified this outbreak indicated that the Ministry of Health believed that there was something unusual about this dengue. The simplest explanation, Stark deduced, was that someone in the Ministry was familiar with the pathogen and that Diego feared the early moments of the outbreak would show that. It was unusual, it had been mishandled in some way, and the Ministry was now hoping the outbreak would run its course and go away—something that Muñoz, at least, had warned them against.

  That was just guesswork, but guesswork based on Stark’s experience with reluctant governments who feared the appearance of botching a public-health crisis. He scratched the tag over his right eyebrow. “Is there a nanophagic analysis? Have genhunters been released yet?”

  “I’m not on the Task Force anymore. I don’t hear what the National Institute is doing, though I might hear about it at the conference today,” said Muñoz. “Here’s another question you should ask yourself, Dr. Stark. Why isn’t there a vaccination program? They say it’s almost mobilized, but I think they’re delaying on purpose.” Muñoz’s voice suddenly sounded solemn, spooky.

  “On purpose? They aren’t vaccinating on purpose?” Stark almost rose from his chair. “What the hell are you talking about, Muñoz?”

  Muñoz whispered. “I can’t say any more. I’m in so much danger. That’s all. The rest is up to you, sir.”

  Stark liked Muñoz and felt for him, an honest man trying to tell the truth in the midst of wild confusion. “You’re right about one thing, Muñoz. This virus requires that your Ministry of Health vaccinate because Ascensión is now primed for a hemorrhagic fever outbreak. It’s unlikely but anyone might deduce from public medical information that it’s a possibility. That’s enough for me to take action. I can start rallying tetravalent vaccine stocks today” said Stark, noting that Queen Mum had already contacted WHO affiliates in the sub-Sahara for donations of dengue vaccine. “Meanwhile, I am a jury waiting to hear more than the weak case you’ve presented.”

  Muñoz seemed reenergized, the stoop in his posture less pronounced. “What do you need?”

  “I need epidemiological data. Better, I’d love to see what Mexico’s field teams say about that data. Can you get me their report when it becomes available?”

  “I can’t imagine how, but I’ll try.”

  “Are you in serious danger at the moment?”

  He sighed so deeply that Stark felt exhausted, too. “Yes,” Muñoz said. “I’m surrounded by doctors from the servicio sagrado and they’re the ones—” In that pause a well of fear opened, and Stark could tell that the young doctor had seen something terrible at the very bottom of it. “As long as I keep taking their punches in public, I think I’m safe. So that’s my strategy for survival.”

  Stark gave Muñoz the clearance code to contact Queen Mum through the Quebec-Denmark link, then realized the Para Ustedes cameraman had returned to his post. Stark wanted to tell Muñoz to check in with him every couple of hours or so, just in case the Holy Renaissance tried to spirit him away, but he was distracted by the view on-screen. “Looks like the field team has arrived. Just take it easy, Pedro. Don’t make any more enemies. Get some sleep and—”

  But Muñoz had already hung up.

  Twee audio crackled through the netcast line, and the view swung away from the hallway in front of the conference room. Ojos and reporters were crowding in front of the elevator doors.

  On-screen, three women and two men were muscling their way out of the elevators. They had the drained, vacant look of a Special Pathogens team who didn’t like where their research had led them, nor the direction it was headed. Two ojos were crowding the field team’s leader with their zombie eyes and ramrod postures, but no one was talking. “Dr. Muñoz claims he’s found thirty-five percent mutation, that this dengue passes from human to human,” said one ojo, his voice surprisingly expressive for his robotic stance. “Is that what you found, Dr. Cristóbal?”

  Cristóbal was a stoic man with a neat brush of a moustache, and, even on net-feed, he exuded clarity of mind and seriousness of purpose. But he brushed past the reporters and grimly stalked toward the conference room. He and his team disappeared inside and a moment later, a queue of doctors, including Pedro Muñoz, followed. Diego Alejandro and Elena Batista brought up the rear, with Batista shutting the doors behind them.

