Architects of Emortality - Brian Stableford [81]
It’s just a matter of time. We still have a better than even chance of putting the whole jigsaw together before the early evening news turns the inquiry into a circus.” Charlotte winced as the car suddenly lurched, throwing her sideways to jostle Oscar Wilde. They had left the transcontinental superhighway at the intersection—she still did not know which one—and had already made a second turn, taking it off the subsidiary highway. The car was now climbing steeply into the hills, along a road which did not seem to have been properly maintained.
Having missed the sign at the intersection, Charlotte’s first response to this realization was to crane her neck to look back at the valley they were leaving behind, trying to figure out where they might be. The nature of the terrain suggested that they must have passed the Los Angeles junction, but she couldn’t tell whether they were south of the Salton Sea. She had only the vaguest knowledge of the West Coast, and wasn’t even sure what state they were in.
This had been a densely populated region in the distant past, but southern California had suffered worse than any other region of the old USA during the ancient plague wars. The so-called Second Plague War—whose obsolete title still lingered, even though modern historians no longer recognized the distinctions made by near-contemporary commentators—had made its grisly debut in Hollywood, which had been widely perceived as the ultimate symbol of twenty-first-century vanity, privilege, and conspicuous consumption. The rumor had been put about that the terrorists who had launched that particular team of viruses had been seeking revenge on the supposed beneficiaries of the “First Plague War,” who had allegedly launched it with the aim of wiping out the economic underclasses of the developed world.
If any of that was true, the “second war” had misfired badly. As in all wars, and plague wars more than any other kind, the poor had sustained far more casualties than the rich. Although the proximity of medical resources and the relative efficiency of emergency measures had helped to keep death rates down in the cities, the response in many rural areas to the emergence of the first cases had been a mass exodus of refugees. Most of those who had survived had never returned, preferring to relocate to more promising land. Three-quarters of the ghost towns of the Sierra Madre were ghost towns still, even after three hundred years.
Charlotte knew that the car hadn’t been on the road long enough to have got to the Sierra Madre, but these lesser hills seemed just as bleak, and the same pattern of response to the plague wars must have been duplicated here. Now that Hal had removed his image from the screen in order to concentrate on his Herculean labors, Charlotte took the opportunity to call up an annotated map of the region onto the screen in front of her. She summoned a blinking light to show her the car’s position, but the datum provided no obvious clue as to where it might be headed or why. The names of several small towns—all flagged as uninhabited—were scattered along their present route, but Charlotte wasn’t surprised that she was unable to recognize any of them.
“The region up ahead seems to be wasteland,” she told Lowenthal and Wilde, vaguely hoping that one of them might be better able to guess where they were being taken.
“She’s right,” Lowenthal confirmed, addressing himself to Wilde yet again, as if