by Nancy Kress
“Unit Nineteen. We killed all the fuckers, we…”
“You what? What did Unit Nineteen do at Sierra Depot? Tell me!”
“There’s a password. Blackie said…”
“A password to what?”
“A key.”
“A key to what?”
“To the locked room.”
“What’s in the locked room?”
“Full of gold and jewels and silver and girls … Blackie said … gold and myrrh and Frank-in-his-senses … Frank is dead.…”
Christ. This was pointless.
Until all at once, it wasn’t.
“Frank who?” Jason asked, because he had to ask something.
“Frank Shuh … Sug … yama. Frankie. The little one.”
Shock jolted Jason, electricity that flashed from his head through his entire body, a lightning stroke that left him momentarily paralyzed. When he could speak again, he said, “Frank Sugiyama? Dr. Frank Philip Sugiyama?”
“They chopped him up. Little Frankie. The doctor screamed but … I couldn’t look and Blackie said I’m a coward.…” The boy started to cry.
“Tell me,” Jason ordered, but Tommy kept on crying.
Lindy took his free hand and stroked it. She said gently, “Tell me, Tommy.” He grabbed her arm as if he were drowning. “Blackie said … Blackie said … Grandma…”
“It’s all right, Tommy. You can tell me. Grandma wants you to tell me … damn. Asleep again. Just a minute…”
She gave him another injection with her free hand. A soon as his eyes opened, she said, “Tell me about Frank Sugiyama. Was he at Sierra Depot?”
“Yeah. Only they chopped up little Frankie and the screaming … the screaming … why wouldn’t she dance with me in the room with gold and jewels and Blackie said—”
“What is the password to the room with gold and jewels?”
“Through the back door, Blackie said. But Grandma … they chopped her up?”
Jason said, “Who was at Sierra Depot with Frank and little Frankie? Was his family there?”
“Three kids, only she wouldn’t dance with me. They won’t let her dance with me unless he tells. Tits and ass and cunt and … Grandma said!”
“What is her name, Tommy? Tell me!”
“Sewn shut, but Blackie said…”
“Her name! The girl who won’t dance with you!”
“Flower. Don’t hurt me, they always hurt me…”
“Which flower? Which?”
“Grandma said…”
“Iris? Pansy? Lily? Tell me!”
“Tell me her name,” Lindy said softly into Tommy’s ear. “The name of the girl who won’t dance with you.”
Tommy said, “Rose,” and burst into loud sobbing, snot running onto his uniform, his body with its drugged loss of coordination twitching on the floor.
Lindy looked at Jason. “Do I…”
“Let him sleep.”
A few moments later, he did. They were the longest moments of Jason’s life. Whole continents of thought rose, lived, and fell in those moments.
Lindy waited. Finally she said, “What does it mean?” And when he didn’t answer, “Come on, Jason. Does he mean Frank Sugiyama the famous physicist? What does he have to do with New America?”
“He’s the genius behind a working quantum computer. He’s supposed to be dead.”
“I thought nobody succeeded in making a reliable quantum computer before the Collapse. You’re saying the military did?”
“Yes.”
Lindy was the most intelligent woman he’d ever known. She put it together. “There’s a quantum computer at Sierra Depot. And New America took the depot. Sugiyama is there—”
“We thought he was dead. They must have found him and brought him there.”
“And little Frankie … oh, God, they have his family. They chopped up his son to gain his cooperation, and Rose is—his daughter? ‘Three kids,’ Tommy said. What do they want from Sugiyama? Tommy mentioned a password … what’s in that computer?”
“It will self-destruct,” Jason said. His lips felt numb. On the floor, Tommy snored. “It will self-destruct if anyone but Army command accesses it. Sugiyama doesn’t know the password.”
“So they’ll torture his family in front of him and kill him for nothing?”
“Yes.”
“Tommy said ‘back door’—is there a back door into the computer code?”
“No.”
Unless Jason had not been told everything he needed to know by a US Army command that barely existed anymore. Or unless Sugiyama, under terror about his family, used the fine mind that made him the twenty-first century’s equivalent of Albert Einstein to find a way around the self-destruct feature.
