The Patron Saint of Plagues

by Barth Anderson

  Domenica translated the images that the woman in white had given her, delivering them as prophecy. The virus was made by a Spaniard and more deaths were coming. If everyone obeyed the doctors, stayed clean and careful, they might live. If not, the Spaniard’s virus would find them.

  Then she collapsed, her head sinking against the cushion with a sigh of relief. Pirate snuffed out the link on his way to the bathroom to get Domenica a compress.

  While she waited for him, arm thrown over her eyes, Domenica could hear the netmonitor across the library, tuned to the Holy Renaissance’s emergency channel. The incessant noise of it was infuriating, but without the Connection, netcasts were the only means of getting news. Domenica listened to the running commentary on the outbreak, and in the avalanche of the netcast chatter, one name leapt out, almost like a pilone data packet filling Domenica’s VisionField.

  She heard the name again. Domenica leaned on one elbow and looked at the netmonitor.

  Chana.

  “Could it be that Mexico’s hot new prophetess is really just a sham artist posing as a nun?”

  Domenica crawled to a sitting position and frowned at the netmonitor.

  “If you’re living outside Ascensión, vote by touching the appropriate box on your screen. We’ll have the poll results right after this.”

  The screen went to a Ministry of Health message about mixing bleach and water. Another screen tumbled forward and split down the middle. The split screen showed Domenica’s own wide smile on one half, a Jesuchristo el conquistador pin on the collar of her Order’s uniform. On the other half was the once-popular actress Chana Chenalho. The eleven-year-old picture, bleached hair cut razor short, a grimace of fury and mockery on her face, was the famous shot of her arrest after her coatl protest.

  “Mary Mother of God,” said Domenica, covering her face with her hand. “What in the world is happening to me?”

  Pirate emerged from the bathroom with a soaked bandana folded into a square. He stopped and looked at the netmonitor as he passed. “What is this?”

  The emergency channels were running old footage of Chana Chenalho’s famous street performance, the one at the wrecked construction site of the first La Alta tower, the performance that had landed the actress “in spa” eleven years ago. “They’re telling people that I’m Chana Chenalho.”

  “The protester?” said Pirate, handing Domenica the compress. “Why?”

  On-screen, Chana Chenalho was wearing her piggishly fat Madame Stephanie Orbegón costume and chattering in the First Lady’s gringa accent and clueless mix of Spanish and English. Behind the actress were the ruins of the first tower, toppled in the earthquake that had unearthed the foundation of the forgotten Temple of Xipe Totec. “I can’t wait! Shopping malls a kilometro above Ascensión! ¡Que puro!” Chana-as-Madame-Orbegón said, thrusting out her great foam chest into the camera. Then she turned and shouted at the workers milling in the construction site. “¡Ándale, muchachos! I have a ten-thirty brunch! Let’s get this tower up!”

  Construction workers stopped and shaded their eyes, smiling in Chana’s direction.

  “Vámanos, OK? Back to work! Emil outlawed unions two years ago!”

  Pirate laughed. “I remember that. I was in orbit, working the satellite relays for Cancún Control when she did this. The servicio sagrado got called in to arrest her because the censors couldn’t shut her down. Her popularity and approval were too high for them to override without risking a revolt. S.S. had to arrest her right in the middle of a hot uplink.” He shook his head in appreciation and handed Domenica the cold bandana. “She sure knew how to work the media.”

  Domenica pressed the compress to her face and stared at the netmonitor through the haze of her headache. She felt like that bent tower, that razed Aztec temple. “The Holy Renaissance is smearing me.”

  Pirate nodded toward the screen. “You’re in good company.”

  On-screen, she could see block rectangles of the Aztec temple’s foundation thrusting through the concrete base of the modern tower. Vertical girders splayed like broken fingers overhead. At the center of the destruction was the two-ton marble head of a feathered serpent, a coatl, pushed up by the earthquake from where Cortés’s soldiers had buried it, archaeologists later determined, in 1519. And the actress ranted. Her fat foam legs, pinched into teeny boots, scissored across the demolished construction site. “I can’t wait until everyone in Mexico gets the Connection!” Chana was saying. “Then you watch, we’ll all get rich, rich, rich on La Bolsa’s hypereconomy. Even las indígenas! That’s what Emil says, OK? No pobres anymore. And I can’t wait to see what Emil does to the poor old Estados Unidos then!”

