Norman Spinrad - Journals of the Plague Years 1

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JOURNALS OF THE PLAGUE YEARS

By Norman Spinrad

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

In many ways Norman Spinrad's "Journals of the Plague Years" is the most

frightening story in this collection-thanks to our public health officials'

neglect of the most dangerous disease since the Bubonic Plague. At least the

medieval city fathers faced with the Black Death had the excuse of ignorance of

disease and germ theory. What excuse do our public safety officials have? No

excuses really, just fear of offending political voting blocs, which keep them

from exercising even the most trivial duties of their office such as tracking

secondary contacts. God forbid they carry out their office; the possibility of

quarantine sets them quivering under their desks.

Thus, here we stand with our collective heads in the sand while this

terrible pestilence has time to incubate and mutate into perhaps more virulent

forms-ones that could possibly be carried by mosquitoes or other insects, or

even contaminate the air we breathe. That's unlikely, but it's not impossible;

no more unlikely than other disasters we do prepare for.

Herewith the new Journals of the Plague Years . . .

________________________________

Introduction

It was the worst of times, and it was the saddest of times, so what we

must remember if we are to keep our perspective as we read these journals of the

Plague Years is that the people who wrote them, indeed the entire population of

what was then the United States of America and most of the world, were, by our

standards, all quite mad.

The Plague virus, apparently originating somewhere in Africa, had spread

first to male homosexuals and intravenous drug users. Inevitably it moved via

bisexual contact into the population at large. A vaccine was developed and for

a moment the Plague seemed defeated. But the organism mutated under this

evolutionary pressure and a new strain swept the world. A new vaccine was

developed, but the virus mutated again. Eventually the succession of vaccines

selected for mutability itself, and the Plague virus proliferated into dozens of

sins.

Palliative treatments were developed--victims might survive for a decade

or more--but there was no cure, and no vaccine that offered protection for long.

For twenty years, sex and death were inextricably entwined. For twenty

years, men and women were constrained to deny themselves the ordinary pleasures

of straightforward, unencumbered sex, or to succumb to the natural desires of

the flesh and pay the awful price. For twenty years, the species faced its own

extinction. For twenty years, Africa and most of Asia and Latin America were

quarantined by the armed forces of America, Europe, Japan, and the Soviet

Union. For twenty years, the people of the world stewed in their own frustrated

sexual juices.

Small wonder then that the Plague Years were years of madness. Small

wonder that the authors of these ,journals seem, from our happier perspective,

driven creatures, and quite insane.

That each of them found somewhere the courage to carry on that through

their tormented and imperfect instrumentalities the long night was finally to

see our dawn, that is the wonder, that is the triumph of the human spirit, the

spirit that unites the era of the Plague Years with our own.

--Mustapha Kelly

Luna City, 2143

JOHN DAVID

I was gunfoddering in Baja when the marks began to appear again. The

first time I saw the marks, they gave me six years if I could afford it, ten if

I joined up and got myself the best.

Well what was a poor boy to do? Take my black card, let them stick me in

a Quarantine Zone, and take my chances? Go underground and try to dodge the Sex

Police until the Plague got me? Hell no, this poor boy did what about two

million other poor boys did--he signed up for life in the American Foreign

Legion, aka the Army of the Living Dead, while he was still in good enough shape

to be accepted.

Now you hear a lot of bad stuff about the Legion. The wages suck. The

food ain't much. We're a bunch of bloodthirsty killers too bugfuck to be

allowed back in the United States fighting an endless imperialistic war against

the whole Third World, and our combat life expectancy is about three years.

Junkies. Dopers. Drooling sex maniacs. The scum of the universe.

For sure, all that is true. But unless you're a millionaire or

supercrook, the Legion is the best deal you can do when they paint your blue

card black and tell you you've Got It.

The deal is you get the latest that medical science has to offer and you

get it free. The deal is you can do anything you want to the gorks as long as

you don't screw up combat orders. The deal is that the Army of the Living Dead

is coed and omnisexual and every last one of us has already Got It. We've all

got our black cards already, we're under sentence of death, so we might as well

enjoy one another on the way out. The deal is that the Legion is all the

willing meat-sex you can handle, and plenty that you can't, you better believe

it!

