Distress полностью

Ned Landers was behind everything. When we met, he'd infected me with one of his secret viruses. And now, because I'd traveled so far to escape it… although Helen Wu had proved that the whole world was nothing but a loop, and everything led back to the same point… now I was coming down with Landers' secret weapon against Violet Mosala, Andrew Worth, and all his other enemies.

I was coming down with Distress.

A tall Fijian man dressed in white poked a drip into my elbow. I tried to shake it out; he held me still. I muttered triumphantly, "Don't you know there's no point? There's no cure!" Distress was nowhere near as bad as I'd imagined; I wasn't screaming like the woman in Miami, was I?

I was nauseous and feverish—but I felt sure that I was headed for some form of beautiful, painless oblivion. I smiled up at the man. "I'm gone forever now! I've gone away!"

He said, "I don't think so. I think you've been there, and you're coming back."

I shook my head defiantly, but then cried out in surprise and pain. My bowels had gone into spasm, and I was emptying them, uncontrollably, into a pan I hadn't even noticed beneath me. I tried to stop. I couldn't. But it wasn't the incontinence that horrified me, as much as the… consistency. This wasn't diarrhea; it was water.

The motion stopped eventually, but I kept shuddering. I pleaded for an explanation. "What's happening to me?"

"You have cholera. Drug-resistant cholera. We can control the fever, and keep you hydrated—but the disease is going to have to run its course. So you're in for a long haul."

19

As the first wave of delirium subsided, I tried to assess my position dispassionately, to arm myself with the facts. I was not an infant, I was not old. I was not suffering from malnutrition, parasite infestation, an impaired immune system, or any other complicating factor. I was in the care of qualified people. My condition was being monitored constantly by sophisticated machines. I told myself that I was not going to die. Fever and nausea, absent in "classical" cholera, meant that I had the Mexico City biotype—first seen in the aftermath of the quake of '15, long since distributed globally. It entered the bloodstream as well as the gut, producing a wider range of symptoms, a greater risk to health. Nevertheless, millions of people survived it every year—often in much worse circumstances: without antipyritics to control the fever, without intravenous electrolytes, without any antibiotics at all—making drug resistance academic. In the largest metropolitan hospitals, in Santiago or Bombay, the particular strain of Vibrio cholerae could be sequenced completely, and a de novo drug designed and synthesized in a matter of hours. Most people who contracted the disease, though, had no prospect whatsoever of receiving this luxurious miracle cure. They simply lived through the rise and fall of the bacterial empire inside them. They rode it out.

I could do the same.

There was only one small flaw in this clear-eyed, optimistic scenario:

Most people had no reason to suspect that their guts were full of a genetic weapon which had detonated one step short of its target. Engineered to mimic a natural strain of cholera as closely as possible—but engineered to push the envelope of plausible symptoms far enough to kill a healthy, twenty-seven-year-old woman, receiving the best care that Stateless could provide.

The ward was clean, bright, spacious, quiet. I spent most of my time screened off from the other patients, but the white translucent partitions let the daylight through—and even when my skin was on fire, the faint touch of radiant warmth reaching my body was strangely comforting, like a familiar embrace.

By late afternoon on the first day, the antipyritics seemed to be working. I watched the graph on the bedside monitor; my temperature was still pathological, but the immediate risk of brain damage had passed. I tried to swallow liquids, but nothing stayed down—so I moistened my parched lips and throat, and let the intravenous drip do the rest.

Nothing could stop the cramps and the bowel spasms. When they came, it was like demonic possession, like being ridden by a voodoo god: an obscene bear-hug by something powerful and alien constricting inside my flesh. I couldn't believe that any muscle in my own rag-doll body could still be so strong. I tried to stay calm—to accept each brutal convulsion as inevitable, to keep my mind fixed on the sure and certain knowledge that this too would pass—but every time, the surge of nausea swept away my laboriously composed stoicism like a house of matchsticks beneath a tidal wave, and left me shuddering and sobbing, convinced that I was finally dying, and half-believing that that was what I wanted more than anything else: instant release.