packet data from the world’s Internet and CCTV network, probabilistic statistics could show where and when humans were interacting, and where there was huge interaction, there was also disease. Dr. Wells’ job was to stop those diseases. A temperate-climate version of Ebola would be disastrous.
“Ah, yes, interesting,” said the thirty-seven year old doctor, as he reclined in his mesh-back chair and studied the printouts. “Seems we have a flu outbreak in Portland. Fifth one this year? And cycling between avian and swine variants?”
“Could it possibly be related to southern immigration?” asked Annie.
“No, probably not. It seems to be directly linked to richer neighborhoods. Very odd profile.”
“Maybe it’s new restaurant cuisines.”
There was a case, way back in 1998, where some exotic Cambodian dish had become the rage, but H. pylori-induced ulcers briefly spiked. A few bulletins were even unnecessary, because the restaurants had already closed.
“No, not in respiratory flus. Well, we’ll send out a field team, and eventually get to the bottom of it.”
Dr. Wells computer finally loaded the webpages he was more interested in: Mariners scores and the proposed redesigns of the Jeep Cherokee.
¤ ¤ ¤
Lacey and Abigail’s relationship began to deteriorate. Possibly things deteriorate of their own accord. Possibly third daughters born seven months after a second will always be born under an ogre’s moon. The rivers and seas might turn wine red, but the critical sign would be whether silverware, left untended overnight or over a fortnight, had blackened and oxidized. Blame might be laid in small part on Kirsten Maddy, who was spending longer and longer periods holed up in the Burbank Branch Portland library, where she was earning strangely high sums for classifying minute differences in insect eyes and feet structures. It was work she began to become better and better at with time. Possibly the Zen community at large should have intervened once the vacuum of Toshio-kun’s absence had become obvious. But at a fireside chat, the split became spoken:
“What we need to do is study whether we can realistically expand our scope, maybe even franchise, send out feeder colonies, and start generating more advanced possibilities with more advanced reiki. It’s distance or video-chat reiki that might be the new direction, and Abigail, you’re just getting in the way.”
Abigail, perched five-foot nine on a fallen tree four feet in diameter, appeared briefly to have a stag’s horn growing out of the far-side of her head, although this was just an optical illusion. Her face betrayed no emotion as she gazed levelly at her baby sister.
“Lacey, this is not the principle of reiki. It is reiki to examine exponential returns or how we can grow out to Tulsa and Aberdeen. We are cosmically linked to this place, this Willamette. There is no other Willamette, and no other, well, Portland.”
Subtle shifts in posture indicated a slight balancing of community sentiment, or to specific, a polarization. About a third were on Lacey’s side, but they were the younger ones, including the youngest of all who technically should have been in class.
“We are also not in the business of just simply erasing from the world without sharing our gift with the people. They’re calling us witches or dumpster divers out there, you know. We might just as easily lose everything we’ve accomplished if we fail to seek out new opportunities.”
“This is hard to teach to you because your training was not complete before you began to practice. The apprenticeship of reiki sometimes took a lifetime in traditional times, and I was lucky that Toshio-kun took me under his tutelage for so long. I knew something like this would happen.”
“Well, the younger girl here are also eager to find things to eat other than discarded McDonalds French fries and mushrooms that occasionally turn out to be sickening. Maybe you can go on a vision quest, and seek out a new path.”
As it was, Abigail did gain spiritual enlightenment, which unfortunately happened to coincide with the spiritual crisis inflicting PPC. Portland Poet’s Collective began to see itself as both the parent organization and its more radicalized youngsters, Portland Reiki Collective, which had abandoned some of the free verse, wood dance, and rain song practices of the ever-so-slightly older group. Thus, Abigail, guided by her spirit voice, used informal networks, exchange markets, and the friendly kind-ship of others who accessed BNB websites to make her way to Guatemala, where she loaned away her Chevy with the trailer, and then networks inflected by certain other illegal forms of trade spirited her away to Peru. From Peru she could have flown back to Portland for a few hundred bucks, but she preferred to rely on the kindness network, and the hippies took a few months to get her back to Portland, where she arrived to find things had changed.
