by Nancy Kress
Keith gaped, but only for a moment. Annabel, her brain still flooded, kicked the body at her feet. When Keith grabbed her arm, she turned on him and opened her mouth. But then she closed it again.
* * *
No. Not a second danger. And the defenses were depleted anyway.
* * *
“Annabel. . .”
“I’m coming,” she said, and they jumped from the train and ran before any more SLA soldiers entered the car. Annabel’s knees shook, but she ran with Keith until she could run no more and the train had started again and was pulling away and she could call Hannah and Paul and then collapse, sobbing, on the ground.
* * *
Hannah coached on what to say when she was arrested, but no one arrested her. There were too many others to arrest.
The train went back to Boston, picking up SLA soldiers at pre-arranged stops, and they stormed the State House with its iconic golden dome admired by generations of tourists. The state militia fought them there, but not before the advance guard, the one that arrived before the reinforcements on the train, had taken the building and killed eighteen people. One of them was the governor of Massachusetts. By the time it was over, nearly three hundred people were dead, the President had declared a state of martial law, and the United States Army occupied Boston.
“This will break the SLA power,” Hannah said grimly, pacing around the apartment. “Public opinion will turn against them now.”
“Don’t bet on it,” Emily said. She stared at Annabel with a mixture of horror and fascination.
Keith and Hannah looked at Annabel, too. Paul bent over her, taking a scraping of cells from the lining of her cheek. He really wanted an fMRI, but it was too late: Whatever event had happened in Annabel’s brain was long since over. He’d have to settle for blood samples, cerebral-spinal fluid, the new Schrader-Tucker tests for detecting the aftermath of brain events in both, and accounts from Annabel and Keith.
Annabel, pale, held tight to Keith’s hand—and why hadn’t Paul known before now that there was a boyfriend in the picture? The kid wasn’t even wearing latex gloves, for chrissake. She said, “Turn on the news.”
Hannah stopped pacing. “Annabel—”
“I want to know!”
Hannah complied, and there were scenes of the attacks on trains, photographed by amateurs on their wristers or tablets, and then sharper, more detailed ones shot by dronecams at the State House. The commentary was horrified, outraged, angry.
“Those are newscasters. I want a call-in show. Get Dov Levin.”
Hannah accessed the site and they watched holos of callers all telling Dov Levin the same thing: This isn’t what the Age of Imagination was supposed to be! I’m a witch/angel host/Transcender/New Spiritualist/psychic/elf princess/regressed survivor of the Spanish Armada, and I’m peaceful and law-abiding! These so-called soldiers hijacked the truth for their own violent ends. They’re throwbacks to the Age of Technology—look, they used guns!
Hannah murmured, “’When culture and science clash, science always loses.’”
But no one was listening, and only she and Annabel were actually paying attention to the news. Keith watched Annabel. So did Emily, her face speculative and oddly predatory. Paul bagged his samples, his mind filled with questions: Had Annabel really killed someone by spitting at them? How? What had caused her neural hijacking, if that was in fact what it had been?
* * *
A few days later, he had at least partial answers.
He sat in his lab at MIT, which had taken over more room as the scope of the project grew. Now there was a clean lab for April and her assistant, an office, and an animal lab lined with mouse cages. Behind Paul the animals squeaked and burrowed. They had been useless; Todd, the animal pathologist, had so far not succeeded in infecting any of them with any of Annabel’s aberrant cells. In mice, the cells just quietly died.
The scraping from Annabel’s mouth revealed yet more strange cells. They were attached to dissolvable sacs holding the strongest kind of toxin that immune-system components used to attack invaders, only in far greater concentration, plus molecules that, had the membranes broken in Annabel’s mouth, would have killed her. When she spit what she described as “more saliva that I thought I had,” the sacs had dissolved. The toxins had hit the boy’s eyes and face, first blinding him, then dripping into his open screaming mouth and killing him.
