by Nancy Kress
Zack put his hand on Caitlin’s forehead. It didn’t feel hot. “Should we send for Lindy?”
“No, I don’t think so. Not unless she develops a fever. But can you sit with her for a while? I have a staff meeting.” Susan, a former CPA, was now the civilian quartermaster for both domes. Her military counterpart had not lived through the Collapse. Susan had the thankless job of stretching dwindling supplies of nearly everything to meet too many requests from too many people.
Zack said, “I’m supposed to be at Lab Dome to brief Marianne Jenner and the other scientists off the Return.”
“Okay,” Susan said. “Star-farers outrank incoming vegetables, which is what this staff meeting is supposed to be about. I’ll postpone it.”
“Thank you, love.” God, he was lucky. Susan was inevitably cheerful, always fair, and far more fearless than he was. When his first family died from RSA, Zack had cursed the immune system that hadn’t let him die with Tara and their sons. He’d thought his life was over. Susan showed him that it was not. She, too, had lost much—there was no one who survived the Collapse who would not bear emotional scars forever—but her natural sturdiness let her carry on, and she carried him with her.
Caitlin said, “It hurts, Daddy.”
“I know. But if you go to sleep, it will be better when you wake up.” Let that be true.
“It will be better if you print my zebras.”
Susan smiled. Zack heard her unspoken words: She can’t be that sick if she’s haggling to use the printer. Paper was a hoarded commodity; no more of it would be manufactured until the war ended.
Caitlin said craftily, “Bollers wants to look at my zebras while I’m sleeping.”
“Well, just this once,” Susan said. She carried Caitlin’s tablet to the quartermaster’s office, printed from it, and returned. Zack duct-taped the picture to the rough wooden wall. The base was well supplied with duct tape, even if everything else was running low. Three zebras, one with only two legs but all with magnificent purple stripes, cavorted across a yellow field.
Occam’s razor did not apply to a child’s imagination. Zebras abounded.
* * *
The conference room at Lab Dome was actually an all-purpose gathering room too small for most of the gatherings it hosted. Space was too valuable to ever sit unused. Zack ousted some soldiers lounging at one end of the long table, plus a small knot of immunologists arguing earnestly at the other end. Two of the scientists left for their lab, but the other two stayed from curiosity about the Worlders, even though they now knew that World was far behind Earth in science.
The room had two walls of metal and two of rough slats, with metal Army-issue chairs and a table of what had once been exquisitely polished wood. After ten years, it bore cup stains, gouges, and a long crack in the middle vaguely resembling the east coast of Africa.
More people filed in and seated themselves. Marianne sat beside Zack and set down a cup of what passed here for coffee, mostly made from chicory. She said to him in a low voice, “I’m astonished by how smoothly—how normal—work seems to proceed here.”
“Well, no, not exactly. We lost so much data and equipment.” The understatement of the year. Maybe of the century. They’d lost the CDC, the US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, the gene labs at UC Berkeley and Harvard—and that was only in biology. Fermi Lab, CERN, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, Livermore, and Cold Harbor.… Some of these places still existed as rusting and abandoned facilities in which everyone had died; some had been nuked in the first chaos of the most ill-defined war in history. Participants hadn’t even been sure who were the other combatants.
And what was “normal” about three Worlders and two Terrans, who had all jumped twenty-eight years and a hundred and three light-years, sitting on metal folding chairs around a table, waiting to hear about a weaponized microbe? Marianne, looking tired and rubbing her forehead. Claire Patel, who was not a geneticist but a physician. Ka^graa, demoted by circumstances from being the most celebrated scientist on his planet to a nobody on this one. Glamet^vor¡, looking sulky. Jane, the translator, who might or might not have enough scientific terminology to actually translate.