“Jason,” Lindy said, “what information is in that computer? Why do you look like that? What can New America do if they get into the quantum computer?”
Jason didn’t, couldn’t, tell her. Classified. He looked at Tommy, snoring on the alien material of the floor. When he woke, he wouldn’t remember what he’d said. That was how truth drugs worked. For a brief moment, Jason envied him.
Lindy said, more insistently, “What’s in that computer?”
“Classified.”
The launch codes for the only three viable nuclear missiles that the United States had left.
CHAPTER 9
Zack sat with Caitlin in the Enclave dining room, called a “mess hall” even though the Army had its own mess in Lab Dome, as the little girl fished the last of her vegetables out of the broth in her bowl. A bit of broccoli dropped onto her pants. She picked it up and ate it.
“Good girl. Now drink the broth.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Drink it, pumpkin. You know we don’t waste food.” There was not as much of it to waste now.
Caitlin made a face and drank her broth. A pair of children from the Settlement entered the mess, surprising Zack; he thought that all the Settlers had been crammed into Lab Dome. Maybe Susan, as quartermaster, had moved some of them over here. Well, that would make sense—the school, such as it was, occupied a single room in Enclave Dome.
Caitlin’s eyes went wide. “Daddy, who’s that!”
The six children of Enclave Dome—that was all Caity had ever seen. Maybe that was all she thought existed in the world. He said, “The new people who came to live at the base. Do you want to say hello?”
She turned shy, pressing herself against his knee. “No. Where’s Mommy?”
“She’s at work. You know that.”
“Okay. Can I eat my peach now?”
“Go ahead.” A woman in a homespun tunic rounded up the two kids and led them away. Compared to the few people in the mess in midafternoon—two uniformed soldiers on duty in Enclave and four pale civilian staffers in old, 3-D–printed jeans—the three sandaled and suntanned Settlers looked as exotic as Fiji Islanders.
Caitlin put down her half-eaten peach. “I don’t feel good.”
“Is it the headache again?”
“No. My tummy.” She turned and vomited onto the wooden bench, then started to cry.
“Oh, sweetie. It’s all right. Here, let’s get that icky shirt off you.”
Zack took off the child’s shirt and wrapped her in his own. Her head lolled against his bare chest. A janitor, sister to one of the lab techs, rushed over. “I’ll take care of that, Dr. McKay. Do you need a doctor?”
“No, she saw Dr. Patel yesterday. It’s just a stomach bug, but I thought she was over it.”
“I’m over it,” Caitlin mumbled against his chest.
“You take her home. I’ll get this.”
“Thank you so much.”
He carried his daughter “home,” which meant an eight-by-ten cubicle that Zack had been moved to after the influx of Settlers. Susan had been careful to not show any favoritism to her own family. Her and Zack’s bed occupied four-by-six of the space; when Caitlin’s trundle was pulled from underneath, there was barely room to stand besid
e it. He extricated the trundle and laid her on it, gazing down worriedly. “Does anything hurt now? Tummy? Head?”
“Nothing hurts. I’m sleepy.”
“I see that.” She was, it seemed to him, sleeping too much lately. But in the last few days, both Claire Patel and Lindy Ross had examined her. Neither had found anything unusual. Zack was supposed to turn Caity over to the two teachers who babysat children as well as taught them, but he wasn’t going to leave his daughter until he was sure she was all right. Anyway, neither Karen nor Marissa would appreciate being saddled with a vomiting child. He intercommed Susan.
Caitlin yawned and said, “Tell me a story.”
He began The Three Bears, a Caitlin favorite, but it was clear she wasn’t listening. In the middle of Goldilocks’s discontent with porridge, she said, “Daddy, who made the domes?”
“The Army made the domes. You know that.”
“No, who made them. Devon says the Army doesn’t know how the domes work.”
True enough. How to explain to a four-year-old what physicists didn’t understand? “The Army built the domes. But they didn’t invent them. Somebody else told them how to make domes. Like when your teacher tells you how to add up numbers.”
