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Janie stared down at her hand. And then she almost laughed at herself.
You can’t see the chip, you idiot.
Then why had she looked when they told her to have it ready? It occurred to her, with no small unhappiness, that she was becoming the robot they wanted her to become.
But right now, to get what she wanted, such behavior was required and there was no getting around it, no matter how distressing or distasteful it might seem. She was directed to go to a site in the GovNet, and there, upon presenting her ready identity, she found waiting for her the personnel records for the town of Burning Road and the county in which it was situated, for a period from two years before the Outbreaks to two years after. But then came the unexpected miracle—by searching in current voting records, she discovered that the part-time public health officer for the period in question was still very much alive.
They had died in droves, just like the physicians, mothers, and priests in Alejandro’s fourteenth-century plague journal. To have survived DR SAM in an official medical capacity was akin to being part of a platoon on a mission and somehow the only one to return alive. Doubts always arose, followed closely by unspoken accusations. The woman in question no longer lived near the camp—No surprise, Janie thought, she was probably hounded out of there—but she’d moved to a place that was still less than an hour away from where Janie herself lived.
A drive out there would probably get her better information than a phone call or a letter. She considered her remaining gallonage; in all likelihood, it was not going to be enough to last the rest of the year.
So I’ll walk when I need to go someplace, or take the bus. She sent the woman a message asking if she could come for a visit the next day.
I need to quit my job, she e-mailed Kristina. It’s starting to look a little fishy, all this time I’m taking off.
“You can’t,” Kristina told her later. “You’ll lose the authority you have from being on staff at the foundation.”
Janie almost laughed. “What authority? I’m just a research associate.”
“It worked with the AMA, didn’t it?”
She was right, Janie realized, it had.
“What if you run into another situation where you need that position? And besides, your record for the time you’ve worked there has been exemplary, so no one’s going to give you a hard time. You have just about the highest attendance percentage of anyone in your research department. And what do you care, anyway? You hate that job.”
Of course, Kristina would know all these things.
“I do. But I still want to do it well. And it’s getting harder, with these distractions.”
The distractions were piling up, fast and deep, and becoming noticeable.
“You’re going on vacation, I see on the schedule,” Chet had remarked the day before when she flitted in and out of the office. It was the second comment he’d made in recent days about her increasingly frequent absences. “I know you do a lot of work outside the facility, but we do like to see you every now and then.”
She was going to have to be careful because things were getting crazy again. She remembered how it felt from London, and dreaded its return. Maybe this trip to Iceland would actually end up doing her some good—it would force her to slow down, assess her situation, regather herself. “I’m completely up-to-date on my projects,” she told Chet. “I’ll make sure I leave everything in good shape. And anyway, I’ll only be gone a few days.”
“You have a week blocked out on the schedule.”
“That was the original plan, but I don’t think I’ll be taking the whole thing.”
Oh? his look said.
She shrugged. “It just doesn’t feel like a good idea right now.”
The Berkshire town was high in the hills and Janie watched her gas gauge with alarm as the Volvo whined upward slowly in second gear, consoled only by the fact that the trip home would largely be made on gravity.
It’s half an hour to the nearest quart of milk, she thought. What do people do out here, when they need to go out for—whatever?
What they did was ride horses. She passed dozens of them on the narrow, twisting roads, almost hitting one or two. Most carried packs behind their riders, a few even pulled small carts. Janie dreamily envisioned carved signs for wainwrights and blacksmiths over open straw-floored storefronts on some old-fashioned Main Street. City laws would not permit it, but out in the hill towns, where bicycles were understandably out of the question, horses were figuring in daily life again. Fertilizer would no longer be a scarce commodity.
She saw only one or two other cars on the road, an old pickup truck grinding down the hill in what remained of its second gear, the other slowly making its way up behind her. It was one of those all-black Darth Vader four-wheel-drive monsters that Janie always imagined to be carrying mafiosi, of whatever sort might be in power at the time. She wondered, as she always did when there were tinted windows, who in the vehicle was so important that absolute privacy was required, and that the gas to run it was not a problem.
Maybe they’re following me, she teased herself. A smile came to her lips.
Okay, catch me if you can.
She slowed down and the car behind her slowed. When she increased her speed, Darth Vader did too and she began to feel a little nervous. She stopped varying her speed and just drove steadily. The black vehicle behind her did exactly as she did.
For a moment, she considered coming to a complete stop on the side of the road, but two things prevented her: It was a narrow road, a dangerous place to stop if one didn’t need to, and she was, according to the landmarks, about to reach her destination. So she kept driving, and when she reached the right driveway the black vehicle sped on past her while she was still in midturn.
