The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories

by Walter Jon Williams

  But he loved her, Michelle insisted inwardly. She knew that in her heart. Stephanie was the woman he loved after Claire died, and then she was killed and Terzian went on to create the intellectual framework on which the world was now built. He had spent his modest fortune building pilot programs in Africa that demonstrated his vision was a practical one. The whole modern world was a monument to Stephanie.

  Everyone was young then, Michelle thought. Even the seventy-year-olds were young compared to the people now. The world must have been ablaze with love and passion. But Davout didn't understand that because he was old and had forgotten all about love.

  "Michelle . . . " Darton's voice came wafting over the waters.

  Bastard. Michelle wasn't about to let him spoil this.

  Her fingers formed . "I'll send you everything once it comes in," she said. "I think we've got something amazing here."

  She picked up her deck and swung it around so that she could be sure that the light from the display couldn't be seen from the ocean. Her bare back against the rough bark of the ironwood, she began flashing through the data as it arrived.

  She couldn't find the police report. Michelle went in search of it and discovered that all police records from that period in Venetian history had been wiped out in the Lightspeed War, leaving her only with what had been reported in the media.

  "Where are you? I love you!" Darton's voice came from farther away. He'd narrowed his search, that was clear, but he still wasn't sure exactly where Michelle had built her nest.

  Smiling, Michelle closed her deck and slipped it into its pouch. Her spiders would work for her tirelessly till dawn while she dreamed on in her hammock and let Darton's distant calls lull her to sleep.

  They shifted their lodgings every few days. Terzian always arranged for separate bedrooms. Once, as they sat in the evening shade of a farm terrace and watched the setting sun shimmer on the silver leaves of the olives, Terzian found himself looking at her as she sat in an old cane chair, at the profile cutting sharp against the old limestone of the Vaucluse. The blustering wind brought gusts of lavender from the neighboring farm, a scent that made Terzian want to inhale until his lungs creaked against his ribs.

  From a quirk of Stephanie's lips Terzian was suddenly aware that she knew he was looking at her. He glanced away.

  "You haven't tried to sleep with me," she said.

  "No," he agreed.

  "But you look," she said. "And it's clear you're not a eunuch."

  "We fight all the time," Terzian pointed out. "Sometimes we can't stand to be in the same room."

  Stephanie smiled. "That wouldn't stop most of the men I've known. Or the women, either."

  Terzian looked out over the olives, saw them shimmer in the breeze. "I'm still in love with my wife," he said.

  There was a moment of silence. "That's well," she said.

  And I'm angry at her, too, Terzian thought. Angry at Claire for deserting him. And he was furious at the universe for killing her and for leaving him alive, and he was angry at God even though he didn't believe in God. The Trashcanians had been good for him, because he could let his rage and his hatred settle there, on people who deserved it.

  Those poor drunken bastards, he thought. Whatever they'd expected in that hotel corridor, it hadn't been a berserk grieving American who would just as soon have ripped out their throats with his bare hands.

  The question was, could he do that again? It had all occurred without his thinking about it, old reflexes taking over, but he couldn't count on that happening a second time. He'd been trying to remember the Kenpo he'd once learned, particularly all the tricks against weapons. He found himself miming combats on his long country hikes, and he wondered if he'd retained any of his ability to take a punch.

  He kept the gun with him, so the Trashcanians wouldn't get it if they searched his room when he was away. When he was alone, walking through the almond orchards or on a hillside fragrant with wild thyme, he practiced drawing it, snicking off the safety, and putting pressure on the trigger . . . the first time the trigger pull would be hard, but the first shot would cock the pistol automatically and after that the trigger pull would be light.

  He wondered if he should buy more ammunition. But he didn't know how to buy ammunition in France and didn't know if a foreigner could get into trouble that way.

  "We're both angry," Stephanie said. He looked at her again, her hand raised to her head to keep the gusts from blowing her long ringlets in her face. "We're angry at death. But love must make it more complicated for you."

