Year Zero (10 page)

The sterile, bony moraine gave way to a valley with wildflowers. He covered six miles in three days, steadily losing altitude. The air grew rich. Rhododendrons glistened among pines. He sampled the green leaves and strips of pine meat. It made him sick. He filled his stomach with milky glacier water. Despite his famine, Nathan Lee felt more and more lucid. That was a bad sign, he knew. The visionary’s conceit.

On the next day, the hermits’ cave appeared on a hillside. It was empty, of course. Ochs had looted their cache, resting and gorging on their food before heading on. The one thing Ochs had not taken was a five-pound sack of
tsampa.
Early on, he’d declared Rinchen’s roasted barley meal inedible. Mixed with water, it formed a sticky brown paste. Nathan Lee took it like a sacrament.

One more pass loomed. Shipton Pass was less than 18,000 feet high, but Nathan Lee was weak and his head ached all the time. It took a week to climb through the cold fog, another week to descend. He could judge the altitude when the leeches began bleeding him.
Hirudinea suvanjieff
did not live above 7500 feet. They would reach out from the leaves and branches like slick black fingers. Every half hour he would scrape them from his ankles and arms and eat a few, tasting his own blood.

On the last day of July, he reached a chain footbridge swaying over the raging Arun River. Makalu was the headwaters of the Arun. The beginning was the end.

He came to a village called Khandbari. The street was vacant. It turned out they were busy killing a rabid dog, which was done by setting out big leaves with poisoned rice and then everyone waiting indoors. As he limped through the middle of the village, people came to their windows. There was no question he made a strange sight with his beard and wood crutch and rain jacket made of a body bag. Nathan Lee was so starved he picked up one of the leaves of rice, but they cried out to him.

He sat on a bench in front of a small schoolhouse. After a while, two policemen in brown uniforms and Nikes approached. The younger man looked frightened. At first, Nathan Lee thought he was scared of the lurking dog. Then he realized he was the source of the man’s fear.

The older policeman was armed with a small bamboo baton tucked under one arm. “Please show me your passport, sir,” he said.

“Gone,” rasped Nathan Lee.

“Are you the gentleman, then, from Makalu?”

They knew him. Suddenly the last of his strength drained away. Ochs had come through here, of course. He had started weaving his cover story, and it was clearly one of his own survival from great violence and deception. Nathan Lee was too tired to try to repair the damage. “May I have some
chai,
please?” he asked.

The interview was interrupted while the younger policeman scampered off for tea. It took several minutes. While he was gone, Nathan Lee asked, “What happens now?”

The officer said, “Everything will be fine, sir.”

The young policeman returned with a thick glass of milk tea dosed with sugar. In his other hand was an ancient set of shackles.

Nathan Lee accepted the tea. He calmly watched them cuff his good ankle. None of this seemed real. None of it. He had a daughter back home. He was not a bad man. They would straighten matters out.
Everything will be fine.

Out of kindness, they didn’t shackle his swollen leg. The chain and extra cuff lay on the ground, unnecessary. It was plain for all to see that the beast had been captured.

K
ERKYRA
,
CORFU

A
fter mass, the faithful milled in the square, chatting with their neighbors, enjoying their last quiet hour before the tourists arrived. Easter was over. The mummified body of the island’s saint had been paraded through the streets and returned to his church. In the town museum, a 2,600-year-old statue of the Gorgon Medusa with serpents for hair had been dusted off. The money season was about to begin.

In forty minutes the ferry from Italy would arrive at the New Port. The first of hordes of pasty white British and Germans would descend into their midst. Before the summer was out, the visitors would number tens of thousands, some on their way to other islands, many just planting themselves on Corfu’s beaches. All had to pass through the island’s capital. The town was ready. The
rembetis
had tuned their bouzoukis and electric guitars. Cafes and bars were well stocked. The prostitutes and taxi drivers and hotel keepers could not wait.

It was a pretty morning. The sun was warm, the sea blue. The hills above town were bright green with basil and rosemary and thyme and oregano seedlings. Drugged with sun, sleepy cats watched from windows and flower boxes.

Suddenly there was a shout from up the narrow street, then another, a bark of outrage. “Slow down, fool,” someone yelled.

