Alt.History 102 (The Future Chronicles)

by Samuel Peralta

  A head popped into his cabin, close to him; blue cap, red hair, deeply pock-marked skin. “New York next,” the boy said.

  “Ghastly brute!” William thought, awakening. In a panic, he groped the seat beside him for his mask hoping to hide his facial scars from the stranger. In London, his naked skin would never be seen. He didn’t go out without one of his masks on, not ever.

  His summer mask wasn’t there. Of course he’d stowed it in his pack. After all, he reminded himself; this was the United States, the naturalists. All xenophobic. If he wore a mask here, the locals would immediately profile him as a foreigner. They would shun him. In these parts, no one minded showing the branding scars that smallpox, staph, or herpes had left on their faces after an infection. They were alive, while so many weren’t: siblings, parents, and friends. All the survivors had suffered.

  William corrected himself, no, not all. Almost all suffered from the infectious plagues, but a few escaped. And that was the whole point of the trip, wasn’t it? To find that exception and bring it home.

  The train boy was gone, leaving William alone facing his own miserable reflection on the window glass. He thought he was a poor specimen of his species, Homo sapiens. Hideous and pock-marked, he was no better looking than the unfortunate youth.

  William pulled out his mobile device and saw he’d missed a message from his wife. This would have to be quick.

  The phone’s frame was too small, and sunlight reflected on the glass surface. His wife’s long, copper-dyed hair was up in an elaborate braid bun kind-of-thing when her image appeared in the chat, but when she faced him he was startled by the look of her mask. “Is that new?” he asked.

  “Like it? Do you, dear?” She was smiling under the mask. He could tell because her ears went up the tiniest bit.

  “Where did you get that?” He saved a screen shot to look up later on the retail outlets, or would it be the black market sites for rare skins? Was it some kind of thin, nearly translucent animal hide? Fetal lamb, maybe?

  “What did I pay for it, you mean? Isn’t that it?” She adjusted the mask around her hazel eyes and he could see the whites were red. “You don’t love it,” she said.

  The mask’s fine, thin material curved over her forehead, hugging her hairline, and clung to her nose and cheeks like a second skin of smooth, pale pink-bronze. “I don’t care one way or the other about it,” he confessed. “What’s the news there?” Whenever he didn’t know what to say, there was always the hourly health report. Everyone got the information feed, even if not all had a strong opinion about it.

  “Two new cases of MERS, wasn’t it, but not close by us. Not much today,” she trailed off. “Another extinction, I heard. The Sumatran orangutan, I think they mentioned, our orange cousins...”

  “...You don’t need to worry about MERS,” he said. Today, the orangutan disappeared. Last month the mountain gorilla. His thoughts jumped from threatened species to species, and he wasn’t concerned just because he had a love for animals. He knew that human population numbers across Eurasia were also steadily declining.

  “We’re like the endangered species now, aren’t we then,” she said quietly.

  “I think you’re depressed. Listen, we’re stopping at Manhattan. Let me get back to you after I hit the city. Recharge my phone.”

  “It’s not just the animals I’m afraid of losing,” she said, and narrowed her eyes studying his image. “You don’t love me, that’s it, isn’t it,” she said. “I see it in your face.”

  He believed that he loved his wife. But the truth was that talking with her didn’t bring him any kind of satisfaction. That came from the hunt. He thought she began to cry but couldn’t be sure. Her face was effectively hidden. “I’ll call you.”

  “When?” she whined as he ended the video chat.

  “Text, idiot, text,” he told himself. Less battery use, less emotional confusion. Jeanne tried to cover the signs of her disease, while he hoped to prevent it. Her tactics, and that whole industry, really, seemed dirty to him. Backward, he thought. Genetic modification was the future. Get at the problem at its core.

  Somewhere, someone had the perfect gene for disease resistance. He’d taken blood samples from people across Europe, and now from urban centers of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island here. So far, he’d not found even one perfect face free of scars. Some were attractive, less disfigured than others, and of course he’d tried to get the best candidates to volunteer and give a blood sample. But he felt he hadn’t found the one yet. The One. Maybe he was going to have to go all the way south to Georgia. Please, not Georgia, not in the heat of July. He hoped he’d find success in New York. One beautiful person was all he needed. He’d be done with it and on his way back to the lab.

