Panacea (29 page)

He shook his head. “No fun. Just a miracle.” He glanced at his watch. “Oops. My plane's boarding. Gotta run. Safe trip wherever you're going.”

And then he was hurrying off.

How odd. A miracle? She was hunting the same thing. And he seemed to have the same level of hope as she about finding one: zero.

In the newspaper rack she found an English-language edition of
People
and brought it back to where they were seated.

Rick was on the phone. He handed it to her as she dropped into her seat.

“Stahlman wants to speak to you.”

His voice sounded wheezier than before
. “I'm terribly sorry for what you've been through. I know you didn't bargain for this and you must believe I had no idea it would turn out this way.”

“I'm sure you didn't.”

“Are you sure you want to continue? I feel terrible and I'm willing to prorate the amount I promised you if you want to quit.”

That word again.

“That's very generous…”

“I don't think I could forgive myself if anything happened to you.”

How true was that? The man had a terminal diagnosis. He wanted to live. No question that he didn't care about the financial cost to himself, but what about the personal cost to others? Well, really, what did it matter what he thought?

“I'm going to see this through.”

The words startled her. They were accurate as to how she felt, but they'd come out on their own.

He didn't respond immediately; then,
“That's very brave. I chose you because I felt you perfect for the job. I didn't know how perfect. Your courage and determination are a lagniappe.”

Was
it courage? She didn't feel brave. Her mother always told her what a stubborn child she had been growing up. Was that what this boiled down to? Stubbornness?

No. More than that. She sensed it went back to those two perfectly healthy corpses, refusing to give up their secrets. And Tommy's perfect joints. This trip was an extension of all that—an assault on an enigmatic onion. She wouldn't be happy until she'd peeled away all its layers of mystery and had her answers.

Not sure how to field the compliment, she said, “‘Lagniappe' … you don't hear that too often in conversation.”

“My word of the day. Call me when you've done what you have to do in Israel. And be careful.”

“Will do.”

“He gave you an out?” Rick said as she handed the phone back.

“He did.”

“And you didn't take it?”

“As I'm sure you heard.”

“Yeah.”

He looked at her, gave her a quick, silent nod, then resumed his thousand-mile stare.

Laura flipped though her
People
and she realized she recognized only one out of ten celebrities in the whole magazine.

Finally she broke down and tried for conversation again.

“So … here we are, embarking on the next leg of our wild-goose chase.”

He snapped out of his reverie and came back from wherever he'd been drifting.

“You still think this is all futile, then? Even after what Ix'chel told you about Chaim being cured?”

She shrugged. “Chaim got sick unto death, Chaim got better—I don't dispute that. The mystery is what happened between. I promised Stahlman two weeks and I'll give him twelve more days of my best to unravel that mystery. And then I'll have to tell a very sick man that I couldn't find his cure.”

“But if you do find it, what will you tell
yourself
?”

The question took her by surprise—not only for its perceptiveness, but because she had no answer.

She looked at Rick and saw he'd already resumed his deep-space stare.

“Thinking about your ‘vast, cool and unsympathetic' intelligences?”

He pulled back to the airport again. “Guess you could say so. But only indirectly.”

“Spend much time thinking about them?”

Now
I'm
dropping pronouns. Is it catching?

“Try not to. But yeah, sometimes.”

She had to say something: “Tell me, do you have something against starting a sentence with a pronoun?”

“What do you mean?”

“‘Guess you could say so' … ‘Try not to' … That sort of thing.”

He frowned. “Never thought about it. Never realized—”

She laughed. “See? There you go again. And verbs and articles as well?”

“No kidding?” His voice went robotic. “I. Will. Try. To. Speak. Your. Brand. Of. English.”

“Now you're being silly. I shouldn't have mentioned it. It just popped out. Back to these intelligences. Have they got names?”

“Maybe. Probably not. They're too rare and too vast and unknowable to have names. Naming is a human thing. When we name something we've classified it, pigeonholed it, circumscribed it—made it safe. Or relatively so. I like to put myself in their place and imagine how they view us.”

“Like bugs?”

His mouth twisted. “More like microbes—but
thinking
microbes. Imagine how entertaining we must be as they toy with our beliefs and emotions on a mass scale to see how we react.”

Okay. She could temporarily buy into this crazy mind-set—but only as an intellectual exercise. Better than silence.

“But if they're that powerful, they could simply wipe us out if we don't respond as they wish.”

He shook his head. “You're getting Old Testamenty there, in the cranky Yahweh mode. If sapience is a rare aberration, they're gonna want to preserve us. If they wipe us out, the toys are gone, and where's the fun in that?”

“Okay, so assume you're one of these intelligences … what do you do?”

“Well, the key word is ‘unsympathetic.' By that I don't mean they have ill will toward us, just that they don't
feel
for us. They've no compunction about hurting us just to see how we react and recover. As for me, as an unsympathetic intelligence, I'd want to set some rules. Every game has to have rules.”

“Like?”

“Okay, you can't simply insert an idea into the heads of a population. That's too crude. Lacks style, no
é
lan. You have to manipulate events in a way that sparks the idea. Once that idea is fixed, then you watch where it goes.”

“Sounds complicated.”

He shrugged. “It is, and it isn't. Maybe they're playing with chaos theory.”

“That's the second time you've mentioned chaos.”

“Is it? Oh, yeah. About Chaim leaving Israel. Just a toss-off about how a seemingly unrelated event in Israel—the failure of a kibbutz in the nineties—triggered enormous changes in your life decades later.”

He was right, wasn't he. A long chain of causes and effects leading directly to her … She found it disturbing.

