Then the barriers are breached. Shadrach turns away momentarily from the procession of the damned to investigate the window of a curio shop — grotesque wood carvings, zebra-skin drums, elephant’s-foot ashtrays, Masai spears and shields, all manner of native artifacts mass-produced for the tourists who no longer come — and someone gives his elbow a sharp stinging blow. He whirls, instantly on guard. The only person at all near him is a small withered old man, chalky-skinned, rag-clad, white-haired, fleshless, who is moving back and forth in front of him in an erratic semicircle, making little harsh clicking noises deep in his throat.
A terminal case. Eyes blotched and dim, belly distended. The disease eats slowly through epithelial tissue, indiscriminately ulcerating any flesh in its path; the lucky ones are those whose vital organs are pierced quickly, but only a few are lucky. Eighteen years have passed since the Virus War launched the organ-rot upon mankind; Shadrach has read that many who were infected in the first onslaught are still waiting for the end to come. This man looks like one of those eighteen-year cases, but he can’t have long to wait now. Every interior mechanism must be seared and corroded; he must be nothing but a mass of holes held together by frail ropes of living fabric, and the next erosion, wherever it strikes, will surely be fatal.
He seems to want Shadrach’s attention, but he is unable to come to a halt in the proper place. Like a robot with rusty contacts he keeps overshooting, going by Shadrach in jerky convulsive motions, stopping, clashing internal gears, pivoting with a wild flapping of slack dangling arms, coming back for another try. At last on one desperate pass he succeeds in clapping his hand around Shadrach’s forearm and anchors himself that way, standing close by him, leaning on him, rocking gently in place.
Shadrach does not pull away. If he can do no more for this maimed creature than give him support, he will at least do that.
In a terrible apocalyptic caw of a voice, a sort of whispered shriek, the old man says something to him that appears to be of high importance.
“I’m sorry,” Shadrach murmurs. “I can’t understand you.”
The old man leans closer, straining to reach his face up to Shadrach’s, and repeats his words with even greater urgency.
“But I don’t speak Swahili,” Shadrach says sadly. “Is that Swahili? I don’t understand.”
The old man searches for a word, wrinkled lips moving, throat bobbing, face taut with concentration. There is a sweet, dry odor about him, the odor of faded lilies. A lesion in one cheek seems nearly to go completely through the flesh from inside to out; probably he could thrust the tip of his tongue through it.
“Dead,” the old man says finally, in English, delivering the word like a monstrous weight that he drops ai Shadrach’s feet.
“Dead?”
“Dead. You — make — me — dead—”
The words fall one after another from the ravaged throat without expression, without inflection, without emphasis. You. Make. Me. Dead. Is he accusing me of having given him the disease, Shadrach wonders, or is he asking for euthanasia?
“Dead! You! Make! Me! Dead!” Then more Swahili. Then some strained rheumy coughs. Then tears, amazingly copious, flooding in deep channels down the dusty cheeks. The hand that grips Shadrach’s forearm tightens with sudden incredible strength, crushing bone against bone and wringing a sharp yelp of pain from him. Then the unexpected pressure is withdrawn; the old man stands free for a moment, tottering; from him comes a hoarse clucking noise, an unmistakable death rattle, and life leaves him so instantly and completely that Shadrach has a quasi-hallucinatory vision of a skull and bones within the old man’s tattered clothes. As the body falls Shadrach catches it and eases it to the pavement. It weighs no more than forty kilos, he guesses.
What now? Notify the authorities? Which authorities? Shadrach looks about for a Citpol, but the street, busy a few minutes ago, is mysteriously empty. He feels responsible for the body.
He can’t simply abandon it where it dropped. He enters the curio shop to find a telephone.
The proprietor is a sleek, plump Indian, sixty years old or so, with large liquid eyes and thick dark silver-flecked hair. He wears an old-fashioned business suit and looks dapper and prosperous. Evidently he has witnessed the little curbside drama, for he bustles forward now, palms pressed together, lips clamped in a fussy oh-dear expression.
“How regrettable!” he declares. “That you should be troubled in this way! They have no decency, they have no sense of—”
“It was no trouble,” Shadrach says quietly. “The man was dying. He didn’t have time to think about decency.”
“Even so. To importune a stranger, a visitor to our—”
Shadrach shakes his head. “It’s all right. Whatever he wanted from me, I couldn’t provide it, and now he’s dead. I wish I could have helped. I’m a doctor,” he confides, hoping the disclosure will have the right effect.
It does. “Ah!” the shopkeeper cries. “Then you understand these things.” The sensibilities of doctors are not like those of ordinary beings. It no longer embarrasses the proprietor that one of his shabby countrymen has had the poor taste to inflict his death on a tourist.
“What shall we do about the body?” Shadrach asks.
“The Citpols will come. Word gets around.”
“I thought we might telephone someone—”
A shrug. “The Citpols will come. There is no importance. The disease is not contagious, I understand. That is, we are all infected from the days of the War, but we have nothing to fear from those who display actual symptoms. Or from their bodies. Is this not true?”
“It’s true, yes,” Shadrach says. He glances uncomfortably at the small sprawled corpse, lying like a discarded blanket on the sidewalk outside the store. “Perhaps we ought to phone anyway, though.”
“The Citpols will come shortly,” the shopkeeper says again, as if dismissing the subject. “Will you have tea with me? I rarely have the opportunity to entertain a visitor. I am Bhishma Das. You are American?”
“I was born there, yes. I live abroad now.”
“Ah.”
Das busies himself behind the counter, where he has a hotplate and some packets of tea. His indifference to the body on the street continues to distress Shadrach; but Das does not seem to be an unintelligent or insensitive man. Perhaps it is the custom, out here in the Trauma Ward, to pay as little attention as possible to these reminders of the universal mortality.
In any event Das is right: the Citpols do indeed arrive swiftly, three black-skinned men in the standard uniforms, riding in a long somber hearselike vehicle. Two of them load the body into the car; the third peers through the shop window, staring long and intently at Shadraeh and nodding to himself in an unfathomable, oddly disturbing way. The Citpols finally drive away.
Das says, “We will all die of the organ-rot sooner or later, is this not true? We and our children as well? We are all infected, they say. Is this not true?”
“True, yes,” Shadrach replies. Even he carries the killer DNA enmeshed in his genes. Even Genghis Mao. “Of course, there’s the Antidote—”
“The antidote. Ah. Do you believe there is indeed an antidote?”
Shadrach blinks. “You doubt it?”
“I have no certain knowledge of these things. The Chairman says there is an antidote, and that it will soon be given to the people. But the people continue to die. Ah, the tea is ready! Is there, then, an antidote? I have no idea. I am not sure what to believe.”
“There is an antidote,” says Shadrach, accepting a delicate porcelain cup from the merchant. “Yes, truly there is. And one day it will be given to all the people.”
“You know this to be fact?”
“I know it, yes.”
“You are a doctor. You would know.”
“Yes.”
“Ah,” Bhishma Das says, and sips his tea. After a long pause he says, “Of course, many of us will die of the rot before the antidote is given. Not only those who lived in the days of the War, but even our children. How can this be? I have never understood this. My health is excellent, my sons are strong — and yet we carry the plague within us too? It sleeps within us, waiting its moment? It sleeps within everyone?”