Collected short fiction.., p.140
Collected Short Fiction of Greg Egan, page 140
Bestowing their luminous blessing on the crowd.
Near enough to touch.
· · · · ·
I threaded my way toward the camouflaged exit. Outside, the cool air and the silence were surreal; I felt more disembodied and dreamlike than ever. I staggered toward the car park, and waved my notepad to make the hire car flash its lights.
My head cleared as I approached the highway. I decided to drive on through the night; I was so agitated that I didn’t think I had much chance of sleeping. I could find a motel in the morning, shower, and catch a nap before my next appointment.
I still didn’t know what to make of the Event—what solid link there could be between the carrier and the villagers’ mad syncretic cyberbabble. If it was nothing but coincidence, the irony was grotesque, but what was the alternative? Some “pilgrim” on the Trail of Happiness, deliberately spreading the virus? The idea was ludicrous—and not just because it was unthinkably obscene. A carrier could only know that he or she had been infected if distinctive symptoms had appeared, but distinctive symptoms only marked the brutal end stage of the disease; a prolonged mild infection, if such a thing existed, would be indistinguishable from influenza. Once Silver Fire progressed far enough to affect the visible layers of the skin, the only options for cross-country travel all involved flashing lights and sirens.
· · · · ·
At about half past three in the morning, I switched on my notepad. I wasn’t exactly drowsy, but I wanted something to keep me alert.
Ariadne had plenty.
First, a heated debate on The Reality Studio—a program on the Intercampus Ideas Network. A freelance zoologist from Seattle named Andrew Feld spoke first, putting the case that Silver Fire “proved beyond doubt” his “controversial and paradigm-subverting” S-force theory of life, which “combined the transgressive genius of Einstein and Sheldrake with the insights of the Maya and the latest developments in superstrings, to create a new, life-affirming biology to take the place of soulless, mechanistic Western science.”
In reply, virologist Margaret Ortega from UCLA explained in detail why Feld’s ideas were superfluous, failed to account for—or clashed directly with—numerous observed biological phenomena, and were neither more nor less “mechanistic” than any other theory which didn’t leave everything in the universe to the whim of God. She also ventured the opinion that most people were capable of affirming life without casually discarding all of human knowledge in the process.
Feld was a clueless idiot on a wish-fulfillment trip. Ortega wiped the floor with him.
But when the nationwide audience of students voted, he was declared winner by a majority of two to one.
Next item: Protesters were blockading the Medical Research Laboratories of the Max Planck Institute in Hamburg, calling for an end to Silver Fire research. Safety was not the issue. Protest organizer and “acclaimed cultural agitator” Kid Ransom had held an impromptu press conference:
“We must reclaim Silver Fire from the gray, small-minded scientists, and learn to tap its wellspring of mythical power for the benefit of all humanity! These technocrats who seek to explain everything are like vandals rampaging through a gallery, scrawling equations on all the beautiful works of art!”
“But how will humanity ever find a cure for this disease, without research?”
“There is no such thing as disease! There is only transformation!”
There were four more news stories, all concerning (mutually exclusive) proclamations about the “secret truth” (or secret ineffability) behind Silver Fire, and maybe each one, alone, would have seemed no more than a sad, sick joke. But as the countryside materialized around me—the purple-grey ridge of the Black Mountains to the north starkly beautiful in the dawn—I was slowly beginning to understand. This was not my world anymore. Not in Herodotus, not in Seattle, not in Hamburg or Montreal or London. Not even in New York.
In my world, there were no nymphs in trees and streams. No gods, no ghosts, no ancestral spirits. Nothing—outside our own cultures, our own laws, our own passions—existed in order to punish us or comfort us, to affirm any act of hatred or love.
My own parents had understood this, perfectly, but theirs had been the first generation, ever, to be so free of the shackles of superstition. And after the briefest flowering of understanding, my own generation had grown complacent. At some level, we must have started taking it for granted that the way the universe worked was now obvious to any child, even though it went against everything innate to the species: the wild, undisciplined love of patterns, the craving to extract meaning and comfort from everything in sight.
We thought we were passing on everything that mattered to our children: science, history, literature, art. Vast libraries of information lay at their fingertips. But we hadn’t fought hard enough to pass on the hardest-won truth of all: Morality comes only from within. Meaning comes only from within. Outside our own skulls, the universe is indifferent.
Maybe, in the West, we’d delivered the death blows to the old doctrinal religions, the old monoliths of delusion, but that victory meant nothing at all.
Because taking their place now, everywhere, was the saccharine poison of spirituality.
· · · · ·
I checked into a motel in Asheville. The parking lot was full of campervans, people heading for the national parks; I was lucky, I got the last room.
My notepad chimed while I was in the shower. An analysis of the latest data reported to the Centers for Disease Control showed the “anomaly” extending almost two hundred kilometers further west along the I-40—about halfway to Nashville. Five more people on the Trail of Happiness. I sat and stared at the map for a while, then I dressed, packed my bag again, and checked out.
