“You probably know more about it than I do,” Tesa said. “Didn’t Debbie have an article about it a few months ago?” Her face strained in recollection. “Lots of experiments are still going on, on the side streets of science. The whole claim of cold fusion is that the nuclei can be breached by some chemical means—outside of the particle chamber. In hot fusion, the action takes place in a near vacuum, because there’s so much empty space, so much distance, ordinarily between the nuclei of one and another atom. But in cold fusion, it’s thought that a lattice is created between two atoms, which allows them to get much closer, so that neutrons and energy can be exchanged.”
“Lattice?”
“Yeah,” Tesa replied, eyes closed as if she were reading Debbie’s article on the insides of her eyelids. She looked haggard—looked her age. “Palladium gets loaded with deuterium, or tritium,” she continued, “and one theory is that a pair of equilibrium sites come into being, through which energy and particles are passed.”
“Jeez,” I said. “So we’re talking about some kind of virus packing the equivalent of palladium for carbon-14, so that it sets up those equilibrium sites when it gets close enough to the carbon-14… Hmmm…palladium is to tritium, as x is to carbon-14—”
“Well, yes, tritium and carbon-14 are both radioactive isotopes—”
“Exactly—”
“But that’s still quite a stretch,” Tesa said, opening her eyes, tired, bloodshot, looking at me. “And how would you account for the Neanderthal features? That’s at least something I’m supposed to be an expert in.”
“That’s the easy part,” I replied. “The virus gets into Dave’s DNA; it edits the DNA; the amended DNA does its thing—instructs proteins how to grow—and that growth turns out to look like a Neanderthal… Not enough to save Dave’s life—hell, it likely wiped out his brain—but enough to make him look like a Neanderthal before he died.”
“Fast work, even for a virus,” Tesa said.
“Not necessarily,” I said. “If we’re right, the virus or whatever it is infected Dave months ago. Same time it infected me. Except I was lucky enough to get the silk cure from the Amish, and Dave was sleeping in silk every night, until…” I sighed. “I sent the cure to Dave, and he didn’t take it. I gave it to Herby Edelstein, just to be sure. You took yours, didn’t you?”
“Yes, yes.”
“OK,” I said, not entirely reassured. “Dave’s collapse must have been just the final stage—the prelude to the metamorphosis, the culmination of months of sub rosa, viral editing.”
“One hell of an edit,” Tesa said. “Almost suggests that we already have some explicit Neanderthal DNA in our genome…”
“Why not? You yourself told me how close our two genomes seem to be,” I said.
She concentrated. “I can’t see how any virus, or whatever we call it, could possibly edit our DNA into something it wasn’t, to create a new species on the spot, even over a few months. A more likely explanation—if any of this was actually happening—might be that we are in effect Neanderthals. That our base-line DNA is Neanderthal. But that somewhere along the line, in evolution, some kind of blocking agent arose which suppressed the Neanderthal genes. Switched them off. And now this virus somehow shuts off the suppression agent? I suppose it’s possible…”
“I could buy that. I’m not wedded to the editing.”
“So what does that say about all of our Neanderthal specimens—the ones uncovered in those fossil beds in Europe, the Middle East, Asia? Some were never alive as Neanderthals? Their carbon-dating is all off? Some unknown number—who knows, maybe all—are just are a bunch of poor shmucks—and women—who died in the past 150 years and happened to be infected by this strange carbon-altering virus we’re hypothesizing?”
“I think the word you’re looking for is shlimazel—a hapless soul—not shmuck,” I said.
“What?”
“Have you or anyone ever seen a Neanderthal alive?”
“You want to throw out a century and a half of paleoanthropology?”
“If that what it takes,” I replied.
Tesa took a perfunctory sip of her tea.
I looked at my watch. “I’m fifteen minutes late,” I said. “But this has been very useful.”
She smiled, weakly.
“Tesa, what’s wrong?” This definitely wasn’t like her. “You used to be even more excited by these things than I am.”
