‘Wouldn’t such an experience leave you with a horror of killing?’
‘No, more like immunity, a fear I am over. I learned at the age of seven: people are animals. Calvin is right. It is no more tragic—’ he kept his voice down—‘to cull our own herd than elephants. Once your own parents are goat in a pot, the rest are spice.’
It was the same old Piper line, but Basengi lacked Calvin’s ebulli-ence; his delivery was inert and therefore more convincing.
‘Does it at least bother you that if Pachyderm goes ahead you yourself are in danger?’
‘Have you read Miss Lonelyhearts? There is a last scene where the main character knows that someone has arrived at the house to murder him. He runs downstairs to answer the door with his arms open.’
‘Is your life so dreadful?’
‘Calvin, you must know, is a maharishi. If I die and help Calvin I am honoured.’
It amazed her how anyone with such a broad suspicion of the entire human race could at the same time place blind faith in a single member. ‘Don’t you sometimes wonder if Calvin isn’t a little bit crazy?’
‘Calvin Piper is the sanest man I have ever met. He could save the whole world.’
‘Nuts,’ Eleanor muttered. ‘I’m living in a comic book.’
‘You should be grateful. If he has picked you, you must be special.’
It’s curious, but somehow the more you care for a man the more you have a perverse desire to tear him apart in public. ‘He hasn’t the faintest idea what he’s doing.’
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‘Calvin has a mind you or I cannot penetrate. In comparison, we are children. He is perfectly logical.’
‘Logic,’ said Eleanor bitterly, ‘can be an affliction.’ There is nothing more irritating than blanket adoration when you are working up a good savaging of your boyfriend. Still, the more she unravelled Calvin, the more he entangled her; the more she whittled at him, the higher the shavings mounted over her head.
‘If logic is an affliction,’ countered the Asian, ‘it is a rare disease.’
‘Pure reasoning without emotion is dangerous,’ she insisted. ‘Look at QUIETUS: that’s where it gets you.’
Basengi tightened, just as Norman had in the corridor. ‘Our agenda is motivated by many feelings: fear of our own extinction; and sympathy, especially for whole generations not yet born who will live in hell because their grandfathers were too lazy or stupid or cowardly to take action while there was time. Even sympathy for crowded countries now. Did you know that in India the unemployment is so terrible that the government hires women to cut city lawns with—?’
‘Yes,’ she cut him off. What little she’d had to do with these people, Eleanor had already noticed their tendency to circulate the same informational titbits, as in small incestuous communities where neighbours copy one another’s recipe for chicken balls. For example: that if we had dropped a bomb the size of the one that destroyed Hiroshima every day since 6 August 1945, we would still not have stabilized human population: she had heard that three times now.
The repetition felt clubby, claustrophobic and it was boring.
‘I know it must be hard for you,’ Basengi consoled. ‘So new with us. Of course you are turning many questions in your head. Perhaps you think we haven’t looked inside ourselves, examined our plans.
It is not like that. You are at an earlier stage. There was a time we, too, talked and worried late into the night. But you cannot stay in this place and still take action. You cannot keep questioning; that is like waking up every morning and deciding afresh whether to get out of bed and why. We have made our peace with the painful sacrifice we must make for the future. In time you, too, will stop 224
torturing yourself. You will understand what has to be done and get on with it. This resolution is much more restful.’
‘Sounds like brainwashing to me.’
‘I thought you liked our research. And you are capable, efficient.
Calvin chose well. I am sorry it sounds as if you are not enjoying our work after all.’
‘I do like the research. But I don’t enjoy being told to stop thinking, and that I’ll get over it. Besides, Basengi, I’m a professional woman.
I have my own work. I’m not used to entering into any organization on the coat-tails of a man. As far as the Corpse is concerned, I’m just a girlfriend, aren’t I? So I have to keep my own ideas. That’s awkward, because—because they don’t like me!’
