Memento Mori

chapter one

We don’t know how it vectors.

Last week the big news was that it isn’t respiratory. RICE had that data over a month ago, but official channels didn’t publish it. We just don’t know enough.

We do know this: no matter what happens tonight, it’s the beginning of a new world. A new era. In one minute, on one single day, everything is going to change. We will never be the same.

Johanna Henning looked over the paragraphs she had scribbled. They weren’t quite what she wanted, didn’t capture the recklessness of the moment, but that would come later.

The Metz Club was crowded, and though it was hours earlier than the regulars would arrive on a normal night, on this night they were already present and in their usual places. The fifty-seven screens that formed a multi-angled sculpture in the center of the floor were each banded with Link logos against static grey, instead of projecting fifty-seven different images, reflections, and angles.

Johanna shook her head as she looked at the static sculpture. When it was alive and broadcasting it was easy to ignore. Then it was simply one more of the mutating images on the dance floor, indistinguishable from the patrons gyrating to the throbbing music.

It was stupid to be here. Public Health officials had closed the bars and the clubs, the cafes and the theaters, at the first signs that infection was spreading out of control. The Metz Club hadn’t cared. Arne, the owner, had opened up every night since the injunction, and his clientele was only pleased by how much more outrageous it was to be present.

The ban on public entertainment had finally been lifted last week, cautiously, though a very few of the cheap and avant-garde bars like the Metz had never closed their doors. Most of the modest neighborhood establishments were gone for good, their owners retired to the country or settled in a new line of work the week the injunction had come down. Fantasy arcades and the expensive lounges that served handmade snacks and unwatered drinks had a new breed of customer, those who had once patronized the low-rent corner pubs that had catered to retail clerks and city office workers.

Johanna had even wandered by one of the expensive lounges on her way to the Metz the previous evening. Solid bureaucrats who looked uncomfortable in their clothes pretended they were rich and important. No one was having any fun. So she’d returned to the Metz again to watch the people who laughed and drank at the end of the world.

She’d been watching that crowd for almost a year now, holding herself aloof while wishing she were one of them. They were mostly younger than she, and she had to remind herself that she had things they wouldn’t understand: her relationship with RICE, her degrees, all the approbation of the intellectual world these youngsters had not yet earned.

And she had her past. These kids were brash and clean and had never been touched too deeply by pain, she thought. They had never tried to leave themselves behind. Not the way she had. Seeing them laugh and drink and flirt she was certain that they had lived the idyllically artistic lives like famous writers and painters of the past. And she envied them their ease and the histories she had created for each of them.

Johanna Henning sat alone at the small table near the front door so she could watch who came and went as she scribbled on her memory pad. The one in front of her now was new, bought in honor of the occasion.

No matter how today’s vote had gone, this was still a beginning. And there was every reason to think that the Quarantine measure had passed overwhelmingly. The people of the city were decent people, thought of themselves as clean and upright and honorable. The Quarantine was the honorable thing to do. Even in the Metz Club, where it was always dark and loud, where nearly early morning the regulars were hard at work ensuring that it boasted a decadence to rival Old Earth’s—even here, the people thought of themselves as too moral to infect the universe.

Even the underground fringe is full of moral fervor.

Johanna sat at her table and read over her observation, frowning. Why should she accept the city’s solid citizens at their own appraisal? She remembered how they’d gone to the Metz in the days before the ban, pretending they were being daring, and how they’d always left before the real club came to life. She thought about that some more, but the flashing colored lights over the bar cycled through faster: someone new was coming in. She looked up and lost her train of thought.

Peter Haas had arrived, wearing the beat-up long leather coat that hadn’t been seen since his grandfather’s day—until Peter had made it fashionable again. As always, he was precisely fifteen minutes early. Which should give him enough time to work his way through the crowd at the bar and get his Jägermeister just as the announcement was read over all of the Metz Club’s fifty-seven screens.

