by Nancy Kress
Five people were still in v-coma, including Branch Carter and one child, Devon James.
The convoy from Fort Hood was a week out from Monterey Base.
Jason’s father and brother were planning a new Settlement, because We can’t live like this for much longer. Ryan, Jason suspected, would be glad to go on doing so, but Ryan would go where Colin led.
Major Sullivan and her team were closer to a vaccine against RSA, but not close enough. Nor had Major Vargas’s team made any progress on a way to tweak the human immune system to fight off RSA.
And Dr. Steffens …
Ah, not yet. Give him a few more minutes before he had to go to Toni Steffens.
Jason walked into the kitchen of Lab Dome mess. Big pots bubbled on a stove. Two Settlers, teenagers, rose hastily from the floor, straightening their clothes. The boy’s ears blushed bright red. Jason said, “As you were,” even though neither was a soldier, and withdrew. The little incident cheered him. Those kids, who had been small children at the time of the Collapse, had found pleasure, maybe even joy, in the midst of crisis. More power to them.
Hillson was increasingly wooden to Jason, and Jason knew he couldn’t hold off Hillson much longer. Hillson’s loyalty was beyond question, but the decision Jason had come to might shatter that loyalty beyond repair. Or not. Either way, Jason would talk to him next.
Right after Toni Steffens.
He made his way to the labs, only to be told that Dr. Steffens was in the underground annex. At the corridor leading to the stairwell, the guard saluted and opened the door. Jason put on an esuit and descended the staircase, his boots ringing on the alien metal. He entered the negative-pressure bird lab.
It was pandemonium down here. Cages and cages of noisy sparrows, none of them happy. Wings flapped, beaks opened, bird shit fell through bars, females squawked as he approached caged and artificial nests. Full-grown birds, fledglings, eggs. How had Dr. Steffens got them to breed so fully in captivity?
Not that Jason would understand it if he were told.
A harried lab tech nodded as he scattered seeds into cages. Jason called over the noise, “Where’s Dr. Steffens?” The man pointed.
Behind a stack of cages, she bent over a lab bench, a short dumpy woman with lethal bird shit on her pants, the brain of a genius in her head. Jason had a sudden incongruous picture of Toni Steffens accepting a Nobel Prize, standing in her bird-stained outfit at the Stockholm Concert Hall before the king, in a room full of chirping sparrows.
“Dr. Steffens.”
She looked up, startled. “Now?”
“Yes.” He hadn’t told anyone, not even her, when it would happen. Benjamin Franklin, again, with his wise counsel on secrets.
“I need a few minutes.”
“Yes.” Jason headed for decon, glad to escape the bird lab. He waited in the small space outside the airlock. To his left was the stockade, in which sat the deranged Corporal Porter, who had attacked Jason’s grandmother. Porter was another problem. Holbrook was trying different meds, although so far all they had done was reduce Porter to zombielike quiescence.
Eventually Toni emerged from the bird lab beside a lab assistant and a loaded carry-bot. The assistant wore a look that Jason recognized all too well: terrified but determined. He’d seen that look on the faces of new recruits in Congo, some of whom had never made it home. Five trusted soldiers from J Squad, fully armed and armored, clattered down the steps.
The eight of them went through the airlock to the tunnel beyond. Parts of the tunnel walls and ceiling had shaken loose during Jason’s relentless bombing of Monterey Base, but the carry-bot was able to navigate three-quarters of the way to the hatch. When rubble blocked the bots’ progress, everyone carried the cages of birds over the debris. J Squad opened the hatch and took up defensive positions, with more soldiers covering them in the woods. However, as Jason had expected, the trees were empty of enemy. New America, reeling from the destruction of Sierra Depot, was most likely regrouping, or concentrating on attacking the undomed convoy.
The cages were lugged up the stairs, one by one. There should have been, Jason thought, some kind of ceremony. What Jason, Toni, and the lab assistant were doing would change the world just as fundamentally as anyone who had ever won a Nobel: Alfred Nobel with his dynamite, Salk with his vaccine, Crick and Watson with their double helix. Just as much as anything since the spore cloud.
