PROLOGUE
Billions died. And millions more wished they had. It was the most devastating plague in history. Meanwhile, not only did I not perish, but for the first time in years, I no longer yearned to. I had new, sinful, more scandalous desires instead. A breed of carnal liberation that was to become an obsession most worthy of being darkly revelled in.
I blame my lifelong inability to walk in straight lines for waging a war in times of peace and for falling in love in times of death.
The title of this memoir, the same as its content, is not strictly speaking accurate. The lands I travelled back then weren’t necessarily barren. I was. But at that time, I saw everything as if through glasses tinted black with despair at being so afflicted. Infertility has intricate ways of gnawing into a woman’s self-worth until none is left. Of tainting her worldview and dulling her senses until she is as good as blind and deaf towards anything but the private battlefield her body has become.
Perhaps the title isn’t off the mark entirely. After all, I can only describe those lands insofar as I saw them with my own eyes.
It may not matter much anyway.
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, Shakespeare’s famous verse argues for the irrelevance of names.
And what indeed is in a name? It is true that said rose would smell as sweet no matter what we called it. Its bloom would glow splendidly scarlet, its thorns sharp as ever. And yet, how moot the Bard’s conclusion is. Names are only ever irrelevant when the entities they are attributed to remain present. When those entities are gone, their names are everything. The name of the rose allows us to smell its sweetness from miles afar. Or even centuries after it had withered. Unlike the flower itself, the name of the rose shall never die. As opposed to billions of people all those years ago.
The virus responsible for the Great Pandemic, or the Carmine Plague—two terms by which it is most commonly known—has been given many names. But in its early days, it was mostly termed ‘Cannibalistic Rabies’ or ‘Lyssavirus Cannibalisticus’ in Latin. Popularly known as CanLys.
The initial, rapid spread of the disease in May 2028 is known simply as the Outbreak. But it has also been called the Zero Event, the Breakout, or, rather melodramatically, the Armageddon.
The infected have also had many names, the most prevalent being cannibals, roamers, and furies.
Yet I have never known what to call people like me who lived through those times. The term ‘survivors’ suggests not only a certain level of passivity, but also a black-and-white character of the persons so termed in the context of whatever they survived. For instance, one could be a natural disaster survivor, and I would take no issue with the designation in such circumstances.
Granted, some were fortunate enough to be mere survivors of the Carmine Plague. I was anything but. If pressed for just one word to describe what I did, I fear that word would have tobe ‘thrive’. I thrived as the world echoed with fatal laments of multitudes. Mine was Nero’s unsavoury, unhinged laughter as I watched my Rome burn.
Which is why it never occurred to me until recently to write about the Great Pandemic. I have always assumed there would be others more suited for such an undertaking. Not only better writers but individuals who, unlike me, did not fail to experience the Carmine Plague as the tragedy it was. Or else, persons whose insight into the nature of the virus was greater than mine. Most importantly, people who fought valiantly for mankind’s survival because of their belief that our species was worth rescuing, a thing I remain unconvinced of to this day. I fought a great deal, but mainly for the sake of one man alone.
That is all to say, I have spent the past sixty-four years convinced that there were people with better stories to tell. Stories in which humans fight against monsters that used to be human. In my tale, it is not so clear who the monsters are.
Many have tried to write about the CanLys years, and I have read numerous such attempts. I read memoirs, biographies, and academic works. And I found them all lacking in one way or another, as if capturing only an echo, but not the original sound. A shadow, but not the object casting it. Still, I waited, confident that the perfect book depicting the Carmine Plague would appear in time. It has not. And in the past decade or so, even those who experienced the Pandemic in their youth have started to die in increasing numbers due to the ailments of old age.
I, too, have become decrepit, like a prisoner in a body so near death that I can smell the decay on myself. I am nothing but a frail shell for a heart that has outlived its desires. An extinguished repository for a mind grown tired of its own thoughts.
Even though I am sure to fail spectacularly, I now believe that the reason I am still alive and have my wits about me is thatI must put my story to paper. My conscience will not allow me to carry my memories quietly to my grave.
There will be those who will argue that I contradict accounts of others in my own narrative. That I disregard objectively known facts. In other words, that I bend history to my own will and imagination. Let no more be said of such accusations. For although I am guilty of them all, it is not for a lack of candour. I do not recoil from the judgement of posterity.
All that you need to know, my dear reader, is this:
To convey the truth in its purest form, one must occasionally break out of the cage of cold, hard facts. You hold in your hands the tangle of thorns that was my life. Bleed unravelling it if you will. Or else plant it and let its blossoms bloom darkly.
More often than not, the name of the rose smells ever sweeter than the rose itself.
Renata Andersen
13 May 2092
PART I
1
WIDENING CHASM
As much as I would have liked to give my past self a little more dignity, the beginning of my tale finds me lying on a procedure table, naked from the waist down, with a thin catheter pushed deep between my legs. Which would make for a terrible beginning to any narrative. It would have been a rather appalling start to the story of how I conceived my child, too. And yet, back then, that was a story I was very much hoping to be able to tell one day.
The only luminescence in the room was provided by the surgical lights burning bright above me, the sterile beam directed towards my lower half. Petr sat in the shadows close by, and his fingers pressed hard into my shoulder. We both watched the doctor’s progress on the monitor parallel to the procedure table. We held our breaths as the tip of the transparent tube slowly entered my womb to deposit its precious cargo there: an embryo that had been created in a petri dish, using our combined genetic material.
All the while, I was desperately trying not to think too deeply about the fact I was being impregnated by my female doctor rather than by my male partner.