At least they’re still watching me, Peter Haas thought. God, I hope that girl doesn’t make it over here before I get to the bar. I don’t even really want to be here, but there isn’t anywhere else to go. The chess parlor would be really awful, like I’m supposed to care or something. And Senga will say something decent and proper and I’ll look like a jerk.

Besides, look at them. They’re thrilled I’m here. Damn, I bet I even get a free drink. It’s crowded tonight. Idiots.

But I’m okay. I’m safe. I’m golden. I took whatever the stuff was in that prescription so nothing’s going to happen to me. They can’t afford anything to happen to me. I’m gonna live forever.

He pushed into the back of the pack trying to order, Arne the owner and bartender having halved the price of the Metz’s most popular drinks for the day of the announcement. But Peter was one of the city’s darlings, had been since he had become the youngest ranked Chess Master in the history of the Second Vector at the age of fourteen. When he had won the last three Virtual Sector Tournaments he had cinched his place forever in the life of the city.

Arne waved the bills away as the bartender handed Peter the drink. No one complained. Everyone in the Metz Club was glad that Peter Haas was there, was not ashamed to be one of them. That even with his popularity he still preferred the company of latex-clad dancers and pounding heavy bass music—unlike his only competition in the city, the other chess prodigy, Senga Grieg.

Senga was a proper schoolgirl, with dark green skirts and neatly braided hair. When she and Peter turned out together at some tournament they made a contrasting pair that pleased the city no end. Peter proved that the city was sophisticated. Senga showed that it was civilized. Together they proved to the entire Second Vector that they were no longer mere colonials, but a center of education, civilization, the arts and sciences. That the city was prosperous and established, that they were no longer at the fringe of refinement, but a true center of culture.

And it was true. Even the Link acknowledged them, after only seven generations, to be the leading intellectual force in the Vector. Reis was prosperous, the land was rich when it was cleared, and the people were hardworking. Excess sons and daughters were sent to the city to become thinkers and teachers and musicians when they couldn’t inherit the land.

Peter took his Jägermeister over to a large table already overfull of university students and artists and would-be poets that Johanna had watched for the past year. They shoved over roughly to make room, greeting him somewhat less heartily than usual. Everyone was subdued. Peter sat down at the place they had made for him, the place with the best view of the multiscreen, which still flickered with static grey.

Peter always did have impeccable timing. He sat down, said soft hellos to Maria and Christian and Renata and Michael, who were immediately around him, and then took a long drink. When he put the glass on the table and looked up, as if on cue, the static cleared to blue/magenta/yellow/red and the big section split into the first fourteen, all identical images of Mayor Anna Brecken standing in front of City Hall. The same picture was reflected through the other cubes placed in precarious stacks throughout the dark space, but Peter still had the best position in the room.

The Mayor looked like she always did, steel-colored hair arranged in a helmet around her face, blue-grey eyes that were always just a touch wary, and a blue suit that had become her trademark. Maria wondered idly if the Mayor owned any other clothes, but was promptly hushed. Maria would chatter away through the entire announcement if no one quieted her, and not be aware that she had inconvenienced anyone.

Today our city has proven overwhelmingly, once again, that we prize not only talent and prosperity, but virtue as well, the Mayor said slowly. "By over ninety percent, we have voted to impose the Quarantine as outlined in the referendum. No longer will anything physical leave this city. Only what is brought by drone will come in. Contamination will be contained until the disease is defeated. Until a cure is found.

"It will be difficult and it will be worse than that. We will have to face the future alone as no single group has been alone since the beginning of the Colonial Era. The only comfort we will have is to know that we have done the right thing, the proud thing, the hard thing.

Someday this plague will pass. We shall find a cure, a prevention. We will not let this thing defeat us. And then we will step back into the community of the universe knowing we have fulfilled our moral responsibilities. We have the chance to prove that in this, as in so many other things, humanity has risen above its past, and can bequeath to our descendants boundless future.

