Otherness

by David Brin

  OTHERNESS

  DAVID BRIN

  To Ben, our 21st Century man

  CONTENTS

  TRANITIONS

  The Giving Plague

  Myth Number 21

  Story Notes

  Dr. Pak's Preschool

  Detritus Affected

  The Dogma of Otherness

  CONTACT

  Sshhh . . .

  Story Notes

  Those Eyes

  What to Say to a UFO

  Bonding to Genji

  The Warm Space

  Whose Millenium?

  CONTINUITY

  NatuLife ®

  Piecework

  Science versus Magic

  COSMOS

  Bubbles

  Story Notes

  Ambiguity

  What Continues . . . What Fails . . .

  OTHERNESS

  The Commonwealth of Wonder

  Transitions

  The Giving Plague

  1.

  You think you're going to get me, don't you? Well, you've got another think coming, 'cause I'm ready for you.

  That's why there's a forged card in my wallet saying my blood group is AB negative, and a Medic Alert tag warning that I'm allergic to penicillin, aspirin, and phenylalanine. Another one states that I'm a practicing, devout Christian Scientist. All these tricks ought to slow you down when the time comes, as it's sure to, sometime soon.

  Even if it makes the difference between living and dying, there's just no way I'll let anyone stick a transfusion needle into my arm. Never. Not with the blood supply in the state it's in.

  And anyway, I've got antibodies. So you just stay the hell away from me, ALAS. I won't be your patsy. I won't be your vector.

  I know your weaknesses, you see. You're a fragile, if subtle devil. Unlike TARP, you can't bear exposure to air or heat or cold or acid or alkali. Blood to blood, that's your only route. And what need had you of any other? You thought you'd evolved the perfect technique, didn't you?

  What was it Leslie Adgeson called you? The perfect master? The paragon of viruses?

  I remember long ago when HIV, the AIDS virus, had everyone so awed with its subtlety of lethal design. But compared with you, HIV is just a crude butcher. A maniac with a chainsaw, a blunderer that kills its hosts and relies for transmission on habits humans can, with effort, get under control. Oh, old HIV had its tricks, but compared with you? An amateur!

  Rhinoviruses and flu are clever, too. They're profligate, and they mutate rapidly. Long ago they learned how to make their hosts drip and wheeze and sneeze, so the victims spread the misery in all directions. Flu viruses are also a lot smarter than AIDS 'cause they don't generally kill their hosts, just make 'em miserable while they hack and spray and inflict fresh infections on their neighbors.

  Oh, Les Adgeson was always accusing me of anthropomorphizing our subjects. Whenever he came into my part of the lab, and found me cursing some damned intransigent leucophage in rich, Tex-Mex invective, he'd react predictably. I can just picture him now, raising one eyebrow, commenting dryly in his Winchester accent.

  "The virus cannot hear you, Forry. It isn't sentient, nor even alive, strictly speaking. It's only a packet of genes in a protein case, after all."

  "Yeah, Les," I'd answer. "But selfish genes! Given half a chance, they'll take over a human cell, force it to make armies of new viruses, then burst it apart as they escape to attack others. They may not think. All that behavior may have evolved by blind chance. But doesn't it all feel as if it's planned? As if the nasty little things were guided, somehow, by somebody out to make us miserable . . .? Out to make us die?"

  "Oh, come now Forry." He would smile at my New World ingenuousness. "You wouldn't be in this field if you didn't find phages beautiful, in their own way."

  Good old smug, sanctimonious Les. He never did figure out that viruses fascinated me for quite another reason. In their rapacious insatiability I saw a simple, distilled purity of ambition that exceeded even my own. The fact that it was mindless did little to ease my qualms. I've always imagined we humans over-rated brains, anyway.

  We'd first met when Les visited Austin on sabbatical, some years before. He'd had the Boy Genius rep even then, and naturally I played up to him. He invited me to join him back in Oxford, so there I was, having regular amiable arguments over the meaning of disease while the English rain dripped desultorily on the rhododendrons outside.

  Les Adgeson. Him with his artsy friends and his pretensions at philosophy—Les was all the time talking about the elegance and beauty of our nasty little subjects. But he didn't fool me. I knew he was just as crazy Nobel-mad as the rest of us. Just as obsessed with the chase, searching for that piece of the Life Puzzle, that bit leading to more grants, more lab space, more techs, more prestige . . . to money, status and, maybe eventually, Stockholm.

  He claimed not to be interested in such things. But he was a smoothie, all right. How else, in the midst of the Thatcher massacre of British science, did his lab keep expanding? And yet, he kept up the pretense.

  Viruses have their good side," Les kept saying. "Sure, they often kill, in the beginning. All new pathogens start that way. But eventually, one of two things happens. Either humanity evolves defenses to eliminate the threat or . . ."

  Oh, he loved those dramatic pauses.

  "Or?" I'd prompt him, as required.

  "Or else we come to an accommodation, a compromise . . . even an alliance."