I made ten calls as I was driving up into the mountains, canceling all my appointments with relatives from Asheville to Jefferson City, Tennessee. The time had passed for being cautious and methodical, for gathering every last scrap of data along the way. I knew the transmission had to be taking place at the Events; the only question was whether it was accidental or deliberate.
Deliberate how? With a vial full of fibroblasts, teeming with Silver Fire? It had taken researchers at the NIH over a year to learn how to culture the virus—and they’d only succeeded in March. I couldn’t believe that their work had been replicated by amateurs in less than three months.
The highway plunged between the lavish wooded slopes of the Great Smoky Mountains, following the Pigeon River most of the way. I programmed a predictive model—by voice—as I drove. I had a calendar for the Events, now, and I had five approximate dates of infection. Case notifications would always be too late; the only way to catch up was to extrapolate. And I could only assume that the carrier would continue moving steadily westwards, never lingering, always traveling on to the next Event.
I reached Knoxville around midday, stopped for lunch, then drove straight on.
The model said: Pliny, Saturday Jan 14, 9.30 pm. My first chance to search the infinite dance hall for the carrier, without an impassable wall between us.
My first chance to be in the presence of Silver Fire.
· · · · ·
I arrived early, but not so early as to attract the attention of Pliny’s equivalents of Sally and Oliver. I stayed in the car for an hour, improvising ways to look busy, recording the license numbers of arriving vehicles. There were a lot of four-wheel drives and utilities, and a few campervans. Many villagers favored bicycles, but the carrier would have to have been a real fanatic—and extremely fit—to have cycled all the way from Greensboro.
The Event followed much the same pattern as the one in Herodotus the night before, though Herodotus itself wasn’t taking part. The crowd was similar, too: mostly young, but with enough exceptions to keep me from looking completely out of place. I wandered around, trying to commit every face to memory without attracting too much attention. Had all these people swallowed the Silver Fire myth, as I’d heard it from Oliver? The possibility was almost too bleak to contemplate. The only thing that gave me any hope was that when I’d compared the number of villages listed on the Event calendar with the number in the region, it was less than one in twenty. The microvillage movement itself had nothing to do with this insanity.
Someone offered me a pink capsule—not for free, this time. I gave her twenty dollars, and pocketed the drug for analysis. There was a slender chance that someone was passing out doctored capsules, although stomach acid tended to make short work of the virus.
A handsome blond kid barely in his twenties hovered around me for a while as the trail-walkers appeared. When they’d vanished into the west, he approached me, took my elbow, and made an offer I couldn’t quite hear over the music, though I thought I got the gist of it. I was too distracted to feel amazed or flattered, let alone tempted, and I got rid of him in five seconds flat. He walked away looking wounded, but not long afterward, I saw him leaving with a woman half my age.
I stayed to the very end—and on Saturday nights, that meant five in the morning. I staggered out into the light, discouraged, although I didn’t know what I’d seriously hoped to see. Someone walking around with an aerosol spray, administering doses of Silver Fire? When I reached the car park I realized that many of the cars had arrived after I’d gone in—and some might have come and gone unseen. I recorded the license plates I’d missed, trying to be discreet, but almost past caring; I hadn’t slept for thirty-six hours.
· · · · ·
The nearest Event west of Pliny, on Sunday night, was past the Mississippi and halfway across Arkansas; I made a calculated guess that the carrier would take this as an opportunity for a night off.
Monday evening, I drove into Eudoxus—population 165, established 2002, about an hour from Nashville—ready to spend all night in the car park if I had to. I needed to record every license plate, or there wasn’t much point being here.
I hadn’t told Brecht what I was doing; I still had no solid evidence, and I was afraid of sounding paranoid. I’d called Alex before leaving Nashville, but I hadn’t told him much, either. Laura had declined to speak to me when he’d called out and told her I was on the line, but that was nothing new. I missed them both already, more than I’d anticipated, but I wasn’t sure how I’d manage when I finally made it home, to a daughter who was turning away from reason, and a husband who took it for granted that any bright adolescent would recapitulate five thousand years of intellectual progress in six months.
Thirty-five vehicles arrived between ten and eleven—none I’d seen before—and then the flow tapered off abruptly. I scanned the entertainment channels on my notepad, satisfied by anything with color and movement; I’d had enough of Ariadne’s bad news.
Just before midnight, a blue Ford campervan rolled up and parked in the corner opposite me. A young man and a young woman got out; they seemed excited, but a little wary, as if they couldn’t quite believe that their parents weren’t watching from the shadows.
As they crossed the car park, I realized that the guy was the blond kid who’d spoken to me in Pliny.
I waited five minutes, then went and checked their license plate; it was a Massachusetts registration. I hadn’t recorded it on Saturday night, so I would have missed the fact that they were following the Trail, if one of them hadn’t—
Hadn’t what?
I stood there frozen behind the van, trying to stay calm, replaying the incident in my mind. I knew I hadn’t let him paw me for long, but how long would it have taken?