Zack plunged in, stopping after each sentence for Jane to translate. “I’d like to first talk about how R. sporii was weaponized, and then what we’re trying to do about it. As you know, R. sporii is related to the paramyxoviruses, a diverse group. Humans and birds were always the natural hosts for the paras, and the human and avian forms share structural features and replication mechanisms. In fact, the Respirovirus may be basal to the bird form, the avulavirus-rubulavirus clade.”
Was he already beyond Jane’s translation ability? He wanted to include enough technical terms to brief Marianne and Claire, but he had no idea what Ka^graa and Glamet^vor¡ could grasp. However, Jane didn’t interrupt, and the two World men seemed to be following. She must have really prepared for this. Zack was impressed with her intelligence and determination.
He continued, “The whole family of paramyxoviridae is genetically stable, but it does have a P gene that can produce multiple proteins not needed for replication. The Gaiists used that, plus histone modification and a host of other tricks. It’s a beautiful piece of work, really.”
Jane looked up sharply at that, but Marianne nodded. She, at least, understood impersonal admiration for a complicated, if evil, piece of scientific work.
“R. sporii lent itself to modification because it was a pretty large virus to begin with, as viruses go, and now it’s bigger still. The genemods to R. sporii did three things. First, they combined the spore virus with the bird virus. Second, they boosted the virus’s virulence in humans, while leaving birds as infected carriers who don’t get sick. Third, genemods aerosolized R. sporii avivirus, making it airborne. It thrives in bird droppings, and when they dry out in warm summer weather, the air is full of the most deadly disease ever known to human beings. Its exposure time plotted versus parts per million is very small, even for an airborne pathogen, which means you don’t need much of it to infect a population. Its kill rate is higher than smallpox.
“The Gaiists were trying to wipe out most of the human race, not just now but in any foreseeable future. That’s why they needed the birds as a second reservoir. R. sporii avivirus kills so many of its human hosts that the disease would die out if birds didn’t keep it alive to infect the next generation.”
Glamet^vor¡ spoke angrily to Jane, who said, “He asks what you will do about this terrible evil.”
“I’m coming to that. We have three scientific teams here at Lab Dome. Let me describe them briefly, and then, if you like, you can question me or find the team members and question them. First, the vaccine team is trying to develop a vaccine against RSA. So far, no luck.
“The immunology team is trying to change or bolster the human immune response to better cope with R. sporii avivirus. They hope to develop a drug that mimics proteins that seem to protect the small number of people with natural immunity, as well as the survivors. Apparently, you can’t get this disease twice. So far, no luck.
“The gene-drive team is working on two gene drives, on a last resort. The first—”
Jane said, “What is ‘last resort,’ please?”
“Something we will do only if all else fails. We’re trying to create a gene drive—that’s a bit of engineered DNA that will paste itself into the chromosomes of both male and female sparrows, so all the offspring inherit it. The first gene drive would make it impossible for sparrows to contract RSA. That’s the harder drive to create, and so far we haven’t succeeded. The second drive, which we haven’t succeeded at either but we’re closer, produces changes in the DNA of the next generation of birds that makes all males sterile. The computer model says that within fifty generations, all sparrows would be gone from North America. Longer for the rest of the world, but selective genetic sweep will eventually get there.”
While Jane translated, Claire said, “A
ll sparrows? You’ll wreck the global ecology all over again!”
Zack said, “I said it was a last resort.”
Marianne said, “This was tried in Africa with Anopheles mosquitoes before I left Terra. It was working. What happened?”
“The Collapse happened,” Zack said, more harshly than he’d intended. “I said that the sterility drive was a last resort.”
Claire echoed herself. “All sparrows? Didn’t they … wasn’t that tried once in China?”
Jane finished translating. Glamet^vor¡ said something to her, his face twisted. Jane frowned at him. Glamet^vor¡ turned to Zack and demanded in heavily accented English, “All things you do? Three things—no things work? Now?”
“No,” Zack said. “None of them work now.” And looked to be a long way from ever doing so.
Glamet^vor¡ said something in his own language. It needed no translation: his contemptuous face and hand gesture were graphic. He stood and stalked out.
