Year Zero (41 page)

Abbot looked over Nathan Lee’s shoulder into the rising sun. His eyes cut to a thin slit. He brought them back to Nathan Lee. “If anyone can understand, it is you,” he finished. “I must not lose my daughter.”

O
CTOBER
E
NDS

H
er father departed, leaving Miranda to guide them back into the sunlight. With a stroke of her pen, she destroyed Cavendish’s culture of secrecy, declassifying all of their research, and scheduling seminars and conferences. From now on the labs were to cooperate, not compete. Like some antique torture device, Cavendish’s notorious deportation order became a thing of the past. Reason, not fear, would rule.

The change that stirred the most controversy was her moratorium on human testing. Miranda suspended the deck sweeps, and announced that no more clones would be grown for medical experimentation. The moratorium upended researchers who had grown used to human guinea pigs. They railed that without human testing, the cure would surely elude them.

Miranda held her ground. “The cure has eluded us
with
human testing,” she told them. “The end no longer justifies the means. Keep searching. Everything will be fine.” They adapted to her edicts. Human ash no longer sprinkled down when the wind blew the wrong way.

Los Alamos settled into its traditions of hard work, hard play, dinner conversations that could be brilliant or mundane, high school Bach concerts, jazz sessions in garages, and petty office politics. Kids got up in the morning, went to class, played video games. The world seemed further away than ever. No storm clouds brewed. The sky stayed relentlessly blue. During lunch hour, beautiful homemade kites of every shape and color climbed up from the labs, drifting back and forth above the forest and the tan and white canyons.

Every morning, Miranda seemed slightly different to Nathan Lee from yesterday. Her green eyes no longer burned from dark recesses in her face. The stubbornness in her jawline softened. Nathan Lee watched her sleeping, or moving about in the kitchen, and tried to put words to it. She was more and more beautiful to him. But the change was something larger than that. He watched her touching the young widow’s shoulder, listening to the impassioned bench worker, or bulling her way with stubborn Council members. They looked up to her. He had seen it in Alpha Lab. Now it was the whole city, giving allegiance to a woman barely out of her teens.

For a time, their peace was disturbed only by Cavendish. Not a day went by that he didn’t condemn Miranda’s softness or pepper them with doomsday predictions. His gnomelike face infiltrated their cable TV and computer screens. He ranted about conspirators in their midst, about the approach of a great army of plague victims, about research being suppressed. He unsettled them, or tried to.

But the shadowy conspirators never materialized. Marine snipers kept watch off the prow of the Mesa, and there was no army of plague victims, only a few hundred wretched pilgrims who returned to camp on the bright orange valley floor. As for suppressed research, the scientists had never known such freedom.

People began to remark that their former tyrant had never been so alive as when he was, effectively, dead. They also remarked that Cavendish had never looked so dead. His illness had thinned him to a twig. His lip curled back on his teeth. He came and went like a poltergeist, never staying for longer than a sound bite. He would speak his poison, then fifteen seconds later be gone, and they would be watching
Jeopardy
or
Frasier
reruns again.

N
ATHAN
L
EE WENT BACK
to the only job he could think of. He returned to the year zero, or tried to.

The city’s fascination with the clones was ended. The appearance of desperate pilgrims in the valley had robbed the Year Zero Hour of its charm and entertainment value. Antiquity seemed dangerous once again. And so the clones lost the celebrity status they’d never known they had. After a three-week absence, Nathan Lee wasn’t sure the tribe would have him back. Izzy made it perfectly clear: no way. The yard had become much too dangerous for him and Nathan Lee. “Might as well jump off a cliff,” he said. “I’ve been tuning in to our friend Eesho over the yard microphones. He’s told the others what Miranda showed him, the clone in glass, and what she said, that she created him. He made it sound like the bottom of hell. They know we’re somehow part of it. They think we’re demons.”

