Darwin's Radio d-1

by Greg Bear

  Bacteria made us. They take us back in the end. Welcome home.

  She woke up in a sweat. The air was getting warmer as they descended into a long, deep valley. How nice it would be to know nothing about all the inner workings. Animal innocence; the unexamined life is the sweetest. But things go wrong and prompt introspection and examination. The root of all awareness.

  “Dreaming?” Beck asked her as they pulled over near a small filling station and garage clapped together from sheets of corrugated metal.

  “Nightmares,” Kaye said. “Too much into my work, I guess.”

  5

  Innsbruck, Austria

  Mitch saw the blue sun swing around and darken and he assumed it was night, but the air was dim green and not at all cold. He felt a prick of pain in his upper thigh, a general sense of unease in his stomach.

  He wasn’t on the mountain. He tried to blink the gunk from his eyes and reached up to rub his face. A hand stopped him and a soft female voice told him in German to be a good boy. As she wiped his forehead with a cold damp cloth, the woman said, in English, that he was a little chapped and his nose and fingers were frostbitten and that he had a broken leg. A few minutes later he went to sleep again.

  No time at all after that, he awoke and managed to sit up in a crisp, firm hospital bed. He was in a room with four other patients, two beside him and two across from him, all male, all less than forty years old. Two had broken legs in movie-comedy slings. The other two had broken arms. Mitch’s own leg was in a cast but not in a sling.

  All the men were blue-eyed, wiry, handsome in an aquiline way, with thin necks and long jaws. They watched him attentively.

  Mitch saw the room clearly now: painted concrete walls, white enameled bed frames, a portable lamp on a chromed stand that he had mistaken for a blue sun, mottled brown tile floor, the dusty smell of steam heat and antiseptic, a general odor of peppermint.

  On Mitch’s right, a heavily snow-burned young man, skin peeling from his baby-pink cheeks, leaned over to say, “You are the lucky American, are you not?” The pulley and weights on his elevated leg creaked.

  “I’m American,” Mitch croaked. “I must be lucky because I’m not dead.”

  The men exchanged solemn glances. Mitch could see he had been a topic of conversation for some time.

  “We all agree, it is best for fellow mountaineers to inform you.”

  Before Mitch could protest that he was not really a mountaineer, the snow-burned young man told him that his companions were dead. “The Italian you were found with, in the serac, he is broken-neck. And the woman is found much lower down, buried in ice.” Then, his eyes sharply inquisitive — eyes the color of the wild-dog sky Mitch had first seen over the arete — the young man asked, “The newspapers say, the TV say. Where did she get the little corpse baby?”

  Mitch coughed. He saw a pitcher of water on a tray by his bed and poured a glass. The mountaineers watched him like athletic elves trussed up in their beds.

  Mitch returned their gazes. He tried to hide his dismay. It did him no good to judge Tilde now; no good at all.

  The inspector from Innsbruck arrived at noon and sat beside his bed with an attending local police officer to ask questions. The officer spoke better English and translated for him. Their questions were routine, the inspector said, all part of the accident report. Mitch told them he did not know who the woman was, and the inspector responded, after a decent pause, that they had all been seen together in Salzburg. “You and Franco Maricelli and Mathilda Berger.”

  “That was Franco’s girlfriend,” he said, feeling sick, trying not to show it. The inspector sighed and pursed his lips disapprovingly, as if this was all very trivial and only a little irritating.

  “She was carrying the mummy of an infant. Perhaps a very old mummy. You have no idea where she got it?”

  He hoped the police had not gone through his effects and found the vials and recognized their contents. Perhaps he had lost the pack on the glacier. “It’s too bizarre for words,” he said.

  The inspector shrugged. “I am not an expert on bodies in the ice. Mitchell, I give you some fatherly advice. I am old enough?”

  Mitch admitted the inspector might be old enough. The mountaineers did not even attempt to hide their interest in the proceedings.

  “We have spoken to your former employers, the Hayer Museum, in Seattle.”

  Mitch blinked slowly.