  Stark blinked the coverage shut and sat for a moment, rocking in his chair without removing his goggles. A country on the brink of war, classifying information and thereby impeding the progress of its own scientists. Perhaps the pathogen was an experimental virus that was accidentally released—Mexico was famous for its viral therapy—and Diego didn’t want the world to know it was his own Ministry’s fault. Perhaps the Holy Renaissance wanted to downplay the outbreak to make sure the US knew Mexico wasn’t to be tangled with, even in the middle of an outbreak. Perhaps there was a connection between Diego’s quarantine and the spy in Stark’s own room?

  Stark scoffed at himself. I just perhapsing myself to death.

  But there was little he could do, so far from Ascensión without blood samples or cryoslides of the virus. He could call Joaquin Delgado, his former teacher, but he wanted more information before bothering him. Stark supposed he could research dengue-4 now. Or brush up on the pathology of arboviruses. Or familiarize himself with recent nanophagic advances in regard to unfamiliar emergents.

  Mainly he wondered if there was anyone besides Muñoz whom he could trust in Mexico, if even his old friend Diego Alejandro had compromised himself.

  SUNDAY, MAY 15. 12:10 P.M.

  THE MAN STOOD beneath the cavernous beauty of the Basilica’s ceiling, his eyes drawing naturally along the gleaming, vaulted arches to the tattered, five-hundred-year-old cloak over the church’s altar.

  Shouldering his backpack, he folded his hands prayerfully. “It’s a relief to see you, Blessed Virgin.”

  He half hoped that a booming voice would greet and repel him when he entered the Basilica of El Conquistador. A clap of thunder? Or could he be so bold as to hope for a welcome from Gabriel’s trumpet? But the only sound that greeted him was the inane babble of tourists, as fifty rolling conveyer belts took chattering Euros and Japanese on a winding, back-and-forth path beneath the cloak.

  The story of the cloak was well-known to any Mexican Catholic. Twelve years after the conquistador Hernando Cortés finished butchering the natives of this valley, the Virgin Mary had appeared to a Nahua indígena named Diego. Atop El Cerrito, the hill that now overlooked the Basilica, Mary soothed the Indian’s fears saying, “¿No estoy Yo aqui que soy tu Madre?” Am I not here, I that am your Mother? Moved by his vision, Diego took a cloakful of roses as an offering to the church at the bottom of the hill (the site of the future Basilica). But when he arrived, the roses had vanished and branded on his cloak was the now famous image of the blue-robed Virgin, her skin and hair, native dark.

  The Virgin of Guadalupe.

  Now, he thought, Mexico has a prophetess to go with her Virgin and he wondered how rival pope Cardinal de Veras liked being upstaged by a nun. Cruddy, bootlegged ojo footage of the nun’s old prophecies filled netcasts at night for the nonpilonistas, and Sister Domenica spread her warnings. Her followers passed them mouth to ear, or pilone to pilone, until all of Mexico seemed to buzz with the word plago.

  Her mention of a plague was sheer coincidence, the man told himself as he stared across the church at the tattered cloak and its faded image of the Indian Madonna. Coincidences. Only coincidences, please, he prayed. No miracles, Mamacita.

  Hanging back, he watched and waited for a sign. On the broadcast two days ago, Pirate had said that the nun would be at the Basilica, delivering a Sunday sermon. Last night, the man hadn’t been able get close enough to touch Domenica at the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows, and he wasn’t certain how many more chances he would receive before the city erupted in chaos.

  He watche
d the local penitents filing in to the Basilica to find a confessor, looking into their pious faces and uplifted eyes, and dividing the crowd into mestizo and nonmestizo, Indian and non-Indian. You. Not you. You. The population, here, was especially diverse, but most were mestizo. He knew that with his passage through the subway, market, and the Basilica, he had left behind a wake of infection, and imagined that he could watch it now, spreading, infiltrating. With every brush of skin on skin, his virus leapt like fire from match head to match head.

  You. You.

  Near him, a loud German couple, white as dead chickens, harangued at each other in their shearing language.

  When the Spanish royalty came to their newly conquered land in the early sixteenth century, they were obsessed with limpieza de sangre. Purity of blood. Though they could not prevent interracial blending in Mexico, the Spanish literally charted the intermingling of races, giving them names like breeds of donkeys and mules: mestizo, indigena, octaroon, mulato, lobo. Portraits were even painted for the benefit of Old World dignitaries, cataloging the faces of the New.

