“Shi-haode,” I say, bemused.
He tells me he knows. He is grave.
Then Dr. Yi hands me my test results.
Lianfeng reaches out and takes my wrist. Carefully he says, “Hold on, little brother.”
I have TB.
* * *
TB is no big deal. I can treat it with antibiotics at the clinic. But it means that I can’t work with patients until I’ve run the treatment course, twenty-one days of antibiotics since I am asymptomatic.
Lianfeng’s blood results obsess me. I include them in my monthly report to Geneva. I go through our records until I find a history of the middle-aged woman whose disease went through the Lianfeng cycle in September and who is from Lijiazhuang, and Xiao Cao and I go to see her. She is like Lianfeng was in the first weeks, childish and simple, but I persuade her husband, and the four of us, Mr. Qian, Mrs. Zhang (husbands and wives do not have the same name in China), Xiao Cao, and I take the train to Tai’an, where Mrs. Zhang is given a full blood work-up.
Her results are not as good as Lianfeng’s, but they are startlingly better than they should be.
“Do you hear whispers?” I ask her through Xiao Cao. She looks at her husband, who is frowning, and leans forward conspiratorially. Like a little girl with a secret, she tells Xiao Cao that “they” upset her husband, so she doesn’t speak of them.
Zhao Lianfeng comes to see me on Sunday, his only day off, and I sit with Xiao Cao and question him about how he feels, about the whisperers. They have taught him to think differently, he says. Sometimes now he can see better ways to make things. They have made him smarter. The village has made a contract to sell motor scooter parts to Guangzhou—which we call Canton—because he has figured out ways to make them cheaper.
“Who are they?” I keep asking, but he doesn’t know. He can only shrug.
“Where are they?” I ask.
In him. And then, surprisingly, in me. “In Xiao Cao?” I ask.
He shakes his head and then looks thoughtful, eyes to the left, that sudden-struck look he had in the hospital in Tai’an.
“He says not, because of the vaccine,” Xiao Cao reports neutrally.
He can understand a little about me, though, because the whisperers are in me, too.
“Can they make me healthier?” I ask.
No, he says, then hesitates. Then firmly, “No, the mold was not right.”
I write it all down.
During the day, I write down lists of things I know about EID. Long and obsessive lists, since at first I do not exclude anything. I write down that it killed my uncle and my father, although not my mother or myself (but it is not gender specific, the World Health Organization’s statistics have found no correlation between mortality and gender). I tell Terry and Jeff, show them the test results, and we talk about it long into the night.
On the twentieth day of my course of antibiotics. I take the train to Tai’an alone, although Terry and Jeff have given me instructions that I have to call and tell them how things turn out. At the Tai’an Guesthouse, I pay and make a long distance call to Geneva, Switzerland. The only name I know is Dr. Geuter, the name on the address I use to mail my reports, and it takes over an hour of long distance operators and receptionists in Geneva before I finally get to him. When I tell him what I have found, he transfers me yet again, to a woman named Ilse Erandt, who speaks clear English with the almost British accent of some Germans.
She listens as I pour out my theory. Probably, over the years, she has gotten these kinds of calls before, I think. People who think that the plague is from God, or from Venusians, or from the increase of active cultures in our diet from eating yogurt. When I finish, she is silent, and I listen to the crackle of the open line, not as clear as it would be from Beijing. Maybe I’ve been in China too long, maybe I’m losing my mind.
“When did he come into your clinic?” she asks.
“March,” I say.
“That’s the earliest case of Windhouk Syndrome so far,” she says. And explains that until I called, the earliest case they knew of was from a camp outside Windhouk, Namibia, back in July. That person was killed in a riot. They have hundreds of cases from August, but the survivors are all still childlike.
“March,” she says. “I would like to see this young man.”
* * *
There are dust storms in Beijing. Sand blown in from the Gobi is turning the sky yellow, even at noon. Sandstorms are not like they are in Lawrence of Arabia, they are more like a yellow fog. The Chinese call it ghost weather.