One by one, Toni and her assistant opened the cages.
Jason watched the last of the sparrows flap off into the trees. Probably some would die, eaten by predators. But in the spring, most would mate. The males, all sterile, would fail to impregnate their wild brides. The females would also mate, producing sterile male offspring and females who would carry the drive into the next generation. As the sterility spread, helped by Toni Steffens’s other, diabolically clever gene tweaks, there would be fewer and fewer sparrows. A “selective sweep,” Toni called it. Sterile males would have to go farther afield to find mates. They could—because they had, once before—cover two continents and, eventually perhaps reach Asia from Alaska. It had happened before.
Fewer and fewer sparrows. Eventually, there would be none. And RSA would die with them.
How long? Toni Steffens had not known for sure: too many variables. What she had known for sure was that Jason’s decision to release the birds would change Earth’s ecology even more profoundly than had the temporary elimination of eight species of mice by the original spore cloud. Sparrows filled more ecological functions than mice. Jason even knew what they were, but in case his knowledge was incomplete, there were going to be outraged scientists eager to shout it at him.
This evening. Time was running out.
For now, he stood quietly, watching a genetically altered sparrow, unwitting time bomb to its own species, perch on the branch of a blue oak. Finally he said to Toni Steffens, “All right. Let’s tell them.” And into his implant, “J Squad—all troops back to the dome. Perimeter patrol—all troops inside. Repeat, all troops inside.”
“Sir?” said a startled voice. Perimeter patrol was always maintained, in case of messages from the signal station.
“All troops inside.”
He tongued off the implant. To Toni he said, just as if she had been one of his soldiers, “Game on.”
Above the trees, a quadcopter hummed. Lieutenant Li, Specialist DeFord, and Corporal Michaelson, all undoubtedly mystified. The signal station had never been left empty before. But Jason wanted everyone here, no exceptions.
He opened the hatch to the tunnel. The sparrow on the blue oak spread its small wings and flew off.
* * *
The armory was the only space large enough to hold everyone, and then only when the FiVees and Bradley were jammed into one corner with the quadcopters on top of them. No room for many chairs; except for the old, people stood or sat on the floor. Jason and Toni climbed onto the hood of a FiVee, where everyone could see them. Half of J Squad stood in a solid line against the ordnance lockers; the other half made a cordon in front of Jason’s FiVee dais.
While people were being escorted from Enclave Dome to Lab Dome, while everyone was being brought through the open internal airlock to the armory, Jason had talked to Hillson. It had not gone well. Hillson stood now by the front left wheel of the FiVee, scowling. Whenever Jason glanced at his master sergeant, his stomach tightened.
The only people not here were the five v-comas who had not yet awakened, a nurse to watch over them, the tranquilized Porter in his stockade cell, the three soldiers on the Return, and Elizabeth Duncan in the command post to maintain surveillance. Duncan already knew what Jason would say. The others would be told right after the meeting.
“You don’t have to introduce it this way,” Duncan had said. “You’re the commander.”
“Yes, I do,” Jason had said. “Otherwise, if I tell it piecemeal, rumors and exaggerations will get completely out of control.”
“True. But, sir … you’ll be inviting ugly deba
te.”
“They’re entitled to debate.”
“And then you’ll carry out the plan anyway.”
Jason hadn’t replied; they both knew he had no real choice about the overall strategy.
He scanned the crowd. Faces curious or apprehensive or hostile. Some of the hostile ones were his own troops. Some still resented his allowing the star-farers to infect everybody, resented his bringing the Settlers to the base, resented the war going on so long without much real action, resented their lives cooped up in two domes. Others of his soldiers waited blank-faced, reserving judgment.
The scientists stood together by the airlock, Dr. McKay next to his Awakened wife, holding their little girl. Dr. Ka^graa was with them, along with Jane, her cousin La^vor, and the giant teenager Belok^. Jane caught his eye and then looked away. In that moment, Jason understood that she knew what he was going to say. How? A little shiver ran down his spine.