  Domenica listened to this with the cold compress warming itself against her hot eyes. The headache wouldn’t go away, not until she slept it off. But she was too angry and shocked for sleep.

  Am I not here, little Chana, the woman in white had said, I that am your Mother forever and ever?

  Eyes closed again, she could hear Pirate shutting down the camera, packing it up. “We can’t stay here much longer. Servicio sagrado is everywhere,” he said. “What about going back to the hot zone?”

  “Sounds like a death sentence,” she groaned. Domenica opened her eyes and looked at the netmonitor.

  A new frame flipped forward and showed a Holy Renaissance psychologist, wearing the now customary black-and-red antiviral suit of a government official. It was a wide-angle shot, showing the psychologist in a garden with an eagle topiary behind him. An interviewer, also wearing a moon suit, sat beside him on a deck chair. Domenica had the distinct feeling that she had once been in that garden. “She was a hard case,” the doctor was saying. Domenica couldn’t see his face through his helmet shield. “Chana Chenalho came through in the end and signed a loyalty oath to the Renaissance after her seven-month spa, but it was a hard seven months.”

  “Praise God,” the interviewer cooed in her helmet. “¡Que puro!”

  “After spa, Chana joined the Order of Guadalupe nuns, changing her name to Domenica. This is all thoroughly documented for public examination,” the doctor said in the frustrated tone of a dad describing all he had done for a rebellious teenager. “We encouraged her. We paid for her schooling at the Convent of the Order of Guadalupe. Everyone on staff wanted her to be happy in her new dedication to God. Now it seems our efforts to reach her were not as successful as I’d been led to believe.”

  “Can you describe the Antigua Method for me, Doctor?”

  Domenica knew that man. She couldn’t place him but she had seen his face before. Was he an old family friend, perhaps, a long-lost character from her childhood? Perhaps he was someone she had known, one of the tech crew from her brief, terrible stint with the telenovelas. Perhaps he was a teacher from one of the improvisational acting schools that she had attended, or a farming compañero of her father’s in Oaxaca who—

  Domenica gasped.

  Those thoughts. Those memories. Whose were they?

  She made a fist until her knuckles blanched, as if wringing those strange memories from her brain.

  Acting school? Whose upbringing was that? That wasn’t her. That wasn’t her childhood of walking up the flower-lined path to her Catholic grade school in the suburbs of Mexico City. Her days after school were spent in the study of the pre-Columbian Anahuac Empire and its reemergence in the rising party, the Holy Renaissance. Telenovelas? Oaxaca? Farmers? She winced, trying to make sense of the craziness that had made its way into her head.

  “The Antigua Method was state of the art for its time,” said the psychologist, “and in my opinion has yet to be disproved. Raghib and Gunderson have thoroughly mapped the faith centers of the brain. It is within the pathology of cerebral development for the mind to encounter and examine its own self, then its own death. Around the age of seven years, the brain provides hardware, if you will, to embrace the paradox of both the ego’s mortality and its undying place in the cosmos. This is faith. A beautiful evolutionary development, essent
ial for a reasoning species. For the faithless, the Antigua Method merely corrects faulty wiring in these underdeveloped regions of the brain.”

  “But it did not work in the case of Chana Chenalho?” asked the interviewer.

  “The Antigua Method replaces one pathology with another,” said the psychologist. “Like crooked teeth, if the braces are removed, the old dental pattern will sometimes reassert itself. So with the brain.” He turned and looked into the camera as it slowly zoomed toward his face. This was all scripted, Domenica realized with a rush of fear. They were trying to invade her mind. “Sister Domenica’s conception of the Virgin is nothing more than a phantom image dancing across the synapses of her broken mind. A conglomerate, I have determined, of old matriarchal family members—her grandmother, specifically, might be whom she pictures when she ‘sees’ the woman in white. I want to help Domenica. Mexicanistas, if you know the whereabouts of Sister Domenica, please, report to your priest or to a Holy Renaissance medical volunteer.” His face hardened into concern and pity. “Please, help me find Chana Chenalho. If you see her, contact the servicio sagrado office in your neighborhood.”