  “Money,” people called the beautiful people. He’d never find them in Europe, where any mutant with perfect skin, however dim-witted, would have the self-preservation instinct to stay behind a mask like everyone else did, or that would be the end of them. It didn’t have to be a fancy or expensive mask, like animal skin, or spun from cocoon fiber, or spider silk. It just had to cover your face.

  He wondered, again, where his wife had bought the new mask. What was it made of?

  You could cover bad skin, or you could fix it with a human face transplant if you had the financial resources. At William’s usual salary, this was not one of Jeanne’s options. Better yet, he thought, discover how to prevent bad skin.

  The main block in his gene therapy work was getting the right people. It could be a person of any origin, at any age; the only qualifier was unblemished skin. No matter how high the compensation William or his co-investigators offered to pay out of his grant funds, no one came forward. Not one.

  He understood. Like the albino in the African countries, a European with perfect skin was, in fact, money. That person was worth as much as the black-market value poachers could get for fresh skin. Sources of perfect skin were simply high-end goods, from a trader’s viewpoint, to supply the mask industry’s demands. Hunted, he thought.

  Yes, they had become prey.

  William suddenly felt worried that the beautiful people would be hunted to extinction. He remembered the long list of species now long gone: Amur leopards, black and Java rhinos, hawksbill and leather back turtles, and more. But now the animals more closely related to humans, the primates, were also disappearing.

  He wasn’t that kind of hunter, and he shuddered at his thoughts. Even though most people he’d met didn’t like him much at first, they didn’t loathe him the way they did the odious skin poachers. He wasn’t a predator. People simply didn’t understand his work as a scientist. A small vial of blood was all he needed to stalk disease-resistance genes, no harm done in the taking. He asked himself, was that too much to ask? No. But to someone who didn’t know what a genetic engineer did, he was simply a blood collector.

  Not sexy, he thought.

  Summer heat radiated off the packed earth and shale fragments beneath his feet. He smelled sun-scorched grass as it crunched under his sturdy boots. The homeless shelter William had targeted in Manhattan was close enough to the train station that he could walk. A tall man, he was cramped from sitting and needed a stretch. He thought he’d speed-walk. He picked up his pace and his breath came too quickly. He felt his heart beating in his temples.

  At almost noon, the shelter would be packed with people coming in for a free meal. Perfect for genetic screening, if they’d let him enter. He didn’t see any reason they shouldn’t. He was sweaty, hungry, thin, and pockmarked with pale purple scars, and he carried a huge backpack worn from overuse. He’d fit right in.

  Poison ivy trailed thick along the edges of the train tracks beside him—a hardy but evil plant, difficult to kill. “What’s your secret?” he stopped to ask the glossy, red-tipped green leaves, carefully avoiding the curling tendrils of vines reaching out at him through the gravel. Why had no one exploited poison ivy as a biological weapon, he wondered? Like most of the En
glish, his skin was horribly sensitive to the plant’s oil, urushiol. He did not intend to return to his wife the next week with a red, blistering rash. He rushed away from the tracks.

  Passing by a waist-high stone wall, he was surprised to find fine-thorned brambles pressed up against it. He stopped again. The plants made a dense blanket woven of brown, gray, and green. It was studded with purple beads in tight cones. Yes, wild blackberries, he knew them! Nature’s artistry. He’d seen nothing more beautiful in the tapestry collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

  His heart constricted painfully, and he pressed his right hand to his chest. Dehydrated from the long trip, he thought. But he remembered. That scent of sunshine on burnt grass and ripe berries touched a deeply quiet, but not dead, region of his brain. He had loved something here, long ago. When he touched a pendulous cluster of blackberries with his fingertips, one dropped into his hand like a gift. After he ate it, the fruit left a faint purple mark on his palm. Not a scar, it was a love mark.

