“Of course I don’t mind.”
He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking, if the angle of his head meant anything, at a blank patch of wall.
“Carol says you’ve been having trouble with your vision.”
“Carol is experiencing what people in your profession call denial. In fact I’m blind. I haven’t been able to see anything at all since yesterday morning.”
I sat on the bed next to him. When he turned his head toward me the motion was smooth but agonizingly slow. I took a penlight from my shirt pocket and flashed it into his right eye in order to watch the pupil contract.
It didn’t.
It did something worse.
It glittered. The pupil of his eye glittered as if it had been injected with tiny diamonds.
Jason must have felt me jerk back.
“That bad?” he asked.
I couldn’t speak.
He said, more somberly, “I can’t use a mirror. Please, Ty. I need you to tell me what you see.”
“This…I don’t know what this is, Jason. This isn’t something I can diagnose.”
“Just describe it, please.”
I tried to muster a clinical detachment. “It appears as if crystals of some kind have grown into your eye. The sclera looks normal and the iris doesn’t seem to be affected, but the pupil is completely obscured by flakes of something like mica. I’ve never heard of anything like this. I would have said it was impossible. I can’t treat it.”
I backed away from the bed, found a chair and sat in it. For a while there was no sound but the ticking of the bedside clock, another of Carol’s pristine antiques.
Then Jason draw a breath and forced what he seemed to imagine was a reassuring smile. “Thank you. You’re right. It isn’t a condition you can treat. But I’m still going to need your help during—well, during the next couple of days. Carol tries, but she’s way out of her depth.”
“So am I.”
More rain beat at the window. “The help I need isn’t entirely medical.”
“If you have an explanation for this—”
“A partial one, at best.”
“Then please share it with me, Jase, because I’m getting a little scared here.”
He cocked his head, listening to some sound I hadn’t heard or couldn’t hear, until I began to wonder whether he had forgotten me. Then he said, “The short version is that my nervous system has been overtaken by something beyond my control. The condition of my eyes is just an external manifestation of it.”
“A disease?”
“No, but that’s the effect it’s having.”
“Is this condition contagious?”
“On the contrary. I believe it’s unique. A disease only I can develop—on this planet, at least.”
“Then it has something to do with the longevity treatment.”
“In a way it does. But I—”
“No, Jase, I need an answer to that before you say anything else. Is your condition—whatever it is—a direct result of the drug I administered?”
“Not a direct result, no…you’re not at fault in any way, if that’s what you mean.”
“Right now I couldn’t care less who’s at fault. Diane is sick. Didn’t Carol tell you?”
“Carol said something about flu—”
“Carol lied. It’s not flu. It’s late-stage CVWS. I drove two thousand miles through what looks like the end of the world because she’s dying, Jase, and there’s only one cure I can think of, and you just threw that into doubt.”
He rolled his head again, perhaps involuntarily, as if he were trying to shake off some invisible distraction.
But before I could prompt him he said, “There are aspects of Martian life Wun never shared with you. E.D. suspected as much, and to a certain extent his suspicions were well founded. Mars has been doing sophisticated biotechnology for centuries. Centuries ago, the Fourth Age was exactly what Wun told you it was—a longevity treatment and a social institution. But it’s evolved since then. For Wun’s generation the Fourth was more like a platform, a biological operating system capable of running much more sophisticated software applications. There isn’t just a four, there’s a 4.1, 4.2—if you see what I mean.”
“What I gave you—”
“What you gave me was the traditional treatment. A basic four.”
“But?”
“But…I’ve supplemented it since.”
“This supplement was also something Wun transported from Mars?”
“Yes. The purpose—”
“Never mind the purpose. Are you absolutely certain you’re not suffering from the effects of the original treatment?”
“As certain as I can be.”
I stood up.
Jason heard me moving toward the door. “I can explain,” he said. “And I still need your help. By all means take care of her, Ty. I hope she lives. But keep in mind…my time is also limited.”
The case of Martian pharmaceuticals was where I had left it, unmolested, behind the broken wallboard in the basement of my mother’s house, and when I had retrieved it I carried it across the lawn through the gusting amber rain to the Big House.
Carol was in Diane’s room administering sips of oxygen by mask.
“We need to use that sparingly,” I said, “unless you can conjure up another cylinder.”
“Her lips were a little blue.”
“Let me see.”
Carol moved away from her daughter. I closed the valve and set the mask aside. You have to be careful with oxygen. It’s indispensable for a patient in respiratory distress, but it can also cause problems. Too much can rupture the air sacs in the lung. My fear was that as Diane’s condition worsened she would need higher doses to keep her blood levels up, the kind of oxygen therapy generally delivered by mechanical ventilation. We didn’t have a ventilator.
Nor did we have any clinical means of monitoring her blood gases, but her lips looked relatively normal when I took the mask away. Her breathing was rapid and shallow, however, and though she opened her eyes once she remained lethargic and unresponsive.
Carol watched suspiciously as I opened the dusty case and extracted one of the Martian vials and a hypodermic syringe. “What’s that?”