Like the recruiting slogan says, "A Short Life but a Happy One." We were

the last free red-blooded American boys and girls. "Join the Army and Fuck the

World," says the graffiti they scrawl on the walls about us.

Well that too, and so what?

Take the Baja campaign. The last census showed that the black card

population of California was entitled to enlarged Quarantine Zones. Catalina

and San Francisco were bursting at the seams and the state legislature couldn't

agree on a convenient piece of territory. So it got booted up to the Federal

Quarantine Agency.

Old Walter T., he looks at the map, and he sees you could maintain a

Quarantine line across the top of the Baja Peninsula with maybe two thousand SP

troops. Real convenient. Annex the mother to California and solve the problem.

So in we go, and down the length of Baja we cakewalk. No sweat. Two

weeks of saturation air strikes to soften up the Mexes, a heavy armored division

and two wings of gunships at the point, followed by fifteen thousand of us

zombies to nail things down.

What you call a fun campaign, a far cry from the mess we got into in Cuba

or that balls-up in Venezuela, let me tell you. Mexico was something like fifty

percent Got It, their armed forces had been wiped out of existence in the

Chihuahua campaign, and so it was just a matter of three weeks of leisurely

pillage, rape, and plunder.

The Mexes? They got a sweet deal, considering. Those who were still

alive by the time we had secured Baja down to La Paz could choose between

deportation to what was left of Mexico or becoming black card citizens of the

state of California, Americans like thee and me, brothers and sisters. Any one

of them who had survived had Gotten It in every available orifice about 150

times by us zombies by then anyway.

Wanna moralize about it? Okay, then moralize this one, meat-fucker:

The damn Plague started in Africa, didn't it? That's the Third World,

ain't it? Africa, Latin America, Asia, except For China, Japan, and Iran,

they're over 50 percent Got It, ain't they? And the It they Got keeps mutating

like crazy in all that filth. And they keep trying to get through with

infiltrators to give us the latest strain, don't they?

The Chinese and the Iranians, they kill their black-carders, don't they?

The Japs, they deport them to Korea. And the Russians, they nuked themselves a

cordon sanitaire all the way from the Caspian to the Chinese border.

Was I old Walter T., I'd say nuke the whole cesspit of infection out of

existence. Use nerve gas. Fry the Third World clean from orbit. Whatever.

They gave us the damn Plague, didn't they? Way we see it in the Army of the

Living Dead, anything we do after that is only a little piece of what the gorks

got coming!

Believe me, this poor boy wasn't shedding any tears for what we had done

to the Mexes when the marks started coming out just before the sack of Ensenada.

Less still when they couldn't come up with a combo of pallies that worked

anymore, and they shrugged and finally told me it looked like I had reached

Condition Terminal in the ruins of La Paz. Like I said, when I first Got It,

they gave me six years, ten in the Army of the Living Dead.

Now they gave me six months.

I shot up with about a hundred milligrams of liquid crystal, chugalugged a

quart of tequila, and butt-fucked every gork I could find. Think I blew about

ten of them away afterward, but by then, brothers and sisters, who the hell was

counting?

WALTER T. BIGELOW

Oh yes, I knew what they say about me behind my back, even on a cabinet

level. Old Walter T., he was a virgin when he married Elaine, and he's never

even had meat with his own pure Christian wife. Old Walter T., he's never even

stuck it in a sex machine. Old Walter T., he's never even missed the pleasures

of the flesh. Old Walter T., he'd still be the same sexless eunuch even if

there had never been a Plague. Old Walter T., he's got holy water for blood.

How little they know of my torments.

How little they know of what it was like for me in high school. In the

locker room. With all those naked male bodies. All the little tricks I had to

learn to hide my erections. Knowing what I was. Knowing it was a sin. Unable

to look my own father squarely in the eye.

Walter Bigelow found Christ at the age of seventeen and was Born Again,

that's what the official biography says. Alas, it was only partly true. Oh

yes, I dedicated my life to Jesus when I was seventeen. But it was a cold,

logical decision. It seemed the only means of controlling my unwholesome urges,

the only way I could avoid damnation.

I hated God then. I hated Him for making me what I was and condemning me

to hellfire should I succumb to the temptations of my own God-given nature. I

believed in God, but I hated Him. I believed in Jesus, but how could I believe

that Jesus believed in me?

I was not granted Grace until I was twenty.