The plane climbs above the yellow, rising out of it until the sky is blue and only the land below is stained yellow. From above, there are thin places and thicker, darker places, as the wind moves the sand in currents.
I have been thinking about the whispers.
It’s possible that Lianfeng has anthropomorphized the changes the disease has caused. That his mind, in order to cope with his brain and body, has manufactured a “them” that “tells him.” But there are two things that keep coming back to me. The first is his insistence that I get a TB test. Maybe it was just a way for him to turn the tables on me because he was angry at me for making him go to the hospital, a kind of “if I have to, you have to” tit-for-tat. But I feel as if he knew I was going to test positive. And he said that it was because the whisperers in me had told the whisperers in him.
Second is something Terry brought up in one of our late-night discussions; the peculiar way that the disease patterns seem to change worldwide, all at once. Lianfeng had the Windhouk Cycle in March, another patient, thousands of miles away in Southern Africa, demonstrated the same symptoms a couple of months later. And when there was an upswing in the disease, it was worldwide. When that happened before, in ’98, ’02, and again in ’07, there were attempts to link the upswing to everything from magnetic storms and sunspots to the greenhouse effect, and on through to astrology.
What if EID is like the sandstorm, not just the grains of sand individually, but the whole? All interconnected. Then it would make sense that, for the whisperers, what happened in Lijiazhuang, China, and what happened just outside Windhouk, Namibia, could be connected. Lianfeng is the first cell to change in a whole body that’s changing.
He’d told Xiao Cao that the whisperers couldn’t improve me because “the mold wasn’t right.”
If they have got that right, that’s going to cause some real change, because, since the US and EC perfected the vaccine in 2010, most of the industrialized countries have been fully vaccinated. And Lianfeng had told Xiao Cao that the whisperers were in Lianfeng, and were in me, but that they weren’t in Xiao Cao, because of the vaccine.
All over the world, in places like the outlying suburbs of Mexico City, and Mozambique, and Bolivia, and all the forgotten countries of the world where the vaccine hasn’t come, there are lots of people for whom “the mold is right.” People who will be healthier, and smarter, and who, like Lianfeng, may be able to improve their village sweatshops. Maybe there is a whole economic miracle about to unfold in the Third World, while the US, locked out by the vaccine, can only watch.
It’s only speculation. And it’s hard to imagine, watching Lianfeng sleep beside me in his seat.
* * *
Geneva is lightyears—a full century!—away from Beijing, and nothing I have told Lianfeng could possibly have prepared him. He stands in the airport in his new Beijing clothes, looking at the advertisements, the mixture of foreigners, innocent of the West.
Dr. Erandt is a woman my mother’s age, wearing a beautiful suit the creamy brown of eggshells. Dr. Erandt’s Chinese translator has an earring in his nose. Lianfeng can’t stop staring at it (and neither can I). I haven’t had a decent haircut in over a year, and I’m still wearing my awful cotton coat from China.
“I am so happy to meet you,” Dr. Erandt says, shaking Lianfeng’s hand. “You don’t have any idea how happy I am to meet you.”
“Dr. Erandt,” I say, “have you ever had EID?”
“No,” says Dr. Erandt, “I was lucky.”
Lianfeng looks at me. He couldn’t have understood, I asked in English. But he nods. “Weiguoren,” he says to me.
Foreigners.
WALL, STONE, CRAFT
Walter Jon Williams
Here’s a vivid and compelling bit of Alternate History, in which Lord Byron—in our universe a famous poet—opts for a military career instead, and becomes the Hero of Waterloo, and one of the most celebrated men on Earth—but finds that his most significant encounter is yet to be fought, a life-and-death contest of clashing wills and conflicting ideals waged against a frail but determined young woman named Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who has greatness inside her, waiting to be born.…
Walter Jon Williams was born in Minnesota and now lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His stories have appeared in our Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Ninth Annual Collections. His novels include Ambassador of Progress, Knight Moves, Hardwired, The Crown Jewels, Voice of the Whirlwind, House of Shards, Angel Station, and Days of Atonement. His most recent books are a collection of his short work, Facets, and a big, critically acclaimed new novel, Aristoi.
