The Second Cure

by Margaret Morgan

  ‘Just had a meeting of the Faculty Planning Committee, Charlotte. All departments within Science must tighten their belts going forward, and so we’re going to rest one of the current second-year courses for the next academic year …’

  Charlie felt a new knot forming in her stomach to go with the one she’d already grown for the seminar.

  ‘Your “Symbiosis and Evolution” unit is one of those under consideration for resting, along with “Plant Ecology in Australasia” and “Evolution of Plants”. I’ve already spoken to the convenors of those two units, and I want each of you to provide me with a one-page outline explaining why your unit should be spared.’

  Charlie was dumbstruck. Her unit was precious to her, not only because she loved the subject matter, but because its continued existence was her best hope for tenure. She worked on yearly contracts, and the insecurity of her position interfered not only with her research but also with her emotional health. Losing her teaching role would be catastrophic.

  Juliette, overhearing, had joined her at the dais, and before Charlie could respond to Reed, she was asking, ‘Why these units, Gordon? Why are these being looked at for axing – oh, sorry, for “resting”?’

  ‘A range of factors were taken into account,’ Reed replied, clearly annoyed by this intrusion. ‘Core themes, student enrolments –’

  ‘You make it sound like a popularity contest.’

  ‘Of course enrolments are taken into account. The students are the ones who are paying, after all. As you well know. I’m not going to get into a discussion on this at present. You and Charlotte have a seminar to give.’ He moved off to take his seat by the aisle.

  ‘Yes, timing is everything,’ murmured Juliette, catching Charlie’s eye.

  ‘He does it deliberately,’ responded Charlie, fuming.

  ‘Jealous. And what’s this idiotic concept of teenagers deciding what constitutes a suitably rigorous science degree? C’est fou.’

  Charlie shook her head, flummoxed by the exchange. Her concentration was thrown, as Reed must surely have realised it would be. Instead of composing her nerves for the seminar, she was composing her one-page defence. She knew she was biased, but no other course in the undergraduate program gave such a sense of the interrelatedness of life and the interaction between species. If she ran this department, she’d ensure her course was mandatory. And that idiot Reed would be back sticking pins into dead moths down in the basement. He would never forgive her for having a higher citation impact than him.

  ‘It’s time to start.’ Juliette nodded at the clock on the wall. Eleven o’clock. ‘Bonne chance.’ She returned to her seat. Charlie took a deep breath, climbed to the dais and checked that the digital projector was responding to the remote. Then she began. She started by outlining what was known about the initial emergence of Toxoplasmosis pestis, which the epidemiologists had pinpointed to the Netherlands, near the German border. From there, it had spread across Western Europe to the Indian subcontinent and the Americas, and then rapidly around the world. It was now on every continent, with researchers in Antarctica having recently tested positive. She covered the switch to humans as the definitive host, and the symptoms and death rates in various species of the Felidae family, and went on to discuss the modes of transmission they had now confirmed: faecal contamination; ingestion of infected, undercooked flesh; and through the exchange of bodily fluids in humans, including semen. She dealt with what they knew of the teratogenic effects of T. pestis: like its cousin, Toxoplasmosis gondii, if contracted during pregnancy it could infect the developing foetus, leading to miscarriage, stillbirth or serious deformity and disability. Of course, it was early days in terms of identifying and quantifying such cases, but it was a grave concern.

  She was ending with an outline of their latest genomic work being published in Nature when she heard a murmuring from the rear of the lecture hall, and then shouting. Charlie trailed off as the audience turned its attention to two students unfurling a banner across the back of the space. ‘Save thetes from science!’ it read in capitals.

  ‘We don’t want your cures!’ the students chanted. ‘We don’t want your cures!’ University security were instantly ready, bundling up the banner and the protesters and escorting them out the emergency exit.

  Reed raised his voice over the chatter in their wake. ‘Oh dear. My apologies, ladies and gentlemen. Humanities students, no doubt.’ A few people laughed, uneasily. ‘“Thete”, as I understand it, is short for synaesthete, specifically one who has become so through infection with T. pestis. There is now a thing called “thete pride”, I gather, and we just witnessed it. Perhaps we could continue, Charlotte?’