  That's what Les always talked about. Symbiosis. He loved to quote Margulis and Thomas, and even Lovelock, for pity's sake! His respect even for vicious, sneaky brutes like HIV was downright scary.

  "See how it actually incorporates itself right into the DNA of its victims?" he would muse. "Then it waits, until the victim is later attacked by some other disease pathogen. The host T cells prepare to replicate, to drive off the invader, only now some chemical machinery is taken over by the new DNA, and instead of two new T cells, a plethora of new AIDS viruses results."

  "So?" I answered. "Except that it's a retrovirus, that's the way nearly all viruses work."

  "Yes, but think ahead, Forry. Imagine what's going to happen when, inevitably, the AIDS virus infects someone whose genetic makeup makes him invulnerable!"

  "What, you mean his antibody reactions are fast enough to stop it? Or his T cells repel invasion?"

  Oh, Les used to sound so damn patronizing when he got excited.

  "No, no, think!" he urged. "I mean invulnerable after infection. After the viral genes have incorporated into his chromosomes. Only in this individual certain other genes prevent the new DNA from triggering viral synthesis. No new viruses are made. No cellular disruption. The person is invulnerable. But now he has all this new DNA . . ."

  "In just a few cells—"

  "Yes. But suppose one of these is a sex cell. Then suppose he fathers a child with that gamete. Now every one of that child's cells may contain both the trait of invulnerability and the new viral genes! Think about it, Forry. You now have a new type of human being! One who cannot be killed by AIDS. And yet he has all the AIDS genes, can make all those strange, marvelous proteins . . . Oh, most of them will be unexpressed or useless, of course. But now this child's genome, and his descendants', contains more variety . . ."

  I often wondered, when he got carried away this way. Did he actually believe he was explaining this to me for the first time? Much as the Brits respect American science, they do tend to assume we're slackers when it comes to the philosophical side. But I'd seen his interest heading in this direction weeks back and had carefully done some extra reading.

  "You mean like the genes responsible for some types of inheritable cancers?" I asked sarcastically. "There's evidence some oncogenes were originally inserted into the human genome by v
iruses, just as you suggest. Those who inherit the trait for rheumatoid arthritis may also have gotten their gene that way."

  "Exactly. Those viruses themselves may be extinct, but their DNA lives on, in ours!"

  "Right. And boy have human beings benefited!"

  Oh, how I hated that smug expression he'd get. (It got wiped off his face eventually, didn't it?)

  Les picked up a piece of chalk and drew a figure on the blackboard.

  HARMLESS—>KILLER!—>SURVIVABLE ILLNESS—>INCONVENIENCE—>HARMLESS

  "Here's the classic way of looking at how a host species interacts with a new pathogen, especially a virus. Each arrow, of course, represents a stage of mutation and adaptation selection.

  "First, a new form of some previously harmless microorganism leaps from its prior host, say a monkey species, over to a new one, say us. Of course, at the beginning we have no adequate defenses. It cuts through us like Syphilis did in Europe in the sixteenth century, killing in days rather than years . . . in an orgy of cell feeding that's really not a very efficient modus for a pathogen. After all, only a gluttonous parasite kills off its host so quickly.

  "What follows, then, is a rough period for both host and parasite as each struggles to adapt to the other. It can be likened to warfare. Or, on the other hand, it might be thought of as a sort of drawn out process of negotiation."

  I snorted in disgust. "Mystical crap, Les. I'll concede your chart; but the War analogy is the right one. That's why they fund labs like ours. To come up with better weapons for our side."

  "Hmm. Possibly. But sometimes the process does look different, Forry." He turned and drew another chart.

  HARMLESS—>KILLER!—>SURVIVABLE ILLNESS—>INCONVENIENCE—>BENIGN PARASITISM—>SYMBIOSIS

  "You can see that this chart is the same as the other, right up to the point where the original disease disappears."

  "Or goes into hiding."

  "Surely. As E. coli took refuge in our innards. Doubtless long ago the ancestors of E. coli killed a great many of our ancestors before eventually becoming the beneficial symbionts they are now, helping us digest our food.

  "The same applies to viruses, I'd wager. Heritable cancers and rheumatoid arthritis are just temporary awkwardnesses. Eventually, those genes will be comfortably incorporated. They'll be part of the genetic diversity that prepares us to meet challenges ahead. Why, I'd wager a large portion of our present genes came about in such a way, entering our cells first as invaders . . ."

  Crazy sonovabitch. Fortunately he didn't try to lead the lab's research effort too far to the right on his magic diagram. Our Boy Genius was plenty savvy about the funding agencies. He knew they weren't interested in paying us to prove we're all partly descended from viruses. They wanted, and wanted badly, progress on ways to fight viral infections themselves.

  So Les concentrated his team on vectors.

  Yeah, you viruses need vectors, don't you. I mean, if you kill a guy, you've got to have a life raft, so you can desert the ship you've sunk, so you can cross over to some new hapless victim. Same applies if the host proves tough, and fights you off—gotta move on. Always movin' on.

