Lone Wolf (29 page)

“Sick,” he mumbles. His eyes flicker, then shut. I’m losing him.

"Yeah,” I say hurriedly, “I know you got sick. But what about the rest of the gang, huh? What happened?”

He shakes his head. “No. Not me.” He takes a deep breath, and the bubbling’s back. “Yeah, I mean, yeah, I got sick. But not just me. Others.”

What? “How many others, Paco?”

“Seven, eight. Ten, maybe. Thought it was food poisoning, That’s what they thought at first, thought we ate some bad drek. But that’s not it. People who got sick didn’t eat the same things. Sick. People got scared. It got real bad."

"Yeah, I can imagine,” Frag, there’s so much I need to know. Much more than I can get in two minutes, but it’s a sure thing Doc Dicer isn’t planning to give me any extensions. I’ve got to cut to the fragging chase, and fill in the details later, or just let them hang. “When did this go down, Paco? When did it start?”

He doesn’t answer at once. His eyes are shut, he’s breathing porridge through his regulator again, and I think he’s
gone. But then he twitches, and says, “Couple days. Couple
days back. Day after the meeting.”

“What meeting?” Dicer’s eyes are telling me I’m on borrowed time here. “What meeting, chummer?”

Again there’s the long delay, and I desperately want to tell the doc not to count dead air against my total. Then he says, “The elves, ’mano. The elves, like the last time.”

“The elves from the Tir?”

“Yeah. After that.” His voice is fading so much I start to lean closer to hear better. Out the corner of my eye I see the doc’s warning look, and I freeze. Oh yeah, laminar-airflow isolation drek.

“Okay, Paco, I scan it—the elves. Then what?”

Long pause, and I think he’s drifted off totally into oblivion. But then his cracked lips move again. “Panic,” he whispers, “get out of there . . . people run . .. leave me. I’m sick, 'mano . . .” And then, with a long sigh, he does fade away. There’s that click again between exhalation and inhalation, and I feel sick.

Dicer grabs my arm in a firm grip. “Right,” she snaps. “Out.”

Like before, I don’t want to buck her order.

* * *

Argent and I don’t talk as we hang in the waiting room. I've got too many thoughts rattling around in my skull for conversation, and the runner’s eyes tell me the same thing’s happening in his head.

Elves. Elves from the Tir. Then this disease—frag, ten people down in two days, it
does
sound like VITAS. Is there a connection with the elves—a real causal connection? Or is it just coincidence? From out of the deep black depths of the past, I flash on something from a freshman philosophy course. One of the common logical mistakes
—post hoc, ergo propter hoc
—“after this, therefore because of this”—the assumption that because event B follows event A that event A somehow caused B.

Frag, I know I’m emotionally burned when I start remembering fragging Latin . . .

The OR door opens, and Doc Dicer emerges. “No, he’s not dead yet,” she says haggardly, answering my question before I can ask it. “He’s sleeping—probably the best thing for him at the moment—and I think he’s stable ... but I thought that before.” She leans against the wall, and rubs at her eyes. What’s she feeling at the moment? Scared, maybe? I can’t see how that laminar-airflow drek could protect her while she’s actually working on Paco. There are magically based isolation schemes that are supposed to block out every bug known (and unknown) to man, but I’ve seen none of the fetishes and talismans and other drek associated with that kind of thing around here. Somewhere in the back of her mind Doc Dicer must fear being exposed to VITAS 4 or whatever it is that Paco’s got, but she agreed to treat him and she’s still working on him. It’s one thing for me to risk dragging him out of the safe house and schlepping him across town; he’s my chummer. I don’t know whether I’d put my hoop on the line for a stranger.

“Any joy?” Argent asks.

Dicer nods slowly. “Something major. Whatever your friend’s got,” she says, turning to me, “it’s not contagious.”

“Huh?” say I, or something equally cogent and compelling.

She shrugs. “I don’t fully understand it,” she admits, “but it’s not contagious, not at the moment. It might have been at some point, like when your friend first came in with it, but I’m not totally convinced.” She sighs. “It’s got this trick of pulling a really profound antigenic shift. That’s the best way I can describe it, though it’s not exactly right.”

“In English,” I suggest.

