Aftermath a-1

by Charles Sheffield

  I stumbled at last through the big double doors, released my hold on West Virginia Seth, and fell on my face. If he spoke while I licked and crunched and swallowed mouthfuls of blessed snow, I have no idea what he said.

  Finally he reached down and lifted me bodily. He was strong, far stronger than he looked. “I don’t know if you’re overdoin’ it there, Doc,” he said, “but I can’t afford you to get sick. We got enough worries as it is. Come on.”

  He helped me walk around to the back of the building and seated me on a concrete block free of snow. He sat down beside me, the knife again prominently displayed. I had a first clear impression of the outside world.

  A great square building of gray concrete stood at my back. In front of me, trees with the foliage of late spring stood with their trunks deep in snow. The breeze on my forehead felt summertime hot. Beyond them, a great river or bay sat lazy in the sunlight. I saw waterfowl, thousands after thousands of them, floating placid on the calm surface.

  “Might be our dinner there,” said West Virginia Seth. “How you feelin’?”

  “I was sentenced to judicial sleep for six hundred years,” I said slowly. “That meant until 2621, and I’d have been dead long before that. I thought I had a deal. I was supposed to be put in abyssal sleep instead.”

  “Lucky for you that you weren’t. Otherwise you’d now be real dead dead.”

  “What happened?”

  “To your deal? Damned if I know. But other stuff happened, a whole shit-pot full.” He went quiet.

  “Are you going to tell me?” I said after a while. I was still scooping up snow, quietly, and transferring it to my burning mouth.

  “I’m going to trade with you. You tell me what I need to know, I tell you stuff.” He still held the knife, but now he was using it to shave thin slices from a piece of cooked ham. “Before we start, just so you don’t get a wrong notion in your noggin, I’ll tell you the deal. I know what’s been goin’ on in the world for the past six years. You have no idea. You’re also in bad shape physically. For all we know, the next few days you fall down in a fit or burn up in a fever. S’pose you need help an’ I’m not here to give it. What you gonna do? Go to some house an’ ask? I don’t think so. They find out who you are, Dr. Oliver Guest the famous child murderer, they run screamin’ or they turn you in. I won’t do that. You may not believe it, but you need me as much as I need you.”

  I realized there was important information in that statement, though I was not yet in a position to assess fully its significance.

  “I didn’t know that you did need me,” I said.

  “I do. We do. But don’t kid yourself. If I have to, I’ll gut an’ flay you.”

  Anyone from my former life could have told Seth that it was not wise to make jokes at my expense. I am a person who takes himself seriously. However, I did not judge that he was joking. My uncouth West Virginia companion was deadly serious.

  Caveat, Doctor. I would be very careful.

  “You first,” he said. “Talk. Tell me all about telomod therapy.”

  “All? The subject has evolved over many years of research.”

  “Gimme the highlights, then. We got lots of time, and I’m in no hurry. Talk.”

  “Where should I begin?”

  “Assume I don’t know a thing.” He presented me with a handful of greasy ham shavings and a piece of dry bread. “I was a businessman, not a scientist.”

  This was a businessman, this crude and dangerous ruffian? No. He was a businessman. And now?

  In a world apparently gone mad, a little more insanity made no difference.

  “Almost every cell in your body has forty-six long strands of DNA called chromosomes,” I said. “Do you understand so far?”

  A nod. “Keep goin’. If I want backup explanation I’ll tell you.”

  “When a body cell divides, the double helix of the DNA unwinds. One spiral goes in one direction, the other in the opposite direction. When the process is finished, in place of the original double spiral we have two identical double spirals. The cell can now divide to give two daughter cells.”

  I paused. Something odd was happening to my body. Tingling had begun in my extremities, suggesting that the process of awakening still had a long way to go. And, more disturbing, there was tightness in my chest. It would be an awful irony to waken from half a decade of judicial sleep only in order to have a heart attack and die.

