Armageddons

by Jack Dann

  The solar panels atop their van caught more power if he parked it in the day's full glare, but then he couldn't get into it without letting the interior cool off. He had driven up here to get a clear view of the rest of the team. He left the van and headed toward where the salvaging team was working.

  Coming back down through kilometers of jungle took him through terrain that reflected his inner turmoil. Rotting logs shone with a vile, vivid emerald. Swirls of iridescent lichen engulfed thick-barked trees. He left the cross-country van on the clay road and continued, boots sinking into the thick mat.

  Nothing held sway here for long. Hand-sized spiders scuttled like black motes across the intricate green radiance. Exotic vitality, myriad threats. A conservation biologist, he had learned to spot the jungle's traps and viper seductions. He sidestepped a blood vine's barbs, wisely gave a column of lime ants their way. Rustlings escorted him through dappled shadows which held a million minute violences. Carrion moths fluttered by on charcoal wings in search of the fallen. Tall grass blades cut the shifting sunlight. Birds cooed and warbled and stabbed insects from the air. Casually brutal beauty.

  He vectored in on the salvaging site. As he worked down-slope the insecticidal fog bombs popped off in the high canopy. Species pattered down through the branches, thumped on logs, a dying rain. The gray haze descended, touched the jungle floor, settled into nooks. Then a vagrant breeze blew it away. His team moved across the hundred-meter perimeter, sweeping uphill.

  Smash and grab, Todd thought, watching the workers in floppy jeans and blue work shirts get down on hands and knees. They inched forward, digging out soil samples, picking up fallen insects, fronds, stems, small mammals. Everything, anything. Some snipped samples from the larger plants. Others shinnied up the slick-barked trees and rummaged for the resident ants and spiders and myriad creatures who had not fallen out when the fog hit them. A special team took leaves and branches—too much trouble to haul away whole trees. And even if they'd wanted to, the politicos would scream; timbering rights here had already been auctioned off.

  Todd angled along behind the sweeping line of workers, all from Argentina. He caught a few grubs and leaves that had escaped and dropped them into a woman's bag. She smiled and nodded respectfully. Most of them were embarrassingly thankful to have a job. The key idea in the Bio-Salvage Program was to use local labor. That created a native constituency wherever they went. It also kept costs manageable. The urban North was funding this last-ditch effort. Only the depressed wages of the rural South made it affordable.

  And here came the freezers. A thinner line of men carrying foam dry ice boxes, like heavy-duty picnic coolers. Into these went each filled sack. Stapled to the neck of each bag was a yellow bar-code strip giving location, date, terrain description. He had run them off in the van this morning. Three more batches were waiting in his pack for the day's work further up the valley.

  His pack straps cut into his roll of shoulder muscle, reminding him of how much more remained to do. To save. He could see in the valley below the press of population on the lush land. A crude work camp sprawled like a tan fungus. Among the jungle's riot of emerald invention a dirt road wound like a dirty snake.

  He left the team and headed toward the trouble, angling by faded stucco buildings. Puddles from a rain shower mirrored an iron cross over the entrance gate of a Catholic mission. The Pope's presence. Be fruitful, ye innocent, and multiply. Spread like locusts across God's green works.

  Ramshackle sheds lay toward the work camp, soiling the air with greasy wood smoke. In the jungle beyond, chain saws snarled in their labors. Beside the clay ruts of the road lay crushed aluminum beer cans and a lurid tabloid about movie stars.

  He reached the knot of men as Cabrina started shouting.

  "Yes we do! Signed by your own lieutenant governor especial!"

  She waved papers at three uniformed types, who wore swathy scowls and revolvers in hip holsters.

  "No, no." An officer jerked at the crowd. "These, they say it interferes with their toil."

  Here at the edge of the work camp they had already attracted at least fifty. Worn men slouched against a stained yellow wall, scrawny and rawboned and faces slack with fatigue. They were sour twists of men, maraneros from the jungle, a machete their single tool, their worn skins sporting once-jaunty tattoos of wide-winged eagles and rampant bulls and grinning skulls.