  Hell, even if you've made peace with a human body, like Les suggested, you still want to spread, don't you? Big-time colonizers, you tiny beasties.

  Oh, I know. It's just natural selection. Those bugs that accidentally find a good vector spread. Those that don't, don't. But it's so eerie. Sometimes it sure feels purposeful . . .

  So the flu makes us sneeze. Salmonella gives us diarrhea. Smallpox causes pustules which dry, flake off and blow away to be inhaled by the patient's loved ones. All good ways to jump ship. To colonize.

  Who knows? Did some past virus cause a swelling of the lips that made us want to kiss? Heh. Maybe that's a case of Les's "benign incorporation" . . . we retain the trait, long after the causative pathogen went extinct! What a concept.

  So our lab got this big grant to study vectors. Which is how Les found you, ALAS. He drew this big chart covering all the possible ways an infection might leap from person to person, and set us about checking all of them, one by one.

  For himself he reserved straight blood-to-blood infection. There were reasons for that.

  First off, Les was an altruist, see. He was concerned about all the panic and unfounded rumors spreading about Britain's blood supply. Some people were putting off necessary surgery. There was talk of starting over here what some rich folk in the States had begun doing—stockpiling their own blood in silly, expensive efforts to avoid having to use the Blood Banks if they ever needed hospitalization.

  All that bothered Les. But even worse was the fact that lots of potential donors were shying away from giving blood because of some stupid rumors that you could get infected that way.

  Hell, nobody ever caught anything from giving blood . . . nothing except maybe a little dizziness and perhaps a zit or spot from all the biscuits and sweet tea they feed you afterwards. And as for contracting HIV from receiving blood, well, the new antibodies tests soon had that problem under control. Still, the stupid rumors spread.

  A nation has to have confidence in its blood supply. Les wanted to eliminate all those silly fears once and for all, with one definitive study. But that wasn't the only reason he wanted the blood-to blood vector for himself.

  "Sure, there are some nasty things like AIDS that use that vector. But that's also where I might find the older ones," he said, excitedly. "The viruses that have almost finished the process of becoming benign. The ones that have been so well selected that they keep a low profile, and hardly inconvenience their hosts at all. Maybe I can even find one that's commensal! One that actually helps the human body."

  "An undiscovered human commensal," I sniffed doubtfully.

  "And why not? If there's no visible disease, why would anyone have ever looked for it! This could open up a whole new field, Forry!"

  In spite of myself, I was impressed. It was how he got to be known as a Boy Genius, after all, this flash of half-crazy insight. How he managed not to have it snuffed out of him at OxBridge, I'll never know, but it was one reason why I'd attached myself to him and his lab, and wrangled mighty hard to get my name attached to his papers.

  So I kept watch over his work. It sounded so dubious, so damn stupid. And I knew it just might bear fruit, in the end.

  That's why I was ready when Les invited me along to a conference down in Bloomsbury one day. The colloquium itself was routine, but I could tell he was near to bursting with news. Afterwards we walked down Charing Cross Road to a pizza place, one far enough from the university area to be sure there'd be no colleagues anywhere within earshot—just the pretheater crowd, waiting till opening time down at Leicester Square.

  Les breathlessly swore me to secrecy. He needed a confidant, you see, and I was only too happy to comply. "I've been interviewing a lot of blood donors lately," he told me after we'd ordered. "It seems that while some people have been scared off from donating, that has been largely made up by increased contributions by a central core of regulars."

  "Sounds good," I said. And I meant it. I had no objection to there being an adequate blood supply. Back in Austin I was pleased to see others go to the Red Cross van, just so long as nobody asked me to contribute. I had neither the time nor the interest, so I got out of it by telling everybody I'd had malaria.

  "I found one interesting fellow, Forry. Seems he started donating back when he was twenty-five, during the Blitz. Must have contributed thirty-five, forty gallons, by now."

  I did a quick mental calculation. "Wait a minute. He's got to be past the age limit by now."

  "Exactly right! He admitted the truth, when he was assured of confidentiality. Seems he didn't want to stop donating when he reached sixty-five. He's a hardy old fellow . . . had a spot of surgery a few years back, but he's in quite decent shape, overall. So, right after his local Gallon Club threw a big retirement fest for him, he actually moved across the county and registered at a new blood bank, giving a false
name and a younger age!"

  "Kinky. But it sounds harmless enough. I'd guess he just likes to feel needed. Bet he flirts with the nurses and enjoys the free food . . . sort of a bimonthly party he can always count on, with friendly, appreciative people."

  Hey, just because I'm a selfish bastard doesn't mean I can't extrapolate the behavior of altruists. Like most other user-types, I've got a good instinct for the sort of motivations that drive suckers. People like me need to know such things.

  "That's what I thought too, at first," Les said, nodding. "I found a few more like him, and decided to call them 'addicts.' At first I never connected them with the other group, the one I named 'converts.'"

  "Converts?"