Collected short fiction.., p.137
Collected Short Fiction of Greg Egan, page 137
“We’re going to need to do some kind of midair splice,” he said. “I just wanted to check what knots are available, and which would be strongest.”
“Why splicing?” Natalie pressed him.
He raised his hands and held them a short distance apart. “Cable.” Then he increased the separation. “River.”
Augusto said, “What about loops?” He hooked two fingers together and strained against the join. “Wouldn’t that be stronger?”
Josh snorted. “And halve the effective length? We’d need three spools to bridge the gap then, and you’d still need to splice the second loop to the third.”
“Not if we preform the middle loop ourselves,” Augusto replied. “Fuse the ends, here on the ground. That’s got to be better than any midair splice. Or easier to check, and easier to fix.”
Natalie looked around the group for objections. “Everyone agree? Then we need to make a flight plan.”
* * *
COMING TO THIS EBOOK IN 2025
or … purchase Instantiation from Amazon Kindle)
Silver Fire
From Luminous by Greg Egan; Millennium, London, 1998. First published in Interzone # 102, December 1995.
* * * * *
I was in my office at home, grading papers for Epidemiology 410, when the call came through from John Brecht in Maryland. Realtime, not a polite message to be dealt with whenever I chose. I’d grown into the habit of thinking of Colonel Brecht as “my old boss.” Apparently that had been premature.
He said, “We’ve found a little Silver Fire anomaly which I think might interest you, Claire. A little blip on the autocorrelation transform which just won’t go away. And seeing as you’re on vacation—”
“My students are on vacation. I still have work to do.”
“Oh, I think Columbia can find someone to take over those menial tasks for a week or two.”
I regarded him in silence for a moment, trying to decide whether or not to tell him to find someone else to take over his own menial tasks.
I said, “What exactly are we talking about?”
Brecht smiled. “A faint trail. Hovering on the verge of significance. Your specialty.” A map appeared on the screen; his face shrank to an inset. “It seems to start in North Carolina, around Greensboro, heading west.” The map was peppered with dots marking the locations of recent Silver Fire cases—color-coded by the time elapsed since a notional “day of infection”, the dots themselves positioned wherever the patient had been at the time. Having been told exactly what to look for, I could just make out a vague spectral progression cutting through the scattered blossoms of localized outbreaks: a kind of smudged rainbow trail from red to violet, dissolving into uncertainty just west of Knoxville, Tennessee. Then again … if I squinted, I could discern another structure, about as convincing, sweeping down in an amazingly perfect arc from Kentucky. A few more minutes, and I’d see the hidden face of Groucho Marx. The human brain is far too good at finding patterns; without rigorous statistical tools we’re helpless, animists grasping at meaning in every random puff of air.
I said, “So how do the numbers look?”
“The P value’s borderline,” Brecht conceded. “But I still think it’s worth checking out.”
The visible part of this hypothetical trail spanned at least ten days. Three days after exposure to the virus, the average person was either dead or in intensive care—not driving blithely across the countryside. Maps tracing the precise routes of infection generally looked like random walks with mean free paths five or ten kilometers long; even air travel, at worst, tended to spawn a multitude of scattered small outbreaks. If we’d stumbled on someone who was infectious but asymptomatic, then that was definitely worth checking out.
Brecht said, “As of now, you have full access to the notifications database. I’d offer you our provisional analysis, but I’m sure you can do better with the raw data, yourself.”
“No doubt.”
“Good. Then you can leave tomorrow.”
· · · · ·
I woke before dawn and packed in ten minutes, while Alex lay cursing me in his sleep. Then I realized I had three hours to kill, and absolutely nothing left to do, so I crawled back into bed. When I woke for the second time, Alex and Laura were both up, and eating breakfast.
