The Patron Saint of Plagues
Page 42
“Santa Domenica!” People struggled and fought to grasp ribbons. “Santa Domenica!”
When the spools had been unwound, Sister Domenica cried out, “¡Mexicanistas!” Her voice was strained but clear. She repeated the call until her voice sounded lonely in the vast cavern of the church. “This morning, Lord Jesus Christ suffered the disease unto me! He brought it to me and I accepted it.”
Penitents at the back of the church cried out before she’d finished her sentence and the crowd wailed its disbelief.
“The disease was a puzzle but it has been solved. It was a mystery, but no more,” Sister Domenica’s clear soprano voice rang out. “Tonight, the first vaccine will be released to you. But I am the price you pay for the cure.”
A priest motioned to Stark and he stepped forward carrying racks of liter bottles attached to hospital tubing. While the priest bent low to Sister Domenica’s ear, reading to her from a small black book, Stark rolled up the sleeves of her mantle. He then arranged the bottles nearby and there was a long pause as the nun nodded and answered the priest quietly.
Domenica and the priest crossed themselves, and Stark came forward with the recoding solution that would either design potent T cells or pass uselessly from her body—either way, in terrible hemorrhages.
Seventy-eight percent success ratio, Stark reminded himself as fear and doubt passed over him.
Domenica raised her hand, holding him in place for a moment. She turned to the congregation, and said, “By tomorrow night, we will know how successful the cure is,” she said. “You can put your babies to bed without fear that they will not wake up. You can read that book you were meaning to read a month ago, take that long walk in the park without wearing plastic gloves.” The crowd prayed, sighed, and some laughed with hope that her words would come true, crossing themselves, all three thousand of them. “Tomorrow night,” Domenica continued, “after you’ve received the vaccine, you can take off your masks and light that cigarette you’ve been waiting to smoke.”
The crowd laughed quietly, caught in the light anxiety of contradiction, perhaps, of virtue advising vice.
But Stark didn’t laugh. He knew what she was advising.
Tomorrow night, after the vaccination program was well under way, the pilone network would crash again.
The long line of M32s in the club-cum-church.
Old Antonio.
The unsmoked cigarette.
How could she know?
Domenica looked up into his face, a challenge in her bloodshot eyes, and nodded to Stark. Go ahead.
Stark looked over at the rangy Emil Orbegón, who closed his eyes behind his spectacles when Stark turned toward him. Right under the Holy Renaissance’s nose, she had just signaled to Old Antonio and Pirate that the revolution should begin tomorrow night.
Stark whispered in his lowest, kneeling beside her glass coffin, “How do you know what the vaccine will do?”
“Pedro,” she whispered to Stark, leaning back against the pillows. “He told me that if you came up with a vaccine,” Domenica motioned him closer so that she could whisper right in his ear, “the pilone would fall, that the Holy Renaissance would be helpless against us.”
“Sister, I can’t,” Stark whispered, holding the syringe that carried the re-coding matrix. “I told you this morning, I’m not Mexican. This isn’t my fight. I can’t be the one to do this.”
Domenica laid a hand on his wrist and gave him her eyes again, but it was a new expression, devilish and playful, a face he had only seen in the old images of Chana Chenalho. “I say,” she whispered, “that you are Mexican.”
Stark was ready to step away from the glass coffin, call Rosangelica to him, and end this fabulous show.
“‘You are indigenous even though you are not indigenous,’” hissed Domenica. “The Purépecha elders told that to another white named Marcos, many, many, years ago.” She tightened her grip on his wrist when he tried to step away. “I told you when we first met that I know you. And I do. I saw your land in you, the way you stood, and the way you spoke. You’re never just a doctor.” Domenica lifted her hand from Stark’s arm, freeing him. “You’re never not a farmer. You are always of the land, and so you are us.”
Stark closed his eyes. Her words were like a release, a flame of relief.
“Now. Take my blood.” Domenica touched Stark’s chest and gently pushed him away. “Do what you have to do.”
Stark turned and scanned the crowd with furtive eyes, saw Isabel, and held her gaze for a long moment until finally she nodded, crossing herself.
Stark knelt and pressed the tip of the needle into the crook of Domenica’s arm. She shut her eyes. Then he injected her, the needle penetrating her skin, entering her vein. He was bonded to Domenica in the moment, fingers on syringe, needle in skin. He was connected to her land, as though his heart were beating blood into these people through the needle, through the red ribbons, down into the veins of Mexico, beating in his own self, into HD, his grandfather’s farm, his land, and this land back into his own body. He wasn’t just giving them a cure. He was giving Mexico a new future, a new land, and taking back for himself, he realized, the same thing.
Almost immediately Domenica pressed herself backwards into the glass coffin, sucking in a great, gasping lungful of air and clutching the fabric of her dress.
Stark backed away. The feeling of interconnection fled as he looked down at Domenica in her agony. His instinct was to help her, but Domenica had said Mexico would want to see her death, however bloody it might be, so he retreated to the far side of the altar, by Orbegón. Stark felt as though something had been severed from his body as he turned away, his head bent, and hands covering his face.
