by Nicholas Lim
“How is your arm?”
“Are you Arshu?” she whispered, staring at Bryce in horror.
Bryce laughed. “Am I a living God? No.” He saw her consider him and shook his head. “He is a great soul – Mahatma the Indians call it – I am merely his instrument.” He gestured with a hand at the greenhouse and the valley beyond. “I cannot show you what he looks like. Images of him are forbidden, only the Asar is allowed. But his presence is all around us. He has enabled all you see.”
“Does he order gunmen to murder innocent people?” Garrett whispered.
“I am sorry about the death of your son. It was wrong. I had nothing to do with it. Neither did Arshu.”
“I don't believe you.” Garrett stepped back from Bryce. Who was he? Her legs began to tremble.
Bryce shook his head. “You don’t understand what’s really going on. Please Christine, trust me just a little longer?”
When he reached out Garrett flinched. “Don’t you dare touch me!”
“Do you remember that day in the lab, when the lab lights went out? When we stood alone together? You were in the dark and frightened, about nothing, by childhood fears. You are in the dark now.” He held out his hand. “There is something you must see. Christine – please?”
Garrett thought of Jason’s twisted, punctured body in the centre of the Eye of Faith. She thought of the purposes of biology twisted by this man and his associates. Why? Why? Arshu. Something in her cried out with anger and a sudden terrible understanding. It was not true what Ivan Karamazov had said, “If God is dead then everything is permitted.” Dostoyevsky had been dead wrong. No: it was living belief in gods – in the invented unseen – that could licence anything, beyond morality and decency. Her mind dug into the fear of it like the bright edge of a spade going into mud. What were they trying to do with this malaria?
She felt again the terrible emptiness in her stomach. She shuddered. Not now! She couldn’t think of the pain. She couldn’t feel it. Not now. She gripped her anger again. Arshu. The malaria. What were they trying to do? The anger stayed. She held onto it, a live animal thing, held onto it for her sanity, against the terrible pain.
“What do you want to show me?”
Bryce gestured. “Everything you see around you is a part of what you must understand. But we have little time: we must go to my lab.”
He led the way across the floor of the greenhouse, trailing a hand as if hoping she would take it. They passed a sapling with fleshy, emerald-green leaves and small purple flowers. He paused.
“Nesiota elliptica – the Saint Helena Olive. Do you know it? It became extinct in two thousand and three.”
Bryce moved on. He stopped by a cluster of tiny open-mouthed orange flowers. “And this is Aurelius Solebaris, an orchid indigenous to Borneo. Now it only survives here.” Garrett recognised the plant from Bryce’s desk in the Porton lab.
“This greenhouse is a small part of Arshu’s vision, the start of what I wish to show you. He is a gardener, as much of flowers as of men. Here he has saved many lives – not individuals, whole life forms.”
He pointed out larger areas planted out with seed crops.
“In the last hundred years ninety percent of edible fruit and vegetable varieties have been lost to us. Just three plant species – wheat, rice and maize – account for more than half of human energy intake. They are distributed by biotech companies as sterile seed. These beds preserve original wild stock and lost cultivars.”
Bryce swept an arm over the plants in front of him.
“There are other seed bank projects – at Svalbard, Kew, the Vavilov Institute – but we are the largest. And this installation – Asari One – is one of five we have around the world. These plants are a commonwealth, a heritage to be saved and shared. Now come, what I must show you is in here. It will explain everything.”
Bryce unlocked a door.
***
They passed down a long corridor, the umbilical cord connecting the greenhouse with a brick complex and steel chimney. Bryce led the way into a spacious lab. Glass-fronted cupboards were filled with flasks, bottled reagents and other equipment. A large computer screen dominated one wall. Garrett eyed a pressurised door.
“Do you have a biosafety zone here?”
“Yes.” Bryce tapped at a keyboard. “For reasons you'll understand in a moment.”
The wall screen blinked and became a pane of electric light. Smaller windows formed and vanished on its surface in quick succession.