As I sat down opposite Laura, though, I wondered if I was dreaming: one of those insidiously reassuring no-need-to-wake-because-you-already-have dreams. My fourteen-year-old daughter’s face and arms were covered in alchemical and zodiacal symbols in iridescent reds, greens and blues. She looked like a character in some dire VR-as-psychedelia movie who’d been mauled by the special effects software.
She stared back at me defiantly, as if I’d somehow expressed disapproval. In fact, I hadn’t yet worked my way around to such a mundane emotion—and by the time I did, I kept my mouth firmly shut. Knowing Laura, these were definitely not fakes which would wash off, but transdermal enzyme patches could still erase them as bloodlessly as the dye-bearing ones which had implanted them. So I was good, I didn’t say a word: no cheap reverse-psychology (“Oh, aren’t they sweet?”), no (honest) complaints about the harassment I’d get from her principal if they weren’t gone by the start of term.
Laura said, “Did you know that Isaac Newton spent more time on alchemy than he did on the theory of gravity?”
“Yes. Did you know he also died a virgin? Role models are great, aren’t they?”
Alex gave me a sideways warning look, but didn’t buy in. Laura continued, “There’s a whole secret history of science that’s been censored from the official accounts. Hidden knowledge that’s only coming to light now that everyone has access to the original sources.”
It was hard to know how to respond honestly to this without groaning aloud. I said evenly, “I think you’ll find that most of it has actually ‘come to light’ before. It’s just turned out to be of limited interest. But sure, it’s fascinating to see some of the blind alleys people have explored.”
Laura smiled at me pityingly. “Blind alleys!” She finished picking the toast crumbs off her plate, then she rose and left the room with a spring in her step, as if she’d won some kind of battle.
I said plaintively, “What did I miss? When did all this start?”
Alex was unfazed. “I think it’s mostly just the music. Or rather, three seventeen-year-old boys with supernaturally perfect skin and big brown contact lenses, called The Alchemists—”
“Yes, I know the band, but New Hermetics is more than the bubblegum music, it’s a major cult—”
He laughed. “Oh, come on! Wasn’t your sister deeply in lust with the lead singer of some quasi-Satanic heavy metal group? I don’t recall her ending up nailing black cats to upside-down crucifixes.”
“That was never lust. She just wanted to discover his hair-care secrets.”
Alex said firmly, “Laura is fine. Just … relax and sit it out. Unless you want to buy her a copy of Foucault’s Pendulum?”
“She’d probably miss the irony.”
He prodded me on the arm; mock-violence, but genuine anger. “That’s unfair. She’ll chew up New Hermetics and spit it out in … six months, at the most. How long did Scientology last? A week?”
I said, “Scientology is crass, transparent gibberish. New Hermetics has five thousand years of cultural adornment to draw on. It’s every bit as insidious as Buddhism or Catholicism: there’s a tradition, there’s a whole esthetic—”
Alex cut in, “Yes, and in six months’ time, she’ll understand: the esthetic can be appreciated without swallowing any of the bullshit. Just because alchemy was a blind alley, that doesn’t mean it isn’t still elegant and fascinating … but being elegant and fascinating doesn’t render a word of it true.”
I reflected on that for a while, then I leaned over and kissed him. “I hate it when you’re right: you always make it sound so obvious. I’m too damn protective, aren’t I? She’ll work it all out for herself.”
“You know she will.”
I glanced at my watch. “Shit. Can you drive me to La Guardia? I’m never going to get a cab, now.”
· · · · ·
Early in the pandemic, I’d pulled a few strings and arranged for a group of my students to observe a Silver Fire patient close up. It had seemed wrong to bury ourselves in the abstractions of maps and graphs, numerical models and extrapolations—however vital they were to the battle—without witnessing the real physical condition of an individual human being.
We didn’t have to don biohazard suits; the young man lay in a glass-walled, hermetically sealed room. Tubes brought him oxygen, water, electrolytes and nutrients—along with antibiotics, antipyritics, immunosuppressants, and pain killers. No bed, no mattress; the patient was embedded in a transparent polymer gel: a kind of buoyant semi-solid which limited pressure sores and drew away the blood and lymphatic fluid weeping out through what used to be his skin.
