The Fountain of Age (41 page)

He went back inside and brought out a big armful of the blankets behind another leaving door in the biggest place. They were like the blankets around Jack and Sally, all shaped like bodies and fastened together with tiny little strings or hard bumps that Li had examined in great detail. “Put these coverings on you,” he told the girls.

“Like Taney has,” Sudie said happily, even though none of Jack’s and Sally’s coverings were slippery like Taney’s. But some were white, and Sudie picked one of those.

Li turned the thing that Jack had turned to make the car go, and it started making noises. But it wouldn’t go forward until he pushed down with his feet on the flat things on the car’s ground. Then the car stopped.

“It’s dead,” Sudie said.

Li made it start again, and pushed the flat things. The car stopped. “maybe I should just push one.”

The car raced away so fast that Sudie screamed, even Jana gasped, and Kim started licking everyone frantically. Li pushed on the other flat thing and the car stopped.

Eventually he figured out how to make it go-stop-go-stop-go-stop, and they started down the wide dusty path, under the hot ball of morning high in the sky, to look for Taney.

“—eight point one on the Richter scale, slightly higher than the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. The president has declared southern California a federal disaster area, and the Department of Domestic Rescue is mobilizing to—” Katherine turned off the car radio.

She drove past the village. Las Verdes—a bitter joke of a name, if there ever was one—had gotten off fairly lightly because when all buildings were one-story adobe brick, collapse was quick and clean. No fires, no burst gas mains, no floods. The underground spring, the only reason this village existed at all, was still there, although the well-house had crumbled. The wind mills and lone cell tower lay on their sides; TV satellite dishes littered the rubble; somewhere a woman wailed, a high keening borne on the thin wind.

Katherine’s house was a pile of dirt, but the shed in the backyard still stood. Under its deceptive façade of cheap plastic was a reinforced steel frame, thief-proof and, unlike the biosphere dome, far too small to crack. She let herself inside with the key around her neck. A generator-powered computer running encrypted, military-grade software sat on a table that nearly filled the small space. It had a direct uplink to a military satellite.

TOP SECRET

CODE WORD ACCESS ONLY

NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION

CASE NO. 254987-A

CODE NAME: ACHILLES

DATE: 6/12/28

AGENT IN CHARGE: SIGMA INVESTIGATOR K. M. TANEY

SUBJECT: DEATH OF GM JUVENILE AGENTS

She typed swiftly, sent the report, and turned off the computer. With a second key, Katherine turned a small lock set into the machine’s side. She closed the door, hobbled back to the car, and drove several hundred feet away. Five minutes later, the shed exploded.

Now there was nothing to keep her here at all.

Nonetheless, she drove toward Las Verdes. The village had regarded Katherine with neither kindness nor suspicion. Mostly it had let her be: one more crazy white inexplicably in love with the inhospitable desert, wasting her time making bad paintings of rocks and sunsets, supported by means beyond their world. Still, the trunk of her car held medical supplies, among other things; perhaps she could help.

The car stopped going and Li couldn’t make it start again no matter what he did. “Is it broken?” Sudie said. “Like the feeder and the world?”

“Yes,” Li said. He opened the door; it was getting very hot inside. It was hot outside, too. The four children got out and sat in the brief shade on one side of the dead car, trying to not touch its burning side.

Jana started to say something, stopped, took Li’s hand.

He gazed out across the big world, glanced briefly at the hot ball of morning in the big sky, and anger grew in him. All this—all this had been out here all the time, and Taney had never let them have it. All this, and now that they had found it, they were going to die here. Li knew it, and he guessed that Jana knew it, too. Sudie and Kim did not. But Kim might have known something, deep in her different head, because she crawled over Sudie and began to lick Li’s face.

He pushed her away and dropped Jana’s hand. His kindness, he knew, was all used up. He didn’t want to die.

“I’m so thirsty,” Sudie said. No one answered.

A long time later Sudie said, “Look at those big birds up there. Flying around and around in circles. Why are they doing that, Li?”

“I don’t know,” Li said.

Jana said, “Something is coming on the big path. There.” She pointed.

Li strained his eyes. Finally he saw a sort of wiggle in the air—how could Jana see so far?—with a black dot in it. The dot got bigger and bigger and then it turned into another “car” but big, enormous, so that Sudie whimpered and tried to hide behind Li. The car stopped and a person got out.

“What the . . . what happened here, son?”

“This car stopped,” Li said. He stood. The man didn’t have hair on his face like Jack, and his voice sounded more like Taney’s.

“
You
were driving? Where’s your folks?”

Li didn’t know what “folks” might be; everything in this world was so strange. He said, “We have to find Taney.”

“But your parents . . . hell, get out of the sun, first. We can help you, son. We’re Department of Domestic Rescue. Climb in.”

Inside the big car was another little world, with chairs and blankets and a feeder. A woman gave them water and said, “Baker, where did they come from?”

Baker sat at another of the little screens and did something to it. “They said ‘Taney,’ but GPS isn’t giving me anything like that.”

“Well, we’re due in Las Verdes like, now. Shall I drive? And while you’re online, is there any more email on why we’re being diverted to an ass-end hole like Las Verdes when real population centers are screaming for help?”

“No. Presumably Las Verdes got an emergency situation.”

“Two states have got an emergency situation, Baker. Why the priority-one diversion to Las Verdes?”

“Ann, ‘ours is not to reason why—’”

“Oh, roast it. I’ll drive.”

Baker gave them all food, and Li fell asleep on the moving ground of the car. When he woke, Baker and Ann were leaving the big car. “You stay here, Li,” Baker said. “Safest and coolest inside, and we’ve got work to do. We’ll get you sorted out tonight, I promise. Okay, buddy?”

