"Yes, but they don't have you as a mom, so it would take courage to say it to them. Give it up, Mom, this is the kind of argument I can't lose."
"I didn't know it was an argument."
"Oh, come on," said Mark. "You try to convince me I'm a perfect son, and that gets me to tell you all the bad things about myself, and then you reassure me I'm not bad, so I tell you worse things. I swear, you ought to be training priests how to take confessions. Or interrogating captured terrorists. You're like a waterboard without all the gasping and gagging and crying."
Cecily hugged him and laughed so hard she cried. "I'll tell you something, Mark. God does have a mission for you, and that's to make me happy while you're growing up in my home."
"Well, then, things are working out nicely for both of us," he said. "But then I think of Chinma and I remember that it can all be taken away. Men show up with guns, or a disease strikes and kills half the family, and … " Then he shrugged.
"And that wouldn't take away anything from the happiness we already had," said Cecily. "When your father died, it hurt me worse than childbirth, worse than a broken bone. But a broken bone doesn't erase all the running you did before, and Reuben dying didn't take away a single happy moment of our lives, and childbirth—wow, that left me with prizes."
Chinma was standing in the doorway to the back yard. "There are many, many cars," he said.
"Cars?" asked Cecily.
"On all the roads. Going every way. How do they know where to go?"
Cecily was confused by the question. Chinma had ridden in cars and trucks—he knew that they didn't steer themselves. So the question wasn't about cars, it was about people. "They're all busy, doing their jobs, taking care of their lives. So one car is headed to the store to buy food, another one is taking someone to his job, and all those people get up in the morning and decide what they need to do and then they do it."
"In cars," said Chinma.
"Not if our president can help it," said Cecily. "Cars are burning up all the oil in the world. We need to get rid of as many cars as we can, and change the rest to electricity."
Chinma nodded wisely. "Then you can walk and be strong," he said.
"Yes," said Cecily, laughing. "That would be good."
"Are you afraid?" asked Chinma.
"Of what? I'm afraid of a lot of things."
Chinma nodded wisely. "Your boy Mark, he's afraid."
Mark's jaw dropped. Cecily certainly understood why. It was such a rude thing to say right in front of him. But then, wasn't that better than saying it behind his back?
Before Mark could recover himself enough to reply as angrily as he would obviously want to, Cecily chuckled and spoke. "Afraid to climb trees? I would hope so! What you do is very dangerous," she said.
Chinma flashed a brief smile. "Trees never hurt me."
"Well of course not," said Cecily. "It's the ground that hurts you, when you fall out of the tree."
Chinma laughed. "Ground never hurt me, either!"
It took a monkey's sneeze to destroy your world, thought Cecily. "You have the climbing experience to be safe in the trees. Mark doesn't. It's sensible for him to be afraid of climbing trees—especially climbing as high as you do, where the branches are so small. But he's brave about other things, you'll see."
Chinma looked at Mark coolly, as if sizing him up. Mark turned to his mother, keeping his expression calm, but obviously saying to her, Can you please get him off the subject of we?
"Is he a soldier?" asked Chinma.
"He's only thirteen years old!" said Cecily.
"In Liberia and Sierra Leone, they made them soldiers. Ten years old. Eight years old."
"And that was a monstrous crime," said Cecily. "Those men who forced little children to fight and kill, God has seen what they did and condemns the evil in their hearts."
"God sees but he does nothing," said Chinma.
"He forgives those soldier children for doing things they didn't understand." But Cecily knew as she said it that she wasn't answering what he was really saying.
"God is weak," said Chinma. "God is afraid."
He sounded so angry and contemptuous that at first Cecily wanted to cry out an affirmation of her faith: No, God is good! But how could she say that to this boy, after all he had suffered through?
Mark did cry out, "God is not afraid!" When he himself had felt under attack, Mark had said nothing; but when it was God being attacked, he could not keep his silence. Both responses said good things about Mark.
"Sometimes," said Cecily, "I hear my children quarreling, but I don't stop them, I keep doing my work, and after a while I hear them make peace with each other. If I stepped in every time they quarreled, then they would never learn how to make peace by themselves."
Chinma nodded—which Babe had warned Cecily did not mean agreement, but rather comprehension; or not even that: Nodding could simply mean, "I understand that you are through talking and I will pretend that I understood so you don't go to the trouble of saying it again."
"God lets us do terrible things to one another," said Cecily. "And he lets nature do terrible things, like this sneezing flu."
"The doctors said it isn't flu," said Chinma.
"The nictovirus. Monkey sickness. Does the name matter?" asked Cecily.
Chinma kept his face solemn when he said, "It mattered to the doctors. They made everybody stop saying 'sneezing flu.'"
Had she caught a twinkle in his eye? Was Chinma mocking the doctors?
Mark spoke up. "They can't cure it, so all they can do is make everybody call it by the name they chose." God, apparently, Mark would defend; the doctors were on their own.
"Let me tell you something," said Cecily. "Back in the days of the Roman Empire, Christians were still a small minority when a plague struck. Very much like the sneezing monkey flu." Which won a brief smile from Chinma—and an eye-roll from Mark, as if to say, What are you doing, joking about this disease that he brought back from the jungle and that killed half his family?