My college roommate Gus was a torment. He flaunted his naked body in what

seemed like total innocence. He masturbated under the bedclothes at night while

I longed to be there with him.

One morning he walked into the bathroom while I was toweling myself down

after a shower. He was nude, with an enormous erection. I could not keep my

flesh from responding in kind. He confessed his lust for me. I let him touch

me. I found myself reaching for his manhood.

He offered to do anything. My powers of resistance were at a low point.

We indulged in mutual masturbation. I would go no further.

For months we engaged in this onanistic act, Gus offering me every fleshly

delight I had ever fantasized, I calling on Christ to save me.

Finally, a moment came when I could resist no longer. Gus knelt on the

floor before me, running his hands over my body, cupping my buttocks. I was

lost. His mouth reached out for me

And at that moment God at last granted me His Grace.

As his head lowered, I saw the Devil's mark upon the back of his neck,

small as yet, but unmistakable--Karposi's sarcoma.

Gus had the Plague.

He was about to give it to me.

I leaped backward. Gus was an instrument of the Devil sent to damn my

flesh to the Plague and my soul to everlasting torment.

And at last I understood. I saw that it was the Devil, not God, who had

tormented me with these unwholesome urges. And God had let me suffer them as a

test and a preparation. A test of my worthiness and a preparation for this

moment of revelation of His Divine Mercy. For had He not chosen to show me the

Sign that saved me from my own sinful nature at this eleventh hour?

That was when I was granted true Grace.

I sank to my knees and gave thanks to God. That was when I was Born

Again. That was when I became a true Christian. That too was when I was shown

my true calling, when the vision opened up before me.

God had allowed the Devil to inflict the Plague on man to test us, even as

I had been tested, for to succumb to the temptations of the flesh was to succumb

to the Plague and be dragged, rotting and screaming, to Hell.

This was the fate that Jesus had saved me from, for only the Sign He had

shown me had preserved me from death and eternal damnation. My life, therefore,

was truly His, and what I must use it for was to protect mankind from this

Plague and its carriers, to save those I could as Jesus had saved me.

And He spoke to me in my heart. "Become a leader of men," Jesus told me.

"Save them from themselves. Do My work in the world."

I promised Him that I would. I would do it in the only way I could

conceive of, through politics.

I became a prelaw major. I entered law school. I graduated with honors I

found courted, and married a pure Christian virgin, and soon thereafter

impregnated Elaine with Billy, ran for the Virginia State Assembly, and was

elected.

The rest of my life is, as they say, history.

LINDA LEWIN

I was just another horny spoiled little brat until I Got It, just like all

my horny spoiled little friends in Berkeley. Upper-middle-class family with an

upper-middle-class house in the hills. My own car for my sixteenth birthday,

along with the latest model sex interface.

Oh yes, they did! My mom and dad were no Unholy Rollers, they were

educated intellectual liberal Democrats, they read all the literature, they had

been children of the Sexy Seventies, they were realists, they knew the score.

These are terrible times, they told me. We know you'll be tempted to have

meat. You might get away with it for years. Or you might Get It the first time

out. Don't risk it, Linda. We know how you feel, we remember when everyone did

meat. We know this is unnatural. But we know the consequences, and so do you.

And they dragged me out on the porch and made me look out across the Bay

at San Francisco. The Bay Bridge with its blown-out center span. The pig boats

patrolling the shoreline. The gunships buzzing about the periphery like angry

horseflies.

Meat City. That's where you'd end up, Linda. Nothing's worth that, now

is it?

I nodded. But even then, I wondered.

I had grown up with the vision of the shining city across the Bay. Oh

yes, I had also grown up knowing that the lovely hills and graceful buildings

and sparkling night lights masked a charnel house of the Plague, black-carders

all, 100 percent. We were told horror stories about it in sex hygiene classes

starting in kindergarten.

But from about the fifth grade on, we told ourselves our own stories too.

We whispered them in the ladies' room. We uploaded them onto bulletin boards.

We downloaded them, printed them out, wiped them from memory so our parents

wouldn't see them, masturbated over the printouts.

