The John Varley Reader (69 page)

Rossnikova paused while many of those present called up this information.

“To implement the zone, the TC-38 was given command of certain defensive weapons. These included ten bevawatt lasers . . . and other weapons which I have not been authorized to name or describe, other than to say they are at least as formidable as the lasers.”

Hoeffer looked annoyed, and was about to say something, but Zeiss stopped him with a gesture. Each understood that the lasers were enough in themselves.

“So while it is possible to destroy the station,” Rossnikova went on, “there is no chance of boarding it—assuming anyone would even want to try.”

Bach thought she could tell from the different expressions around the table which people knew the whole story and which knew only their part of it. A couple of the latter seemed ready to ask a question, but Hoeffer spoke first.

“How about canceling the computer's instructions?” he said. “Have you tried that?”

“That's been tried many times over the last few years, as this crisis got closer. We didn't expect it to work, and it did not. Tango Charlie won't accept a new program.”

“Oh my God,” Dr. Blume gasped. Bach saw that his normally florid face had paled. “Tango Charlie. She's on Tango Charlie.”

“That's right, Doctor,” said Hoeffer. “And we're trying to figure out how to get her off. Dr. Wilhelm?”

Wilhelm was an older woman with the stocky build of the Earthborn. She rose, and looked down at some notes in her hand.

“Information's under the label Neurotropic Agent X on your machines,” she muttered, then looked up at them. “But you needn't bother. That's about as far as we got, naming it. I'll sum up what we know, but you don't need an expert for this; there
are
no experts on Neuro-X.

“It broke out on August 9, thirty years ago next month. The initial report was five cases, one death. Symptoms were progressive paralysis, convulsions, loss of motor control, numbness.

“Tango Charlie was immediately quarantined as a standard procedure. An epidemiological team was dispatched from Atlanta, followed by another from New Dresden. All ships which had left Tango Charlie were ordered to return, except for one on its way to Mars and another already in parking orbit around Earth. The one in Earth orbit was forbidden to land.

“By the time the teams arrived, there were over a hundred reported cases, and six more deaths. Later symptoms included blindness and deafness. It progressed at different rates in different people, but it was always quite fast. Mean survival time from onset of symptoms was later determined to be forty-eight hours. Nobody lived longer than four days.

“Both medical teams immediately came down with it, as did a third, and a fourth team.
All
of them came down with it, each and every person. The first two teams had been using class three isolation techniques. It didn't matter. The third team stepped up the precautions to class two. Same result. Very quickly we had been forced into class one procedures—which involves isolation as total as we can get it: no physical contact whatsoever, no sharing of air supplies, all air to the investigators filtered through a sterilizing environment. They
still
got it. Six patients and some tissue samples were sent to a class one installation two hundred miles from New Dresden, and more patients were sent, with class one precautions, to a hospital ship close to Charlie. Everyone at both facilities came down with it. We
almost
sent a couple of patients to Atlanta.”

She paused, looking down and rubbing her forehead. No one said anything.

“I was in charge,” she said, quietly. “I can't take credit for not shipping anyone to Atlanta. We were going to . . . and suddenly there wasn't anybody left on Charlie to load patients aboard. All dead or dying.

“We backed off. Bear in mind this all happened in five days. What we had to show for those five days was a major space station with all aboard dead, three ships full of dead people, and an epidemiological research facility here on Luna full of dead people.

“After that, politicians began making most of the decisions—but I advised them. The two nearby ships were landed by robot control at the infected research station. The derelict ship going to Mars was . . . I think it's still classified, but what the hell? It was blown up with a nuclear weapon. Then we started looking into what was left. The station here was easiest. There was one cardinal rule:
nothing
that went into that station was to come out. Robot crawlers brought in remote manipulators and experimental animals. Most of the animals died. Neuro-X killed most mammals: monkeys, rats, cats—”

“Dogs?” Bach asked. Wilhelm glanced at her.

“It didn't kill
all
the dogs. Half of the ones we sent in lived.”

“Did you know that there were dogs alive on Charlie?”

“No. The interdiction was already set up by then. Charlie Station was impossible to land, and too close and too visible to nuke, because that would violate about a dozen corporate treaties. And there seemed no reason not to just leave it there. We had our samples isolated here at the Lunar station. We decided to work with that, and forget about Charlie.”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

“As I was saying, it was by far the most virulent organism we had ever seen. It seemed to have a taste for all sorts of neural tissue, in almost every mammal.

“The teams that went in never had time to learn anything. They were all disabled too quickly, and just as quickly they were dead. We didn't find out much, either . . . for a variety of reasons. My guess is it was a virus, simply because we would certainly have seen anything larger almost immediately. But we never
did
see it. It was fast getting in—we don't know how it was vectored, but the only reliable shield was several miles of vacuum—and once it got in, I suspect it worked changes on genetic material of the host, setting up a secondary agent which I'm almost sure we isolated . . . and then it went away and hid very well. It was still in the host, in some form, it
had
to be, but we think its active life in the nervous system was on the order of one hour. But by then it had already done its damage. It set the system against itself, and the host was consumed in about two days.”

Wilhelm had grown increasingly animated. A few times Bach thought she was about to get incoherent. It was clear the nightmare of Neuro-X had not diminished for her with the passage of thirty years. But now she made an effort to slow down again.

“The other remarkable thing about it was, of course, its infectiousness. Nothing I've ever seen was so persistent in evading our best attempts at keeping it isolated. Add that to its mortality rate, which, at the time, seemed to be one hundred percent . . . and you have the second great reason why we learned so little about it.”

“What was the first?” Hoeffer asked. Wilhelm glared at him.