‘No,’ he conceded nimbly.
Though she was the one who said it and she knew it was so, Eleanor was crushed.
Basengi reached impulsively to put a hand on her arm. ‘But I like you!’
As she worked with him the next few weeks, Eleanor drew a few more details from the Pakistani. His uncle adopted him and sent him to the London School of Economics. The family moved to Uganda, where he arrived only to be cast out when Idi Amin expelled the whole Asian community in 1972. Basengi left for Kenya, where he worked in developmental economics for USAID and met his destiny down the hall. The rest of his people dispersed to the UK
and Brazil. Like every other conspirator in QUIETUS, he had no children. Basengi was a private, ingrown, lonely and disturbed little man, with one remaining alliance with the living: Calvin Piper. She gave up finding fault with their fearless leader, for the least niggle only inspired Basengi to vaults of devotion that Eleanor found a little sickening.
There is a drama to any research, for libraries occasion all the heartaching setbacks, long stalls in the trenches and Godsent ground-gaining that you find in battle. This theatre is considerably heightened when your results determine whether your boyfriend goes on a historically unprecedented homicidal rampage at the millennium.
Eleanor was on a roll. Working from Pathfinder, she stayed far later than her staff. With the time difference, she could 225
ring the Harvard AIDS Institute until midnight, dialling the same number over and over with that exaggerated patience which borders on insanity. In the morning, she was the first to go through the post, flipping for the Anderson article in Nature the way the debt-ridden might comb their mail for cheques.
When envelopes arrived from Peter, she threw them hastily in the bin.
Eleanor’s diligence vexed her employer. After a vigorous statistical shoot-out at one in the morning, Eleanor accused him, ‘You’re just afraid you’ve been OBE’ed.’
‘Sorry?’
‘It’s a diplomatic term.’ She undressed, militarily, taking items of clothing off one by one, the way a soldier would put them on. ‘Like when you arrive in Ghana the morning after a military coup and the man with whom you’d scheduled breakfast is dangling in the cellar: you are Overtaken By Events. You have coffee in your hotel room, dithering nervously with the TV, all of whose stations have mysteriously gone off the air.’
‘And how does this apply to me?’ He executed the usual fastidious looping of his tie and lining up of trouser creases that Eleanor had come to find repugnant.
‘If AIDS takes enough of a chunk out of population growth, Pachyderm will turn into a white elephant. You’d have to convert the lab to a camp for disadvantaged parking boys.’
‘Why shouldn’t that suit me down to the ground? Think of the trouble AIDS could save me.’
‘I think you want trouble. Without QUIETUS, you lose your raison d’être.’ She faced him naked, hands on hips, with a shamelessness that amounted to assault.
‘It is classic that you should approach this matter in terms of what I do and do not want.’ He fiddled with his shirt buttons with more concentration than they required, gratifying Eleanor that he could not quite stare her down when she’d nothing on. ‘The question is mathematical, and has nothing whatsoever to do with my feelings.
The fact is, you continually quote me minor inflammatory sero-positivities in particular pockets of Uganda. You have yet to present me with wider projections that daunt population growth across the board,
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especially in
Asia, where they’re a bit less sexually fraught. What have you dug up on the big picture?’
‘I haven’t finished,’ she closed up, curling into the bed with the sheet bunched to her chin.
‘So secretive,’ he clucked. ‘Have you a surprise?’
‘Are you worried?’
‘I am nothing.’
She tossed a pillow at his taut, hairless behind. ‘I wish you would stop pretending to be a machine.’
‘I wish you would stop theorizing about my character and turn your full attention to the material.’ He picked up the pillow and smoothed it back on the bed. ‘I am irrelevant.’
‘You are highly relevant.’ She raised herself on her elbows. ‘The models I’ve located don’t agree. How, then, do you decide which to believe? You do, Calvin, want AIDS to be “just another deadly disease”. Otherwise, seven years’ work is out the window.’