Jane said, “Please to excuse Glamet^vor¡’s unpolite. He … has the headache.”
No one spoke until Marianne said, “The virophage in our blood…”
“The immunology team is working with it now. It would help if we had the samples you already cultured on your ship.”
“Yes. Meanwhile, I’d like to ask you more about both the potential vaccine and the gene drive. Have you found a homing endonuclease to reliably cut or insert—”
Zack listened patiently. He wanted to go back to Enclave Dome and check on Caitlin. He wanted to go back to work with Toni Steffens on the gene drive, even though it meant putting up with her calling it the “bird basher.” He wanted these scientists, who could not contribute to any of the desperate and unsuccessful trials going forward under this inverted alien bowl, to leave him alone.
And if he had to sit here and patiently answer Marianne’s questions, he hoped to hell that she didn’t know too much more about the mosquito trials in Africa just before the Collapse. They had been on the point of cancellation because it was discovered that the gene drive had transferred itself to at least one other species of arthropod. A fairly distant species. Zack did not want to discuss the possible risk of his sterility drive transferring from birds to other warm-blooded species.
Like, for instance, mammals.
No, he did not at all want to discuss that possibility, not until he and Toni had found a way around it. Horizontal gene transfer of a drive that interfered with reproduction—that would be a zebra fatal enough to do what RSA had not, ending human life on Earth.
Unthinkable.
* * *
Kill all the birds? Was killing all that these Terrans ever thought about?
Disgust flared Jane’s nostrils, knotted her stomach as she rushed along the corridor. World was not like this. Every small child knew that each species needed the rest, that all of Mother Nature was a harmonious whole and could no more function smoothly, optimally, than could a human body if you cut off its arm. And if what you sliced out was not a limb but a liver or heart …
And she had liked Zack McKay. How was he different, really, than the Gaiists who’d tried to kill humans? Were human lives so much more valuable than birds? The hawk she’d seen from the quadcopter, swooping over meadows and forest—wasn’t it sentient to some degree?
Murder. The soldiers with their weapons, the scientists with their genes. All Terrans were so—
No. Not all. Colin Jenner and his group were different. When Jane had looked at Colin, she’d seen a Kindred, not a killer. Although he let the babies at his dome die—but he did not make that decision—
“Jeg^faan!”
Glamet^vor¡ stopped her headlong race to the privacy of her sleeping room. He was a convenient target for her anger and confusion. “Don’t call me that name! I told you!”
“I greet you, Jeg^faan,” he said, not courteously.
“Let me pass, please.”
“You are becoming as demanding as the Terrans. I—”
“Jane!” A shrill, grating voice behind her. Jane went immobile, but this World signal for privacy did not stop Kayla Rhinehart. Nothing stopped Kayla.
“I want to talk to you, Jane!”
“I greet you, Kayla.”
“Yeah. Whatever. I heard that you—”
“This is Glamet^vor¡.”
“Hi. I heard that you went to Colin Jenner’s Settlement!”
“I did go there, yes.” Kayla’s eyes looked almost as big as a Worlder’s, although of course they were not, and too shiny. She had been given some sort of Terran medicine for her crying sadness—had the medicine made her like this, talking too fast and unable to stay still? If so, maybe the sadness was better. More human.
Kayla breathed, “What is it like? Tell me everything!”
“It’s a farm. Everyone is RSA survivor so no person wears esuits. They have a dome but the airlocks are open except of attacks. They live very simple. No weapons, no killing animals. They—”
“It sounds like Eden!”
Jane didn’t know what that was. She said, “But children—”
“What is Colin Jenner like? Is he handsome?”
“I am sorry, I don’t know that word but—”
“Is he good to look at?”
Jane saw again Colin’s smiling, expressive face, his strong hug to his chilly brother, the affection in his eyes for Marianne. The way he’d gazed at Jane. “Yes. He is good to look at.”
“Mated?”
