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Scribe
Join Date: Feb 2006
Location: Brisbane
Gender: Male
Posts: 58
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A Song Of Plagues Suite 1 part A
A
“Who can say when the first infection of the last plague actually began? We were awash in an ocean of life. We watched it for centuries trying to control it, to anticipate it, and we were always a step behind what was actually happening.”
—from “A Survivor’s Log.”
When the agent from the global quarantine program arrived at the reservation, she was met at the foot of her flyer’s gangplank by a wizened old man in a filthy black smock. His name was Jean-Ricard Dupont and he had been a resident of the reservation since its official formation, thirty-two years earlier.
“Mmm, welcome Agent Cohen.” He said by way of greeting, his sharp, grey eyes taking in the new-comers appearance with a glance. She was about one-hundred-and-sixty centimetres tall, quite short for an arcology dweller, and quite ugly, which meant she had almost certainly been conceived without engineered selection.
Her nose was her dominant feature, like a thrown axe, until he noticed her eyes, which were the eyes of someone throwing an axe at him. They were dark, nearly black, and they glittered with fierce calculating intelligence. The rest of her was, of course, covered by the skin-tight, white q-suit of a quarantine agent which projected a lustrous, gold aura of displaced electrons that repelled most pathogens. Apart from her imposing dress and demeanour, Dupont found her ugliness to be quite personable. He attempted an ingratiating smile, showing teeth blackened by scurvy.
Rachael stopped mid-bow, shocked at the old man’s discourteous greeting and repulsed by his filthy appearance.
He’s been stuck among these primitives too long, she thought, uncharitably.
“Dupont-san,” she said, skipping to the next stage of protocol in greeting. “I am pleased at your welcome. I beg to inform you that my superiors have ordered…”
“Yes, yes, I know,” muttered Dupont. “I have the communiqués. Shall we retire to my hut? The humidity troubles my bones, you know.” Without waiting for her to respond, he turned his back on her and hobbled into the black, glassteel hut behind him, which was so at odds with the woven-palm stilt houses that pressed in from either side.
The hut was mercifully climate-controlled and sterilised. Rachael breathed a sigh of relief to be out from under the naked sky. After a few minutes forced pleasantries with Dupont, she pleaded fatigue and retired to a small room that he kept maintained for the use of visiting agents. Only when she was alone in the quarantined cell did she feel secure. She lay on the thin mattress looking up at the featureless black ceiling. She was glad that there were no windows. Not only was this the first time she had been sent on a field assignment, it was the first time she had ever been outside. She hated the chaos of this place already and, knowing the potential diseases that lurked here in the swamps, she feared the filth that seemed to besiege her sterile quarters. She wondered again what had possessed her to volunteer for the assignment, but reflected that it was too late to back out now.
Some decisions just have to made, she thought as she drifted off to sleep. Only then can we know if they’re good or bad. Sometimes we never know.
A few hours later, when the sun had just crested the dark green hills flanking the valley but had not yet touched the mist that filled it, Rachael Cohen stepped gingerly through the tacky red mud of the village streets. Her mouth burned with the taste of the spoiled, freeze-dried coffee which Dupont had forced on her and the road steamed in the tropical heat. She stared in mortification as a dirty-grey dog was chased across the deserted street and down an alley by a child less than three years old who wore only tiny, leather boots.
I must not interfere, she thought. The first law of observation. She shook herself from her reverie and walked on, slowly.
I wish there were automatons for this, she thought. I hate being exposed to a potential outbreak. With the thought came a thrill of fear down her spine. The humid air felt filthy in her mouth and she wrinkled her nose as she gazed across the primitive village square. She had to trust her life to the agency that had sent her, and to her q-suit. But if there was a mutagenesis-node somewhere around the village, an outbreak could happen at any moment. Neither the distant agency nor the q-suit could help her if the node bloomed. If the resulting new pathogens were too virulent, her colleagues would not even attempt to devise antibodies, they would simply roast the whole valley from orbit, and her with it.
Fear clouds perception. Clarity requires courage. The old lessons rolled through her mind, calming her breathing. She shivered beneath her voluminous, watertight parka.
I am here to find the node, she thought. I’ll find it and I’ll go home.
An inhuman scream sounded from right behind her. In panic, her combatant-program came online and her muscle-nerve control was increased by orders of magnitude. Her soft, lazy muscles were commanded into lethal efficiency as her neural implant pin-pointed the sound’s origin and calculated a response. She spun around in a blur of speed and fell into a crouch with her pistol half out of her shoulder holster. Behind her stood the toddler who had been chasing the dog. He laughed in glee at her fright and screamed again. He held the collar of the large, lean hound who twitched away at the sound, much as Rachael did. She recovered her poise and concealed her pistol hastily.