  "The hell it does." Cabrina crossed her arms over her red jumper and her lips whitened.

  "The chemicals, they make coughing and—"

  "We went through all that with the foreman. And I have documents—"

  "These say nothing about—"

  Todd turned out the details and watched lines deepen in the officer's face. Trouble coming, and fast. He was supposed to let Cabrina, as a native, run the interference. Trouble was, these were macho backcountry types. He nodded respectfully to the head officer and said, "Our schedule bothering them?"

  The officer looked relieved to deal with a man. "They do not like the fumes or having to stay away from the area."

  "Let's see if we can do something about that. Suppose they work upwind?"

  So then it got into a back-and-forth negotiation. He hated cutting in on Cabrina but the officer had been near the breaking point. Todd gradually eased Cabrina back in and the officer saw how things were going to go. He accepted that with some facesaving talk and pretty soon it was settled.

  Todd walked Cabrina a bit back toward the jungle. "Don't let them rile you. Just stick to the documents."

  "But they are so stupid!" Flashing anger, a wrenched mouth.

  "Tell me something new."

  Their ice van growled into view. It already had the sample sacks from the fogging above. Time to move a kilometer on and repeat the process. All so they could get into this valley and take their samples before these butchers with their bovine complacency could chop it down for cropland or grazing or just to make charcoal. But Todd did not let any of this into his face. Instead he told Cabrina to show the van where to go. Then he went over and spoke to several of the men in his halting Spanish. Smoothing the way. He made sure to stand close to them and speak in the private and respectful way that worked around here.

  Amy followed the rest of her team into the ward. It was the same as yesterday and the day before. All beds filled, patients on the floors, haggard faces, nurses looking as bad as the patients. The infection rate here was at least eighty percent of the population. These were just the cases which had made it to the hospital and then had the clout to get in.

  Freddie went through the list prepared by the hospital director. They were there to survey and take blood samples but the director seemed to think his visitors bore some cure. Or at least advice.

  "Fever, frequent coughing, swellings in the groin," Freddie read, his long black hair getting in the way. He was French and found everything about this place a source of irritation. Amy did not blame him but it was not smart to show it. "Seven percent of cases display septic shock, indicating that the blood stream is directly infected."

  "I hope these results will be of help to your researchers," the director said. He was a short man with a look that alternated between pleading and outright panic. Amy did her best to not look at him. His eyes were always asking, asking.

  Freddie waved his clipboard. "All is consistent with spread directly among humans by inhalation of infected respiratory droplets?"

  The director nodded rapidly. "But we cannot isolate the chain. It seems—"

  "Yes, yes, it is so everywhere. The incubation period of the infection is at least two weeks, though it can be up to a month. By that time the original source is impossible to stipulate." Freddie rattled this off because he had said the same thing a dozen times already in Tanzania.

  Amy said mildly, "I note that you have not attempted to isolate the septic cases."

  The director jerked as if reprimanded and went into an explanation, which did not matter to anyone but would make him feel better, she was sure.
She asked for and received limbic fluids, mucus, and blood samples from the deceased patients. The director wanted to talk to someone of higher authority and their international team filled that need. Not that it did any good. They had no vaccine, no real advice except to keep the patients cool and not to use sedation which would suppress their lung function. They told him this and then told his staff and then told him again because he just kept looking at them with those eyes. Then they went away.

  In the next town Amy got to a telephone and could hook up her modem. She got an uplink with only a half hour wait. They drove back into the capital city over dusty roads while she read the printouts.

  Summary View.