  You. Not you. You.

  Standing in the rear of the church, feigning quiet contemplation beside the Germans, he noted the many lightning-strike scars on left temples: the brain of the Holy Renaissance. Other than the scar, they looked no different from anyone else—indeed, some obviously weren’t even mestizo. But they were Connected, and they carried themselves differently, listening to and reading the barrage of information on the Holy Renaissance’s central pilone net as it arrived in their minds’ eyes, fast as sparking neurons, an Internet of flesh, blood, and slow cortical brain waves.

  The German couple stepped forward, and, at that moment, a round-faced priest, in Holy Renaissance black-and-scarlet robes, edged himself into the man’s peripheral vision. “Is this your first visit to the Basilica?”

  He pretended not to hear.

  The priest stepped into the man’s line of sight. “Are you from Mexico, sir?”

  “Yes,” he said, annoyed. “Born and raised.”

  Eyes drifted over the older man’s face. “And, yet, no pilone?”

  The man took a step back and reminded himself that the priest had no reason to suspect him of anything. “No, I never got the surgery.”

  “That’s what I find strange. I saw you standing here, a good-looking gentleman, so stately that I took you for a lawyer or a physician,” the priest said. “It seemed strange to me that a man like you wouldn’t have—”

  The priest trailed off, and the man stared at him, hard, letting the silence stretch uncomfortably between them. “I can’t afford it,” he lied.

  “Ah! My apologies. Are you a bajadore, then?”

  He was asking if the man lived street level. “Yes,” he lied again.

  “I understand.” The priest removed a card from a packet in his hand. “Take this, then.”

  The man took it, holding it at arm’s length in order to read it clearly.

  DIVINE INTERVENTION, PILONE IMPLANT SURGERY

  AND WETWARE THERAPY, SLIDING SCALE FEES FOR

  CITIZENS OF LA BAJA CIUDAD, Ascensión DF.

  “The Holy Renaissance’s hypereconomy can help anyone who’s Connected. Not to mention the benefits of instant confession and guaranteed last rites. There are so many opportunities available to you after the surgery.”

  The man suddenly couldn’t see the words printed upon the paper card. Blood seemed to wash across his vision, and, struggling to maintain his composure, he said, “I have heard that.” He raised the card to his lips, as if considering, convinced that the pounding of his overburdened heart could be heard throughout the church.

  They proselytize it. Priests push the Connection, here, in the Holy Basilica. I had no idea.

  The German couple rolled back to where the man and the priest were standing, and, with his passable German, he understood the woman to say, “This is taking too long. Let’s go and hear the nun at la Capilla now.”

  Ah. My sign. Gracias, Virgen de Guadalupe. It’s good to know that You are on my side, the man prayed. He recovered himself and made sure that the edge of the card was damp as he lowered it from his mouth, then offered it to the priest. “I’m unable to receive the implants as my immune system rejects them.”

  “Oh, I see.” The priest took the card gingerly, pursing his lips in irritation at its dampness. “You can’t afford it and your immune system won’t accept the pilone.” He wiped his fingertips on his satin robe. “That’s an unbelievable tragedy, one that I’ve reported along with an image of you, sir,” he said stiffly. “Conquer with Christ, hijo.”

  The man frowned, trying to look stricken, or sad, or poor. Truly, though, he didn’t care if the priest believed him or not. Beneath his brows, he was looking at the white line of the priest’s pilone scar disappearing into his thinning hair, and thinking:

  You.

  Cerro de Tepeyac was a little mountain on the Valley of Mexico’s floor overlooking the high Basilica. The steep hill, lush with gardens and green topiaries, drew a steady stream of people ascending to the chapel and the sacred site where Don Diego had seen the Virgin long ago.

  The man climbed quickly in long steps, perspiring in the blaze of Mexico’s sun, but slowed as he came upon three men with their shirts off who were whipping themselves as they walked, opening long creases of blood down their skinny backs. The man recoiled, stride faltering briefly before he found his feet. Black leather hood-masks hid their faces, the man knew, to keep them anonymous so their agony would not be equated with Christ’s. The air around them was steely with the smell of sweat and blood.

