The one thing that was different outside of work, I suppose, was that my husband was home more than usual, often sleeping in his bed or napping on the sofa. He even came home earlier on his free nights, and when he did, I could hear that he moved slowly, even heavily. Normally, he walked lightly, but now his walk was different, and when he climbed into bed, he groaned, quietly, as if he were in pain, and his face often looked puffy. He had been working extra hours at the Pond, just as I had been working extra hours at the lab, but I didn’t know if he knew what I knew, which wasn’t very much, anyway. People who worked at the Pond and the Farm did vital jobs, but just as I didn’t know what they were actually doing in those jobs, they often didn’t, either. It could be that he was staying late, for example, because a lab—maybe even a lab at RU—had urgently requested a certain kind of material from a certain kind of plant, but just as I didn’t know why I was preparing the mice, he wouldn’t know why he was preparing a sample. He would just be told to do it, and he would. The difference was that I wasn’t curious about why I was told to do anything; it was enough for me to know that my work was necessary, that it was useful, and that it had to be done. But my husband had been two years away from completing his doctorate when he was declared an enemy of the state and expelled from his university—he would want to know why he was asked to do things. He would even, perhaps, want to contribute an opinion. And yet he never would.
I remember that, once, I had been very upset after one of my lessons with Grandfather about the sort of questions I should ask people. I was often frustrated after our sessions, because I was reminded of how difficult it was for me to do and say and think things that seemed to be so easy for other people. “I don’t know how to ask the right questions,” I said to Grandfather, even though that wasn’t exactly what I wanted to say, even though I didn’t know how to say what I really wanted to say.
Grandfather had been quiet for a moment. “Sometimes not asking questions is a good thing, little cat,” he said. “Not asking questions can keep you safe.” Then he looked at me, really looked at me, as if he were memorizing my face and might never see it again. “But sometimes you need to ask, even if it’s dangerous.” He stopped again. “Will you remember that, little cat?”
“Yes,” I said.
The next day at work, I went to see Dr. Morgan. Dr. Morgan was the most senior postdoc at the lab, and he oversaw all the techs. But even though he was the most senior, the Ph.D.s didn’t want to be like him. “God help me if I turn out like Morgan,” I sometimes heard one of them say to the others. This was because Dr. Morgan didn’t have a lab of his own and was still working for Dr. Wesley, seven years after he’d begun. In fact, Dr. Morgan and I had joined Dr. Wesley’s lab in the same year. Grandfather had told me that every lab would have at least one postdoc who never left, who stayed on and on, but I should never mention that fact to them, or remind them of how long they’d been there, or ask them why they hadn’t gone somewhere else.
So I never had. But Dr. Morgan had always been nice to me, and, unlike many of the other scientists in the lab, he always said hello to me if he saw me in the hallway. Still, I rarely sought him out except to ask for permission to leave early or come in late, and as I didn’t know the best way to approach him, I spent about five minutes waiting near his station while most of the lab was away eating lunch, not knowing what to do and hoping he would eventually look up from his work.
Finally, he did. “Someone’s watching me,” he announced, and turned around. “Charlie,” he said. “What are you doing, just standing there?”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Morgan,” I said.
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
“No,” I said. Then I couldn’t think of what else to say. “Dr. Morgan,” I said, quickly, before I lost my nerve, “will you tell me what’s happening?”
Dr. Morgan looked at me, and I looked back at him. There had always been something about Dr. Morgan that reminded me of Grandfather, though for a while, I couldn’t figure out why: He was much younger than Grandfather, just a few years older than I am. He was a different race. And, unlike Grandfather, he wasn’t acclaimed or influential. But then I realized it was because he always answered me when I asked a question—other people in the lab, even if I asked them, would tell me I wouldn’t understand, but Dr. Morgan never said that.
“It’s a zoonosis, and definitively a hemorrhagic fever,” he finally said. “And it’s spread by both respiratory aerosols and droplets as well as by bodily fluids, which makes it profoundly contagious. We don’t yet have a clear sense of its incubation period, or of how long the period is between diagnosis and death. It was identified in Brazil. The first case in this country was found about a month ago, in Prefecture Six.” He didn’t need to say that this was a lucky thing, as Prefecture Six was the most sparsely populated of the prefectures. “But since then, we know it’s been spreading—we don’t yet know how fast. And that’s all I can say.”
I didn’t ask whether that was because Dr. Morgan didn’t know more or because he couldn’t tell me more. I just thanked him and returned to my area, so I could think about what he had told me.
I know that the first thing someone might wonder is how this disease got here in the first place. One of the reasons there hadn’t been a pandemic in almost twenty-four years is because, as I’ve said, the state closed down all the borders, as well as banned all international travel. Many countries did the same. In fact, there were only seventeen countries in total—New Britain, a cluster in Old Europe, and a second cluster in Southeast Asia—with reciprocal movement rights for their citizens.
But although no one was allowed to come in and no one was allowed to go out, it didn’t actually mean that no one came in and no one went out. Four years ago, for example, there was a rumor that a stowaway from India had been found in a shipping container at one of the ports in Prefecture Three. And as Grandfather always said, a microbe can travel in anyone’s throat: a person’s, of course, but also a bat’s or a snake’s or a flea’s. （This is a figure of speech, as snakes and fleas don’t have throats.） As Dr. Wesley always said, all it took was one.
Then there was another theory, one I would never repeat—though other people did—that the state invented the diseases themselves, that half of every research institute, even RU, was dedicated to making new illnesses, and the other half was dedicated to figuring out how to destroy them, and that whenever the state thought it needed to, it deployed one of the new diseases. Don’t ask me how I know that people thought this way, because I couldn’t say—I just do. I can say that my father thought this way, and it was one of the reasons he was declared an enemy of the state.
But though I had heard these theories before, I didn’t believe them myself. If that had been true, then why wouldn’t the state have deployed an illness in ’83 or ’88, during the uprisings? Then Grandfather would still be alive, and I would still have him to talk to.
I would also never say this, but sometimes I wished there would be another disease from far away. Not because I wanted people to die but because it would be proof. I wanted to know for certain that there were other places, and other countries, with people living in them and riding their own shuttles and working in their own labs and making their own nutria patties for dinner. I knew I would never be able to visit these places—I didn’t even want to be able to visit them.