Colin, in his powerchair, sat beside Jane, with Jason’s father seated on a folding chair, one hand on his cane and the other on Colin’s shoulder. Ryan looked very old. The Settlers clustered behind Colin. Jason looked for his grandmother, but couldn’t find her or Lindy in the press of bodies. He spotted Claire Patel, Dr. Holbrook, and one of the young teachers from Enclave Dome with Dr. Sugiyama’s two children clinging to her. Holbrook had told Jason that the teacher was the only one who could deal with their trauma, and they would not leave her. The little boy, trembling, had his face buried in the teacher’s neck.
Lieutenant Li, standing by the ordnance lockers, stared steadily at Jason. Did he guess? Maybe.
The rest of Jason’s officers, both line and staff. None of them among the Awakened.
The enlisted troops who were Awakened: McNally, Swinford, Ramstetter, Veatch, Larriva, Buckley.
Mason Kandiss, standing impassive with J Squad.
Beside Jason, Toni Steffens sat down on the roof of the FiVee’s cab. She must be exhausted. Her work on the gene drive had been unceasing. But, then, so had Jason’s work.
He braced himself. Everyone was here, 660 people. Time to begin.
“People of Monterey Base,” he said, knowing the term sounded both pompous and faintly comic but unable to think of anything better, “we are all here together because I have two announcements that you all need to hear. They affect everyone, military and civilian alike.”
Someone coughed. It was the only sound. Well, that wouldn’t be true for long.
“Neither announcement will, or can, be reversed, although I know you will have a lot to say about both. Here is the first: Dr. Steffens developed a gene drive to spread sterility among the sparrows that carry RSA. She and her team bred birds carrying that drive, and we have released them into the wild. In thirty to fifty years, by best estimate, the United States will be free of RSA. It will no longer exist here.”
Babble of voices: Done what? Released what? What does he mean? But at least half of the crowd knew enough. Colin shouted, “You can’t!”
Zack McKay started to say something, stopped, stared at Jason as if at a mirage. Voices rose. Jason raised his hand, but no one stopped talking. Over the din—as bad as the birds—Colin’s voice prevailed; he was, in his own way, as used to command as Jason. People quieted to listen.
“Are you insane? You’ve wrecked the entire ecology! Do you know what happened a hundred years ago when the Chinese tried to eradicate sparrows? Insects swarmed out of control because no birds were eating them, the insects ate the crops, twenty million people died of starvation! And now with the ecosystem already so fragile—”
“We haven’t got twenty million people,” Jason said. “There aren’t twenty million people left in the entire country. Look, I know this is a huge meddle with the—”
“It’s irresponsible! It’s criminal!”
All at once, Jason had an image of Colin as a small child during one of their brotherly fights: “Dad! He hitted me! It’s cwimial!” God, the betrayals of memory!
He looked at Colin’s non-childish face and said, “It’s done, Colin. It was a choice between the ecology and the population dying of RSA.”
“But out in the—”
“You have no right to—”
“No idea of—”
“No authority for—”
Half the crowd glared at him; the other half asked bewildered questions of their neighbors. Here and there were a few understanding faces, chief among them Jane’s. She was translating for her father and cousin, but her eyes were on him.
He’d expected this. But he didn’t expect Colin’s next shout, or the sudden pain it gave him. Colin said, “So how are you any different from the Gaiists, taking the fate of the Earth into their own hands?”
Relative silence. Now—he would have to finish this now. He called loudly, “There is more.”
The murmuring and questioning quieted but didn’t stop, and Jason kept his voice raised to just below a shout. Everyone needed to hear this.
“There’s another reason I released the birds. Listen, everyone, this is the larger of my two announcements, and it affects all of you. Our scientists will no longer be able to work on the gene drive, or to create a version that stops RSA without eliminating sparrows. They won’t be able to do that because we will no longer be here. And neither will the domes.”
The crowd stilled as if shot.