  Her green eyes searched him. "It's not death you're in love with, is it? Because—"

  Terzian blew up. She had no right to suggest that he was in a secret alliance with death just because he didn't want to turn a bunch of Africans green. It was their worst argument, and this one ended with both of them stalking away through the fields and orchards while the scent of lavender pursued them on the wind.

  When Terzian returned to his room he checked his caches of money, half-hoping that Stephanie had stolen his Euros and run. She hadn't.

  He thought of going into her room while she was away, stealing the papiloma and taking a train north, handing it over to the Pasteur Institute or someplace. But he didn't.

  In the morning, during breakfast, Stephanie's cell phone rang, and she answered. He watched while her face turned from curiosity to apprehension to utter terror. Adrenaline sang in his blood as he watched, and he leaned forward, feeling the familiar rage rise in him, just where he wanted it. In haste she turned off the phone, then looked at him. "That was one of them. He says he knows where we are, and wants to make a deal."

  "If they know where we are," Terzian found himself saying coolly, "why aren't they here?"

  "We've got to go," she insisted.

  So they went. Clean out of France and into the Tuscan hills, with Stephanie's cell phone left behind in a trash can at the train station and a new phone purchased in Siena. The Tuscan countryside was not unlike Provence, with vine-covered hillsides, orchards a-shimmer with the silver-green of olive trees, and walled medieval towns perched on crags; but the slim, tall cypress standing like sentries gave the hills a different profile and there were different types of wine grapes, and many of the vineyards rented rooms where people could stay and sample the local hospitality. Terzian didn't speak the language, and because Spanish was his first foreign language consistently pronounced words like "villa" and "panzanella" as if they were Spanish. But Stephanie had grown up in Italy and spoke the language not only like a native, but like a native Roman.

  Florence was only a few hours away, and Terzian couldn't resist visiting one of the great living monuments to civilization. His parents, both university professors, had taken him to Europe several times as a child, but somehow never made it here.

  Terzian and Stephanie spent a day wandering the center of town, on occasion taking shelter from one of the pelting rainstorms that shattered the day. At one point, with thunder booming overhead, they found themselves in the Basilica di Santa Croce.

  "Holy Cross," Terzian said, translating. "That's your outfit."

  "We have nothing to do with this church," Stephanie said. "We don't even have a collection box here."

  "A pity," Terzian said as he looked at the soaked swarms of tourists packed in the aisles. "You'd clean up."

  Thunder accompanied the camera strobes that flashed against the huge tomb of Galileo like a vast lighting storm. "Nice of them to forget about that Inquisition thing and bury him in a church," Terzian said.

  "I expect they just wanted to keep an eye on him."

  It was the power of capital, Terzian knew, that had built this church, that had paid for the stained glass and the Giotto frescoes and the tombs and cenotaphs to the great names of Florence: Dante, Michelangelo, Bruni, Alberti, Marconi, Fermi, Rossini, and of course Machiavelli. This structure, with its vaults and chapels and sarcophagi and chanting Franciscans, had been raised by successful bankers, people to whom
money was a real, tangible thing, and who had paid for the centuries of labor to build the basilica with caskets of solid, weighty coined silver.

  "So what do you think he would make of this?" Terzian asked, nodding at the resting place of Machiavelli, now buried in the city from which he'd been exiled in his lifetime.

  Stephanie scowled at the unusually plain sarcophagus with its Latin inscription. "No praise can be high enough," she translated, then turned to him as tourist cameras flashed. "Sounds overrated."

  "He was a republican, you know," Terzian said. "You don't get that from just The Prince. He wanted Florence to be a republic, defended by citizen soldiers. But when it fell into the hands of a despot, he needed work, and he wrote the manual for despotism. But he looked at despotism a little too clearly, and he didn't get the job." Terzian turned to Stephanie. "He was the founder of modern political theory, and that's what I do. And he based his ideas on the belief that all human beings, at all times, have had the same passions." He turned his eyes deliberately to Stephanie's shoulder bag. "That may be about to end, right? You're going to turn people into plants. That should change the passions if anything would."