  New York was the most diverse region, obvious the moment he walked through the shelter’s open door. Inside, it was steaming. In the shaded interior, he saw the homeless bent over their metal food trays, or standing in line waiting for one, these stocky or slim, statuesque or dwarf, limp or lean, and muscled, raven-haired, redheaded, platinum blond, black, and bald people. William couldn’t even get them all into categories in his head.

  He beamed at them. These descendants of the English, Belgian Flemings, French Huguenots, Africans, Germans, Jews, and Scandinavians had come, stayed, and mixed here in what could only be described as a gold mine of genetic possibilities. Alive, he thought. And what that meant to William was that they had survived smallpox, measles, and even the flu epidemic that had killed his own folks. These survivors had lived through the waves of countless outbreaks that broke on their shores over the years. After the vaccines stopped working last century, epidemics became as expected as the changes of the seasons.

  Immunization had been a revolutionary idea when Louis Pasteur came up with it, and later, the vaccines were blockbuster products for the British pharmaceutical industry for a while. But evolution just kept on going. Mutation, variation, and change didn’t stop when people created vaccines. The pestilences like smallpox lived, mutated, and waited. And then they outwitted the humans in the game of natural selection, because tiny viruses were so much faster to grow and to change. They reproduced in absolute numbers far greater than the lumbering, long-lived primates.

  William wiped his eyes, burning from the salt of his sweat. He scanned the hall. Who among these homeless was not only a survivor, but more? Was one resistant, without a trace of scars left by disease? This coveted, elite class of human could harbor a pathogen, maybe smallpox, or a virus like Ebola or HIV—any bug really—without showing one sign of illness. A virus would enter their body, yes, like it did any other person, through the breath or skin, from kisses, sex, or even from a wound for the least fortunate. But there, the virus would stop, being unable to get inside a cell to grow, reproduce, and make an infection. These people, and their genes, could close the door on human extinction. They were the key to unlocking a future of health. They were beautiful.

  He caught himself smiling like an idiot, and looked down, getting hold of his emotions.

  The staff wore blue paper hats covering their hair, and thin, clear plastic gloves protecting their hands. They doled out steamed corn on the cob, and baked beans covered in maple syrup and some kind of crystal sprinkles that looked like sea salt. Without making eye contact, a young woman placed a perfect triangle of what William thought might be squash pie onto his tray. The sweet was gelled with some kind of Atlantic seaweed. Agar maybe, William guessed. Dairy was only a distant memory. After the World Health Organization and United Nations enforced a plant-based diet to save the human species from starvation, dairy and meat were as hard to find as a clear-skinned face.

  The enormous hall was nearly full. The air reeked of unwashed bodies. At the far end, a woman with long, glossy black hair was taking notes. Looking at her from behind he couldn’t be sure, but was she interviewing? As William got closer, he could see vine-like tendrils of her silky hair trailed over her shoulders out of her firm, even braid. For some reason he didn’t comprehend, he thought of poison ivy.

  He slid into an empty place on a bench at a long wooden table farthest from the entry, and poked at his slice of pie with a thin wooden fork. He watched it resist and return.

  “Can I join you?”

  He turned to her and his heart stopped, then raced wildly. He was afraid he was having a cardiac attack of ventricular fibrillation and would keel over dead. He was immobilized, facing the woman with the long hair. There it was. Perfect skin. W-factor. The future.

  She laid one hand on his right shoulder and sat down on the bench beside him. “I’d like to ask where you’re from,” she said slowly, and removed her hand, soft as a feather. Before he realized what she was doing he heard a faint click and knew she’d photographed him. Looking down, she typed notes into a tablet as he answered.

  “Plymouth. Originally,” he said remembering he had no reason to go back. “It’s a small place, in Massachusetts,” he added. After all the losses, he didn’t want to think about his hometown. His parents died there in the last flu epidemic. The loss of their hundred acres, which had been in the family since one of the early 17th century invasions, was also too painful a wound to revisit. No, William had no desire to think about his past. He wondered why he didn’t just answer “London” and be done with it. But he never knew how someone here would react to him as a foreigner.

  “You’re of pilgrim heritage?”

