Young Blood

by Brian M Stableford

  'That's not true,’ I said, finding my voice at last. ‘None of this is your fault. You did everything you could. You're doing everything you can. You're not to blame.'

  That was what I'd come to say. That was what she'd let me in to say. For the moment, the function other friends and neighbours and everyone else in the world was simply to assure her over and over again that it wasn't her fault, that she shouldn't blame herself. It was the only way that the world could be made bearable for her.

  I owed her that much, at least.

  I let her put her arms around me and literally cry on my shoulder. I held her fleshy body in my skinny arms and hugged her like a mother, as guilt and sentiment obliged me to do. And in the end, she allowed herself to be soothed, to be convinced—as she had secretly been all along—that it really wasn't her fault, and that everybody realised the fact, and that it was okay to go on living, breathing and maybe even hoping.

  7

  It had grown dark by the time I got back to the campus, but the science buildings were all ablaze with light, as they invariably were. The corridors weren't very crowded, because the staff and students were already trickling off home, but the double-doored lab where Gil had been doing his experiments was still lit up. Through the observation window I could see Professor Viners’ research assistant, Teresa, washing apparatus at the sink. Her dark hair looked untidy, and she seemed more than a little impatient to be gone. She looked up briefly and saw me, but she wouldn't meet my eyes, or give any sign of recognition. She just turned back to her work. I could see my own reflection in the glass; it was as though I were standing inside the room looking back at myself. I seemed uncommonly relaxed, almost as though I belonged there.

  I went to the door of Professor Viners’ office, and knocked.

  He seemed pleased enough to see me—rather less uncomfortable, in fact, than Dr Gray had been. He got up when I came in, and gestured politely to the armchair on the near side of his cluttered desk.

  'Thank you for coming to see me, Miss Charet,’ he said. ‘It's very good of you to spare the time.'

  He waited until I'd sat down before resuming his own seat. ‘How are you now?’ he asked, but didn't wait for an answer. ‘I know some of the people at the hospital quite well, including Maurice Hodgson; he told me you'd been released. He probably told you that he did some extra blood tests because I asked him to, and that there's nothing at all to worry about. I thought I'd better reassure you of that myself. I don't know what Gil told you, that day you were attacked, but I know that he thought, even then, that he'd been infected by something he picked up in the lab, and I assume he'd already told you a good deal about the kind of work he was doing here. I just wanted to make sure that you understood that there's no possibility at all that you've been infected by any of the viruses I've been working on. Have the reporters been on to you yet?'

  I shook my head. ‘There were a couple at the hospital, but I didn't talk to them.’ I said. ‘I don't think they'll bother with me any more.'

  'I'd like to think that were true, but it isn't,’ the professor assured me, dolefully. ‘They'll be around for some time yet. I don't want to instruct you in what to say or what not to say when they do start asking awkward questions, but I do want to explain the situation here. My work is under threat, you see, and I want to make sure that you know what's at stake.'

  'I understand,’ I said. Not unnaturally, he couldn't be content with that.

  'Gil came to see me the day he killed himself,’ he said, awkwardly. ‘He was very distressed—though I didn't, of course, realize quite how distressed—and he told me that he was worried about you. He was worried about the fact that you hadn't regained consciousness after the blood transfusion, I took some blood from him to test it for antibodies to the experimental viruses. We can do that, you see—if anyone does become infected by any of our viruses, we can find out. Each antibody is quite specific; it always migrates to a particular spot on the relevant chromatogram. Do you know what I'm talking about? Never mind, if not. Just take it from me that if Gil had been exposed to any of the experimental viruses, the blood test would have shown it up. His blood was perfectly normal, Anne—just like yours. It was all in his mind.'

  I remembered what Gil's ghost had told me in the hospital. He'd accused me of not listening, but I had been listening, and even though I didn't understand completely, I knew vaguely what he'd been trying to say.