The whole episode had been triggered, as best as Paul could deduce with Schrader-Tucker tests, by brain signals which brought about massive neural firings in two parts of her brain. Chemical signals had tsunamied the amygdalae, those seats of rage and aggression. Simultaneously, dopamine had surged through Annabel’s nucleus accumbens, much as if she had taken a hit of the street-drug Ecstasy. But whereas Ecstasy made you energetically dance and be joyful and love the whole world, this surge of dopamine, in conjunction with enormous floods of adrenalin, had given Annabel not only her towering and uncharacteristic rage but also the strength to knock down a grown man, akin to the frail grandmother who lifts a car off her trapped grandchild. It was possible that, if the saliva toxin had failed, she could have torn that SLA soldier apart with her bare hands.
Taken together, it was a defense system. The parasites were protecting their host.
To do that, they had controlled her behavior.
Many parasites could change their hosts’ behavior, and even their metabolism. The parasitic wasp Cotesia congregata altered the way tobacco hookworms processed food. Another species of wasp turned cabbage worms not only into incubators for the wasps’ eggs and food for the larvae, but also into bodyguards for the subsequent cocoons. Thorny-headed worms forced small crustaceans to not flee from ducks into the safe bottom of ponds, but instead to swim up to the light so that ducks could eat them. Many parasites had mastered the language of their hosts’ neurotransmitters and hormones, coming up with molecules to modify those for the parasites’ own uses.
But—
Given what he had just learned—or might have learned, Paul clung desperately to the uncertainty built into all hypotheses—these were not really parasites on Annabel. Parasites took and did not give. This was something else. Paul’s orderly mind tested the word, rejected it, and then was forced to accept it.
Symbiote.
Annabel was now two organisms, inseparably intertwined, each benefitting the other. The organisms had cells not only in her brain but in her optic, olfactory, and auditory nerves; her thalamus, the brain’s signal switchboard; her skin; deep into her limbic system. Annabel provided locomotion to reach new hosts, raw materials for nourishment, senses with which to perceive the outer world. The organism provided defense and, for all Paul knew, Annabel’s perfect health, which he had assumed was merely the genetics of particularly lucky youth.
Symbiosis. Was the second partner conscious?
It was such a fantastic idea that Paul dismissed it immediately. Besides, science couldn’t even agree on what caused consciousness in humans, let alone in. . .whatever this thing was. However, Paul knew one thing: This was too big now to be a research byway. The director of the CDC was going to have to inform the White House.
How? “Mr. President, a teenage girl is now a symbiote with a possibly alien species, and so are twenty-three adorable pre-schoolers in Boston”? They would think him crazy.
Maybe he was.
No. He had data, samples, hypotheses, replicable results, all the things you were supposed to have when you did science. This was not a bid for attention from some demented imagination-age delusional. It only sounded like one.
Yesterday Paul had done an uncharacteristic thing. Not much given to fancifulness, he never read fiction and seldom went to the movies. But last night he had watched three old films on his tablet: Alien and The Puppetmasters and The Thing. He watched them all the way through. Then, groaning, he’d had an unusual and very large belt of bourbon. Even long before the Age of Imagination, no one had been able to imagine anything like Annabel except as horr
or.
Emily came into the lab, carrying a stack of flimsies. She saw his face, and said, “What?”
He told her and she listened eagerly. Really eagerly, which was good because it showed she could transcend the dislike they’d always felt for each other. Paul was going to need his whole team. He had to run repeated tests on these samples; any findings he presented had to stand up to extreme scrutiny. He would face massive scientific skepticism, massive governmental preoccupation with outbreaks of SLA violence, and the usual massive machinery of bureaucracy, slow as snails. He had to be sure. Science demanded no less.
* * *
VIII
Annabel and Keith climbed the stairs—the elevator had broken again—to the roof of Annabel’s apartment building. It was the first time Annabel had left the apartment, for her protection and everybody else’s, since the aborted train trip a month ago.