Once she was off the road, Janie sat in the car for a moment and thought about what had just transpired. She discovered, unhappily, that she was shaking; what had started out as a little joke with herself had turned into something way too real. She got out of the car and looked around for a few moments to calm herself. The setting was beautiful and secluded, and from the rustic appearance of the house, Janie had the feeling that her electronic sidekick would not be welcomed by the human who inhabited it. So she locked V.M. securely in the trunk of the Volvo.
But when she stepped inside, ushered in by a gracious and smiling Linda Horn, she found herself within an aerie of light and sound and perfect climate, with moist air and the smell of peat, and butterflies, hundreds of them all over the place, their colorful wings silently aflutter. They were perched on the lamps and books and knickknacks, but in greatest numbers on the amazing assortment of plants. It was as if a tropical wonderland had inexplicably relocated in the low mountains of western Massachusetts. Off in one corner of the great room, she saw a sleek new computer, its screen aglow.
“Oh, my,” Janie said softly as she gazed around in awe. “This is just—wonderful. But how …?”
“My husband is an energy engineer,” Mrs. Horn answered. “He set the whole thing up for me.”
“Does he hire out?”
Linda Horn smiled. “He’s retired now. Sorry.”
“Well, if he ever decides to come out of retirement, I’ll be his first customer.”
The woman laughed quietly and shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said. “There’s a line, believe me.”
A small bright blue butterfly landed on Janie’s shoulder. “I can understand why. What a haven you’ve created here.”
“We’ve been working on it for a long time. We’re members of a movement, of sorts. Of people who want to live like this.”
Movement. It was a word from a previous generation, and it carried a certain weighty implication. “The participants must be awfully quiet.”
“Oh, we are—but there are lots of families setting up situations like this and we all stay in touch.” She nodded in the direction of the computer and smiled. “There are a number of people in this area who are rather heavily involved,” Mrs. Horn said.
Janie gazed around, entranced by what she saw. “It must have been quite a challenge to get this all going. It’s so—perfect.”
“The biggest problem was acquiring the land. You need at least a hundred acres to get a permit for the type of setup we have here. We bought this land a few acres at a time over the course of our entire marriage, otherwise we couldn’t have done it. The solar collectors don’t take all that much room, but the windmills require a lot of space and a certain kind of placement.”
Still exploring with her eyes, Janie said, “I congratulate you. This is truly amazing. This is a type of living that’s always appealed to me. But I never got even close to it. My life was just too—busy.”
“It’s never too late,” Linda Horn said.
“Oh, I don’t think anything like this is going to happen to me, at least not in the immediate future, anyway. But the reason I wanted to see you …”
She explained, slowly and carefully.
Linda’s brow tightened and little lines appeared on it. “I was wondering when someone would start looking into that whole thing.”
Janie nibbled quietly on a lemon crisp as Linda Horn related all the details of the incident at Camp Meir.
“They had lab tests showing Giardia lamblia in the bloodstream of some of the campers. And their water samples from the pond showed an infestation. But we never did find anything. We didn’t do the blood tests.”
Janie wondered why—it could be considered an oversight. “Any particular reason?”
“I worked for the town, but in a situation like that the county called the shots. They told me to accept the camp’s tests as valid. Didn’t want me to spend the money to replicate them. A few of the boys had the right symptoms.…”
“You wouldn’t by any chance have kept the records from back then?”
“No. When the whole thing started, I had no inkling that it would all develop into something that smelled so fishy. But I remember it all pretty well. Largely because the camp’s on-staff nurse refused to accept any assistance from our office when we offered—usually she welcomed our help. I mean—a camp full of teenage boys? Come on. It would have been mayhem if they all got sick at once. So it stuck out in my mind as an unusual reaction on her part. And we never were able to reproduce the results they had in their water tests. You probably remember that all the antibiotics were on their way out at the time—and we weren’t allowed to authorize casual or prophylactic use—so we wanted to have solid evidence.”
“But you never found anything in the local water.”
“No. Well, wait a minute—that’s not entirely true. We found one spot with a slightly elevated level of Giardia. But nothing that would cause a major health hazard, and certainly none of the water from that source was making it anywhere near the camp’s water supply. They weren’t using that pond for swimming or canoeing, either. We tested and tested, at a lot of different sites all around the area, but we never found anything more than that little trace.”
“Interesting.”
“Very. But even so, someone from the camp’s insurer showed up one day at my office with a fistful of official-looking papers and explained how they were going to drag us into court immediately for keeping them from carrying out their in loco parentis duties toward the campers. They had most of the parents convinced that the threat was real.”