  Offscreen, the interviewer breathed, “¡Que puro!”

  Domenica struggled to her feet and looked at Pirate. “Get your stuff. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “Something tells me,” Pirate said, snapping the camera into its carrying case, “we’re not going back to the convent.”

  “No,” Domenica said, “we’re going into the hot zone.”

  Pirate laughed. “Old Antonio told me I’d be back.”

  TUESDAY, MAY 17. 7:00 A.M.

  “YOU’RE CLEAN. Congratulations.” The medica at the International Airport smiled at Stark through her face shield after reading the last of his test results. “You’re one of us.”

  Stark checked the clock on the wall—0700. He was exhausted, having spent the better part of his first night in Ascensión examining airport operations and, with Rosangelica’s help, coordinating them with the Task Force, soon to be under Stark’s command. Wearily, he picked up the white Racal-plus suit that he’d been issued. “It’s been a while since I put one of these on,” he said, slipping his feet through the suit’s legs and into the boots. He shimmied the waistband up to his hips, then realized he’d gone about the process all wrong. The locks at the wrist cuffs dangled out of his reach as he gripped the waistband in place. “Um.”

  The medica held the shoulders of his suit while he shrugged inside, then locked his neck collar. She even held his gloves for him as if he were a toddler getting dressed for winter. “You’ll get used to it,” she said, snapping the air tanks onto Stark’s back. She fitted the helmet over his head, sliding it against the suit’s collar until it caught with a click and hiss. “Ready?”

  He nodded. “Empuédame.” Power me up.

  She closed the collar, then hit the power.

  Immediately, the suit puffed, making him look slightly rounder, the lines of his compact body indistinct. His ears filled and popped, and it was almost as if his hangover popped too. Nice bonus for wearing this bag.

  Rosangelica, already suited, appeared at the entrance to the bathroom-cum-exam station. “All clean, Estarque?” Rosangelica said, though the Spanish word she used was “blanco” not “limpia,” as Stark would have expected. Are you white, Estarque?

  A bit of leftover racism from the Spanish colonial era, Stark imagined, casting a nervous glance at the dark-skinned medica.

  “There’s an aerobus waiting,” she said, her voice high and chirping through the suit’s speaker. “Ándale. We leave at seven-thirty.”

  Stark followed Rosangelica out of the VIP Exam Room, then stopped. “What do you mean ‘we’?” He had presumed that once they’d issued protocols on how global shipments of vaccine were to be handled that the sabihonda would see how boring his work was and choose to leave him alone. “I thought we were parting ways here.”

  “The senior members of your Task Force,” Rosangelica said, still walking, “are planning to meet you on the way to the Majority Cloister in Torre Cuauhtémoc. Everyone is here. You and I were the last to arrive.”

  It was so loud in the airport concourse that Stark had to run after her and ask her to repeat her last sentence. The International Airport was solely for medical shipments and transport, per Stark’s orders in transit, so trucks and ambulances had turned the airport’s corridors into cacophonous roadways, as queues of ground transports moved medical supplies from the tarmac inside. “But I’m here now. Safe and sound. I don’t need you anymore,” Stark shouted over the roar of passing trucks.

  “It’s already arranged. We’ll be in Torre Cuauhtémoc, the La Alta tower where President Orbegón has gathered the core of the Holy Renaissance—the Majority Cloister,” Rosangelica said, leading Stark to a set of giant air locks covering the airport’s foot-traffic exit. A line of people in ill-fitting Racal-plus suits or gloves and clamp masks were waiting to pass through the air locks. “The Ministry of Health is there. So is the National Institute, and of course your Outbreak Task Force. Orbegón wants to monitor your progress closely.”

  Plastered across the airport’s windows were posters playing the Mexican national anthem and calls for Anahuacs to reunify Texas to La Patria. Many posters showed stylized pictures of the President for Life, high-contrast images of his rectangular moustache, chevron eyebrows, and signature spectacles. EMIL EL OLVIDADO DE DIOS, read the posters, their pilone prayer nodes blinking ineffectually. Emil the Damned. Siempre rezamos por su alma. We pray for his soul always.

  “What a load of crap,” Stark said in English.

