Prime (2 page)

Al-Tusi laid a hand on the wooden body
of the instrument. He saw that several bowls also occupied the tabletop, each
of them containing lumps of powder—ash, sulfur, salt and other substances that
he did not immediately recognize. All of them were arranged in a circle around
the
urghan
, just as he and his fellow
scientists had done years before, along with leaves of vellum and paper, the
latter inscribed with diagrams and notations in Arabic. Then he saw something
else on the table. It was the parchment he himself had written, which explained,
among other things, how to construct and use the machine. It lay unrolled and
open for all to see.

But
where is the Book? Surely they would be together.

Through a supreme effort of will, he
maintained his neutral demeanor. “There is a bladder of air inside. It is
filled with a bellows.” He indicated another lever, which he began pumping with
the heel of his hand. “There is a
ney
inside
—
a
hollow reed with many different holes—and when you press one of these levers,
it releases the air and covers one of the holes.”

He demonstrated its operation with a few
random notes, finishing with a discordant combination that, he noted with some
satisfaction, caused the general to wince. “Not very useful as a weapon,”
al-Tusi continued. “I suppose with several of these you could make the enemy
drop their swords and cover their ears.”

“A musical
instrument?
It is nothing more than that?” Guo continued to watch him, as if he could read
in al-Tusi’s eyes the truth about the device. “I shall take it with me then.
Perhaps I will learn its mysteries.”

Al-Tusi shrugged, but this time he
wasn’t trying to hide anxiety. Guo had overestimated the
urghan’s
importance.

Now
if he will just get out of the way, I can find the real prize
.

“Yes,” the general went on. “Perhaps you
will teach me how to play it.”

“I am no musician,” al-Tusi replied,
staring at the
urghan
,
surreptitiously searching the surrounding tabletop for the Book. “And I have
the Khan’s business to attend to here. I must try to preserve what little of
the library you have not already destroyed.”

With what he hoped was an air of casual
disdain, al-Tusi turned away and started gathering scrolls and codices from the
tables. He purposely ignored the parchment on the table with the
urghan
, hoping that Guo would lose
interest, or more accurately, that he would be deceived by al-Tusi’s apparent
disinterest.

“I leave you to your task,” Guo said,
after a long silence. He strode toward the exit, pausing at the threshold. “I
think I would like that instrument, though. I’ll send some men to collect it.
Please make sure nothing…untoward…happens to it.”

As soon as the general was gone, al-Tusi
let out the breath he had been holding, and he hastened back to the table. With
barely restrained urgency, he began sorting through the papers arranged around
the
urghan
.

Where
is it? It has to be here
.

His fingers lit upon the parchment. He
was surprised at the memories a simple touch evoked, but he tucked the
nostalgia away, along with the roll, which disappeared into the folds of his
robes.

Let
Guo have the
urghan
; without this, he will never begin to grasp
its true importance.

But securing the parchment brought him
scant comfort. The Book was nowhere to be found.

He searched
every
document in the room, and when he was done, he searched the other observatories
and reading rooms. Over the days that followed, he would inspect every scrap of
paper or parchment that Guo’s soldiers had not destroyed—setting aside more
than four hundred thousand unique documents—but the one book he sought most continued
to elude to him.

There was a simple explanation, of
course. The Book, that singular, irreplaceable chronicle of the experiments
conducted at the Prime…the tome that, quite literally, contained within its
pages, the secrets of life itself…was gone.

Destroyed.

Pitched into the
Tigris like so much waste.

At first, al-Tusi was inconsolable, but
as the days and weeks passed, he realized that perhaps his father had been
right about such things. Allah had seen fit to remove the knowledge from the
world.

The Caliph had tried to use the
discovery as a weapon of war. No doubt, men like Hulagu and Guo would have
attempted to do the same, and if they had somehow succeeded…

Al-Tusi didn’t want to contemplate what
that might mean.

Perhaps it was best that the Book was
gone.

Inshallah

Yunnan Province, China, 2005

Katherine Geller stared at the endless emerald-green tea plants
covering the distant hills, with a mixture of nostalgia and contempt. She was a
coffee drinker and had been since her late teens, imbibing mug after mug of the
beverage, sweet but without milk, as she studied and crammed to get through her
university courses, and subsequently her PhD in Biology, along with Masters
degrees in molecular biology, organic chemistry and epidemiology, respectively.
Coffee was a drink she associated with ambition and the drive to succeed; tea
just made her think of Richard.

They’d been good for each other, even if they
hadn’t been terribly successful as a couple. Richard had also been driven to
succeed, and with the nearly limitless resources of his inheritance, his only
limiting factor was the scope of his vision. She had helped him articulate his
grandiose schemes, and he in turn had opened doors for her that she hadn’t even
known existed. They had pushed each other to new heights, competed with and
dared each other, and in the end, extended their reach well beyond what either
of them had thought possible to grasp. Perhaps because their personalities were
so much alike, the intimate relationship that had started it all—which they
both recognized from the outset as nothing more than a diversion—had withered
on the vine. Not surprisingly, they were both better for it. He had gone on to
pursue his ambitions, and she had returned to her true passion: research.