She looked up out of all fifty-seven screens that surrounded them. The Metz Club was, for the first time since Arne had opened the doors over ten years ago, completely silent. Not even the squeak as someone shifted in a chair could be heard.

During the Quarantine we will receive nothing from the rest of the Vector, the Mayor continued, her voice rising with stirring tones. But that does not mean that we will be cut off or alone. No, we shall be able to reach out with our images, with our thoughts and ideas, to the rest of Colonial Space. And what is best here will live forever on a hundred Colonial Worlds and Trader ships. Truly, how often does anyone physically leave the world at all? It is our minds that leave, that travel, that play chess against others throughout our Vector. And our minds will still travel, our culture and heritage and learning, our contribution to the wealth of humanity, will not be diminished in the slightest. No matter what happens, no matter what the cost, this time in the life of our city will live forever in the history of humanity, in the minds and culture of all generations to come.

The screens faded. And now the underroar of conversation broke against the Mayor’s dissolve. Arne mumbled about turning on the music and giving out beer for free. The end was already in sight. People laughed at him. Half price was irrational enough for them.

At Peter’s table, Michael was talking. It doesn’t really change anything, he said sententiously. No one ever really leaves the city. Why would anyone want to? Even you, Peter, when you play you play through RICE. So nothing changes. It’s a grand gesture, nothing more.

Jens and Stephan made faces at each other. It means that we’re not going to be able to export anything, Stephan said. He was a graduate student in economics and so frequently found it necessary to make pronouncements. That means that we cannot afford to buy imports. We won’t get the hard-tech we need from Peshera, especially when you add the cost of transports. We can’t send them back! And no matter how well things like RICE work, they need hardtech in places like the Morastig. The original equipment that cleared the inner ring is worn out, dead. And if we don’t get anymore, there goes opening new districts.

I’m sure we’ll get food shipments, if we need them, and medicines, Renate said softly. How many times have we sent off shipments to help relieve a famine, or to fight cholera on Mir? I don’t think we will be friendless.

Stephan shook his head as if Renate had said the most incredibly stupid or naive thing. "So we get a few charity shipments—if we get them. Who is going to think about charity for us, anyway? We’re rich, we’re prosperous, our farms outproduce anyone else’s in the Vector. No one will send us anything. And if they do, if, it won’t help. We can’t control what we get unless we have something to sell in return. So it’s all over."

It was all over before the first case was reported, Peter said, thinking carefully, as he would in a match.

It always is, Christian replied, smiling slightly. So, we’re all going to die. We’re all going to die anyway. Everyone is going to die. It doesn’t change a thing.

Maybe they will find a cure, Maria said, shaking her head. RICE is working on it, and even before the Quarantine question came up it was locked in all over the Vector. So it really is all a gesture, and in a few months or so we’ll get some vaccine and that will be the end of it.

That’s what you get with a university education, Jens said, sneering. Believe the party line.

Stephan shook his head. You know, Jens, sometimes you’re really way out of line. Maria is right. RICE may find a cure. Or someone else might. And I think if anyone else had said it you would agree.

Around the table people nodded slightly. Jens’s jealousy and dislike of Maria were well known. Just because Maria’s family was wealthy and had not disowned her, whereas Jens had managed to get thrown out of three departments before the Provost had thrown up her hands and written the letter of dismissal.

Well, whether or not they find a cure we’re all going to die some day, Christian cheerfully said again, so in the end it’s all true. He raised his glass. To the beginning of a new era. To the first day of the Quarantine.

He shouted so loudly that half the club heard him. And half the club raised their glasses with him. Even Johanna looked up from her memory pad and gazed around the room carefully before going back to writing even faster than before.

So, what do we do now? Stephan asked, flippant.

Arne reminded them that all drinks were half price, as if that settled the matter. The table decided on Jägermeister for everyone. Jägermeister was an import, and soon, Peter thought, there would be no more. Might as well drink up while it was half price.