“Who told the Army how to make domes?”
“People from another planet. People like Jane—you met Jane.”
“She’s pretty.”
Was she? Zack realized that he hadn’t ever noticed. Susan was the only woman he’d noticed that way in years. Talk about your long-married clichés.
Caitlin said, “Jane must be really smart if she showed Colonel Jenner how to make domes.”
“Well, it wasn’t exactly like … you see, sweetie, some other people showed Jane’s people how to make domes.”
“Who?”
“Nobody knows. Nobody has ever seen them. They’re … they’re like super-aliens. Like in your book about Jerry and the Space Puppy.”
That woke her a little. Caitlin sat up. “There are super-aliens? Where?”
“Nobody knows. They left a long time ago.”
“Where did they go?”
“Nobody knows.”
“What did they look like?”
“Nobody knows.”
“Why did they go away?”
“Nobody knows that, either.”
She stared at him doubtfully, this father who didn’t seem able to provide answers to anything, and then lay back down on her trundle bed. “I know.”
“You know what the super-aliens look like?”
“Yes.”
“Then tell me! I really want to know!”
Caitlin frowned, and her eyes roamed the room, jammed with her family’s few possessions, most heaped on shelves hastily affixed to the wooden walls. Her gaze fell on her own drawings. Triumphantly she said, “The aliens look like zebras, ’cause they are zebras!”
When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses not zebras.
“Maybe,” he said, but Caitlin was already asleep.
* * *
Zack hurried through the tunnel connecting the domes. This was just as complicated as going through two ground-level airlocks, but right now Zack didn’t want to deal with delay of the required military escort. It had taken too long to find someone to stay with Caity, and he was already late.
He ran down the long flight of stairs leading from the kitchens. The large, alien-metal room at the bottom was Enclave Dome’s storeroom, jammed with produce, eggs, and grain from the Settlement and forest game shot by the Army. Semi-successful cheeses ripened on a shelf, the result of a semi-successful experiment with capturing and milking wild sheep. Two men were filling tote bags with apples from a crate; the smell made Zack’s mouth water.
In the corner stood the door to decon and the airlock. “Retinal scan and digital chip match: Dr. Zachary McKay.” The kitchen workers watched him with an expression Zack couldn’t read: envy or pity or maybe just puzzlement that anyone would risk exposure to RSA. I already had it, boys, he thought, and pushed the memory away.
The airlock gave onto a tunnel with two branches. One, sealed a short distance along, was an escape hatch that Zack hoped fervently would never have to be used. He hurried, holding his flashlight, along the much shorter tunnel. It connected to a similar branching outside Lab Dome. Airlock, decon, and he stood in the small space outside the bird lab and the mysterious, heavy third door. Up the stairwell to the young soldier on guard (didn’t they ever get bored, doing essentially nothing?), who unlocked the door to Lab Dome.
Zack raced into the conference room jammed with chairs, people, and the odors of too many bodies. Colonel Jenner sat at the head of the table. Was Jenner’s command post at the top of Enclave Dome more spacious than this? Zack had never seen it. Almost no civilian had, and only the most trusted soldiers.
“Sorry I’m late,” Zack said, squeezing into the only empty chair, beside Toni. Jenner frowned at him. Present were the heads of each research team, with some of their colleagues both military and civilian, plus some of the lab assistants. Four newcomers: two Army captains, Marianne Jenner, and Claire Patel. Neither of the Worlder scientists, which surprised Zack. Either Jane would not be able to keep up with the translation for this more technical meeting, or Jenner had decided on security grounds to exclude Ka^graa and Glamet^vor¡ from what was essentially a military briefing. Theoretically, these monthly briefings were classified, although in such close and crowded quarters almost nothing stayed secret very long. Major Duncan, whom Toni referred to as “Stonejaw,” wasn’t here; presumably Jenner had left her in temporary command at the top of Enclave Dome.
