"No, I don't expect to change the world. I'm just a clueless only child who deals with other people's kids. I just want the Faithful in
my
village to stop using the Plague to boss the rest of us around. Is that wrong of me? Am I mistreating them by asking them to let us get on with our lives without the threat of their God demanding our obedience to rules that they make up as they go along? Whatever happens after I share the news, I will deal with as it comes."
Gentiola leveled an impenetrable glare at him over the rim of her teacup. He couldn't tell whether he had provoked her wrath or made her think. "I'd be deluded if I said a little knowledge never hurt anyone, but it is certainly preferable to ignorance. What was it about the Plague that the Faithful thought needed to be explained better?" she asked.
"Oh," Charlinder breathed, "where do I begin? Where it came from, for one. How did it kill so many people in so little time? I could go on, if you give me a moment."
"Yes, that much I can explain for you. Microbes evolve into new species all the time, and when a new one is introduced to a metazoan population, it strikes especially hard because the victims haven't yet developed an immunity. The indigenous peoples of the Americas and Pacific islands, for example, suffered immense casualties to things like measles, which the Europeans had suffered without catastrophe for centuries. When the Plague virus appeared, no one had ever seen it before, and so no one had any immunity. Since it appeared in a time of high mobility and an area popular for tourists, it reached a lot of people and quickly spread over an unprecedented area before anyone knew what was going on. It worked by attacking the vital organs, starting with the intestines. The first symptom was an episode of bloody diarrhea, which left the immune system further compromised. From there it worked its way through the liver, kidneys, and if the patient didn't die first, it ended by perforating the heart. The only organs not affected were the lungs."
None of that was anything Charlinder didn't already know from Eileen’s journals. He waited, as he was sure she had more yet to say.
"The virus
was
tremendously contagious as such organisms go, and was uniquely efficient at killing its victims, but the real secret to the disease was the long incubation period. Ninety days, minimum."
"Sorry; the long what?" he asked. Perhaps because Eileen's main strengths were not in the natural sciences, it was a term he hadn't previously come across.
"The incubation period is the span of time in which a virus or other pathogen lives in its host before symptoms manifest. That means, for the Plague, that a person could contract the virus and have three months to carry it around, and spread it to others, before they felt sick. Do you see the problem?" she prompted.
"Yeah, that makes sense," said Charlinder. "Then, when the first person to catch the virus started showing symptoms, it would have already spread to a lot of other people."
"Who were already unknowingly passing it on to still others, so by then the authorities would have no way of knowing who needed to be quarantined. It was just the right combination of factors to wipe out massive populations, even the ones with the best medical care available. In fact, in some ways the wealthiest and most connected people in the world were the least likely to avoid the disease, though of course poverty was anything but a preventive factor. Based on what you observed in your traveling, do you think all parts of the world had equal survival rates?"
"No," he responded, "no, most of the cities were empty."
"Of course. There's been some migration of the surviving people since then towards the more fertile and temperate lands, but I can tell you what the map looked like at the end of the pandemic."
"Really?"
"Make sure I show you my globe while you're here. I can tell you which parts of your country fared better than others, but overall Canada suffered less damage, while Mexico fared considerably worse. Very few major cities, anywhere, had any survivors at all. The areas with the highest survival rates were Greenland, Siberia, Australia, and most of Saharan Africa. Can you say how that happened?"
"Low population density," he said, equally without thought.
"That's right. Which means the pandemic practically turned the population map into a negative of its old self. The areas with the fewest people before the pandemic had the most survivors after."
"This is the kind of thing I wanted to know!" said Charlinder. "This is just the information I needed. You've made my whole trip worthwhile. Only, how do you know all this, about the way the virus worked? Were you assigned to research the disease, and somehow avoided getting sick? Was all this gathered from your biology work?"
"It's funny you should ask that," she said, and now her eyes glowed with the most eerily powerful light he had seen since he'd met her. "My work as a scientist is the reason I know all this, but I was never a researcher for this disease. All the research I had to do on the virus, I did before I created it."
Charlinder suddenly felt like a clockwork into which someone had just thrown a bunch of rocks, so that the gears halted and creaked uselessly while struggling with the alien stones. "Wait. Sorry; I thought I just heard you say you created the Plague virus. That can't be what you just said, can it?"
"No, you heard right. I developed the pathogen in a laboratory upstairs."
The gears cracked through the initial rocks and continued grinding along in their old direction, now bumping and creaking precariously. "So, you must have been in a team of scientists working on some project, and you were only following orders to create the virus, and then it got out to the population somehow. That's what happened, right?"
"No, I acted alone," she answered. The light in her eyes flared. "I chose traits from several preexisting viruses, and I made them work together. I engineered its genome so it wouldn't strike any organisms except human beings. Then I released it in the center of Milano. The first victims soon spread the virus to the rest of the country. That was before that year's tourism season."
"Did you use magic to do this?"
"Yes, I did use my powers to make up for my deficiencies in equipment." She cocked her head at a curious angle and went on, "Does that make it worse, somehow? Are you going to be even more horrified at me because I used spell-work instead of a DNA sequencer?"
"What in the hell’s a DNA sequencer?!"
"It doesn’t matter now. We don’t use them anymore; they’re impossible to build."
"So you used your magic to create a disease that destroyed the world?"
"No, you’ve got it backwards. Magic doesn’t belong to me or any other witch; it belongs to the Earth, and we only use it. I only used it to do what my goddess asked of me. And I didn’t destroy the world, it was destroying itself."
