The Burning Road

by Ann Benson

  She set the earphones down with regret. Maria Callas, unfortunately, would not be making a comeback anytime in the foreseeable future, no matter how carefully the atmosphere was rebalanced or how many mosquitoes they fed her.

  Be a great project to bring her back, though, Janie thought for a brief moment. She’s buried in Paris.…

  But mere mortals such as herself could not get visas to Paris. And no more digging, her lawyer had insisted. Digging is trouble.

  Janie pulled the insistent phone out of her pocket and whispered a wish that the call would be from the lawyer in question, and that he would, for a change, be the bearer of glad tidings. She flipped open the phone and said, “On,” in the flat tone she’d trained the device to recognize, and then added a friendlier “Hello.” The familiar but rather tired-sounding voice of attorney Tom Macalester came over the airwaves, and Janie thought, finally.

  “You’re outside …” he said after they’d exchanged greetings. “Birds.”

  “I am. Taming some shrubs that think they’ve been moved to Florida. They like this hot weather, a lot more than I do—I wilt, they get happy.” She lowered herself into a lawn chair with a quiet oomph. “However, I’m getting the distinct impression from the sound of your voice that you aren’t happy about something,” she said when she got settled. “You sound—dismayed.”

  “And I was so determined to put on a good front.” On the computer-phone inside the house, she knew she would see him frowning. On the cellular, she could hear it in his voice. “Maybe that stuff works on juries, Tom, but I know you too well.”

  “Oh, really?” he said sarcastically. “Then why is it I’m always wishing we knew each other just a little better?”

  With a jaded-sounding chuckle, she said, “There’s only one way we could know each other better than we already do.”

  He laughed. “Your place or mine?”

  “Okay, now you sound more like yourself.”

  “Good.” He paused and took a breath, and when he spoke again, his tone of voice was far more serious. “I heard from the reinstatement committee. About your application.”

  Janie had been right. He was unhappy, and therefore in very short order she was as well. She’d been a neurologist of some accomplishment before the Outbreaks—when the rogue disease DR SAM (an acronym for drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus mexicalis, coined by a clever journalist who’d later drunk himself to death) had dropped its load of misery on an unprepared world.

  How could they have known or prepared? It was so much worse than anyone could have imagined. She half listened to Tom recite the legal minutiae of her quest for reinstatement to the life she’d once known. A scene from the previous day flashed through her mind as the same reasons for denial she’d heard before were repeated again in Tom’s most empathetic voice. No matter how sweetly he delivered the news, each time it became more hateful to her. So she pushed it into the back of her mind with the memory of the victim and police vehicles crowded around a Dumpster in the supermarket parking lot, the green biosafe suits, the green cordoning tape, and then, as she drove by slowly with the window rolled down, one cop’s comment into a cell phone:

  “Tell someone to turn off the counters.”

  She knew which counters he’d meant. They’d been turned off once before. It was one small step in the progression of events that led to the dramatic changes in her life. She’d been a good mother, a loving wife, a satisfied human being with a lot still on her horizon. But it had all been taken away from her—first her family, by the disease itself, and then her profession, in the forced medical realignment of the early post-Outbreak era. And then came the fateful trip to London, the one that was supposed to set her on the right road to a new and rewarding career in forensic archaeology. It had been the biggest fiasco of her life. Now, with the help of the accomplished lawyer who’d been her longtime friend, she was desperately trying to get back what little she could of the life she’d known before.

  It was beginning to seem like the process itself would consume her.

  Tom’s voice resurfaced in her consciousness. “A lot of those professional and employment rights were suspended during the first wave,” Tom explained, “and the cases with potential to set precedent still haven’t worked their way through the courts. But no one’s pulling out of the class-action suit yet, so I’d advise you to stay in. We’ll keep trying for an individual reinstatement of your license. Whichever comes first, we don’t care. The ultimate goal is to get you back in practice, however we have to do it.”