“Probably the only thing that can save her life.”
“Is it? Are you sure of that, Tyler?”
I nodded.
“No,” she said, “I mean, are you really sure? Because that’s what you gave Jason, isn’t it? When he had AMS.”
There was no point in denying it. “Yes,” I said.
“I may not have practiced medicine for thirty years, but I’m not ignorant. I did a little research on AMS after the last time you were here. I looked up the journal abstracts. And the interesting thing is, there isn’t a cure for it. There is no magic drug. And if there were it would hardly be cross-specific for CVWS. So what I’m assuming, Tyler, is that you’re about to administer a pharmaceutical agent probably connected with that wrinkled man who died in Florida.”
“I won’t argue, Carol. You’ve obviously drawn your own conclusions.”
“I don’t want you to argue; I want you to reassure me. I want you to tell me this drug won’t do to Diane what it seems to have done to Jason.”
“It won’t,” I said, but I think Carol knew I was editing out the caveat, the unspoken to the best of my knowledge.
She studied my face. “You still care for her.”
“Yes.”
“It never fails to astonish me,” Carol said. “The tenacity of love.”
I put the needle into Diane’s vein.
By midday the house was not merely hot but so humid I expected moss to be hanging from the ceilings. I sat with Diane to make sure there were no immediate ill effects from the injection. At one point there was a protracted knocking at the front door of the house. Thieves, I thought, looters, but by the time I got to the foyer Carol had answered and was thanking a portly man, who nodded and turned to leave.
�
�That was Emil Hardy,” Carol said as she pulled the door closed. “Do you remember the Hardys? They own the little colonial house on Bantam Hill Road. Emil printed up a newspaper.”
“A newspaper?”
She held up two stapled sheets of letter-sized paper. “Emil has an electrical generator in his garage. He listens to the radio at night and takes notes, then he prints a summary and delivers it to local houses. This is his second issue. He’s a nice man and well meaning. But I don’t see any point in reading such things.”
“May I look at it?”
“If you like.”
I took it upstairs with me.
Emil was a creditable amateur reporter. The stories mainly concerned crises in D.C. and Virginia—a list of official no-go zones and fire-related evacuations, attempts to restore local services. I skimmed through these. It was a couple of items lower down that caught my attention.
The first was a report that solar radiation recently measured at ground level was heightened but not nearly as intense as predicted. “Government scientists,” it said, “are perplexed but cautiously optimistic about chances for long-term human survival.” No source was credited, so this could have been some commentator’s fabrication or an attempt to forestall further panic, but it jibed with my experience to date: the new sunlight was strange but not immediately deadly.
No word on how it might be affecting crop yields, weather, or the ecology in general. Neither the pestilential heat nor this torrential rain felt especially normal.
Below that was an item headlined LIGHTS IN SKY SIGHTED WORLDWIDE.
These were the same C- or O-shaped lines Simon had pointed out back in Arizona. They had been seen as far north as Anchorage and as far south as Mexico City. Reports from Europe and Asia were fragmentary and primarily concerned with the immediate crisis, but a few similar stories had slipped through. (“Note,” Emil Hardy’s copy said, “cable news networks only intermittently available but showing recent video from India of similar phenomenon on larger scale.” Whatever that meant.)
Diane woke for a few moments while I was with her.
“Tyler,” she said.
I took her hand. It was dry and unnaturally warm.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“You have nothing to be sorry about.”
“I’m sorry you have to see me like this.”
“You’re getting better. It might take a while, but you’ll be all right.”
Her voice was soft as the sound of a falling leaf. She looked around the room, recognizing it. Her eyes widened. “Here I am!”
“Here you are.”
“Say my name again.”
“Diane,” I said. “Diane. Diane.”
Diane was gravely ill, but it was Jason who was dying. He told me as much when I went to see him.
He hadn’t eaten today, Carol had informed me. Jase had taken ice water through a straw but otherwise refused liquids. He could barely move his body. When I asked him to raise his arm he did so, but with such exquisite effort and torpid speed that I pressed it down again. Only his voice was still strong, and he anticipated losing even that: “If tonight is anything like last night I’ll be incoherent until dawn. Tomorrow, who knows? I want to talk while I still can.”
“Is there some reason your condition deteriorates at night?”
“A simple one, I think. We’ll get to that. First I want you to do something for me. My suitcase was on the dresser: is it still there?”
“Still there.”
“Open it. I packed an audio recorder. Find it for me.”
I found a brushed-silver rectangle the size of a deck of playing cards, next to a stack of manila envelopes addressed to names I didn’t recognize. “This it?” I said, then cursed myself: of course he couldn’t see.
“If the label says Sony, that’s it. There ought to be a package of blank memory underneath.”
“Yup, got it.”
“So we’ll have a talk. Until it gets dark, and maybe a little after. And I want you to keep the recorder running. No matter what happens. Change the memory when you have to, or the battery if the power gets low. Do that for me, all right?”