I glanced up at the disinterested stars, trying to savor the irony because it tasted much better than the fear. I’d always known there’d be a risk, and the odds were still heavily in my favor. I could put myself into quarantine in Nashville in the morning; nothing I did right now would make the slightest difference…
But I wasn’t thinking straight. If they’d traveled together all the way from Massachusetts, or even from Greensboro, one should have infected the other long ago. The probability of the two of them sharing the same freakish resistance to the virus was negligible, even if they were brother and sister.
They couldn’t both be unwitting, asymptomatic carriers. So either they had nothing to do with the outbreaks—
—or they were transporting the virus outside their bodies, and handling it with great care.
A bumper sticker boasted: STATE-OF-THE-ART SECURITY! I placed a hand against the rear door experimentally; the van didn’t emit so much as a warning beep. I tried shaking the handle aggressively; still nothing. If the system was calling a security firm in Nashville for an armed response, I had all the time I needed. If it was trying to call its owners, it wouldn’t have much luck getting a signal through the aluminum frame of the village hall.
There was no one in sight. I went back to my car, and fetched the toolkit.
I knew I had no legal right. There were emergency powers I could have invoked, but I had no intention of calling Maryland and spending half the night fighting my way through the correct procedures. And I knew I was putting the prosecution case at risk, by tainting everything with illegal search and seizure.
I didn’t care. They weren’t going to have the chance to send one more person down the Trail of Happiness, even if I had to burn the van to the ground.
I levered a small, tinted fixed window out of its rubber frame in the door. Still no wailing siren. I reached in, groped around, and unlocked the door.
I’d thought they must have been half-educated biochemists, who’d learned enough cytology to duplicate the published fibroblast culturing techniques.
I was wrong. They were medical students, and they’d half-learned other skills entirely.
They had their friend cushioned in polymer gel, contained in something like a huge tropical fish tank. They had oxygen set up, a urethral catheter, and half a dozen drips. I played my torch beam over the inverted bottles, checking the various drugs and their concentrations. I went through them all twice, hoping I’d missed one—but I hadn’t.
I shone the beam down onto the girl’s skinless white face, peering through the delicate streamers of red rising up through the gel. She was in an opiate haze deep enough to keep her motionless and silent, but she was still conscious. Her mouth was frozen in a rictus of pain.
And she’d been like this for sixteen days.
I staggered back out of the van, my heart pounding, my vision going black. I collided with the blond kid; the girl was with him, and they had another couple in tow.
I turned on him and started punching him, screaming incoherently; I don’t remember what I said. He put up his hands to shield his face, and the others came to his aid: pinning me gently against the van, holding me still without striking a single blow.
I was crying now. The campervan girl said, “Sssh. It’s all right. No one’s going to hurt you.”
I pleaded with her. “Don’t you understand? She’s in pain! All this time, she’s been in pain! What did you think she was doing? Smiling?”
“Of course she’s smiling. This is what she always wanted. She made us promise that if she ever caught Silver Fire, she’d walk the Trail.”
I rested my head against the cool metal, closed my eyes for a moment, and tried to think of a way to get through to them.
But I didn’t know how.
When I opened my eyes, the boy was standing in front of me. He had the most gentle, compassionate face imaginable. He wasn’t a torturer, or a bigot, or even a fool. He’d just swallowed some beautiful lies.
He said, “Don’t you understand? All you see in there is a woman dying in pain, but we all have to learn to see more. The time has come to regain the lost skills of our ancestors: the power to see visions, demons and angels. The power to see the spirits of the wind and the rain. The power to walk the Trail of Happiness.”
Singleton
From the online version at the author's website — http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/MISC/SINGLETON/Singleton.html — First published in Interzone #176, February 2002.
* * * * *
2003
I was walking north along George Street towards Town Hall railway station, pondering the ways I might solve the tricky third question of my linear algebra assignment, when I encountered a small crowd blocking the footpath. I didn’t give much thought to the reason they were standing there; I’d just passed a busy restaurant, and I often saw groups of people gathered outside. But once I’d started to make my way around them, moving into an alley rather than stepping out into the traffic, it became apparent that they were not just diners from a farewell lunch for a retiring colleague, putting off their return to the office for as long as possible. I could see for myself exactly what was holding their attention.
Twenty metres down the alley, a man was lying on his back on the ground, shielding his bloodied face with his hands, while two men stood over him, relentlessly swinging narrow sticks of some kind. At first I thought the sticks were pool cues, but then I noticed the metal hooks on the ends. I’d only ever seen these obscure weapons before in one other place: my primary school, where an appointed window monitor would use them at the start and end of each day. They were meant for opening and closing an old-fashioned kind of hinged pane when it was too high to reach with your hands.
I turned to the other spectators. “Has anyone called the police?” A woman nodded without looking at me, and said, “Someone used their mobile, a couple of minutes ago.”
The assailants must have realised that the police were on their way, but it seemed they were too committed to their task to abandon it until that was absolutely necessary. They were facing away from the crowd, so perhaps they weren’t entirely reckless not to fear identification. The man on the ground was dressed like a kitchen hand. He was still moving, trying to protect himself, but he was making less noise than his attackers; the need, or the ability, to cry out in pain had been beaten right out of him.