Bryce’s movements became urgent, his hands agitated. “Christine, I want you to understand me and what it is we are doing.”
An hourglass filled over and over on the screen. Bryce stood up.
“I must start at the beginning.” A login window appeared and Bryce stooped to enter credentials. “About fifteen years ago our teacher Arshu visited Borneo with the aim of founding a new forest commune. He had already established the large worship communities in Paliputra, Santa Rosa, Oregon, Queensland – and dozens of other centres. But he wanted to build aboriginal faith connections.”
“I was also in Borneo. My father – a biologist – had decided my mother and I should go with him on a field trip.”
“He didn't understand the danger he was putting us in.” The softness left Bryce's face. “The surviving rainforests of this world are a war zone. Three weeks into the trip, we were caught in the crossfire between some tribesmen, settlers and mercenaries of a logging company. My parents were killed. I survived. With Arshu’s help.”
“Arshu found me under a smoking ruin in the tribal village next to my father’s research station. He took care of me. We lived six months in the forest until a plant led us out, the orchid Aurelius Solebaris. Arshu had discovered its fruits and, searching for it, we were picked up by a logging company.”
Bryce’s voice became quiet, conversational. “Tell me, have you heard of the miner’s canary?”
Garrett stared.
“Canaries are sensitive to carbon monoxide – which to us is odourless and colourless – so were taken down pits in cages by miners. If a bird died the miners would evacuate.” Bryce's eyes did not leave hers. She saw his body settle, joint by joint, from the shoulders down. A hardness – anger? pain? self-control? she couldn’t tell – entered his face. “I later found out that Aurelius Solebaris was known as a “Climate canary”, that is, a species chosen by biologists to signal danger to an ecological system.”
Bryce tapped a sequence of keys on the keyboard. Four milky blue-green spheres appeared on the wall screen above tables and charts of data.
“Arshu has explained how its extinction is a parable for us. Watch.”
Bryce clicked his mouse. The spheres began to spin.
“You are looking at a simulation. Four, to be precise; global projections of our biosphere, with indicators for climate, ice caps, species populations, forestation etc.”
Bryce swung round to face Garrett. His voice became sonorous, lecturing.
Do you know what the projected population of our planet is forty years from now? Eleven billion. Eleven. It is now six.”
Garrett felt the muscles in her legs begin to tremble again. She wanted to sit down. Bryce saw Garrett’s face and raised a hand. “Please. Wait. Just listen.”
“Arshu has warned us that the emergent, acute danger is nuclear conflict over inadequate resources.” Bryce hit a key and nodded at the screen. The right hand globe flared briefly orange and red before cooling to black. “The world after a thermonuclear war will remain polluted for a hundred half lives of Uranium two-three-two – about twenty million years.”
“But Arshu has explained how even if we avoid that event, current demands on resources are creating two further catastrophes: species extinction and mean temperature increases.”
Bryce turned back to the keyboard. His long fingers sounded a soft rain. On the wall screen, the middle two globes began to spin.
“Under extreme population pressures, it is the ecocidal destruct
ion of the rainforests that is proving decisive. An area the size of Belgium has been destroyed in the last five months. When canopy edges are compromised, leaf litters dry out. Drought-led fires – which should occur every five hundred years – are occuring every five. Chwarae troi'n chwerw, wrth chwarae gyda thân.” His words were soft as he gestured at the screen. The two spinning middle spheres were turning brown, like autumn leaves.
“The trouble is, these rainforests function as our planet's lungs. They suck millions of tonnes of greenhouse gases out of our atmosphere. Within fifty years we will reach a point where the extraction process will fail completely. Our planet will cease to breathe.”
He turned his head to her, owlish behind his spectacles. “Have you ever watched your breath for any length of time? Can you imagine what it would be like if it stopped?”
“The consensus on the global warming rate is that it will reach one degree Fahrenheit per decade by twenty thirty and by then will be irreversible.”