They were still close. His company was
discreetly funding her current endeavor. She called every day on the Qualcomm
satellite phone he had insisted she take along, but their conversations rarely
evoked any kind of emotional response. The sight of the hills covered in tea
however, reminded her of the god-awful fresh-cut peppermint tea that he was
always trying to get her to drink, and that took her to more intimate places in
her mind.

“Dr. Geller!”

Katherine shook her head to clear away the memories
of her former lover. She turned toward the person shouting her name. Bradley
Stafford, one of her graduate students and her chief research assistant, was
hastening in her direction, waving a sheet of paper she knew would contain the
raw data from the latest batch of samples. If Stafford’s enthusiasm was any
indication, the news was good. She took the report with a patient smile, and
gave it a cursory once-over.

Good news indeed—excellent in fact.

“We found him, didn’t we?” asked Stafford.
“Patient Zero.”

Katherine cast him a reproving glance. “We’re
just collecting samples, Brad. We’ve got half a dozen more sites to visit
before we can even begin parsing the data.”

Although her statement was accurate, she had
a more compelling reason to be hesitant about declaring victory. In a lower
voice, she added: “The last thing we need right now is for Han to get all
excited and shut us down.”

Dr. Han Li was their official liaison with
the Chinese Ministry of Health, or to be more precise, their government-appointed
babysitter. Although Katherine’s team nominally had the full support and
cooperation of the Ministry, implicit in that agreement was the expectation
that they would find nothing to upset the status
quo,
and certainly nothing that might reinforce the idea that the People’s Republic
of China was the birthplace of catastrophic infectious diseases. The Ministry
had granted them access to archaeological sites in Yunnan Province only in
hopes they might find clues that would lead them elsewhere, perhaps to India or
one of the other hypothesized origination sites for the pandemic.

Katherine didn’t want Han to know all the
evidence pointed to the unarguable conclusion that the most devastating
outbreak in the history of the world had begun right here in Western China.

Bradley wasn’t wrong; they were closing in on
Patient Zero—the source of the Black Death.

The Black Death
.

The name wasn’t just dramatic hyperbole. The
outward symptoms of the plague that had swept across the known world during the
fourteenth century were black pustules on the skin and a darkening of the
fingernails as the tissue underneath began to necrotize. There was debate about
how many had died from the plague, which reached its peak between 1348 and
1350, but it was generally believed that the pandemic had killed half the
world’s population. Estimates of the death toll ranged from 75 million to 200
million, making it even deadlier than the Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918.
Katherine imagined that the survivors must have felt like they were living
through the tribulation prophesied in the Bible: “Then two shall be in the
field; the one shall be taken, and the other left.”

In the big picture of infectious disease, the
Black Death was a statistical anomaly—a flash fire that had done a lot of
damage in the short
term,
and then more or less burned
itself out.

The strangest thing about the Black Death was
that no one was really sure what it was. Common wisdom held that the plague
organism was
Yersinia pestis
—the
bacteria responsible for bubonic and pneumonic plague—which had jumped from
rodent populations to humans through flea bites. Forensic evidence tied the
bacterium to the Black Death, but some historians believed the evidence had
been misread. Many of those who contracted the plague lived in climates where
transmission by flea bites would have been extremely unlikely. Some
scientists—and Katherine was among their number—believed that bubonic plague
was coincidental with the actual cause of death, or that the agent responsible
was either a unique strain of
Yersinia
or something that worked in tandem with the plague bacterium to enhance its
lethality.

Katherine’s team was trying to identify the
original source of the pandemic, to find its earliest victims and hopefully to gather
samples of DNA from the plague organism that would provide a definitive answer.
But unlike viruses, which were really nothing more than chains of protein that
could remain dormant for years or even centuries, bacteria were living cells
that needed sustenance. When an infected person died, the bacteria in their
body died soon after and began to degrade. Sometimes though, traces of
bacterial DNA remained in the bones and teeth of
victims
long dead—traces that could be extracted in the mobile laboratory and sent off
for analysis using a satellite Internet connection.

Archaeologists had identified several sites
in Asia where the plague had ravaged the population. Entire villages had died and
been reclaimed by the earth. It was in these places that Katherine hoped to
find Patient Zero—figuratively at least—and to answer two questions: what
really was the cause of the Black Death, and why had it appeared, seemingly
from nowhere, to nearly wipe out humanity?

She tucked the report under her arm, and with
Stafford in tow, she headed for the dig. This particular site, a village that
had completely vanished from history during the early fourteenth century, had
been a godsend. They had found dozens of remains in small clusters, families
that had died in their homes with no one left to bury them. Over the years that
followed, seasonal rains had caused the earth to swallow them up where they
lay.

