Year Zero (15 page)

They had no idea what they were looking for. No one knew what Corfu looked like. Its proteins remained a mystery. Blood drawn from modern victims had still not yielded any strange microorganisms. Corfu acted like an endogenous virus, a type of retrovirus that could lie dormant through extremes of heat or cold, and over great spans of time…then suddenly switch itself on. But it could just as well have been a prion, which was an even less lifelike mechanism.

Some people, credible scientists, thought Corfu might have evolved from the same pestilence that Moses had supposedly called down upon the Egyptians. Given the mutation rate, its symptoms might have changed from the boils described in the Bible. Other scientists scrutinized the terrible plague which felled Athens in the fourth century
B
.
C
.
E
. In his
History of the Jews,
Josephus alluded to, but had not detailed, a plague in the century before Augustus Caesar came to rule. Or maybe one of Alexander the Great’s soldiers had brought it home. One way or another, the contagion must have traveled along some land or sea route during some empire.

The bottom line was that the Year Zero bones from Jerusalem had remained mute. They had yielded not one clue. But now Miranda had an idea.

“The call is out for Year Zero material that might be lying around in private collections or museums,” Miranda explained to Golding. “But chances are we’re not going to get anything more to work with. So I thought, why not make the bones work for us?”

“Go on,” said Golding.

“Clone them.”

Golding was quiet a minute. “You mean to bring the bones back to life?”

“I know it sounds crazy.”

“Crazy is not the word, Miranda.” Cloning was precisely what Golding had made this trip to stop. Before she could say more, Miranda shot ahead with her notion.

“I’ve found a way to ramp up the DNA,” she said. “It’s there. It’s in the bones. The genetic signature of probably four hundred different men right here on these tables and shelves and in these drawers. If we restored them to life, we might find some evidence of the virus in its original state.”

“It would never work,” Golding retorted. She needed to demolish this fancy, first. Then she would drop the bigger bomb. A moratorium on all human cloning research. People needed to be focused on the basics, not fiddling around on the far edges. “Even if you could clone them, the virus wouldn’t be resurrected inside them.”

“Not the virus,” said Miranda. “Its genetic shadow. The genetic scars of the disease.”

“The antibody?”

“Or the shadow of an antibody. It might lie in the memory T-cells. If any of these men were a survivor of the disease, his cells would hold a permanent memory of the virus structure. It would become part of the code, to defend against future attacks. Or it could be hidden in the junk DNA somewhere, zipped inside reverse transcriptease with other inert viral genomes.”

“Shadows,” murmured Golding. She was not pleased. She had flown all this way to lecture Miranda, to grind into her that Thou shalt not do evil in order to do good. But what if she was wrong? “I don’t know about this,” she said. “It sounds so desperate. Like an excuse. A fishing expedition in the dirt.”

“I was thinking more along the lines of a manned probe into the Year Zero,” said Miranda. “But you’re right, it is desperate. We have to try everything, don’t we?”

“Everything?” said Golding. “What does that mean?”

“Elise, you’re so pale. Come over here. Sit down.”

Golding let herself be guided. She sat. Miranda brought her a paper cup of water. “Your heart?” she asked.

Golding patted Miranda’s hand. “I’m just tired.” But it seemed the world kept on dropping out from under her feet.

W
INTER

N
orth from Kathmandu the highway lay silenced. Truck and bus drivers had walked away from their stalled vehicles. Roadside vendors had packed up their sweets and cigarettes and Tiger Balm. Now their little shanties stood empty. Nathan Lee was the sole traffic. Going up, he pushed the ponderous, overloaded mountain bike. Descending, he smelled rubber and wished for extra brake pads.

It was not that there were no people. Villagers and animals meandered antlike on the terraced hillsides. Their sounds carried through the valley air, the blacksmith’s hammer, cows lowing, the temple bell, children’s laughter. They made him ache for a place and people of his own. Nights he lay on the dirt by his bike and watched the distant lights of candles and fires wink out. One afternoon, he looked down from a bend and spied boys playing soccer on a flat section of the road. But they were long gone by his arrival.

In his role as cannibal and leper, Nathan Lee had come to take loathing for granted. This was different. These people didn’t know him except as an outsider in the far distance. It wasn’t his reputation that frightened them, but the mere approach of a stranger. He had never known Nepalis to act that way.

He held on to his theory that the new king had made up the plague to scare his people out of democracy and back into the fourteenth century. It wouldn’t be the first time. Pol Pot had done it in Cambodia, Hoxha in Soviet Albania, bin Laden with Islam. The fact was he had no proof either way. Mile after mile, he saw no sign of medical clinics or health workers. He saw no sick people. No stacks of dead. It was so much less complicated to believe the plague was imaginary.

Nearing the border, Nathan Lee kept anticipating soldiers. If Nepal had locked itself in feudal antiquity, then someone had to be keeping the outside world at bay. While he pedaled, he worked up an elaborate story to bluff his way through. But when he got to the crossing, there was not a sentry in sight, even on the Chinese side. He simply pedaled across the bright yellow stripe in the middle of the Friendship Bridge and exchanged one country for the next. First an imaginary plague, now an imaginary border.