“Work isn’t everything, Phil. I guess I’m concerned about Debbie.”
“What’s the matter with Debbie? Does she need the cure?” As far as I knew, she hadn’t had any direct contact with any neo-Neanderthal.
“No, it’s not that,” Tesa replied. “It’s her taste in men. As in: she has none. And she’s involved with some guy now… I don’t know, I just don’t like him.”
“Tell me about him,” I asked.
“Nothing I can put my finger on,” she said. “He talks like he’s lived in the Bronx or Brooklyn—I never can keep those two accents straight—all his life. He works on Wall Street. I don’t know—he just gives me the creeps.”
I took her hand, squeezed it. “Well, as long as he doesn’t look like a Neanderthal,” I said.
But the joke was becoming worn, for both of us.
ACTUALLY, I DID know someone who looked like a Neanderthal—and so did Tesa.
After kissing her goodbye on the cheek, and telling her to please get some rest, I walked over to see him again at the Bobst Library.
“Phil D’Amato!”
“Mrs. Delany, how are you?” I smiled. I didn’t expect her out here in front of the earth-red library.
“I’m fine, and I bet you’re not here to see me, but Stefan Antonescu.”
“Well, yes, I am. But it’s good to see you too.” For a second, I had a feeling I was going to hear that Stefan Antonescu wasn’t in today. Could he have forgotten our appointment—
She smiled. “Stefan’s downstairs, on the lower level, right where he always is on his days off—probably reading To the Ends of the Earth!”
“The Ends of the Earth?”
“Oh yes,” Delany said. “A wonderful book about The Silk Road, The Spice Route, all the ancient highways and byways.”
I nodded.
“I heard about the medical examiner, Dave Spencer,” she said and leaned closer. “It’s a terrible thing, losing a colleague like that.”
“Yes, it is—”
“But I guess things are at least beginning to get back to normal now for you, and thank goodness Stefan was OK. I guess things all fall into place, sooner or later.”
“Yeah, that’s the plan.” But as much as I thought I was beginning to comprehend, I was sure it was going to be later.
“Well, I’d better get this book to the professor who requested it.” She leaned over even closer. “Those Humanities professors are the worst—they think we’ve got nothing better to do than to wait on them hand and foot, and immediately! Now a science professor, or an engineer, they understand that sometimes it can take a while to locate a book in our stacks. They understand the meaning of time…”
I nodded sympathetically. “Librarians never made house calls in my day!”
“Isn’t that the truth!” Mrs. Delany came back for a last confidential communication. “They say he’ll be Dean next year, and I figure it doesn’t hurt to have friends in high places. And the sun is beautiful today…”
As indeed it was. I followed it into the library’s huge atrium, where its rays came down like quick-silver strands of silk from the skylight. Silk…everywhere I looked now, I saw silk. When I wasn’t seeing the result of viruses turning corpses into prehistoric Neanderthals…
I showed the guard the temporary pass Ruth Delany had been good enough to send along to me several months ago, and walked down the stairs to find Stefan Antonescu.
I FOUND HIM at one of the reader desks, poring over To the Ends of the Earth, just as Ruth Delany had said.
“Stefan? Sorry I’m late.” I had called him
on the phone the day before, told him some of what I knew—or thought I knew—about the silk cure, and had set up this meeting.
He looked up at me, thick-boned face with keen grey-green eyes. “Dr. D’Amato. No need to apologize.” He caressed the book. “It was time well spent.”
I marveled again at the gentleness, the sheer musicality, of his tone—not only the voice, which seemed to sing as much as speak, but his demeanor. I still could not tell if this quality was enhanced because of its contrast with the face and torso, or if it would be as pronounced in any physical frame.
“I was wondering if I might entice you into a little conversation with some tea,” I said. “And since you’re not really at work here today—”
“Yes,” Stefan said. “The Library is very kind to me in that way—there’s always a seat for me here, whether I’m working or not.”
I nodded. “Ruth Delany seems like a very compassionate woman.”