She let out a shuddering gasp, the metallic tang of adrenaline heavy in her breath. Her combatant-programs went offline, but she wondered with horror how close she had come to shooting the child out of hand.
I’m out of my element, she thought. I’m panicking into error.
The filthy boy was spilling mucus out one nostril and grinning gummily so it dripped into his mouth. Rachael choked back a retch and turned away, grimacing. Her pulse raced, she felt suddenly faint. The naked toddler gurgled happily and dragged the luckless dog back across the street. She watched breathlessly as the pair disappeared down another narrow alley.
The risk of infection among these primitives! She thought, fearfully. I want to go home! She closed her eyes and swayed on the spot, breathing too quickly. The government office on the village outskirts called out to her, with its quarantine seals and sterile interior. She wanted to get back inside more than anything, not just back to the tiny glassteel hut, but all the way home to the reassuring enormity of the arcology where she was born. Outside, under the sky, she felt naked in a hostile ocean, but she mastered the impulse to flee.
Control yourself, she thought. Concentrate! Steadying her breathing, she continued down the muddy streets.
She came at last to the rude wooden structure where she was to meet her contact. It was made from untreated logs and woven palm leaves, and bore the signs of decades of use. Wrinkling her nose at the smell of unwashed humans, she stepped through the low doorway and into the dark interior. The floor was almost as muddy as the streets, but here and there, woven grass mats delineated living areas. In the musky gloom, Rachael could make out a half dozen shapes, humans and animals, sitting in the mud and straw quietly. With an effort, she restructured her face to conceal the revulsion she felt and cleared her throat.
“Matthias Lot?” She called, softly. Her briefing had not included any mention of the culture of these villages, and she fervently hoped none of the assembled savages would take offence. “My name is Rachael Cohen, we spoke on the comm’ last week...?”
A rich, bass voice answered from the gloom in colourfully accented Basic.
“Welcome, Agent Cohen, welcome!” Matthias spoke as he rose from his mat near the small campfire. He was very tall and very dark. Rachael shrank back from his imposing figure as he rose from the gloom like a spectre. She berated herself silently and bowed to him formally, careful to keep her distance. Matthias’ deep, brown eyes crinkled in amusement and he returned the bow in what seemed a mocking way. In the firelight, his dark, brown skin was a network of scars and blemishes. Rachael stared rudely at his body for a long time, revolted and fascinated. He wore a woven grass loincloth and little else, and his physique was superb. As a biologist and as a woman, Rachael was impressed, but the scars terrified her. They spoke of violence over decades, maybe everyday. Even more terrifying were the tiny pimples and discolourations that peppered his brown skin. They advertised at least fifty pathogens which Rachael could name off the top of her head. None of them were terminal or dangerously infectious, but they were all certainly there. For some reason, she thought of the lean, dirty-grey hound that she had passed along the way. Like this man, it had radiated a sense of powerful vitality despite a life of torturous hardship. Matthias grinned, his teeth were yellow and the top two in the middle were missing. Rachael realised she was staring, and dropped her gaze.
“Thankyou, Sir,” she said, counting on his familiarity with arcology courtesies. “I hope I am not disturbing you?”
“Not at all,” he replied, his voice full of mirth. “I was just eating with mah family.”
He is being sarcastic, Rachael thought. He is smarter than he looks.
“Please forgive the intrusion, Sir,” she said. “I shall wait for you outside.” Without another word, she turned and stepped out the doorway into the sunlight. The air was humid and stank of rotting vegetation, but it was better than the smell of the hut, and Rachael took deep breaths as she strode out and stopped to wait on the corner of the street.
When Matthias appeared from his home, he wore a broad-rimmed, straw hat and leather boots. He grinned at her amiably.
“Mah wife thinks yah don’t like her,” he said, conversationally, leading her down the street.
“Why would she think that?” Rachael asked, startled. Which one was his wife? What should I say? She thought frantically.
“Oh, she wanted yah to stay for lunch,” chortled Matthias. “She don’t understand about arcology-folk. I told her yah’d be too scared to touch a thing.” He looked sideways at Rachael, smiling.
He’s testing me, she thought. What would my father do? Her father never failed to put people at their ease and to earn their respect.
“Well, you’re quite right,” she said, honestly. “I am scared of infection, and you would be too, in my job. Look, I’m really sorry I’ve offended your wife. If you like I’ll go back and apologise, maybe we can still eat lunch together.” Her stomach clenched at the idea but she held his gaze evenly.
“No, she’ll be ’right,” said Matthias, smiling. “She won’t want yah to be scared, but thanks a lot for saying.” Rachael fancied his voice was no longer mocking.
“C’mon,” he said. “If yah want to reach the site by sundown, we’d better go soon. I just got to get one thing along the way, okay?”