A wild-eyed young man came careening down the winding lane, scarcely able to control his bicycle. A big fisherman reached out and caught him before he ran into the Sunday crowd. The bike struck a wall. He dropped the young man onto his seat on the cobbles.

“Ah, it’s only Spyros,” people said. Half the men on Corfu were named Spyros after their saint, the mummy Spyridon. But something in the inflection distinguished this one. He was Spyros the simpleton, a laborer on a farm.

“Madonna, Madonna.” Tears poured down his face. He was dressed in coarse, patched trousers and a faded Rolling Stones T-shirt.

“What is it this time, Spyros?”

Spyros scrambled to his feet. He began shouting about an apparition.

“Hush,” a woman said, “you’ll scare the children.”

But he went on. An angel had appeared to him in the hills above town. “The Virgin herself.”

A local tough strutted up. He shoved Spyros. “Don’t be sacrilegious,” he said.

The big fisherman pushed the tough away. “Leave him alone. He’s simple,” he said.

“Then shut him up. He’ll drive the tourists away.”

“She is coming,” said Spyros. He cast fearful glances up the street. Others looked and saw nothing.

Someone threw a small stone at him as if driving away a dog. Another stone followed. People clucked or hissed or spit.

“She comes from heaven,” said the young man.

“Go back to your goats, Spyros.”

“I never trusted his family,” a man said. “Look at those blue eyes. He comes from the Turks.”

Only slowly did they become aware of her. She appeared from the lane’s deep shadows and descended into view. Perhaps she had followed the simpleton downhill. Perhaps she was drawn by the church bells. Maybe she had simply obeyed gravity on her trek to the sea.

“Dear Christ in Heaven,” someone whispered.

She moved on two legs, but did not look human. Naked as a ghost, she seemed made of glass. From a distance, as they squinted into the shadows, her body seemed to flicker in and out of reality. She drew nearer, but haltingly, with the pace of a sleepwalker.

As she passed, Spyros put his hands to his head and cowered against the wall. The fisherman stared in disbelief, then took off his cap uncertainly. He crossed himself. She swayed past them without a glance.

“What is this?” someone murmured. The square opened to her. The crowd pressed back against the buildings.
Who could she be? Where did she come from?

She entered the sunlight and became even more fantastic. For her skin was nearly transparent. Her veins showed clearly. Backlit by the sun, her organs were a silhouetted mass. One could see the limned bones.

And yet she was not a gruesome sight. Quite the opposite. Despite her condition, the woman’s beauty was evident. Her hair was long. Except for the transparent roots, it was black and tangled with flowers and vegetation. Her figure was voluptuous, with luminous breasts and flared hips.

She came to a halt. Some noticed her lower legs and feet. The skin was torn. Shepherds’ dogs had bitten her. Thorns stuck from the edges of her soles. Even if this transfigured being had descended from the heavens, it was clear she had also walked a long distance.

It might have been the smell of the sea which stopped her, or the warmth of the sun or the flatness of the square, the fact that she was no longer being pulled downhill. Or it could have been the sight of the church. No one knew why she stopped in their midst. She had a slight cough.

“What is your name?” a man called out.

Nothing in her radiant face conveyed knowledge. She seemed not to register the question. Her peacefulness was startling.

“Why have you come here?” someone asked.

Her mouth opened, but no language came out, only a sound like the beginning of a song. Her innocence stilled them. They listened to her single note of sound. It went on and on.

She raised her arms out to the sides. Something wondrous happened. Wings of color flashed and disappeared as her hands lifted up. Her flesh had become a prism. She faced the sun, and her entire body threw a penumbra of rainbow.

“What kind of creature is this?” someone asked.

Someone might have recognized her, even in her condition, if she were a daughter of this island. As it was, no one in this town had ever met Medea, the fifth wife of Nikos Engatromenos. She was a stranger to them regardless of her flesh.

An old woman in black dared to go forward. Clutching her rosary, she reached out and touched the angel. The strange creature lifted her head and turned blindly in the direction of the old woman. A murmur rifled through the crowd.

The old woman brought her face closer and made her judgement. She knelt.
“Evloyite,”
she said. Normally it was a greeting reserved only for monks. She said it again.
Bless me.
Rainbows danced upon the old woman’s black dress.