There was kindness in Baker’s voice, so Li said, “Yes.”

“You could maybe . . . I know! Here.”

Baker did something to the car’s sky, and all at once a screen came down, glowed, and made
cartoons
. Sudie squealed with joy. A cartoon bird—how could cartoons have birds, not just people?—flew toward the hot ball of morning in the sky, chased by a person. Sudie, Kim, and Jana crowded close.

Li watched through the clear place in the car’s sky as Baker and Ann walked toward piles of dirt and crying people. He watched for a long time. The hot ball of morning sunk down into the ground (how did it do that?) and the sky turned wonderful colors, purple and red and yellow. Baker and Ann came in and out, carrying things out with them. On one coming in, Ann touched a place on the wall and morning came inside the car’s world, although not in the big world outside. The girls watched the cartoons, too absorbed to even laugh. Li looked outside.

Figures moved in and out of houses made of blankets, some of which Ann had folded. Little bits of morning lighted the blanket houses. And by that light, as he peered out of the car with his nose pushed flat against it, Li saw her.

“Taney!”

Her back ached. She had moved too much, lifted too much, grown too old for this sort of field work. For any sort of field work. But everything was done that could be done tonight. Under the capable direction of the DDR agents, Ann Lionti and Baker Tully, the wounded had been treated, the homeless housed in evac inflatables, the spring water tested and found safe. Everyone had been fed. Tomorrow the dead would be buried. Katherine looked up and saw a ghost at the window of the DDR mobile.

No. Not possible.

But there he was.

Li waved his arms and Katherine, dazed, half lifted her hand before she let it drop.
How
. . . But it didn’t matter how. What mattered was that Lionti and Tully, that everyone here, that Katherine herself, was already dead.

The leaving door wouldn’t open. It wouldn’t
open
, no matter how Li pushed it. He cried out in frustration and shoved Sudie, who was making everything harder by pushing the door in a different direction from Li. But then he got the door open and tumbled down the square rocks made of sky material and he was with Taney, throwing his arms around her waist, Sudie and Jana and Kim right behind him. Kim started licking Taney’s face, jumping up in mute excitement.

“Taney! Taney!”

“You found us!”

“You lost your covering! I can touch you!”

“Taney, the world broke and we came out! It broke!”

“Taney! Taney!”

“You know these kids?” Baker said behind Taney. She turned, Li and Sudie still clinging to her, and Baker said in a different voice, “Doctor—what is it?”

“We . . . they . . . Kim,
stop
!”

They had never heard that voice from her before. Li, startled, stepped back. But then Taney’s kindness was back, although she sounded very sad.

“Li, take the others back inside the trailer. I promise I’ll come in just a little while, okay? Just everybody go inside.”

They went, of course; this was
Taney
. Jana and Li stared at each other. Sudie went back to watching the cartoons still showing on the screen. Kim pressed her nose against the clear sky-metal to watch Taney, mutely following her every tiny movement in the gathering dark. Li joined Kim.

A woman ran up to Taney and Baker, waving her arms and shouting.

“Experiments?” Baker Tully said, bewildered and angry and, Katherine could see, terrified. As well he should be. “Bioweaponry experiments?”

“From the very end of the war,” Katherine said. “Intelligence discovered the operation and we sent in two entire battle groups five days before the surrender.”

“And Ann—” He couldn’t say it. It had been hard to pull him away from Ann Lionti’s body, lying crumpled between a DDR inflatable and the ruins of an adobe house. Beside her, incongruously, lay an unbroken planter filled with carefully watered dahlias. Now Katherine and Baker stood behind the huge mobile, away from the others. She looked at his young, suddenly ravaged face, dimly lit by a rising gibbous moon, and she thought,
I can’t do this
.

He had courage. He got out, “How long? For me, I mean?”

“I don’t know for sure. The only tests we could run, obviously, were on animals. When did you and Ann first pick up the children?”

“About six hours ago. Give it to me straight, doctor.
Please
. I have to know.”

She saw what he was doing: looking desperately for a way out. All his training, like hers, had taught him that the way out of anything was information, knowledge, reasoning. But not this time.

I can’t do this.

She said, “I have to sit down, I’m sorry . . . knee injury.” She eased herself onto the ground, partly cutting off the illumination from the floodlamps, so that they sat in shadowed darkness. That should have made it easier, but didn’t.

“A virus in their breath gets into the bloodstream from the victim’s lungs and makes a targeted, cytopathic toxin. When the virus has replicated enough for the toxin to reach a critical level, it stops the heart. And the virus is highly contagious, passed from person to person.”

“So everyone here—”

“Yes,” Katherine said quietly.

“I don’t understand!” All at once he sounded like a child, like Li. Simultaneously Katherine shuddered and put a hand on his arm. Baker shook it off. “I just don’t understand. If that’s all true, the virus would spread through the whole country, killing everybody—”

“The—”

“—and then the whole world! The enemy would have killed themselves, too!”

“No,” Katherine said. Her knee began to throb painfully. “There are racial differences among genomes. Small differences, and not very many, but enough. Think of genetic diseases: Tay-Sachs among Jews, sickle-cell anemia among Blacks. We’ve found more, and much more subtle. This virus exploits a tiny difference in genetic structure, and so in cellular functioning, in anyone with certain Caucasian-heritage genes. Tully—”

“The Indians here . . .”

She peered at his face, shrouded in night, and loved him. She had just told him he was going to die, and he had a soul generous enough to think of others. She started to say, “Depends on whether any of their ancestors intermarried with—” when his rage overcame his generosity.