The gears now spun freely off their shafts, no longer caring what was left to do their job. He experienced a brief vision of Miriam drowning small children in the Paleola River, with the sensation that it would be a less shocking event than what he was presently hearing from Gentiola.
"Were you having some kind of psychotic episode at the time?" he tried. Surely there had to be a way out of the horror she was sharing with him.
"There was no episode," she answered. "I was just as sane then as I am now."
"
Why?!
" was all Charlinder could get out of his mouth.
"The Earth was suffering. I'm sure you can't imagine how bad it could be, as you've only ever seen Her healthy, but She was in a terrible state back then, and it was all from the damage our kind inflicted on Her with their industry and machinery and other poison dealt out in the name of 'progress,' and She begged me for help."
"The Earth. Our planet. Asked for your help."
"Yes," she replied, as earnestly as a mother answering that she loved her child. "She told me that humanity was killing itself and taking everything else along with it, and in just a few more years the damage would be so great there would be no way to stop it."
"So to stop humanity from killing itself, you killed everyone off instead?"
"Don't you hear me, Char? It wasn't just about us. If we had kept going the way we were, this planet would have been so wrecked that we would have all died from drowning, wild fires, starvation and disease, only it wouldn't have taken just a couple of years, it would have been decades of increasing agony. And in those decades, countless other species would have gone extinct along with us, so that when the time came when we were all gone and could no longer strip, poison and burn our planet down to a toxic wreck, nothing more complex than cockroaches would have been left alive."
"But if the situation were really that bad, you couldn't have been the only one to notice!"
"Of course I wasn't the only one, there were many, many other people who saw what was going on and were trying to halt the damage, but it wasn't nearly enough. There were others, including many with a great deal of power to keep the system in place, who claimed that climate change
wasn't happening
," she explained, "or that there was no point in trying to stop it, and they were winning. They only wanted to have more, burn more, waste more, and never think about where all those resources were coming from, or what was left in their place. Every year the sea grew deeper, but no cleaner. Our fresh water was vanishing, animals and plants were dying off and running out of room to live, and the air was only getting harder to breathe. People were getting sick, even, and there wasn't enough room to grow food for all of us, so many were going hungry, but that didn't matter to us. The greatest irony to all the evil we perpetrated on the Earth was that the people in the most danger of the consequences of our actions were the ones who participated in that evil the least. The guiltiest people were the ones with the least incentive to change. The ice caps were already melting, and we only had a few more years until the permafrost thawed and set off a chain reaction that would have been impossible to reverse. The goddess spoke to me, and She said, humanity is done, it has killed itself. It's only a question of how long it takes to die. She showed me how the Plague virus would work, and how it would get our extinction over and done with while all other life recovered."
"What about your fellow witches? What did they have to say about this?"
"Well, I couldn't very well tell them what was happening, as I hadn't heard from any of them in years."
"What about your brothers? Did they know Mother Earth was giving you instructions on getting rid of humanity?"
"No, my brothers never knew what to do with me, and they hardly spoke to me after our parents died."
"Your colleagues, the other biologists? Did they agree that the world was already destroying itself?"
"I couldn't say anything to my colleagues; they would have had me locked up."
Charlinder wanted to jump over the table and shake her by the upper arms. "Yes, they would have had you locked up, so what does that
tell
you about what you were
doing
?!"
"It tells me they didn't know what we were up against. The goddess wasn't talking to any of them."
"But, you told me yourself that our minds can play tricks on us, so we need to question our experiences until we can get better evidence!"
"This wasn't a trick," she argued, in a tone that said the difference should have been perfectly obvious. "My goddess was speaking to me. I couldn't ignore that any more than I could ignore my house being set on fire."
Charlinder was at a loss for words. He sat there and gaped at her while she went on talking like if he could just hear her out, then he would understand.
"So I rented this house from its owners, took a leave of absence from my job, and set up a laboratory upstairs. I had the virus ready after six months, and then I heard Her again. She said Milano would be the perfect place to get it moving, and it would be best to do it before the summer tourists started coming in."
Something in his brain connected. He left his seat on the sofa, and before he could register that his legs were moving, he was outside in Gentiola's sunny, patchwork-seasonal garden.
So now he had his answer. He stood between the herb garden and rabbit hutches with Gentiola's story echoing in his mind. The truth circled itself around him like a crowd of monkeys and cackled; even the sun seemed to jeer at him. He had met this woman and liked her immediately; trusted her enough to tell her things he never told anyone else; enjoyed her company so much he lost track of time. The woman he saw as a kindred spirit was a mass-murderer of the highest order. He was enjoying the hospitality of an anthrocidal killer who wiped out her own brothers, her own colleagues, her own neighbors, all because she heard the Earth talking to her.
Did anyone else know what she'd done? Of course not; if she'd told anyone at the time, they'd probably been already on their deathbeds with the virus she'd created. What about the local villagers? They couldn't possibly know; otherwise she wouldn't be safe to go near them. He needed to go somewhere; he needed to get away from this house, and tell people the truth about how the old world had ended. He would get out and tell the villagers the real story of this magical, apparently benevolent woman in their midst. No matter what they decided to do about it, they deserved to know the truth.
But he couldn't talk to them.
He let out a roar just like the one he'd uttered when he'd unfettered himself in the Himalayas and found that Lacey had been dried up.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Questions
So he couldn't talk to anyone except for Gentiola. There was one thing he could do. He found the darkest, remotest corner of her property, sat down in the grass, and closed his eyes to count backwards from seven.