View from Ararat (16 page)

16

Locking the Gate

NATASSIA'S STORY

There comes a moment in every disaster when things slip beyond the point of no return – when all the preventive solutions are rendered useless and momentum takes over.

For the human community on Deucalion, that moment was reached somewhere in the days before the twenty-third, and, like most pivotal happenings in history, it had passed virtually undetected.

According to Security records released later, they found him wandering disorientated and in terrible pain along one of the main pedestrian malls in the centre of Edison. His name was Peter Anthony Rayston, and he was a Security operative working on the isolation detail outside Wieta. The two guards who found him thought he was drunk or drugged. He was delirious, stumbling from one support to the next, struggling to hold himself erect and mumbling incoherently.

Within three days both the guards were dead, too, but by that stage the news was out. There were outbreaks in most suburbs and the whole city was in a state of panic.

Piecing things together afterwards from the transcripts of the guards' incident reports, it was pretty clear that by the time anyone was aware of what was wrong, it was already impossible to work out exactly where in the city Rayston had been wandering. Within minutes of being picked up he had lapsed into a coma from which he did not regain consciousness.

Of course, no one knew anything about Pete Rayston or the danger he represented until it was far too late. The government's ‘need to know' policy meant that the population was totally unprepared for what was about to hit them, and being unprepared meant that the panic following the eventual revelation was far worse than it might have been if they'd been kept informed from the beginning.

Or was it? Knowing earlier might have made for a more orderly evacuation of the affected areas, but what was the point? This was Deucalion. Outside the settled areas of the major cities it was one of the most desolate places that humans had ever tried to inhabit. There weren't a whole lot of places to escape to.

Especially as no other community on the planet was about to accept refugees under such conditions.

I was working the city desk that week. Forsythe was on holidays somewhere up Elton way, visiting his children, and I was filling in. So I was at the console when the announcement came in. President M
ü
ller would be making an address to the nation at five o'clock.

There was no word on what the subject would be, but I had a strange premonition that it wasn't to announce that he'd been swapped at birth with someone named Renos Kohl.

Presidential Complex

New Geneva (City Central)

23/1/203 Standard

TERRY

‘It's not going to work, you know.' Leon M
üller, the seventeenth President of the Republic of Deucalion stands in front of the full-length mirror and studies his appearance, brushing at an imagined mark on the lapel of his jacket. ‘They're going to freak out, no matter what spin we try to put on it. They all know about Wieta, or they think they do, thanks to that bitch on Internet, and when they find out how bad it's going to get, we'll be lucky to escape with our skins, let alone get re-elected.'

Behind him, Terry Eiken, his aide, shakes his head and looks away, silently tasting the words he would like to say.

Re-elected! In a month they could all be dead, and no one even bothered to mention the danger to them until it was too late to do anything about it. When the ship's going down, and there aren't any lifeboats, who gives a flying crap who's in charge? Why
shouldn't
they freak?

But the words remain unspoken. What would be the point of speaking? In the end, none of this is M
üller's fault, and you really can't blame a politician for being . . . a politician. He's egotistical, a power-junkie and a blow-hard, but in the scheme of things, considering his profession, he's a halfway decent human being, caught in an impossible situation. Under the circumstances, can you really blame anyone for clinging to the familiar habits?

And at least the new crisis has removed the terrible obligation to make a decision about the people in the camp itself. For days Tolbert and his crew have been pushing the old man to sign the ‘containment' order. And for days he has been resisting their pressure, praying for a miracle to lift the burden of responsibility from him. Now the decision has been taken out of his hands.

But it is small comfort in the face of what is to come.

In his hands Terry holds the text of the presidential address – a carefully constructed piece of positive-spin double-talk, designed to sugar-coat the fact that no one has a clue what to do.

And the old man is right. It won't work. No one's going to buy the rhetoric, when the bottom line is that in a full-blown epidemic their chances of survival are roughly the same as a mosquito in a fusion-furnace.

The old man is talking again. The young aide places the speech on the desk and turns to listen. At times like this Müller seems almost human – not the successful politician, not the great orator selling ideas and phrases created for him by a phalanx of spin doctors and highly paid speechwriters.

In private he is just a man. And he is tired.

And suddenly reminiscent.

‘My grandfather was one of Denny Woods's small group of revolutionaries during Gaston's phony presidency. He was barely eighteen. He put up anti-Gaston posters all around New G, right under the noses of the Security guards, and sat down in solidarity with the Elokoi at the end of the Long March, when they filled the streets surrounding these offices.

‘They say that when Gaston looked out of these windows, down on that huge, silent crowd, he knew it was the beginning of the end. My grandfather lived for another sixty years after that day, but that was his proudest moment.'

Müller looks back from the window. It is like he is expecting a reply.

Receiving none, he continues. ‘When I was first elected to the Council . . . What was I? Twenty-six? I remember he called to congratulate me. But he told me not to let it go to my head, that I had just scored the only job in the world where you have thirty million bosses, and no matter what good you do, no one will ever remember anything but your mistakes. Then he said something that I didn't really understand until years later. “The Elokoi have a saying”, he said. “A clan without a history is like the howling of wind in the leaves of the Ocra”.'

Terry Eiken waits, but Müller has turned back to the window. Finally the young man asks the question.

‘What did he mean? Your grandfather . . .'

After a few seconds Leon Müller speaks to his own reflection. ‘You know, you can see half the world from up here. But it's still so very easy to lose track of it. I guess we never really learn.'

He moves to pick up the sheets from the desk and glances at the opening paragraph of the most important speech he will make, in a lifetime filled with important speeches.