The day after the attack on the State House, she and Keith had become lovers. Hannah actually seemed glad to have Keith around pretty much all the time; Annabel suspected it took some of the burden off Hannah. She was involved in the biggest case of her career, not against the SLA but against a company that stood accused of importing and selling the kind of N-caps that had nearly destroyed Keith. Hannah was junior counsel, but she waspresent at top-level meetings even if she didn’t get to do much talking. Annabel had trouble imagining a scenario in which Hannah didn’t talk much.
They emerged onto the roof. The early summer night smelled wonderful, warm air scented with the tang of salt from the harbor. Twelve stories below, Boston looked like the war zones on the news of other countries. Well, it was. Soldiers patrolled the streets, tanks stood at the ready in every neighborhood, and arrests were ongoing. The SLA had had a mole in State House security, which was how they’d initially gotten in.
“Don’t look down,” Keith said.
“I’m not afraid of heights.”
“I meant at the soldiers.”
Annabel smiled, without mirth. “That won’t change the fact that I killed a man.”
“Who might have killed you. It was self-defense, Annie. Anyway, you didn’t really do it.”
“No, my termites did.”
“Don’t call them that.”
“That’s what they are, isn’t it? An infestation. A plague. Like fleas on a rat, only the fleas are inside me.”
Keith didn’t answer. Probably he was sick of this conversation, which they’d had over and over. Sick of her self-pity and self-loathing. Annabel was sick of it, too. All at once she seized his hand, which had also happened over and over. “I’m sorry, Keith! I’m sorry!”
“It’s all right. Look up, Annabel. That’s what we came for.”
Annabel looked up, at the first clear night in weeks. Her breath caught in her throat. The lights of Boston dimmed the stars a little, but there were not as many lights as there used to be, and east toward the harbor, nearly none. Overhead the summer triangle, Altair and Vega and Deneb, shone brightly. Annabel gazed, and it happened again, just as it had in a field thick with snow.
Holiness. Mystery. Everything one and everything interconnected, all of it. One. And I, too, part of that vast starry expanse, and not just in a physical way. . . The feeling went on and on, and she was more than Annabel, she was everything.
When the feeling finally faded, Keith sat on a rotting pile of lumber, watching her.
“That’s real,” Annabel whispered.
“I believe you.”
She sat beside him. “Paul says it’s not. He says what I feel is ‘a well-documented phenomenon.’ He says it happens to experienced meditators, Buddhist monks and nuns who pray a lot and those types. He says—”Annabel’s voice took on a savage edge “—that blood flow was redirected in my brain, toward the focus centers and away from the posterior parietal lobes, which tell me where my body ends. Less blood flow, and I feel my body dissolve, and then I focus on the stars and. . .presto! Annabel has a mystic experience! Paul wants to take even this away from me. But. . .it is real. It’s not my termites!”
He put his arm around her.
“Keith—why aren’t you afraid of me? I’m a monster.”
“You’re not. You’re Annabel.” And then, “I knew you when we used to pretend to be frogs.”
This struck both of them as so ridiculous that they laughed aloud. Annabel said, “We were grubby little kids.”
“Now we’re grubby big kids.”
“You can’t ever marry me. I can’t have children. I’d infect them. Wait, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t say that about marriage, I don’t know what I should say—” She put her head in her hands and sobbed.
Keith, not looking at her, said, “I’m going to become a space engineer.”
Annabel raised her head, confused and a little affronted. “You are?”
“Yes. The private space programs are just roaring along, thanks to Carlos Riguerrez. I’ve already got half the credits I need for graduation because I tested out of so many courses. . .yay, brilliant me. In two more years I’ll be qualified through this special program to work on ground crews at the new Riguerrez Spaceport, and I’ll make a good salary. I’ll move there, and you’ll marry me, and we’ll get off Earth together. We won’t even need kids.”
We. Space. Stars. Such a sweet feeling came over Annabel, washing her in delight, that she rose to her feet. She could have risen up into the air, floated gently like a balloon all the way to the stars. “I love you, Keith.”
