The Nirvana Plague (45 page)

Adams directed Marley out of the Olsens’ neighborhood to a bridge over the fast-flowing creek that Marley had nearly stumbled into last night, then on down Calhoun Street to the governor’s mansion. As he drove he described for them the scene in the mayor’s bedroom.

He parked in the governor’s driveway. The white mansion stood on a hill overlooking the city center.

“The governor lives with his wife,”
Adams said.
“And there’s a maid.”

He walked up to the columned porch and rapped the doorknocker loudly. No one came. Not a sound. The door was unlocked. He went inside and immediately discovered the governor and wife and maid sitting in the dining room. They had taken three chairs from the table and were sitting in them side by side, facing the large window, holding hands, the governor in the middle seat. They were also nude.

They didn’t look up as he came into the room.

“Hello?” he said.

No response.

“My name is Marley,” he said as he approached them.

No response.

“Do you hear me?”

The governor’s wife turned her head very slightly in his direction, but did not speak or look at him. After a few seconds her eyes returned to the window.

The view from the window was spectacular. Out in the channel the Coast Guard cutter lay watching him looking at it. The surveillance helicopters hovered over the waterfront, like enormous dragonflies, slowly gliding back and forth.

He left the house quietly, closing the door behind them.

Out on the lawn, as he listened to the not very distant thump of helicopter rotors, he reported back to Benford.

“All three of them are sitting in the dining room staring out the window. They’re also catatonic. Also nude. Also holding hands.
Gone.
”

“Also nude?”
Benford said.
“So they don’t just sleep like that.”

It was an anthropological observation.

Marley smiled. He thought perhaps it was the only really silly thing he’d ever heard Benford say.

“No,” he said. “They were probably all in the street last night. So their clothes were cold and wet. So they stripped.”

His controllers directed Marley to the police station, city hall, the courthouse, state government offices, the federal building. Every office in every building was empty.

He parked the Humvee downtown and walked from door to door. Restaurants, bars, boutiques, souvenir shops: all empty.

He saw a noisy gang of crows fighting over the garbage spilled from an overturned trashcan.

The communications van and several Humvees and police cruisers were still sitting in the street outside the Purple Pony.

He went back inside the saloon. The military phone was still on the bar beside the bottle of vodka and the dry glass with the ear bug in it. He pocketed the electronics, but left the vodka untouched.

Next they sent him through the residential neighborhoods, on foot, going from door to door like a canvasser, looking for “survivors.” After a while, he gave up knocking on the doors, and just went inside. Many doors were already standing open anyway. As far as he could make out, only empty houses had locked doors.

Dogs barked at him from backyards.

Everyone was catatonic, minimally responsive at best. Everyone in each house was gathered together in the same room. Not everyone was naked, but many were. No one spoke. No one was any more responsive than the mayor’s daughter had been. Sometimes the family pets lay curled up with them.

The sun cleared the mountains around midmorning and the city warmed under the clear skies. City of light, city of zombies.

They sent him around to the larger hotels. He found tourists huddled together in the lobby or down a hallway, sitting or lying, side by side, like dogs in a den.

They sent him onto the cruise ship at the waterfront. He found several large groups gathered together in different great rooms of the ship — the ballroom, the restaurant, the game room. Everyone was
gone
.

The ship, at least, running on its own generators, had power. But there was no one at the controls, no one on the bridge or in the engine rooms, kitchens, or communications. Passengers and crew were all mixed together.

Seagulls waddled along the waterfront streets among the abandoned cars and pickups, like they’d just inherited the whole place and weren’t quite sure what to do with it.

Marley wandered the ghostly city all day long. He found no one who was unaffected. He saw no one on the streets. He never found Roger or Delacourt.

Finally, footsore and heart-weary he drove the Humvee back to the barricades at the center of the bridge.

Tyminksi took the wheel and drove him and Benford back to Abrams.

“IDD is not a disease,” Pritzker said. “It’s a movement.”

His face, huge on the wallscreen, looked haggard. He said that he’d been up all night meeting with the Security Council, and now he was reporting the result.

“The government’s position toward this has now officially changed,” he continued. “IDD is, effectively, in every practical sense, an insurgency. If it happened in Juneau, it can happen elsewhere. Elsewhere might be Chicago, or New York, or Washington.”

Marley listened helplessly. The inevitable was finally happening.