“The best,” Stefan said.
“So, shall we decamp to that new tea place on Waverly?” I asked.
“It’s not as good as some, but I had some pretty nice Monk’s Blend there last week,” Stefan replied.
“Good, let’s go then,” I said. “I’d like us to be working together rather than against each other on this, Stefan.”
“I’m beginning to find some of this of interest,” he replied.
WE WALKED ALONG the east side of Washington Square Park. I decided to take advantage of Stefan’s apparent lack of hostility today, and lay out some of my cards. I told him about our virus theory—how whatever it was that had crushed telomeres and killed Dave Spencer, had also worked on his DNA to turn him into a Neanderthal whose DNA dated back thirty thousand years.
“Ah, I see,” Stefan said. “So I become the anomaly again, because I look like a Neanderthal and I’m still alive.”
“Yes,” I said. “But there’s no insult intended. I’m just interested in who you really are—I’m not looking to hurt you.”
“Thank you. So what would like to know about me?”
“How old are you?”
“Well, you already know I’m not thirty thousand years old,” Stefan said.
“How would I know that?”
“I assume you recovered a cell or two from my lips from the last cup of tea you gave me,” he said.
I smiled. “Yes, and that did date as contemporary. But what can be triggered can also be reversed. If a cold-fusion virus can breach atomic nuclei and lower the ratio of radioactive material so it dates as much older than it really is, a similar virus could raise it so it dates much younger. If an unknown agent shears off telomeres and causes people to drop dead in their prime, it’s not that big a leap to look for another related agent that keeps telomeres intact and confers longevity.”
Stefan gestured to a vacant park bench. “Shall we stay outside for a while? It’s a lovely day.”
I sat down, gingerly—a habit I’d no doubt acquired after too many years of splinters in my backside from the rotting green-painted wood of New York’s inimitable park benches. This one seemed smooth and new, though.
“I assure you I’m no immortal,” Stefan said. “There’s more to immortality than your telomeres, in any case.”
“You’re amazingly well read,” I said. And I was sure I’d said that to him before.
“Thank you.”
“And, of course, if you were thirty thousand years old, that would be more than enough time for your comprehensive reading. And you’d still be telling me the truth—technically—about your not being immortal.”
Stefan laughed—soft rain, pinging against a new window. “You’re way off,” he said. “By a factor of a hundred.”
I BECAME AWARE of a flute playing—a boy with sallow skin and sunken eyes had settled in against the next bench, actually on the ground right in front of it, with his back up against the edge of the wood. Or maybe he’d been there all along—he certainly looked no more strange than many of the park’s other inhabitants. But it was suddenly difficult to take my eyes and ears off of him.
“Don’t look so dazed,” Stefan said. “You were suggesting I was thirty thousand years old. Surely a mere three hundred isn’t that shocking.”
“It’s still an astonishing admission,” I said. “What more can you tell me?”
“You’ve already guessed a part of it,” Stefan said. “I was born in Magyar territory—what we now call Hungary—some three hundred years ago. I came by my Neanderthal features honestly—naturally—there must have been some interbreeding between Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon, whatever the current theories say. There are actually lots of people walking around with at least some of my features. I’m just a more extreme case.”
“Go on,” I said.
“There were alchemists from the Far East moving through my city when I was boy. They were always more concerned with sexuality, immortality—the tan—than we in the West. There was a fire in a tavern one night. I happened by at the right time—I ran in and pulled out a burning man. I don’t know what could have possessed me to do that. But I did, and he recovered, and he was grateful. And he told me about silk…”
“It conveys immortality—longevity?”
“No,” Stefan said. “It’s not as simple as that. It only has that effect—longevity is a good word—on people who already look like me. True Neanderthal telomeres react a bit differently to Bombyx mori DNA than the telomeres of Homo sapiens sapiens.”
“But silk saved my life.”