  This present plague is certainly a derived form of influenza. It is well known that the "flu" virus undergoes "antigenic" drifts—point mutations in the virus's outer protein coat which can enhance the ability of the virus to attack the human immune system. New pandemic viruses emerge at unpredictable intervals on the order of decades, though the rate of shifts may be increasing. The present pathogenic outbreak, with its unusual two- to three-week incubation period, allows rapid spreading before populations can begin to take precautions—isolation, face masks, etc. Fatality rate is 3% in cases which do not recover within five days. Origin: The apparent derivation of this plague from southern Asia has been obscured by its rapid transmission to both Africa and South America. However, this Asian origin, recently unmasked by detailed hospital studies and demographics, verifies the suspicions of the United Nations Emergency Committee. Asia is the primary source of "flu" outbreaks because of the high incidence there of "integrated farming," which mingles fowl, pigs and fish close together. In Southeast Asia this has been an economic blessing, but a reverse-spin disaster for the North. Viruses from different species mix, recombining and undergoing gene reassortment at a rapid rate. Humans need time to synthesize specific antibodies as a defense. Genetic aspects: Preliminary results suggest that this is a recombinant virus. Influenza has seven segments of RNA, and several seem to have been modified. Some correlations suggest close connection to the swine flu from pigs. This is a shift, not a simple drift. Some recombination has occurred from another reservoir population—but which? Apparently, some rural environment in southern China.

  She looked up as they jounced past scrubby farmland. No natural forest or grassland remained; humans had turned all arable land to crops. Insatiable appetite, eating nature itself.

  Nobody visible. The superflu knocked everybody flat for at least three days, marvelously infective, and few felt like getting back to the fields right away. That would take another slice out of the food supply here. Behind the tide of illness would come some malnutrition. The U.N. would have to be ready for that, too.

  Not my job, though, she thought, and mused longingly of Todd.

  São Paulo. Earth Summit V, returning to South America for the first time since Summit I in the good old days of 1992. He was to give a talk about the program and then, by God, he'd be long gone.

  On the drive in he had seen kindergarten-age children dig through cow dung, looking for corn kernels the cows hadn't digested. The usual colorful chaos laced with gray despair. Gangs of urchin thieves who didn't know their own last names. Gutters as sewers. Families living in cardboard boxes. Babies found discarded in trash heaps.

  He had imagined that his grubby jeans and T-shirt made him look unremarkable, but desperation hones perceptions. The beggars were on him every chance. By now he had learned the trick which fended off the swarms of little urchins wanting Chiclets, the shadowy men with suitcases of silver jewelry, the women at traffic lights hawking bunches of roses. Natives didn't get their windshields washed unless they wanted it, nor did they say "no" a hundred times to accomplish the result. They just held up one finger and waggled it sideways, slowly. The pests magically dispersed. He had no idea what it meant, but it was so easy even a gringo could do it.

  His "interest zone" at Earth Summit V was in a hodgepodge of sweltering tents erected in an outdoor park. The grass had been beaten into gray, flat blades. Already there was a dispute between the North delegates, who wanted a uniform pledge of seventy-five percent reduction in use of pesticides. Activists from the poor South worried about hunger more than purity, so the proposal died. This didn't stop anyone from dutifully signing the Earth Pledge which covered one whole wall in thick gray cardboard. After all, it wasn't legally binding.

  Todd talked with a lot of the usual Northern crowd from the Nature Conservancy and World Wildlife Fund, who were major sponsors of BioSalvage. They were twittering about a Southern demand that everybody sign a "recognition of the historical, biological and cultural debt" the North owed the South. They roped him into it, because the background argument (in Spanish, so of course most of the condescending Northerners couldn't read it) named BioSalvage as "arrogantly entering our countries and pushing fashionable environmentalism over the needs of the people."

  Todd heard this in a soft drink bar, swatting away flies. Before he could respond, a spindly man in a sack shirt elbowed his way into the Northern group. "I know who you are, Mr. Russell. We do not let your 'debt swap' thievery go by."

  BioSalvage had some funding from agreements which traded money owed to foreign banks for salvaging rights and local labor. He smiled at the stranger. "All negotiated, friend."

