The Patron Saint of Plagues

by Barth Anderson

  “Mouth pustules?” asked Garcia.

  “No, no mouth pustules yet.”

  “Momentito,” Garcia said. “Dr. Cruz, this is Dr. Florencia Ramos, the head of Perimeter Clinic Eight.”

  Joaquin opened his eyes and smiled at Dr. Ramos.

  The suited doctor saluted him by way of greeting. “My pleasure. What do you practice, Doctor?”

  “I was in genetics at Zapata,” Joaquin said. It was now time to make his play for the head physician’s trust. “But I also tailored Zapata’s computer system for its unique epidemiological needs.”

  Garcia examined him skeptically. “Computers?” The word sounded like an anachronism, the way she said it. “You’re a geneticist and a computer man?”

  He flashed his best smile at her. “What can I say? I’m good with code.”

  Garcia was distracted, momentarily, but not by Joaquin’s beauty. “Our new Joint Ops coordinator, a man named del Negro,” she said, “seems to think our mission is collecting data.”

  “Sounds like an epidemiologist. I’ve worked with them before as a data cruncher.”

  Garcia nodded, thinking. She was smart, Joaquin could see. She was curious about him, maybe even a bit dubious. But Joaquin’s résumé was irresistible, and under the circumstances, she obviously couldn’t take time for lengthy job interviews.

  “Dr. Ramos, take Cruz to Systems,” Garcia said finally. “Del Negro wants chicken reports collated with our findings. Maybe Cruz, here, can handle that so the rest of us can concentrate on—” Garcia paused, standing in a stilted pose, mannequin-like.

  Dr. Ramos took a shaky step forward, as if she meant to embrace Joaquin.

  Joaquin stepped backward. “Doctors?”

  Garcia seemed ready to topple, and Ramos stumbled back to lean her forearm against the wall. Garcia swooned so badly that Joaquin held out his hand to her. Suddenly her head jerked to the side in a violent spasm. So did Ramos’s. Then both women leaned their full weights back against the wall.

  “What’s wrong?” Joaquin shouted. “Tell me what’s happening!”

  Down the hall, someone dropped a metal pipe. A woman swore. All four workers erecting the air lock were swaying on their feet.

  From the lab, Joaquin could hear the female announcer of Radio Bajo saying, “What is it? What’s happening?”

  Joaquin stepped away from Garcia, but then she raised her head, and her eyes were glassy for a moment. They cleared and she looked up at Joaquin with a feeble smile. “What’s wrong?” she said.

  “Hey,” one of the young men by the air lock said, “hey, it’s up. It’s up!” He gazed off as if he could see far beyond the walls of the old community college.

  Joaquin’s stomach clenched in terror.

  “I noded in!” another orderly said.

  “Me, too!”

  “Attention, bajadores,” the sultry Radio Bajo announcer said. “We have pilone. If you’re cut, you’re in, as we used to say in Monterrey.”

  Both doctors paused as they obviously checked their wetware, eyes scanning in the empty air before them as though reading. They looked at each other for confirmation, then at Joaquin.

  “I’m sorry—I,” Joaquin stammered, “I’m not—I don’t have the hookup.”

  The two doctors looked away as if he simply did not exist, enraptured by whatever wonders the pilone was showing them, Joaquin imagined. “What a blessing,” Dr. Ramos said. “This is all going to be so much easier now.” She turned away. “We can explore pilone land later, everyone,” she called down the hall. “Right now we have infected patients.” She turned to Joaquin. “Help them get that up, will you, Dr. Cruz?”

  As he turned to walk down the hall, he heard Ramos say to Garcia, “We’ll need to be in constant contact with the infirmary. Get a pilonista to attend Reynaldo Cruz.”

  Joaquin felt the clinic compressing around him, as if tendrils of wetware were closing in and snaking out toward him. He couldn’t remember if he had seen a pilone scar on Reynaldo Cruz’s body. If so, could someone here discover the man’s node? Could people tell Cruz was dead, just by trying to contact him? Joaquin’s posture stiffened and the scars on his back hummed with pain. He forced himself to relax but feared he only managed to look nauseous as he approached the four orderlies. “Bueno, let’s—” His voice constricted as if a cold hand were gripping his throat.