I surprised myself by crying, silently and briefly, hot tears of anger. Rage dissipating into a vacuum; I knew there was no one to blame. Half the students had medical degrees—but if anything, they seemed more shaken than the green statisticians who’d never set foot in a trauma ward or an operating theater—probably because they could better imagine what the man would have been feeling without a skull full of opiates.
The official label for the condition was Systemic Fibrotic Viral Scleroderma—but SFVS was unpronounceable, and apparently people’s eyes glazed over if news readers spelt out four whole letters. I used the new name like everyone else, but I never stopped loathing it. It was too fucking poetic by far.
When the Silver Fire virus infected fibroblasts in the subcutaneous connective tissue, it caused them to go into overdrive, manufacturing vast quantities of collagen—in a variant form transcribed from the normal gene but imperfectly assembled. This denatured protein formed solid plaques in the extracellular space, disrupting the nutrient flow to the dermis above and eventually becoming so bulky as to shear it off completely. Silver Fire flayed you from within. A good strategy for releasing large amounts of virus, maybe—though when it had stumbled on the trick, no one knew. The presumed animal host in which the parent strain lived, benignly or otherwise, was yet to be found.
If the lymph-glistening sickly white of naked collagen plaques was “silver”, the fever, the autoimmune response, and the sensation of being burned alive was “fire.” Mercifully, the pain couldn’t last long, either way. The standard First World palliative treatment included constant deep anesthesia, and if you didn’t get that level of high-tech intervention, you went into shock, fast, and died.
Two years after the first outbreaks, the origin of the virus remained unknown, a vaccine was still a remote prospect and, though patients could be kept alive almost indefinitely, all attempts to effect a cure by purging the body of the virus and grafting cultured skin had failed.
Four hundred thousand people had been infected, worldwide; nine out of ten were dead. Ironically, rapid onset due to malnutrition had all but eliminated Silver Fire in the poorest nations; most outbreaks in Africa had burned themselves out on the spot. The US not only had more hospitalized victims on life support, per capita, than any other nation; it was heading for the top of the list in the rate of new cases.
A handshake or even a ride in a packed bus could transmit the virus—with a low probability for each contact event, but it added up. The only thing that helped in the medium term was isolating potential carriers, and to date it had seemed that no one could remain infectious and healthy for long. If the “trail” Brecht’s computers had found was more than a statistical mirage, cutting it short might save dozens of lives—and understanding it might save thousands.
· · · · ·
It was almost noon when the plane touched down at the Triad airport on the outskirts of Greensboro. There was a hire car waiting for me; I waved my notepad at the dashboard to transmit my profile, then waited as the seating and controls rearranged themselves slightly, piezoelectric actuators humming. As I started to reverse out of the parking bay, the stereo began a soothing improvisation, flashing up a deadpan title: Music for Leaving Airports on June 11, 2008.
I got a shock driving into town: there were dozens of large plots of tobacco visible from the road. The born-again weed was encroaching everywhere, and not even the suburbs were safe. The irony had become clichéd, but it was still something to witness the reality firsthand: even as nicotine was finally going the way of absinthe, more tobacco was being cultivated than ever before—because tobacco mosaic virus had turned out to be an extremely convenient and efficient vector for introducing new genes. The leaves of these plants would be loaded with pharmaceuticals or vaccine antigens—and worth twenty times as much as their unmodified ancestors at the height of demand.
My first appointment was still almost an hour away, so I drove around town in search of lunch. I’d been so wound up since Brecht’s call, I was surprised at just how good I felt to have arrived. Maybe it was no more than traveling south, with the sudden slight shift in the angle of the light—a kind of beneficent latitudinal equivalent of jet lag. Certainly, everything in downtown Greensboro appeared positively luminous after NYC, with modern buildings in pastel shades looking curiously harmonious beside the gleamingly preserved historic ones.