‘They won't believe it, Terry. Not a damned word. And they'll do whatever they think it'll take to survive. No matter what we try to tell them to do.'

Terry Eiken watches the wrinkled hands of the seventeenth President of the Republic of Deucalion, hands that have signed into being all of the most significant legislation of the past decade. He watches them as they drop the speech back onto the polished surface of the desk, and he notices how badly they are shaking.

NATASSIA'S STORY

In essence, the government plan was exactly the kind of plan you might expect from a group of career bureaucrats and politicians who didn't have a clue what they were dealing with, or how they were supposed to fight it, then suddenly found themselves in the middle of a ‘worst-case scenario' of planet-decimating proportions.

M
üller gave a well-prepared speech, accurately explaining the extent of the crisis facing all of us, while attempting to sound positive and in control. It was an A-grade performance.

And no one listening was convinced for a moment.

We were advised to stay in our homes, and to avoid congregating anywhere. This ‘voluntary' quarantine was to remain in force until the government got procedures in place for feeding an entire population living under virtual house arrest, and finalised their plans for a safe evacuation of the entire metropolis of Edison, a city which overnight had become potentially lethal.

Of course, half the population immediately ignored instructions and ran out into the streets trying to find someone who knew what was going on.

Why would you expect anything else? We'd been kept in the dark for weeks, since the danger had first surfaced in the labs of Med-Research in Edison and the
Pandora
had arrived in the skies over New G.

Just about everyone was watching the presidential address, so they all heard the instructions, but news of that magnitude doesn't sink in just like that.

Maybe in an ideal universe you can snap your fingers and everyone will instantly understand how serious the situation is.

In reality, it was the classic reaction to impending death: people en masse going through all the inevitable stages – denial, anger and, finally, acceptance and adjustment.

Unfortunately, denial and anger aren't ideal emotions to occupy your attention when survival depends on a careful and logical analysis of the facts.

To try to keep some kind of control of the situation, all traffic movements in and out of the city – whether by public or private transport – were temporarily suspended, and Security forces were deployed to enforce this and other decrees issued under the extraordinary presidential powers voted into existence a few hours earlier by a previously unpublicised Council-appointed ‘Emergency Cabinet'.

I sat there with everyone on shift at Internet as Müller spoke, and I wasn't surprised at what he was saying. I guess all those hours spent on the trail of the story outside Wieta had prepared me for the worst.

Maybe it was the attitude of the Security people on isolation duty at the camp, or the occasional glimpse I'd managed to get of the inmates. I saw that angry resignation peculiar to people who were about to pay the ultimate price for someone else's mistakes.

Even the government's official policy of stubborn silence had triggered warning signals somewhere deep in my newshound's subconscious instinct.

After all, this wasn't Earth. For all its faults – and there were many – the key feature of Deucalion politics for the last century had been openness. After all those years of government imposed from afar, and the farce of the phony elections of 101, accountability has been built into the Constitution of 103. It might have been highly inconvenient for the politicians, but it had been the way of things on the planet.

Until the arrival of the Crystal Death.

So I was expecting something major. But in spite of all that, the magnitude of the news was far beyond anything I might have predicted. I sat there in silence with the others for I don't know how long, until Gerry Sloane stood up.

‘Well,' he said. ‘That's it. I'm out of here.' And he left the office.

I never saw him again. But I did find his name a few months later on a long list of citizens killed trying to run the Security blockade around Edison in those early days of the crisis.

By the time Müller had begun his speech, it was already too late to try to get out. Edison was tied up tighter than a drum.

Not that it made much difference in the long run.

On Earth they used to have a saying, which went, ‘There's not much point locking the stable after the horse has bolted.'

There were never any horses on Deucalion, but the essential logic of the advice still holds true. There were more than a thousand flyer movements – public and private – into and out of Edison every day, in the time before the arrival of the plague.

That's maybe thirty thousand individuals a day travelling the routes to the major cities and the small centres across the Great Continent, to points as diverse as the silver-mining towns of Asgard and Valhalla on the far-northern Argentine Peninsula and the new Research settlement of Sukoma in the far south.

There were even one or two tourist-flyers heading for villages in Vaana.

Research information released later indicated that in the two or three days before he was discovered, Rayston must have been contagious, even if he wasn't feeling too bad. So he might have infected any number of people. They might not have come into contact with him directly, just been somewhere after him, and touched something he'd touched. And any one of them was a potential traveller.

Thirty thousand people per day for two or three days travelling to every inhabited part of Deucalion. Sixty or ninety thousand possible carriers, spreading out across the face of the planet. This meant that in a matter of days the number of potential threats worldwide was already in the millions. What real hope was there of stopping the spread of the thing?

Maybe none. But as long as there were no reports of outbreaks beyond Edison, containment was the only option: a blockade with orders to shoot to kill, and voluntary curfew in all other population centres to reduce the risk if the horse had indeed bolted.

If Sloane had waited a few days, he could probably have walked out of Edison unopposed, but by that stage there was literally nowhere to go.

Quarantine Camp, Old Wieta Reserve

Edison Sector (East Central)

26/1/203 Standard

KAZ'S STORY

When I finally made it inside the camp infirmary, Jerome Hamita was standing staring at one of the monitors. There were a couple of other people, a man and a woman, sitting at different consoles at the other end of the room. They looked up as I entered, but neither of them said anything.

I stood there waiting for him to notice me. He wasn't much older than me. Twenty-five, twenty-six, maybe. But there was a stoop in his shoulders, as if he was carrying a weight that was too heavy for one man. And he'd been carrying it for far too long.