Pritzker continued his oration. His tone was emotionless, professional, almost bureaucratic: “Of course, there are a number of unusual aspects to the situation. There are some significant ways in which the progress of IDD differs from revolutionary movements. But we have got to decide on some kind of model to guide our response. At this point, the model of popular insurrection serves us better than disease outbreak. It’s not a perfect model, and we’ll depart from it wherever necessary. Our response can be creative without being formless. The model can guide our actions without being restrictive. We are adopting this model because the contagious disease model has failed. Aside from the fact that it is spreading like the plague, so to speak, IDD is in no significant sense similar to any known disease, including all generally accepted psychiatric diagnoses. It appears that the only plausible vector of transmission is simply interpersonal communication. Real diseases are not spread by talking. But real revolutionary movements are. The President is making no official announcement yet, but as of midnight last night, the government of the United States is effectively operating under martial law. Habeas corpus is suspended. Civilian legal procedures, search and seizure rules, warrants, and so on, shall be, for the time being, inoperative. Military and civilian police units are today establishing control over all national and local media and communications services. Once that is done, the President will address the nation.”

He stopped and turned to General Harden, beside him on the wall.

Harden did not begin speaking at once, giving Pritzker’s announcements the space their gravity warranted.

Marley felt like he was being squeezed in a vice. And he wondered what role he was now going to be expected to play in this strange new world.

Harden looked down at Benford and the officers around her. “The CDC has also been placed under military authority,” he said. “Colonel Benford, your job is to coordinate with military command there to re-establish control of Juneau. The city will remain under absolute quarantine indefinitely. Army General John Graham is now in general command of all operations in the Juneau sector. Temporary operational HQ will be established at the airport. The Seventh Fleet’s secondary command ship, the
USS Auster,
is currently en route. It should arrive in two days. If the situation has not been resolved by then, General Graham will relocate joint operations headquarters onboard the
Auster
.”

NEWSREADER: Since the imposition of martial law,
Newsline
has been operating under the oversight of authorities of the federal government. This is true of all the major media. These are temporary measures in a time of national emergency. In a few minutes we’ll be speaking with Secretary of Homeland Security Eliot Pritzker about what all this means. Secretary Pritzker will be discussing curfew, quarantine, and censorship orders, and what you need to do over the next few days to keep yourself and your family safe and healthy …

Marley was alone in the small glass-walled conference room. He had Newsline on one screen, muted and captioned; on another, the video of the street scene from the day before. But on audio he was reviewing the ear bug recordings from the Purple Pony meeting, looping back and forth through key moments.

ROGER: The development of mind was as revolutionary as anything that had come before it, but it wasn’t magical. Mind is as natural as anything else. But it seems different because that’s what it is made to do. It’s meant to make things seem.—

Benford came in, carrying a cup of coffee in one hand, her tablet in the other, and checking her watch. “You’re up early,” she said.

He was leaning back in his chair, resting his legs on another chair. He punched the tabletop controls to pause the playback. “Couldn’t sleep.”

“Me either.” She sat down opposite him.

Marley studied her. She was in uniform, of course. She didn’t look like she hadn’t been sleeping, but she didn’t look fresh either. Like an old suit neatly pressed and folded.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“What I should have been doing two days ago. Should have been doing all along. Maybe I’ve never really done it.”

“What’s that?”

“Listening. Trying to understand. Not just diagnose.”

Benford fiddled with her tablet while she talked. “Trying to figure a way out of this situation?”

“No!” he snapped.

She looked back at him, across the table.

“You see, you’re not listening to me either. I’m trying to find a way
into
it.”

“All right. Making any progress?”

“I don’t know. But I do know that the more I listen to Roger’s explanation of IDD, the more sense it makes. It makes more sense than any of our own explanations anyway. We tried calling IDD a disease. That didn’t work. Now it’s an insurrection. But what laws have been broken?”

“Quarantine orders have—”

“Which we imposed because we decided IDD was a disease. If we hadn’t made that diagnosis, there wouldn’t have been a quarantine to violate.”

“I don’t want to have the ‘Is IDD real?’ debate again, Carl. It’s too damn late for that, and too damned early in the morning.”

“Of course, IDD is real. I keep remembering something Fred Peters said, the first time the team met, that day at the NIH. He said that IDD is an
idea disease
. It’s a bad idea that has caught on for reasons unknown to us. Maybe unknowable. — But what if it isn’t a
bad
idea?”

She was reading her tablet again as he talked. “Well, it certainly caught on with Dr. Peters,” she said without looking up. “Anyway, I have some news for you.”

“About Ally and Karen?”

“Yes. FBI office in Wisconsin just forwarded a report to me. Seems they ditched your car a few days ago. — Must have been right after the traffic stop. — They traded it for a thirteen-year-old Hyundai pickup truck. It got flagged by FBI data surveillance when the dealer registered the sale.”