The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk Page B

glad to see her there, looking calm and composed as she always did, graceful in her cross-legged posture, her hair dyed a shocking red and rising from her head in flamelike peaks, her dark eyes darting around the room, reading the mood of the group. Salal was not easily intimidated or confused, and she was unshakable under pressure.
    I will just close my eyes, for one moment, to rest them, Madrone told herself. The buzz of voices and the flying hands of the speakers simultaneously translating their words into Sign were hypnotic. Although the main discussion was in English, side conversations went on around the edges of the room in Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic, Cantonese, Tagalog. Every neighborhood in the City claimed a mother tongue of its own to cultivate. With global transportation systems broken down and the Stewards still jamming the airwaves after twenty years, who knew, these days, what survived in Canton or Cairo or Manila or Mexico? The City’s neighborhoods might well be the last preserves of their languages and cultures.
    Lulled by the voices, Madrone dreamed the domed hall as the four-chambered heart of the City, where she could rest, feeling its pulse, taking the measure of its beat, listening for what swam hidden in its secret veins, the spirochete, the parasite, the virus. Oh, it was deceptive, this strength, thisvigor. But she could hear what whined below, like one small mosquito in a large room when you were trying to sleep.…
    “Madrone?”
    The sound of her name jolted her into wakefulness. She opened her eyes. Salal was looking at her expectantly.
    “Can you give us a report from the Healers’ Council? What’s happening with this latest epidemic? How dangerous is it?”
    Madrone rose to speak. She looked around the room at eyes of every shape and color, all focused on her. That was what she did, sometimes, when she had to look into a mother’s eyes and tell her her child would not live. She would focus on the shape, and the color of the iris, and the way the lid curved over the surface, and the way the lashes were set into the lid. Eye after eye, each one a small cauldron, container of water. A vessel. A lens.
    “It’s bad. Very bad.” Madrone spoke, as they all did when addressing Council, in English augmented with Sign. “It begins as a low-grade fever, like a mild flu. Headache, muscle aches, congestion. In a small percentage of patients, that’s all it is, and after a week or so they recover. But most go through a crisis, where the fever shoots up suddenly, high enough to cause brain damage or death, especially in children. And for pregnant women it’s disastrous. The high fever triggers labor prematurely and can seriously damage the fetus even if it survives.” These were the facts, laid out for them, but she felt compelled to add more. “We’ve dealt with a lot of diseases over the last ten years, one epidemic after another, if not on quite the same scale as ’38. But this one scares me.” She found, as always, that her spoken words could lie with their intonation, with the flat control of their delivery, but her fingers could not conceal her emotions. “I won’t pretend it doesn’t. It’s the worst thing we’ve had to deal with in a decade.”
    There was silence. If Madrone was scared, they knew it was bad. Usually they counted on her for reassurance.
    “You’ve tried to identify the cause?” Sal asked.
    “We suspect another mutant virus, but we don’t really know yet. None of our antivirals work against it, or any of our other drugs.”
    Silence again.
    “Shouldn’t we evacuate the pregnant women?” someone asked.
    “Where to?” Madrone asked. “The damn thing appeared upriver almost as soon as it did down here.”
    “What do you suggest we do?”
    What she wanted to say was, Do anything you ever wanted to do and haven’t done, now, quick, while you still can. Eat the berries unripe off the vines, set your caged birds free. But she couldn’t say that. Ghost eyes