‘“You find what you seek.” You sound like Threadgill.’
‘All right. These studies fall into two groups.’ She dimpled the mattress in two places where he would lie. ‘Those by demographers and those by epidemiologists. Which projections are the most extreme?’
Calvin considered on the edge of the bed and smiled. ‘The epidemiologists’, of course.’
‘Precisely. Because the demographers want there still to be a population problem, or they’re out of a job. The epidemiologists want AIDS to be as dreadful as can be, for maximum funding. Greed colours their results. Cynical enough? I don’t think that sounds like Wallace. It’s vintage Calvin Piper.’
The day Eleanor was to present her first report on AIDS demography to the sceptics of QUIETUS, she got up early, dressed, changed her mind, dressed again, dressed a third time. As the sun rose, she fussed with three-colour graphs on her laptop, deciding the right order, crossing out her notes. She was as prepared as she could get, which wasn’t very. Eleanor was trying something precarious, but with two billion people at stake it was worth a go.
She couldn’t eat breakfast. She and Calvin had nothing to say.
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The Corpse converged on Nyayo at nine. For the first time Eleanor took her seat before the keyboard, facing her recalcitrant audience.
She felt like a new teacher with an uncooperative class. These boys and girls would not heckle, chew gum, throw spit-wads or write obscenities on the board when her back was turned, but there are worse forms of unruliness: silence, the rolled eye, the stolid square glare of students who have decided before you open your mouth you are wasting their time. When she inserted her disk in the drive, her hand was shaking.
‘As most of you are aware, I have been asked to track down the potential impact of HIV on population growth.’ Eleanor’s voice was an octave too high. ‘Most of these projections have focused on Africa, where the epidemic is most advanced, and their application to other areas of the world with high growth rates is not yet clear. Furthermore, all these models rely on the same, often weak data. My presentation is preliminary, then, and open to debate.’ Here you are at one of the most important moments of your life, she thought, and you are still apologizing.
‘I have chosen to present three computer models of HIV demography, which embrace the range of opinion and are regarded as the most mathematically sound.’ Eleanor loaded a graph on the screen.
‘The US Census Bureau predicts the impact of the unchecked epidemic on sub-Saharan Africa over a twenty-five-year period.
Without AIDS, population is expected to expand from 540 million to 950. With HIV, however, population is expected to reach only 900
million—’
‘ What a reduction,’ Calvin intruded.
Eleanor shot him a black look. ‘In lieu of the epidemic, the Census Bureau would expect annual growth rates to have declined to 2.2
per cent; an infected population would still experience a growth rate of 1.8 per cent.’
The company whistled lightly through their teeth and visibly relaxed.
‘Obviously according to this model,’ Eleanor continued, beginning to relax herself (wasn’t this what they hoped to hear), AIDS has the moderate impact on population growth of .4 per cent. This model is, however, the most conservative.
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If we proceed to the Population Council simulation—’ She entered her keystrokes firmly, her hands steady.
‘Here we see another twenty-five-year projection, only Bongaarts expects sero-positivity to reach 21 per cent. Total population growth rate over this period falls from 3 per cent, without the epidemic, to 2 per cent, with the epidemic. Clearly, however, if the continent is left with even a 2 per cent growth rate, it continues to double its population every thirty-four years.’
Her audience was leaning back, lighting cigarettes. Victoriously, she loaded her last graph, hitting chords of keys like the finale of a Mozart piano concerto. In this picture, the trajectories drooped, dying off on the right side and sagging into oblivion, nothing like the healthy, soaring, barely daunted arcs of the first two graphs.
‘Roy Anderson at the Imperial College, London, has run the only model available with long-term prognosis, projecting the course of the epidemic over the next 200 years. In this model, population either levels off or plummets. Whether or not the peoples of Africa are virtually wiped out depends on the variable employed for “vertical transmission”: the likelihood of pregnant carriers passing the disease on to their children. At this time, the chances of an infected infant being born to an infected mother are estimated anywhere from 22
to 70 per cent. In the instance of only 30 per cent vertical transmission, population doubles and more or less stabilizes after forty years.