  Seth said, “Get on with it, Doc. We don’t have all day.”

  So much for sympathy and tender loving care. I forced myself to take a deeper breath.

  “The cellular division process is neat, efficient, and I would say beautiful. But there is a complication. During the copying, the very end of a chromosome is not duplicated. So with each cell division, the chromosomes gradually shorten. That should mean gradual loss of genetic material, but one thing saves us: the actual ends of each chromosome do not contain genetic material. Instead, they have a repeating pattern of molecules called a telomere. The telomeres contain no part of the genetic code. They are there only to protect the true genetic material. On each cell division, the telomeres shorten. When they are reduced to a certain point, the cell can no longer divide.”

  I looked at West Virginia Seth, who hardly seemed to be listening. “Do you already know some of this?”

  “Know all of it.” He grinned at me again. “No offense, Doc, but I have to check you out. You been asleep for six years. For the past two weeks, your life-support system’s been a piece of junk. How’m I to know if your brain’s what it used to be, ’cept by askin’ you things I already know?”

  He was right. It was the age-old conundrum: How do I know that the ’me’ who wakes after a night’s sleep is the same ’me’ who went to bed? I don’t. I merely employ it as a working assumption, for lack of anything better. But after a sleep of six years?

  I thought of my treasures, locked away in their hidden store. They might not have survived for six hundred years, but six years was a near certainty. I felt my breath quicken. In one way at least, the essential I remained unchanged.

  Seth had been studying my face closely. Too closely. I reminded myself that crudeness and barbaric behavior do not necessarily imply lack of intelligence.

  He waved the knife at me. “If you’re all done dreaming, get on with it.”

  The incongruity of it. A lecture on the basics of telomod therapy, facing a snowy landscape under a sky of pale blue, in a changed world about which I knew little or nothing. Seth might be lying about the last point, but his appearance and my own premature resurrection inclined me to believe him.

  “Since the telomeres shorten on cell division,” I said, “that should be the end of the story. It isn’t. There is an enzyme called telomerase that rebuilds telomeres. In humans, telomerase is found mainly in two types of cells. The first kind is the germ cells, so every fertilized egg begins its division with full-length telomeres. The second kind is cancer cells. Almost all cancer cells contain telomerase. That’s how they can reproduce indefinitely, until they overwhelm and kill the host.”

  Again I was forced to pause. My breathing was easier, but now I had no feeling in my hands — no body sense that they were even there. My arms seemed to end at the wrists.

  Seth was glaring at me again. It was pointless to tell him of my woes. I forced myself to continue.

  “Telomod therapy for cancer, which is what you had” — I was guessing, but he did not contradict me — “is a delicate balance. First, a patient is treated with a telomerase inhibitor. The cancer cells continue to reproduce rapidly, but their telomeres shorten with each division. When the telomeres are gone, the cells die. The cancer dies. The patient, assuming that the telomerase inhibitor was suitably applied, does not die.”

  “Not quite.” Seth stared out across the peaceful river. “He gets real damn close.”

  I could have made a grab for the knife, sitting on the concrete block. I had more sense than to try. Thus far the information transfer had been
almost all one way.

  “The treatment is unpleasant,” I said, “but consider the alternative. And there are possible compensations beyond the obvious benison of a cancer cure. If a patient were simply treated with telomerase inhibitor, death would soon follow. Every telomere in every cell would shorten, until the cells reached the Hayflick limit and could no longer give viable daughter cells. You would age rapidly, you would die.”

  “That’s what the Institute told us. Telomeres shorten, I’m a goner. But there’s a way out, right?”

  “At least in principle. Assuming that the delicate point is reached where the cancer is dead and the patient is not, a telomerase stimulator is administered. The body’s cells have their telomeres restored to their original, juvenile length. Naturally, nothing can be done to restore dead cells; but the patient is in a very real sense rejuvenated. Of course, you now face the possibility of new cancer. Telomod therapy must juggle telomerase inhibition and stimulation, in a manner different for each patient. It is not clear what the life expectancy of a patient given such treatment might be.” I stared at Seth. “At least, we did not know at the time of my descent into judicial sleep.”

