The Nirvana Plague (25 page)

“What did you say?” she said.

He shrugged again, looking back down at his pad. “I didn’t say anything.”

She realized what was so queer about this conversation. He was saying “I”! She thought back over their exchange. Almost everything he’d said to her in the last two minutes had begun with “I”. Her hand slowly slid down out of the air.

She was afraid to speak, to break the spell.

“Roger?” she said softly.

He looked up at her again and smiled that odd half-smile. “Don’t worry.”

She came round to the other chair and sat down in it, also too low without its cushion. She looked at him closely. “How are you?” she said.

He considered the question seriously for a long beat. “Mm. I don’t know,” he said slowly, as if he didn’t understand the question.

“Are you feeling better?”

“Better than what?”

“You seem — different.”

He looked at her curiously. “Different than what?”

Behind him, the cat was awake now, of course, and purring noisily.

“What were you drawing?” she said.

“Ideas.”

“You were drawing
ideas?”

“Yes.”

“What ideas were you drawing?”

He looked at his pad thoughtfully. Because of the cast he could only hold the pencil with his fingertips. It was poised over the pad, ready for light to break out.

“The ones which occur here.”

“Here? On the paper?”

He looked up at her again.

“Yes,
here
altogether.”

He made a gesture that seemed meant to include both himself and the sketchpad.

“The pencil draws together,” he said.

“May I see it?”

“Yes,” he said, holding out the pad, “but it’s dark.”

She didn’t know whether he meant the room or the page was dark, or both.

She stood and took the pad to the kitchen.

“Why didn’t you light a candle?” she said.

There was one standing on the counter. Everyone kept candles on hand. Lightsticks were too expensive.

“Mm. What does why mean?”

She felt the moment of lucidity slipping away. She wanted to keep him engaged for a little while longer. Please, just a little more!

“Did you forget about the candle?” she said.

“Forget? Mm. I don’t know. It didn’t occur to me.”

She fumbled with the trigger of the lighter till it finally caught, and lit the white candle. The little kitchen lit up with a yellow glow. She sat on a stool at the counter and looked at his drawing through the mist of her exhalations.

The sheet was a riot of tiny figures, patterns, words, and numbers, all meticulously rendered with his mechanical pencil. She turned it round and round. There was no right way up to it; the figures were oriented every which way. There was a little cat, and lots of little faces and eyes and hands, and a foot, and circles within circles like a solar system or a Bohr atom, and cubes and spheres and pyramids, and grids drawn in perspective like gravity wells, and molecular formulas. And the word “this” appeared many times with all sorts of variations:

this THIS tHIS thIs thiS siht sith

sith it is

it is this?

?

ist this it is? Tis!

I. It. Hit. Sit. Tsi. I. I is it. It is I. I is I. It is it.

Tis it tis it?

“So what are these ideas?” she said.

“The ideas which occurred.”

“Come over here. Look at it with me.”

He got up and came over. The cat jumped down and followed him. He sat down on the other stool, on the living room side of the bar.

She pointed at one of the
thisses
. “What
this?”

“This.”

“Yes. This. What idea is
this
?”

“Yes.”

She smiled.
Who’s on first?
“But what idea is it, this
this
?”

“This is a word.”

“Yes.”

“Word is a word.”

“Yes.”

“But all these words,” he said, “have come unstuck from all these ideas.”

“Unstuck,” she said. What a great word that was!
Unstuck.
That was just how she felt.

“Me too,” he said.

And a chill ran through her. An eerie, delightful chill, for she knew that he had felt her feeling. They were coming just a little less un-stuck from each other.

“But
those
ideas do not occur,” he continued, “but I remember them. I remember those ideas, but they do not occur now. A remembering idea is not the same kind of idea as an occurring idea. Mm.”

“Like the difference between a sound and its echo?”

He smiled. “Yes. That is an analogy.”

She laughed. “Yup, that’s what it is!”

“But now
these
ideas are not stuck to any words,” he said. “These sounds aren’t echoes of any other sound.”

“Very postmodern,” she said with mock sobriety.

This was not the same style of gibberish he usually muttered to her about or, at other times, roared at her. It was organized. She didn’t quite get the organization, but she sensed it was there. She studied the drawing while he talked. The more she looked at it, the more coherent the drawing
felt
, even though she couldn’t actually
see
the order in it.

He talked and talked. She saw that he really wanted her to get it. And he knew she wasn’t getting it.

But she understood some of it. She could hear in it some echoes of his scientific training. And echoes of other things too — of mystical religious rants from some dry “history of religion” course she’d had in college way back when, and also of more recent conversations overheard in student pubs — smart, smug little brainiacs holding forth in their intensely dreary way about the metaphysics of politics, or the politics of metaphysics, or some damn thing.

Still, she didn’t trust the connections she was making. She knew she wasn’t half getting his point. But she knew with perfect certainty that this time,
this
time, at last, he actually had a definite point, a real point, which he was struggling to express — and she to grasp.

Roger talked for an hour, till the sun was up and their little apartment was bright again.