Arne turned on the music, and after the silence and the anticipation it sounded louder than usual, and more hollow. Couples got up to dance, gyrating aimlessly over the tiny floor between the front tables and the bar. The screens showed different scenes, all of them changing with the music, all of them seeming about blood and pain and loss. The new era had officially begun.

Johanna Henning had not returned home. She had drunk way too much and didn’t remember why she had staggered over to the table of intellectual snobs and cynics in the corner. But someone had gotten her to her office just off Heisenberg Square.

Now the dancing morning light made her head hurt. Flickers of rainbow darted over the walls, thanks to the fountain in the middle of the square. Chatter from the square below seemed louder than usual, though that could well be the aftermath of drinking to the end of the world.

Johanna rubbed her eyes and counted to five as she took a deep breath. Water, she needed some water. That would at least wash the ugliness from her tongue. She made her way slowly down the hall to the water cooler. After three cups full she felt—not better, but not quite so bad. She wanted to avoid the whole day, curl up and sleep and wake up tomorrow, when it would all be over.

There was no way to do that. She was awake, she wasn’t home, and she was stuck. Damn reality.

She took one more refill on her cup with her and returned to her workstation in the open center facility. No one else was there. They should be there, she thought. No matter what else was going on in the city, RICE still had to run basic services. And with the Port Ceremony coming up, the tram schedule would have to be put on an emergency—a holiday?—schedule.

Someone had to inform RICE, and stay with the system during implementation and the Port shutdown, which no doubt RICE would experience as some objectionable minor trauma. RICE had already been enough trouble. Johanna sighed. She had not planned to take on the city system along with her research.

She had once thought that mathematics was a safe place. It was far away from the emotions and death she had touched back home in the Stahlquelle before she had come to the city. There was no feeling, only beauty and elegance and eternal truth. What was, was forever. And she could prove it. Unlike all the unprovable axioms handed down in the white church where Alex was buried.

She shut that place from her mind. Instead she stared at her board. She could have gone into full interface, she had her own full-link chair in a private cubicle. But she didn’t want that now. She wanted to see the data expressed in the pristine terms that she found so satisfying, human history and death all compressed into a few lines of minimalist symbols.

All that anyone wanted to know about the plague was there, except how to cure it. All over, people were talking about a cure, about something that could be done to control the dying that had come to Reis so quietly and had suddenly become the center of existence. No one really believed that this would last very long. An anomaly, that was all. Disease was history, like famine and flood and fire, like all the reasons their great-great-grandparents had left the old planet to create the new. Nothing too awfully bad was permitted to happen on Reis. It was against their law.

Johanna’s head hurt. She stared at the equations on the board, squinted at them. But they did not change. They had not changed since she had put together the first conjectures.

At first she had hoped she was wrong. All of human history, after all, was merely history. It was a thing the people of Reis had avoided. They had left all that history behind. This was a new place, a new world. There was no reason for Gaia and all her problems to follow them into the void.

And yet, she couldn’t change a single notation on the board. She had reworked everything and had RICE triple-check, then again, and then again. There was no mistake. The plague on Reis was a pandemic of perfectly classical proportion. Mathematics didn’t lie. The frequency and transmission pattern of disease and the intensity of it followed all known and recorded patterns. She couldn’t ignore the data or discard it.

Johanna rubbed her eyes again. She was fuzzy from the night before, that was all. She’d always been a maudlin drunk, and had never been able to handle a hangover.

The light grew more brilliant as the morning grew late. The whole office was alive with light, sparkling as if this were some glorious new birth. And still no one else had arrived to monitor the day’s work.

With a sense of unfairness at the necessity, she turned off her displays and leaned back in the chair. The visor closed around her face and her hands and forearms sank into the gel of the conducting arms. She watched the dislocation as she came into interface, and wished to hell she’d kept her eyes shut like an arcade client.

The interface resolved and she settled in the department’s default metaphor. It looked like what someone envisioned old university libraries to be, the main reading room heavily paneled and full of comfortable leather chairs at thick polished tables. It was nothing at all like the university where Johanna had studied, where central library files were downloaded in an information dispensing center between candy and ice cream machines.