1
She awoke, there in the common room of the inn, from a brief dream of roses and death. Once Mary came awake she recalled there were wild roses on her mother’s grave, and wondered if her mother’s spirit had visited her.
On her mother’s grave, Mary’s lover had first proposed their elopement. It was there the two of them had first made love.
Now she believed she was pregnant. Her lover was of the opinion that she was mistaken. That was about where it stood.
Mary concluded that it was best not to think about it. And so, blinking sleep from her eyes, she sat in the common room of the inn at Le Caillou and resolved to study her Italian grammar by candlelight.
Plurals. La nascita, le nascite. La madre, le madri. Un bambino, i bambini …
Interruption: stampings, snortings, the rattle of harness, the barking of dogs. Four young Englishmen entered the inn, one in scarlet uniform coat, the others in fine traveling clothes. Raindrops dazzled on their shoulders. The innkeeper bustled out from the kitchen, smiled, proffered the register.
Mary, unimpressed by anything English, concentrated on the grammar.
“Let me sign, George,” the redcoat said. “My hand needs the practice.”
Mary glanced up at the comment.
“I say, George, here’s a fellow signed in Greek!” The Englishman peered at yellowed pages of the inn’s register, trying to make out the words in the dim light of the innkeeper’s lamp. Mary smiled at the English officer’s efforts.
“Perseus, I believe the name is. Perseus Busseus—d’ye suppose he means Bishop?—Kselleius. And he gives his occupation as ‘te anthropou philou’—that would make him a friendly fellow, eh?—” The officer looked over his shoulder and grinned, then returned to the register. “‘Kai atheos.’” The officer scowled, then straightened. “Does that mean what I think it does, George?”
George—the pretty auburn-haired man in byrons—shook rain off his short cape, stepped to the register, examined the text. “Not ‘friendly fellow,’” he said. “That would be ‘anehrphilos.’ ‘Anthropos’ is mankind, not man.” There was the faintest touch of Scotland in his speech.
“So it is,” said the officer. “It comes back now.”
George bent at his slim waist and looked carefully at the register. “What the fellow says is, ‘Both friend of man and—’” He frowned, then looked at his friend. “You were right about the ‘atheist,’ I’m afraid.”
The officer was indignant. “Ain’t funny, George,” he said.
George gave a cynical little half-smile. His voice changed, turned comical and fussy, became that of a high-pitched English schoolmaster. “Let us try to make out the name of this famous atheist.” He bent over the register again. “Perseus—you had that right, Somerset. Busseus—how very irregular. Kselleius—Kelly? Shelley?” He smiled at his friend. His voice became very Irish. “Kelly, I imagine. An atheistical upstart Irish schoolmaster with a little Greek. But what the Busseus might be eludes me, unless his middle name is Omnibus.”
Somerset chuckled. Mary rose from her place and walked quietly toward the pair. “The gentleman’s name is Bysshe, sir,” she said. “Percy Bysshe Shelley.”
The two men turned in surprise. The officer—Somerset—bowed as he perceived a lady. Mary saw for the first time that he had one empty sleeve pinned across his tunic, which would account for the comment about the hand. The other—George, the man in byrons—swept off his hat and gave Mary a flourishing bow, one far too theatrical to be taken seriously. When he straightened, he gave Mary a little frown.
“Bysshe Shelley?” he said. “Any relation to Sir Bysshe, the baronet?”
“His grandson.”
“Sir Bysshe is a protegé of old Norfolk.” This an aside to his friends. Radical Whiggery was afoot, or so the tone implied. George returned his attention to Mary as the other Englishmen gathered about her. “An interesting family, no doubt,” he said, and smiled at her. Mary wanted to flinch from the compelling way he looked at her, gazed upward, intently, from beneath his brows. “And are you of his party?”
“I am.”
“And you are, I take it, Mrs. Shelley?”
Mary straightened and gazed defiantly into George’s eyes. “Mrs. Shelley resides in England. My name is Godwin.”
