In the Courts of the Sun (78 page)

LEON thought. LEON moved.
Huh.
Ten thousand four hundred forty.
That is, as of now—it was the Game’s three hundred eighty-fifth move—I, or maybe I should say “LEON and I,” had identified ten thousand four hundred and forty potential doomsters.
Of course, we’d discounted a lot. Our baby might have gotten tossed out with the bilgewater. Still, I thought, I’d go three to one that our guy’s in there.
Not bad. Just roll with that for now. Okay.
I moved. LEON moved. The wire was still way high overhead, but it was getting closer to the ground. Eight skulls. I lost a skull. Seven skulls. Not in Alaska. Hah. Now we’re getting somewhere. Hmm. Not California—
HAH!
Not in the U.S.
He’s Canadian.
And playing odds again, he’s still in Canada. And just guts-wise I’m betting on BC or Alberta. Leave out the North Side for now. Yeah. I’m gonna nail you, you maple-sugar-assed snowback fuck.
I moved. It was as though I was standing somewhere around Vancouver, and it was December 10, eleven days before 4 Ahau, and I was looking around in the fog, and I couldn’t see much, but still, there was a feeling the fog was burning off, that things would get clearer. LEON moved. Okay. Not there, I thought. There. No. Not there. Not there. Not this. Not that. I flipped through the profiles. A lot of them were just names, with maybe a few associated handles from social-networking sites. Some of them were just handles without names. Some were just user IDs. Check ’em anyway, I thought. Don’t be a choosy beggar. Okay. There. Not there. Not him. Not him. Now it felt like I could almost touch the wire again, except now the wire was flipping this way and that way, slipping away from me in the storm. There. I grabbed at it. Irrelevant bits dropped away like snowflakes melting in midair. Missed. Come on. Move. I moved. Okay. Things really were getting clearer. Or rather . . . hmm. They weren’t clearer in terms of shapes but just in terms of the light, the light. . . .
Huh. There was a glow up ahead, a color, a brilliant light red, like the color of the lacquer on Maximón’s fingernails back in San Cristóbal Verapaz. Odd, I thought. Red’s a southeast thing. What’s it doing up here in Gray country? Was I going in the wrong direction? Maybe—
Beep. LEON moved.
Huh.
Light red. Okay.
I moved. Seven skulls. He moved. Six skulls. I hesitated. I moved. Down to five skulls. He moved. Four skulls. I started to move. No, wait. I took it back. Damn. Not thinking so straight.
Take a breath.
I snuck a look at the time window. It was three in the afternoon. So I’d been playing for nearly eight hours of clock time, longer than I’d ever been able to play before. On the other hand I was feeling worse than I ever had before. Symptoms included disequilibrium, depressed heart rate, and difficulty remembering my own name. I held on to the edges of the keyboard, as though it could be used as a flotation aid in the unlikely event of a water landing. Keep it together, Jed. It’s just the endgame.
Somewhere the last dregs of the Steersman’s dust flared into bioavailability just before my overstimmed synapses collapsed into Alpha. I managed to wonder whether the color might be a clue to something else, a shape, an animal, something associated with the color, something I’d seen before, a number, maybe, or even a word, or a phrase.
I moved. He moved. Three skulls, two skulls.
A word, maybe? No, two words. Two short words. It was something I’d seen before, something that didn’t sound like it made a lot of sense, what was it, what was it . . .
I moved.
One skull—
Hell Rot.

[69]

I
n the first window an eight-hundred-mile cold front, represented as a choleric yellow against the royal-blue Gulf of Alaska, rolled west at twelve miles per hour. According to the accompanying text panel the front would reach the coast of British Columbia at about 5:30 A.M. PST, fifty minutes from now. Dawn would be at 5:22 A.M., twenty-one minutes after the scheduled assault time. In the second window, an unenhanced view from a KH-13 Ikon reconnaissance satellite, you could see the dark Strait of Georgia on the left, the orange sodium lights of Vancouver with the dark river running up through them, and then on the right the long tail of white lights along the Trans-Canada Highway, heading east in a wide U alongside the Fraser river. At the end of the tail, at the far right of the screen, you could just see a smudge of lights marking the town of Chilliwack. The text panel listed a few key facts: that Vancouver was the second-largest biotechnology center in North America and the fastest-growing one in Canada, that it was consistently rated among the top four major cities worldwide in standard of living, that its citizens’ average IQ was estimated to be a robust 98, and—maybe contradictorily but, to us, relevantly—that it also had the highest suicide rate per capita of any major city in the Western Hemisphere.