  Inside her helmet, Rosangelica’s low voice was threatening. “You’re not in Bastrop anymore, Doctor.”

  “Mexicans really believe that line about an Anahuac Empire?” The Holy Renaissance dubbed every pre-Columbian discovery in North America—whether an Ojibwe fire pit in Saskatchewan or an Olmec boulder head in Veracruz—proof of the once-sprawling Anahuac Empire. Proof of Mexico’s ancient dominance over the continent. “Or does everyone know that just government garbage?”

  “Cut it, Estarque.”

  He had to know how deep her loyalties ran. “Do you believe it?”

  Rosangelica led Stark to the queue filing through the massive set of exit air locks, big particle arresters that panted and sighed like giant lungs. Stark’s ears didn’t fill as he passed through the air lock. The pressure in his suit was stable, he was glad to see. “I believe in El Olvidado de Dios. That’s what I believe,” said Rosangelica.

  “The hell you talking about?”

  “I believe in Orbegón. Emil.” Rosangelica had shifted to Spanish, and said it like she knew the man. “Emil is El Olvidado de Dios because he takes all of Mexico’s sins upon himself. The wars. The killing of criminals and other low elements.” Ahead of them people stamped their feet on chemical pads and raised their arms for a blast of bleach across their suits. “He’s the savior-scapegoat of a deeply Catholic country.”

  This gonna be my constant companion, huh? Stark thought, passing through the ALHEPA. Ain’t that wonderful.

  Outside the airport, beneath the full glare of the Mexican sun, Rosangelica looked up and down the unloading zone’s roundabout, lined with aero-buses and swoops, searching for the one she wanted.

  “This way. They’re down here.”

  Stark saw eight people in Racal suits standing before a bloated aerobus. Six of the suits were like Stark’s, white with cube helmets and broad, clear face shields. The other two were black and red with the shepherd-staff seal on the back. Holy Renaissance officials.

  As the eight people noticed Rosangelica approaching, they turned to greet the pair. Stark shook hands at once with Jarum Ahwaz, who now sported a well-trained handlebar moustache and a powdering of gray hair since the last time Stark had seen him in Atlanta. Jarum was a Palestinian from the Pan-Islam Virological Institute and had been a frequent advisor to the Doctors Without Borders Commission, a group that the CDC’s Cen
tral Command worked with closely. “Dr. Stark,” Ahwaz said in English, “I regret no time for poker in this outbreak. It’s a very bad one.”

  Stark assured Ahwaz that, if possible, they would find time to relieve the Palestinian of his cash.

  The other face Stark knew was precious to him, one with which he identified the most gruesome moments of his life. Dr. Isabel Khushub from Pakistan.

  “What did you say?” Rosangelica asked.

  Stark had muttered his thought aloud. What a relief.

  Stark had worked with Isabel in the old days when he was with Special Pathogens, and Isabel was a viral pathologist for Mexico’s National Institute—back when she was known as Dr. Isabel Fuente Niebla. Circumstances—or astrological phenomena, according to her—constantly threw Stark and Isabel together, outbreak after outbreak; but he hadn’t seen Isabel for over a year, not since the Imhotep Outbreak in Cairo. Quashing the smallpox epidemic had earned Isabel Khushub an impressive book deal in the virus’s wake, and reading her book had made him feel close to her—though he was in Wisconsin and she, Punjab. But here she was, not the compassionate mind behind a well-written book, but Isabel herself, with all her glorious contradictions—her blown-glass elegance, filthy mouth, cutting mind, and maddening superstitions.

  Isabel was speaking with one of the men in a Holy Renaissance suit. Stark strode toward her. “Dr. Khushub,” he said loudly. “I finally read The Mummy’s Curse last winter. We’ll have to confer about your portrayal of me.”

  Isabel turned to face Stark. The bulky antiviral suit and aquarium helmet couldn’t conceal the woman’s polish. Briefly, she lifted her arms akimbo, as if to catch Stark, or embrace him, perhaps, then folded them across her chest again. She was looking at him, she recognized him, but Isabel’s eyes guttered and went dead. “I thought I knew you well enough,” she said, in an even voice, devoid of humor, “to paint an accurate picture, Dr. Stark.”