  She regained her composure, completed her part of the talk, then introduced Juliette and returned to her seat. The protests were escalating. There had been a few articles in the student newspaper claiming that the Biology Department was ‘anti-thete’, and a new ‘thete’ club had formed on campus with an increasingly activist bent.

  Juliette told the audience about the proteins translated from the parasite’s genome that they’d thus far isolated, and how these would be crucial to developing a cure. This proteomics work was technical and complex, and Charlie took an unkind pleasure in knowing that it would largely go over Reed’s head.

  Gordon Reed was an old-school taxonomist. His professional life had been devoted to identifying and categorising species (his expertise was a family of moth endemic to Australasia, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea). Some taxonomists were lumpers and some were splitters. Lumpers tended to see a few key characteristics as significant and preferred to take a broad view. They sought to make genera and families more encompassing. Reed was a splitter. As soon as he found significant physiological differences in a population, he would agitate for a new subspecies, species, or even genus. He had fought his battles against the lumpers with a passion verging on the religious.

  Reed and his rivals, however, were soon confronted by a foe more dangerous than either could ever hope to be: the phylogeneticist. Genetics was creeping into taxonomy and morphology had to make room. The phylogeneticists were using genetic analysis to show evolutionary relationships between taxa with a certainty that blew the mere comparison of moths’ labial palp structures out of the water. Reed had come of age as a scientist well before the dawn of modern molecular biology and was lost in this brave new world of systematics and statistical bootstrapping. These developments forced him to withdraw from combat. He refocused his career on the bureaucratic rather than the biological. He began playing politics with a deftness he’d never displayed as a researcher and rapidly became Head of the Biology Department. His next goal was Dean of Science and he wasn’t subtle in his lust for the Vice Chancellor’s gig, either. Management’s loss as he progressed through its layers would ultimately be biology’s gain, Charlie thought, but in the meantime his intrusion into the day-to-day workings of the biologists was untenable.

  She was jolted out of her thoughts by Juliette finishing her section of the talk and realised guiltily that she had hardly heard a word. They gave each other a warm smile as they passed, Juliette returning to her seat, and Charlie to the dais. But before she made it back to the microphone, she was overtaken by an applauding Reed. He held his clapping hands high and the audience joined in. Then he raised his hands for silence, and Charlie awkwardly backed into her seat next to Juliette, who whispered, ‘Looks like someone wants to share the limelight.’

  ‘Thank you, Charlotte Zinn and Juliette Moreau. Excellent, excellent work, I’m sure you’ll all agree. Now, are there any questions?’

  Charlie was astounded. She had expected Reed to be dismissive, to affect boredom. But this? As the applause faded, an array of hands rose.

  ‘Yes?’ Reed asked, pointing at someone near the back. ‘You’ll have to speak up; we have no roving mikes.’

  ‘Is there any evidence that a previous infection with Toxoplasmosis gondii confers an immunity to Toxoplasmosis pestis?’

  ‘Charlotte?’
asked Reed.

  She returned to the dais and he held the mike in front of her face. He wasn’t going to relinquish it. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not that we’re aware of. But our international consortium of researchers is still looking at distinguishing features of the antibodies produced from infection by the two species, so it is a little too early to say. We do have enough to identify which species has infected an individual, though.’

  ‘Are you infected, Charlie?’ called someone from the side.

  ‘No. At least, not yet,’ she answered. ‘All our lab members have tested negative.’

  Reed whipped the mike away from her and invited a question from an honours student at the front.

  ‘You said it can be transmitted through semen. So it’s a sexually transmitted disease?’

  Charlie leant into the mike in Reed’s hand. ‘It’s one of the vectors, yes. It isn’t surprising. Gondii does too, in rodents.’

  ‘I have something I’d like to raise,’ said Reed, who now completely owned the dais. ‘Host behavioural manipulation. We know that in Toxoplasmosis gondii rat and mouse hosts lose the fear normally generated by the scent of cat urine, which makes them more likely to put themselves in the path of danger, of being eaten. And that this is in the interests of the parasite, increasing its chance of reproduction and transmission. We also know that gondii-infected humans share some of these behavioural changes – increased fearlessness, for example. Promiscuity, according to some research. So the question this prompts is whether any behavioural changes have been observed in humans infected with Toxoplasmosis pestis?’ Reed wasn’t even looking at Charlie and certainly not inviting her to respond. ‘By fortunate coincidence,’ he continued, ‘we happen to have someone here who might be able to assist on that very point …’ He looked with anticipation up into the back rows.