The river thundered below, fed by Himalayan snow. Langur monkeys barked and sprang through green rhododendron forests glued to the gorge walls. A large red flag of the People’s Republic hung in limp tatters. Nathan Lee didn’t like the looks of that. It was one thing for a tiny kingdom to fall into neglect. But a whole empire? Maybe, he considered, the Bamboo Curtain had fallen. Maybe China was fracturing into independent states. Maybe they’d given Tibet back to the Dalai Lama for his dream of an Asian Switzerland. The French woman’s word came back to him. Shambala.

A mile further up the steep road, the town of Tingri perched upon a mountainside. As he pushed his bicycle along the single, winding street, there was not a movement or sound. It was not like in Nepal where windows and doors were tightly shut while entire villages waited for him to pass on. There you could smell the life. Here the doors and shutters flapped open. Tingri didn’t smell like a town. It smelled like a cold rock. Not a soul stirred. Oddly, that gave him hope. In the plague chronicles he’d read, from Thucydides to Camus, there was always some stubborn old woman or a simpleton or blind man who remained behind. With his mother in Africa, he’d passed through ghost towns ravaged by AIDS, and there was always someone left.

The door to the customs post yawned wide. Inside the floor was littered with application forms that had blown from the counter. The bureaucrats had been in such a rush they’d even left their rubber stamps. On a whim, Nathan Lee took out his book of fairytales and stamped a Chinese visa on a blank page. Grace would like that.

He looted a bit and found a pair of quilted pants to go with the Jagged Edge parka he’d stolen from a trek shop in Kathmandu. Then he continued upward and north. The air poured cold through the shadows of the gorge. On his first day in Tibet he more than doubled his altitude.

Long ago, when he was seventeen years old, Nathan Lee had taken this very road on his way to Everest with his father. Just as he remembered, the dirt road was carved from cliffsides and skirted waterfalls. But rockslides had not been cleared away in months. Ominously, certain sections looked dynamited, as if the Chinese were trying to close the door behind them. There could be only one reason they would do such a thing. His high hopes faded. Maybe the plague was real.

His progress up the canyon became a crawl. The larger rockslides forced multiple trips back and forth to transfer his food, gear, and bike. The rubble shifted, threatening to spill him hundreds of feet to the river. Every slide cost him hours. One day he covered less than a mile. At that rate, with a mere 12,000 miles to go, he might as well have stayed in jail. “God damn it,” he shouted at the empty sky. His words rounded back on him in echoes.

Every day was a fight to keep his spirits up. He reminded himself that the slow pace was allowing his body to acclimate to the thin air and dropping temperatures. His aching muscles were proof of his convalescence. Legs, lungs, and calluses: he was regaining his body.

A
T LAST
, after a fortnight in the bleak gorge, Nathan Lee reached the high side of the Himalayan barrier. He came to the Chinese highway at 12,000 feet above sea level. It was a glorified dirt road running from west to east, built to supply soldiers on the far borders and transport ore to the interior. Tibetan pilgrims used it on their overland treks to the holy mountain Kailas. Tourists rode it to Lhasa. This morning, as far as the eye could see, the highway was empty in both directions. The Tibetan Plateau lay polished bare. The absence of people was beginning to rattle him. They had been swept away, it seemed, even the animals. Even the birds. What did the solitude mean? How far did it stretch?

Nathan Lee headed due east, which put the wind, in general, at his back. During the first few days, he felt welcomed into this land of wind and light. The sun warmed him. For hours at a time, the wind would blow so smoothly from behind that he didn’t need to pedal. With his back and shoulders as a mast, it felt as if he might sail the whole way home. For the time being there was no need for a map. Instead of a magnetic north, he had the southern horizon studded with giant white mountains. He had memories.

His father’s idea of a present had always been some invitation into his own world. For his tenth birthday, Nathan Lee got a pair of crampons. While other kids his age were plowing into
Silver Surfer
or
Conan
or
Playboy,
Nathan Lee was stuck with books by Hermann Hesse, Rene Daumal, Han Shan, and other mountain mystics. Like many American climbers of his era, his father treated the mountains as a blue collar shaolin temple filled with special wisdom and muscular, brooding fraternity. Poverty, risk, even death: they were all part of the vertical Way.
We’re made in the image of the mountains, Nate,
his father would spontaneously declare.
There’s no hiding who we are. Our souls stand out against the sky.
Embarked on her own magical mystery tour, his mother went along with these noble chestnuts, helplessly in love with the man.

Cho Oyu appeared, then Everest, thirty miles off, the summit plume smoking like a volcano. Nathan Lee’s memories of the expedition with his father were clean and simple. He’d been a happy-go-lucky kid back then, a favorite with everyone, helpful on the trail, guileless, strong as a yak. Stronger, it turned out, than his own father. They were both surprised by that. Neither was quite ready for it. One stormy afternoon near the end of the expedition, he and his father had climbed to the North Col to strike the last tent. It wasn’t high, but the saddle dropped off on either side and made for good theater. “Here,” his father said, and gave Nathan Lee his ice axe. That was a big moment. Then they went down.