He tilted his head to one side.
“Do you know that there are more species in ten square meters of rainforest than in all of Europe? Up to ninety percent of all species are in closed tropical forest. You would think we would preserve these places like treasure houses.”
He pushed his glasses up his nose with the fork of two fingers.
“Instead we destroy them. More than fifty thousand species become extinct annually. That's over a hundred a day.”
Bryce’s glasses glinted at Garrett. Behind them, his eyes were intense in their still regard.
“And it’s not just on land. Every exploited marine species will be commercially extinct by 2048.”
“Rheinnalt?” Garrett said. Her appeal was direct, to his over-bright eyes. She leaned against a lab bench. She was having trouble standing.
“Let me quote you this statement signed in 1992 by the majority of Nobel prize winners then alive. Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course... if not checked... our current practices... may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know... no more than one or a few decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost. “
Bryce shook his head. “Dawnsio ar y dibyn. We dance on the edge of a cliff. While the politicians argue and businessmen fiddle their carbon tax reports, our planet burns.”
Bryce hit runs of keys. Numbers appeared below the globes.
“Look at my four scenarios. Do you see them?”
“The world middle-left is the result of global warming by twelve degrees. Life is fugitive, it has ceased to exist as we know it. The last time the planet warmed by seven degrees so quickly, almost everything on Earth died.”
“The next world has warmed by eight degrees. Humanity has survived but most life forms haven’t. It took ten million years for Nature to recover from the last mass extinction event. This man-made one will be far worse.”
“Of course my models only confirmed Arshu’s first prophesy.” Bryce walked towards the wall screen. “But fifteen years ago he had a vision of an alternative.”
Bryce gestured at the last spinning globe, still serene, still milky blue-green.
“The world on the left has a viable biosphere. More than that, it is thriving. Mankind is in balance with the earth. We comprise a few million prudent gardeners, not a pestilence of billions.”
“Pestilence?” Garrett whispered. She couldn’t control the shaking in her legs. She felt the sweat again on her forehead.
“Christine, as biologists we understand genetics. That allows us to see truly; our sight is unveiled. Have you considered honestly, rationally, how we are more likely to survive?” He waited only long enough for her silence. “We are scientists. It is our duty to follow the evidence is it not, wherever it leads? And we are granted power beyond that of ordinary men and women; we have tools that can change the world. That carries a terrible responsibility. Responsibility that requires action.”
Garrett stared into Bryce's eyes. They were black and shining and alive in their twitching purpose. She saw the madness of complete certainty. A feverish chill swept through her body.
“What have you done?”
“We have started a cull.”
Garrett stared at Bryce in horror. She saw his hands mimic sadness, in his eyes and the gestures of his hands.
“Do you not concede the logic?”
“Rheinnalt?” Garrett whispered. She remembered her nightmare of school children playing with dynamite. Understanding swept through her trembling body. She raised her right hand to visor her eyes. From somewhere unexpected she noticed tears for the man who had lost and been lost. And all the anger was in the understanding.
“What have you done?” Garrett whispered again.
“You were right about the malaria strain. The disease that killed your three cases in Brighton is an engineered orally-transmissible hybrid of falciparum-streptococcus, very infectious and lethal. Its name is Krissa. It was carried by the man you know as Christmas.”
Garrett let out a sigh with her whole body.
“It was created by accident, by an old colleague at Kronos, my first laboratory.”
“Sikanda.”
“Yes – or Professor Richardson as he was then known. Like many great scientific discoveries it was a mistake. Richardson had ignored protocols and introduced foreign sequences into the Plasmodium genome. He was chasing the first malaria vaccine, and had a good candidate. The unexpected side-effect of oral transmission was to be his crowning stroke of genius: a free, fast distribution mechanism, able to reach the most remote of areas. But the vaccine strain turned out to be viable and pathological, lethally so. I had transferred to Porton searching for a disease agent, but when Richardson told me about his failed project I realised we had found what we needed.”