  “Are you all right, Doctor?” an orderly asked.

  “Let’s get to work,” Joaquin rasped, nodding. “I have so much work to do today.”

  TUESDAY, MAY 24. 8:00 A.M.

  “REMEMBER HOTEL CHOLERA?” Isabel said to him, sprawled in her bed, arm thrown over her eyes.

  Stark could smell sour laundry and roses as he came into her dark bedroom. Isabel’s gate had let him in. “Ah, such a nice trip down memory lane.”

  Hotel Cholera was what Isabel and Stark had called their tent, their cots, and their meager clean water supply. The Holy Republic of Mexico was wrestling Colombia from what remained of the Federal-Cartel Alliance armies, and cholera had broken out in Tres Esquinas, the longtime flash point for Colombia’s near century of drug wars. Stark’s barrack-sized tent was pitched outside the reconstructed city among deep green coffee plants. The Pan-Islamic Virological Institute had sent her to code nanophages in the safety of a lab—but she came out to the field and never balked at working with Stark in the clutter and filth of the outbreak. A godsend. Her nanophages hunted down Vibrio cholerae in the small intestines of officers in their barracks, coffee pickers with wicker baskets around their necks, working faster than a vaccination program ever could for cholera. He had also appreciated working with a doctor who said precisely what she thought, describing harsh emotions and harsh situations with equally harsh swearing. As the tasks of cleaning up the hot zone were ticked off his list, Stark had felt his heart turning to Isabel Khushub.

  “You could have had me, then,” Isabel said now, red mouth moving beneath her arm in the dark bedroom.

  “I could have you now,” Stark chided, hand still on her leg.

  “Go ahead.” She was still groggy from a sleep-shot last night. “Wake me when it’s over.” Isabel dropped her arm and smiled at him. “Are we still in Mexico? Is it still Big Bonebreaker? Haven’t we moved on to something nice and simple like a rhinovirus?”

  Stark smiled at her and noted how haggard and skinny she looked. The recoding project’s sims were eating her alive. “Sorry Bela. Still here. Jarum is waiting for us. We need to get to the National Institute as soon as possible.”

  “With my Venus in Taurus and your Mars in Scorpio, we should have had babies together, Henry David,” she whispered. “You should have spirited me away to your communist collective and given me baby after baby.”

  “I know.” He didn’t think so, really, but he wasn’t about to contradict her now. “But it’s a cooperative, not a commune.” He kept tracing his nails over her exposed leg, knowing this relaxed her. “There are six principles of cooperation, did you know? Principle One: democratic control of capital. Principle Two—”

  “How long have we known each other, novio?” She smiled, arm still over her eyes, seemingly grateful to interrupt him on cue.

  “We met seven years, umpteen viruses, and a squad of bacterial infections ago.”

  “I shit on the empty heads of girls who marry too young.” She sat up and touched his bright, yellow beard. “We could have had thousands of babies by now.”

  “You have kids, Bela. You love your boys.”

  “I know. I wish you and I had children, though. A farm full of our babies in Wees-kohn-seen.”

  It always sounded so exotic when Isabel said the name of his home, or talked about the fantasy of them together there. But the thought always made him laugh. Isabel? In the quop? Like a peacock in an ice-fishing shack. It was always just a lovely diversion in the middle of horror.

  The fantasy was an oasis now, because the sims were nightmarish. Even Stark had to admit it. The first morning and afternoon of inp
utting data had been fine. That was Saturday. Sunday and Monday morning were grueling as Isabel reconstructed her version of Generation One. But last night, the first sim showed in excruciating detail what would happen to a living person. The three networked inteligentsias artificiales named the sim patient Debora1, and described her in unnerving detail. A teacher with brown eyes, blond hair, two children, a sweet job selling tea, and the description of her death was awful. Her body shed and emitted its natural lymph system, making way for the new, with a set of symptoms shockingly similar to hemorrhagic fever. Stark asked Ofelio Xultan to tone down the i.a.’s verisimilitude, but that would have taken hours that they simply did not have.

  Worse, when they tested Debora1’s simulated body for wetcoded white blood cells and the potential for a successful recoding matrix, they found that the new immune system didn’t survive long enough to bud wetcoded T cells, let alone create a matrix for recoding immune systems. Isabel modified her version of Generation One, reconstructed from the prints that Stark had stolen from Zapata, but it didn’t help Debora2. She died as quickly as Debora1, and Isabel Kushub had left the lab last night looking threadbare, drunk.