  “We still don’t. An’ it’s worse than that.”

  “You knew all this?”

  “Yeah. Pretty much. I told you, I had to check you out. But now there’s stuff I don’t know, an’ I’m hopin’ you do. You feelin’ okay?”

  I was feeling, if not okay, a good deal better. I had hands again, and my chest no longer hurt.

  “Paradoxically,” I said, “I am feeling sleepy. Apparently five years and more are not enough.”

  “You can follow all right, if I talk?”

  “I think so. Nudge me if I drop off.”

  “Trust me. You won’t.”

  He told me little about the general events of the past six years, and rather a lot about Supernova Alpha. I assume that any reader will already know what he said, and I will not record it here. (Yes, of course I assume there will be readers. Did any diarist, no matter how the material was hidden or encoded, not assume that the entries would someday be read? A secret diary can be many things, but unless it is destroyed there is one thing it can never be, and that is secret. You still do not agree, although your unseen presence at my shoulder provides the ultimate proof that I am right? Then ask yourself why Samuel Pepys wrote all sexually explicit material of his diaries in Latin, rather than in English.)

  I was shocked by what he told me. I was also relieved. My implant, with an operating lifetime designed to allow authority to track me to and beyond my final release, surely depended on working microchips. And amid global turmoil and deaths numbered in the millions or billions, my own little misdemeanors would never be noticed.

  I was free, as never before. Or I would be, provided that I practiced suitable restraint and patience.

  “Let me summarize,” I said, when Seth reached a suitable breakpoint in his narrative. No matter how long he spoke, we both realized that he could never tell me everything that had happened. For one thing, he had limited information sources. “You had been monitoring your own status with the help of a full genome sequencer. Now the sequencers are useless. You want an alternative technology that will allow you to continue to monitor your condition, and provide telomerase inhibitor or stimulator as needed.” “You got it. Question is, can you do it?” “I would logically say yes, wouldn’t I, regardless of truth? But I will do more than say, I will tell you how. Let me begin with a question. What do you know of the history of sequencing the human genome?”

  “I know it was done over twenty years ago.” “Correct. But what you may not know is how major an effort it required at that time. The tools were restriction enzymes, chemical tests, chromosome sequence matching, partial data bases, and a limited knowledge of molecular biology; crude and primitive by today’s standards, but all that were available. Hundreds of groups worked together to produce the sequencing of the three billion nucleotide bases in the human genome. It took over twenty years of steady work. At the end of that time one — one! — individual genome had been mapped.”

  “You tryin’ to discourage me and get yourself in real trouble?”

  “Not at all. I am pointing out that modern sequencers, all dry and all digital, represent a marvel of twenty more years of progress in both medicine and technology. A genome, any genome, can be totally mapped in a few hours by a modern sequencer. Unfortunately, all such devices became brain dead the moment that the gamma pulse from Supernova Alpha created its EMP. I feel sure that when you discovered this, you were in despair.”

  “For ten minutes.” He sounded like a man who was not exaggerating. “I been through despair before, an’ I didn’t like it.”

  “So let me offer you reason for optimism,” I said. “You and your friends were given sequencers because it is much cheaper and easier to offer a standard mass-produced instrument than it is to produce a made-to-order device. But of course, you had no call for the full power of a genome sequencer. All you wished, to know was the condition and length of the telomeres, those tiny fragments at the very ends of each chromosome. You didn’t care what bases were in them, only their length. A full sequencer is huge overkill for such a task. I can show you how to accomplish the same result with the aid of five standard wet chemistry procedures, tests which can be applied to anyone after fifteen minutes of instruction. I will do this, provided that you are able to offer me a suitable quid pro quo.”