“As long as Diane doesn’t need urgent attention. When do you want to start?”
His turned his head. The diamond-specked pupils of his eyes glittered in the strange light.
“Now would not be too soon,” he said.
Ars Moriendi
The Martians, Jason said, were not the simple, peaceful, pastoral people Wun had led (or allowed) us to believe they were.
It was true that they weren’t especially warlike—the Five Republics had settled their political differences almost a millennium ago—and they were “pastoral” in the sense that they devoted most of their resources to agriculture. But nor were they “simple” in any sense of the word. They were, as Jase had pointed out, past masters of the art of synthetic biology. Their civilization had been founded on it. We had built them a habitable planet with biotech tools, and there had never been a Martian generation that didn’t understand the function and potential uses of DNA.
If their large-scale technology was sometimes crude—Wun’s spacecraft, for instance, had been almost primitive, a Newtonian cannonball—it was because of their radically constrained natural resources. Mars was a world without oil or coal, supporting a fragile water-and nitrogen-starved ecosystem. A profligate, lush industrial base like the Earth’s could never have existed on Wun’s planet. On Mars, most human effort was devoted to producing sufficient food for a strictly controlled population. Biotechnology served this purpose admirably. Smoke-stack industries did not.
“Wun told you this?” I asked, as rain fell continuously and the afternoon ebbed.
“He confided in me, yes, though most of what he said was already implicit in the archives.”
Rust-colored light from the window reflected from Jason’s blind, altered eyes.
“But he could have been lying.”
“I don’t know that he ever lied, Tyler. He was just a little stingy with the truth.”
The microscopic replicators Wun had carried to Earth were cutting-edge synthetic biology. They were fully capable of doing everything Wun promised they would do. In fact they were more sophisticated than Wun had been willing to admit.
Among the replicators’ unacknowledged functions was a hidden second subchannel for communicating among themselves and with their point of origin. Wun hadn’t said whether this was conventional narrowband radio or something technologically more exotic—the latter, Jase suspected. In any case, it required a receiver more advanced than anything we could build on Earth. It required, Wun had said, a biological receiver. A modified human nervous system.
“You volunteered for this?”
“I would have. If anyone had asked. But the only reason Wun confided in me was that he feared for his life from the day he arrived on Earth. He harbored no illusions about human venality or power politics. He needed someone he could trust to take custody of his pharmacopoeia, if anything happened to him. Someone who understood the purpose of it. He never proposed that I become a receiver. The modification only works on a Fourth—remember what I said? The longevity treatment is a platform. It runs other applications. This is one of them.”
“You did this to yourself on purpose?”
“I injected myself with the substance after he died. It wasn’t traumatic and it had no immediate effect. Remember, Tyler, there was no way for communication from the replicators to penetrate a fully functioning Spin membrane. What I gave myself was a latent ability.”
“Why do it, then?”
“Because I didn’t want to die in a condition of ignorance. We all assumed, if the Spin ended, we’d be dead within days or hours. The sole advantage to Wun’s modification was that in those last days or hours, as long as I lasted, I would be in intimate contact with a database almost as large as the galaxy itself. I would know as nearly as anyone on Earth could know who the Hypotheticals were and why they had done t
his to us.”
I thought, And do you know that now? But maybe he did. Maybe that was what he wanted to communicate before he lost the ability to speak, why he wanted me to make a recording of it. “Did Wun know you might do this?”
“No, and I doubt he would have approved…although he was running the same application himself.”
“Was he? It didn’t show.”
“It wouldn’t. Remember: what’s happening to me—to my body, to my brain—that’s not the application.” He turned his sightless eyes toward me. “That’s a malfunction.”
The replicators had been launched from Earth and had flourished in the outer solar system, far from the sun. (Had the Hypotheticals noticed this, and had they blamed the Earth for what was in fact a Martian intervention? Was that, as E.D. had implied, what the sly Martians had intended all along? Jason didn’t say—I presumed he didn’t know.)
In time the replicators spread to the nearest stars and beyond…eventually far beyond. The replicator colonies were invisible at astronomical distances, but if you had mapped them onto a grid of our local stellar neighborhood you would have seen a continually expanding cloud of them, a glacially slow explosion of artificial life.
The replicators were not immortal. As individual entities they lived, reproduced, and eventually died. What remained in place was the network they built: a coral reef of gated, interconnected nodes in which novel data accumulated and drained toward the network’s point of origin.
“The last time we talked,” I reminded Jase, “you said there was a problem. You said the replicator population was dying back.”
“They encountered something no one had planned for.”
“What was that, Jase?”
He was silent a few moments, as if gathering his thoughts.
“We assumed,” he said, “that when we launched the replicators we were introducing something new to the universe, a wholly new kind of artificial life. That assumption was naive. We—human beings, terrestrial or Martian—weren’t the first sentient species to evolve in our galaxy. Far from it. In fact there’s nothing particularly unusual about us. Virtually everything we’ve done in our brief history has been done before, somewhere, by someone else.”
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