  While Stark watched Isabel’s mood and resolve break over the last two and a half days, he had the growing awareness that he had to hold himself together now—their traditional alliance of love and intimate support was completely drained. He was alone. There were no personal mentors or colleagues left to call and beseech help. Anyone with expertise was already here, already working hard, already overwhelmed. Four days ago, standing on Filomeno Mata Avenue, Stark had stared up at the greasy smoke that had once been a small group of people—a little coterie of human beings, crowding together not on a street corner or in a concert, but gathering midair—and had been given a taste of his own mind cracking.

  The hardest thing he’d ever had to do in order to stop an outbreak was on an endangered primate reserve in Tanzania, where researchers suspected an emergent virus had leapt from Lusk’s mangabeys to humans. At first, Stark had quarantined the mangabeys to keep them from infecting the other endangered primates on the reserve. But Joaquin Delgado’s pathology report, written from London, showed that the emergent virus was mutating rapidly, and that the mangabeys, with their long, almost human bodies and Mark Twain facial hair, were uniquely qualified to ensure that the virus would leap to humans. They had been cloned to perfection, after all, from the last wild mangabeys—hampered immune systems intact.

  So Stark gave the order to euthanize the last of a species.

  But that was simply a letter he had to write and sign. He didn’t have to watch it happen. Here he had to interview the sacrifices, make sure they were the physical specimens they needed. “Three nuns from this tower have agreed to meet with us,” he said.

  Isabel picked up a glass of water from her bedside and stared at it. “Nuns.”

  Zipping his coveralls, Stark said, “Hermenia is one. Geraldina is another. I can’t remember the third. Roberto Cazador gave me their names.”

  “And they know what we did to Deboras 1 and 2?”

  “I told Cazador, yes, and he told the volunteers.”

  “Oh, Henry David, how can you call them volunteers? As if there could be no coercion in this situation. As if nuns of all people could clearly consent to—”

  “Stop it, novia,” Stark said, picking up his Racal-plus and holding it by the waist and slipping in his feet. “We’ve been down this street.”

  She drank. Her dark eyes were bloodshot over the rim of her glass as she stared at him with accusation.

  Stark imagined being put on trial—either a court of law or a medical ethics board—to answer for this brutal endgame. The mathematics of trading one human life for many. Part of him wished someone would haul him off before the project went any further—before he had to make that choice. “Don’t think it doesn’t bother me.”

  “I know it does,” she said. “But you never act like it. You and Joaquin. You have poker. And him with Pluto at midheaven, he has chess. Either way I’ve been partnered with scientists who see human genetic recoding as a test of skill instead of what it is.”

  Stark wriggled his hands into his gloves. “And what is it, Bela?”

  She raised her hand and let out a sardonic laugh. She set her empty glass down with a loud thunk. “It’s death. It’s all death. Valemadre, valemadre, death, death, and—”

  “Bela, stop.” He didn’t like growing impatient with her, but he needed a dram of her strength and nerve now, not her wilting despair. She was every bit the wetcoder that Joaquin was, but whether it was Pluto at midheaven or just cojones the size of God’s, Joaquin had something Bela didn’t: a complete lack of guilt. “It’s the only way out of this horrid, putrid situation, which will only get more horrific and more putrid if we don’t do this.”

  Isabel sat slouched on the bed. “I know.”

  She wasn’t fighting back, the way she had when they first argued about the recoding project. The realization depressed him. He pushed. “I say damn the consequences. I say damn us to Mexico’s idea of hell for killing a volunteer. I accept that. Now get your coveralls, Doctor,” Stark said. “It’s time to go.”

  Naked on the bed with her shoulders slumped over her crossed legs, Isabel looked like a skinned animal. Her eyes rose to him, pleading. “Don’t be that way with me now.”

  He snapped his wrist and ankle cuffs in place. He reached for his helmet and slipped it on over his head. “I don’t mean to hurt you.” He snapped the locks closed at his collar. “But you said yourself we could see a tidal wave of infections starting today or tomorrow. If that happens, I think I’ll fall apart if I allow myself to feel it the way you feel.” He clicked the speaker on so that his voice was loud and clear in the bedroom. “And we can’t both crack and disappear. Not now.” Stark picked up her underwear from the floor and handed it to her.

