Asimov's SF, September 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Are you ready?” the hangman asked.

  The sound shocked her nearly as much as the consideration. His voice was like her uncle's, too, low and resonant.

  She nodded. Why not? As ready now as ever, and then the hangman stepped back and the trapdoor opened and the world jerked hard...

  * * * *

  “Why did you do it?” her lawyer asked before he even sat down, the first time they ever met. Salierson, he said his name was, looking sharp and professional and completely out of place in the grime of the Ghanan National Police interrogation room.

  “When I was a little girl, I thought I would be a witch when I grew up,” Adija said, not quite answering the question, or at least not answering it in quite the way her lawyer wanted. “I lived in the Kpatinga witch camp and it was well known that girls who were exposed to that kind of evil influence often became witches themselves when they were older."

  “And so you became a scientist instead?” Salierson pulled up a battered metal chair, brushing it off with two careful swipes before he took a seat. “Isn't that just the modern variant?"

  Adija blinked, offended, but trying not to show it. She required his help, if not with the trial—that was a foregone conclusion—then with obtaining what she needed. Just one small thing, brought from her bags, and she could make it through this.

  “I don't know how old I was when I first came to the camp,” she said, pressing on, determined to win him over.

  Six, maybe, she guessed, judging by the smallness of her hands compared to the thick biology text she remembered best. Like everyone, she knew the day of the week of her birth—she was a Thursday's child—but the year had always meant less in Ghana and so Adija had to estimate. Of what she remembered, though, this was always clear:

  They had fled her village in the middle of the night on her father's motorbike, her granny-Nya clinging to her father and Adija clinging to her granny. A few of the boys had heard them running away and chased after, flinging rocks and curses. A sharp one had caught her in the middle of her back and she had felt it all the way to the camp, first as a stinging, then as a wetness, then as a sticky, pulling pain.

  She knew why they'd had to run, too. Her Nya had killed a little boy, they said; he had seized for three days straight and then choked his way down into death, still jerking weakly. That was witch's work, clear as day, and soon the village realized it was her Nya who was the witch.

  But her grandmother had a chance to prove her innocence. Right after they had arrived at the camp, with the sun still rising over the horizon, the Gambaraana witch-doctor had met them with his guinea fowl in hand.

  There were a few huts in a circle and other girls there to help their witch-grannies, maybe ten of them altogether. Adija wanted to ask her father about them but she didn't think that she should ask a question like that right then. He looked sad and scared, and thin, too, she realized for the first time, as she stood beside him and saw him sideways on.

  Later, she would remember that, and her mother's thinness, too. Nobody said HIV, ever, and for all Adija knew some other old woman had been blamed for their deaths and sent off to a witch camp or maybe killed outright. She never knew, just as she never knew if her father had left her there for her Nya's sake—her grandmother was too old to gather sticks for the fire or water from the well—or whether it was for Adija's sake alone, given the foreign aid that kept the camp alive.

  Salierson frowned.

  Adija stopped.

  “Your parent both died of AIDS?"

  Adija nodded. That was just the sort of thing she needed him to hear—so sympathy-inducing—but to come right out and say it—well, that wasn't the way that stories went in Ghana. If she were out of here, back in the US, or maybe in her lab in Singapore, she could put the story together like a proper research paper, with the abstract in the front. Here everything blurred in the heat and a simple, statistical decision turned back into a darker, weirder thing made of witches and blood and children gone forever wrong.

  She never knew which way was right.

  So she just kept going, weaving her way back into the tale until it felt as if she was standing there again, smaller than nearly everything except the guinea fowl itself.

  The chief was saying a few words, but Adija didn't understand, even in retrospect. Some secret ritual language, she supposed now, some garbled nonsense that had acquired the patina of power over the generations. Abracadabra, the Gambaraana might as well have said, and then she remembered just how he had slit the guinea fowl's neck, gently, with a slice deep enough to kill but shallow enough to take a little time for the bird to die.

  He dropped the fowl and it landed on its feet, then stumbled, one leg going out from under it just as a man's would, if his knee had buckled. Adija didn't think birds had knees, not exactly, and in any case the little chicken soon recovered, popping its wings out for balance.

  It turned its head and looked right at her—maybe she was the only one small enough for it to see eye-to-eye with—and with that turn something pulled loose; the blood began to flow. It cocked its head, surprised, perhaps, just like Adija had felt surprised when the stone had cut her back, and for a moment she was afraid to move so much as a muscle, for fear her back would rip open just like the little bird's neck, and both of them would gush their lives out on the sand.

  But she couldn't hold still that long. She moved, and the bird moved too, flapping its wings this way and that as if it were dancing, with a dip and a twist and a steady drip of blood.

  Adija leaned forward as if she could catch it, fix it, put it back right, and it leaned forward, too. It was too far away, though, and there was a hand on her shoulder besides. So she quit leaning and it kept going, until it keeled over and quietly expired, face down on the ground. A minute, maybe two, since its throat had been cut, and that was a quick death in this place.