Devotion overtook the crowd. It was spontaneous. In their collective minds, the woman was nothing less than an angel fallen to earth.

Word spread. Hundreds of people came close to genuflect and reach out to touch her. Those close enough crossed themselves with beads of her sweat. Others tore off bits of their clothing to press to her miraculous flesh.

In the distance, a horn sounded from the sea. The 12:10 ferry from Brinidisi was approaching. Dock workers and merchants and taxi drivers and cafe owners detached from the crowd and hurried to greet the boatload of tourists.

Medea sang to them. She glistened. On foot, with wings of light, the plague had come to meet its messengers.

N
EW
M
EXICO
S
EPTEMBER
, F
OUR
M
ONTHS
L
ATER

T
heir yellow schoolbus burst from the mob. Splattered with eggs and blood and neon paintballs, it looked psychedelic, like a time machine from the Age of Aquarius. Abbot glanced around him. Peeking from the windows, some of his fellow passengers could have been flower children with their stringy hair and old jeans. In fact they were international scientists on their way to the Mesa, better known as Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Every seat was filled. There were young and old, rich and poor, weird and plain, each one of them on the cutting edge of their research. From the rear, he saw bleached blond buzz cuts and pierced ears, long hair, bald monk pates, pencil necks, wrestler shoulders, mad scientist frizz, and expensive blow-dried perms, male and female. Some were high-bred cosmopolitans able to navigate the most convoluted dinner conversation. Others were near dumb with introspection and shyness. Some lived by Bach, others by Puff Daddy. Many were university academics or ran labs for the government or private industry. Several had branched out and beached tens of millions with their own biotech start-ups. The majority were biologists, who tended to be more social and grounded than, say, mathematicians or particle theorists. Abbot thought that had to do with their proximity to living beings, regardless of how minuscule. In one form or another, they handled the mortal coil. It kept them from spinning off into surreality.

Abbot was the chief of the National Academy of Sciences. The riot reflected on him. He had orchestrated for them a quiet taste of the Southwest. Rancho Encantado was a resort north of Santa Fe. The Dalai Lama had stayed there once. There was a picture in the lobby of him with a cowboy hat. For the first two days, the scientists had presented papers, showed pictures, and ridden horses. This morning they had risen early and eaten a pancake-and-eggs breakfast, and boarded the bus. And driven straight into that howling gauntlet awaiting them on Highway 40.

There was no questioning the mob’s hatred for the scientists. The demonstrators had let the eggs rot in the sun for days. You could smell the sulfur dioxide on the riot cops hunkered in the aisles and in the well of the bus door. Their ninja-turtle armor dripped with gouts of neon paint and spoiled food, and the scientists leaned away from them. The paint and rotten food were mischief, thought Abbot. But the blood was pure malice. It was human, donated by the pint from radical anarchists. In these times of AIDS and Hep-C, throwing blood was not a statement, it was an act of terrorism.

The newspapers would treat it as one more demonstration against the G.E.s, or genetic engineers. Token peaceniks would decry the random violence, but denounce the evil scientists. The sheriff would stress his restraint, the governor would extend apologies. It was all theatrics. Abbot knew how these things worked. Someone very high up had authorized putting some fear of God into the distinguished members of Genome XXI, the twenty-first symposium of the Human Genome Project.

Abbot mulled over his enemies. There was a vicious Senate battle in progress over budget cuts. The sciences were being treated like parasites. In the name of his creationist constituents, Senator Jimmy Rollins of Kansas was once again frothing at the mouth, a feeble mind, a cheap plagiarist. It could have been the European Union lobby, of course, still trying to block genetically modified “frankenfoods” from their shores. Or the farm unions, working for leverage.

“Stop fretting,” Abbot’s seatmate said. Her name tag read
Elise Golding/UC.
The “UC” was too humble. In fact the University of California was almost an empire unto itself, including even Los Alamos. Fossilized bubblegum stuck to the wall beside her plaid skirt. She patted his arm. “It’s the times, Paul.”

Her salt-and-pepper hair was bound in a thick ponytail. The low sunlight glinted off the planes of her face. The radiance stripped her face of its crow’s-feet and laugh lines. For a moment she appeared thirty years younger, that same young woman he’d first met, ironically, at a wild stormy protest against the Vietnam War. She had been on the faculty at Cornell, he at MIT. Everyone had been full of daring that day. And night.