“Yes, it saved your life,” Stefan said. “It counteracted the virus, if that’s what you want to call it, that killed your friend. But you will not be immortal—you will not even live any longer than your natural lifespan. For you, the silk treatment repaired the damage to your telomeres that the virus was beginning to cause, and that is all. Think about it—silk is almost as common as dirt in our world. If contact with it in any way extended people’s lives, everyone would have already known about it for a very long time.”
“All right,” I said. “This is beginning to make a little sense. But why the knife attack on me? I don’t believe in coincidences like that.”
“Maybe it was a coincidence,” Stefan said. “If it wasn’t, and someone wants you dead because of your involvement in these recent events, you’ll likely be hearing from that person again.”
THIRTEEN
“Fax coming in for you, honey.”
“Be there in a second. Who’s it from?”
“Hold on,” Jenna said. “Looks like it’s from England—44 country code—yeah, it’s from Michael.”
“Good, he said he’d be sending something along. Nice to see we’re not the only ones working on a Sunday,” I said.
Jenna took a scissor to the shiny thermal paper.
“I know, I know. We need to get a new one,” I said. “Mallory told me his people were looking at some bizarre possible mention of a Neanderthal curse in Tocharian manuscripts. Is that it?”
Jenna nodded. “Yeah, it’s a translation of a part of a Tocharian manuscript, with a copy of the original attached for comparison. Looks like this one was written on some kind of paper.”
“Chinese paper,” I said, “Some of those manuscripts were bi-lingual, with words known in Sanskrit, so translations have been available for years. The manuscripts date from the 7th and eight centuries A.D.—commercial documents, permits for caravans, lots of religious stuff, and a few medical and magical texts. Mallory told me the Brits had been working up some new translations and someone spotted a possible connection to our case.”
“Hmm…” Jenna pored over the translation. “This does seem to be a piece of a medical text—or maybe magical; I guess there wasn’t that much difference between the two back then.” She pointed to a page.
I’ve come to understand that we are the brutes, it said, and the singers are angels—
“Did the Tocharians believe in angels?” Jenna asked. “You’ve got to be careful not to impose your own concepts with translati
ons.”
“Well, sure, they could have believed in angels,” I replied. “All they would have needed for that was some kind of Christian or Jewish contact, and there must’ve been plenty of that on the Silk Road.”
“OK,” Jenna said, and we looked again at the translation.
Our ancestors must have been jealous of the singers, for they killed most of them. Not because they were ugly, but because their minds were beautiful, and more knowing than ours. Their intelligence must have frightened our forebears, far more than their faces. Our forebears bred precautions, but the blood of the singers had its revenge, in the illness it has bestowed upon us and the children like a curse.
Mallory had underlined most of that last phrase at the bottom of the page—illness it has bestowed upon us and the children like a curse.
“Anything more?” I asked.
“No, I don’t think so,” Jenna replied. “Mallory says the word cure appears a few pages below curse in the manuscript, but the rest of the original has been corrupted.”
“You gotta love that British usage: corrupted,” I said. “Let’s see the original.”
There was something magical indeed about seeing the graceful Indo-European script of the Tocharians, courtesy of a photocopy in London and a trip across the Atlantic via fax. But the manuscript did appear to be burned or charred at the end—whether by deliberate flame or natural oxidation, who could say. And the word that apparently was cure floated alone in a sea of smudge on the fax…
“So can we assume that these ‘singers’—these ugly brutes—are at least our Neanderthals?” I asked.
Jenna held her hands up in an I-don’t-know gesture.
“I think it’s time to get Mallory—and Lum up in Canada—on the phone,” I said.
I SET UP a three-way conference call the next day—London, Toronto, New York City. Expensive as bloody hell, as Mallory would say. But like the vagrant who sneaks in to see the expensive doctor in the old joke also says: “Hey Doc, when it comes to my health, money’s no object.”
How much was the health of our whole species worth?
The city would get the bill, a month from now, in any case. The Department had quietly reopened the investigation with me in charge, in the wake of Dave’s metamorphosis.
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