  “Jesus, Tom, we have a Bill of Rights, a Constitution.…”

  “I know. Everyone knows. Don’t ask me how we all forgot those things.”

  “Isn’t that why we elect representatives, to stay on top of this stuff?”

  “Your representative already said she couldn’t do a thing for you. And it’s a well-established precedent that in times of national emergency, the government has a broad mandate to do what’s necessary to ‘maintain order,’ whatever that means.”

  “The emergency’s over. The scanners are gone, the isolation wards have been dismantled.…”

  “I know.” He paused for a contemplative moment that seemed more weighted than it ought to have been. “At least they mostly have.” Then he added, “But I still wouldn’t be looking for those rights to be restored anytime soon.”

  “Why not, for God’s sake?”

  “I’ve had this discussion more often than I’d like,” he said in a resigned tone of voice. “It never comes out any better. Word is that there’s pretty strong resistance to putting things back the way they were before—especially among the powers-that-be. They like things restricted. Remember what happened when they tried to get Big Dattie dismantled?”

  It had been an almost laughable exercise in futility, when a coalition of concerned civil liberties groups pooled their talents and resources and sued for the destruction of the universal genetic database that had grown slowly over the years before the DNA code of ethics was established and reached its full flower during the first Outbreak. It was out there on some monstrous server, with its insidious and dangerous data, a constant reminder that nothing was truly private anymore. On balance, the proponents of keeping it intact had argued, it’s more beneficial than harmful. And the disease counters, they claimed, were absolutely necessary. Opponents had reacted with a flurry of flag-waving and proprivacy rhetoric, with which Janie actually found herself in tentative agreement. And diseases could be counted in other, less invasive, ways they’d put forth. Janie recalled her stunned disbelief at how quickly the Supreme Court had reached its decision in that case, and the surprising stab of fear she’d felt on hearing that they’d found the database a necessary evil, and had let it stand.

  “You must hear all this stuff hot off the presses,” she said.

  “Most of it never makes it to the presses.”

  He’d become an expert in medical law many years before, long in advance of the abrupt rise in demand for his specialty in the wake of all the confusing changes the Outbreaks had wrought. He’d lawyered his way through the first wave as a champion to the isolated, the quarantined, the shunned. Tom’s practice had boomed in the calmer aftermath, and he’d tucked a lot of potential alliances away in some mental back pocket, into which Janie knew he would have no fear of reaching should it become necessary. He maintained skirting contact with groups who were looking for the Outbreaks’ DR SAM, the beastly disease, to slouch toward the United States for reincarnation, despite the vehement and continued pooh-poohing of those who ought to have known better. It would do as it would, despite the best intentions of the medical establishment, and continued efforts to eradicate it. First time around, after a protracted reign of terror, it had finally departed of its own whimsical accord, leaving in its wake a plethora of bewildered and mortified health professionals.

  Not to mention dead ones.

  “So,” she said wearily, “what do you think I should do?”

  “Right now?
Absolutely nothing.”

  “Tom, I—”

  “I know,” he interrupted her, “it’s against your religion to be patient. Unfortunately, your options are pretty slim. Patience is still the best one.”

  He’d already told her that she should expect her application for reinstatement to neurology to be denied, so this phone call was really only a confirmation. Still, it was frustrating. “Good Lord,” she said. It sounded too much like whining to her. “Everything in my life is on hold. I don’t know how I’m going to stay patient for much longer.”

  “What else can you do, Janie? Pestering these people isn’t going to help. They’re up to their necks in applications. In fact, I’d wait about six months before you reapply.”

  “I don’t want to wait that long. Not unless I absolutely have to.”

  “Well, I think you do absolutely have to, unless your current circumstances change dramatically. The only way we’re going to get you back in business right now is if you have some unique specialty—like repairing optic nerves or reversing certain kinds of brain damage—or something equally impossible.”