“Not a chance then?” Nathan Lee said. His regret had less to do with having a job than having a place. He’d grown used to the high walls and the company of misfits, and now he shared their sense of dislocation. He felt confused and, ever since Denver, had fastened on the peace of their little fishbowl in the sun. He wanted their ignorance of the world. He was tired of hope.

“Forget it,” said Izzy. “Ochs poisoned the well.”

“Ochs?” Was there no end to the man?

“Freaking folly. Him and Eesho.”

“What did he do?”

“Got himself reborn. You were in decon. It’s all on tape.”

Izzy guided him through the tapes of Ochs’s interview with Eesho. It had taken place in a room with only a bare table and chairs. The date of the interview was October 11, one day after Nathan Lee’s descent into Denver. The camera showed Izzy sitting to one side of the clone and Ochs, who kept wiping his palms. He looked anguished, but excited, even feverish. Izzy hit fast forward and the three characters began twitching in their seats.

“Skip the first few hours,” said Izzy. “Broken record. Ochs asked the same questions you and I did. Got the same rap. Straight from the Book.”

“So is Ochs the one who scripted him?”

“Not in a million years. He wouldn’t dare. He makes that poor worshipping fool Ross look downright atheist.”

Izzy slowed the tape, listened a moment, sped it forward, slowed again. “Here we go,” he said. “Ochs asked him about his missing years, the gap between his late teens and late twenties.”

It was one of the great mysteries of the New Testament. For centuries preachers and theologians had wondered about Jesus’ evolution from a precocious kid to the King of Kings. The theories were rife, some even claiming he must have traveled to India for a Beatles-style enlightenment with the gurus.

“How did Eesho field that one?” asked Nathan Lee.

“Claims he went off to university, you know, temple,” said Izzy. “He said his father farmed him out to the Teacher of Righteousness. Don’t know where that came from.”

“The Dead Sea Scrolls again,” said Nathan Lee. “It’s a story about a teacher and his favorite student, who betrays him with some kind of heresy. In the Scrolls, the student is called the Wicked Priest.”

“Well Eesho was no rebel student,” said Izzy. “Much too proper, this lad.”

“Interesting, though. Eesho’s showing another side. He keeps stepping out of the Gospels, into the Scrolls.”

Izzy shrugged. “Safe place to do it,” he said. “The mystery years. You can say anything you want and nobody can really argue otherwise.”

Nathan Lee watched the tape. He could tell Ochs wanted to pursue the missing years, but that he’d come with heavier freight to unload.
“Now, as an academic matter,”
Ochs said on the tape,
“I’d like to visit this issue of miracles and healing. Did you ever perform miracles?”

Izzy translated the question, and Eesho responded in the affirmative, one more rote recitation of the loaves and fishes and healing the blind and crippled. Ochs appeared pleased, even inspired.

“Talitha, cuma,”
Ochs said. That seemed to be the extent of his Aramaic. Nathan Lee recognized it, straight from scripture. He knew the place, he knew the miracle. It meant
Little girl, arise.
Ochs was tossing it out there to see if he got a bite.

Eesho looked at him with increasing ascendancy.
“I spoke those words,”
he said,
“and the child woke up.”

“And Lazarus?”
said Ochs.

Eesho gave a spare rendition of raising that corpse, too.

Nathan Lee knew where Ochs was heading. The context was all important. Chronologically, just a day earlier in Denver, Nathan Lee had refused to dig up Lydia and Grace. Now Ochs was about to ask the clone to do the job Nathan Lee wouldn’t.

“You claim to be able to raise the dead,”
Ochs reiterated.

A minute later, Izzy gave the response.
“He wants to know if you’re asking him for a miracle.”

Ochs said yes.

Izzy protested.
“This is getting out of hand.”

“Does he have the power to raise the dead? Ask him,”
said Ochs.