  Juliette hissed at Charlie. ‘Isn’t that your ex-husband?’

  ‘What?’ Charlie frowned as she peered into the audience.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ announced Reed. ‘We are honoured to have visiting us today, from Zinn Neurotechnologies up in Townsville, Dr Shadrack Zinn.’

  As Shadrack walked down the central aisle, Charlie turned to Reed. He was watching her and his expression was one of quiet triumph.

  10.

  Winnie Bayliss sat as unobtrusively as she could at the side of the classroom. Her role was observer, and she wanted the children to focus on Tricia Townsend, not on her. It was important, too, that Tricia forgot her presence, so she wouldn’t feel she was being tested, although of course she was. It was Tricia’s first time.

  The boy with the smirk had his hand up again. He was half-slumped on his desk, the flopped hand waving in a desultory manner. Jayden, that was his name. Red hair, freckles. A troublemaker, in Winnie’s experience. Tricia was wisely ignoring him and continued addressing the class.

  ‘And so we see, children, God’s love. Through Noah, God collected all his creatures, two of each, and saved them all from the flood.’

  The boy swapped arms and bleated. ‘Mizz?’

  ‘Yes?’ Tricia frowned.

  ‘How did they all fit in? The ark must’ve been huge.’

  ‘Yes, it was huge,’ Tricia told him briskly, and picked up the scripture book. ‘Page sixty-one, boys and girls.’

  ‘Well, he’d have to have taken food for them all, too. And water. That’d take up heaps of space.’

  Tricia peered at his hand-drawn nametag. ‘Yes … Jayden. There was enough room for food and water. God told Noah how to build it big enough. Now, page sixty-one, “Noah’s Ark”. The tune is “Mary had a Little Lamb” and I’m sure you all know that.’ She wasn’t giving him time for another question. A sensible move, Winnie thought. Tricia raised her arms and set her feet firmly on the floor in a semblance of a conductor, and began to sing in her thin and wobbly coloratura.

  ‘Noah had a great big ark,

  Great big ark! Great big ark!

  And on that ark he had two lions

  ’Cause it was like a zoo!’

  The children gradually joined in, in a mishmash of keys and tempos, and an undertow of general drone from the boys. Jayden wasn’t singing. He was picking his nose, gazing out the window.

  ‘… Roar roar roar roar roar roar roar …’

  At least this was working, thought Winnie. Tricia was on safe ground with singing.

  ‘Pigs!’ cried Tricia Townsend.

  ‘… And on that ark he had two pigs

  ’Cause it was like a zoo!’

  A disturbance in the second row: two girls, one shoving the other, and a blurted, ‘Stop it!’ Tricia unleashed a pointed shush at them, but it had no effect.

  ‘… Oink oink oink oink oink oink oink …’

  The voices trailed off as one of the girls started crying and immediately became the focus of the class and much conversation.

  ‘What’s wrong –’ Tricia peered at the nametag ‘– Kaleesha?’

  ‘That’s Kyeema, not Kaleesha.’ Jayden again. The class was erupting and Winnie could see that Tricia was losing control.

  ‘Kyeema?’ Tricia asked. Kyeema dragged her sleeve over her nose and sobbed, ‘She pushed me. She said I was singing in green.’

  ‘Singing in green? What’s that supposed to mean, er … Emma?’

  ‘She was, miss! She was singing in green and it’s meant to be in purple!’ Emma was indignant.

  ‘Emma, you’re talking nonsense,’ said Tricia. ‘Songs aren’t in –’

  ‘Mizz! Mizz!’ Another child, a little Asian lass, had her hand up, hoping to be noticed above the melee. Tricia was flustered, but Winnie knew she shouldn’t intervene. That would subvert Tricia’s authority.

  ‘Yes? What is it?’

  ‘What about cats? Were there cats on the ark?’

  ‘Of course …’

  ‘But my dad says cats are cursed. That’s why they’ve died.’