George’s eyes widened, flickered a little. Low English murmurs came to Mary’s ears. George bowed again. “Charmed to meet you, Miss Godwin.”
George pointed to each of his companions with his hat. “Lord Fitzroy Somerset.” The armless man bowed again. “Captain Harry Smith. Captain Austen of the Navy. Pásmány, my fencing master.” Most of the party, Mary thought, were young, and all were handsome, George most of all. George turned to Mary again, a little smile of anticipation curling his lips. His burning look was almost insolent. “My name is Newstead.”
Mortal embarrassment clutched at Mary’s heart. She knew her cheeks were burning, but still she held George’s eyes as she bobbed a curtsey.
George had not been Marquess Newstead for more than a few months. He had been famous for years both as an intimate of the Prince Regent and the most dashing of Wellington’s cavalry officers, but it was his exploits on the field of Waterloo and his capture of Napoleon on the bridge at Genappe that had made him immortal. He was the talk of England and the Continent, though he had achieved his fame under another name.
Before the Prince Regent had given him the title of Newstead, auburn-haired, insolent-eyed George had been known as George Gordon Noël, the sixth Lord Byron.
Mary decided she was not going to be impressed by either his titles or his manner. She decided she would think of him as George.
“Pleased to meet you, my lord,” Mary said. Pride steeled her as she realized her voice hadn’t trembled.
She was spared further embarrassment when the door burst open and a servant entered followed by a pack of muddy dogs—whippets—who showered them all with water, then howled and bounded about George, their master. Standing tall, his strong, well-formed legs in the famous side-laced boots that he had invented to show off his calf and ankle, George laughed as the dogs jumped up on his chest and bayed for attention. His lordship barked back at them and wrestled with them for a moment—not very lordlike, Mary thought—and then he told his dogs to be still. At first they ignored him, but eventually he got them down and silenced.
He looked up at Mary. “I can discipline men, Miss Godwin,” he said, “but I’m afraid I’m not very good with animals.”
“That shows you have a kind heart, I’m sure,” Mary said.
The others laughed a bit at this—apparently kindheartedness was not one of George’s better-known qualities—but George smiled indulgently.
“Have you and your companion supped, Miss Godwin? I would welcome the company of fellow English in this tiresome land of Brabant.”
Mary was unable to resist an impertinence. “Even if one of them is an atheistical upstart Irish schoolmaster?”
“Miss Godwin, I would dine with Wolfe Tone himself.” Still with that intent, under-eyed look, as if he was dissecting her.
Mary was relieved to turn away from George’s gaze and look toward the back of the inn, in the direction of the kitchen. “Bysshe is in the kitchen giving instructions to the cook. I believe my sister is with him.”
“Are there more in your party?”
“Only the three of us. And one rather elderly carriage horse.”
“Forgive us if we do not invite the horse to table.”
“Your ape, George,” Somerset said dolefully, “will be quite enough.”
Mary would have pursued this interesting remark, but at that moment Bysshe and Claire appeared from out of the kitchen passage. Both were laughing, as if at a shared secret, and Claire’s black eyes glittered. Mary repressed a spasm of annoyance.
“Mary!” Bysshe said. “The cook told us a ghost story!” He was about to go on, but paused as he saw the visitors.
“We have an invitation to dinner,” Mary said. “Lord Newstead has been kind enough—”
“Newstead!” said Claire. “The Lord Newstead?”
George turned his searching gaze on Claire. “I’m the only Newstead I know.”
Mary felt a chill of alarm, for a moment seeing Claire as George doubtless saw her: black-haired, black-eyed, fatally indiscreet, and all of sixteen.
Sometimes the year’s difference in age between Mary and Claire seemed a century.
“Lord Newstead!” Claire babbled. “I recognize you now! How exciting to meet you!”
Mary resigned herself to fate. “My lord,” she said, “may I present my sister, Miss Jane—Claire, rather, Claire Clairmont, and Mr. Shelley.”
The Year's Best SF 11 # 1993 Page 89
