Hidden Empire (Empire 2)

"You didn't know the password," said Nick.

"I knew everything else!" screamed Lettie.

Aunt Margaret turned to Chinma. "What in the world would your parents do about a child like this?"

It was about time someone asked him that. "They would beat her until she fainted."

Lettie turned to him in scorn. "Oh, they would not."

Nick, who had seen Chinma without his shirt, asked, "Shall we show her, Chinma?"

"Show me what?" Lettie demanded.

Chinma stood up, turned his back, and raised up his shirt. He knew what they would see, because other nonfavorite children in his family bore similar scars, though perhaps he had the most.

Lettie said nothing at all.

Chinma lowered his shirt and turned back to face her.

"I didn't know," said Lettie quietly. "I'm sorry."

"Good heavens," said Aunt Margaret. "The child has a spark of empathy after all. Come, Chinma. Let's get you packed."

CHLHBflR

War will exist as long as any community desires to impose its will on another community more than it desires peace.

Coercive men see only slaves and rivals in the world.

If the meek refuse war to defend themselves against coercion, then they deserve to be slaves.

Peace-lovers can only have what they love by being better at what they hate than those who love war.

There is no road to peace that does not pass through war.

Cecily had made the rule that the American caregivers could only move through the city of Calabar two by two. To do otherwise was to invite attack by the opportunistic brigands who still lurked on the fringes of the city.

But the presence of the caregivers had brought a calm to the city, born of hope, for word soon spread that the Americans had medicines that would help.

Cecily warned everyone never to promise a cure. "The most you can ever say is, 'This might help improve the chance of survival.' Anything else, and you will create bitterness and anger wherever death comes despite our help." Everyone agreed, but still the rumors spread that the Americans had brought a cure.

Rumors also spread that the Americans had a cure because they had created the disease and infected Africa with it because the Americans hated black people and always would. There was nothing Cecily could do about this, and she warned the others that arguing would accomplish nothing. "If you are met in a household by angry accusations, walk away and go on to the next house."

But there were those who could not keep their tongues still. "If we created the disease, and if we have a cure, why are so many of our soldiers sick with the nictovirus?"

For the disease was actually worse inside the American base on the university grounds than it was out in the city. The monkey sickness, as it was called in Nigeria, was still fairly new to Calabar; Lagos and the western part of the country had been ravaged already, but the majority of the households in Calabar did not yet have the disease. The American soldiers, though, had been so confident that their barriers against infection from outside the base would work that they were careless about their safeguards inside it, and so once their wall was breached by the disease, it spread quickly and there was no soldier who was not at one stage of the disease or another.

Fortunately, the number of soldiers was not large—Cole's command was special ops, and so they worked in small units. There were only about three hundred soldiers in Calabar, and since one caregiver could provide for the basic needs of ten patients, only sixty of them remained on the university grounds to care for the soldiers in two twelve-hour shifts.

The rest of them went out into the city, at first the neighborhoods near the university—Akim Qua, Big Qua, Uwanse, Atimbo, Satellite Town—but then ranging farther and farther into Calabar. They brought with them bags of medicine—ibuprofen, stool softeners, and antidiarrhea medicine. The instructions were simple: Take the stool softeners as soon as the sneezing turns into coughing; then, when the fever starts, switch to the antidiarrhea medication and begin taking ibuprofen.

Using an ancient offset printer at the university, one of the soldiers who was not yet desperately ill had printed out instruction sheets in English, but that only went so far—the poor and uneducated could not read it in English, and there were many, especially among the elderly, who could not have read it in any language. So the caregivers had become adept, by necessity, in acting out a pantomime.

Within a few days, however, students and faculty members began showing up, offering their services as interpreters. They were all fairly fluent in English, though few of them had much experience with medical terminology; all of them spoke Efik, the dominant local language. Cecily had never heard of Efik, and a Nigerian interpreter explained why. "Efik is a language of the delta, where all the oil is. Therefore everybody treats our language and our people as if we did not exist. Hausa, Yoruba, Ibo, English—they are all languages of strangers who rule over us in order to take our oil and give us nothing."

"They gave you the nictovirus," said Cecily.

The woman grinned at her.