As porn went, it was crude, amateurish stuff. What could you expect from

teenage virgins? And it was all the same. A teenager Gets It. And runs away

to San Francisco. Or disappears into the underground. And, sentenced to death

already, sets out to enjoy all the pleasures of the meat on the way out, in

crude, lurid, sensational detail. And of course, the porn sheets all ended long

before Condition Terminal was reached.

But I was a good little girl and I was a smart little girl and the sex

interface my parents gave me was the best money could buy, not some cheap one-

way hooker's model. It had everything. The vaginal insert was certified to

five atmospheres, but it was only fifty microns thick, heated to blood

temperature, and totally flexible. It had a neat little clit-hood programmed

for five varieties of electric stimulation and six vibratory patterns. I could

wear the thing under my jeans, finger the controls and never fail to come, even

in the dullest math class.

The guys said that the interior lining was the max, tight and soft and

wet, the stim programs the best there were. But what did they know? Who among

them had ever felt real meat?

Oh yes, it was a wonderful sex interface my parents gave me to protect me

from the temptations of the meat.

And of course I hated the damned thing.

Worse still when the guy I was balling with it insisted on wearing his

interface too. Yech! His penile sheath in my vaginal insert. Like two sex

machines doing it to each other. I remember an awful thing I did to one wimp

who really pissed me off. I took off my interface, made him take off his,

inserted his penile sheath in my vaginal insert, activated both interfaces, and

made him sit there with me watching the two things go at each other without us

for a solid hour.

And then there came Rex.

What can I say about Rex? I was eighteen. He was a year younger. He was

beautiful. We never made it through two interfaces. I'd wear mine or he'd wear

his and we'd go at it for hours. It was wonderful. We swore eternal love. We

took to telling each other meatporn stories as we did it. This was it, I knew

it was, we were soul mates for life. Rex swore up and down that he had never

done meat and so did I. So why not . . .

Finally we did.

We took off our interfaces and did meat together. We tried out everything

in those meatporn stories and then some. Every orifice. Every variation.

Every day for two months.

Well, to make the usual long sad story short and nasty, I had been telling

the truth, but Rex hadn't. And I had to learn about it from my parents.

Your boyfriend Rex's Got It, they told me one bright sunny morning. He's

been black-carded and they've dropped him in San Francisco. You and he never .

. . you didn't . . . because if you did, we're going to have to turn you in, you

know that, don't you?

Well of course I freaked. But it was a cold slow-motion freak, with

everything running through my head too fast for me to panic. I had a whole

month till my next ID exam. I knew damn well my card would come up black. What

should I do? Let them drop me in San Francisco and go out in a blaze of

meatfucking glory with Rex? Yeah, sure, with the lying son of a bitch who had

killed me!

I thought fast. I lied up and down. I threw an outraged temper tantrum

when my parents suggested maybe I should go in for an early check. I convinced

them. Or maybe I just let them convince themselves.

I found myself an underground doc and checked myself out. Got It. I

drifted into the Berkeley underground, not as difficult as you might think for a

girl who was willing to give meat to the secret Living Dead for a few dollars

and a few more connections. I learned about how they kept ahead of the Sex

Police. I learned about the phony blue cards. And I made my plans.

When I had hooked enough to score one, I got myself a primo counterfeit.

As long as I found myself a wizard every three months to update the data strip,

it would show blue. I could stay free until I died, unless of course I got

picked up by the SP and got my card run against the national data bank, in which

case I would turn up null and it would all be over.

I hooked like crazy, three, four, five tricks a day. I piled up a

bankroll and kept it in bills. The day before I was to report for my ID update,

I got in my car to go to school, said the usual goodbye to my parents, and took

off, headed south.

South to Santa Cruz. South to L.A. South to anywhere. Out along the

broad highway to see what there was to see of California, of what was left of

America, out along the broad highway toward the eventual inevitable--crazed,

confused, terror-stricken, brave with fatal knowledge, determined only to have a

long hot run till my time ran out.

DR. RICHARD BRUNO

They used to call it midlife crisis, male menopause, the seven-year itch,

back when it wasn't a condition to which you were condemned for life at birth.

I was just about to turn forty. I had dim teenage memories of quite a

meaty little sex life back at the beginning of the Ugly Eighties, before the

Plague, before I married Marge. Oh yes, I had been quite a hot little cocksman

before it all fell apart, a child of the last half-generation of the Sexual

Revolution.