She shoots me a nasty glare, then seems to repent, and nods apologetically. “Antigenic shift,” she says, starting again. “It’s like . ..” She closes her eyes as she searches for an analogy suitable for bonedomes like me. “As part of the immune response, the body produces these things called antibodies. You can think of them like cops, okay?” I glimpse Argent’s faint grin, but I ignore him.

“The cops get this report to stop a red Jackrabbit with tag thus-and-so,” the doc goes on, “and the car’s the virus. Okay?” I nod. No-brainer so far. “In an antigenic shift, it’s like the red Jackrabbit keeps changing its tag and its color,” she continues. “The cops keep getting updated reports— now it’s a black Jackrabbit with out-of-sprawl tags, that kind of thing—but they’re always one step behind. That’s antigenic shift, and that’s what this virus is doing.” She frowns. “Sort of.”

“Why ‘sort of’?” Argent wants to know.

Dicer shakes her head, and her eyes flash with anger. Not at either of us, I suddenly realize, but at herself maybe. “It’s an antigenic shift, but it’s more than that, too. Let’s go back to the car analogy. It’s like the Jackrabbit suddenly changing into a Westwind instead of just changing its color and tag when the cops start getting too close. And then maybe into a city bus. And then a Merlin V/STOL. And then a suborbital. And then a fragging cruise-liner.” She snorts. “That’s why I said it might have been contagious when your friend got it, but it’s not now. It can change that profoundly. It’s not precisely like anything I’ve ever seen. And there are even more disturbing characteristics . .

Argent holds up a matte-black hand. “Let’s take this slow,” he suggests. “You say it’s not precisely like anything you've seen before. Is it
vaguely
like anything else?”

The street doc smiles wryly. “I hear you,” she says, “and yes, the thought had crossed my mind, believe me.” She pauses, as though she doesn’t want to voice her conclusion. “It
is
similar in some ways to VITAS 3. In
some
ways,” she stresses again.

“VITAS 4?” The question’s out of my mouth before I can stop it.

She scowls at me. “Meaningless label,” she snaps.

“But it says it, doesn’t it?” I shoot back.

“To the uneducated,” Dicer ripostes, and the battle’s joined . ..

Or it would be, if Argent doesn’t raise another metallic hand. Both the doc and I shut up instantly. “We’re both uneducated when it comes to this kind of thing, Mary,” he says softly. “How about giving it to us in words of one syllable?” Her hard expression softens, and she nods. “This is a retrovirus,” she says after a few moments. She glances at me. “Like VITAS 3, yes, I’ll admit that. But there are other retroviruses too. Some are nasty—HMHVV causes vampirism, for example—one causes a kind of meningitis, but then there’s the retrovirus that causes recurrent dandruff in trolls, and one that seems to convey a severe allergy to peanuts. Popular media to the contrary, ‘retrovirus’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘global pandemic,’ okay?”

“Okay,” I agree. “But is this particular retrovirus like the particular retrovirus that causes VITAS 3?”

“Sometimes,” she says grudgingly. “I’ve seen some modes where it looks remotely like the VITAS 3 virus. And I’ve seen some modes where it looks nothing like it. It’s this damn antigenic shift thing.”

“Yeah, moving target, I get that.” I pause for a moment. “You’re saying that
in this mode
”—I hit the words hard,
earning me a scowl from the doc, but what the frag—“it's
not contagious. But it may have been, and it might get that way again. So even if it’s not a—what did you call it?—a global pandemic, it can still get pretty fragging nasty?” Dicer doesn’t want to, but she nods. “Theoretically,” and she hits the word pretty fragging hard herself. “And, also theoretically, it might antigen-shift itself into something totally harmless . .

“Or something that causes recurrent dandruff in trolls. Yeah, right.”

Dicer looks at me curiously. “Why do you want this to be VITAS 4?” she asks quietly.

That shuts me up for a moment. It’s sure as frag the way I’ve been sounding, I realize, reviewing my last few comments. Then a new thought hits me. “Hey, wait a tick,” I say suddenly. “It had to be contagious at one point, right? Paco caught it, nine or ten other people caught it. That’s contagious, isn’t it?”

Both Argent and Dicer are shaking their heads, but it’s the doc who answers. “Not necessarily. Not necessarily at all. ‘Contagious’ means you can catch a disease from someone who’s already infected. But there are lots of other vectors— that’s ‘ways of transmitting a bug’,” she amplifies. “Off the top of my head, I could list you a dozen diseases that are nasty as drek but aren’t strictly contagious.”