The third window showed about two square miles of Chilliwack. It didn’t look all that menacing. There were two street grids, one north-south and another in the northwest quadrant rotated twenty degrees clockwise. On the south side the streets got longer and curvier, which told you they were the better and newer residential blocks. The east side was an older residential zone, also with big houses but with closer, smaller blocks, short on the north-south axis and long on the east-west one. Marguerite Avenue ran east to west in the center of the area, and 820 Marguerite was in the center of the block. This window’s accompanying text noted that Chilliwack was a community of over seventy-eight thousand, that although the town’s economy was primarily agricultural, many of its residents worked in the big city, sixty miles to the west, putting up with the long commute as a lifestyle trade-off, that the town’s median income was forty-eight thousand dollars Canadian, and that the birth rate was 9.8 per 1,000 and the death rate was 7 per 1,000 per year. Soon to be 0 and 1,000, respectively, I thought.
“Why didn’t they pick him up when he was out of the house?” A
₂
whispered in my right ear. She’d just come in.
“He hasn’t been outside in four days,” I said.
“Oh.”
“Anyway, now they think he’s got the Goat in there someplace. That’s why they moved it up to today.”
She said, “Oh,” again. She sat down next to me and looked up at the video wall. We were all in a big conference room at the temporary convention facility near the Hyperbowl—“we” meaning Taro, Dr. Lisuarte, Larry Boyle, Tony Sic, Taro’s interns, Michael Weiner, who was bulking up the chair on my left, me, and almost everybody else involved with the Parcheesi Project except for Marena, who, for some reason I didn’t understand, was watching from her house in Colorado. The whole thing had a such a
gemütlich
feeling that I could almost imagine that we were just a bunch of undergrads spontaneously gathering in the rec room to watch a presidential election or
How the Grinch Stole Christmas
. But y’aren’t, Blanche, I thought. Y’aren’t.
“That’s the second tanker coming in,” Laurence Boyle said. He pointed to the next window, #4, with a blue laser dot. It showed a real-time night-vision satellite view of about four blocks, with the Czerwick home at the center. You could see that the house had two gables, that there was a two-car garage with a flat roof added on, and that there was a pretty big deck in the long, narrow backyard. The roof, unfortunately, was made of copper-plated metal alloy, which made it hard to get an infrared reading from above. The tanker Boyle had pointed out looked like a can of Red Bull, sliding in without headlights behind its parked twin on Emerald Street, two blocks south of Marguerite.
I stood up to get a look over Tony Sic’s head at window #5. It had a nice telephoto shot from a radio tower five blocks downtown, with a good view of the whole 800 block from about a 45° angle. From here you could see that the house was a roughly four-bedroom job, with just enough styling to identify itself as Colonial. There were four steps up to the door, going up sideways to a little sort of porch with an overhang, and that would slow the team down a second or so. But the place wasn’t huge—the development had been built in 1988, just before the McMansion era—and the ERT captain had estimated they could clear it in less than eight seconds. The houses on either side were a little different but mainly the same. There were a few middle-aged maple trees in the front yards. They weren’t in leaf yet. Everything looked pretty normal. The definition of normal, even. I could’ve told you, I thought. Everybody’s known for decades that suburbs were a bad idea, but they kept building them anyway, and now look where the Seven-Headed Beast’s coming from.
Ma and Pa—at thirty-six Madison Czerwick still lived with his parents—were almost certainly in the master bedroom on the second floor, and there was somebody, probably the little brother, in a room in the back. Madison—with whom we were all now on a first-name basis—was most likely in his room. All other readings were showing what they called a “pattern consistent with overnight sleep.” That is, there were no televisions or task lights on in the ground or second floors. There hadn’t been any mouse movements on any computers for over an hour. Telephones, PDAs, and other Net-enabled gadgets were inactive. Power draw was inconclusive, meaning that something, but nothing huge, might be running in the basement. Probably, everyone was nestled all snug in their beds. While visions of genocide danced in their heads. Head.