But Mexico watched. They had seen this scene too many times in the last week, in death and destruction, not to want to see it now in healing. Blood gushed from Domenica’s nostrils first. Then her mouth. Blood smeared along the glass walls of the coffin and three thousand people screamed at once. A startled flock of doves took flight from inside one of the ceiling chambers and their wings glittered through spot lighting aimed at the saints. The crowd pushed forward, but the cordon of guards kept them back.
Next to Sister Domenica’s dying body, one bottle filled red. Then another, filling each until all three sat like red cylinders on the altar. The pheresis began spinning in the cylinders, plasma separating from the red blood cells. Arresters in the bases of the cylinders began counting platelets and immunocytes, isolating them for the matrix of wetcoded viral engines to come.
Touching his tongue to his healed lip, Stark lowered his hands when he heard the whir of the phereses and watched Orbegón descend the steps to pray with his family. Jarum Ahwaz ascended the steps to examine the results. Stark could see the future from the altar, as sure as he was watching it on a monitor. If the recoding was successful, a thousand pallets of vaccine would be cloned by midnight. And another thousand by morning. Vaccination teams would circle the hot zones, and by nightfall tomorrow, after another two thousand more pallets of vaccine had been distributed, the vaccine would disable enough wetware that the pilone network would crash for the second time. Old Antonio would give the order, and Los Hijos de Marcos would engage confused, disConnected Holy Renaissance troops in Ascensión. A similar thing would happen in Texas and the Mexican government would find itself pinched between reinvigorated civil unrest and hungry US Federal troops, eager for revenge. There wouldn’t be time for Cazador, Ofelio Xultan, or even Rosangelica to analyze why the pilone network had fallen. The revolt would be swift, Stark prophesied, and the murderers would be cleansed from Mexico’s halls of power.
Jarum straightened and looked at Stark until Stark turned and met his eye. “Done. We have it isolated.”
“And?” said Stark.
Jarum had a hitch in his voice. “I’ll take this back to the lab and begin cloning at once.”
From his pew, Emil the Damned heard Jarum and smiled. The president kissed his wife, then faced the two doctors, s
tanding and raising his hand in a salute of thanks.
I AM SELF, said the twin viruses, week after week, whispering into the ear of the immune system. I am you, they lied, speaking the body’s own language. They held up mirrors to the collective immune system, whispering, Look, I am you, I am you, as they bred with the body’s own cells, leaping from skin to skin via handshakes, kisses, family dinners, laughter—infecting, breeding, killing. Infecting, breeding, killing.
The collective immunity had never seen these viruses before. T cells searched their inherited memories, the immunological archives from the mothers of every previous generation, but wrongly called these viruses dengue.
Then tidings came from outside the body. A barrage of wetcoded viruses and nanorecorders appeared, carrying information about the twin viruses and how to fight them. Immediately, a new T cell entered the bloodstream.
I am you, the augmented cell said. The viruses are not.
Like a vision, the body could now see what had to be done to protect itself. Integrating and imitating the new information, the immune system created an army of defenders, mimicking the genetic structure of the augmented immunocyte.
I am Self, said the vaccinated body, and its colonies of killer T cells agreed, We are Self.
When the viruses leapt into the vaccinated body, this phalanx immediately inspected, arraigned, and killed the viruses before they could find purchase.
We are Self, said the phalanx, as it identified cells in the brain that did not belong in the body. You are not Self, they told the pilone wetware. The defenders lysed these cells, rendering them ineffective. Now you are Self, too.
The collective immunity transformed into an ever-constricting maze in the population, and the viruses found fewer and fewer bodies in which to breed. Those that received vaccinations imparted a kind of immunity on those that didn’t, a statistical barrier between the viruses and the unvaccinated. Working in tandem with nanophages that entered the bloodstream and devoured the viruses, the body of Mexico, week by week, quelled the epidemic.
You are gone. We remain. We remember. We are Self.
Afterward, the immune systems of vaccinated women wrote the names of the viruses into the archives of their immunological memories—a benefit unforeseen by the designers of the augmented T cell. If they became mothers, these women imparted to their babies the names of the two viruses, so the bodies of their children would always remember.
We are Self.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Barth Anderson’s short stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Polyphony, Alchemy, Talebones, The Journal of Mythic Arts, and a variety of other quality venues. Barth received the Spectrum Award for Best Short Fiction in 2004, and he writes regularly for Utne Reader’s Best of Indie Press-nominated Wedge Newsletter. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife and son. The Patron Saint of Plagues is his first novel.
THE PATRON SAINT OF PLAGUES
A Bantam Spectra Book / April 2006
Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2006 by Barth Anderson
Bantam Books, the rooster colophon, Spectra, and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Anderson, Barth.
The patron saint of plagues / Barth Anderson.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-553-90239-6
1. Center for Disease Control—Fiction. 2. Epidemics—Fiction.
3. Viruses—Fiction. 4. Virologists—Fiction.
5. Mexico City (Mexico)—Fiction. 6. Science fiction.
PS3601.N46 P37 2006
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