  "Not plants," Stephanie hissed, and glanced left and right at the crowds. "And not here." She began to move down the aisle, in the direction of Michelangelo's ornate tomb, with its draped figures who appeared not in mourning, but as if they were trying to puzzle out a difficult engineering problem.

  "What happens in your scheme," Terzian said, following, "is that the market in food crashes. But that's not the real problem. The real problem is what happens to the market in labor."

  Tourist cameras flashed. Stephanie turned her head away from the array of Kodaks. She passed out of the basilica and to the portico. The cloudburst had come to an end, but rainwater still drizzled off the structure. They stepped out of the droplets and down the stairs into the piazza.

  The piazza was walled on all sides by old palaces, most of which now held restaurants or shops on the ground floor. To the left, one long palazzo was covered with canvas and scaffolding. The sound of pneumatic hammers banged out over the piazza. Terzian waved a hand in the direction of the clatter.

  "Just imagine that food is nearly free," he said. "Suppose you and your children can get most of your food from standing in the sunshine. My next question is, Why in hell would you take a filthy job like standing on a scaffolding and sandblasting some old building?"

  He stuck his hands in his pockets and began walking at Stephanie's side along the piazza. "Down at the bottom of the labor market, there are a lot of people whose labor goes almost entirely for the necessities. Millions of them cross borders illegally in order to send enough money back home to support their children."

  "You think I don't know that?"

  "The only reason that there's a market in illegal immigrants is that there are jobs that well-off people won't do. Dig ditches. Lay roads. Clean sewers. Restore old buildings. Build new buildings. The well-off might serve in the military or police, because there's a certain status involved and an attractive uniform, but we won't guard prisons no matter how pretty the uniform is. That's strictly a job for the laboring classes, and if the laboring classes are too well-off to labor, who guards the prisons?"

  She rounded on him, her lips set in an angry line. "So I'm supposed to be afraid of people having more choice in where they work?"

  "No," Terzian said, "you should be afraid of people having no choice at all. What happens when markets collapse is intervention—and that's state intervention, if the market's critical enough, and you can bet the labor market's critical. And because the state depends on ditch-diggers and prison guards and janitors and road-builders for its very being, then if these classes of people are no longer available, and the very survival of civil society depends on their existence, in the end the state will just take them.

  "You think our friends in Transnistria will have any qualms about rounding up people at gunpoint and forcing them to do labor? The powerful are going to want their palaces kept nice and shiny. The liberal democracies will try volunteerism or lotteries or whatever, but you can bet that we're going to want our sewers to work, and somebody to carry our grandparents' bedpans, and the trucks to the supermarkets to run on time. And what I'm afraid of is that when things get desperate, we're not going to be any nicer about getting our way than those Sovietists of yours. We're going to make sure that the lower orders do their jobs, even if we have to kill half of them to convince the other half that we mean business. And the technical term for that is slavery. And if someone of African descent isn't sensitive to that potential problem, then I am very surprised."

  The fury in Stephanie's eyes was visible even through her shades, and he could see the pulse pounding in her throat. Then she said, "I'll save the people, that's what I'm good at. You save the rest of the world, if you can." She began to turn away, then swung back to him. "And by the way," she added, "fuck you!" turned, and marched away.

  "Slavery or anarchy, Stephanie!" Terzian called, taking a step after. "That's the choice you're forcing on people!"

  He really felt he had the rhetorical momentum now, and he wanted to enlarge the point by saying that he knew some people thought anarchy was a good thing, but no anarchist he'd ever met had ever even seen a real anarchy, or been in one, whereas Stephanie had—drop your anarchist out of a helicopter into the eastern Congo, say, with all his theories and with whatever he could carry on his back, and see how well he prospered . . .

  But Terzian never got to say any of these things, because Stephanie was gone, receding into the vanishing point of a busy street, the shoulder bag swinging back and forth across her butt like a pendulum powered by the force of her convictions.