  “They tell us you were involved in the theft of antiquities from the federal government, the skeletal remains of an Indian, called Pasco man, very old. Ten thousand years, found on the banks of the Columbia River. You refused to hand over these remains to the Army Corpse of Engineers.”

  “Corps,” Mitch said softly.

  “So they arrest you under an antiquities act, and the museum fires you because there is so much publicity.”

  “The Indians claimed the bones belonged to an ancestor,” Mitch said, his face flushing with anger at the memory. “They wanted to bury them again.”

  The inspector read from his notes. “You were denied access to your collections in the museum, and the bones were confiscated from your house. With many photographs and more publicity.”

  “It was legal bullshit! The Army Corps of Engineers had no right to those bones. They were scientifically invaluable—”

  “Like this mummified baby from the ice, perhaps?” the inspector asked.

  Mitch closed his eyes and looked away. He could see it all very clearly now. Stupid is not the word. This is fate, pure and simple.

  “You are going to throw up?” the inspector asked, backing away.

  Mitch shook his head.

  “Already it is known — you were seen with the woman in the Braunschweiger Hiitte, not ten kilometers from where you were found. A striking woman, beautiful and blond, observers say.”

  The mountaineers nodded at this, as if they had been there.

  “It is best you tell us everything and we hear it first. I will tell the police in Italy, and the police here in Austria will interview you and maybe it will all be nothing.”

  “They were acquaintances,” he said. “She was — used to be — my girlfriend. I mean, we were lovers.”

  “Yes. Why did she return to you?”

  “They had found something. She thought I might be able to tell them what they had found.”

  “Yes?”

  Mitchell realized he had no choice. He drank another glass of water, then told the inspector most of what had happened, as precisely and clearly as he could. Since they had not mentioned the vials, he did not mention them, either. The officer took notes and recorded his confession on a small tape machine.

  When he was finished, the inspector said, “Someone is sure to want to know where this cave is.”

  “Tilde — Mathilda had a camera,” Mitch said wearily. “She took pictures.”

  “We found no camera. It might go much easier if you know where the cave is. Such a find…very exciting.”

  “They have the baby already,” Mitch said. “That should be exciting enough. A Neandertal infant.”

  The inspector made a doubtful face. “Nobody says anything about Neandertal. So maybe this is a delusion or joke?”

  Mitch was long past losing everything he cared about — his career, his standing as a paleontologist. Once more he had screwed things up royally. “Maybe it was the headache.

  I’m just groggy. Of course, I’ll help them find the cave,” he said.

  “Then there is no crime, merely tragedy.” The inspector rose to leave, and the officer tipped his cap good-bye.

  After they were gone, the mountaineer with the peeling cheeks told him, “You are not going home soon.”

  “The mountains want you back,” said the least snow-burned of the four, across the room from Mitch, and nodded sagely, as if that explained everything.

  “Screw you,” Mitch muttered. He rolled over in the crisp white bed.

  6

  Eliava Institute, Tbilisi
>
  Lado and Tamara and Zamphyra and seven other scientists and students gathered around the two wooden tables on the south end of the main laboratory building. They all lifted their beakers of brandy in toast to Kaye. Candles flickered around the room, reflecting the golden sparkles within the amber-filled glassware. The meal was only halfway finished, and this was the eighth round Lado had led this evening, as tamada, toastmaster, for the occasion. “For darling Kaye,” Lado said, “who values our work…and promises to make us rich!”

  Rabbits, mice, and chickens watched with sleepy eyes from their cages behind the table. Long black benches covered with glassware and racks and incubators and computers hooked to sequencers and analyzers retreated into the gloom at the unlighted end of the lab.

  “To Kaye,” Tamara added, “who has seen more of what Sakarrvelo, of Georgia, has to offer…than we might wish. A brave and understanding woman.”

  “What are you, toastmisrress?” Lado demanded in irritation. “Why remind us of unpleasant things?”

  “What are you, talking of riches, of money, at a time like this?” Tamara snapped back.

  “I am tamada” Lado roared, standing beside the oak folding table and waving his sloshing glass at the students and scientists. Above slow smiles, none of them said a word in disagreement.

  “All right,” Tamara conceded. “Your wish is our command.”

  “They have no respect!” Lado complained to Kaye. “Will prosperity destroy tradition?”

  The benches made crowded Vs in Kaye’s narrowing perspective. The equipment was hooked into a generator that chugged softly out in the yard beside the building. Saul had supplied two sequencers and a computer; the generator had been supplied by Aventis, a huge multinational.

  City power from Tbilisi had been shut off since late that afternoon. They had cooked the farewell dinner over Bunsen burners and in a gas oven.

  “Go ahead, toastmaster,” Zamphyra said in affectionate resignation. She waved her fingers at Lado.

  “I will.” Lado put down his glass and smoothed his suit. His dark wrinkled face, red as a beet with mountain sunburn, gleamed in the candlelight like rich wood. He reminded Kaye of a toy troll she had loved as a child. From a box concealed under the table he brought out a small crystal glass, intricately cut and beveled. He took a beautiful silver-chased ibex horn and walked to a large amphora propped in a wooden crate in the near corner, behind the table. The amphora, recently pulled from the earth of his own small vineyard outside Tbilisi, was filled with some immense quantity of wine. He lifted a ladle from the amphora’s mouth and poured it slowly into the horn, then again, and again, seven times, until the horn was full. He swirled the wine gently to let it breathe. Red liquid sloshed over his wrist.

  Finally, he filled the glass to the brim from the horn, and handed it to Kaye. “If you were a man,” he said, “I would ask you to drink the entire horn, and give us a toast.”

  “Lado!” Tamara howled, slapping his arm. He almost dropped the horn, and turned on her in mock surprise.

  “What?” he demanded. “Is the glass not beautiful?”

  Zamphyra rose to her feet beside the table to waggle a finger at him. Lado grinned more broadly, transformed from a troll into a carmine satyr. He turned slowly toward Kaye.

  “What can I do, dear Kaye?” Lado said with a flourish. More wine dripped from the tip of the horn. “They demand that you must drink all of this.”

  Kaye had already had her fill of alcohol and did not trust herself to stand. She felt deliciously warm and safe, among friends, surrounded by an ancient darkness thick with amber and golden stars.

  She had almost forgotten the graves and Saul and the difficulties awaiting her in New York.

  She held out her hands, and Lado danced forward with surprising grace, belying his clumsiness of a few moments before. Not spilling a drop, he deposited the ibex horn into her hands.

  “Now, you,” he said.

  Kaye knew what was expected. She rose solemnly. Lado had delivered many toasts that evening that had rambled poetically and with no end of invention for long minutes. She doubted she could equal his eloquence, but she would do her best, and she had many things to say, things that had buzzed in her head for the two days since she had come down from Kazbeg.

  “There is no land on Earth like the home of wine,” she began, and lifted the horn high. All smiled and raised their beakers. “No land that offers more beauty and more promise to the sick of heart or the sick of body. You have distilled the nectars of new wines to banish the rot and disease the flesh is heir to. You have preserved the tradition and knowledge of seventy years, saving it for the twenty-first century. You are the mages and alchemists of the microscopic age, and now you join the explorers of the West, with an immense treasure to share.”

  Tamara translated in a loud whisper for the students and scientists who crowded around the table.

  “I am honored to be treated as a friend, and as a colleague. You have shared with me this treasure, and the treasure of Sakartvelo — the mountains, the hospitality, the history, and by no means last or least, the wine.”

  She lifted the horn with one hand, and said, “Gaumarjos phage!” She pronounced it the Georgian way, phah-gay. “Gaumarjos Sakartvelos! “

  Then she began to drink. She could not savor Lado’s earth-hidden, soil-aged wine the way it deserved, and her eyes watered, but she did not want to stop, either to show her weakness or to end this moment. She swallowed gulp after gulp. Fire moved from her stomach into her arms and legs, and drowsiness threatened to steal her away. But she kept her eyes open and continued to the very bottom of the horn, then upended it, held it out, and lifted it.

  “To the kingdom of the small, and all the labors they do for us! All the glories, the necessities, for which we must forgive the…the pain…” Her tongue became stiff and her words stumbled. She leaned on the folding table with one hand, and Tamara quietly and unobtrusively brought down her own hand to keep the table from upsetting. “All the things to which we…all we have inherited. To bacteria, our worthy opponents, the little mothers of the world!”

  Lado and Tamara led the cheers. Zamphyra helped Kaye descend, it seemed from a great height, into her wooden folding chair.

  “Wonderful, Kaye,” Zamphyra murmured into her ear. “You come back to Tbilisi any time. You have a home, safe away from your own home.”

  Kaye smiled and wiped her eyes, for in her sodden sentiment and relief from the strain of the past days, she was weeping.

  The next morning, Kaye felt somber and fuzzy, but experienced no other ill effects from the farewell party. In the two hours before Lado took her to the airport, she walked through the hallways in two of the three laboratory buildings, now almost empty. The staff and most of the graduate student assistants were attending a special meeting in Eliava Hall to discuss the various offers made by American and British and French companies. It was an important and heady moment for the institute; in the next two months, they would probably make their decisions on when and with whom to form alliances. But they could not tell her now. The announcement would come later.

  The institute still showed decades of neglect. In most of the labs, the shiny, thick, white or pale green enamel had peeled to show cracked plaster. Plumbing dated from the 1960s, at the latest; much of it was from the twenties and thirties. The brilliant white plastic and stainless steel of new equipment only made more obvious the Bakelite and black enamel or the brass and wood of antique microscopes and other instruments. There were two electron microscopes enshrined in one building — great hulking brutes on massive vibration isolation platforms.

  Saul had promised them three new top-of-the-line scanning tunneling microscopes by the end of the year — if EcoBacter was chosen as one of their partners. Aventis or Bristol-Myers Squibb could no doubt do better than that.

  Kaye walked between the lab benches, peering through the glass doors of incubators at stacks of petri dishes within, their bottoms filled with a film of agar swept
and clouded by bacterial colonies, sometimes marked by clear circular regions, called plaques, where phages had killed all the bacteria. Day after day, year after year, the researchers in the institute analyzed and cataloged naturally occurring bacteria and their phages. For every strain of bacteria there was at least one and often hundreds of specific phages, and as the bacteria mutated to throw off these unwanted intruders, the phages mutated to match them, a never-ending chase. The Eliava Institute kept one of the largest libraries of phages in the world, and they could respond to bacterial samples by producing phages within days.

  On the wall over the new lab equipment, posters showed the bizarre spaceshiplike geometric head and tail structures of the ubiquitous T-even phages — T2, T4, and T6, so designated in the 1920s — hovering over the comparatively huge surfaces of Escherichia coli bacteria. Old photographs, old conceptions — that phages simply preyed upon bacteria, hijacking their DNA merely to produce new phages. Many phages did in fact do just that, keeping bacterial populations in check. Others, known as lysogenic phages, became genetic stowaways, hiding within the bacteria and inserting their genetic messages into the host DNA. Retroviruses did something very similar in larger plants and animals.

  Lysogenic phages suppressed their own expression and assembly and were perpetuated within the bacterial DNA, carried down through the generations. They would jump ship when their host showed clear signs of stress, creating hundreds or even thousands of phage offspring per cell, bursting from the host to escape.

  Lysogenic phages were almost useless in phage therapy. They were far more than mere predators. Often these viral invaders gave their hosts resistance to other phages. Sometimes they carried genes from one cell to the next, genes that could transform the cell. Lysogenic phages had been known to take relatively harmless bacteria — benign strains of Vibrio, for example — and transform them into virulent Vibrio cholerae. Outbreaks of deadly strains of E. coli in beef had been attributed to transfers of toxin-producing genes by phages. The institute worked hard to identify and eliminate these phages from their preparations.