Glimmering

“It’s everywhere, Jack. It’s on the street, in IZE. Do you know about ice?” Her voice dropped. “GFI holds the patent on the IT discs. Without IZE they’re just 3-D TV. But with the drug—” She hunched her shoulders, shivering. “It’s incredible. I did it a few times, before I met Leonard. The chemical effects produced by the fusarium aren’t addictive—but IZE is. GFI owns the pharmaceutical company that developed it. It’s not a street drug at all. GFI owns it; GFI has made it addictive; they’re making it available now, through drug cartels. Eventually, once everything’s restored, they’ll market it. They’ve got the sky stations repairing the ozone layer, so they’ll be able to continue broadcasting. They’ve got the IT technology to tie into TV and the web. And they’ve got IZE.”

Jack stammered, “But—why?”

“Why not? It’s not a conspiracy. If GFI really can repair the atmosphere, the rest will fall into place. Everyone will just pick up where they left off. The technology exists to retrofit televisions for IT, and GFI has already invested in front-end manufacturing sites in Malaysia. It’s not such a big deal, really. Except that an incredibly powerful new psychotropic drug has been introduced all over the world, as part of a multinational corporation’s five-year plan,” she ended. “So you see that Leonard Thrope is just a very small messenger—”

Jack struck her hand. “How do you know all this? Who told you, who started it, how do you know?”

She tilted her head toward the door. “The movie. The documentary materials.”

She ducked from the alcove, out of sight and back again. “Here.” She handed him a stack of legal-sized papers. “Look.”

A rusted paper clip clamped them together, that slick heavy mimeograph paper he hadn’t seen since childhood. He glanced at the top sheet. Japanese, but there were scattered English words in there too, amidst tiny smudged photographs—

!!URGENT DOSSIER!!

[[ WAR CRIMES DIVISION ]]

II: UNIT 909

::

//UN. 731//

:CODE: CHERRY BLOSSOMS AT NIGHT

UNIT 731

He turned the page, scanning down columns of unreadable text until he found a list of Japanese names printed in English. One name seized him—

KEISUKE HANADA

He heard Leonard’s voice, saying, “He told me that he’d come to the monastery in 1946, right after the war… He had set up this sort of laboratory—”

“Oh my God,” breathed Jack. “He’s a fucking war criminal—what the fuck are they doing?”

Nellie crouched beside him. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe he’s making amends. Because this drug could be a fantastic thing. Some day we may all think of him like Louis Pasteur.”

Jack thought of invasive bacteria that did not respond to antibiotics; of viruses that replicated hundreds of times in a heartbeat. He drew a finger to the inner corner of his eye, felt the faint encrustation, grains of emerald sand.

Nellie nodded. “Blue Antelope, all those fundamentalists—they think we should all just die—”

She touched the scarred aureole. “They think that would be making amends. They’re wrong. I was with them for a while, but not anymore. When I first got sick, I just wanted to kill people—do you know what I mean?”

Jack stared down at his hands. “Yes.”

“But then Leonard contacted me about the documentary, and after we met he gave me the Fusax. And after a while I saw that it could be different. That it was different.”

She reached for the ripped T-shirt at the edge of the futon, plucked something from it. A needle. “Look—”

She took the bedsheet, held it so that he saw the candlelight through it, showing the fabric’s weave. “Here—”

She gave him one end of the sheet to hold. She began piercing the cloth with the needle. Tiny perforations appeared. In one spot the fabric grew weaker, thinner, until a small hole gaped there and the flame glowed, as though it had burned its way through the cloth.

“Do you see?” said Nellie. She took the sheet from him and held it taut, moved it back and forth to make a shifting cloud of light and dark against the candle glow. “Where there are enough of us—people like you and me, people who’re taking Fusax, or ice—it can be like this. Our consciousness can weave itself together. We can make a new web, a new pattern; even if we are making holes in the old pattern. See?”

Jack shook his head. “No.”

But it did make a kind of sense, as though he could intuit her meaning on some submolecular level, without intending or wanting to. Which angered and frightened him; because he did not see a web, but legions of alien creatures swarming in his body, microbial threads corkscrewing themselves into his brain.

It sickened him.

“I’m dying,” he said, and looked up at Nellie. “I’m dying.”

“We all are,” she said. “I know, everyone always says that; but it wasn’t until I got sick that I really understood.