“But you think it wasn’t.”
“It doesn’t matter what I think. I can only go by what the water tests showed, and all but one of them were grossly negative.”
“But you gave them the permit for the antibiotic anyway, so you must have—”
“I didn’t really have any choice, Dr. Crowe. These people were quite assertive. The county and town were already suffering from fiscal difficulties—we were terribly understaffed, and sometimes my paychecks were delayed. It didn’t seem like much of a sacrifice to give these campers a nearly useless medication if it would keep the town from being sued.”
Janie was pensive while she sipped her tea.
“So,” Linda finally said, “why are you looking into this? Does your foundation have an interest here?”
Janie set her teacup down before answering. “A lot of boys whose only connection to each other is the camp are getting sick, at the same time, with a similar rare condition.”
“Which is?”
“At this point, I should probably tell you only that it’s orthopedic, with neurological implications. I haven’t sorted out the details completely just yet.”
“Well,” Linda said as she refreshed her own tea, “I for one am not at all surprised.” She took in a long breath and gazed straight ahead as if she were trying to remember something. “I went out there on some other silly pretext on the day the treatments were being administered. I admit I was curious, and being the health officer I couldn’t just be turned away and told to come back at a more convenient time. I saw a couple of the vials. The medication they were supposed to be giving those kids was metronidazole. In injectable solution it’s almost perfectly clear with a slight golden tinge to it, and it comes in transparent rubber-topped vials. There was only one company still manufacturing it at the time, and that’s what its product looked like. Now there are none, by the way, if that’s of any interest to you.”
“It’s not an effective medicine anymore.”
“And it was on the way out then, which is another reason why I found the whole thing very odd. In any case, what they were injecting into these kids was being drawn from opaque white plastic containers, but I couldn’t really get close enough to see what color the liquid in the syringes was. And instead of dropping the empties in a biosafe bag for disposal as would ordinarily have been done, they put them all into a plastic case with some sort of snap lid.”
“So you didn’t get the impression that they were being discarded, then.”
“No. Not at all. In fact, it looked to me like they were accounting for every one of them.” She looked directly into Janie’s eyes. “I remember this weird, creepy feeling I had for the rest of the day. And something else—there were two men there, watching the whole thing. They looked ludicrously out of place. They were wearing suits. It was July, and well over ninety degrees.”
“Any idea who they were?”
“None whatsoever. But everyone at camp wore those blue T-shirts. As it happened, I wore one too that day.”
“So you blended in, then. I don’t suppose you did that on purpose, did you?”
Linda made a little smile. “I had a bunch of those T-shirts. They were always giving them away.” She shrugged. “That color looks good on me.”
Janie stayed quiet as she mulled over Linda’s revelations. There didn’t seem to be much more to ask. It was so thoroughly pleasant in the house that she didn’t want to leave. But it was time to move on.
“I was wondering,” she said, hoping it would seem like an afterthought, “during the Outbreaks, how did you manage …”
“To stay alive?” Linda Horn smiled. “I hid.”
As nonjudgmentally as possible, Janie said, “Ah … I see.”
“Here,” Linda added. “The place wasn’t quite finished, but that didn’t matter to us.”
“So you and your husband had this place … to hide.”
A little bittersweet smile of recollection came onto Linda’s face. “We brought the entire town of Burning Road with us.”
Janie stared at her. “The whole town?”
“It was a small town.”
“Still,” Janie said with uncertainty, looking around,“this house isn’t all that big.”
“We set up a campsite. The townspeople had some experience in that, after all. If you bother to look at the records, you’ll see that the Outbreak death rate in Burning Road was zero for local residents. There were some squatters and out-of-towners who died—”
“But no one from the town?”
“No one. We all went back, a year later.”
“I wasn’t expecting a happy ending to that story.”
“No one ever does.”
“The people of the town were very lucky to have you. Well, here’s hoping they won’t be needing you in that capacity again.”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
Janie stayed quiet for a moment, then sat back down again. “I think you might mean something by that remark, but I don’t quite get it.”
“I do. I was wondering if you had heard anything, that’s all. About DR SAM coming back again. I’ve been reading things, hearing things.”
It cannot come back, Janie thought. It just can’t. “I read a small article in the paper a few days ago—in fact it was on the front page—but it wasn’t being described as a comeback.”
“Then they are keeping it quiet.”
“When did you hear this … and where—”
“People in our movement—we behave like one big family, really, and when there’s any kind of DR SAM news, it travels really fast. We’re all starting to get a little nervous. There have been a couple of pop-ups on the West Coast in the last week or so.”