  “Twenty years of training and practice aren’t enough?”

  “Apparently not. Forgive me, I know this sounds awful. But according to government figures, there are more nonspecialized neurologists than necessary for current population levels. If a few more of you had croaked during the Outbreaks, then it would be a different story, maybe. Now, if you were willing to do infectious diseases …”

  “Don’t go there, Tom.…”

  “I’m only saying that it’s a wide-open specialty and a quick retrain, so if you really want to practice medicine, it’s something to con—”

  “No. Not now, not ever.”

  “Your talent could be used there, Janie.”

  A guilty pause. “I know. But I just can’t.”

  “Okay, then you’re going to have to be content with doing research at the foundation for a little while longer. Until a few of the old guys die off. Or things lighten up. Then we’ll try again.”

  She sighed in deep disappointment. “This stinks.”

  “I know. But at least you’re working.”

  “If you can call it that. I hate my job. It’s like being someone’s secretary. All I do is detail work.”

  He managed a little laugh. “Well, you could always do forensic archaeology.”

  “This from the guy who doesn’t want me to dig.” She closed her eyes and rubbed her tightening forehead. “Any news from Immigration?”

  “Sorry, no,” Tom said. “Do you want me to call Bruce and tell him?”

  “No. I was going to call tomorrow, anyway. If it were good news, I’d call today. But bad news can wait.”

  She took off her gardening gloves and dropped them into her tool bin, but before going into her house Janie stood in the garage next to the venerable but beat-looking Volvo she’d bought shiny and new a thousand years before. In the oddly comforting presence of the familiar car, she rubbed her palm for a moment, daydreaming of easier times. She could no longer find the tiny implant in the flesh pad below her thumb; not even the slightest lump remained. The actual chip, as promised by the immigration officer in Boston—You won’t even know it’s there in a day or two, he’d said—had been sucked up as a nutrient by the surrounding cells, but not until its electronic data had been absorbed into her flesh. It was a legally mandated physical insult, approaching universal application, necessitated by the artful work of some criminal genius who’d hacked into the appropriate server and, with a few well-placed lines of code, dispatched cornea and palm print identification to the heaven reserved for archaic, useless technologies.

  But as time passed, she’d allowed her personal distaste for electronic intrusion to wear down, because it was incredibly convenient to have an instant identity, and as long as she maintained a good credit rating she could do almost anything she needed to do with a simple swipe of the hand. But she’d felt none of the first-library-card pride that accompanied the issuance of her Social Security number and driver’s license, back in the paper days. Instead, after they’d blown the chip into her palm, she’d stared in quiet horror at the little red mark and longed painfully for the twentieth century.

  It was the final straw in her problem-ridden reentry from England to the United States, which was highlighted by the visa rejection of the man she intended to marry when they were settled on her side of the big pond, because someone in London thought he needed a talking-to about a certain bio-incident that had occurred in the institute where he did his research.

  But it had been a mishap in the course of Janie’s research on London soil samples that had brought about the near catastrophe, a project that had nothing to do with Bruce except that he worked in the facility where the chemical analysis of the samples was to be performed. He’d been something of an innocent bystander, caught up in the intrigue when he began to care about Janie, the woman at the center of it, and he quickly became the one who helped her when she found herself in trouble. Accompanied by her assistant, and all dressed up in burglar’s garb on a dark night, she’d stolen a small sample of soil from a certain piece of property, against the wishes of the property’s caretaker. And in the dirt they dug up, there had been a small piece of decaying fabric, on whose fibers was embedded a sporified bacterium, an archaic bacterium whose present-day form was rather substantially mutated. At first, no one recognized it for what it was. It had been reborn in a lab accident, and revealed itself to be Yersinia pestis.…

  … the causative agent of bubonic plague. It promptly picked up a passing plasmid and became a monster.