She couldn’t remember how long it had been since they had talked together this much. The more he talked the more emotional she became. She remembered how she missed him, how she admired him. The smartest man she’d ever known. And she missed him laughing at her jokes. He got her as no one else did. He saw through her as no one else had. He’d always known, when no one else did, that she’d always been mocking herself when she mocked everyone else.

The power did not come back on, but the stove was gas, so she put on a pot of water to boil for tea and broke some eggs into a skillet — all the while keeping him talking over her shoulder. He was coming back from wherever he had been and she wanted him back. But he was coming back different too. This was not that same Roger she’d known then. This man had come
unstuck
from
him.
That Roger, her Roger, was really dead now. She cried a little as she scrambled the eggs, but kept him from seeing it.

And then someone knocked hard on the door, and she jumped. She saw the cat go skidding around the end of the counter into the bedroom, and heard from beyond the door a man’s deep voice:

“Mrs. Sturgeon! Open up, please!”

It was dark by the time they reached the carrier. An officer met them on the deck and handed Benford a tablet.

“Orders from Washington, sir. As soon as you’re cleaned up, we have a conference room set up for you to make your call.”

He led them to their quarters below decks.

Marley had a small stateroom to himself. The other bed would have been Tennover’s. Marley peeled off his filthy soldier garb and slipped into the cramped little shower. The hot water felt like a blessing from God. He enjoyed less than two minutes of this bliss before someone came rapping on the shower stall door.

It was the young lieutenant who’d been assigned as Peters’ aide. He was a tall, good-looking kid. But he had a hectic look in his eyes. He had a clean blue jumpsuit over his arm.

“I’ve been reassigned to you, sir,” he said without smiling. “We’re all very sorry about Lieutenant Tennover. He was a friend of mine.”

“Yes.” Marley rubbed the water out of his eyes. “Sorry, what’s your name again?”

“Lieutenant Friedlander, sir.”

Friedlander handed him a towel.

Marley hadn’t seen him since the night of the attack on Camp Alkarbah. Friedlander had spent that night fighting alongside the camp forces while Tennover and the civilian members of the taskforce had been holed up in the tomb with the “bambies.” Looking in his face now, Marley wondered if Friedlander had ever seen action before that night.

“What’s your first name, Lieutenant?”

“Mark, sir.”

“I need to call my wife, Lieutenant.”

“Yes, sir.” Friedlander held out the jumpsuit. “The team is assembling in the conference room, sir.”

Friedlander led him to a crowded meeting room, where he found the rest of the team — Benford, Delacourt, Sikora, DiGrandi, and Wenslau — already seated around a cramped table under glaring ceiling lights — everyone except Fred Peters.

Delacourt greeted him warmly: “I’m so glad to see you’re all right!” she said.

He took a seat beside her. The aides stood around them, crowded up against the grey soundproofed walls. The screen on the wall was empty, except for the words
Waiting for party to connect.

“We’re just about to start,” Benford said. “Waiting for General Harden’s office. It’s still morning there.”

“Where?” Marley said.

“Washington.”

“What time is it here?”

“Nineteen-hundred hours.”

“Why are they on morning time and we’re on military time?” Sikora said.

“Let’s keep this professional, please,” Benford said wearily.

“Who’s General Harden?” Marley said.

“My boss.”

“I need to call my wife, colonel.”

“Of course. Right after the meeting.”

Delacourt poured a cup of tea for him from a pot on the table. “You look well,” she said to him privately.

“Thanks. Not much damage done.”

“Sorry about Tennover.”

“How’s Fred?”

“Physically, he’s fine. Quarantined.”

“You saw him? He wasn’t hurt?”

“Yes, I saw him. He wasn’t injured. He came in on one of the flights this morning. Along with the other IDD cases from the camp.”

“I saw it happen to him. I saw him lose his mind. You can actually see it happen.”

She studied him sympathetically.

He looked away. He felt shaky.

The wallscreen lit up at last and descrambled into a view of a large, paneled conference room. Several men and women in suits sat round a varnished semi-circular table facing the screen. Electronic nametags appeared above each head.

General Harden, in uniform, sat in the middle. He quickly introduced the participants on his side of the world.

Benford introduced her team members to them.

General Harden, briefly but more or less effectively, expressed his regret over the unfortunate turn of events to which some members of the taskforce had been subjected. Then he turned the meeting over to someone named Linney sitting next to him. Harden’s nametag dimmed, and Linney’s lit as she started talking:

“As some of you know by now, we believe the incidence of IDD has increased significantly in the past two days. It’s difficult to get reliable numbers, of course, but we’re pretty confident about the trend. Dr. Lang’s latest epi curve makes the point pretty clearly.”

She signaled to someone off screen and a second later the graphic appeared.

“That spike you see yesterday represents, obviously, the biggest one-day gain we’ve seen,” she said.

Benford said, “Anything you’d like to add, Dr. Lang?”

“I’ve only just updated these numbers about an hour ago,” Dr. Lang said, her pretty voice making a little song of it. “I’d like to point out that the figures for the 13th, the last day shown here, that is
today
, are probably incomplete, since the 13th is still in progress. But I have included it to show that even with the count we already have for today, the number is already higher than any day previous, except, of course, for yesterday’s remarkable spike.”