  ‘Cursed? Oh, no, Noah didn’t leave them behind …’

  But the bell finally rang, and all further words were lost under the dragging of chair legs over floorboards. Through the chaos of chatter and bags being thrown over shoulders, Tricia called out, ‘I’ll see you next week, children. Don’t forget your prayers and remember Jesus loves you!’

  Winnie had had her doubts about whether Tricia Townsend would be suitable for this work and realised now that they had been justified. Before retiring, Winnie had been a schoolteacher. She’d taught high school English, so her students had been much older than these, but the principles were the same. Tricia’s only experience with children was with her own, and what she’d just witnessed led Winnie to feel some pity for them. But with two scripture teachers dropping out this month, there was little choice. She needed her. She walked over to the front desk where Tricia was packing up her books and putting them in her bag. All but one of the children had drained from the room. Jayden was standing in front of Tricia as she readied to leave.

  ‘Yes?’ Tricia wasn’t even trying to disguise her dislike of the boy, Winnie thought.

  ‘I don’t reckon that story about Noah’s true. I don’t reckon he could’ve fit all those animals in. And, anyway, how did he get all of them back where they belonged? Like the penguins in Antarctica?’

  ‘We don’t question God’s word, you know. That is a sin,’ Tricia told him. ‘And God doesn’t like us sinning.’

  Now Winnie definitely had to intrude. ‘I think the bell’s gone, Jayden.’

  Jayden slouched out, and Tricia raised her eyebrows. ‘Well, he’s a brat.’

  ‘Some of the children are harder work than others. And it was only your first class –’ began Winnie.

  ‘– Oh don’t worry. I’ll sort them out. A bit of discipline, that’s all they need.’

  ‘Perhaps we should try for a little more … nuance. They are only young.’

  ‘Nuance?’ queried Tricia. Winnie suspected it wasn’t a word in her lexicon.

  ‘We need to make it fun for them. They’re not ready for the
ology …’

  ‘If we’re not going to teach them, I don’t know what we’re doing here, Winnie.’

  ‘Of course, but –’

  ‘– Being the widow of a priest doesn’t give you any special insights, you know. Much as we all loved Hector dearly, of course.’ Tricia was smiling, that annoying simper of hers, as though that made her words less rude. She hoisted her bag strap over her shoulder. ‘Anyway, enough chitchat. I have a meeting with the rector.’

  They made their way down the corridor. ‘You’re rostered to do the displays for Sunday, aren’t you?’ asked Tricia. Winnie knew exactly what she was doing: reasserting her authority. Tricia was the chair of the Flower Committee.

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ she answered.

  ‘And how is your little garden?’

  ‘Not too bad, given the heat. It’s hard to keep the water up to it,’ Winnie confessed.

  ‘Ah, now, didn’t I tell you? Mulch mulch mulch. You can never have too much mulch!’ That smile again. ‘So. Till Sunday!’

  Winnie opened the double doors into the car park and winced at the light screaming at her eyes. The throb of the cicadas was like a wall. The heat blasted at her. Her head ached. She wondered what the point of it all was. Making these children sing songs about things that meant nothing to them. She almost envied Tricia Townsend her utter certainty, her lack of curiosity and doubt, her conviction about her place in this world and in the next. So easy not to think. And she loathed her. She loathed her smugness, her concrete hair, her posture and pearls, her simper and her bloody prize-winning fuchsias.

  Fumbling with the car keys, Winnie opened the driver’s door and slid onto the searing upholstery. She started the engine and turned the air-conditioning to maximum, and she sat, bathed in the torrent of air, waiting for relief.

  The life-cycle of the nematode roundworm Dracunculus medinensis, commonly known as the Guinea worm, starts in water where they are eaten by copepods, microscopic crustaceans called water fleas. They develop within their hosts, but these are not the home they need to mature. Once a mammal drinks water containing the tiny copepods, the water fleas are killed and dissolved by stomach acids, freeing the Guinea worm larvae, which make their way through the mammal host’s intestinal and stomach walls. Once mature, a male and female Guinea worm will find each other within the host’s cells and mate, and the pregnant female will migrate to the host’s subcutaneous tissue, generally on a lower limb. The male, his work done, dies, but the female continues to grow, feeding on the host’s tissue to nourish her unborn young. By now, she is nearly a metre in length. When her larvae are ready to be born, she works her way through the surface of the host’s skin, forming a painful blister.