By summer, the only people transmitting live on the Net lived in isolated pockets in rural areas. Rafe monitored every waking hour. Grimly he reported that some of those people were falling ill, too, from a dozen different diseases.
“The winds go everywhere,” Clari said. She was having a very bad pregnancy, morning sickness and anemia and edema and half a dozen other things Cord couldn’t name. He wanted to spend every minute with her, and he wanted, from guilt, to never see her at all. Fortunately, the decision was not his. Every person on the farm was working as hard as possible all day, every day, to make the place self-sufficient. There were a lot of things they were going to have to do without, but right now the aim was simple survival.
Taneesha said, “You mean… everybody in the world might die?”
“Except us,” Emily said. She was too thin. She hadn’t eaten more than snatched mouthfuls in days. Neither had Dr. Wilkins, who was much older and looked much worse.
Clari said, “How would we know if anybody else survives?”
Lillie said, “Rafe will hang onto the Net until nobody at all posts or until the satellites fall out of the sky. But there might be really isolated groups that survive who don’t have Net access. Inuit or Laplanders or someone.”
Cord didn’t know who those people were, and he didn’t ask. It wouldn’t help anything. And the truth was, he didn’t really care.
Uncle Scott cared. He said somberly, “When I was born, the world held six billion people. After the first biowar there were two billion left, about the same as there had been in 1900. Today there’s maybe two hundred million people on Earth. I’m estimating, of course, extrapolating from what few figures I have. Two hundred million is the same number as when Christ was born. And the number is going down.”
Emily said gently, “Scott, the changed ecosystems probably can’t support many more than that, anyway.”
“And who changed them? Us. Humans. We’re all as guilty of these deaths as the people who fired those bioweapons.”
To Cord, that was just silly. He and Uncle Scott and Aunt Emily hadn’t killed anybody. Somebody in one of the back bedrooms began to play the music cube: “Don’t Matter None to Me.”
“Population projections for this year,” Uncle Scott said, “once were ten billion people. Instead, we have suigenocide.” He walked heavily to his room and closed the door.
Cord didn’t know what “suigenocide” was. He didn’t ask Aunt Emily. She and Uncle Scott were talking about the past, and the past was over and gone. Cord honestly couldn’t see the point. “We’ve lost so much,” Aunt Robin constantly whined. But Cord couldn’t see that, either.
Everything that mattered to him was here, now.
Then, in April, the cattle suddenly began to die.
CHAPTER 22
“Oh, God,” Lillie said. “Scott, what can we do?”
“Nothing until we figure out what’s killing them,” Scott said testily. “Send the range crew out for blood and tissue samples. Mark each cow carefully so we know what came from whom. Emily and I will get to work as soon as you bring the samples back.”
“No,” Emily said.
It was another farm meeting in the great room. As usual, only about half were present; the rest couldn’t be spared from vital work, or were grabbing a few hours of sleep, or, in the case of Clari and Felicity, were throwing up from pregnancy. Another meeting, but different, Cord thought. He could remember when farm meetings had announced new income, new cattle purchases, new gains in water supplies. Now all the news was bad.
The room even looked different. The windows were closed tightly, a minor effort to keep out windborne micros. Alex and Dakota had built a series of entryways with shallow pans of chemicals in each to wash off your boots. People kept their outdoor clothes there, and only there, stripping to light inner layers and washing their hands before they came into the big house. The house had acquired an unaired, stale smell. And hot; this was July. Not even the thick walls could keep the house cool.
Dr. Wilkins said harshly, “What do you mean, ‘no’? Don’t go difficult on me, Emily!”
The young woman, her blond hair dirty and lank, faced the old man who had been born the same year she had. With difficulty she said, “Scott, listen. The people who never went up to the pribir ship… all that you got for genetic modifications was the olfactory alterations. You remember, at Andrews no doctors could find any other expressed alterations, and you and I haven’t found any either. That means you and Uncle DeWayne and Aunt Robin don’t have enhanced immune systems. Yours are no better than Jody’s or Carolina’s, and you’re much older. I don’t think you should handle any of the cattle samples, in order to avoid infection. I can do it all.”
“You can’t! You don’t know enough to—”
“Yes,” Emily said. “I do.”
Dr. Wilkins looked at her for a long time. Finally he nodded, saying nothing. Then he turned and walked slowly out of the room, closing the door. Cord thought of a cow he’d once seen, old and unable to keep up with the herd, lumbering away from the herd to lie down in shade.
Emily said, “I—” and stopped.
Cord’s mother said clearly, “You did the right thing, Em. Now everybody get back to work. DeWayne, Robin, you stay indoors, just in case.”
Ashley muttered, “Like anybody cares if that old bag Robin gets infected.”
“Shut up,” Taneesha said. The two girls glared at each other. At least, Cord thought, they couldn’t have another fight. Both their bulging bellies would keep them from getting close enough to each other to swing.
The cattle samples showed an engineered virus that Emily had never seen before. She took printouts in to Scott, who hadn’t seen them either. Scott chafed at not being able to work with the live samples, but Lillie, DeWayne, and Emily remained firm. Scott never left the big house to go anywhere, especially not down to the small house taken over as Emily’s laboratory.
“It kills bovine cells, all right,” Emily said, “but I think it’s species specific. Look, here—”
Scott listened. “I think you’re right.”
Jody, hovering in the doorway, said, “How many head are we going to lose?”
Emily answered. “All of them.”
“All? The entire herd?”
“Yes.” Her thin face looked pinched. She knew what it meant. They were all going to have to survive on corn, chickens, and hunted game… unless that went, too. What then? There was enough food stored for maybe six months, but no more than that. The corn, genetically enhanced, gave a high yield as long as it was irrigated constantly. But no more food was going to come in to Wenton for trade.
Jody said, “It’s almost calving time. Will the calves—”
“I don’t know,” Emily said. “Isolate the calves as soon as they’re born, and wash each with dip right away. Keep them from contamination from their mothers.”
He stared at her. “Emily, how the hell can we do that? You’ve never done a calving. There’s blood and what you’d call ‘tissues’ all over the place. You can’t keep the calves from ‘contamination by the mothers.’ And even if they could, the calves have to nurse, for God’s sake. How can we—”
“I don’t know how!” Emily shouted. “That’s your job! Just do it!”
Emily never lost her temper. Dr. Wilkins put a hand on her arm. Emily shook it off. Cord, listening, went to find Keith and Spring, to tell them the herd was going to die and the calves had to be isolated from the milk that would maybe have kept them from dying, too.