“Those weren’t just fundamentalists and anti-abortionists,” he growled. “You saw their signs. All the Luddites were there in force. Greenpeace, Earth First, WAAKE-UP, the animal rights people, the AFLCIO goons. It was a lynch mob.”

“And you provoked it,” she said.

“Good grief, Elise, they just attacked a childrens’ schoolbus.”

“They attacked an idea.”

“Driven by demagogues and talk radio and tabloid nonsense.”

“Admit it, Paul,” she said more quietly. “You’re mad because your plan backfired.”

“What plan,” he said.

“You used us.” Her eyes flashed like grey steel. She had a low tolerance for falseness of any kind. Shenanigans, she called it. It was why he’d placed Miranda under her guidance. Elise was an ethics lesson in motion. “You drew a line in the sand. They crossed it. It’s that simple. Politics. You’re just as guilty as they are. You wanted to make a statement, and it bit you on the ass. It got ugly. Thank goodness no one got hurt. These windows aren’t bulletproof, you know.”

“Now we have to ask the rabble’s permission to do science?” he blustered. “Someone has to take a stand, Elise. It’s not just gen-tech they’re after, you know. All the sciences are under fire. I see it on the editorial pages, in the budget cuts, in the empty classrooms. We’re sliding backwards into the Dark Ages. Next they’ll be burning books. Or us.”

“You want them to love you.”

“Of course not,” he snorted.

She continued. “You do. You want them to feel the spark of discovery and be awed and thank us. And one day, Paul, they will again. Maybe we’ll give them a new energy source. Or a cure for the common cold. Or a vaccine for this Mediterranean thing. These things move in cycles. But you have to accept that for every glorious Apollo moon landing there’s some Galileo upsetting their apple cart. For every Salk or Curie, there’s a Darwin calling them monkeys. For every Carl Sagan or Stephen Hawking trying to illuminate the masses, there’s a Mengele or Teller giving them nightmares. We’re not in the hugging phase right now, that’s all. And hosting a convention of geneticists in their backyard won’t get you there.”

“Backyard? We’re in the middle of nowhere.”

“You know what I mean. You arranged headlines. You gave that
20/20
woman an interview last week. You could have focused her on the search for this Mediterranean virus, you could have made us heroes. Instead you talked about evolution. What was all that about mutation as God’s plan? And why on earth did you pick a ranch in the desert instead of just housing these people at Los Alamos where it’s secure?”

Just yesterday, Abbot had seen classified reports from the National Security Agency and Homeland Security recommending an immediate three-month shutdown of U.S. borders. He was on the inside of that call. It would be a draconian measure—no air, sea or land travel, no shipping, no business trips back and forth to Paris, no spring breaks in Cancun—and it would have to be done by Presidential directive. Politicians and bureaucrats would stonewall it until doomsday. The economy would plunge. The President was wavering. But the foot-and-mouth epidemic and the mad cow scare in Europe a few years back, and more recently America’s brush with anthrax, were turning out to be handy lessons in rapid response. The President was close to signing the directive. For now, however, there no sense panicking the public. It was agreed at the very top levels, business as usual. Even Elise was out of the loop.

“The Med outbreak is a million miles away to most Americans. Besides the Europeans are handling it. That’s not our story here. It’s a free country, Elise. That’s my point. Science is still part of the world.”

“And to make your point, you put us at risk. We were lucky.”

She had him. In a sense, they were his, each of them, from these biologists to the astronomers and robotics wonks and butterfly chasers and all the other scientists he represented. As the so-called Science Czar, he nurtured them with funding which he enchanted from Congress, corporations, and true believers. He sheltered them with his fixers and spinmeisters and his Mosaic influence. He shaped their research with his master plans. He rewarded them for their genius. Even those from other countries moved within his orbit, ambassadors to his empire. And yes, he did feel guilty about the mob. He was their king, and it was his job to safeguard each and every one of them. Elise was right. They were lucky. Those paintballs could have been bullets.

“I love this hour of the morning,” she suddenly announced, and he glanced at her. She was pretending to look out the window glutinous with egg and spittle. The mob had frightened her. Now she simply wished to get on with the day.