“And I’ve loved you all my life. It will be all right, Annabel. We’ll make it all right.”
“Yes.” For that moment, anyway, she believed it.
* * *
Hannah sat facing Paul in his lab, where she’d never been before. She shouldn’t be there now, but Paul had insisted. The lab smelled of rats in their cages along the back wall, of disinfectant, of odd chemicals. Unknown machinery whirred softly. Hannah should be at her own odorless office, preparing a critical brief in the case of Massachusetts v. Palliter et. al. There was fresh wire-tapping evidence that the Chinese makers of the deadly N-caps were branching out. Instead of relatively crude, electrical methods of stimulating the brain’s “pleasure centers,” the underground company was developing biological methods of stimulation, much harder to detect. So far the case was based on violating technology import-export laws, but if the charges could be broadened to include biologicals. . .
“Hannah, are you listening?”
“Of course I’m listening. You said that you wanted to talk to me without Emily or the others. Why? You said you don’t have any new findings on Annabel.”
“Not new findings, but a new interpretation, and I need you to hear it first. Because I’m going to have to take it more public.”
She stiffened. “That would endanger Annabel!”
“It’s the only way we can secure more safeguards for Annabel. I mean, federal safeguards. But first I need to tell you what I’m going to present to my director. You know, a critical element of very early evolution may have depended on symbiosis.”
“Symbiosis?”
“Yes. Serial endosymbiosis theory. It says that in the very early days of life on Earth, swimmer organisms merged with heat- and sulfur-loving microbes to make a new kind of cell that incorporated both survival methods. Then later, when oxygen increased in the atmosphere, anaerobic phagocytes were added, and when you added proteobacteria to the mix, you got something very like present-day mitochondria that—”
“Paul,” Hannah said with what she hoped sounded like patience, “cut to the chase.”
Paul rushed on. “All life on Earth started by organisms merging into each other. That’s how you got new species before Darwinian evolution began to separate them again. Your brain has microtubules in its nerve cells that are exactly like the microtubules in bacteria. Your gut is full of symbiotic bacteria that you can’t live without, and they can’t live without you. The mitochondria in your cells are the descendants of free-living bacteria, captured by a larger org
anism that was your ancestor. The cilia lining your throat match the DNA of archaebacteria. You exist as a mass of incorporated organisms.”
Hannah said, ominously quiet, “But it’s not my gut or throat or brain we’re talking about, is it? It’s Annabel’s.”
“Yes. Of course. The organisms in her are a part of her now. They’re not parasites, they’re symbiotes. We know that in the past attackers became symbiotes and, over time, became organelles in the human body. That’s what Annabel may have. The parasites conferred on her the evolutionary advantage of a novel defense system, however little we might like that. They may be working to confer on her other advantages. We don’t know. But she is now Annabel plus. And, Hannah, that’s not all bad! Long ago parasites caused the first appearance of a human immune system. Parasites may have also caused the evolution of human sex. In fact, a human fetus is a sort of parasite. All evolution is inevitable, it proceeds along its own path and—”
Hannah stood. “It’s a good thing you’re not a lawyer, Paul. You have no idea how to present a case. You’re telling me that my sister is now some sort of alien being?”
“No, that’s what I’m not telling you! She’s Annabel. But she’s also more than Annabel, possibly the next step in human evolution. Or a false step, a branch that won’t last, we just don’t know. But these organisms can take over her brain when they need to, can activate the defense system, and—more!—can influence what substances like dopamine exist, and in what concentration, in what part of her brain. They can—”
“Dopamine?” Hannah said sharply. “You mean, like N-caps do? Are you saying my sister has inside her the equivalent of an N-cap?”
“No, no. . ..it’s not the same. But that’s the whole point, Hannah, we don’t know what these organisms can, or will, do. In Annabel or in the other children, when their symbiotes mature enough. Or maybe they have already. Annabel needs to be at the CDC or NIH, she needs to be studied—”
“Like a lab rat!”
“—and, more important, protected.”
“I’m not letting you take her.”