  'Your tests only showed that we hadn't produced antibodies,’ I said, to prove to him that I was no fool, that he couldn't just overwhelm me with the authority of his expertise. ‘Isn't it possible that Gil's immune system simply didn't react? He said something to me once about the possibility of viruses not being recognised as invaders by the body—about their becoming integrated with the host DNA. Isn't there some theory which suggests that spontaneous integration of new DNA is an important aspect of the process of evolution?'

  I watched a frown settle slowly upon Professor Viners’ brow. It was a frown of uncertainty as well as anxiety. He had been hoping that it would all be easier than this.

  'It's an unorthodox theory,’ he said, blandly.

  'Gil was always bragging about the unorthodoxy of his theories. He told me that some of your own ideas were considered way out.'

  The professor took up a black notebook from the pile of debris beside his PC. ‘I've been reading Gil's lab notes,’ he said. ‘He jotted down some fanciful hypotheses in the margins. I can't decipher them all, but one or two of them are more than a little wild. If the press got hold of it, or if someone else were to give them an account of Gil's ideas—even an ungarbled one—we could easily be made to look like a couple of mad scientists. Yes, you're right—even I'm considered way out by some of my colleagues. That makes it hard to get funding for my research. The dean of the faculty is always reminding me how publicity-conscious the university has to be nowadays, and how we might have to alter our research priorities and become “more practical", in order to attract money from industry. He'd far rather I were testing newly fashionable drugs on old-fashioned rats for the ever-fashionable drug companies. If Gil was infected by one of our viruses without forming antibodies, Miss Charet, it was a chance in a million. And no matter how badly it affected him, he shouldn't have done what he did. All he had to do was go into the hospital. That's what I told him to do, when I saw how worried he was. The police tried to pin the murder of that little girl on him—I suppose they were very disappointed when you told them that he wasn't the person who attacked you. I can't believe that he did something like that, no matter how deranged he might have been, for whatever cause. Can you?'

  'No,’ I lied. He relaxed a little when I said that.

  'I won't try to pretend to you that my work is absolutely vital to the future of humankind,’ he said, spreading his hands in an awkwardly pleading gesture. ‘I can't even tell you what it is we'll eventually have discovered, if anything, when the series of experiments I've planned is complete. I know that they tell you over in the philosophy department that the purpose of experiments is to subject concisely framed hypotheses to rigorous tests, but that's too neat and too narrow. A lot of experiments are just exploratory, to see what might turn up.

  'What I'm trying to do is explore the links between DNA, brain chemistry and certain psychological phenomena, like dreams and delusions. We can study the dreams of animals, you know—there's a body at the base of the brain called the pons, and if you remove it surgically you take away the off switch which normally prevents signals being relayed to the motor nerves during dreaming. Cats and rats and rabbits can be forced to act out their dreams. We can only watch what they do, of course; we have no idea what they see, but it's something—a baseline to work from. So we can observe, in a vague sort of way, how the dreams of our experimental animals are affected when they're infected by the viruses—if they're affected at all. We get a lot of negative results, because viruses which affect humans often don't affect animals at all, or affect them in a different way. We
also do a lot of tissue-culture experiments, which allow us to study the fine biochemistry of infection.

  'I've infected myself with some of the experimental viruses, at various times—I'll admit that to you, as I admitted it to Gil. They're not dangerous, Miss Charet. They all come from the general population to begin with; they're all ordinary products of nature. We don't do any genetic engineering here, and if we're secretive about what we actually do it's mostly because we don't want to attract the attention of those idiots who think that people who experiment on animals ought to be firebombed into seeing the light. It's true that viruses don't affect everybody the same way, and that certain particular individuals may react very badly to a virus which other people never even notice. If that's what happened to Gil, I'm very sorry—but if that is what happened, it may not have been one of my viruses at all. It could be any old virus that he happened upon for the first time, far from home in cold-ridden England. He could have caught it from anyone, Miss Charet—even you. Even so, I'd still have to ask you to be very careful what you say to the press. The Sun or the Star could close me down with one casual scare-story, and I don't want that to happen. Do you?'

