Warday

It is thus important that patients learn the symptoms of the third-stage preludium so that they can carry out their plans at the first sign.

The burning sensation commonly known as firepox is the most common initial sign of stage-three disease. This means that there has been invasion of the organs extensive enough to cause a buildup of uric acid in the blood. The firepox sensation occurs when acid-laden blood enters open second-stage lesions. Double vision, the seeing of flashes, hearing loud noises without known source, feeling of elation alternating with deep depression, sudden bursts of intense sexual desire, inappropriate laughter, “Pell’s sign,” continuous vomiting, and the sloughing off of skin that had seemed healthy are signs that third-stage disease is fully developed. Euthanasia should be carried out without delay at this point.

The British Relief has determined that N S D is moving through the North American population at a nonexponential rate, suggesting that the illness is induced from something in the environmental background and is not spread person to person. British Relief statisticians have found that initial outbreaks of disease may occur anywhere on the continent, without regard to the background radiation level. For example, 3.34 percent of the population of Greater Atlanta have NSD, even though G.A. enjoys a radlevel little higher than it was prewar. On the other hand, Houston, with its high radlevel, has only a 1.59-percent incidence of the disease. Chicago, with a higher radlevel than Houston, has a 5.61-percent incidence.

The possibility of an artificially induced vector—such as a delayed-activation biochemical weapon—cannot be discounted in the case of NSD any more than it can with the flu, but the spottiness of the outbreaks, and their tendency to cluster around specific small areas within the affected regions, suggests that some other factor is at work.

I guess that’s all pretty technical, but it’s the straight truth as I understand it. As yet, there is no central effort to determine the cause of Nonspecific Sclerosing Disease, because it affects a relatively small segment of the population and appears so intractable to even the most advanced attempts at analysis, much less cure.

As I said at the beginning, I am a medical doctor. I am also a recent convert to Catholicism. I converted a week after His Holiness declared that officially sanctioned voluntary euthanasia was not murder in North America and the Russian states. The chief thing I have to say is that I believe America is going to get through this. There will come a day when we doctors do not have to routinely take life, when we can help all people in need and not worry about the triage. I look forward to that day.

I have to stop now. I have a meeting with my Viral Particle Team now. Their job is to attempt to find a viral disease vector for NSD, but so far nothing has turned up.

Interview Rita Mack, Professional Rememberer

[THE ABSENT. We met Rita Mack on a street-corner. If there is a truism about life in our times, it is that the poor die first. And in America that means, for the most part, the black.]

In 1987 there were approximately thirty million black people in the United States.

I can remember walking the streets of Chicago a little earlier, in the autumn of 1983, and seeing black faces everywhere.

And now? The Loop is not empty of people, but blacks are rare.

There are stories of whole neighborhoods starving, and there are long, blank streets.

We have no idea how many blacks remain alive in our country now. Their world was fragile because it was poor, and it obviously has not fared well. The loss of life among blacks must be much higher than among the rest of the population.

We saw very few black people on our journey. Certainly not in California, where Hispanics and Asians represent the major visible minorities. And on the road, the absence of black people was eerie at first, and finally terrifying.

By the time we reached Chicago we had come to feel an urgent need to seek out and interview someone who could effectively represent black experience.

Seeing Rita Mack, I experienced a kind of loneliness for the past. A black woman was partner in my raising. My earliest memory is of her face, peering down into my crib. There is thus some deep solace for me in the presence of black people. And their absence is fearful. These streets and buildings, this country, belonged to them just as certainly as it did to the wealthier elements of the society. When I saw Rita Mack hurrying toward me I wanted to embrace her, to greet her and hear her tell me that all was well, that black Chicago, once so powerful, had emigrated en masse to Atlanta or Birmingham or Mobile.

But she did not tell me that.