“Of course,” replied Rachael, paling at the thought of trying to strike camp in the jungle after nightfall. She followed docilely as he led her back and forth around the tangled huts and though winding alley-ways. After nearly fifteen minutes, during which time Rachael was growing increasingly impatient, they came across the charcoal-grey hound still held fast by the naked child. Both toddler and dog ran to Matthias in greeting and he put a large hand on each of their heads as though in benediction.
“Mah son,” he said to Rachael, proudly. “C’mon, lad,” he said to the boy, picking him up in one arm. “I got to take Blacky for a walk now.” The boy clung to his father with the instinctive grace of a monkey and regarded Rachael with an arrogant stare. The dog padded loyally at Matthias’ side as the child was carried back to the hut and delivered to his mother’s embrace. Rachael waited outside.
“He follows the hound everywhere,” he boasted to Rachael later, as though this was some rare gift. “He’d follow us all the way on foot if we let him.”
Matthias led Rachael eastwards out of the village and into the wilderness. The dog ran ahead with its nose to the earth. The land began to slope downwards as they descended into the heart of the valley and then began to follow the wide, muddy river downstream. Rachael kept silent as they hiked, breathing heavily under the weight of her backpack and concentrating on putting each foot down steadily in front of the other.
Without her guide, and the dog, Rachael could never have found her way. Her implant relayed her exact position from the vantage point of an overhead satellite, as well as the location of all the test-sites, but that did not help her move so efficiently through the swamp, or avoid all its many dangerous creatures. More than once she stumbled and slipped, even with her balance and threat-response heightened by her neural-implant. Matthias seemed tireless, and he kept silent most of the way as well, perhaps taking his cue from her. He led her expertly through the hostile landscape, sometimes pointing out dangers as they passed. Infrequently, he would whistle for the hound when it had wandered too far from their path or had stopped to snuffle at something invisible and fallen behind.
The fat, tropical sun hung low over the jungle canopy when they arrived at the main test-site, several hours later. The clearing lay in darkness, a silver mist curling up from the dense, rotting litter on the ground. The pungent odour of the surrounding swamplands dominated Rachael’s senses. She was dripping with sweat that refused to evaporate in the hot, wet air. In the centre of the clearing, a molecular testing pole, thin and white, rose twelve feet into the air. Matthias stood smiling proprietarily at the clearing’s edge, almost invisible in the undergrowth.
“Alright?” He said and Rachael nodded. “There’s a spot for tent-holes near the pole and I’ll be back at noon in seven days, okay?”
“Yes, excellent, thankyou, Mister Lot,” Rachael said, distractedly, bowing to him. He bowed in return and vanished into the mist. She heard him whistle for the dog and the faint sounds of it crashing through the undergrowth to follow him.
Then there was silence.
It was not the absolute silence of a sound-proofed arcology-cell, but the deep, throbbing silence of a million, million creatures waiting for the sun to set. Rachael felt eyes crawling over her skin and she shivered. In the pink sky the silence was broken as a giant flock of bats flew over the clearing, shrieking to each other. As though this was a signal, countless insect-songs began in every direction, growing louder and softer in irregular pulses that seemed to pluck at Rachael’s nerves. Anxious for shelter, she erected her silksteel tent with economical precision and anchored it to the rocky earth near the pole. For a few seconds she stood and admired the effect of the shiny dome beside the silver pole in the misty jungle. It seemed to her for a moment like a microcosm of civilisation, a tiny arcology in the wilderness, just for her. She dived gratefully inside and sealed the outer sphincter.
Rachael sighed in relief as she passed the tent’s quarantine seal, which buzzed and crackled over her clothes and skin. She dumped her pack and peeled off her parka and her boots, placed her pistol carefully to one side, and deactivated the slippery static charge of her skin-tight q-suit. The tent was lit by pale-green glow-tubes along the curved walls. The dark, silksteel fabric was inflated with electrons, making it rigid and impenetrable, and giving off a faint smell of ozone. Sitting on the narrow mattress built into the tent’s floor, she unpacked the rest of her equipment and stowed it away in the pouches hanging from the walls. Then she lay back on the mattress and closed her eyes. For the first time since she left the government hut that morning, she felt a measure of security. She drained a bulb of chilled orange juice thirstily and smacked her lips. She was halfway through a ration-bar when she remembered that she had promised to call her father as soon as she had arrived at the site. She consulted the chronometer in her neural implant, the digital display shining in her mind’s eye read 1804. It was past two in the morning back home and her father was usually in bed by nine, but she knew he would be waiting up for her call nonetheless. With a martyred sigh, she put aside her supper, lay back on the mattress and activated her communication program.
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"The clown bestows upon his audience the saving grace of laughter."
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