  'No,’ I said, truthfully. I knew that what had happened to Gil was my fault, not Professor Viners'. I didn't want to blight his career.

  'Thank you,’ he said, warily. He didn't think he was out of the wood yet.

  'Tell me about Gil's wild ideas,’ I said, because I was genuinely curious. ‘He used to tease me a bit, boasting about how way out they were, without ever spelling them out.'

  He looked dubious. He was scared that I didn't mean what I said—that I might repeat anything he told me to other people, including the creepy-crawlies of the gutter press.

  'This idea that our dreams might be caused by stray DNA, for instance,’ I said. ‘That's very intriguing, isn't it? I mean, I know that we have bacteria inside us all the time, and all kinds of other tiny parasites. One of the teachers at school once told my class that if everything in the world were invisible except for nematode worms, you could still see all the trees and buildings and people as faint white clouds of nematode parasites. I know that our blood and our brains are full of microscopic passengers, which mostly don't do any harm and sometimes do us some good, helping us to digest our food and the like, but nobody ever said at school that those invisible passengers might affect our minds. I suppose it's obvious, when you think about the way that flu or meningitis can make you delirious, but Gil thought it might go far beyond dreams, didn't he? Even you think psychotropic DNA might be involved in certain kinds of mental abnormality, don't you? Gil told me that.'

  'It's a natural line of speculation to follow,’ Professor Viners admitted. ‘It's very difficult to figure out how certain disruptions of brain chemistry can be translated into highly specific delusions or patterns of behaviour. For the most part, I think, we manufacture our own dreams and our own delusions—and in spite of the sterling efforts of Dr Freud I think much of what occurs to us in our dreams is mere random noise. But there are patterns in dreams and delusions; there are even patterns in delirium. Of course I'm interested in the biochemical bases of abnormal psychology and of so-called religious experiences. It's only natural that I should be. The links between brain chemistry and particular mental events may be tortuous and tenuous, but they do exist. Our DNA does influence, in some way, the capacity we have for experience.'

  'What about people who see ghosts? What about people who believe in vampires and werewolves? Do our genes affect those kinds of things?'

  'It's easy to involve those kinds of things in the argument,’ the professor hedged. ‘But it's all just science fiction at present. We have to do the experiments, you see. We have to start from the bottom, with the things we can observe. I can't get seriously involved with speculations like these until I've done much more elaborate groundwork. I think Gil was a little overoptimistic about what our lab work might ultimately achieve—but in a way, it's good to be able to see the further horizons, to be able to take inspiration from the big ideas.'

  'You haven't told me yet,’ I pointed out, ‘exactly what Gil's big and wild ideas were.'

  'I only have his jottings to go on,’ he said. ‘But if I'm taking the right inference from them, he seems to have been wondering whether our minds are entirely—how shall I put it?—our own. He seems to have toyed with the idea that consciousness itself might be a collaborative endeavour, in which the part played by the DNA of our own genes interacts with the DNA of what you call our “passengers". As you may know, lots of the DNA in the nuclei of our cells doesn't appear to be active in making proteins. Most people think it's just redundant junk which gets copied along with the functional genes, but some—Gil included, I suppose—take pleasure in trying to figure out roles it might play. Some people think that viruses can become integrated into the chromosomes by inserting themselves in the non-functional DNA. That way, their selfish genes attain the end of reproduction without destroying the cells of their host. Gil wondered whether some of that apparently spare DNA might be involved in fundamental mental phenomena. Not just dreams and delusions, but the basic properties of mind: thought, emotion, even self-consciousness. It's all pure speculation—not a shred of evidence in sight. Just game-playing.'

  'You mean,’ I said, trying to prove that I was on the ball, ‘that consciousness—or some of its attributes—might be a kind of universal disease?'