  Terzian thought that perhaps he'd never see her again, that he'd finally provoked her into abandoning him and continuing on her quest alone, but when he stepped off the bus in Montespèrtoli that night, he saw her across the street, shouting into her cell phone.

  The next day, as with frozen civility they drank their morning coffee, she said she was going to Rome the next day. "They might be looking for me there," she said, "because my parents live there. But I won't go near the family, I'll meet Odile at the airport and give her the papiloma."

  Odile? Terzian thought. "I should go along," he said.

  "What are you going to do?" she said. "Carry that gun into an airport?"

  "I don't have to take the gun. I'll leave it in the hotel room in Rome."

  She considered. "Very well."

  Again, that night, Terzian found the tumbled castle in Provence haunting his thoughts, that ruined relic of a bygone order, and once more considered stealing the papiloma and running. And again, he didn't.

  They didn't get any farther than Florence, because Stephanie's cell phone rang as they waited in the train station. Odile was in Venice. "Venezia?" Stephanie shrieked in anger. She clenched her fists. There had been a cache of weapons found at the Fiumicino airport in Rome, and all planes had been diverted, Odile's to Marco Polo outside Venice. Frenzied booking agents had somehow found rooms for her despite the height of the tourist season.

  Fiumicino hadn't been reopened, and Odile didn't know how she was going to get to Rome. "Don't try!" Stephanie shouted. "I'll come to you."

  This meant changing their tickets to Rome for tickets to Venice. Despite Stephanie's excellent Italian the ticket seller clearly wished the crazy tourists would make up their mind which monuments of civilization they really wanted to see.

  Strange—Terzian had actually planned to go to Venice in five days or so. He was scheduled to deliver a paper at the Conference of Classical and Modern Thought.

  Maybe, if this whole thing was over by then, he'd read the paper after all. It wasn't a prospect he coveted: he would just be developing another footnote to a footnote.

  The hills of Tuscany soon began to pour across the landscape like a green flood. The train slowed at one point—there was work going on on the tracks, men with bronze arms and hard
hats—and Terzian wondered how, in the Plant People Future, in the land of Cockaigne, the tracks would ever get fixed, particularly in this heat. He supposed there were people who were meant by nature to fix tracks, who would repair tracks as an avocation or out of boredom regardless of whether they got paid for their time or not, but he suspected there wouldn't be many of them.

  You could build machines, he supposed, robots or something. But they had their own problems, they'd cause pollution and absorb resources and on top of everything they'd break down and have to be repaired. And who would do that?

  If you can't employ the carrot, Terzian thought, if you can't reward people for doing necessary labor, then you have to use the stick. You march people out of the cities at gunpoint, like Pol Pot, because there's work that needs to be done.

  He tapped his wedding ring on the arm of his chair and wondered what jobs would still have value. Education, he supposed; he'd made a good choice there. Some sorts of administration were necessary. There were people who were natural artists or bureaucrats or salesmen and who would do that job whether they were paid or not.

  A woman came by with a cart and sold Terzian some coffee and a nutty snack product that he wasn't quite able to identify. And then he thought, labor.

  "Labor," he said. In a world in which all basic commodities were provided, the thing that had most value was actual labor. Not the stuff that labor bought, but the work itself.

  "Okay," he said, "it's labor that's rare and valuable, because people don't have to do it anymore. The currency has to be based on some kind of labor exchange—you purchase x hours with y dollars. Labor is the thing you use to pay taxes."

  Stephanie gave Terzian a suspicious look. "What's the difference between that and slavery?"

  "Have you been reading Nozick?" Terzian scolded. "The difference is the same as the difference between paying taxes and being a slave. All the time you don't spend paying your taxes is your own." He barked a laugh. "I'm resurrecting Labor Value Theory!" he said. "Adam Smith and Karl Marx are dancing a jig on their tombstones! In Plant People Land the value is the labor itself! The calories!" He laughed again, and almost spilled coffee down his chest.