Satellite imagery and ground-penetrating
radar had given them a rough map of the village, and now strips of engineer’s
tape showed where houses had once stood. Several of these had already been
excavated, the remains catalogued and removed, but there were a few more at the
north end of the village that were still being probed. Katherine walked between
these, monitoring the progress of her graduate students and the archaeologists
that were working with them, curious to see what new discoveries would be made,
but any excitement she might have felt was tempered by the fact that Han Li was
hovering nearby.

The Chinese doctor glanced up as she approached.
“Dr. Geller, good morning.”

His English was perfect, his manner as quiet
and dutiful as always, but Katherine thought she detected a hint of agitation.
She wondered if the data in the report had already reached him, but a moment
later she realized that his anxiety arose from another source. Several of the
team members were working in a new area, outside the map of the village. A new
grid of tape was being laid out just beyond the eastern perimeter, and several
of the team members were eagerly watching the proceedings.

“What’s going on over there?”

“A discovery has been made,” Han explained.

Katherine pushed past him and approached Bill
Smythe, the ground-radar technician who was overseeing the new operation.
“Bill, why are you setting up here?”

Smythe made no effort to hide his excitement.
“We found something. There’s a large void here, less than two meters down.”

It took a moment for her to process. The void
could be a root cellar, not the likeliest of places to find the bodies of
plague victims, but if there were remains inside, they would have been shielded
from the elements—possibly even mummified. Katherine made an effort to quell
her rising enthusiasm. It was better to be surprised with success than with
disappointment. “Find a way in. The rest of you have
work
to do.”

Fifteen minutes later, Smythe reported back
that he had found what appeared to be the original entrance to the cellar, a
staircase that descended into the void. Laborers used picks and shovels to
loosen the earth, and in short order, they created a hole large enough to
accommodate a person.

Before descending into the dark space,
Katherine donned a HEPA respirator mask and latex gloves—the same bio-safety
level-two equipment worn by the team as they dug up the village. It was a
precautionary measure, and not just because of the very remote chance of
exposure to
Yersinia;
there were
other pathogens—bacteria, viruses, fungal spores—that might be lurking in the
sealed environs of the cellar. Thus equipped, she lowered herself into the
opening, with Han and Stafford right behind her, the latter recording
everything with a handheld video camera equipped with a brilliant LED
spotlight.

The descending staircase was uneven, littered
with fallen dirt and rock from the excavation, but the space beyond was
untouched by time. Katherine directed the beam of her flashlight into the dark
depths of the enclosure, and realized immediately that this was no root cellar.

It was a tomb.

The chamber was filled with statuary—dogs,
dragons, traditional representations of the Buddha—but there were also elements
that, to Katherine’s uneducated eye at least, did not appear to be Chinese in
origin. Weapons of war—swords, lances, bows and quivers full of arrows—were
prominently displayed, along with life-sized ponies, saddled but riderless. The
pieces appeared to have been arranged with
feng
shui
—Chinese geomancy—in mind; the statues formed a maze designed to
confound evil spirits who preferred to travel in straight lines.

Han placed a restraining hand on Katherine’s
shoulder. “Dr. Geller, I must insist that we withdraw until I can advise the
Ministry. This is a significant archaeological find, and has nothing to with
your research.”

Katherine gazed back at him. He was right;
this tomb had probably been laid long before the outbreak of the plague, and it
was unlikely that it would yield any clues relating to their search.

Nevertheless, her curiosity was burning. This
was a once in a lifetime opportunity. “We should collect environmental samples
as a baseline. And while we’re at it, we can make sure it’s safe for the
archaeological team.” She patted his arm in what she hoped was a comforting
gesture. “Don’t worry; I won’t touch anything.”

Katherine felt his hand slip away, and
realized that he was as eager to plumb the tomb’s depths as she.

They moved through the maze, leaving a trail
of footprints in the layer of dust on the earthen floor but otherwise
disturbing nothing. The path wound around the outer edge of the enclosure, then
spiraled in toward the center where they found a bier, upon which lay an ornate
sarcophagus with a terra cotta effigy, presumably the occupant of the funerary
container. Han played his light across the familiar looking ideograms inscribed
on the sarcophagus, but shook his head signaling incomprehension. Then he
turned his beam to an object that had been conspicuously placed alongside the
bier.

“This doesn’t belong here.” He reached out
and placed a gloved hand on it, as if to confirm its solidity.

Katherine directed her light onto it as well.
It didn’t look like a Chinese artifact; the symbols on its exterior were
vaguely familiar, but definitely not in the style of the ideograms on the
sarcophagus. It showed considerable decay and looked like it might have been
damaged prior to its placement, so a positive determination of its purpose was
impossible. Like the identity of the tomb’s occupant, the object would be
something for the experts to figure out, but it was a mystery that had no
bearing on her own research.

She was about to turn away when her light
fell on Han’s fingers. She gasped behind her mask.

A black film clung to the latex membrane of
his glove. He saw it as well, and his face twisted into a perturbed frown.