This was it. He needed to make it simple enough for the teenage Settlers to understand, convincing enough for the scientists, strong enough to command his army.
“The people coming out of v-comas have increased intelligence. Most of you already know that. They fell into v-comas in the first place because they possess a certain gene. I’m sure most of you have already heard that, too. This gene doesn’t only exist among people at Monterey Base. It’s a human gene, found in both Terrans and those from World. About four and a half percent of all humans possess it—possibly more, because Monterey Base is a small sample size to generalize from. Four and a half percent of all humans, including the New America enemy.”
On some faces, growing comprehension.
“All of us were infected with the virophage from World. Everybody. However, most of us didn’t even notice, or had just a slight headache, and then we got over it, like you do a cold. But those with a special gene who are exposed to the virophage go into comas and come out changed. The virophage activates the gene. After the v-coma, those people are still carriers and can infect others who have the special gene. And after the v-coma, when you awaken, your brain is different. Rewired. More intelligent. And so what you will infect others with is increased intelligence.
“I want to say that again—every single one of the Awakened can infect anyone else who carries the right gene, and the result will be that that person, too, becomes much smarter.
“People, intelligence is a weapon. It is the most formidable weapon there is. Intelligence lets us create ever more effective weapons, ever more effective strategies to perceive and exploit our enemies’ weaknesses. Intelligence—in both uses of the words, information and smartness—is what wins wars.
“We can’t let New America win the United States. We can’t let those among the enemy who possess that special gene become more intelligent. That means we can’t let them be exposed to those among us who are v-coma carriers.”
Dead silence.
Jason continued, “This means we can’t ever, ever allow any of the Awakened to be exposed to anyone in New America. Nor can we allow anyone from New America access to the domes of Monterey Base. Because although we know that those of you who never went into v-comas are free of virophage by now, there are still dormant spores of the virophage in the domes. They’re apparently just as tough as R. sporii.
“I repeat, enhanced intelligence is a weapon. We can’t leave that weapon to New America. What we can leave, what we are leaving, is a planet that somewhere down the road will be free of RSA. But neither the Awakened nor the domes must remain where New America can get at them.”
Someone in the crowd yelled, “Kill all the Awakened!”
Jason did not see who yelled, but the shout was taken up by a few others. J Squad drew their weapons. Jason shouted, “There will be no killing!”
He saw Colin jerk his chair to shield Jane. Marianne continued to gaze directly at Jason. Hillson, with the agility of a much younger man, had climbed to the roof the FiVee cab, directly behind his commander, assault rifle on his shoulder.
Jason said, “Here is what we will do. Listen carefully, because most of you will have a choice to make. Three days from now, the Return, the World spaceship, will go back to World, who owns it. Every single Awakened will be on it. No exceptions. The rest of you may also choose to travel to World, or you may choose to stay here. However, the domes will be destroyed.”
Gasps. There was only one known way to destroy an alien dome.
“If you choose to stay on Earth, you must leave Monterey Base tomorrow. Civilians will be provided with FiVees, supplies, tech, some weapons. You can return to the Settlement dome if you choose, although I don’t recommend it because New America will attack there again and you will be vulnerable to siege.
“Army troops have four choices. You may come on the spaceship to World, under my continuing command. You may separate from the army and accompany civilians. You may stay with this battalion, which will now be commanded by Major Mainwaring, and will move into the mountains. Or you may join a convoy now on its way here from Fort Hood, although I should tell you that I believe Fort Hood to be under an unstable military dictatorship. All of those choices are more physically dangerous than accompanying us to World, but the decision is yours, except for the Awakened.”
It was Ryan, his usually meek and depression-prone father, who called out loudly, “‘Us’? Are you going on the ship to World?”
“Yes,” Jason said. “I am. So is Major Duncan, Captain Goldman, Lieutenant Li, and others.” All his coconspirators. “I urge you all to come with me to World, but I will not issue orders even to the soldiers among you. The decision is yours.”
Someone called, “You’re going to nuke the domes?”