  With a frantic effort, she and Bruce and her assistant, Caroline, had managed to contain Y. pestis when it started to reproduce, at a rate that promised to make up for its six-hundred-year interment. To their eternal horror, a few people had succumbed to it, though in consideration of this particular bacterium’s history it was a miraculously low number. Caroline had become so ill herself that she nearly died.

  And through the skill and cleverness of Bruce’s efforts, Janie had somehow escaped scrutiny for the incident, though in truth she’d been far more heavily involved than he had been.

  The memory of it all put her in a momentary daze as scenes of yore drifted in and out; she tried to will them all back into the underlayer of her consciousness, but they kept clawing their way back to the surface. She let her glance drift over to the corner of the garage where the research tools she’d brought back with her were now stored, in their well-traveled canvas bag, and wondered if they were beginning to rust inside it.

  Get rid of them, she told herself. But she’d tried before, and couldn’t seem to do it. They were a direct connection to something she wasn’t ready to break away from, and they’d turned out to be a fortunate distraction in the reentry process, enabling her to slip through an even more unusual item that might otherwise have attracted attention.

  Too bad I couldn’t have wrapped Bruce in laundry and tucked him into my suitcase next to the journal.…

  … the journal that held the secrets of an ancient physician, whose determination and skill had shown Janie the light when all seemed impossibly dark.

  She sighed, and shook her head from side to side. It would be so much easier if I could just be doing some work that means something again.…

  A unique specialty, Tom had said.

  Is there anything unique left in this world? she wondered dismally. She left the daydream and went into the house.

  There were reams of “government figures” in the universal genetic database, including, after years of laborious data entry, the complete genome of nearly every U.S. citizen, and when Janie sat before a computer as she did now, considering a trip inside, she always ended up feeling confused and overwhelmed.

  Get over it, her supervisor at the New Alchemy Foundation had told her. It’s just part of your job.

  It was, and she was familiar with the techniques involved in collecting, sorting, and evaluating da
ta, but the database into which she was about to make an entry could be a scary, forbidding place, if only for its size. Her feelings about its existence changed from day to day. One minute it seemed a wonderland, ripe for exploration, the next a wasteland to be trudged through in protective mind-gear. And every time she went inside it Janie felt like a trespasser, an outsider, someone who had no right to be there. It was a sentiment encouraged by the opening screen of the operating system, which did not say Welcome to Big Dattie, come right in, but rather:

  STOP! YOU HAVE REQUESTED ENTRY INTO A SECURE DATABASE. PLEASE FOLLOW ALL SUBSEQUENT ON-SCREEN INSTRUCTIONS EXACTLY. FAILURE TO DO SO MAY RESULT IN IMMEDIATE DISCONNECTION AND REVOCATION OF FUTURE ENTRY PRIVILEGES. THIS VISIT WILL BE RECORDED IN ITS ENTIRETY.

  Someday, she thought, I’ll be brave enough to waltz in there and just float around looking at stuff, with no particular place to go … but this would not be the day. Janie did precisely as she was instructed, nothing more or less, initializing the required commands with cold precision. She placed her right hand with its invisible but always detectable electronic code on the flat surface of the computer screen and waited for the sensor to process it. And somewhere, deep in the bowels of Big Dattie, she envisioned certain tickers going up one notch, the ones having to do with overeducated middle-aged white females of mid to high income who worked for the New Alchemy Foundation and were searching for information from the particular computer she happened to be using. Someone would find this information germane, at some time. But Janie didn’t want to meet that person. Ever.

  The screen came up yellow—too happy a background color for the stern text being displayed. She was prompted by a beep to choose a route into the database, so she touched an entry point on the screen and waited, engaging in silent self-amusement as her search was directed down this demographic data path and that. Speeding south on Boy Boulevard, cutting over onto Route 13, turning left on White Street. It would have been so much more efficient just to type in the name of the boy in question, Abraham Prives, but there was something about being so direct that Janie found unsavory, almost assaultive.