Izzy grudgingly asked, and gave the reply.
“If anyone tells you, ‘Look here is Christ!’ don’t believe it. Because false christs and false prophets will rise and show signs and miracles to deceive you.”
Mark was it, or Luke? Nathan Lee couldn’t remember anymore.

Ochs grew very still. His eyes grew brighter. Nathan Lee was confused. Eesho was, of course, refusing to perform a miracle…because he couldn’t. But Ochs looked thrilled to be denied.

“What about the plague?”
asked Ochs.
“Ask him if he can lift its curse from us.”

“You ask me to undo God’s judgment,”
Eesho responded.
“If I say no, then what? Will you condemn God so that you can be justified?”

“What about mercy?”
Ochs asked.

“God causes everything on the face of the whole earth to happen,”
said Eesho.
“Do you understand? You must prepare yourself like a man. Repent in dust and ashes.”
Back to the Old Testament. Job. The man was like a grasshopper, bounding from one text to another.

No sooner had Izzy finished translating than Ochs leapt to his feet. His round face took on a fixed, eerie look.

“Now here it comes,” Izzy muttered to Nathan Lee.

Ochs walked around the table. The clone got up from his chair and backed against the wall. Ochs towered above him, a good foot taller and twice his weight. “Scared him silly,” remarked Izzy. “Eesho thought he was about to get the royal thrashing. Thought he’d stiffed the wrong man.”

For a moment, Nathan Lee thought the same thing. Eesho had just given Ochs the high hat.
“Back off, there,”
Izzy told Ochs.

Instead, abruptly, Ochs dropped to his knees at the clone’s feet. His jowls shook. His tree trunk arms raised up.

“What are you doing?”
Izzy objected on tape.
“Get to your feet, man. You’ll twist him.”

“It was like he’d been waiting to kneel all his life,” Izzy commented to Nathan Lee.

“Forgive us,”
said Ochs.

Eesho looked down at Ochs. It was hard to tell who was converting who. In the span of an instant, Eesho’s alarm changed to disbelief. He looked like a man who’d just won the New Jersey lotto.

“I hear your words,”
Eesho replied,
“but not your heart.”

With that the clone placed his hand on Ochs’s bald head, then shoved him away. Ochs fell to one side. He began to weep with joy, or release.

It was, Nathan Lee realized, a moment of perfect unison. It was like watching the virus find its host. Which was the virus, and which was the host, Nathan Lee couldn’t say.

H
ALLOWEEN CAME
. The streets filled with monsters who were hideous and princesses who were beautiful. The pumpkins were fat and orange. The moon was striped with clouds.

Tara went as Madeline dressed in blue, her bangs cut square, her muscled frame square, too. Nathan Lee and Miranda trailed her in the dusk, holding hands. Tara didn’t seem to notice that she was trick-or-treating by herself. If she heard the distant children whispering about her, she didn’t pay attention. She was too busy counting her harvest, flashing her light in the bag after each house. Back at the Captain’s house, while they drank hot cider and ate pumpkin pie, she counted every piece of candy, then started over again at one hundred.

“I’ve never seen a Halloween like this,” said the Captain. “Look at all that loot.”

“That means the people loved Madeline,” his wife declared.

Down on the floor with her candy, Tara smiled broadly.

Ever since Tara had moved in with them, the Captain and his wife had grown younger. The framed pictures of their own daughter—dressed for prom, on a river rafting trip, holding a fish, standing beside a Navy jet in her flight suit—had been crowded out by Tara’s artwork. Tara filled their quiet with songs. There was life in the house again.

“…eight, nine, ten….” Tara was dividing her bounty between five dolls, who sat side by side along the wall. She kept sneaking looks at Nathan Lee. Miranda nudged him with mock jealousy.

Nathan Lee was happy tonight, and also sad. He didn’t say what he was thinking, that Los Alamos was starting to face up to its end. This
was
the best Halloween ever, but for a reason. The great pretending had begun. He’d seen it last summer in towns across America, the grownups beguiling their children, making believe the good times had no end.