Panacea

by F. Paul Wilson

  “Sounds like PhD work. How does an MD get involved?”

  “When she’s just ‘too perfect’ not to be involved.”

  He gave her a wry smile. “Am I ever gonna hear the end of that one?”

  “Not while I’m around. Anyway, when I was in my fourth year of med school, someone heard from someone who’d heard from someone—you know how that goes—that I was half Mayan and spoke Yucatec. An ethnobotanical research company—”

  “There’s a mouthful.”

  “—approached me and offered big bucks if I’d help investigate medicinal plants and practices in Mesoamerica. The money was too good to turn down. I could put off my residency—I’d been planning on neurology—and build up my résumé along with my savings while possibly making a breakthrough discovery. I mean, the anti-lymphoma drug vincristine was developed from the rosy periwinkle found on Madagascar. If I could come up with something like that … well, the positives far outweighed the negative of delaying my residency. In fact, if I was successful at all, I could name my residency.”

  “And did you?”

  “Make the breakthrough discovery?” She shook her head, saddened by the memories. “Turned out the company that hired me was more into biopiracy. They’d find something useful, patent it, and license it to one of the big pharmas without giving a dime back to the people they’d stolen it from. I blew the whistle on them and got out.”

  He pointed to her. “See? You’re one of the good guys. And now you’re back, hunting for the panacea.” He waved at the surrounding countryside. “You think it might have originated here?”

  “No. Because—and I thought I’d made this crystal clear to Mister Stahlman—I don’t believe it exists.”

  He finished loading the magazine, then shoved it into the Glock’s grip. She noticed that he didn’t chamber a round before stowing it in the glove compartment.

  “Something is going on.”

  As he spoke he pulled a large, black-handled jackknife from the box. He unfolded and refolded a wicked looking four-inch blade, then stowed it in a side pocket of his jacket.

  “I won’t argue that,” she said. “And I’ll admit that I don’t have an answer as to what is really going on. But I‘m not going to fill the void with a mythical cure-all.”

  “You ever think that the panacea might exist because we’re able to have the opinion that it can’t?”

  “Can’t what?”

  “Exist.”

  Was she hearing right?

  “Could you repeat that?”

  “Okay. Did you ever think the panacea might exist because we’re able to have the opinion that it can’t exist?”

  It made even less sense the second time.

  “Just what is that supposed to mean?”

  He sighed. “It’s complicated.”

  Was this one of the “interesting conversations” Stahlman had mentioned?

  “We’ve got plenty of time.”

  “Nah.” He looked almost embarrassed. “Let’s keep our eye on the prize.” He checked his phone again. “We’re headed for…” He shook his head. “No idea how to say this. Don’t your Mayan folk believe in vowels?”

  “We have lots of vowels. Show me.”

  “Not while you’re driving. But at least I can pronounce the name of the medicine man or curandero we’re supposed to see.”

  “It’s ah-men in the old tongue.”

  “As in ‘amen to that’? Anyway…” He squinted at his phone’s screen. “This guy’s name is Mu—”

  “Mulac? I know him.”

  Rick gave her a wide-eyed stare. “And there it is.”

  “What?”

  “One degree of separation again. Why should I be surprised you know this guy? This whole scenario has been arranged.”

  So he was back to that now? “You said that yesterday. It was ridiculous then and it’s ridiculous now.”

  “Really? Guy who was terminally ill returns from Maya country in perfect health and dispenses an ‘impossible’ cure to an incurably ill little boy known to a certain deputy medical examiner who happens to be half Mayan. The healer guy dies as a result of what looks like foul play and ends up on the autopsy table of said deputy ME who happens to have traveled extensively in the area where the dead man visited and just happens to know the medicine man to whom the dead man has been connected.”

  Put that way, Laura found it … startling. More than a little.

  “Okay, you’ve got a point. An amazing string of coincidences, but nothing more. I mean, how could anyone arrange that chain of events?”

  “Not talking about just anyone.”

  “Then who? God?”

  He looked uncomfortable. “Not sure I want to get into this.”

  They reached the junction with Route 293 then. She turned onto it, heading on a northwest course along the narrower, two-lane blacktop.

  “Go ahead. We’ve still got a ways to go before we go off road. Hit me.”

  “When do we hit the jungle?”

  She gestured at the trees crowding closer to the road. “This is it.”

  He stared out at the leafy hardwoods of various shapes and sizes. “Really? You call this a jungle?”

  “It is. You were expecting ferns and palms—a rain forest, right?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Rain forests are a subset of jungles, but not all jungles are rain forests.”

  “Duly noted. So I shouldn’t expect to see monkeys swinging from branch to branch and I can’t grab a banana whenever I feel like it?”

  “You might catch sight of a spider monkey, but banana palms prefer wetter feet than they can get here. Rain on the peninsula averages maybe forty, fifty inches a year—about the same as Long Island. Enough for hardwoods like these. The really tall ones with the big buttress roots you see are ceiba trees, the smaller ones are baalché and copal.”

  “Spoken like a true ethnobotanist.”

  “Right. But now let’s get back to how this was all arranged.”