With higher values—which appear more medically likely—population declines below present levels in between 100 and 200 years. With 70 per cent vertical transmission, in two centuries this continent may be threatened with extinction.’
Bunny, Grant and Louis all put out their cigarettes simultaneously.
‘In conclusion, models which give the epidemic only two and a half decades to take off do not produce a sizeable projected decrease in population growth. Only over time does the impact of the disease make itself felt. I would assert, however, that as the purpose of this committee is to design a pathogen with so many of the characteristics HIV already exhibits, we have been upstaged. On the basis of these findings
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I could only recommend disbandment. After several generations and a regrettable amount of suffering, biology will reduce human numbers of its own accord. Given the untried and potentially destabilizing nature of Pachyderm, AIDS seems a less dangerous, established pathogen to allow to run its course.’
The committee sat in stunned silence. Only Calvin smiled, more on one side than the other. While she wasn’t sure, he seemed to be admiring her. Eleanor took a deep breath and prayed that now she had said her piece she would be allowed to go home.
No such luck. With dim horror, she watched Bunny Morton pull out of her briefcase the same US Census Report with its orange cover, the same brown and white Population Council working paper, the same Roy Anderson photocopy from Nature. Bunny smoothed open the first, and it was black with underlining. Eleanor’s heart sank. She had done her work well enough to know where the holes were.
‘Ms Merritt,’ Grant began. ‘Are you familiar with the history of epidemiology?’
‘I’m no expert.’
‘You’re no expert, but you’re still telling us what to do. To abandon seven years of work on the basis of your “findings”.’
‘It was my assignment to collect available research. These are not my findings; they are the findings of experts.’
‘Can you cite us another example of a disease that has raged through a population unabated for 200 years?’
‘AIDS is an unprecedented contagion.’
‘Of course it is precedented,’ Grant countered. ‘We all like to think of our own age and our own problems as special. But the human race has been afflicted by incurable ailments from i
ts beginning. In spite of them our numbers are sky-rocketing. I would submit that this pandemic requires so long to stem the tide that it will subside before it gets the opportunity. You are familiar with viruses?’
‘I’ve had the flu.’
They snickered.
‘You’re aware that they mutate? That historically viral virulence will peak and weaken? Syphilis—the Great Pox, after which the lesser malady is named—was once a vicious killer, 230
in comparison to which its current incarnation is an inconvenience.
And you’ve read that HIV has already shown signs of change; that HIV—2 is demonstrably less lethal than its predecessor?’
‘I haven’t found any basis for the assumption that HIV will transform overnight into hives in the foreseeable future.’ It occurred to Eleanor that even a year ago under this degree of fire she would already have burst into tears. She looked at Calvin with a funny gratitude.
‘You set so much store by the Anderson study,’ intruded Bunny.
‘How can you defend a model with an assumption of crude sexual homogeneity? Which makes no provision for the fact that not every Kenyan man sleeps with Nairobi prostitutes? A model that makes no distinction between urban and rural infection rates, which are so demonstrably disparate?’
‘Yes.’ Eleanor’s face tingled. ‘That is a weakness of the Anderson equations.’
‘And you neglected to mention,’ Bunny pressed on, ‘that the Population Council does not cut off its projection at twenty-five years; rather, Bongaarts established a high likelihood that the epidemic will hit an equilibrium once it reaches an outside sero-positivity of 30 per cent, still resulting, however incredibly, in a sustained 2 per cent population growth rate?’
‘That simulator,’ she admitted, ‘did turn up a levelling off, yes.’
‘I am most concerned,’ Grant band-wagoned, ‘with this business of acting on a simulation of the next 200 years based on data you said yourself was unreliable.’