“I don’t get that,” I admit.

“There was a nasty bug that decimated the hemophiliac population in France back in about 2037,” the doc explains, her voice taking on a dry, lecturing tone. “A virus with a long latency period—decades, in some cases. You couldn’t catch it from someone infected, not normally. You could suck face with them, jam with them, share eating utensils, whatever. But if you get a blood transfusion from them, bingo, you’ve got the bug.” She pauses. “Okay, that’s still contagious, strictly speaking, because you can catch it from someone who’s got it, even though only through special circumstances,’'

“Tsimshian two-day fever,” Argent suggests, and the doc nods

“Good example,” she agrees. “That’s a kind of bug you
find in certain streams in the Queen Charlotte Islands in
Tsimshian—or whatever they call those islands now. The experts think it might be a retrovirus, but nobody’s sure because the Tsimshian government has outlawed research, for some wrong-headed reason.

“Anyway, if you drink the water, you get the bug. you get the fever, and you're probably dead in forty-eight hours. But even while you’re honking up your stomach lining,” she goes on, “you can’t infect anyone else. Not by breathing on them, spitting on them, honking on them, drekking on them, bleeding on them . . . nothing. The sole vector for the bug that’s ever been found is the water of those particular streams. If you don’t drink the water, you’ll never get the bug. Got it?”

I nod. Explained that way, it’s an easy enough concept to grasp. “So what’s the ... the vector ... for what Paco’s got?” I want to know.

“Yes, that’s the sixty-four thousand nuyen question, isn’t it?” From her expression, I figure Doc Dicer’s got an answer, but I also figure it’s one she doesn’t like at all.

“Go on, Mary,” Argent prompts, his voice quiet, and I know he’s scanned it the same way I have.

The woman nods and makes a grim face. “This is all tentative,” she starts, “without more study ..

“Received and logged,” Argent interrupts gently. “We’re not holding you to anything here.”

Her smile combines gratitude and embarrassment, as she goes on, “Okay, I'm assuming this isn’t contagious, and it wasn’t when the subject . . .”

“Paco,” I correct.

Her gaze meets mine for a moment, then she glances away. “Sorry. It wasn’t contagious when Paco was infected. Granted, it could have been, but I think the odds are small.

“So that means some other vector,” she goes on. “I’d guess it’s either airborne or ingested.”

“Lots of mucus,” Argent points out.

Dicer nods. “His GI tract’s a nightmare too,” she says, “though I don’t know which is primary and which is secondary.”

“Paco said they thought it was food poisoning,” I say.

“He also said they all ate different things,” she comes back fast. Then she relents, “Okay, it’s possible . . . Maybe something in the water. But I still put my money on airborne. I think the ... I think Paco breathed it and it got into the bloodstream through the lungs.”

“So the question becomes, where did it come from? Right?” I press. “How did it get into the air, or the water, or the food, or whatever.” I glance at Argent, see his frown. From somewhere I get the feeling he’s wondering the same thing as me—a connection with the elves here?

Dicer nods, but slowly, like she’s not totally convinced. “What?” I ask.

She doesn’t answer immediately, and I feel a kind of cold twisting in my gut. Suddenly I don’t want to hear what she’s got to say. Just keep me comfortably and reassuringly ignorant, thanks all the same. “Yes,” she says finally, “that is important. But there’s another question. What triggered it?”

Argent and I go, “Huh?” in unison.

“Some viruses and bacteria are infective all the time,” the doc explains slowly, as though it’s something she doesn’t want to think about either. “They get into your system and they make you sick, end of story.

“But then there are some that act differently,” The dry lecture-tone’s back, and I get the sudden strong feeling she’s using it to numb out her own emotions. And that’s even scarier. “Some bugs—viruses and bacteria—can get into your system,” she goes on, “and just stay there for months or years or decades . . . sometimes your whole life. They’re totally latent—they’re there, but they don’t do anything. Until something happens to trigger them. Then they start to replicate, and they start to make the body sick. AIDS was like that before the T5 phage treatment was discovered. HMHVV is like that. Harmless until triggered, then they go on a rampage