Surrounded by all those uniforms, Jenner looked tired but even more powerful than usual. “The emperor in state,” Toni said to Jason under her breath. She had the disconcerting ability to speak sotto voce without moving her lips at all.
Jenner said, “This briefing is in session. I’d like to introduce captains Mott and Darnley from Headquarters. Their mission is to update General Hahn.”
Zack blinked. Sending brass from Headquarters was a big deal, complicated and dangerous, unless these captains were already in the area. Why would that be? Something in Jenner’s posture suggested that this visit had been a surprise to him as well.
Jenner said only, “Captains Mott and Darnley will need to be brought up to speed on progress to date, so please start with the basics of your work. Dr. Yu?”
Dr. Jessica Yu, chief scientist for the base, also headed the vaccine unit. It seemed to Zack that she had always headed the vaccine unit, since the beginning of time. She’d been with the original Embassy team with Marianne. They had succeeded in creating a vaccine against R. sporii, and now Dr. Yu was trying to do the same for its weaponized cousin. At eighty-two, however, she turned more and more of the work over to others. She said, “Dr. Sullivan will present for the team.”
Major Denise Sullivan, once of the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, stood diamond-fiber straight, facing her listeners as diagrams from her tablet appeared on the wall screen behind her. Despite the lack of advance warning, her presentation was meticulous and detailed. Zack couldn’t tell how much of it the visiting captains understood, but by the end, one thing was clear: there was still no vaccine against RSA.
“Thank you, Major,” Jenner said. “Major Vargas?”
Juan Vargas, a brilliant but disorganized researcher perpetually in trouble for disregarding military protocol, headed the human immunity unit. His uniform, which he hardly ever wore, was missing a button. Toni, who respected both Vargas’s ability and his laissez-faire attitude toward spit-and-polish, changed her expression from fake to genuine interest, even though both she and Zack knew that Vargas’s unit had nothing real to report. They had made no progress toward tweaking the human immune system to cope with RSA. The variant of the protein that conferred natural immunity on a very few people was their hope; they had not been able to mimic it.
Marianne and Claire both asked a lot of questions. Zac
k watched Mott and Darnley. He became certain that they understood little of what they were hearing; Vargas was being too technical for laymen. Well, Zack could remedy that, maybe earning some brownie points for his team.
When Vargas wrapped up his presentation, Jenner said, “Dr. McKay?” And to the newcomers, “Dr. McKay heads the experimental unit. Please keep in mind that his research is the fallback position and may never be deployed, even if successful.”
Zack got to his feet. Before he could begin, Jenner added, “Since your area is the least familiar to all of us, Doctor, I hope your materials will begin with basics.”
“Yes,” McKay said. Definitely brownie points. He picked up a marking pen and pressed the button that retracted the screen into the ceiling. Behind it was an old-fashioned whiteboard on which someone had written “I WANT FUCKING REAL COFFEE!” There was no eraser. Zack swiped his sleeve across the board, leaving a smear. The marking pen had gone dry. Toni looked like she was suppressing giggles.
Two pens later, when he got one that actually wrote, he drew a diagram, talking as he sketched.
“Sparrows inherit two copies of every gene in their bodies, one from each parent. We are trying to alter one or more of those genes in order to develop two separate and distinct gene drives. Let’s call a sparrow carrying one copy of any altered gene ‘capital G.’ The other copy of the gene, plus both genes in unaltered wild sparrows, ‘small g.’ If the altered gene is dominant, then usually inheritance will go like this through successive generations:
“As you can see, fifty percent of the offspring carry the altered gene. Now each of these birds mates with wild sparrows, who are all small g:
“Now only one-quarter of offspring carry the altered gene. In the next generation, it will be only one-eighth, until the genetically engineered change effectively dies out. But with a gene drive, the situation is different. A gene drive utilizes a so-called ‘selfish gene,’ which is a bit of parasitic DNA that circumvents the laws of normal inheritance. It gets itself propagated preferentially by pasting a copy of itself into the matching chromosome inherited from the other parent, so that all of the offspring carry two altered genes. By piggy-backing on a selfish gene, a gene drive always gets inherited, like this.”