She felt restless and it was hard to breathe. Her head itched. She pulled her scarf off, let it hang loose around her neck. “Tell me about the virus.” She wanted to know how the Mirror felt when she tried to heal people and they died; she wanted to know how it was to get sick and not know whether or not you were going to die. She needed to know what to expect.
Instead of switching off the board’s field and pushing the pieces flat to close it up, Lu Wai pulled each piece free one by one and laid them down carefully in some pattern Marghe could not follow. “The virus has a long incubation period, very long,” the Mirror said, intent on the little pawns and castles, “so we’d all been down here a while and settled in before anyone got sick. The first one I saw was called Sevin. He was a plastics engineer. Started coughing one day out by the perimeter, and didn’t stop. I gave him, tried to give him, emergency CPR, but he died. Took just six hours. His death was the easiest I heard of.” She examined the pieces critically, closed the box, ran her finger along the seal, and slipped it into a belt pouch. She untied her scarf, began to fold it into smaller and smaller triangles. “The next one I dealt with was a woman, named Margaret. She liked to cook, she told me.
I remember that because I hate to cook. That’s all I could think of, how I hate to cook, while she coughed and her eyes swelled up and she screamed with a headache not even mycain would help. She survived, though.” She tried to smile. “Made me a thank-you dinner.
“By then we knew it was some kind of virus that integrates with human cell DNA, a bit like a retrovirus. People, mainly men, were dead all over the planet.
Communications were bad, still are, so we couldn’t call everyone in for medical attention. Lots of people are still officially missing, that’s how we lost such a lot of equipment, sleds and such, but we know that most of them are dead. We tried everything against that virus we could think of, but none of the usual nucleoside analogues made a dent in its multiplication. We tried the interferons and synthetic analogues of 2' ,5'-oligoadnylate; nothing worked. When we figured out that the female mortality rate was around twenty-three percent—”.
“I thought it was less than twenty.”
Lu Wai smiled again, but this time it was a hard sliding of muscles like tectonic plates. “Officially it is, if you don’t count those ‘missing.’ ” She paused. “You want me to go on?”
Maighe nodded. Her skin was tight and cold, as though someone had rubbed her down with a handful of ice. It was different down here, in the close, perfumed air, with the clouds massing overhead; Lu Wai had seen it on a scale Sara Hiam could not even imagine.
“So, we saw that more men than women were dying; we tried hormones. Didn’t work. Maybe it’s some kind of estrogen metabolite that inhibits the virus, but we don’t know which one. There might even be more than one. We were desperate. We tried isolation. It didn’t work, of course—Jeep’s a hard, mean little virus, uses everything and anything as a vector: air, water, saliva, sperm, food, feces…
everything.”
“Does it affect animals?”
“Doesn’t seem to.”
“So where does it come from?”
“That’s what I’d like to know. If we had the records of the first settlers, maybe it would turn out that it was a genetically altered virus that got transferred from an animal to a human, and became something else.”
“It would have to have had much more than one crossover point. That seems to preclude accidents.”
Lu Wai smiled, that hard sliding of muscle again. “You haven’t seen a man stuck out in the boonies for weeks on end. He’ll fuck anything after a while.”
Marghe wanted to believe this was Mirror humor, but Lu Wai did not seem amused. “I didn’t know there were any large animals here.”
“I haven’t heard tell of any. Maybe they all died, too. But it
Instead of switching off the board’s field and pushing the pieces flat to close it up, Lu Wai pulled each piece free one by one and laid them down carefully in some pattern Marghe could not follow. “The virus has a long incubation period, very long,” the Mirror said, intent on the little pawns and castles, “so we’d all been down here a while and settled in before anyone got sick. The first one I saw was called Sevin. He was a plastics engineer. Started coughing one day out by the perimeter, and didn’t stop. I gave him, tried to give him, emergency CPR, but he died. Took just six hours. His death was the easiest I heard of.” She examined the pieces critically, closed the box, ran her finger along the seal, and slipped it into a belt pouch. She untied her scarf, began to fold it into smaller and smaller triangles. “The next one I dealt with was a woman, named Margaret. She liked to cook, she told me.
I remember that because I hate to cook. That’s all I could think of, how I hate to cook, while she coughed and her eyes swelled up and she screamed with a headache not even mycain would help. She survived, though.” She tried to smile. “Made me a thank-you dinner.
“By then we knew it was some kind of virus that integrates with human cell DNA, a bit like a retrovirus. People, mainly men, were dead all over the planet.
Communications were bad, still are, so we couldn’t call everyone in for medical attention. Lots of people are still officially missing, that’s how we lost such a lot of equipment, sleds and such, but we know that most of them are dead. We tried everything against that virus we could think of, but none of the usual nucleoside analogues made a dent in its multiplication. We tried the interferons and synthetic analogues of 2' ,5'-oligoadnylate; nothing worked. When we figured out that the female mortality rate was around twenty-three percent—”.
“I thought it was less than twenty.”
Lu Wai smiled again, but this time it was a hard sliding of muscles like tectonic plates. “Officially it is, if you don’t count those ‘missing.’ ” She paused. “You want me to go on?”
Maighe nodded. Her skin was tight and cold, as though someone had rubbed her down with a handful of ice. It was different down here, in the close, perfumed air, with the clouds massing overhead; Lu Wai had seen it on a scale Sara Hiam could not even imagine.
“So, we saw that more men than women were dying; we tried hormones. Didn’t work. Maybe it’s some kind of estrogen metabolite that inhibits the virus, but we don’t know which one. There might even be more than one. We were desperate. We tried isolation. It didn’t work, of course—Jeep’s a hard, mean little virus, uses everything and anything as a vector: air, water, saliva, sperm, food, feces…
everything.”
“Does it affect animals?”
“Doesn’t seem to.”
“So where does it come from?”
“That’s what I’d like to know. If we had the records of the first settlers, maybe it would turn out that it was a genetically altered virus that got transferred from an animal to a human, and became something else.”
“It would have to have had much more than one crossover point. That seems to preclude accidents.”
Lu Wai smiled, that hard sliding of muscle again. “You haven’t seen a man stuck out in the boonies for weeks on end. He’ll fuck anything after a while.”
Marghe wanted to believe this was Mirror humor, but Lu Wai did not seem amused. “I didn’t know there were any large animals here.”
“I haven’t heard tell of any. Maybe they all died, too. But it
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