  'Not exactly a disease,’ he corrected me. ‘Gil wasn't quite that cynical—I think he'd have regarded any fundamental contribution made to human consciousness by non-human DNA as a matter of symbiosis rather than disease, although the notion of mental illness would then come to be seen in a different light. And if, as you suggest, Gil was sufficiently entranced by Hoyle and Wickramasinghe's ideas about evolution occurring by means of the continual co-option into existing genomes of DNA falling from the sky, he would presumably have envisaged that symbiosis is a preliminary stage in the process of absorption and incorporation. It's an idea for philosophers to kick around rather than serious-minded biochemists—perhaps you can have some fun with it in your department.'

  He'd changed tack while he was speaking. He was challenging me now, deliberately becoming more abstruse in the hope that I wouldn't be able to follow the argument but would be too proud to ask for further clarification. And he was teasing me too, being condescending towards philosophers and their supposed unworldliness, as practical scientists so often are. But I'd learned enough from Gil to be familiar with most of the words, and I thought I saw what he was getting at.

  No wonder Gil still thought, even after finding himself alive after death as a phantom inhabitant of the borderlands, that it was all down to some virus.

  I could see too that if Gil were right about the virus, then what Professor Viners had said earlier might be true. Gil hadn't picked it up in the lab at all: he'd picked it up from me. I was the carrier, the centre of infection. I was the one whose consciousness had first been supplemented and gradually transformed. I was the one who might start an epidemic. Not Viners, his lab or his assistant: only me.

  'It's all very interesting,’ I told Professor Viners. ‘I wish I understood it better. But I see what you mean, now, about the possibility that the press might get hold of the wrong end of the stick. It wouldn't be too difficult to make a real horror story out of it all. And scare-stories sell papers, don't they?'

  'But you're an intelligent girl,’ he told me. If all else fails, try flattery. It'll get you almost anywhere. ‘You know what damage silly scare-stories can do. You're a philosopher—you know what follies sloppy argument can lead to.'

  'You have to make Viners understand,’ Gil had said. ‘You have to persuade him to take it seriously.’ But it wasn't that easy. Even if I had wanted to, I didn't have the power to make Professor Viners see what he was determined not to see. Even if I had told him everything—about me, about Maldureve, about what had become of Gil—it wouldn't have had the desired effect. If I convinced him
that I really had been infected by something nasty, I'd also convince him that I was deranged. He wouldn't be able to take what I said seriously. Anyway, I didn't want to tell him, because I thought I understood what was happening better than any of them. I had been with the owls, and had begun to learn wisdom.

  'I'll be very careful,’ I promised. ‘I won't speak out of turn to anyone, least of all the press.'

  'Thank you,’ said Professor Viners. He wasn't about to heave any tremendous sighs of relief just yet, but I could tell that he liked me and thought that he could trust me.

  It had been an interesting meeting. I felt that I'd learned something. But I knew that Gil's theories didn't really matter. They didn't really change anything, even if they were true. It didn't matter whether or not the owls were really images born of stray DNA, because I already knew that thinking of them as ‘owls’ was just a matter of convenience. It was just a fudge-word. What mattered was not what they were but what they could do, what difference they could make to me and to the world. It didn't matter if everything was just a kind of delusion or disease; what mattered was finding a good way of life, a good way of being, a good way of operating in the real world. If it really was a virus that had provided the key to liberate my locked-up soul, the last thing I wanted was to be cured. I was more than willing to welcome it, to let it be part of me. I'd made some bad mistakes, but now I was better placed, better prepared and better able to do what had to be done.

  I was the one who understood. I was the only one who understood. It was up to me to determine what needed to be done.

  8

  I walked back to Brennan Hall along the usual path. It wasn't late, and the path was by no means deserted. I didn't bother to fall into step with some other group, or dog their footsteps. I walked by myself, at my own pace.