Hidden Empire (Empire 2)

Chinma refused to let the scientist take him all the way to the village—he knew that if he arrived in the scientist's truck, all his brothers and sisters would hate him and the big ones might beat him because he thought he was better than everyone else. They would say he thought he was a scientist now and taunt him, or say he let the scientist do bad things to him so he was filthy now.

So the scientist dropped him off on the highway a half-mile from the dirt road leading to the village. Before he drove away, the scientist gave him a notebook and a pencil and told him to take notes, because that's what scientists did. And after he had copied all the pictures from his cheap little digital camera to his laptop, the scientist gave Chinma the cheap little digital camera he had been using. "It runs on batteries and you have to have a computer to get the pictures out of it," said the scientist. "Do you have a computer?"

Chinma didn't know anyone with a computer, but he wanted the camera, so he nodded and the scientist smiled and gave it to him. Then he drove away.

Chinma hid the notebook in a bush before he got to the village, and he kept the camera in the deepest pocket of his pants. He would never show it to anyone or they would take it away from him.

Back at the village, Father made the obvious decision. "No more monkeys," he said. He glared at Chinma.

For once, somebody spoke up for him. "Chinma warned Ire," said Ade. "It wasn't his fault the monkey was sick."

"I know," said Father.

Chinma took the box where he kept all his money and

handed it to Father. "To make up for the monkeys we'll never catch now."

"No," said Father. "You earned this."

Several times over the next few days, Chinma smelled something that triggered a sneezing fit. Not just one sneeze, but many in a row. "Get out of the kitchen," said Father's second wife. "Nobody wants you sneezing on the food."

"I think it was the pepper that made me sneeze," said Chinma.

"Well, I have pepper in the kitchen, so get out," she said again.

But Chinma had what he wanted—one of the plastic bags that the women washed and reused again and again in the kitchen. Chinma went back to the notebook and pencil and put them in the plastic bag and left them hidden because if he started writing in a notebook they would say he thought he was a scientist now and they'd beat him and steal the notebook. Later I'll come back and get it. Later I'll take notes and be a scientist.

It wasn't until the fifth day that Chinma began to get really sick, with a fever and vomiting. And by that time, three of the other children were having occasional sneezing fits, too. So was Father.

And off in Lagos, where the Nigerian scientist lived and worked, he also had sneezing fits, and so did his closest colleagues.

"Flu," said the scientist.

"Flu," said his colleagues.

But when the scientist ran a fever so hot that it made the nurse who discovered it run screaming for a doctor, they stopped saying "flu" and the men in suits from the World Health Organization came back. If the scientist had not been so sick, he would have told them about Chinma and even where his village was, because Chinma had told all about his home as they rode together in the car to see the red-bellied guenons.

Instead, like Ire before him, the scientist lay on his bed, racked with fever, blood seeping out of his eyes and then from his ears and nose and finally from random breaks in the skin all over his body. His brain was bleeding, too, so even if he could have talked, he would have had nothing to say; he didn't remember anything except the pain and the fear. And then he felt nothing at all.

Here is the amazing thing: Chinma did not die.

Father died. Many of the other children died. The two wives ahead of Mother died. But Mother and Chinma and Ade lived, and so did a scattering of others in the village.

But when it was over, instead of 3,000 speakers of Ayere in the world, there were only 1,500.

And the neighboring villages were full of people having sneezing fits. So were the streets of Ilorin and Lagos. And because it took days before people infected through their lungs had any symptom worse than the sneezing fits, there was plenty of time for such people to get on buses and ride to other cities, or get on planes and fly to other countries.

It was a lucky thing that at first it was a disease of poor and uneducated villagers, and of the shopkeepers in Lagos where the Nigerian scientist had sneezed before he died. None of them were the kind of rich and educated people who flew across the Atlantic or north across the Sahara. So far, at least, the airborne epidemic was confined to West Africa.

But it was consistently killing between thirty and fifty percent of the people who caught the infection. And all you had to do to catch the thing was be within ten feet of someone who sneezed the virus into the air.

FAVORITISM

In the past, "stimulating the economy" has meant pork. Meaningless projects that did no more than pump money out of Washington and burden future generations with debt—and for what? There's nothing to show for it.

We're not doing it that way this time. We're going to do work that matters. The stimulus money will go only to projects that will pay for themselves many times over. Future generations will forget that we were stimulating the economy—but they'll remember what we built.

Colonel Bartholomew Coleman liked the city of Kiev. He liked it so much that he walked everywhere he could, so he could enjoy walking among the people, and seeing the shops and houses and parks at street level, and taking odd routes through buildings so he couldn't easily be followed by car.