When I was Tod's age, fifteen, I had already had more real meat than the

poor frustrated little guy was likely to get in his whole life. Now I had to

watch my own son sneaking around to sleazy sex parlors to stick it into sex

machines, and don't think I was above it myself from time to time.

Marge, well . . .

Marge was five years younger than I. Just young enough to never have

known what the real thing was like, young enough to remember nothing but condoms

and vaginal dams and the early interfaces. Oh yes, we had meat together in the

early years, before it finally resulted in Tod. Poor Marge was terrified the

whole time, unable to come. After Tod was born, she got herself an interface,

and never made love again without it.

Marge still loved me, I think, and I still loved her, but the Plague Years

had dried her up sexually, turned her prudish and sour. She wouldn't even let

me buy Tod an interface so he could get it from a real girl, if only secondhand.

His sixteenth birthday is more than time enough, she insisted shrilly everytime

we fought about it, which was frequently.

Naturally, or perhaps more accurately unnaturally, all my libidinal

energies had long since been channeled into my work. It was the perfect

sublimation.

I was a genetic synthesizer for the Sutcliffe Corporation in Palo Alto. I

had already designed five different Plague vaccines for Sutcliffe that made them

hundreds of millions each before the virus mutated into immunity. I was the

fair-haired boy. I got many bonuses. I had my own private lab with little

restraint on my budget. For a scientist, it should have been heaven.

It wasn't.

It was maddening. A new Plague strain would appear and rise to dominance.

I'd strip off the antigen coat, clone it, insert its genome in a bacterium, and

Sutcliffe would market a vaccine to those who could afford it, make hundreds of

millions in six months. Then the next immune strain would appear, and it would

be back to square one. I felt like a scientific Sisyphus, rolling the dead

weight of the Plague uphill, only to have it roll back and crush my hopes every

six months.

Was I taking my work a bit too personally? Of course I was. My "personal

life" consisted of the occasional interface sex with Marge, which I had long

since come to loathe, watching my son sneaking around to sex machine parlors,

and the occasional trip there myself. My "personal life" had been stolen from

me by the Plague, by the Enemy, so of course I took my work personally.

I was obsessed. My work was my personal life. And I had a vision.

Cassette vaccines had been around for decades. Strip down a benign virus,

plug in sets of antigens off several target organisms, and hey, presto,

antibodies to several diseases conferred in a single shot.

Why not apply the same technique to the Plague? Strip one strain down to

the core, hang it with antigen coats from four or five strains at once, and

confer multistrain immunity. Certainly not to every mutation, but if I could

develop an algorithm that could predict mutations, if I could develop cassette

vaccines that stayed ahead of the viral mutations, might I not somehow be able

eventually to force the Plague to mutate out?

Oh yes, I took the battle personally, or so I admitted to myself at the

time. Little did I know just how personal it was about to become.

JOHN DAVID

No sooner had we finished mopping up in La Paz than my unit was airlifted

up to the former Mexican border as part of the force that would keep it sealed

until the SPs could set up their cordon. Through the luck of the draw, we got

the sweetest billet, holding the line between Tijuana and San Diego.

They kept us zombies south of the former border, you better believe they

didn't want us in Dago, no way they would let us set foot on real American soil,

but meatfucker, you wouldn't believe the scene in TJ!

Back before the Plague, the place had been one big whorehouse and drug

supermarket anyway. For fifteen years it had been a haven for underground

black-carders, Latino would-be infiltrators, black pally docs, dealers in every

contraband item that existed, getting poorer and more desperate as the cordon

around Mexico tightened.

Now TJ found itself in the process of becoming an American Quarantine

Zone, and it was Bugfuck City. Mexicans trying to get into Dago on false

passports and blue cards. Wanted Americans trying to get out to anywhere.

False IDs going for outrageous prices. Pussy and ass and drugs and uncertified

pharmaceuticals and armaments going for whatever the poor bastards left holding

them could get.

And the law, such as it was, until the SPs could replace the Legion, was

us, brothers and sisters. Unbelievable! We could buy anything-drugs, phony

blue cards, six-year-old virgins, you name it--or just have what we wanted at

gunpoint. And money hand over fist, I mean we looted everything with no law but

us to stop us, and did heavy traffic in government arms on top of it.

Loaded with money, we stayed stoned and drunk and turned that town into

our twenty-four-hour pigpen, you better believe it! No one more so than me,

brothers and sisters, with those marks coming out, knowing this could be my last

big night to Party.

I scored half-a-dozen phony blue cards and corroborating papers to match.

I stuffed my pockets with money. I shot up with every half-baked pally TJ had

to peddle, and they had everything from Russian biologicals to ground-up nun's

tits in holy water. If this was my Condition Terminal, I was determined to take

as much of the world with me as I could before I went out. I meat-fucked myself

deaf, dumb, and blind and must've Given It to five hundred Mexes in the bargain.

Then they started phasing in the Sex Police. Well, as you might imagine,

there was no love lost between the Army of the Living Dead and the SPs. Those

uptight Unholy Rollers took any opportunity to snuff us. Looters were shot.

Meatfuckers caught in the act were executed. And of course, brothers and

sisters, the Army of the Living Dead gave as good as we got and then some.

We'd kill any of the bastards we caught on what remained of our shrinking

turf. We'd get up kamikaze packs and go into their turf after them. When we

were really loaded, we'd catch ourselves some SP assholes and gang-bang them

senseless. Needless to say, we weren't into using interfaces.

Things got so out of hand that the Pentagon brought in regular airborne

troops to round us up. That little action took more casualties in two days than

the whole Baja campaign had in three weeks.

When they started dropping napalm from close-support fighters, it finally

dawned on those of us still around that the meat-fuckers had no intention of

rounding us up and shipping us to the next theater. They were out to kill us

all, and they were probably working themselves up to tactical nukes to do it.

Well, we weren't the Army of the Living Dead for nothing. I don't know

where it started or who started it. It just seemed to happen all at once.

Somehow all of us that were left stuffed our loot in our packs, armed ourselves

with whatever we could lay hands on, and suddenly there was a human wave assault

on the border.

It was the bloodiest ragged combat any of us ever saw, crazed zombies

against gunships, fighters, and tanks. How many of the bastards did we get on

the way? More than you might imagine, better believe it, we were stoned, drunk,

in a berserker rage, and we were now the Living Dead twice over, with Double

Nothing to lose, triple so for yours truly.

How many of us got through? A thousand? Five hundred? Something to keep

you from oversleeping, citizens. Hundreds of us zombies, our packs stuffed with

money, false IDs and ordnance, over the border into San Diego, hunted, dying,

betrayed by even the Army, with nothing left for kicks but to take our vengeance

on you, meatfuckers!

And I was one of them. The meanest and the craziest, it pleases me to

believe. Betrayed, facing Condition Terminal, with nothing left to do with what

little was left of my life but bop till I dropped and take as many of you as I

could with me.

LINDA LEWIN

I drove aimlessly around California for months, down 101 or the Coast

Highway to Los Angeles, down 5 to San Diego, up to L.A. again, up 5 to the Bay

Area, back around again, like a squirrel in a cage, like one of those circuit-

riding preachers in an old Western.

I Had It. My days were numbered. I needed cash--for gas, for food, for a

flop in a motel, for what pallies I could score, for updating the data strip on

my phony blue card. I hooked wherever I could, using my interface always, for I

swore to myself that I would never do to anyone what Rex had done to me. I

didn't want to go to Condition Terminal with that mark on my soul.

Bit by bit, inch by inch, I drifted into the underground. You'd be

surprised how many black-carders there were surviving outside the Quarantine

Zones on phony IDs, a secret America within America, hiding within plain sight

of the SPs living by our wits and our own code.

We found one another by some kind of second sight impossible to explain.

Pally pushers. ID wizards. Hookers just like me.

And not like me.

There were bars where we met to trade in pallies and IDs and information.

You met all kinds. Pally dealers and drug dealers. ID wizards. Hookers like

me, male and female, selling interface sex to the solid citizens. And hookers

of the other kind.

Hookers selling meat.

It was amazing how many blue-carders were willing to risk death for the

real thing. It was amazing how innocent some of them were willing to be. At

first I refused to believe the stories the meatwhores told in the bars, cackling

evilly all the time. I refused to believe that they were knowingly spreading

the Plague and laughing about it. I refused to believe that blue-carders could

be so stupid.

But they were and they could. And after a while, I understood.