  "The debt was contracted illegally!" The man slapped the yellow plastic table, spilling Coke.

  "By your governments."

  "By your criminals!—who then stole great sums."

  Todd spread his hands, still smiling though it was getting harder. "Hey, I'm no banker."

  "You are part of a plot to keep us down," the man shot back.

  "By saving some species?"

  "You are killing them!"

  "Yeah, maybe a few days before your countrymen get around to it."

  Two other men and a woman joined the irate man. Todd was with several Northerners and a woman from Costa Rica who worked for the Environmental Defense Fund. He tried to keep his tone civil and easy but people started breaking in and pretty soon the Southerners were into Harangue Mode and it went to hell. The Northerners rolled their eyes and the Southerners accused them in quick, staccato jabs of being arrogant, impatient, irritated when somebody couldn't speak English, ready to walk out at the first sign of a long speech when there was so much to say after all.

  Todd eased away from the table. The Northerners used words like "proactive" and "empowerment" and kept saying that before they were willing to discuss giving more grants they wanted accountability. They worried about corruption and got thin-lipped when told that they should give without being oppressors of the spirit by trying to manage the money. "Imperialista!" a Brazilian woman hissed, and Todd left.

  He took a long walk down littered streets rank with garbage.

  Megacities. Humanity growing by a hundred million fresh souls per year, with disease and disorder in ample attendance. Twenty-nine megacities now with more than ten million population. Twenty-five in the "developing" world—only nobody was developing anymore. Tokyo topped the list, as always, at thirty-six million. São Paulo was coming up fast on the outside with thirty-four million. Lagos, Nigeria, which nobody ever thought about, festered with seventeen million despite the multitudes lost to AIDS.

  He kicked a can and shrugged off beggars. A man with sores drooling down his face approached but Todd did not dare give him a bill. Uncomfortably he wagged his finger. Indifference was far safer.

  Magacities spawned the return of microbes that had toppled empires down through history. Cholera, the old foe. New antibiotic-resistant strains. Cysticercosis, a tapeworm that invades the brain, caught from eating vegetables grown in the city's effluent. Half the world's urban population had at least one skin rash per year.

  And big cities demand standardized, easily transported foods. Farmers respond with monocrops, which are more vulnerable to pests and disease and drought. Cities preyed on the cropland and forests which sustain them. Plywood apart
ment walls in Nagasaki chewed up Borneo 's woodlands.

  When he reached his hotel room—bare concrete, tin sink in the room, john down the hall—he found a light blinking on the satellite comm. He located the São Paulo nexus and got a fastprint letter on his private number. It was from Amy and he read it eagerly, the gray walls around him forgotten.

  I'm pretty sure friend Freddie is now catching holy hell for not being on top of this superflu faster. There's a pattern, he says. Check out the media feeding frenzy, if you have the time. Use my access codes onto SciNet, too. I'm more worried about Zambia, our next destination. Taking no recognition of U.N. warnings, both sides violating the ceasefire. We'll have armed escorts. Not much use against a virus! All our programs are going slowly, with locals dropping like flies.

  The sweetness of her seemed to swarm up into his nostrils then, blotting out the disinfectant smell from the cracked linoleum. He could see her electric black hair tumbling like rolling smoke about her shoulders, spilling onto her full breasts in yellow candle light. After a tough day he would lift her onto him, setting her astride his muscular arch. The hair wreathed them both, making a humid space that was theirs only, musk-rich and silent. She could bounce and stroke and coax from him the tensions of time, and later they would have dark rum laced with lemon. Her eyes could widen with comic rapt amazement, go slit-thin with anger, become suddenly womanly as they reflected the serenity of the languid candle flame.

  Remember to dodge the electronic media blood hounds. Sniffers and lickers, I call 'em. Freddie handles them for us, but I'm paranoid—seeing insults spelled out in my alphabet soup. Remember that I love you. Remember to see Kuipers if you get sick! See you in two weeks—so very long!