  He nodded yes. “Scientist,” he couldn’t help adding.

  “Is that right. But you said Plymouth and I’m guessing you’re English, from way back, maybe, I think,” she said, and watched him nod yes. “What brings you to the city?”

  “Research.”

  “Really. We’ve something in common then, you know? Because I’m finishing a research project: origins of the homeless people of Manhattan. Would you like me to include you and your story?”

  He shook his head, no. “You’re from?” he asked, getting his 30-second pitch ready to recruit volunteers for his disease-resistance gene identification study.

  “I’m mixed, two families,” she said, but he just kept looking at her, waiting. “No one ever asks about me! All right, here you go. Mother was Lakota, you know, we’re Sioux? And my father’s family, they were Scotch-Irish.”

  William raised his eyebrows, shook his head side to side in denial. This was too good to believe!

  First on his list of prime destinations would have been one of the nations that surround the United States in a fragile union. These regions were famous for the breath-taking beauty and undeniable vitality of their citizens—people like her. Now, the U.S. territories had only 30 million people, total. Their population was slowly, steadily declining, just as Europe’s and Asia’s were. But he knew the 500 diverse indigenous nations that lay beyond the U.S. borders were increasing, with over 300 million living souls in their North Land Union today.

  To sample from 300 million, or alternatively, from 30 million, would have been vastly different projects. If he could get into the North Land, having access to ten times more people could be highly significant for his research. It meant ten-fold higher odds of finding the gene he was after, because with more candidates, he had more possibilities of finding The One.

  The Creek or Cherokee, Dine or Dakota, the Seminole or Sioux, he could go on and on; he’d requested entry to them all. Not one nation would let him pass their borders. To visit even briefly had proven impossible. He had an international passport, but no North Land nation would approve his travel visa. English colonial settlers and their descendants hadn’t managed to penetrate far beyond the Atlantic coastline either, centuries ago, he reminded himself. More European invaders had died from the epidemics than combat then, as was true of ea
ch and every war since.

  The newcomers had weaker bodies and immune systems than the North Landers. Even now, in peacetime, European visitors were warned that they put themselves at risk, if they did manage to obtain a visa. Coming from England and a scientist as he was, William fell into a least-favored visitor class. Was he also weak? Vulnerable? He thought not, and crossed that obstacle off of his mental list of barriers. William was not risk-adverse.

  He knew he’d never get in to take samples where he most wanted them.

  Somehow, miraculously, she had come to him. The One.

  She said, “So, I’ll take a break from my work, and if you won’t let me interview you, I’ll pretend you’re interviewing me. My story surprised you, right? It happens, a mixed-race family. When they’re near the border like my mother was. Because of school, you know? She was in her college studies, and in her youth, naturally people fall in love. I never met the man myself, you know, he died quite suddenly after he met my mother, she told me, or some time right around then.”

  Why had he died after meeting her mother, William wondered? Was she an elite carrier, not sick herself, yet passing on some kind of disease? But he remained silent.

  “And now my mother’s gone missing,” she said. He watched the velvet-smooth skin of her forehead pull together in a worried frown. “Since a month ago, and we’ve looked everywhere, even here. Honestly it’s a good thing I’ve got the project now. I’m afraid that I’d go crazy at home.”

  What was her mother’s fate, and what would hers be? He didn’t dare to imagine; so many disappeared and were never found alive, or intact. But in truth, William was hardly listening as the young woman talked about her project, and finishing her degree, and her scholarly interests. His thoughts about his own research plans raced so fast that he was afraid he’d forget to breathe.

  He quickly sorted the few facts he had into a logical sequence. She was Scotch-Irish, yet unblemished. Her ancestors would have been the lowland Scots. They were sent by King James to colonize the aboriginal Irish. Then they invaded the North Lands here. Same reason. In the English colonies abroad, Scotch-Irish were always the principle fighters. They became the architects of the union that made up the United States years later. Would they ever have stopped fighting, if they’d survived? No, he thought. But disease and death stopped them at the new U.S. borders. And outbreaks continued to cut their numbers over the generations.