“The difficulty of investigating such a subtle process of infection by remote control.”

“Ah, of course.”

“The other thing was simply fear. Too many people had died for there to be any hope of hushing it up. I don't know if anyone tried. I'm sure those of you who were old enough remember the uproar. So the public debate was loud and long, and the pressure for extreme measures was intense . . . and, I should add, not unjustified. The argument was simple. Everyone who got it was dead. I believe that if those patients had been sent to Atlanta, everyone on
Earth
would have died. Therefore . . . what was the point of taking a chance by keeping it alive and studying it?”

Dr. Blume cleared his throat, and Wilhelm looked at him.

“As I recall, Doctor,” he said, “there were two reasons raised. One was the abstract one of scientific knowledge. Though there might be no point in studying Neuro-X since no one was afflicted with it, we might learn something by the study itself.”

“Point taken,” Wilhelm said, “and no argument.”

“And the second was, we never found out where Neuro-X came from . . . There were rumors it was a biological warfare agent.” He looked at Rossnikova, as if asking her what comment GMA might want to make about
that
. Rossnikova said nothing. “But most people felt it was a spontaneous mutation. There have been several instances of that in the high-radiation environment of a space station. And if it happened once, what's to prevent it from happening again?”

“Again, you'll get no argument from me. In fact, I supported both those positions when the question was being debated.” Wilhelm grimaced, then looked right at Blume. “But the fact is, I didn't support them very hard, and when the Lunar station was sterilized, I felt a lot better.”

Blume was nodding.

“I'll admit it. I felt better, too.”

“And if Neuro-X were to show up again,” she went on, quietly, “my advice would be to sterilize immediately. Even if it meant losing a city.”

Blume said nothing. Bach watched them both for a while in the resulting silence, finally understanding just how much Wilhelm feared this thing.

 
 
There was a lot more. The meeting went on for three hours, and everyone got a chance to speak. Eventually, the problem was outlined to everyone's satisfaction.

Tango Charlie could not be boarded. It could be destroyed. (Some time was spent debating the wisdom of the original interdiction order—beating a dead horse, as far as Bach was concerned—and questioning whether it might be possible to countermand it.)

But things could
leave
Tango Charlie. It would only be necessary to withdraw the robot probes that had watched so long and faithfully, and the survivors could be evacuated.

That left the main question.
Should
they be evacuated?

(The fact that only one survivor had been sighted so far was not mentioned. Everyone assumed others would show up sooner or later. After all, it was simply not possible that just one eight-year-old girl could be the only occupant of a station no one had entered or left for thirty years.)

Wilhelm, obviously upset but clinging strongly to her position, advocated blowing up the station at once. There was some support for this, but only about ten percent of the group.

The eventual decision, which Bach had predicted before the meeting even started, was to do nothing at the moment.

After all, there were almost five whole days to keep thinking about it.

 
“There's a call waiting for you,” Steiner said, when she got back to the monitoring room. “The switchboard says it's important.”

Bach went into her office—wishing yet again for one with walls—flipped a switch.

“Bach,” she said. Nothing came on the vision screen.

“I'm curious,” said a woman's voice. “Is this the Anna-Louise Bach who worked in The Bubble ten years ago?”

For a moment, Bach was too surprised to speak, but she felt a wave of heat as blood rushed to her face. She knew the voice.

“Hello? Are you there?”

“Why no vision?” she asked.

“First, are you alone? And is your instrument secure?”

“The instrument is secure, if yours is.” Bach flipped another switch, and a privacy hood descended around her screen. The sounds of the room faded as a sonic scrambler began operating. “And I'm alone.”

Megan Galloway's face appeared on the screen. One part of Bach's mind noted that she hadn't changed much, except that her hair was curly and red.

“I thought you might not wish to be seen with me,” Galloway said. Then she smiled. “Hello, Anna-Louise. How are you?”

“I don't think it really matters if I'm seen with you,” Bach said.

“No? Then would you care to comment on why the New Dresden Police Department, among other government agencies, is allowing an eight-year-old child to go without the rescue she so obviously needs?”

Bach said nothing.

“Would you comment on the rumor that the NDPD does not intend to effect the child's rescue? That, if it can get away with it, the NDPD will let the child be smashed to pieces?”

Still Bach waited.

Galloway sighed, and ran a hand through her hair.

“You're the most exasperating woman I've ever known, Bach,” she said. “Listen, don't you even want to
try
to talk me out of going with the story?”

Bach almost said something, but decided to wait once more.

“If you want to, you can meet me at the end of your shift. The Mozartplatz. I'm on the
Great Northern,
suite 1, but I'll see you in the bar on the top deck.”

“I'll be there,” Bach said, and broke the connection.

 
Charlie sang the Hangover Song most of the morning. It was not one of her favorites.

There was penance to do, of course. Tik-Tok made her drink a foul glop that—she had to admit—did do wonders for her headache. When she was done she was drenched in sweat, but her hangover was gone.

“You're lucky,” Tik-Tok said. “Your hangovers are never severe.”

“They're severe enough for
me,
” Charlie said.

He made her wash her hair, too.

After that, she spent some time with her mother. She always valued that time. Tik-Tok was a good friend, mostly, but he was so
bossy
. Charlie's mother never shouted at her, never scolded or lectured. She simply listened. True, she wasn't very active. But it was nice to have somebody just to talk to. One day, Charlie hoped, her mother would walk again. Tik-Tok said that was unlikely.

Then she had to round up the dogs and take them for their morning run.

And everywhere she went, the red camera eyes followed her. Finally she had enough. She stopped, put her fists on her hips, and shouted at a camera.