  A quick, decisive death. A thrill ran round the circle and Adija tried to remember what her cousins had told her, out by the well, about sorcerers and witches and how you knew their guilt. Face up or face down, that was how you knew, from the way the bird died, but which was which?

  She didn't have to remember, though. People were already drawing back from her Nya, though why they would do that if the rest of them were witches too was beyond Adija. The bird had died face down and they said that meant her grandmother was guilty of witchery, plain as day.

  The Gambaraana sent a girl scurrying off and she came back with a potion in a lopsided clay bowl. It was thick and red, Adija could see when she stood on tiptoes to peer over the rim. It looked as if it had been standing out for a while too, because there was something small and kicking near the surface, some insect that had fallen in and was close to its own drowning death.

  But they made her grandmother drink it, flies and all, and she was sick for three days straight. It was supposed to make her safe to live with, to bind her power, but Adija wondered if she would have to stay here if her Nya died. Adija hadn't killed anyone with witchcraft, after all, and maybe three days in this place wasn't enough to taint anyone. But her grandmother lived and her parents died and time passed and finally she was thirteen, still living in the Kpatinga witches’ camp.

  Adija stopped, then swallowed.

  Salierson tipped his head to the side. The room was hot; no air conditioning to waste on wicked things like her. The sweat on his temple changed direction as his head tilted, slipping sideways instead of down. “That's a pretty rough story,” he said, finally.

  He stood up, then smiled. “Not the worst I've ever heard, though I am sorry about your parents."

  He said a few more things—none of them reassuring—and left, smoothing his suit down as he left, one hand after the other.

  Adija stared after him, long after the door had shut. Maybe she should get a different lawyer? There had to be someone, somewhere, who would bring her the implant from her bags—there were factions out there who thought she was a hero.

  Of course, it had to be a law
yer, to be approved to see her, and most of her supporters consisted of highly reasonable scientists, along with some eminent statisticians.

  And on the other hand, she could easily end up with someone worse. The world was currently full of her ... detractors.

  That was the way she chose to think of them. It was as good a word as any for people who thought lynching was too good for her and that a trial was a slap in the face to all their suffering.

  She understood that, too. She had, after all, killed more than eighty million people.

  * * * *

  Salierson was back the next day, though, escorting her to court with a solicitousness that reassured. She'd looked over his resume again; there was no reason to suspect that he was against her apriori.

  The courtroom was packed, unsurprisingly, wall to wall humanity in the spectator rows. It smelled of stale sweat compressed into too small a space, exuded and reabsorbed and then exuded once again.

  The first witness was the chief of the Singapore biotech company that she'd worked for. It felt strange to see him outside of his bright, steel-edged office; he seemed skinned and scared in the natural light of day.

  Still, he testified clearly, if quickly, RetroVax had developed a novel approach to overcoming HIV. The only natural immunity to HIV so far had been found in people who lacked the CCR5 receptor. Therefore, the company had developed a way to knock out CCR5. Presto, natural immunity.

  The prosecutor paused and nodded wisely, as if he really understood, and cut to pictures from the vaccine trial as they went. The unlucky 10 percent, of course, in close-up: bodies swollen, abdomens tight with fluid, blood trickling from a nose or mouth.

  Adija closed her eyes. She couldn't watch it all again. She'd hated it as much the first time through, but it didn't change the math.

  Salierson rose, looking neat as ever, and his defense was good. What was a 10 percent risk when 100 percent of people with HIV died, and decades of promises of Western medications had always, always come to nothing? Weren't those deaths just as bad? Shelving the treatment had everything to do with Western scourges—liability and lawsuits and tanking stocks—and nothing to do with African ones, like an actual disease.

  It didn't seem to matter.

  The chief left without meeting her eyes. It wasn't so much the deaths, he'd said back when they'd argued about the company's decision. It was the liability.

  A little less smart and a little more savvy, he'd said. Couldn't be a scientist without understanding legalities just as well as you did ligation. Did she want to end up in jail for criminal negligence?

  Want, no, Adija thought, letting her gaze sink back to the defendant's table in front of her as they let him go.

  Need, maybe, if it meant doing what was right.

  Besides, in the end, the only person in the room she needed on her side was the one next to her, her lawyer. Just one person, that was all she needed to convince, to get out of this alive.

  * * * *

  “My wife died from your cure,” Salierson said conversationally, when they were back in the interrogation room. “She didn't even have HIV, did you know that?"

  Adija sat, and didn't answer. What could she say? That it didn't matter, when more lives were saved than lost?

  She turned it over in her head regardless. “Do you think that makes it worse?” she said finally. “That the ones with HIV deserved to die more than your disease-free wife? Because they had done something wrong and she hadn't?"

  “It means that if you hadn't come along, she would still be alive, that's what it means."

  That sat between them for a while. Adija would have apologized, if that had felt right, if she were less sure that she had done what was right.

  “I should get another lawyer,” she offered in the end. “You didn't disclose that before. It's a conflict of interest, at the least."

  Salierson smiled, almost sweetly. “Eighty million dead? Who hasn't got a conflict of interest?"

  Adija considered her response, considered protesting—hundreds of millions more saved—once again. Instead she said, “I think you did a good job in court today.” It was true; Salierson obviously hated her on some level but he hadn't compromised his profession.