  He nodded. It was clear that despite his deliberate pose of the barbarian at the gates, he had understood every word that I said. I wondered again about his background. There was more here than the good ol’ boy pose. In the hours that we had been talking, the sun had moved around so that it was directly in our faces. In its afternoon light his eyes seemed wolf eyes, more yellow than brown. I was exhausted. But an absolute need to match him drove me to alertness.

  “Here’s the deal, Doc,” he said confidentially. “You show me an’ Art an’ Dana — yeah, I know, but I might need ’em later. This ain’t a game to play solo. Anyway, you show us what we need, how to keep the treatments goin’, how to know they’re working. An’ after that you’re a free agent. We won’t tell anybody you’re out. We won’t ever look for you.”

  “Unless something goes wrong, and you need me again.”

  “Well, yeah.” He grinned. “I won’t say no to that. We all do what we hafta do.”

  “About your two companions. Are you suggesting that they have already agreed to the terms that you propose?”

  “No. And I’m not sure they would. They’re different from me — from you, too, Doc. But you don’t need worry about them. I’ll handle ’em if I have to, once you and me have an understanding”

  He held out a dirty, broken-nailed hand. “I’m Seth Parsigian. Do we have a deal?”

  After a moment I took his hand and shook it. “We have a deal.”

  I trusted Seth — trusted him to pursue his own interests, to the exclusion of everything else. I knew exactly what he was like.

  And I knew one more thing, with certainty. When the right time came, when I was no longer dependent on his assistance and his special knowledge, I would send Seth Parsigian beyond this vale of joy and tears. I would kill him. We would see, paraphrasing his earlier crude parlance, who was eviscerated and lacked an epidermis.

  I stood up, stretched my tired limbs, and looked around at the scattered clouds of the late afternoon sky. I hurt in half a dozen places where IVs and catheters had been removed. My muscles were weak. However, all those effects of my long coma were minor and predictable. They should soon vanish.

  It was good to be alive, awake, and on the way back to normal.

  27

  At one o’clock exactly Saul stepped onto the south lawn of the White House.

  The flight from Indian Head aboard the Sea Stallion had been breathtakingly fast. A formation of bright blue Air Force jets — old F-16s, Saul thought, though he was not sure — had accompanied them for the
last few miles along the Potomac, before dipping wings in unison salute and peeling off to the west.

  Dinner with Tricia was not until six. No one should be waiting to see him, since he was not expected back until late afternoon. He had five free hours, time he had gained by rapid travel from Indian Head.

  Saul headed straight indoors, reflecting how age changed a man. He remembered an afternoon, forty-five years ago, when the electronic teaching system had failed and he and half a dozen other kids were released early. They stood in a ring and speculated how they would use the time. The afternoon stood open, an endless stretch in which they could do anything they liked.

  But when I became a man, I put away childish things. The Christian Bible, surely. Time is money. Who was that? Harder, but probably Ben Franklin. Saul paused in the outer room, where Auden Travis was giving instructions to three messengers from the Hill.

  “Good afternoon, Auden. Would you locate General Mackay, and ask her to come to my office as soon as possible?”

  “Very good, sir. I had no idea that you would be here so soon. Secretary Munce was in the building, most anxious to talk to you.”

  “Did he specify a subject?”

  “No, sir.”

  “If he’s still here, tell him to join me and General Mackay. What I have to say is relevant to him, too.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Are you feeling all right, Auden?” Travis seemed different.

  “Perfectly fine, Mr. President.”

  “Good. Tell General Mackay to come right on in when she gets here. No need to announce her arrival.” Saul continued to his office. If Auden Travis was different, it seemed a change for the better. He was handling the messengers more easily, emphasizing what he wanted but doing it with a joke. Maybe Saul ought to leave the White House more often.

  The list of calls on his desk was the same as at Indian Head, with additions and an ordering of priorities. Auden Travis had appended his own notes to some of them: