Mercy 6

Thorpe’s God Particle was an unseen and unknown virion, submicro, existing outside most definitions of life, not composed of cells but able to reproduce, able to act, those actions defined by hiding, disguise, and opportunistic moving, sliding. Not inanimate but not life. A-life. Thorpe’s God Particle was also predicted by absence but not one evidenced in math. It was predicted by history.

Medicine was stacked on history. A correct diagnosis — this man has influenza caused by an RNA virus — can be traced back through medical history, never veering from the text, to a laughable diagnosis: This man is sick from walking the cold, wet heath.

Mullich’s God Particle was a hypothetical mass defined by its velocity and its effects on surrounding cells and particles. It would be microscopic. It would be extrasolar, produced by a stellar explosion somewhere in the galaxy. These particles exist, are prevalent. They have been defined by math. They have been collected. They have been photographed. They hide in apathy. No one cares about them except the few scientists who collect and study them. They are pieces of glass or metal. Studying them earns no reward or recognition.

Studying dark matter, antimatter, the Higgs boson, earns reward, money, even makes it to television. Studying Thorpe’s virions earns the same.

Take me with you when you go.

39

It was full morning. They stood on the roof, the telescope relic focusing the sun into a hard white circle on the surface between them. The daylight gave her near-vertigo, the way it always did after night shift, her circadian rhythm awry. Below, blocking the roads from Mercy General, white trucks had morphed into white vans. In daylight she could see that the vans had clusters above them, receivers and transmitters and surveillance. Mullich followed her gaze. He pointed to ones she had not seen right away, the ones in camouflage with armored sides. He pointed to the roof of a far building, about a mile away, where that night helicopter roosted.

“The cases in Boston,” she told him. “They’re false.”

He nodded.

“The one in Reykjavik.” Her voice faltered. She had to take an extra breath. “There may be something.”

The look he gave her — for him it was a gentle one, the closest to gentle she had seen. An angle of revelation in his expression, a nick of a smile. “Does that break your resolve?”

“It heightens it.” She almost took hold of his hand, wanted to feel the coolness of it, the length of fingers. “It gives me necessary complexity. You know?”

“But,” replied Mullich, “it indicates possible outbreak. It gives Thorpe and Disease Control much more power and license. Now their concerns are global. Their audience global. If you still want to do this, you will be heading into something that just got a lot stronger and a lot more vigilante.”

“You think it’s shoot to kill?” She made her hand into the shape of a pistol.

“I wouldn’t joke,” he said. He folded his hand over hers and pushed it down. “You really need to see that Kivla person? See him?

I could maybe get him messages.”

“I do. I have to see Jude Covey’s reactions and I have to have a full exchange. What I’m thinking is new to me. I need to have an exchange with an expert. My expertise with his. Just like you with me.”

He appeared to like this, drew his finger along his jaw.

“Okay, then.”

He pointed to an area just beyond south parking, where the scrub of the foothills met the asphalt of the lot. “See that little protrusion of stone? That stump just poking out of the brush?”

She thought he was demonstrating averted vision again. She felt way beyond that. But she complied, and she looked, and she saw it. Something she had passed a thousand times and never thought about, never bothered to identify as anything more than an oddly large and upended stone.

“I see it.”

“It’s a remnant,” he told her. “Most likely a sundial. All around it are other stones and pebble lines, almost hidden beneath decades of scrub and brush and soil. But it’s in the original landscape blueprints. A therapy garden. The kind still prominent back then, in the 1930s.”

“For the loonies.” She rubbed her eyes, glanced at the sun for needed sting. “Like me.”

“And for physical therapy. And for the doctors. Like your running trails out there.”

She could kind of see it, a vague impression in the scrub and hardpan surrounding the stone remnant. Shallow, truncated pathways among the sumac, a line here and there too straight for nature.

She nodded.

“It was named for the mother of the doctor who started this place.” Mullich tapped the telescope relic. “The same man who put this here.”

“He wasn’t happy. Was looking for a way out.”

“Probably you’re right,” replied Mullich.

He straightened his arm, pointed to the sundial ruin, checked her eyes, made sure she followed. He swung his aim slightly and said, “There, two paces left of that stone, is your exit.”