  At the summit, the flagellants’ moans disappeared in the din of the murmuring crowd gathered before the hill’s chapel. Standing in the rear, on the stairs, he couldn’t see Sister Domenica. Most couldn’t. The chapel’s crowd was filled with pilonistas, the man surmised, accessing the chapel’s node or Domenica’s personal terminus, listening to her sermon via Connection and nodding to the words in their minds. Poorer people in the crowd, their temples unmarred by the lightning-strike incision, pushed toward the sound of Domenica’s high soprano voice. The man moved with them.

  Before the ornate sixteenth-century chapel, Sister Domenica stood like a common indígena woman in her dark blue serape and long, black braid. A number of nuns from the Order of Guadalupe were lined up nearby in pale blue mantles and white dresses, and between the crowd and Domenica were a cordon of young machos. Staring outward, statues of the nine archangels guarded the chapel, watchful eyes turned to the honking, thronging grid-work of La Baja Ciudad below and the pristine, sea-green towers of La Alta above.

  “Orbegón calls Mexicans ‘Anahuacs,’ the First People of the Americas,” the nun cried, her voice dripping with condescension. “But has Emil Orbegón allowed the Nahua Council or any Native Mexicans into his Majority Party?”

  The shy woman from the Pirate’s broadcast was gone. This was a hothead, a radical, not a soft-spoken nun.

  “The Holy Mother told us about the eruption of Popo before it happened. She told us about the uprising in our Guatemala province. Her prophecy is unfinished. She begs you to believe Her, Mexico, when She warns that a greater lesson is coming.

  “When this bloody plague arrives,” Domenica said with both hands held high, palms outward, “a decision will be put before each one of you. Destroy or build. Fight Orbegón’s wars or heal yourselves. Remember this when the dead are so many that they cannot be buried.”

  The man couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Dissent to the Holy Renaissance? Did the loathsome little priest down in the Basilica know what the woman was saying on holy ground?

  The nun shouted, “The great Marcos once said that Indians are those who remember. Well then, let’s remember. Now. Together. Eight years ago Orbegón said the Aztec homeland, Aztlán, was in Arizona and New Mexico. So Orbegón went to war and took those two territories. Now his archaeologists claim that Aztlán was in Texas and Oklahoma too. In eight more years, he’ll claim Az
tlán was in Chicago, New York, Canada, Great Britain. Lies told to you by fascists who need your sons to fight their wars. Will your children follow marching orders while your own parents die of this unnatural disease at home? Will you bring war to the United States while Ascensión collapses?”

  She couldn’t know. She couldn’t possibly know, but she knew. The man couldn’t fathom how, but, by her words, Domenica knew what he’d introduced to Mexico just four days ago. Bloody plague? Unnatural disease? Somehow she understood that his fever was about to sink this city. The man had the distinct feeling that they were dueling—that he and the nun stood alone before the chapel—she with her back to the church, he with an archangel at either shoulder, the square between them shuffling with ghosts.

  The frightened core of the crowd pressed forward and formed a line—students or poor campesinos from outside the city, and a cluster of wild-eyed men clutching to the scraps of their sanity—escapees of the servicio sagrado‘s spas, the man imagined.

  “Bless my baby!” a mother shouted. “Protect her from the plague!”

  The man fell in line with the others, rolling up his sleeves, close enough now to see a zigzag scar disappearing into Domenica’s thick hair as she reached for the infant. “Sister, touch me!” he cried out in a mix of fury and confusion. She cannot know. She knows. She cannot know. He wiped his nose on his palm, then extended his hand toward her, fingers spread.

  The nun’s head jerked toward him.

  Her companion, a strapping young man with curly red hair, leaned toward her, whispering urgently. Domenica’s eyelids fluttered, as if she were faint. She answered him, then he took the child from her arms, gazing down the line with a scowl—searching for someone who didn’t belong.

  The man stepped back from the line, willing himself to dissolve into the crowd’s anonymity. You saw nothing, you saw nothing, he said silently.