“They’re talking about moving back five minutes,” Ana’s voice said over the communal speaker. You could hear voices hubbubbing in her background. “To set up the hoses.”
“Thanks, Miss Vergara,” Boyle said. Miss, huh? On any other day I and everyone else would have snickered. Today no one did. Ana—who was turning out to be less of a grunt, and more of a player, than I guess I’d realized—was one of thirty or so guests in the trailer of a poshly converted semi ten blocks away from 820.
“Okay, there they are,” Ana said. Her cursor slid onto window #5, wiggling around a four-person crew who were now attaching long white hoses to the back of the two chrome tankers. They laid the hoses down in two neat paths to within fifty feet of 820, leaving a few hundred feet of slack at each end. There was a pause. Then someone turned a valve, and each hose inflated up to just before the slack section, where I guess there was another valve. You could already see water vapor condensing around the hoses. They were full of liquid nitrogen, which, we hoped, would hold in the Goat.
On their first day of investigation the detectives had found that Madison had been “one step removed” from access to a breeding population of a “purpose-raised” strain of
Brucella abortus
. By the end of their second day they’d confirmed that his Internet activity, especially the haplotype maps he’d downloaded, indicated he was actively tweaking their DNA.
Brucella
are a venerable and trusty bacteria, something you’d get from, say, delivering a baby water buffalo or drinking raw goat’s milk with Zorba the Greek. Over the years it had been called Malta fever, goat fever, contagious abortion, Bang’s disease, or any of a hundred other names. We were just calling it the Goat. Compared to the Disney World virus, the symptoms weren’t anything fancy: sudden sweat that smells like wet hay, muscle pains, fainting, and, of course, death. Which is pretty scary, especially the sweating part. Better be sure to pick up an organic deodorant crystal on the way to oblivion.
The Goat’s main claim to infamy was that it had been the first bacillus ever weaponized by the U.S. government. In 1953 they’d tested it on animals, using the same grapefruit-sized bomblets they later used for anthrax. The air force had chosen it because, unlike most bacilli, it could survive airborne for hours and, even more excitingly, could penetrate intact human skin, so that even if you were wearing NBC gas masks and rotating them in sealed off-gassing booths, if you had a patch of pink showing somewhere, you were toast-to-be.
Even so, by the 1970s, what was left of those strains had been decommisioned and stored in two igloos at the Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas. And by the 1980s it was supposedly all destroyed. But somebody’d been kidding around with it since then, either to develop defenses against it or to sell it or, probably, both.
In the sixteen months since he was downsized from his job at CellCraft’s Vancouver facility, Madison had greatly improved the Goat. The Czerwick Strain—at least, as the CDC had projected it based on data they’d grabbed remotely from Madison’s hard drive—now had the usual trendy features like ultrafast reproduction, disinfectant resistance, asymptomatic infection, and a precision nanochronometer. But the most notable upgrade was what they called vector flexibility. The classic
Brucellis
strains can jump from some types of animals to humans, and possibly from humans back to animals. But most animals either don’t get them at all or because of lifespan or lifestyle aren’t suitable vectors for human transmission.
Madison’s work had vastly enlarged the pool of potential vectors. The new strain would mutate faster, and in more likely adaptive directions, than any natural bacillus. It would seem as though it were adjusting its own DNA to accommodate the different protein profiles of hundreds of families of animals, not just primates.
B. czerwicki
could jump the species barrier again and again, back and forth, throughout the biosphere. Ordinarily epidemics become less virulent as they spread—since otherwise there wouldn’t be any vector animals left—but with so many species susceptible to the Goat, it would be a long time before that happened. Some of the CDC projections said it could probably kill off all species of primates and all or most other mammals. Which just tells you what an angry little weasel Czerwick was. People is one thing, but when you go after Bonzo you know you’re really fucked up.