“Dear God.”
“And what’s most troubling: we heard it was all over Mexico, and they aren’t saying anything down there. Or doing a blasted thing to stop it.”
“Well, they didn’t before.”
“And that’s how the whole thing got out of hand.”
“Okay, here she is again.”
The sound of a car starting came through the speakers, then the crunch of gravel under the tires, and shortly after that, there was music. And then painful shrieking, as Janie tried, in her own unique way, to sing along to a recording of Maria Callas.
The listeners all winced. The volume was turned down. “She obviously just left it in the car when she went inside.”
“I’d like to know why. Kristina, what do you think?”
The young woman looked around at the gathered group, whose eyes had all come to rest heavily on her. “I don’t know,” she said. “She’s been very good about taking it with her. And she brought it along, she just didn’t bring it into the house when she went inside.”
“Curious. I wonder … do you think she suspects?”
Call me, the e-mail from the travel agent said. I have some information for you.
“I can change your return flight,” the agent told her when they spoke a few minutes later, “but the outgoing flight is fixed. You have to enter on a certain date. That way they don’t get too much of a pileup in immigration. Iceland’s a small country—until the year before the first Outbreak the President’s phone number was still listed in the directory.”
“No kidding. Don’t suppose I could get it now, and ask if she’d help me change my incoming flight?”
“Probably not,” the woman said. “The problem is that they can’t just call up a few immigration agents to come in for a little overtime. They don’t have the manpower. So they try to pace the entries.”
“Going out, though, I can pretty much get on whatever plane I want to.”
“Yes. Whichever plane has room for you.”
Then she read the rest of her mail. The next incoming message was another unfriendly one, much like the one she’d received just a few days earlier, which said that she ought to back off, though what she was supposed to avoid doing wasn’t made clear.
I don’t think so, she’d replied bravely.
Janie assumed it was from the same source. But this time it was a little more jarring than the first.
She didn’t reply. She deleted the malevolent little blip from the mailbox as soon as she finished reading it.
Janie needed advice and company, so she was very grateful when Tom said yes to her last-minute offer of dinner.
“Ten minutes’ notice and I’m here,” he said when he met her at the restaurant. “Pretty pathetic, don’t you think?”
She laughed. “I’m imagining that you canceled a date with the clone of Marilyn Monroe to meet me.”
“I wish. But you are one of my most important clients. So if I did happen to have a date like that, I probably would have canceled it.” He grinned.
“Now, that’s pathetic.”
“Oh, I don’t think so.” He cleared his throat with a nervous little cough. “So, when are you leaving? Soon, I imagine.”
“Tomorrow, actually.”
Tom looked away briefly, then said, “Well, I know you’ll have a good time. But like I said yesterday, I’ll miss you.”
A silence followed as thoughts went unspoken on both sides of the table.
“So how long are you going to be gone?”
“I don’t know yet. I have to arrive tomorrow, there’s no choice on that. Apparently they schedule their entries pretty rigidly. But I can go back out again anytime there’s room on a plane as long as I stay within the date limits of my visa.”
“I could stay for up to a month if I wanted to.”
His face seemed to fall, just long enough for Janie to recognize the expression for what it was, though he seemed to be trying to hide it.
“I won’t be staying that long, Tom. I don’t think I’ll be gone more than a few days. I’m way too involved in this other stuff right now. I don’t really want to leave it at all. I feel pretty confused about it—and other things.”
They stopped speaking and smiled mechanically when the waiter presented himself, and remained silent while he recited the specials. They ordered soup and salad for simplicity’s sake. And as soon as the waiter was out of hearing range, Tom said, “This isn’t just something mildly interesting to you anymore, is it, or a way to get relicensed?”
“No. I’m hardly even thinking about my license at this point. It’s become much more than that.”
“I get the feeling that you’re actually enjoying it.”
His understanding felt like a blessing. She leaned forward with a gleam in her eye and let the excitement come through in her voice. “Yes. I am. I can’t tell you how much, and how everything else just seems very small and unimportant all of a sudden. I wish it was … cleaner, though. Things seem to be getting much more complicated in the last couple of days.”
She told him about the second threatening message, and watched him as he considered what she’d told him. She couldn’t avoid the thought that he was trying very hard not to show any reaction.
“I wonder if I should have someone look after my house while I’m gone.”
“That might be a good idea. Do you know anyone who could do it?”
“I was thinking of asking this girl Kristina who’s been—uh—for lack of a better word, running me.”
“Interesting way to put it.”