Bryce bent to tap a few keys. A new window opened on the screen. “Shall I tell you what happens next? Arshu has seen it all.”
Garrett gripped the lab bench with both hands. She looked around the closed lab. On the screen a newscaster was speaking. There was no sound.
“The first outbreak is established here in the UK. Last night we saw the beginnings of the media frenzy and official reaction. I expect a state of emergency will have been declared by now.”
Bryce turned from his keyboard and began to pace back and forth in the narrow corridor between the lab benches. “The international reaction will begin soon.”
“As the death toll rises, so will the panic. The first foreign case will provoke counter-measures of incredible brutality.” His words came faster now, with scripted urgency. “The UK will be sealed off from continental Europe. The French will close surrounding airspace. Any attempted international flights will be shot down. The Channel tunnel will be shut; a complete naval blockade will prevent ferries and merchant shipping out of British ports.” Bryce’s eyes contacted then swept past Garrett’s, his voice a pre-recorded chant.
“But the measures will be too late. This pathogen will not respect borders or the delayed measures of bureaucrats.”
“Stop it.”
“I can’t.”
“Please try.”
“There are four other vectors, on separate continents. According to my models, new outbreaks are already incubating in a dozen countries. Within a week from now, genuine Krissa cases – among a flood of false positives – will be identified on every major landmass, despite the best efforts of governments and the WHO. We know it will be successful because of our trial. We sent the first vector out early to a remote island chain.”
“Where?” Garrett whispered. She leaned against the lab bench and cradled her injured left arm in her right. She tried to stop the shivers in her body but found she couldn’t.
“Kepalua. It’s off the south coast of Java in Indonesia. There were thirty deaths in two weeks,” Bryce shrugged, “hardly an international incident. But when we had confirmed the contagion the others started their journeys. The UK’s vector w
ent first – he didn’t wait as long as instructed, not that it matters. By the end of the month, Krissa will be a worldwide pandemic.” Bryce looked past Garrett. He spoke out of an often-rehearsed future. On-screen a map of the UK appeared behind the newscaster’s head.
“The first reaction of governments will be to reach for the gun. Martial law will be declared. Cold war protocols will be activated.” Bryce shrugged. “They will discover barriers designed for radiation are not effective against Krissa. All that the Plasmodium needs to destroy a human group, whatever the size, is a single infected carrier cell. And remember, the modern world has never faced a serious global biological attack. It is simply not equipped to deal with it.”
“I see you are wondering how I am so certain. Arshu dreams with his eyes open. He has seen it. It will come to pass.”
On the screen the map of the UK was speckled with clusters of red dots, like a body with chickenpox.
“The breakdown of modern society will be unexpectedly rapid. Our technologies are dependent on people, the weakest links in all the chains. They will not turn up to work; they will desert public spaces; they will stay at home. Transport systems will falter and stop; the airwaves, landlines, the Internet will fall silent; our skies and highways and railways and shipping lanes will empty; power stations will stop generating. Across all our great cities the lights will go out.”
Garrett listened to the soft, reasonable voice. She stared in frozen horror at the man in front of her, at his smile of prophecy. Behind his head the newscaster had been replaced by the prime minister looking grave, mouthing silent words.
“Soon, the loggers’ chain saws will stop, for the first time in fifty years. All around the globe, factory trawler fleets will put in to port, and stay there. The world’s five-hundred-million-strong car fleet will slow down, park, and start rusting along with fertilizer spreaders and combine harvesters. Mines will shut and power station chimneys stop belching smoke.”
“Arshu predicts fifty-year carbon emission targets will be met within nine months. The atmosphere will stabilize, and then begin to repair itself – incredibly quickly in most of the models I have run. The ice caps will grow back over the poles. Glaciers will reappear in the high Himalayas. Water tables will replenish themselves and rivers run clean and full. The Colorado, Yangtze and Ganges will reach the sea again for the first time in decades.”