“Is this where you tell me it was arranged?”

He laughed. “You think I know? I'm just juggling ideas. And that brings me back to chaos theory, which is most easily appreciated in predicting weather.”

“You mean like the butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil causing a tornado in Kansas?”

“That's the famous example everyone gives. It's exaggerated but it sets up the paradigm that in a complex system like weather, small variations in initial conditions can have huge effects down the line. Look how El Ni
ñ
o, created by the temperature of a relatively small area of the Pacific off the west coast of South America, influences droughts and tornadoes and hurricanes in and around the U.S.”

“So chaos theory would apply to the complex system of a globe-spanning race of sapient beings. Namely us.”

“You got it. Maybe these unsympathetic intelligences like to introduce an anomaly here and there to see where the ripples go.”

Now she saw where he was heading. A crazy, almost psychotic conversation, but she couldn't deny she was enjoying it. How many men—how many
people
of either sex—could spark a conversation like this? She couldn't remember ever meeting anyone like him.

“An anomaly like a panacea?”

“Exactly. Maybe they introduced it to a pagan cult and waited to see how its spread would affect human civilization. But the cult kept it to itself and doled it out to only a lucky few. That's got to piss off the U-I's.”

U-I's?
she thought. Oh, unsympathetic intelligences.

“Why?”

“No chaos effect or ripple effect into the larger system because their panacea was kept under wraps, leaving the system unaware of its existence. The experiment was a failure.”

“Fine. No fun for them. But I'm still not sure I get this whole event-manipulation thing.”

“They wait a couple of millennia—an eye blink to them—and no chaos effect. So they start manipulating events to get this thing out in the open. The result is Doctor Laura Fanning on her way to Mesoamerica, and then to Israel.”

A chill ran through her. “You think they
want
me to find it?”

“Of course they do. And it works even better to have it revealed
now
rather than back in the Iron Age or whatever. Because
now
the sapient microbes have
science
and we're gonna be faced with something that breaks all our carefully constructed theories of biology and physics. The ripple effects through all of science and eventually human civilization will be enormous.”

Yes, Laura thought, nodding. Widespread availability of a panacea would cause … she could barely comprehend it. Agree with him or not, he was a thinker, this guy.

“‘Enormous' doesn't touch it,” she said. “The effect of no disease, and no premature death from disease, will change
everything
. Old religions will fall before the panacea, new religions will spring up around it, the social order will convulse with all these extra old folks around, the course of history will be corkscrewed.”

“Or just plain screwed.”

She remembered something he'd said yesterday. “Is that what you meant by ‘Did you ever think that the panacea might exist because we're able to have the opinion that it can't exist?'”

“Uh-huh. Science has worked for centuries to make sense of the world around us. We've had theories which we've confirmed enough to call knowledge. We can say that this is the way things work, and then along comes the panacea and it breaks all those rules. The Garmin GPS of human knowledge says ‘Recalculating route,' and that starts an intellectual chain reaction leading who knows where?”

Laura sat back and shook her head. “This sounds suspiciously like intelligent design.”

“No-no. Just the opposite. More like intelligent disarray or intelligent disorder. It's like seeing something as orderly and productive as a beehive and saying, ‘I wonder what would happen if we stole the queen?' And then you do just that. Or on a human scale, it's, say, 1963 and you've got a cold war between two factions of your microbes, the commies and the capitalists. Let's take a guy connected to the commies and nudge him to kill the leader of the capitalists and see what happens. That sort of thing.”

“I see why you want to keep the word ‘unsympathetic' in there. And I see where this is going. Endow this hate-filled little Austrian with an enormously seductive and persuasive speaking voice and see where it takes him.”

“Now you've got it. But that pales in comparison with introducing a true panacea to humanity.” He was staring at her. “Which brings us to the big question.”

“Which is?”

“If you find the panacea, what will you do?”

For an instant she seriously considered her answer, then shook herself.

“A moot point, Rick. It doesn't exist.”

“Imagine it does, and you find its secret, and it's up to you to reveal it to the world or keep it hidden. What do you do?”

What was he doing … asking out of curiosity? Or probing her ethics, taking her measure? It made her a little uncomfortable. But she'd engaged in the topic, so she figured she owed him an answer.

She thought of the turmoil the panacea would cause in every facet of human civilization. And yet …

“Okay, assuming it exists, I think I'd give it to the world.”

“Despite the consequences?”

“I don't think it would be my right to withhold it. And if I did, every time I heard of a child dying from a supposedly incurable illness, I'd feel responsible. I couldn't live like that.”

“So it's all about you?”

“That's not fair.” She was getting a new, unsettling perspective on Rick. “Let me turn this around. Let's say the panacea exists and I found it. Would you stop me from giving it to the world?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“What kind of answer is that? You're starting to worry me. If I lift up your sleeve, will I see a 536 there?”

He laughed but his head shake was emphatic. “You've seen my arms. But it comes down to this: I was hired to watch your back during your travels and return you safely to Mister Stahlman. And that is what I will do.”

She still hadn't learned where he stood on this admittedly moot question.

She said, “Let me rephrase: If you found the panacea, would you give it to the world?”

“I probably wouldn't be able to answer that until I had it in my hand.”

“You're really doing your damnedest to avoid an answer.”

“Okay, that scenario would put me in a position to frustrate the U-I's, and I've got to tell you, I'd be sorely tempted not to play the game. I might even destroy it.”

“And condemn untold millions to premature death?”

“I wouldn't be condemning anyone to anything. The operative word there is ‘tempted.' The jury's still out on what I'd finally decide.”

“But the very fact that you'd even be tempted…”