“Well, that’s sort of what it feels like. I don’t know what else to call it. It’s like she’s my spymaster.”
“Bond has his M, you have your Kristina.”
“There you go.” She reached down and patted the briefcase that contained V.M. “And my fancy technological gizmo. I don’t think I ought to be taking him to Iceland.”
“You could just give it back to her and she could take it home with her.”
“I suppose I could.” Then she paused for a moment. “You know, I don’t have the faintest idea where she lives.”
He looked surprised. “You’re kidding.”
“I never had any reason to ask her. I’ve always reached her electronically. V.M. has a mail module with a preset route to her, but I don’t have any way of unembedding the address. I’ve never called her on the telephone, even. But I assume she lives somewhere close by because she shows up on pretty short notice when I contact her.”
“Maybe she’s really some bizarre alien being and only corporates when she’s with you. Maybe she reverts to a gaseous state the rest of the time, and hovers in the air, awaiting your summons,” Tom said.
“Wouldn’t that be a neat explanation? In the case of this particular girl, it doesn’t sound all that far-fetched. She has some—oddities. And there was something I’ve been noticing in the last few days. Something really unusual in a young person.”
“Which is?”
“She seems to have some difficulty with her memory.”
“Really? That is unusual, I guess. What kind of difficulty?”
Janie noticed an unusual edge to Tom, a sudden stiffness that wasn’t generally present in him. She wondered why. “Well,” she said, “I would tell her something one minute, but the next, it was as if she hadn’t heard me.”
“Maybe she was distracted.”
“I thought of that. She’s quite distractable. But it’s happened more than once. And I know she hears well enough.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Tom. What did I do before the Outbreaks?”
“Oh. Right. Neurology.”
“She shows all the classic signs of short-term memory problems. Long term, I don’t see anything unusual. She calls up knowledge in impressive depth. But moment to moment she seems to be skipping a few beats. Twice yesterday there were funny little incidents, lapses almost.”
“Maybe you should examine her. See what’s going on.”
“Maybe. But not yet.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want her distracted.”
“You don’t want her distracted? From everything we’ve discussed, I got the impression that it’s this Kristina handling you, not the other way around.”
“Well, that’s true, in terms of this project, or whatever you’d call it. This mission, maybe. But that’s not what I’m talking about. She needs a different kind of handling, I think. She seems awfully lost sometimes, like she could use a little parenting.”
After a reflective pause, he said, “Something I know very little about.”
“Which I, for one, have always thought to be one of the Cosmic Troll’s worst decrees. You would have been a great father.”
Tom smiled down sadly at his plate, and Janie asked him, “Do you ever regret not having had children?”
“There are way too many things I regret.” He looked up at her. “I would’ve needed a partner, and that just never seemed to work out. But the flip side is that I never had to go through losing a child. I watched a lot of people crumble a few years back. I don’t know how well I would’ve done with that.”
“I don’t think that’s something you can predict ahead of time.”
“Maybe not.”
“Imagine how the parents of these camp boys must feel now. Their sons all made it through the Outbreaks. They probably thought they were home free.”
“Are you ever home free when you have kids?”
“No,” she said quietly.
“I didn’t think so.”
Janie sat on the edge of her bed between the two items that were going to occupy the remainder of her night. Though both required her attention, she was simply sitting and thinking, ignoring her obligations.
“Sorry, guys,” she said, as if her empty suitcase or Virtual Memorial could hear, or would understand. “I don’t mean to neglect either of you, but he’s a tough act to follow.”
She finally heaved herself off the bed and went to her closet to begin the onerous task of figuring out what was just enough, and what would be too much to take to a country where the temperature was hard to predict from one day to the next. The travel agent had given her a book with guidelines and suggestions, which seemed too complicated to follow.
Fuck it, she thought, I’ll just pack everything I own. Let someone at the airport decide what I should leave home. Once upon a time she could have taken what she wanted, for a price. But everything now had limits.
She came back to the bed with an armful of clothing, and set it down. Then she went to V.M. and typed in a few more additions to the growing list of what she wanted to search for in Big Dattie when she returned from Iceland. The list was growing longer at an alarming rate. But she had only thirty minutes to do the work and record what she’d done.
“Okay, that’s all the attention I can give you tonight,” she said to V.M. “But I promise to be better when I return. I’m going to give you back to your other parent while I’m gone.”
One last thing to do. She needed to tell that other parent that she planned to take an excursion into Big Dattie, and she needed to try to get the mysterious “agency” to fund it.
She e-mailed Kristina. Bring the leash, she wrote, after everything else was conveyed. It’s your turn to walk the dog.