"The plague was very bad," Cecily went on. "About a third of the people who caught it died. It terrified everybody. The rich fled the cities and went to their country estates. Even the doctors ran away, because they couldn't cure it. If a family member got sick, the family would lock them in a room, or throw them out of the house, or run away from the house so they wouldn't all catch the disease."
"Come on," said Mark.
"Families in the Roman Empire weren't as close as ours are," said Cecily. "Husbands were often twenty years older than their wives. They practiced infanticide, they treated daughters as if they had no value, husbands could order their wives to have an abortion even though they knew it might well kill her. They didn't value the kind of family loyalty we have."
Mark still looked skeptical. Cecily figured that was a good thing, that he had a hard time believing families could be as uncaring as they were in the days of the Roman Empire.
Chinma, for his part, had no trouble believing this. He was nodding, more to himself than to her.
"But among the Christians," said Cecily, "things were different. Women were valued. Infanticide and abortion were forbidden. And when a family member got sick, the rest of the family took care of him, even though they knew they might easily catch the disease themselves and die from it."
Now it was Chinma's turn to look skeptical, while Mark was reassured.
"They really did—the Roman writers of the time, even the ones who hated Christians, commented on the fact that not only did Christians nurse one another through the plague, they even went and took care of sick pagans, not just their pagan friends, but total strangers."
"And God protected them, right?" said Mark.
"No," said Cecily. "God did not protect them. Christians got sick at exactly the same rate as anybody else. But they didn't die at the same rate."
"So they were healed," said Mark, demanding confirmation of his faith.
"In a way," said Cecily, "but it wasn't miraculou
s. Not like you're thinking. When people are sick, their bodies are doing all they can to fight the infection. But they need food and water to keep up the fight. When everybody runs away, there's no one to provide that food and water. No one to wash them or bathe them to try to keep the fever down. No one to put blankets on them when they're cold. No one to take away their bodily wastes. So even if their body might have fought off the infection, they died because they got too weak to keep fighting, or they caught a secondary disease from the filth around them, or they were weakened by exposure to the cold. You see?"
"So the Christians' nursing people helped them live?" asked Mark.
"Exactly. It seems that with good nursing, only about ten percent of the people who were afflicted died. So a perfectly understandable kind of miracle happened. Because Christian love triumphed over their fear of this terrible disease, only one out of ten Christians who got sick died of the disease, instead of three out of ten. And even though the Christians doing the nursing usually got sick, they knew someone else would nurse them, and so they, too, had a much better chance of survival."
"And the pagans they helped," said Mark, "I bet they became Christians."
"I don't know if you can become a true believer out of gratitude, but maybe you listen to the gospel more receptively if the people teaching you about Jesus had already proven to you that they had a Christlike love for you. Maybe, out of gratitude, you give God a chance to touch your heart."
Mark was already leaping ahead of the discussion to the conclusion that mattered to him. "So that's why Christianity took over the Roman Empire," he said. "More of the pagans died because nobody nursed them. More of the Christians lived, and the pagans they helped became Christian—"
"And after two such terrible plagues, a century or so apart, Christians were no longer a tiny minority, they were a very large minority, and they had a powerful reputation for sincerely living up to their beliefs."
Chinma turned away and walked angrily to the kitchen door, as if he were leaving. Then he turned back, and his face bore a terrible expression of grief and rage, and tears were flowing down his cheeks. He had shown almost no emotion till now, and now he was showing more emotion than Cecily had ever seen one face contain.
"Where were the Christians!" he shouted. "My mother and brothers were Christian but they blamed me and shut me out the door. I was all alone to be sick! Where were the Christians!"
Then Chinma shoved open the glass storm door and ran out into the back yard and scampered back up the tree.
"Wow," said Mark.
"That poor boy," said Cecily. "Nobody told me that his own family didn't nurse him when he was sick."
"Aren't there any Christians in Nigeria?" asked Mark.
"Millions of them," said Cecily. "And for all we know, they're mostly doing what they should, caring for one another. It's just a tragedy that his own family didn't live up to the standard of faith set by the Christians in the early Church."
"I would never leave you or any of the family," said Mark fervently. "I'd take care of you until I caught the sickness myself, and I'd keep taking care of you until I died."
"I know you would," said Cecily. "And I would do the same for you."
"You can't tell me that people in the Roman Empire didn't love one another!" said Mark. "I don't believe it."
"There are people today who don't love one another, Mark. And in a society where no value is placed on family loyalty of that kind, there would be a lot more people who would feel no obligation to put their own lives at risk for the sake of their family. And besides, what if the whole family was sick all at once? Who takes care of one another then? The Christians sought one another out, took care of people who weren't in their family. But the pagan religion didn't have that kind of loyalty. I'm not making this up, Mark. Even the emperor Julian, when he made a last-ditch effort to stamp out Christianity and restore paganism, demanded that pagan priests do what Christians were doing—take care of other people. The pagan writers of the time all affirmed that the Christians acted just the way I'm describing."