“No, I don’t think … no one said…”
“I hate living in this dome,” Kayla said. “It’s worse than World.”
“It is different. But Colonel Jenner is trying to—”
“He’s the worst thing about this fucking place!”
Jane was silent. Her head ached. She wanted to be alone to think.
Kayla said, “Colin Jenner’s dome sounds wonderful. How far away is it?”
“I don’t know. We went in a flying machine.”
“A plane? A helicopter? A dirigible—what?”
“I don’t know those words.”
“I wish it wasn’t so hard to talk to you!” Kayla flounced off.
Glamet^vor¡ said in World, “What did you and Kayla say?”
Jane didn’t want to repeat the entire pointless conversation, nor talk about Kayla’s mental condition. “My head hurts, Glamet^vor¡. Excuse me, please.”
“My head hurts, too.”
That caught her attention. Were the Worlders becoming sick with some Terran microbe? She said swiftly, “Do you know if my father or La^vor or Belok^ have headaches, too?”
“I don’t know. You were talking with Kayla about Colin Jenner.”
“Yes. Glamet^vor¡, I must go. Where is my father?”
“In the other dome, you can’t go there without an esuit and ‘military escort.’ Fah!”
La^vor and Belok^ weren’t at the other dome. They were here. Jane pushed past Glamet^vor¡, but he caught at her arm. “When you said ‘Colin Jenner,’ you didn’t look like your head ached.”
What? How had she looked? Jane felt warmth rise from her neck through her face, and knew that her blush was only making things worse. She broke free of Glamet^vor¡’s hand and went to the tiny sleeping room shared by the three World siblings, their own small lahk.
La^vor and Belok^ weren’t there. But there were only a few other places where they could go. Jane began to search, hoping that both of them felt fine, that her own headache and Glamet^vor¡’s were due merely to the newness and tension of everything in this terrifying, fascinating, always tense world.
All at once the dome exploded into activity. Soldiers ran toward airlocks. Lindy Ross tore out of the corridor leading to sleeping rooms, followed a moment later by more people and a robot carrying heavy medical equipment. From another direction, Claire Patel sprinted past.
“Claire!” Jane called. But no one answered.
* * *
The Return had landed.
Jason hadn’t been sure that
Branch Carter, who admitted that he didn’t understand the alien ship, would be able to follow Li’s directions to land on an upland meadow a mile from the signal station. Carter wasn’t, after all, a trained pilot, not even for Terran craft. But Carter had succeeded, and Jason and Li slapped hands in a high-five gesture that Jason hadn’t made since the Collapse. Jason was surprised that Li, younger, knew the high-five at all.
Jason spoke to the Return through the comsat; communication was so much easier with New America’s comsat out of commission and unable to pinpoint their location.
“Lieutenant Allen, are you also able to lift and land the Return?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. You, Carter, and Specialist Martin will remain aboard. Dr. Jenner says she needs some supplies and specimens from the ship. I’ll send a FiVee to pick up whatever Carter thinks the scientists will need, everything suitably protected from contamination.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And then—”
Jason’s earplant erupted into sound. “Colonel Jenner, Hillson here. Perimeter received a report of an attack on the Colin Jenner Settlement at the coast. New America ground troops. Play recording?”
“Yes. Allen, stand by.” Jason’s guts twisted. He’d insisted on providing Colin with radio equipment to contact the base if necessary. Reluctantly Colin had agreed to leave it hidden in woods beyond a bean field. The equipment had never been used before. Contact now meant that at least one person was outside the dome and that the attack was severe.
The recording came on. A woman’s voice, shrill and terrified, gunfire in the distance. “They’re here! They’re shooting at us, at everybody who couldn’t get to the dome in time … some people are dead—please come help! Please! Help us! They—”
A burst of automatic fire, deafeningly loud, and a dull thud. She was gone. Then Hillson’s voice. “Sir?”
“Any more intel? Did anyone on site say how big the attack force is?”