  Ignoring him, she stood from the bed and picked up her coveralls from their place on the oak dressing table. “Your mother has a dick. I don’t need underwear or your condescension.”

  “Who’s condescending?”

  She tugged on the coveralls, wrestling needlessly. “I’m not vanishing, either. I am all too here,” she said, and there was force in her voice again. “As long as I’m here, I’ll foquin do it.” Wisps of hair spidered around her long braid, which she’d slept in, and she scowled at her leggings as she jammed her toes into them as if angry with her own feet. “If for no other reason to prove that my wetcode is always better than Joaquin Delgado’s.”

  TUESDAY, MAY 24. 11:41 A.M.

  “Mexicanistas,” President for Life Emil Orbegón was saying from the monitor.

  Stark and Muñoz were waiting in the National Institute’s atrium for a consultation with Jarum and Isabel. “Shh,” Stark told Muñoz, who was talking to a member of the Mortuary team via cell phone. The pilone net had been up for two days, but most of Mortuary, whom Muñoz was ordering to load bodies in grocery warehouse freezer lockers before the heat of June hit, didn’t have the Connection. “Here it is. Here it is.”

  Muñoz said into the phone, “I’ll call back.” He looked briefly at the keypad, trying to make sense of the Farsi notations, then hung up.

  On the netmonitor, Orbegón sat with a bank of fluffy peonies behind him. He wore neither a suit nor clamp mask and lush sunlight fell over his tanned face.

  “Sun?” Muñoz looked at the wet windows of the immune complex’s atrium. “A man can’t trust his own eyes.”

  “El Sol Real. Gives you any kind of sunlight you prefer, anywhere in La Alta. It’s all the rage,” Stark said, grateful to have Pedro Muñoz as his companion. They could be perpetually amazed at La Alta together.

  “I come before you today bringing you very good news concerning the state of Big Bonebreaker in the capital,” Orbegón said. “But first, I want to take this opportunity to honor a patriot. Colonel Xavier Sanjuan, the Holy Renaissance’s former Minister of Health.”

  “‘Former’?” Sta
rk said. “Did he say ’former?”

  “Shh!” Muñoz hissed. He picked up his coffee cup and memboard, and joined Stark on the couch, slapping his legs to make him move.

  “—with Mexico’s gratitude,” Orbegón was saying, “to reward Minister Sanjuan with a more important post.”

  Stark and Muñoz glanced at one another. Neither acknowledged it, but the truth behind Orbegón’s announcement hung in the air. The writer of the “crucial opportunity” that had stalled Mexico’s initial response to Big Bonebreaker was dead.

  “At least we don’t have to worry about Sanjuan recognizing you anymore, Dr. del Negro,” Stark said, using Muñoz’s nom de guerre. In his five days as Joint Operations Coordinator (overseeing La Alta sentinel clinics with the seven perimeter clinics in La Baja), Muñoz had never bumped into Minister Sanjuan—Stark had made sure of that. For most hours of the day, “Dr. del Negro” was in a clinic near the docking bays of Torre Cuauhtémoc. It was when he ventured into the National Institute, higher up in the tower, that he pressed his clamp mask tight against his skin and kept his helmet low over his brow.

  “Minister Sanjuan saw Mexico safely through the first week of this horrible crisis,” Orbegón continued, with deep seriousness in his voice. “But with the outbreak now reaching a critical stage, we see fit to promote Minister Sanjuan to a position within our inner circle, to advise the president on medical matters within the military, to safeguard our soldiers against possible viral attacks on the Tejas border.” Orbegón raised the back of his hand to the camera and bobbed it once, the Mexican gesture for honored thanks. “Xavier, you have the Holy Renaissance’s deepest gratitude. Good luck in your new position.”

  The atrium door opened with a hiss as the ALHEPA vacuums started up, and Isabel walked in. Behind her was Jarum Ahwaz. Both were looking uncharacteristically upbeat.

  Isabel stood in the ALHEPA calling over the rush of the particle arrester. “Did you hear about Sanjuan?”