“Lacey, what is going on? Why is Mr. Bubbles tied up here? And how did you get Mr. Twig and Mr. Boo to settle down in our camp?”
“Abigail, these are female bears. And yes, I agree tying up Bubbles is a bit of an excess, but as you can see, Twig and Boo are both freely making their habitat in this delightful location we have set aside for them, and in fact, they have been generously supplying us with gifts that is a sign of their providence and support.”
Abigail, who had already untied Bubbles, now wiped her hands on her bare thighs. She had been required to wear clothes while in South America; the mores there were Catholic. Yet even now, as the relieved Bubbles licked her hand in frantic gratitude, she felt strangely sleepy, helpless to alter the dynamics of the coven even as a quorum had assembled.
“Oh god, this is black reiki, isn’t it? I was told about this. I was warned about the dangers of exposing children too young to advanced practice.”
“Abigail, you’re barely a few years older than me. And in any case, we’re tripling and quadrupling in size. We have over a hundred root chairs growing, and we’re expanding into bowers, tables, maybe even an entire root house. We have distance reiki operating out to Philadelphia, and some of us can now do it in our sleep, or even without consciously knowing we are doing it. Foreign buyers are paying a premium price for moon bear secretions and the other gifts Diana the Hunt Goddess sends us. So that is the inevitable march of progress.”
It was possibly true. There was possibly a healthier gleam in the eyes of the girls, and the blue pigment seemed more generously daubed on than in the past. Finally although Bubbles was now licking his paws, he did not run away either, and more secretions meant more silver buried away under a new moon, whilst commodity prices were skyrocketing in a more heavily trading world.
“But I have to keep an eye on things. You’re still a loose cannon.”
Abigail may have been willing to forgive things, but during a reiki session, Lacey showed an aura change that she would never have recognized before. The client, a portly fifty-five year old clerk, could have been simply healed, but Lacey wanted to show Abigail that the fault lay internal to the man himself. A brief manipulations of the energy field demonstrated that the man’s life hung within two fingers like a thread, and the practitioners could have snapped that thread just as easily as surrounded it with loving kindness. Abigail gave no clue to her feelings.
¤ ¤ ¤
CRUNCH was working full-time, on the computers of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that were being time-shared to the CDC and using graphics chips originally designed for high-speed rendering of exploding video-game spaceships and aliens to capture the path of pathogens across the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest District IV. Thanks to the development of cloud computing and on-the-fly downloads, data reports could be pushed to Dr. Wells’ Blackberry even as he flew Southwest to Portland, bringing along an ad hoc team of almost a dozen graduate students and interns.
“Okay team,” said Dr. Wells, in the assembled conference room, “as you know we are on the true cutting edge of the Center for Disease Control, and our success or failure on this mission is going to mean whether or not our practices become the official protocol for our entire agency, or whether $7 billion in expenditure just generat
ed the biggest false positive since Galileo went to Rome. There’s no space for egos; there’s not much space for error. So, let’s do our best, err on the side of avoiding a dramatic catastrophe, and just try to locate the source of the outbreak.”
The graduate students, mostly in their late twenties and early thirties, nodded. They were among the best the universities could offer, and CRUNCH was providing some of the earliest numbers possible on influenza mutation. Whatever was happening, it was happening here in Portland, and possibly the next pandemic could be stopped before it ever mutated into a truly deadly form. Nobody had to be reminded that 1918 superflu had infected a quarter of the world’s population and killed ten in a hundred victims or that an H5N1 variant had been carried by a single “super-carrier” to over a dozen cities, who knew he was sick yet insisted on traveling and working abroad. If this Portland experiment succeeded, it would be a stunning level of breakthrough.
“Oh, hello, everyone,” said the county health officer as she walked in with her team, and here, although it was not expressed, a minor feeling of relief passed through the CDC team. There were two negative possibilities: that the local health officer would be an academic like themselves, eager to grab a