Game Control (34 page)

70 per cent vertical transmission, in two centuries this continent may be threatened with extinction.' Bunny, Grant and Louis all put out their cigarettes simultaneously. 'In conclusion, models which give the epidemic only two and a half decades to take off do not produce a sizeable projected decrease in population growth. Only over time does the impact of the disease make itself felt. I would assert, however, that as the purpose of this committee is to design a pathogen with so many of the characteristics HIV already exhibits, we have been upstaged. On the basis of these findings

I could only recommend disbandment. After several generations and a regrettable amount of suffering, biology will reduce human numbers of its own accord. Given the untried and potentially destabilizing nature of Pachyderm, AIDS seems a less dangerous, established pathogen to allow to run its course.'

  The committee sat in stunned silence. Only Calvin smiled, more on one side than the other. While she wasn't sure, he seemed to be admiring her. Eleanor took a deep breath and prayed that now she had said her piece she would be allowed to go home.

  No such luck. With dim horror, she watched Bunny Morton pull out of her briefcase the same US Census Report with its orange cover, the same brown and white Population Council working paper, the same Roy Anderson photocopy from
Nature
. Bunny smoothed open the first, and it was black with underlining. Eleanor's heart sank. She had done her work well enough to know where the holes were.

  'Ms Merritt,' Grant began. 'Are you familiar with the history of epidemiology?'

  'I'm no expert.'

  'You're no expert, but you're still telling us what to do. To abandon seven years of work on the basis of your "findings".'

  'It was my assignment to collect available research. These are not my findings; they are the findings of experts.'

  'Can you cite us another example of a disease that has raged through a population unabated for 200 years?'

  'AIDS is an unprecedented contagion.'

  'Of course it is precedented,' Grant countered. 'We all like to think of our own age and our own problems as special. But the human race has been afflicted by incurable ailments from its beginning. In spite of them our numbers are sky-rocketing. I would submit that this pandemic requires so long to stem the tide that it will subside before it gets the opportunity. You are familiar with viruses?'

  'I've had the flu.'

  They snickered.

  'You're aware that they mutate? That historically viral virulence will peak and weaken? Syphilis—the Great Pox, after which the lesser malady is named—was once a vicious killer,

in comparison to which its current incarnation is an inconvenience. And you've read that HIV has already shown signs of change; that HIV—2 is demonstrably less lethal than its predecessor?'

  'I haven't found any basis for the assumption that HIV will transform overnight into hives in the foreseeable future.' It occurred to Eleanor that even a year ago under this degree of fire she would already have burst into tears. She looked at Calvin with a funny gratitude.

  'You set so much store by the Anderson study,' intruded Bunny. 'How can you defend a model with an assumption of crude sexual homogeneity? Which makes no provision for the fact that not every Kenyan man sleeps with Nairobi prostitutes? A model that makes no distinction between urban and rural infection rates, which are so demonstrably disparate?'

  'Yes.' Eleanor's face tingled. 'That is a weakness of the Anderson equations.'

  'And you neglected to mention,' Bunny pressed on, 'that the Population Council does not cut off its projection at twenty-five years; rather, Bongaarts established a high likelihood that the epidemic will hit an equilibrium once it reaches an outside sero-positivity of 30 per cent, still resulting, however incredibly, in a sustained 2 per cent population growth rate?'

  'That simulator,' she admitted, 'did turn up a levelling off, yes.'

  'I am most concerned,' Grant band-wagoned, 'with this business of acting on a simulation of the next
200 years
based on data you said yourself was unreliable.'

  Bunny chimed in, 'Why, Anderson himself asserts, "There is no
a priori
reason to assume that extrapolation is valid beyond a short time span".'

  'It seems ludicrous to me,' Grant objected, 'to project the progress of an epidemic about which we know so little and which has
already
defeated, fantastically, the alarmist predictions of AIDS ghoulies for the developing world made only three or four years ago.'