He moved deeper into Tibet. The sky was so blue it verged on black. Night was worst. It was so cold. He had stolen a tent in Kathmandu, then discarded it. Now he suffered in the open. Mostly he curled in shallow pits along the road or huddled behind rocks. The wind stalked him. The stars strafed him.

He came upon an old
dzong
or fortress and sheltered in its roofless ruins. One night he found a meditation chamber cut into the earth. Monk after monk had taken turns here, spending months, even years, walled inside the hole, praying and fasting. It was scarcely bigger than a coffin, and he had nightmares of jail. Another time he crawled into a cave and slept atop a pile of hundreds of crumbling clay plaques imprinted with Buddhas.

One afternoon he stopped by a road sign with faded Chinese characters that meant nothing to him. Tibetan pilgrims had tied one end of their long streamers of prayer flags to the metal post. Most of the prayer flags were stamped with a cartoon horse. Among the monsters and gods of Tibet, the
lung ta
—or wind horse—was an important creature. Animated by the wind, the little horse flew to the heavens with prayers on its back. Nathan Lee cut down a flag. It weighed as much as a feather. You could see right through the fabric, except for the ink of the horse. He laid it betwen the pages for Grace.

The helpful wind turned mean and fitful. Gusts slapped him from the sides. Weaving like a drunk, he would make a few hard miles. Day after day he fought the wind. It bruised his face. Dust caked his mouth and fouled his sinuses. Bit by bit, the green paint on his bike was sand-blasted to bare metal.

By mid-December he still hadn’t reached Lhasa. In the lee of a shattered monastery, he spread out his Bartholomew’s map of Asia and pinned the edges with rocks. He’d traced three major alternatives, one along the Yangtze River to the South China Sea, and one boldly to Beijing, where he fantasized the American Embassy might take pity on him. His final option, the most lonely, was to stick to the wastelands. By threading the Gobi Desert north through Mongolia, he could strike out across Siberia and try to reach the Bering Sea.

Looking at the map debilitated him more than the wind or cold. It showed him reality. Even once he reached Lhasa, he would barely have gone an inch. Getting home was going to take him many months, maybe even years. After so much patience learned in jail, Nathan Lee hated the idea of being patient longer.

Then one day the dirt road became asphalt. It transformed slowly. Heaps of brown dirt had drifted across the highway, and the asphalt surfaced like an old memory. Gradually the puddles of blacktop spanned open. Nathan Lee lay down his bike. He lifted his eyes and the paved road stretched off into the distance and went around a hill. He pried away his dark glasses and stamped his good foot, relishing the fossil hardness.

His wilderness was over! He knew that wasn’t so. Still, America suddenly seemed close enough to touch. He got the bike upright again, all eighty pounds of it, and straddled the seat, and gave a stroke to the pedals. The asphalt felt like a river slinging him on. The knobby tire treads thrummed pleasantly.

There would be a town ahead, if not around this bend, then the next. If there were people, he would beg. If not, he would steal. He would replenish his food, sleep in a bed, find wood, start a fire. He remembered it was almost Christmas.

The highway dipped. He picked up speed. His luck had changed. Even the wind had quit. The last thing he expected were the corpses.

Before he could safely stop, he was deep among them. Big trucks had careened right and left from the highway and tipped or else trundled to lazy halts. Some had nosedived into a ravine, others had coasted far out upon the plateau and looked like tiny islands. For the first time since the French couple spoke about an apocalypse, Nathan Lee saw a human body. Not one, but many. Many hundreds. Thousands.

It was like being dropped into the middle of a battlefield. What had happened here? The road was littered for miles. Everywhere, everyone, dead. He emptied the slight, leather odor of them from his lungs and approached a nearby truck.

The driver lay propped against the window as if taking a nap. His hair was straight and black. One hand still rested on the steering wheel. It was covered with a white cotton glove, an odd, delicate affectation even the roughest truckers shared. His head was turned away, and Nathan Lee couldn’t see the face. Had the skin turned transparent? Was he an invisible man?

He selected a second corpse, one that was in the open, away from the tangled heaps. It was a young woman lying face down. Her hands were exposed, and her skin was not transparent, but black, baked by the sun, preserved and polished by the cold and wind. She had bound her black braids with strands of turquoise strung on white yak hair.

Nathan Lee remembered being awestruck at the sight of Tibetan girls like her. She would have had powerful high cheekbones and almond eyes and very white teeth. They could be awesome beauties, and awesome flirts. He remembered some of the archaeologists at Everest razzing him.
Have one,
Professor Ochs had urged him. That came back to him, Ochs prodding him, even in the beginning, to do what he should not do.

His first assumption was that they were plague victims. The French couple had been right, but wrong. Nothing about these cascades of bodies falling from the truck beds suggested forgetfulness. Certainly there were no invisible men or women. Whatever it was, the disease was not supernatural. It was infectious. It killed quickly. Almost instantaneously.

And yet something didn’t seem right. Why had so many people died in one place at one time? What were they doing out here? Where were they running to? What were they running from? Only then did Nathan Lee notice that the entire convoy had been heading west…away from China and into the barrens.