Sisyphus ransacked the libraries, and played them reading their own works. Ginsberg howling "Moloch! Moloch!" Burroughs rasping "A Junkie's Christmas"—all severed limbs in suitcases, and scoring the immaculate fix.
And best of all, Kerouac himself, wild and melodic, stoned and innocent: "What If The Three Stooges Were Real?"
Afternoon sunlight slanted across the ward and brushed the side of my face, bridging distance, energy, scale, complexity. This was not a reason for terror. It was not a reason for awe. It was the most ordinary thing imaginable.
I was as ready as I'd ever be. I closed my eyes.
Someone prodded my shoulder, and said for the fourth or fifth time, "Wake up, please."
I'd lost all choice in the matter. I opened my eyes.
A young woman stood beside me, no one I'd seen before. She had serious, dark brown eyes. Olive skin, long black hair. She spoke with a German accent.
"Drink this." She held out a small vial of clear liquid.
"I can't keep anything down. Didn't they tell you?"
"This, you will."
I was past caring; vomiting was as natural to me as breathing. I took the vial and tipped the contents down my throat. My esophagus spasmed, and acid hit the roof of my mouth—but nothing more.
I coughed. "Why didn't someone offer me that sooner?"
"It only just arrived."
"From where?"
"You don't want to know."
I blinked at her. My head cleared slightly. "Arrived? What kind of drug wouldn't be in stock already?"
"What do you think?"
The flesh at the base of my spine went cold. "Am I dreaming? Or am I dead?"
"Akili had samples of your blood smuggled out to… a certain country, and analyzed by friends. You just swallowed a set of magic bullets for every stage of the weapon. You'll be on your feet in a matter of hours."
My head throbbed.
"You don't want to know."
"I think you're right." I still wasn't convinced that any of this was happening. "Why? Why did Akili go to all that trouble just to save me?"
"We had to find out exactly what you were carrying. Violet Mosala might still be at risk, even though she's showing no symptoms. We had to have a cure for her, ready, here on the island."
I absorbed that. At least she hadn't said:
"So what was I carrying? And why did it detonate prematurely?"
The young AC frowned solemnly. "We still haven't worked out all the details—but the timing fell apart. It looks like the bacteria generated confused internal signals, due to a disparity between intracellular molecular clocks and the host's biochemical cues. The melatonin receptors were choked, saturated—" She stopped, alarmed. "I don't understand. Why are you laughing?"
By the time I left the hospital, on Tuesday morning, I had my strength back—and I was enraged. The conference was half over, but TOEs were no longer the story—and if Sarah Knight, for whatever unfathomable reasons, had abandoned the war over Mosala to sit by Yasuko Nishide's bedside, incommunicado… I'd finally have to start unraveling the whole complicated truth for myself.
Back in my hotel room, I plugged in my umbilical fiber, passed Kuwale's eighteen mug shots to Witness, and flagged them for constant real-time search.
I called Lydia. "I need five thousand dollars extra for research: database access and hacking fees. More is going on here than I can begin to describe. And if you don't agree that it's worth every cent in a week's time, I'll refund it all."
We argued for fifteen minutes. I improvised; I dropped misleading hints about PACDF and an impending political storm, but I said nothing about Mosala's planned emigration. In the end, Lydia caved in. I was astonished.
I used the software Kuwale had given me to send ver a deep-encrypted message. "No, I haven't spotted one of your goons. But if you expect any more help from me—beyond acting as a living culture medium—you're going to have to give me all the details: who these people are, who employed them, your analysis of the weapon… everything. Take it or leave it. Meet me at the same place as last time, in an hour."