Over the years, Abbot had refined his version of why they had not married back in the beginning, and she had, too. They talked about it sometimes. If only you’d said this or done that, they would say. The bottom line was that they had not married. They had drifted on to other lives, found mates, made families, then lost their mates. Death had taken her Victor just six months ago, and tried to take her, too. The surgeons had repaired her broken heart, but she was still frail. Impulsively Abbot wanted to take her hand in his, to hold it without the excuse of fear or consolation, just to remind them both of what might have been. But he did not. If they were younger and it mattered, perhaps. But neither of them would marry again. That’s how it was.

The bus wound toward the mesa top. They passed through Los Alamos, and its plain buildings and green park could have been anywhere in 1970s Middle America. It was a company town. Their business was simple: Big Science.

The bus stopped at a bridge above a sheer canyon. Traffic normally flowed into the research complex beyond. But this morning, following the demonstration outside Rancho Encantado, heavily armed Pro Force soldiers were ready and waiting. An officer with a clipboard mounted the bus and walked down the aisle to where Abbot and Golding sat. Golding knew right where to sign the paperwork. He said, “Thank you, ma’am,” and started handing out security badges and dosimeters. Soldiers waved the bus through a makeshift barricade. As they crossed the bridge, the air of tension relaxed. The sight of machine guns on hummers was a novelty to many of the scientists. They treated the security badges and radiation tags like tickets to a James Bond theme park.

Occupying some twenty square miles, the laboratory grounds were hived off into technical areas containing research facilities and office buildings. Back in the early ’50s, when Godzilla and the Blob were leaving wakes of fear, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission had been tasked to study mutations caused by ionizing radiation. If they were going to start dropping H-bombs or building nuclear reactors, the government wanted to know the consequences. With time, the Mesa had gotten a makeover of sorts. The Atomic Energy Commission had become the Department of Energy. Los Alamos had come under the administration of the University of California. Genetic research morphed into the Human Genome Project. And now two former peaceniks, Elise Golding and Paul Abbot, were largely in control of the birthplace of the Bomb.

They reached an empty parking lot in front of a newly built structure. A
LPHA
L
ABORATORY
, read a sign. The bus stopped. A solitary, twisted figure awaited them in a wheelchair. He looked like a broken fighter pilot, his wheelchair a veritable cockpit bristling with gadgets, joysticks, and a built-in computer terminal.

“Cavendish,” one of the passengers hissed.

Someone said, “The dark prince.”

He looked much the way Abbot remembered him at the commission hearings in Washington two and three years ago. No buttons: a turtleneck. Penny loafers. The small chin shaved clean.

The occassion of the first Congressional hearing had been Cavendish’s infamous “meat tree.” Funded by Burger King, working in a private lab in Nebraska, Cavendish had conjured up a herd of headless cows. As a matter of fact, Cavendish’s cows did have heads, but genetically stripped to the basics, a tiny bone casing with a hole for breathing and one for tube feeding. He’d deleted eyes, ears, jaws, and horns, anything superfluous to rudimentary existence. Technically each animal had a brain. The nubbin of a brain stem ensured that the lungs respirated and the food digested.

Until then, no one had ever heard of Edward Cavendish. That changed. Skirting the academic publishing process, he’d released the story directly to the public. His photos had shocked the world. Meat trees, he’d dubbed his creations. He offered a variety of uses and excuses for them. The animals would provide a cheap protein source for the Third World. Housed in factories, they would save the rainforest and return America’s grazing lands to the buffalo. And since his mutant cattle were born into a state of coma, he pointed out, they felt no pain at “harvest.” They had no consciousness, no “animal soul,” meaning even vegans could eat them without qualm.

The pundits quickly jumped on the real underlying issue. If one could create headless cows for harvest, why not headless humans for organ transplants? For a few horrified weeks, Cavendish had dominated international attention, even edging out the latest supertyphoons in Bangladesh and car bombings in Quebec. The supermarket tabloids whipped public hysteria into a froth. Everyone had an opinion, from cowboys predicting the end of family farms to bishops and philosophers damning his twist on nature. All in all, the incident had been a bold, clumsy coming-out party for himself, a one-man show. Congress quickly passed a law against meat trees. But that wasn’t the end of Cavendish.