“If you were worried that the Americans might harvest one of our subjects for research it doesn’t matter now. They can have all of the subjects we’ve already sent but any preventive measure they design will be built on the wrong generation of the disease.”
She walked over and placed her palm on the glass and even when the subject lunged at her and slammed its face against the inner wall on the other side she didn’t flinch. There was an adoring look on her face as she stared at the subject.
Gault came to stand next to her. The subject kept banging against the glass, its infected brain unable to process the concept of transparency. Even without scent it knew that its prey was there. That was the only thought it could hold on to.
In an awed voice, Amirah whispered, “Once we release these new subjects into the population the infection will spread beyond control. They won’t be able to keep ahead of it.”
Gault nodded slowly but his mind was working at computer speed, putting everything he’d seen and everything Amirah had said into context. It was an effort to keep his feelings about all of this off his face.
“This is unstoppable,” Amirah said with a predatory hiss in her voice. “We can kill them all.”
“Now, now,” he said, wrapping his arm around her, “let’s not lose focus here. We don’t want to kill them all, darling. What would be the point in that? We simply want to make them all very, very sick.”
He stroked her breast through the hazmat material.
She said nothing but he saw her turn away as if to look at some gauges and he was certain she was trying to hide her expression. “You told me to continue with the research, to improve the model. What do you expect me to do with everything I’ve developed? Just destroy it?”
“Yes, I bloody well do,” he said, but then he stopped, lips pursed, considering; then something occurred to him. “Actually hold on a bit.”
She turned back to him, her face showing hurt and suspicion. “What?”
“I have a wonderful idea,” he purred. “I think I figured out how to use your new monster. Oh yes, this is both juicy and delicious.”
Still frowning, she said, “Tell me!”
“Before I do you have to promise me that you’ll use it only as I suggest. We can’t really let this generation of the pathogen out. Not ever. You do understand that, don’t you?”
She said nothing.
“Do you understand?” He said it again, slowly, reinforcing each syllable.
“Yes, yes, I understand. You really are such an old woman at times, Sebastian.”
“Dear heart we want to buy the world, not bury it.”
Amirah gave him a slow three-count and then nodded. “Of course,” she said. “I just wanted you to see what we could accomplish. We’ve created a new kind of life, an entirely new state of existence. Unlife.”
He stepped back from her and stared, the devious smile still frozen onto his mouth.
Unlife.
God Almighty, he thought.
“Now tell me your idea,” she said, breaking through the shell of his shocked and fragile thoughts. “How can you use my new pathogen to help us in our cause?”
And suddenly Gault was snapped out of his reverie and out of his shock and was completely present in his mind. She had said “cause,” not program. Not scheme, or plan. Cause. That is a very interesting choice of a word, my love, he thought.
So he told her and he watched her face as she listened; and he paid special attention to the muscles around her eyes and the dilation of her pupils. What he saw told him a lot. Perhaps too much, and it both elated him and hurt him. By the time he was done her beautiful face was suffused with a terrible light.
Amirah pulled him close and wrapped her arms around him. They held tightly together, ignoring the absurdity of the PVC suits.
“I love you,” she said.
“I love you, too,” he said, and meant it.
And when this is done I may have to feed you to one of your pets, he thought. And he meant that, too.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Balkh, Afghanistan / Five days ago
THE TOWN OF Balkh in northern Afghanistan was once one of the great cities of the ancient world. Now, even with a population of over one hundred thousand the town is largely in ruins. The Iranian prophet Zoroaster was born there and for centuries it was the center of the Zoroastrian religion. Now, like much of Afghanistan it varies between poverty and desperation, with some rare spots of music, color, and the laughter of children too young to grasp the realities of the life that awaits them.
South and a little east of the city is the small town of Bitar, a village caught like an eagle’s nest in the spiky crags of a mountain pass. Only one serpentine road led up into it and a worse one wound down. Camels manage it because they’re stubborn, but even they slip once in a while. There are eighty-six people living in Bitar, most of them childless parents whose sons have died fighting either for the Taliban or against them; or who have gone off to work the poppy fields and never returned. A few of the youngest children walk seven miles to go to school. There are only thirty camels in the whole town. The chickens are all skinny. Only the goats look hardy, but they are a hardy breed used to very little. For plumbing the people have well water that smells of animal urine and old salt.
Eqbal was sixteen and his parents had not yet lost him to the poppy fields or the wars. Eqbal was destined to service Allah through service to his family. It was his qawn identity, he was sure, to be a farmer and in that way both preserve old ways and yet provide for the future. Despite war and strife, Eqbal believed in the future and to him it was bright with promise. Wars pass, but Afghanistan, graced by the love of Allah, endures.
Every morning Eqbal would rise with the day, clean himself, and then dress in loose robes and place a kufi cap on his head so that he would be ready to say his first prayers of the day, following the precise requirements of salat. First standing and then kneeling and finally prostrate in humility before the grace and majesty of God.
Though a young man of uncomplicated faith and one who had dedicated himself to the simple rigors of the farm life there in the dusty desert, Eqbal was not a simple-headed youth. As he tended his flocks or did chores around the farm he was often deep in complex thought, sometimes wrestling meanings out of the passages in the Qur’an; sometimes working to understand the complexities of delivering a breeched goat without losing either mother or kid. He did not think fast, but he always thought deep, and when he came to a conclusion he was generally correct.
Had he lived Eqbal would have very likely become the headman of the village, and certainly a man to be counted. But Eqbal did not live. Eqbal would not live to see his seventeenth birthday, which was eight days away.
“Eqbal!” called his father, who was laid up with a broken ankle. “How is that goat coming along?”
The young man crouched over the gravid goat, who was crying out in pain as Eqbal worked his hands inside the birth canal to try and turn the kid. The other goats picked up her nervousness and the air was a constant barrage of snorts and baas. Eqbal’s hands were red with blood and mucus and sweat shone brightly on his face as he worked, brow knitted, his clever fingers feeling along the tiny legs of the unborn goat.
“I think I have it, Father!” he called as his fingertips encountered the soft ropy length of the umbilical cord. “The cord is twisted around the hind legs.”
He heard the scrape of a crutch as his father shuffled toward the open window. “Be gentle now, boy. Nature does not want you to hurry.”
“Yes, Father,” Eqbal said. It was one of his father’s favorite sayings, and it matched the slow process of thought and action that made Eqbal his father’s son. Patience was as valuable to a farmer as seeds and water.
He curled one finger around the cord and gently-very gently-pulled it down and over the kid’s legs, then felt inside to make sure that there was no other obstruction. With great care he pushed on the kid to turn it inside the mother, who continued to bleat and cry.