  'It seems no more ludicrous,' Eleanor snapped, 'than planning mass murder on the basis of equally conjectural demographic projections. Just twenty years ago, Ehrlich was

predicting 33 billion people in 2100, and now we're down to 14.'

  'So we're supposed to throw up our hands because we can't trust anyone's projections of anything?'

  'Maybe,' she said hotly.

  'What distresses me,' Louis raised, 'is the expectation in your models that sexual behaviour remains constant. Do you believe Africans are so foolish? Hasn't the gay community successfully disciplined its behaviour in the US? Why assume Africans can't get the message?'

  'In fact, you omitted,' Bunny accused, 'the bulk of this report.' She waved the orange folder in Eleanor's face. 'Intervention strategies. Even with no cure or vaccine, should a mere 10 per cent of this continent begin using condoms, you bring down sero-prevalence in

2015 by over a third. With 25 per cent condom use, sero-prevalence
declines
to less than 2 per cent. With a 25 per cent reduction in casual sex—for the average African man, one less encounter per month—sero-prevalence declines in twenty-five years to nearly zero.'

  'To presuppose Africans cannot change their habits as Americans have seems a highly racist assumption,' Louis charged. 'Are Africans not rational? Can they not learn?'

  Grant added, 'HIV is an inadequate pathogen precisely for that reason. Even without medical breakthroughs, its spread can be controlled with a little common sense. We need an agent that hits a third of the world up side of the head. It may be taking a long time for people to wise up, but they can, and they will, and then we're up to our eyeballs in as many starving children as before.'

  The meeting degenerated into pandemonium, everyone bellowing at once. Calvin allowed them to caterwaul, Bunny jabbing at graphs, members tearing the Bongaarts or the Anderson out of each other's hands, while three-colour graphs glowed munificently over their heads. As his comrades clamoured across the table, Calvin stretched. Eleanor toyed with the computer, playing intervention strategies, age structures, dependency ratios whimsically above their gyrations like videos in a disco. She looked up to find Calvin watching her with that bemused smile, which was, if she wasn't mistaken, unusually warm. After five minutes of Babel, Calvin reached

for a pencil, its end sharpened to a pinprick, and bounced it on teak,
t-t-t-t
. They shut up.

  'My dear Corpse,' he intoned. 'Eleanor was just doing her job. She warned you her results were speculative.'

  'I would like to pursue this research further,' said Eleanor. 'The Sixth Annual AIDS Conference meets next month in San Francisco. I would request funds to make the trip.'

  There was no complaint; at least California would get her out of their hair.

  The rest of QUIETUS cleared out, irate, arguing, demanding photocopies of the reports. Eleanor and Calvin remained seated until they were gone. He kept looking at her with that appreciative smirk until, flustered, she asked, '
What
?'

  He stood up, put on his coat, came round to pull out her chair. 'Nice try.'

  'At what?'

  He put an arm around her as they walked out of the door. 'You don't really believe AIDS will lead to negative population growth, do you?'

  She sighed. 'No.'

  He kissed her forehead. 'You're brilliant.'

  'I thought you'd be angry.'

  'I am,' he corrected, 'entirely charmed.'

There was no need for Calvin to accompany Eleanor and Basengi to the San Francisco AIDS conference, but he had no desire to be left behind, his house bereft of 'Blowin' in the Wind' and 'You're So Vain'—her musical tastes were lamentable. So he would fly to California because the alternative was to admit he missed her, and how could he possibly miss those drippy pieties thrown in the face of the stark, immutable horrors of the hard-hearted real world? What was it about those insipid miniature jam jars she saved from airlines that could make him ache when she was gone?

  So he cleared away the detritus of Threadgill's daily death threats to route out a hefty stack of eco-doom for the trip—
The Sea and
Summer, The Last Gasp
—and arranged to meet a range of demography denizens in the States just to have his own appointments. He reminded himself that Eleanor was working for him, so he wasn't really tagging along, even if her research was intended to undermine the most important project of his life.

