“What do the attackers want?” Gavein asked, thinking of his wife.
“To kill you,” Yull answered simply. “In my opinion, it’s not possible. One proof of which was that crack-up on the street in front of your house. The cordon is really to protect people from their own stupidity.”
“I’m concerned about my wife. Let it be broadcast, now, on television, that I’m being taken to the Division of Science.”
“Okay. I’ll see to that.”
“What’s on the other side of the cordon?”
“We are. Normal life continues, to a degree. Normal, if not for these deaths. Each one accidental, explainable, and invariably in accordance with the Significant Name of the victim. But invariably, also, with your assistance…”
“If the deaths are accidental and explainable, then why this panic?”
“Because so many are dying. Quite aside from the connecting factor, this is an epidemic.”
“An epidemic?”
“Absolutely. There are so many more deaths than before the correlation—that’s you—was introduced. A difference of maybe twenty percent.”
The convoy rushed on, its sirens off now, only the colored lights flashing.
“What are you measuring with that sensor?”
“Radiation from you. It’s background level. That is, not a factor. We’ll find something eventually, I think. Everything has a cause.”
“The cause may not be logical,” said Omar. “It may be pure coincidence. Though the chance of that is infinitesimally small. And yet an event, no matter how improbable, must take place eventually if one waits long enough.”
“I don’t believe in miracles of probability,” said Yull dismissively.
47
The ride, at full speed, went on for hours. They tore through streets that the police had closed off to traffic.
Later, there were no lines of spectators. An occasional pedestrian looked with indifference at the vehicles rushing past. Life went on as usual here. No one connected the convoy with the news on television.
Suddenly they had left all the buildings behind—unheard of in Davabel, where urban sprawl covered the continent, except for the airports. Ayrrah was similarly populated. Empty stretches could be found in Lavath, to the north—eternal ice covered the land there—and also in the southern reaches of Llanaig, where the intense sun had turned the land into desert.
The empty stretch here was the result of the leveling of houses. Bulldozers had gone at them wholesale.
In the distance rose the mighty complex of the Division of Science.
They stopped at a barbed-wire checkpoint. Soldiers peered curiously into the ambulance.
Why are the idiots staring? thought Gavein. If I really am Death, they’re dead.”
Passing the checkpoint, the convoy made for the buildings.
“All this demolition, it’s in my honor?”
“That too,” muttered Yull. “A lot of effort has gone into this. The DS was given a bundle of money.”
“Who’s in charge?”
“Boggs is the head, but Siskin’s running things, since the plan is his.”
“Plan?”
“There were several proposed. His was chosen. But others are being kept in reserve, in case his fails.”
“This is all very flattering.”
Omar asked Gavein to get into a plastic suit similar to theirs. He was supposed to inhale through a filter, exhale into a tank. The thin material didn’t hinder conversation. After the cars pulled up to the institute, the ambulance interior was sprayed with a strong disinfectant.
“What’s this for?”
“Siskin’s plan tries to leave nothing out. We’re fairly sure there’s no bacillus involved, but why take a chance?”
The sterilization didn’t take long. The ambulance door was opened by people in similar suits, and Gavein was escorted through a membrane tunnel to the building.
He was taken to a specially equipped section of the institute’s hospital for infectious diseases. Everyone he met was covered with plastic. He was asked not to remove his suit until the results of the bacteriological tests were in. Even the toilet was designed hermetically: the suit attached to the seat, and his behind was automatically washed with a stream of water, then dried with a stream of hot air. The unit packaged the excrement as if it were a treasure. The same with his urine and spit. Gavein did not meet the brains of the project, did not even see them on a screen. The specific tests were conducted by biologist Yull Saalstein and physicist Omar Ezzir.
Their superior was a physician who obviously wanted to keep his existence a secret. Gavein was amused by the chain of command and by the cowardice behind it. All he would have to do, after all, was direct his attention to the unseen doctor.
Medved’s people had set up a clearinghouse of information on the deaths. They were looking for chains of causality between the victims and Gavein. No detail was too small to be entered into the database. The most insignificant fact, like a thread of a spiderweb, could lead to the perpetrator who sat unwitting at the center. The researchers were less interested in the cause of death than in how the death fit the victim’s Significant Name. The rest was a police matter.
The questions put to Gavein dealt with minutiae, since the basic facts had been known for some time. He repeated things that he had repeated several times already. This exhaustive interrogating made no sense to him: if you analyzed carefully enough what any citizen did, you were bound to find some link between him and the fate of any other citizen.
But the invisible leaders had faith in Medved and his statisticians. Deaths were being classified by their degree of connectedness to Gavein. The death count, broken up into these categories, was displayed daily on the DS monitors. Each time, Gavein looked for a death unrelated to him, but the number in that column—labeled Apparent Lack of Connection with GT—was always zero.
He was not allowed to use the telephone, but they promised him that every day someone would call Ra Mahleiné and speak with her. He could listen to her voice recorded on tape.
“Dr. Nott sends me pills regularly. I’m stronger after taking them and have stopped sleeping during the day,” said Ra Mahleiné in one recording. “They’ve provided me with a wheelchair. Lorraine pushes me along the streets around the house. Laila is not doing as well. Fatima asked if her daughter could push my wheelchair sometimes. Wilcox has hanged himself, and since then Brenda does nothing but drink. I never see her sober. The buildings around us are all abandoned, the stores boarded up. Our necessities, even the alcohol for Brenda, but whatever we ask for, are brought by police van.”
There was a rattling sound in the receiver.
“We don’t pay for a thing. It’s like having unlimited credit with the government bank. This is not good, not normal.” She paused, then continued. “Zef started reading Nest of Worlds. He says he’s undergoing mind thaw, because there are no lectures now to deplete his gray matter, so he’s taken up the book and the matter of Wilcox. He also says he needs to choose a topic for his thesis. Edda wanted to throw the book out, but Zef told her that since his Name is Murhred, it’s not the book that threatens him but other people. Also, he told her that he read in the introduction that the book would finish off only Wilcox. I don’t know if that convinced her, but for the time being she has stopped talking about chucking books into the fire. Zef is reading a lot, taking notes, many notes, because this will be his thesis. You wouldn’t believe how he’s changed. He cut off his Mohawk. He wears gray. He can pester me with questions for an hour, for example asking if his clothes have achieved the Lavath standard for dullness. His enthusiasm gives him energy, not at all the way it was with Wilcox. The book destroyed Harry, you could see day by day how he was falling apart, how the end was coming.”