I ended up eating sandwiches in a small diner and going through my notes again, obsessively. It was seven years since I’d done anything like this for real, and I’d had little time to make the mental transition from theoretician back to practitioner.
There’d been four new cases of Silver Fire in Greensboro in the preceding fortnight. Health authorities everywhere had long ago given up trying to establish the path of infection for every last case; given the ease of transmission, and the inability to question the patients themselves, it was a massively labor-intensive process which yielded few tangible benefits. The most useful strategy wasn’t backtracking, but rather quarantining the family, workmates and other known contacts of each new case, for about a week. Carriers were infectious for two or three days at the most before becoming—very obviously—sick themselves; you didn’t need to go looking for them. Brecht’s rainbow trail either meant an exception to this rule or a ripple of new cases propagating from town to town without any single carrier.
Greensboro’s population was about a quarter of a million, though it depended on exactly where you drew the boundaries. North Carolina had never gone in much for implosive urbanization; growth in rural areas had actually outstripped growth in the major cities in recent years, and the microvillage movement had taken off here in a big way—at least as much as on the west coast.
I displayed a contoured population density map of the region on my notepad; even Raleigh, Charlotte and Greensboro were only modest elevations against the gently undulating background of the countryside, and only the Appalachians themselves cut a deep trench through this inverted topography. Hundreds of small new communities dotted the map, between the already numerous established towns. The microvillages weren’t literally self-sustaining, but they were definitely high-tech Green, with photovoltaics, small-scale local water treatment, and satellite links in lieu of connections to any centralized utilities. Most of their income came from cottage service industries: software, design, music, animation.
I switched on an overlay showing the estimated magnitude of population flows, on the timescale relevant to Silver Fire. The major roads and highways glowed white hot, and the small towns were linked into the skein by their own slender capillaries, but the microvillages all but vanished from the scene: everyone worked from home. So it wasn’t all that unlikely for a random Silver Fire outbreak to have spread straight down the interstate, rather than diffusing in a classic drunkard’s walk across this relatively populous landscape.
Still … the whole point of being here was to find out the one thing that none of the computer models could tell me: whether or not the assumptions they were based on were dangerously flawed.
· · · · ·
I left the diner and set to work. The four cases came from four separate families; I was in for a long day.
All the people I interviewed were out of quarantine, but still suffering various degrees of shock. Silver Fire hit like an express train: there was no time to grasp what was happening before a perfectly healthy child or parent, spouse or lover, all but died in front of your eyes. The last thing you needed was a two-hour interrogation by a total stranger.
It was dusk by the time I reached the last family, and any joy I’d felt at being back in the field had long since worn off. I sat in the car for a minute, staring at the immaculate garden and lace curtains, listening to the crickets, wishing I didn’t have to go in and face these people.
Diane Clayton taught high school mathematics; her husband, Ed, was an engineer, working night shifts for the local power company. They had a thirteen-year-old daughter, Cheryl. Mike, eighteen, was in the hospital.
I sat with the three of them, but it was Ms Clayton who did most of the talking. She was scrupulously patient and courteous with me, but after a while, it became clear that she was still in a kind of daze. She answered every question slowly and thoughtfully, but I had no idea if she really knew what she was saying, or whether she was just going through the motions on autopilot.
Mike’s father wasn’t much help, since the shift work had kept him out of synch with the rest of the family. I tried increasing eye contact with Cheryl, encouraging her to speak. It was absurd, but I felt guilty even as I did it—as if I’d come here to sell the family some junk product, and now I was trying to bypass parental resistance.
“So … Tuesday night he definitely stayed home?” I was filling in a chart of Mike Clayton’s movements for the week before symptoms appeared—hour-by-hour. It was a fastidious, nit-picking Gestapo routine that made the old days of merely asking for a list of sexual partners and fluids exchanged seem positively idyllic.