  In her own preparations Eleanor fussed over dresses, bought new shoes. 'We're not going on honeymoon,' he quipped as she folded low-cut silk with tissue paper. 'We're going to an AIDS conference.'

  'These are highly social events,' said Eleanor. 'Lots of chawing after hours.' She layered linen slacks with micro-cassettes. 'There's one issue,' she raised casually. 'Are we bringing Panga?'

  'No one brings Panga. Especially dead. I suppose she'll go if she likes.'

  'No, Calvin. You bring Panga. You bring her everywhere. I'm suggesting you ask her to stay at home.'

  'In some respects I haven't any choice. It's called history.'

  'Panga might be history, but thanks to your regular updates she's current events.'

  'She's
your
best friend.'

  'She's not my best friend, she's my predecessor.'

  'You imply she's been supplanted. She has not.'

  Eleanor went stony. 'Can we at least skip buying her a ticket? She can walk the aisles or sit in the loo, can't she? It's 3,000 dollars.'

  Calvin smiled. 'Panga prefers to ride on the wing.' He watched Eleanor whisk back and forth from the dresser she'd commandeered to her suitcase. She paused with her back turned, not quite concealing a small blue plastic case. With Calvin in the room she couldn't sneak the thing in gracefully, so she threw the diaphragm on to her peach suit.

  'What's that for?' he asked casually.

  'AIDS conferences are big pick-up scenes. I might get lucky.'

  He was about to remark that considering the nature of the occasion condoms were
de rigueur
, but he was suddenly stricken by an unwelcome image: of it getting later and later in a hotel room and still Eleanor has not returned. He reads badly and tries to sleep and cannot and reads again until sunrise, at which time he finds her at breakfast nibbling toast with some pompous CDC poof. Calvin takes a different table and she nods with a little smile and then goes on ogling this oh-so-fascinating glorified hygienist who is maundering about t-cells, but with a sordid glimmer in his eye and a smutty understanding between them…The picture came at him in a rush, in a rage, and this was called: jealousy. Which should not be possible, so he proposed instead, 'Well, then. Perhaps we should take separate rooms.'

  'Don't be retarded.'

  He was not comforted, for though she would never do such a thing, it didn't alter this new and offensive information that if she did he would be hurt. You could not injure the predead; that's what mobile mortality was all about.

saved her peanuts; she saved the chocolate, the towlette,
she saved
the salt and pepper
. She tucked the uneaten triangles of Gouda from all three trays into her bag, where they would be found in a week, squished and rancid and leaving a greasy spot on her carry-on. When the stewardess collected their neighbours' discarded rubber chicken, Eleanor craned her neck with all the morbid fascination of passing a gory road accident. Calvin got the impression that if Eleanor had her way she'd amass the leftovers and shove them out the emergency exit, overseeing the first airlift of pineapple fool to the Ogaden. Most peculiar of all was that Calvin wouldn't have her any other way; that should she let her jam jar slip nonchalantly into the bin at breakfast he would feel mournful.

  While poor services and limited imports might accustom one to the primitive joys of a simple life, instead prolonged spates in the Third World turn the most high-minded Westerners into raving materialists. In the San Francisco airport, Eleanor and Calvin gaped agog at electronics, delicatessens and the mind-boggling proximity of decent ice-cream. Eleanor was beset by longings for pizza and pastrami as if she were pregnant. In the taxi rank, she had to resist the urge to lie with her cheek to the smooth tarmac, and as they drove past pay phones her impulse was to reach for stray receivers through the window, just to hear the dial tone purr.

  In their room at the Marriott, Eleanor took off her shoes and danced on the thick carpet, switching across the 120 cable networks, flicking over the tightly packed radio dial and, best of all, phoning Ray and Jane and getting through the
first time
, and she could
hear
them
and they could hear her as well and the call didn't cut off in the middle or anything—it was all too wonderful to bear.

  Crossing the two blocks to register for the conference, however, was to run a gauntlet of guilt, for panhandlers had flocked from all over the city to line the corridor from the hotel to the Mascone Center, each with his cardboard concession: