Darwin's Radio d-1

by Greg Bear

  Mitch did not hesitate. “Of course,” he said.

  “I will try to arrange it. But for now—” Luria glanced down at Mitch’s leg.

  “At least four months,” he said.

  “Not a good time to be climbing, four months from now. In the late spring, then, next year.” Luria stood, and the woman, Clara, took his glass and hers and set them on Mitch’s tray.

  “Thank you,” Brock said. “I hope you are right, Dr. Rafelson. It would be a marvelous find.”

  They bowed slightly, formally, as they left.

  12

  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta

  SEPTEMBER

  “Virgin females don’t get our flu,” Dicken said, looking up from the papers and graphs on his desk. “Is that what you’re telling me?” He raised his black eyebrows until his broad forehead was a dubious washboard of wrinkles.

  Jane Salter reached forward to plump the documents again, nervous, laying them with a solicitous finality on his desk. The concrete walls of his subbasement office enlivened the rustling sound.

  Many of the offices in the lower floors of Building 1 of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had been converted from animal labs and holding cells. Concrete dikes jutted up near the walls. Dicken sometimes imagined he could still smell the disinfectant and monkey shit.

  “That’s the biggest surprise that I can pull out of the data,” Salter confirmed. She was one of the best statisticians they had, a whiz with the variety of desktop computers that did most of their tracking, modeling, and record-keeping. “Men sometimes get it, or test positive for it, but are asymptomatic. They become vectors for females, but probably not for other males. And…” She finger-tapped a drum roll on the desktop. “We can’t get anyone to infect themselves.”

  “So SHEVA is a specialist,” Dicken said, shaking his head. “How the hell do we know that?”

  “Look at the footnote, Christopher, and the wording. ‘Women in domestic partnering situations, or those who have had extensive sexual experience.’ “

  “How many cases so far — five thousand?”

  “Six thousand two hundred women, and only about sixty or seventy men, all partners of infected women. Only constant reexposure transmits the retrovirus.”

  “That’s not so crazy,” Dicken said. “It’s not unlike HIV, then.”

  “Right,” Salter said, mouth twitching. “God has it in for females. Infection begins with the mucosa of nasal passages and bronchia, proceeds to the mild inflammation of alveoli, enters the bloodstream — mild inflammation of ovaries…and then it’s gone. Aching and some coughing, a sore tummy. And if the woman gets pregnant, there’s a very good chance she’ll miscarry.”

  “Mark should be able to sell that,” Dicken said. “But let’s make his case stronger. He needs to scare a more reliable group of voters than young women. What about the geriatric set?” He looked at her hopefully.

  “Older women don’t get it,” she said. “Nobody younger than fourteen or older than sixty. Look at the spread.” She leaned over and pointed to a pie chart. “Mean age of thirty-one.”

  “It’s too crazy. Mark wants me to make sense of this and strengthen the surgeon general’s case by four o’clock this afternoon.”

  “Another briefing?” Salter asked.

  “Before the chief of staff and the science advisor. This is good, this is scary, but I know Mark. Look through the files again — maybe we can come up with a few thousand geriatric deaths in Zaire.”

  “Are you asking me to cook the books?”

  Dicken grinned wickedly.

  “Then screw you, sir,” Salter said mildly, head cocked. “We haven’t got any more statistics out of Georgia. Maybe you could call up Tbilisi,” she suggested. “Or Istanbul.”

  “They’re tight as clams,” Dicken said. “I was never able to shake much out of them, and they refuse to admit they have any cases now.” He glanced up at Salter.

  Her nose wrinkled.

  “Please, just one elderly passenger out of Tbilisi melting on an airplane,” Dicken suggested.

  Salter let loose an explosion of laughter. She took off her glasses and wiped them, then replaced them. “It’s not funny. The charts are looking serious.”

  “Mark wants to let the drama build. He’s playing this one like a marlin on a line.”

  “I’m not very savvy about politics.”

  “I pretend not to be,” Dicken said. “But the longer I hang around here, the more savvy I get.”

  Salter glanced around the small room as if it might close in on her. “Are we done, Christopher?”

  Dicken grinned. “Claustrophobia acting up?”

  “It’s this room,” Salter said. “Don’t you hear them?” She leaned over the desk with a spooky expression. Dicken could not always tell whether Jane Salter was joking or serious. “The screaming of the monkeys?”

  “Yeah,” Dicken said with a straight face. “I try to stay in the field as long as possible.”

  In the director’s office in Building 4, Augustine looked at the statistics quickly, flipped through the twenty pages of numbers and computer-generated charts, and flung them down on the desk. “All very reassuring,” he said. “At this rate we’ll be out of business by the end of the year. We don’t even know if SHEVA causes miscarriages in every pregnant woman, or whether it’s just a mild teratogen. Christ. I thought this was the one, Christopher.”

  “It’s good. It’s scary, and it’s public.”

  “You underestimate how much the Republicans hate the CDC,” Augustine said. “The National Rifle Association hates us. Big tobacco hates us because we’re right in their backyard. Did you see that damned billboard just down the highway? By the airport? ‘Finally, a Butt Worth Kissing.’ What was it — Camels? Marlboros?”

  Dicken laughed and shook his head.

  “The surgeon general is going right into the bear’s den. She’s not very happy with me, Christopher.”

  “There’s always the results I brought back from Turkey,” Dicken said.

  Augustine held up his hands and rocked back in his chair, fingers gripping the edge of the desk. “One hospital. Five miscarriages.”

  “Five out of five pregnancies, sir.”

  Augustine leaned forward. “You went to Turkey because your contact said they had a virus that might abort babies. But why Georgia?”

  “There was an outbreak of miscarriages in Tbilisi five years ago. I couldn’t get any information in Tbilisi, nothing official. A mortician and I did a little drinking together — unofficially. He told me there had been an outbreak of miscarriages in Gordi about the same time.”

  Augustine had not heard this part before. Dicken had not put it in his report. “Go on,” he said, only half-interested.

  “There was some sort of trouble, he wouldn’t come right out and say what. So — I drove to Gordi, and there was a police cordon around the town. I did some asking around in a few local road stops and heard about a UN investigation, Russian involvement. I called the UN. They told me that they were asking an American woman to help them.”

  “That was—”

  “Kaye Lang.”

  “Goodness,” Augustine said, and pressed his lips into a thin smile. “Woman of the hour. You knew about her work on HERV?”

  “Ofcourse.”

  “So . . . you thought somebody in the UN was on to something and needed her advice.”

  “The thought crossed my mind, sir. But they called on her because she knew forensic pathology.”

  “So, what were^oH thinking about?”

  “Mutations. Induced birth defects. Teratogenic viruses, maybe. And I was wondering why governments wanted parents dead.”

  “So there we are again,” Augustine said. “Back to wild-eyed speculation.”

  Dicken made a face. “You know me better than that, Mark.”

  “Sometimes I haven’t the slightest idea how you get such good results.”

  “I hadn’t finished m
y work. You called me back and said we had something solid.”

  “God knows I’ve been wrong before,” Augustine said.

  “I don’t think you’re wrong. This is probably just the beginning. We’ll have more to go on soon.”

  “Is that what your instincts tell you?”

  Dicken nodded.

  Mark drew his brows together and folded his hands tightly on the top of the desk. “Do you remember what happened in 1963?”

  “I was just a baby then, sir. But I’ve heard. Malaria.”

  “I was seven years old myself. Congress pulled the plug on all funding for the elimination of insect-borne illnesses, including malaria. The stupidest move in the history of epidemiology. Millions of deaths worldwide, new strains of resistant disease…a disaster.”

  “DDT wouldn’t have worked much longer anyway, sir.”

  “Who can say?” Augustine peaked two fingers. “Humans think like children, leaping from passion to passion. Suddenly world health just isn’t hot. Maybe we overstated our case. We’re backing down from the death of the rain forests, and global warming is still just a simmer, not a boil. There haven’t been any devastating worldwide plagues, and Joe Sixpack never signed on to the whole Third World guilt trip. People are getting bored with apocalypse. If we don’t have a politically defensible crisis soon, on our home turf, we are going to get creamed in Congress, Christopher, and it could be 1963 all over again.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  Augustine sighed through his nose and lifted his eyes to the ranks of fluorescent lights in the ceiling. “The SG thinks our apple is still too green to put on the president’s desk, so she’s having a convenient megrim. She’s postponed this afternoon’s meeting until next week.”

  Dicken suppressed a smile. The thought of the surgeon general faking a headache was precious.

  Augustine fixed his gaze on Dicken. “All right, you smell something, go get it. Check miscarriage records in U.S. hospitals for the last year. Threaten Turkey and Georgia with exposure to the World Health Organization. Say we’ll accuse them of breaking all our cooperation treaties. I’ll back you. Find out who’s been to the Near East and Europe and come down with SHEVA and maybe miscarried a baby or two. We have a week, and if it’s not you and a more deadly SHEVA, then I’m going to have to go with an unknown spirochete caught by some shepherds in Afghanistan…consorting with sheep.” Augustine mocked a hangdog expression. “Save me, Christopher.”

  13

  Cambridge, Massachusetts

  Kaye was exhausted, felt like a queen, had been treated for the past week with the respect and friendly adoration of colleagues saluting one who has after some adversity been recognized as having seen farther into the truth. She had not suffered the kind of criticism and injustice others in biology had experienced in the last one hundred and fifty years — certainly nothing like what her hero, Charles Darwin, had had to face. Not even what Lynn Margulis had encountered with the theory of symbiotic evolution of eucaryotic cells. But there had been enough -

  Skeptical and angry letters in the journals from old-guard geneticists convinced she was chasing after a wild hair; comments at conferences from faintly superior, smiling men and women convinced they were closer to a big discovery…Farther up the ladder of success, closer to the brass ring of Knowledge and Acknowledgment.

  That was fine by Kaye. That was science, all too human and better for it. But then there had been Saul’s personal dustup with the editor of Cell, stalling any chance she had of publishing there. She had gone to Virology instead, a good journal, but a step down the ladder. She had never made it as far as Science or Nature. She had climbed a good distance, and then stalled out.

  Now, it seemed, dozens of labs and research centers were eager to have her see the results of the work they had done to confirm her speculations. For the sake of her own peace of mind, she chose to accept invitations from those faculties, centers, and labs that had shown her some encouragement in the past few years — and in particular, the Carl Rose Center for Domain Research, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  The Rose Center stood on a hundred acres of pines planted in the 1950s, a thick forest surrounding a cubical lab building, the cube sitting not flat on the earth but elevated on one edge. Two floors of labs lay underground, directly beneath and to the east of the elevated cube. Funded in large part by an endowment from the enormously wealthy Van Buskirk family of Boston, the Rose Center had been doing molecular biology for thirty years.

  Three scientists at Rose had been given grants by the Human Genome Project — the massive, heavily funded, multilateral effort to sequence and understand the sum total of human genetics — to analyze archaic gene fragments found in the so-called junk regions of human genes known as introns. The senior scientist managing this grant was Judith Kushner, who had been Kaye’s doctoral advisor at Stanford.

  Judith Kushner stood just under five and a half feet high, with salted and twisted black hair, a round, wistful face that seemed always on the edge of a smile, and small, slightly protuberant black eyes. She was known internationally as a true wizard, someone who could design experiments and make any apparatus do what it was supposed to do — in other words, to fashion those repeatable experiments necessary to make science actually work.

  That she spent most of her time nowadays filling out paperwork and guiding grad students and postdocs was simply the way of modern science.

  Kushner’s assistant and secretary, a painfully thin young redhead named Fiona Bierce, led Kaye through the maze of labs and down a central elevator.

  Kushner’s office lay on the zeroth floor, below ground level but above the basement: windowless, concrete walls painted a pleasant light beige. The walls were crammed with neatly arranged texts and bound journals. Four computers hummed faintly in one corner, including a Sim Engine supercomputer donated by Mind Design of Seattle.

  “Kaye Lang, I am sopmud” Kushner got out of her chair, beamed, and spread her arms to embrace Kaye as she entered. She gave a little squeal and waltzed her former student around the room, smiling in professorial joy. “So tell me — who have you heard from? Lynn? The old man himself?”

  “Lynn called yesterday,” Kaye said, blushing.

  Kushner clasped her hands together and shook them at the ceiling like a prizefighter celebrating victory. “Wonderful!”

  “It’s really too much,” Kaye said, and at Kushner’s invitation, took a seat beside the Sim Engine’s broad flat display screen.

  “Grab it! Enjoy it!” Kushner advised lustily. “You’ve earned it, dear. I saw you on television three times. Jackie Oniama on Triple C Network trying to talk science — wonderfully funny! Is she so much like a little doll in person?”

  “They were all very friendly, really. But I’m exhausted from trying to explain things.”

  “So much to explain. How’s Saul?” Kushner asked, doing well to hide some apprehension.

  “He’s fine. We’re still trying to pin down whether we’ll be going into partnership with the Georgians.”

  “If they don’t partner with you now, they have a long way to go before they can become capitalists,” Kushner said, and sat beside Kaye.

  Fiona Bierce seemed happy just to listen. She grinned toothily.

  “So…” Kushner said, staring at Kaye intently. “It’s been kind of a short road, hasn’t it?”

  Kaye laughed. “I feel soyoungl”

  “I am so envious. None of my crackpot theories have gotten nearly as much attention.”

  “Just gobs of money,” Kaye said.

  “Gobs and gobs. Need any?”

  Kaye smiled. “Wouldn’t want to compromise our professional standing.”

  “Ah, the big new world of cash biology, so important and secret and full of itself. Remember, my dear, women are supposed to do science differently. We listen and slog and listen and slog, just like poor Rosalind Franklin, not at all like brash little boys. And all for motives of the highest ethical purity. So — when are
you and Saul going to go public? My son is trying to set up my retirement account.”

  “Probably never,” Kaye said. “Saul would hate reporting to stockholders. Besides, we have to be successful first, make some money, and that’s a long way down the road.”

  “Enough small talk,” Kushner said with finality. “I have something interesting to show you. Fiona, could you run our little simulation?”

  Kaye moved her chair to one side. Bierce sat by the Sim Engine keyboard and cracked her knuckles like a pianist. “Judith has slaved on this for three months now,” she said. “She based much of it on your papers, and the rest of it on data from three different genome projects, and when the word came out, we were ready.”

  “We went right to your markers and found the assembly routines,” Kushner said. “SHEVA’s envelope, and its little universal human delivery system. Here’s an infection simulation based on lab results from the fifth floor, John Dawson’s group. They infected hepatocytes in dense tissue culture. Here’s what came out.”

  Kaye watched as Bierce played back the simulated assembly sequence. SHEVA particles entered the hepatocytes — liver cells in a lab culture dish — and shut down certain cellular functions, co-opted others, transcribed their RNA to DNA and integrated it into the cells’ DNA, then began to replicate. In brilliant simulated colors, new virus particles formed naked within the cytosol — the cell’s streaming internal fluid. The viruses migrated to the cell’s outer membrane and pushed through to the outside world, each particle neatly wrapped in a bit of the cell’s own skin.

  “They deplete the membrane, but it’s all rather gentle and controlled. The viruses stress the cells, but they don’t kill them. And it looks like about one in twenty of the virus particles are viable — five times better than HIY”

  The simulation suddenly zoomed in to molecules created along with the viruses, wrapped in cell transport packages called vesicles and pushed out with the new infectious particles. They were labeled in bright orange: PGA? and PGE?