Like its ancestors the Goat could probably be treated by intramuscular injections of streptomycin. But with timed, simultaneous symptomaticity, there wouldn’t be enough antibiotics to go around even if there were still people who were able to administer them. And of course, the CDC was already working on a vaccine, but it would take another week or so to finish developing it and more than a year to produce it in anything like medical quantities. The CDC’s projections, or at least the ones we’d gotten reports on, suggested that some people in polar areas might survive. But with the Goat’s resistance to cold, it wouldn’t be many. The species-jumping geneware would keep the subarctic world too hot for humans for decades. At least.
“How much of the stuff do they think he has in there?” A
₂
asked. I realized she was standing on tiptoes to get close to my ear. I guess she was too polite or uptight to grab my shoulder and drag my head down. I crouched down a bit.
“Ana thinks it’s about two gallons,” I said. “He’s been going through bovine colloid like it was bean dip.”
“Is that enough?”
“You mean, like, enough to do the whole planet?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, you have to figure that’s about three point four trillion microbes per gallon,” I said. “So say you had, like, a ten-percent-per-day division rate, even with a twenty-percent die-off per day you’d get around, uh, two times ten-to-the-eighteenth bugs in one week, and that’s more than most diseases that are, you know, considered epidemics.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Yeah. Yeah, depending on the number of added vectors . . . in a month or so it could be as common as, like, say, Staphylococcus.”
“Gesundheit,” Michael Weiner said in my other ear.
“Thanks,” I said. “Yeah, there’s no humor like gallows humor.” He nodded.
“At least it sounds like they know everything, anyway,” A
₂
said.
“One hopes,” I said. Actually, she was right, or righter than I was. From what I’d seen, at least, the U.S. and Canadian detectives had, amazingly, done a good job. I’d have thought they’d take weeks to build a case against him, but they were ready in couple of days. Although I guess you could get probable cause off the Web site. In fact, he’d dropped enough hints in his blog that you’d think I’d have spotted it right away all that time ago. The way he’d been going on about the Disney World thing had been more like somebody who was afraid he was going to get scooped, that some slant teenager was going to steal his place in history, than like somebody who actually cared about the problem. Should’ve made him then, I thought for the nth time. Idiot. Could have avoided this whole thing. Except it’s not so easy, is it? Especially for somebody like me, for whom empathy requires some effort. Anyway, cut yourself some slack. Hell Rot wasn’t a big page, but thousands of people had seen it, including DHS profilers, and none of them had flagged it, despite the fact that it included such gems as this:
People have been making movies and
games and stories about the END TIME
for FOUR THOUSAND YEARS. The
Reason is that they KNOW it is the
RIGHT THING TO DO. And finally Now it
is achevable [sic].
Maybe it hadn’t gotten singled out simply because Madison hadn’t put up anything specific. He hadn’t mentioned any names, places, or dates. Speaking of which, one odd thing was that from the blog, at least, it looked like he’d chosen December 21 arbitrarily. There was no mention of the Maya calendar, or pre-Columbian stuff, or anything. It was like he’d just pulled it out of his paper hat. Although I was sure he hadn’t.
“Two hundred seconds,” Ana said.
Everyone in the room straightened up a little. Michael Weiner started to cough and then didn’t follow through. Nobody threw up, though. Somebody turned on the general operations audio and we listened to the CO running through the final checklist.
“Hazmat Unit A,” his voice said.
“In place,” a lady from Hazmat Unit A said.
“Hazmat Unit B,” the CO said.
They covered a lot in the next sixty seconds, a chemical hazard team, a poison specialist, a biohazard reduction team that used antiviral and antibacterial sprays, two inhalation specialists, two gas compression trucks, a truckful of tracking dogs, a bomb squad, a bomb-disposal robot, and a bomb-disposal robot wrangler. Next, the three five-person assault teams checked in. Or, rather, they called them “elements,” not teams. Each element had a captain, two assaulters, a spotter, and a rear guard. Two elements would go in the front door and the front ground-floor rooms and the upstairs. The other would go in the back, check the kitchen, and then head to the basement.