  “Okay. But prepare yourself for some weirdness—at least what most people would consider weird.”

  She shook her head. “You wouldn’t believe the weirdness I’ve seen people do to themselves and to each other. It takes a lot to weird me out.”

  “This’ll leave everyday weirdness in the dust. So here goes: What if … what if humanity’s sentience, our consciousness, our self-awareness is an anomaly?”

  “An anomaly?”

  “Yeah … an aberration. What if we started out genetically geared to be dumb forest dwellers, hanging from trees and eating insects and fruit? But something went wrong. Some errant gamma ray got through the magnetosphere and collided with some proto-chimp’s chromosomes and its brain started to change.”

  He sounded erudite, and that surprised her—like he’d done some research.

  “That’s not a terribly far-out what-if,” she said. “It might very well have happened that way, though probably not. But I can go with it for the sake of discussion.”

  “Doesn’t have to be a gamma ray. Can be a random mutation—anything that changes a primate’s genome and affects its brain. Now, those brain changes, through millions of years and stages of developmental modifications and evolutionary dead ends, they eventually result in a mind—sentience, sapience, self-awareness, reasoning, imagination.”

  He’d changed as he spoke. The flat, almost dead eyes had come alive. Wherever this was going, he was into it.

  “Okay,” she said, “the hominid chain leads to Homo sapiens. Us. That’s pretty well accepted.”

  “Right. But the next is a bit of a leap for most people: What if sapience and self-awareness are an anomaly in the universe?”

  “Okay. Stop right there. That’s hard to buy. No, impossible to buy. The universe is unimaginably huge. Our galaxy alone contains over four hundred billion—that’s with a ‘b’ as in boy—stars. If you imagine the Milky Way as the continental U.S., our sun, Sol, is the size of a white blood cell in Colorado. As for the
universe, with its billions of galaxies—again with a ‘b’—the experts figure there are a septillion stars out there.”

  “Never even heard of a septillion.”

  “Think of a ten with twenty-four zeroes after it. With that many stars, and all the possible planets circling them, I don’t see sapience and self-awareness being the least bit rare.”

  “What about Fermi’s paradox?”

  “Fermi the physicist?”

  “Yeah. One of the so-called fathers of the atomic bomb.”

  “Well, I’ve heard of him, but didn’t know he had a paradox.”

  “Also known as the Great Silence. It accepts what you said about all the billions of stars and planets in our galaxy, but it asks: With all those potential civilizations out there, many so much older than ours, why haven’t we heard from anyone?”

  “I … I don’t know.” She’d never really thought about it.

  “The conclusion I draw is that we’re either alone, or that sapience is extremely rare—you might say, vanishingly rare. Look, we’ve got a million and a half vertebrates and invertebrate species on the planet. How many are sapient and self-aware? You can make a case in a very limited sense for dolphins and some apes maybe, but only one species has built a civilization. Sure, lots of stars and lots of planets out there, and no doubt lots of species spread all over the universe, but what if the human level of sapience is so rare that when it occurs it attracts … attention.”

  “Attention from what?”

  “From larger intelligences—‘intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic,’ as Wells put it.”

  “H. G.?”

  “The same.”

  “A War of the Worlds scenario? You’re not seriously going there.”

  He shook his head. “Nothing so trite or obvious. You’ve heard of the Chinese curse, right?”

  “‘May you live in interesting times’? Sure.”

  “A multipart curse. That’s only the first of three. The next one is ‘May you come to the attention of those in authority.’”

  She hadn’t heard that one. Like the first, in typical Asian fashion, it could be taken in either a positive or negative way. But since it was a curse …

  “Yeah, I can see that. Better to stay off the radar.”

  “Exactly. But what if our sapience has brought us to the attention of ‘vast, cool and unsympathetic’ intellects in authority?”

  A crazy concept … and not a comfortable one.

  “Your what-ifs are starting to creep me out.”

  “Just asking questions.”

  “Are you talking about God … or gods?”

  He shook his head. “Bad word. ‘God,’ whether uppercase or lowercase, conjures up the supernatural and the spiritual. Gets you into religion or H. P. Lovecraft territory, and that just muddies the water. I’m talking about entities, vast intelligences. Don’t dress them up any more than that.”

  This was so off the wall, but Laura had to admit he had her attention. “Okay. We’ve been noticed by … entities. Now what?”

  “That’s the big question. Here we are, an aberration that calls itself Homo sapiens, a curiosity on the radar and under the cosmic microscope. How are we viewed? Simply as curiosities? Or as playthings … toys?”

  “Curiosities, I would hope. Where’s all this going?”

  “Right back to this panacea we’re hunting. You yourself have said it’s scientifically impossible.”

  “It is.”

  “Impossible is merely an opinion.”

  “No, impossible is impossible.”

  “Like putting a man on the moon and bringing him back alive?”

  “Okay. I stand corrected. Many people were of the opinion it was impossible when they should have said ‘not feasible.’ Because in theory nothing about a round trip to the moon broke the laws of physics and biology. A panacea smashes them to bits and pieces.”

  “Then why are we driving through a Mayan jungle?”

  Okay, now she was on more comfortable ground—her turf.