Johanna threw herself down in one of the overstuffed chairs and raised her eyes to the door. RICE never kept her waiting. Already it was entering the reading room wearing its favorite persona of a ruddy-cheeked professor with chalk streaks on his jacket. With his wispy hair and his habit of wiping his glasses before he began any statement, it was hard for Johanna to remember this was a fairly young AI. Which was the purpose of the guise. RICE often had to assert authority, and it was easy to defer to this kindly professor, to talk to him and accept his solutions. Even Johanna, who knew RICE well, usually ceded the persona authority.

Yes, yes, it’s been quite a rush, RICE said, spreading papers over the table between them. A slight rise in crime last night, to be expected with the announcement and all. And while we have ruled out respiratory transmission, this thing at the Port is still not a good idea. Doesn’t everyone know they shouldn’t congregate?

Johanna shrugged. I suppose the city administrators thought that it would be better for morale this way. Besides, people are going to want to go to church. And it’s not as if staying in has exactly slowed down the contagion rate.

RICE looked worried. That’s the problem, isn’t it? We’re going to have to consider some of the stranger vectors, something we haven’t tried before. I’m already working on several of the double scenarios. The additional data from the latest Reporting Call has been very useful.

And? Johanna didn’t dare hope there were enough new data to tell them what to do, how to stop the spread of the plague.

I’ve ruled out city water sources as a prime agent, though water could possibly be part of a larger cycle, RICE told her.

Oh, so we can shower in regular water again, Johanna said. Her voice reflected less enthusiasm than she felt. Sponge baths in distilled water, dispensed from the neighborhood Disease Control Centers, had never been satisfying.

Maybe we could use the public baths as sanitation centers, she thought aloud. The memory of a proper soak and cleaning in the steam room and the brisk feel of a lemon-scented towel over her newly scoured skin filled her with longing. Some of the bathhouses had never really closed, but Johanna worked for the city and obeyed the injunction.

There are no major contraindications for that, RICE said hesitantly. But it is not prudent. Even if the bathhouses are not part of the problem, they are still easily eliminated.

Johanna snorted but said nothing. It was sensible until they understood exactly how the disease was passed, but RICE didn’t have a sense of smell and didn’t know how the oil coating her hair and rising from her pores made her feel.

If we’re looking at a double cause paradigm we have no reason to keep the bathhouses closed, she pointed out. And it would improve morale.

RICE did not understand stinking or feeling filthy, but it did have some respect for morale.

Perhaps we should add the variable for consideration, it said, rubbing the illusionary glasses clean on the hem of an equally unreal handkerchief.

So, what is our agenda today? the AI asked briskly.

With the thing at the Port, we’re going to have some serious transport problems, Johanna began. Not that transport was her job, but there was no one else around.

RICE shook his head. I have it all under control. Here. See? He pulled out some schedules from the pile of papers in front of him. This one—no, this one. And I’ve got Records covered as well.

You don’t want any input? she asked, amazed. Usually RICE wanted to check all the details of the city’s arrangements first.

RICE looked at her with an expression just short of disapproval. You are obviously, ummmm, not feeling well just now, he said gently. Perhaps a nap would do you some good?

The interface faded around her. She had been dismissed, and she was ashamed. RICE had never seen her hung over before. She hadn’t realized that the condition read so clearly.

Johanna looked at the empty stations, the dust dancing over the low area partitions, and decided that the day was too lovely to stay inside. There might not be many fine days left. What the hell. RICE was doing everything to monitor density on tram usage along with everything else. Johanna was going down to the Port.

Peter Haas woke near noon. His head was dull and throbbing, his mouth felt like a pig wallow, and all he wanted was to go back to sleep. Someone banged dishes in the kitchen, and he abandoned that plan. Instead he heaved himself out of bed and made his unsteady way to the bathroom.

There were only two aspirin left in the