“I suppose it depends on where you are. The mutiny didn’t have much of a chance to succeed, and then the surprise epidemic hit, and that changed everything.”
“How was it supposed to play out?” The question might catch her with her guard down.
“The official story? The mutiny planted it and was going to blame it on the Prez. False flag.” She shrugged, detached—cynical, in fact. Her brilliance shone, but something had extinguished her empathy. “I think it was hatched by his extreme supporters and not him. There’s always a lot of infighting and factions, and people who are hard to control.”
I wondered how she could sound so sure, and after a moment’s thought, I had an answer. Her verb tense—the present with all its immediacy—had placed her within the loop.
“And it might not have worked,” I said. “The surprise epidemic virus that was released by whomever might have interacted poorly with the attenuated virus and created a worldwide disaster.”
She nodded, her eyes searching for a place to avoid encountering a future she had once hoped would never happen, and that we had avoided as much by accident as by planning.
“And,” I said, now cynical myself, “someone with the means and motive could be blamed.”
“We always have enemies.”
I remembered her shouting in dismay when she thought that the vaccine had been released everywhere: infighting and factions among people who were hard to control and who had done the wrong thing—in her judgment. Someday, if I could, I’d find out what the supposed right thing in her judgment would have accomplished in the world.
“Why do it?” I asked, knowing that any answer she gave would leave me disgusted.
“Why try to stop the mutiny?” That spin on the question hid the murderous intent of the act. “They don’t even know what they want. Just disobey. Old-fashioned freedom. What’s that?”
(They, not we.) “Freedom,” I murmured. “What for?”
“Exactly. I mean, refugees have to be resettled carefully, for example. We don’t have enough capacity to just hand out free stuff to everyone. We’d all wind up living three to a room and eating fake steak.”
“For some people, that would be an improvement.” Confucius had once said he would find joy in living on water and coarse rice rather than unrighteous wealth.
“But not an improvement for me,” she said. “Don’t get self-righteous. You played god, and look where that got you.”
“I was a benign god.”
She laughed. “It’s always good to talk to you, Peng. You have such a unique attitude. I’ve got to get back to work.” She walked out, and I knew to my unmeasurable disappointment that I’d be happy never to see her again. In only a matter of time, she would likely be arrested. I’d supplied enough evidence for any careful investigator, and more was available if needed.
I’d also asked too many questions for my peace of mind. And I’d displayed a unique attitude compared with her circles, where I would be full of laughable, old-fashioned ideas about compassion and responsibility. It would take a while to round up the guilty, and in the meantime, patience would be my most fitting friend and sorrow my most constant companion.
I had work to do, too, and perhaps I could find treatments to propose that would be needed in desperate circumstances before proper testing. I could imagine a doctor somewhere facing a dying patient with an unproven medication sitting on a nearby shelf. Use at your own risk—or rather, the patient’s risk, which would deepen the quandary.
Ethics extracted an expense, which made them a luxury. We had been living in a kind of poverty. Shakespeare wrote as a joke about someone who could be poor but honest, knowing how privation brutalized us. Even imagined privation could turn us into brutes. I had struggled to remain benign despite where it got me. It was the most joyous thing I could do.
CHAPTER11
Irene ran to the truck. With help from a friend in Madison, she’d finally broken into Ruby’s computer to check in with Nimkii’s tracker service. The radio ankle bracelet placed him about twenty miles north, in Lincoln County, a little west of Merrill. He was the only reason she hadn’t left yet.
For two days now she’d waited, even though she hated everything about Prairie Orchid Farm and about a cascade of bad memories that fell on her head and shoulders every time she walked into the farmhouse. She hated the three fresh graves in the rear of the property that Ruby must have dug—two for people, a small one for the dog. A splash of blood on the ground next to the kennel explained what had happened to the dog. The graves lay right next to the little stream: groundwater contamination for sure.
Should she mention that when she was called to be a witness against Ruby? Because she’d been informed she would be. When? No one had any idea.
Besides that, the Prez’s supporters were still fighting back, in a few places, like some suburbs near Detroit, with shootouts despite the ongoing terror of the virus, since a few people felt sure that they were immune. Someone was bound to decide to go after supposed Chinese spies again. She remained alert during every waking moment and slept hiding in the shed near the barn.
Now that she’d located Nimkii, when she found him, what would she do with him? Well … this was no time to look for a new home. She had no good ideas.
She entered the location of the radio bracelet, and the truck drove off.
Hers was about the only vehicle on the two-lane road. Occasionally another car drove past the other way. No one seemed to be outside in the yards and fields. Her nose told her about death a few times, a lot of death, probably livestock in