  “Because this is how science works. Stahlman says it exists, I say it doesn’t and tell him to prove his position. He says I can find it here and is willing to make it very much worth my while to look for it. I’ve come to investigate and prove him wrong.”

  “But you’ve seen cures you can’t explain.”

  “True. But I have limited data on those ‘cures’ and so I’m here to expand my knowledge base.”

  “That doesn’t change the fact that you’re looking for something you say cannot exist.”

  “No, I’m looking for something that may be real but is being passed off as something that cannot exist—a medical breakthrough being passed off as a cure-all. Big difference. That unknown something might not have the unlimited scope of a panacea, but might well have limited properties that could prove to be a boon for some field of medicine.”

  She realized she was back to a form of bioprospecting.

  He said, “But what if a true panacea does exist?”

  “It can’t.”

  “Go with me. What if it does? Would you use it?”

  “Of course. To cure the incurable is a doctor’s dream come true.”

  “Well, a healer’s dream, anyway.” His eyes were virtually sparking now. “Know the third part of the Chinese curse?”

  “No. But I’m sure I’m about to learn.”

  “‘May you find what you are looking for.’”

  “Really?”

  “Really. Sounds good but has an ominous ring.”

  It certainly did. Enough to send a chill through her. In fiction, finding your heart’s desire never turned out well. Probably worked the same in real life.

  “I don’t see how a panacea could be something bad,” she said.

  “Even if it’s from outside?”

  “Outside? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “A true panacea would upset the order of things. Think about it. We’re talking about breaking the laws of biology and even physics. That’s why you keep saying it’s impossible. So if it does exist, it can’t be from here. Has to be from somewhere else.”

  “You’re getting all fantasy and science fictiony again.”

  “Not fantasy or fiction of any kind if it’s real. Something like that, something that breaks all the rules, has to have been introduced from somewhere else—from outside. And for what purpose? Just to see how the playthings deal with it? Or is there an agenda … one we can’t comprehend?”

  Something in his tone struck her. On the surface it sounded like proselytizing, but she detected something else. A note of … what? Desperation? Almost as if he was trying to convince himself as well as her.

  “What do you know—or think you know?”

  He shook his head. “Know? Don’t know, that’s the problem. But I’ve seen…”

  “Seen what?”

  “Nothing. I’m going to shut up now.”

  “Come on. You can’t cut off with a statement like that.”

  “Hey, look,” he said, craning his head to look up through the windshield. “A helicopter. We should have rented ourselves one of those.”

  “Don’t try to change the subject.”

  “Forget it,” he said, leaning back. “Just funning with you.”

  She didn’t believe him, not for a nanosecond. But she’d seen the walls go up and the shades come down. She wasn’t going to get any more.

  “‘Funning,’ eh? Like your ‘vast, cool and unsympathetic’ intellects?”

  “Exactly. Although you’re the intellect here. I’m just the muscle.”

  Laura wondered about that. She’d already caught him in one lie. How many others hid beneath that blunt exterior?

  “You do realize that mental institutions are full of people with ideas like the ones we just discussed, don’t you?”

  He nodded. “And that’s a shame, isn’t it. Because if you say you can’t eat pork because the creator of the universe told you not to, fine. If you say there’s a part of
you no one can see that’s immortal and will be reincarnated in a new body after you die, cool. If you say the earth was created in six days back in four thousand four BC, some school boards even consider making that part of the curriculum. If you—”

  “Okay, you’ve made your point.”

  “I rest my case.”

  What a strange man he was turning out to be. A lot deeper—and a whole lot weirder—than she’d imagined. Obviously he’d given this trip and its purpose a whole lot of thought, but from such an unusual angle.

  Something in his past—something he’d experienced or thought he’d seen—had skewed his take on reality. That made her a little uneasy. She preferred a travel companion thoroughly grounded in the real world to someone who thought humanity was the plaything of “intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic.”

  But she was stuck with him.

  3

  After a bumpy ride through the jungle, Laura finally found her way to the village.

  “Gotta tell you,” Rick said as they pulled up to the outskirts, “this isn’t at all what I expected.”

  A cluster of huts lay ahead, stippled with afternoon sunlight, yet he was looking out the rear window.

  “How so?”

  “When you think Mayans, you think stone—or at least I do. Stone houses, stone temples, stone walls. These may have thatch roofs, but they’ve got solid walls and look like, well, houses.”

  “They may not have central AC, but the twentieth century has had its influence.”

  “But not the twenty-first?”

  “Not yet.”

  He looked around through the rear window again.

  “That’s like the fourth or fifth time you’ve done that. What are you looking for back there?”

  He shrugged. “Just wondering if we were followed.”

  “We’ve had the road—or maybe I should say ‘path’—all to ourselves.”

  “If you say so.” He gestured to the village. “Where is everyone, by the way?”

  The village looked pretty much the same as the last time she had been here, except it had been bustling with life then.

  “I don’t know.” Laura reached for the door handle. “Let’s go take a—”

  “Hang on,” he said, gripping her forearm. “Give me a minute.”

  He pulled out a couple of his zip ties and began looping them around his belt near his right hip.