There were people who would pay fantastic prices for meatsex with another

certified blue-carder. There were clandestine meat-bars where they hung out,

bars with ID readers. Pick up one of these fools, pop your phony card in a

reader, and watch their eyes light up as the strip read out blue, no line to the

national data banks here, not with the SPs raiding any such bar they could get a

line on. And you got paid more for a quick meatfuck than you could earn in a

week of interface hooking.

Sure I was tempted. There was more to it than the money. Didn't I long

for meat myself? Wasn't that how I had Gotten It in the first place? Didn't

these damn blue-card assholes deserve what they got?

Who knows, I might have ended up doing it in the end if I hadn't met Saint

Max, Our Lady of the Flowers.

Saint Max was a black-carder. He carried his own ID reader around and he

didn't worry about phony cards reading out blue.

Saint Max would give meat only to certified black-carders, and he would

never refuse anyone, even the most rotted-out Terminals.

I was in an underground bar in Santa Monica when Saint Max walked in, and

half-a-dozen people told me his story before I ever heard it from his lips.

Saint Max was a legend of the California underground. The only real hero we

had.

Max was a bisexual, male or female, it didn't matter to him, and he never

took money. People fed him, bought him drinks, gave him the latest pallies,

found him free flop, sent him on his way. "I am dependent on the kindness of

strangers," Max used to say. And in return, any black-carder stranger could

depend on kindness from him.

Max was old; in terms of how long he had survived with God knew how many

Plague strains inside him, he was ancient. He had lived in the San Francisco

Quarantine Zone before it was a Quarantine Zone. And he was a man with a

mission. He had this crazy theory.

I heard it from him that night after I had bought him a meal and about

half-a-dozen drinks.

"I'm a living reservoir of every Plague strain extant, my dear," he told

me. "And I do my best to keep up with the latest mutations."

Max believed that all black-carders had a moral obligation to have as much

meatsex with one another as possible. So as to speed the pace of evolution. In

a large enough pool of cross-infected Plague victims the virus might mutate out

into something benign. Or a multiimmunity might evolve and spread quickly. A

pathogen that killed its host was, after all, a mal-adapted organism, and as

long as it was killing us, so were we.

"Natural selection, my dear. In the long run, it's our species' only

hope. In the long run, everyone is going to Get It, and it's going to get most

of us. But if out of the billions who will die, evolution eventually selects

for multiimmunity, or a benign Plague variant, the human race will survive. And

for as long as all these pallies keep me going, I intend to serve the process."

It seemed crazy to me, and I told him so, exposing yourself to every

Plague strain you could. Didn't that mean Condition Terminal would just come

quicker?

Saint Max shrugged. "Here I am," he said. "No one's been exposed to as

many Plague variants as me. Maybe it's already happened. Maybe I've got

multiimmunity. Maybe I'm a mutant. Maybe there's already a benign strain

inside me."

He smiled sadly. "We're all under sentence of death the moment we're born

anyway, now aren't we, my dear? Even the poor blue-carders. It's only a matter

of how, and when, and in the pursuit of what. And like old John Henry, I intend

to die with my hammer in my hand. Think about it, Linda."

And I did. I offered Max a ride up the coast and he accepted and we ended

up traveling one full slow cycle of my circuit together. I watched Max giving

meat freely to one and all, to kids like me new to the underground, to thieves,

and whores, and horrible Terminals on the way out. No one took Saint Max's

crazy theory seriously. Everyone loved him.

And so did I. I paid my way with the usual interface sex, and Max let it

be until we were finally back in Santa Monica and it was time to say goodbye.

"You're young, Linda," he told me. "With good enough pallies, you have years

ahead of you. Me, I know I'm reaching the end of the line. You've got the

heart for it, my dear. This old faggot would go out a lot happier knowing that

there was someone like you to carry on. Think about it, my dear, 'A Short Life

but a Happy One,' as they say in the Army of the Living Dead. And don't think

we're all not in it."

I thought about it. I thought about it for a long time. But I didn't do

anything about it till I saw Max again, till Max lay dying.

WALTER T. BIGELOW

After two terms in the Virginia Assembly, I ran for Congress and was

elected. Capitol Hill was in a state of uproar over the Plague. National

policy was nonexistent. Some states were quarantining Plague victims, others

were doing nothing. Some states were testing people at their borders, others

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