  “I know about the man you killed.” Salierson shifted in his chair, almost awkwardly.

  Adija looked up, puzzled. “The” hardly covered it when you had released a re-engineered adenovirus that brought a 10 percent mortality rate along with its cure for HIV.

  “The Gambaraana's son. The first man that you killed,” Salierson said, persisting.

  “Why do you want to know about that?” Adija asked. That had been so long ago, and so justified, that it barely registered in her memory.

  “Did you think he deserved to die?"

  Adija cocked her head and looked at him. “Yes.” She paused, then went on, unsure where this was going. “What do you know about it?"

  Salierson shrugged. “By the testimony—completely under the radar and paid for anonymously, you may either be relieved or completely unmoved to hear—of one of the aid workers, you murdered him."

  Adija stared, then tried not to. This mattered to Salierson, obviously, though she couldn't fathom why. “I'm not on trial for that, am I?"

  “And you never will be,” Salierson said. “Humor me. I just need to know what happened."

  Adija brought her hands up from her lap, rested them on the table. She preferred not to think of her time in the camp, had always preferred to think of tomorrow instead, but her tomorrows were potentially becoming very small.

  Besides, she had already opened her past once to try to influence this man—what was once more? Surely it was a good sign that he wanted to know; it meant, perhaps, that he cared, that he would bring her what she needed?

  “Did you know that in Africa most men think that having sex with a virgin cures HIV?” Adija said, therefore.

  Salierson blinked and almost seemed to soften, suddenly. “Is that what happened to you?"

  The question almost shocked her. Even after all the years she had lived in America, before she had moved to Singapore for her postdoc, she had never become accustomed to that tendency to ask forthright questions, to pry so directly and unashamedly.

  “No,” Adija said honestly, wondering if, truly, it would be better if she said yes. “I wasn't a very pretty child and I wasn't docile either."

  There were other girls in the camp, pure and sweet and easy to control, she remembered that all too clearly. “The Gambaraana's son, he started with my friend Elilia. It didn't work, of course. So very stupid. The aid workers told everyone, over and over and over again, that it didn't work that way."

  “So he deserved to die? He was a rapist, maybe even a pedophile, and he had it coming?” Salierson said. “You could maybe convince me of that."

  Adija shook her head, watching her lawyer's face, sensitive to the slightest twitch. “No. I killed him because he would have done it again and again. More of the girls would have been hurt and infected, pulled down with him."

  Salierson snorted. “The dispassionate savior. Did they thank you for it?"

  No. They hadn't. But they had sent her away, gotten her out of there when they realized who had found the root, the one they used in the ritual potion, the one that made the new witches so sick. She had slipped a triple portion in the Gambaraana's son's second flask, the one he would drink when he was already too drunk to think better about any strange, unnatural taste, and she had solved the problem for good when the aid workers would do nothing but stand around and talk about how terrible it was.

  Salierson smiled. It was a small, commiserating type of smile, as if he knew exactly what she felt. He leaned forward, put his hand on top of hers where they rested on the table and she managed not to jerk her hand away.

  “I need you to bring me something from my bags,” Adija said. Now or never. “We both know what the sentence of the court is going to be and I can't face the execution without some help. I have a medication
I brought with me. It's a, a kind of sedative."

  Salierson didn't waiver. “No, it's not.” He rubbed his hands once across the top of hers before he disengaged.

  But he brought it to her anyway.

  * * * *

  The fall, it seemed, lasted forever; an eternity of the gallows rushing past. Then the rope was biting deep, cutting, and Adija thought she felt blood trickle down her front. She kicked out, unable to stop herself, and her hands twisted inside the bindings, trying to free themselves and release her neck.

  It went on, as endless as the fall, worse and worse with more and more pain until she thought she would lose her mind, if not her life.

  That, finally, was what calmed her despite the pain. She was still alive.

  She stilled her kicking with the greatest of effort, mind over body, forcing herself to become quiet, deathlike, but inside her heart was singing. The implant worked, it worked, it worked. Even now it was producing oxygen, pumping it up into her brain, substituting for her lungs.

  It had been developed for deep-sea divers and what was she if not a visitor to a strange and airless place? She had enough oxygen to keep herself alive for forty-eight hours, according to the specs, though they should cut her down in just a little while. A few moments more of torture was nothing, surely.

  But, oh God, it hurt.

  Her heart beat faster, though, despite the pain—innocent, innocent, innocent, it said. Face up and not a witch, said the oldest, most childish part of her. Soon they'd cut her down and take her to the morgue, and then—for who guards the dead?—she would rise and go.

  They'd think she was a ghost, the ones who saw her, and they would run and never touch her. She could walk her way to freedom, and if it was their superstition that saved her now, then wasn't that only right?

  But they didn't cut her down. They disassembled the platform from around her and then they took down the chain-link fence and let the crowd come in.

  They weren't anything like she expected, now that she was hanging. They were quiet, awed almost, and they filed by, one by one or in families, and they spoke to her as they came. She heard their stories and they touched her.