"Yeah, well, this is proof then," said Mark.
"Proof of what?"
"That America is definitely not a Christian nation, or we wouldn't be blockading Africa, we'd be helping."
"The President is trying to keep the disease from spreading throughout the world. He's trying to save lives."
"And all those people who ran away from the plague in Rome, they were just trying to save lives, too, right? Their own!"
"Mark," Cecily began.
"Where did you get all this stuff?" asked Mark.
"A book," said Cecily. "I read it several years ago." She got up from the kitchen table and went to the shelves in the living room. It was hard to remember where it was—it's not as if the house was on the Dewey decimal system, so books often got put wherever there was an empty space on the shelves.
But there it was, Rodney Stark's The Rise of Christianity. She slid it off the shelf and handed it to Mark, who had followed her into the room. He looked at the cover. "How do I know this isn't just crap?" asked Mark.
"You read it, you see what you think of the evidence he assembles, and you make up your own mind."
"It's not like he was there at the time."
"Often being there at the time," said Cecily, "means you don't see things clearly at all."
Mark looked up at her with his most sarcastic expression. "So you mean just because you have meetings with the President, that doesn't mean you're always right?"
"No, it doesn't," said Cecily, more than a little outraged. "I never said it did!"
Mark didn't even hint at an apology. In fact, he could barely hide his delight at having offended her. This was so not like him—he usually couldn't stand offending anybody and was all over himself with apologies.
He held up the book and backed toward the stairs up to the bedrooms. "I'm going to read this," he said. "I'm going to find out whether Christians are any different from other people."
"No matter what you find out," said Cecily, "you know me and you know our family and you know that you would never have to face a plague like this alone the way Chinma did."
"That's because we're a good family," said Mark. "Not because we're Christians."
"So you agree with Chinma," said Cecily.
"He's the only one around here who's actually lived through a plague," said Mark. And then he was gone.
DEFENDING THE DEAD
Human beings are not designed to keep secrets. Every aspect of our being is shaped for the sharing of information—through speech, gesture, facial expression, posture, and every other deliberate or inadvertent sign of emotion and intent.
Thus it should not surprise us that every would-be dictator, tyrant, conqueror, prophet, colonizer, politician, artist, and dogcatcher in history clearly signaled his intentions long before he acted, and in plenty of time for others to prevent them. Neither Hitler nor Churchill, neither Pol Pot nor Abraham Lincoln, ever did anything they hadn't told us and shown us they would do.
That they are rarely prevented has more to do with our inattention, cowardice, or ambition to ride his coattails than with his particular skill. Dogs might run from the dogcatcher as soon as they see the net, but they rarely tear out his throat and kill him, which is, of course, the only rational course of action for the dog that values its life, liberty, or happiness.
Jungles were not the ideal environment for using exoskeletons. The foliage didn't know it was supposed to get out of the way, and it had a nasty habit of hiding awkward geographical features. So there were no leaping moonwalks in the woods. That was for open country and urban combat. Instead, wearing the Bones allowed them to walk at a brisk, near-running pace without any fatigue.
With UASs patrolling the entire boundary zone between the Muslim north and the epidemic-plagued south of Nigeria—heavily armed drones like Predators and Reapers, or a few old unarmed Shadows and Hunters—Cole had a pretty good idea of where the enemy was, and which t
owns were their targets.
Not that any targets made sense for the Nigerian army—or, more properly now, the Nigerian Muslim army, the northern army, the Hausa-speaking army. Did they really think they could keep the epidemic at bay by creating a no-man's-land between the nicto-ridden south and the Muslim north? This epidemic was going around the edges of any wall you could put up. Eventually, it would get into northern Nigeria through Niger or Burkina Faso or Chad or Cameroon. They didn't have the money or manpower to seal their borders, and someone would get through, sneezing.
But for now, their scorched-earth policy was working—there were no cases of nictovirus reported in the Muslim north. And the Muslim nations of North Africa, beyond the Sahara, were perfectly happy for their brothers in Nigeria to do the bloody work of keeping the plague as far away from them as possible.
Cole's special-ops mission, on the other hand, was to stop the Nigerians from enforcing their quarantine—even as other U.S. forces, now helped by British, Brazilian, Australian, and Indian ships, worked to enforce President Torrent's quarantine. Cole was quite aware of the irony, and if he hadn't been, Cecily made sure his eyes were opened before he left. She was all smiles as she went straight for the jugular.
"So what you're saying, Cole, is that it's wrong for the Nigerian Muslims to use their army to protect themselves from the epidemic, but it's right for America to impose a quarantine on the entire continent of Africa."
"It's not a double standard," said Cole.
"Pray explain the difference," she said, handing him a plate of cookies. "Your bullets are made in heaven?"
"First of all, the government of Nigeria is supposed to be protecting the whole country. Instead, they're savagely attacking their own citizens to protect, not the uninfected, but the Muslim unaffected."
"So they're a bad government," said Cecily. "Name a good one."
"They're an evil government," said Cole, "and I don't have to name a good one, I only have to count the better ones, and that list is in the high double digits."