by M. R. Carey
She smiles at the incongruous image. In her current mood, she finds it has a certain insane appeal. But the thought of what’s to come still weighs on her: the known unknowns of giving birth inside a tank in the middle of a war zone. She feels a sudden, dizzying sense of dislocation, a keen awareness of unfathomable distances: between here and Beacon; between the past and the present; between the world as it is and how she would wish it to be.
Paradoxically, though these thoughts give her pause, they don’t cow her into despair. There is the baby now, a new and unknowable factor. The baby could be the bridge over all these abysses.
“Hey,” she says, trying for a bantering tone. “Do you want to volunteer to pick up that last specimen cache?”
Stark horror makes John’s eyes open wide as saucers. “Rina, it’s halfway up a mountain!” he protests.
She shakes her head. “Near the top, I think. Eight hundred metres up.”
“Do you want to give birth on a rock ledge?” He hugs her close as if he could protect her from her own recklessness.
“I was kidding,” Khan whispers.
“Don’t.”
30
The land east of the A82 is rugged and broken, with a topography that changes from mile to mile. Rosie makes indifferent speed even with full daylight. As the sun drops and the shadows lengthen, she slows to a crawl.
The poker session is equally desultory. Brendan Lutes’ ghost hovers over it, making the usual raucous banter seem like a slap in his ectoplasmic face. Finally, the game dribbles to a halt.
McQueen strolls out to the mid-section to oil his gun. And to brood, something that he feels is best done alone. He is unused to giving way to his emotions, or at least—he corrects himself wryly—to being aware that he is doing it. It sits badly with him, like most things that have happened since Invercrae.
He admitted he was wrong to fire the flamethrower. The colonel had a chance to admit, in his turn, that—orders or no orders—McQueen pulled all their arses out of the fire. He didn’t do that. They could have met in the middle but they didn’t, so they have retired to their corners instead.
At some point, the bell is going to ring for round two.
In the meantime, they’ve got someone on their tail and McQueen knows in his gut that it’s the exact same bastards who killed Lutes. Said bastards have cars or—his best guess—bikes, and they know enough to stay out of the range of the infra-red scopes. Wouldn’t have been hard to slip down some back crack out here in the fucked-up wilderness and flank them. Find a good spot to dig in and wait for fireworks.
So leaving the road was pretty much the stupidest thing they could have done. It makes them a little bit harder to track, sure, but they’re the only thing moving out here so how hard can it be? And the slower they go, the more chance the Invercrae posse have to get ahead of them again.
Tonight, tomorrow or the next day—soon, anyway—they are going to find themselves in the middle of another surprise party, probably a lot wilder than the last one. When that happens, they’re going to need him. Need him on the big guns, up in the turret, laying down serious hurt. And he will do his duty, as per the oath he swore when he joined up. He’ll do whatever has to be done to keep them all alive.
Even if that means putting a bullet in the colonel’s head and assuming command himself.
While he is musing on these matters with the rifle completely disassembled, the Robot comes tripping through from the crew quarters, heading for the lab. McQueen snaps out a warning, but the kid steps nimbly between the components and the grease rags. Doesn’t touch a spring or a bolt. McQueen finds this irritating without being able to say why.
“This is delicate equipment,” he says sternly. “Each of these little bits and pieces has got a job to do, sunshine. Don’t mess them up.”
Greaves turns around and faces him. Well, that’s probably stretching it a little; the Robot keeps his eyes on the ground the way he always does. But he is looking at the ground in front of McQueen in a way that’s maybe a little sassier than usual.
He points to the dismounted pieces of ordnance laid out neatly on the floor, and as he points he names them. “Operating rod. Bolt. Firing mechanism and trigger guard. Magazine. Takedown pin. Pivot pin. Charging handle. Bolt carrier assembly. Buffer assembly. Spring.”
Considering how inflectionless his voice is, it’s amazing how much defiance and sarcasm it carries. McQueen is nonplussed, and even a little impressed.
“Well, hooray for you,” he says. “Ever use one?”
“Yes.”
Of course he has. Everyone in Beacon has to do their civil defence, even people who manifestly shouldn’t be allowed to use sharp pencils.
“Ever hit anything?”
“No.”
“Right. So you stick to your test tubes and I’ll look out for the guns, okay?”
“Okay,” Greaves agrees. He walks on into the lab, but he mumbles something as he goes.
“What was that?” McQueen calls. Because he’s not taking any cheek from this reality-challenged little snot.
The Robot stops and half-turns around, so he is talking to his own shoulder now. “You’re going to get a hammer follow,” he says, and he slides the lab door across between them.
“The fucking hell you say,” McQueen says to the closed door. Indignant. Like anyone could tell that without even bending down to inspect the gun parts up close. But of course he has to check now.
And of course (because what’s a joke without a punchline?) the Robot is right. There is wear on the hammer face and on the sear, so McQueen probably would have got a hammer follow and a bad misfire sometime in the next ten or twenty shots.
He changes out the sear spring and the disconnector. He is thinking dark thoughts when he starts, but by the time he’s done he finds it hard to keep from grinning. He set out to school the Robot and got schooled himself. That is pretty funny, any way you look at it.
Everything is a lesson. This one is about not judging by appearances. Just because the kid has a face as empty as a bucket with a hole in it doesn’t mean he’s stupid. And just because he creeps around like a whipped puppy doesn’t mean he’s got no spirit.
Everyone is special, right?
31
In the end, it’s McQueen and Phillips who climb Ben Macdhui and bring the specimen cache down. They’re professional about it, but they let their irritation show. If going cross-country was a bad idea, parking up to run errands makes it catastrophic.
But Sixsmith makes it easy for them, taking Rosie up the shallow slopes of the Cairngorm plateau almost to the summit. It’s such a bravura performance, they’re barely aware they’re climbing.
“Door to door,” she jokes, as she brings them to a halt at the mid-point of the Lairig Ghru, directly below the peak.
“Keep the engine running,” McQueen tells her. “We’re not sticking around.”
It’s cold as hell on the slope and the ice makes the going precarious, but fifteen minutes’ slog brings them out above the treeline. The world opens out, suddenly. They can see Braeriach to the west, and lonely Ben Nevis beyond like a sleeping god who has turned his face from them, pulling the mantle of the snow up around his shoulders. Right at their feet, the valley dips and bends all the way down to the loch in switchback curves like a roller coaster.
Phillips stops to gawk. Stubbornly resisting the beauty of the vista, McQueen urges him on and up. He has seen the splash of orange on the ridge above them and wants very much to get this over with.
Phillips is looking thoughtful as they climb the last hundred feet to the cache. It’s an unusual enough occurrence that McQueen feels it needs to be checked out.
“What?” he demands. He grudges the spent breath a little, and the gulp of frigid air he swallows to replenish it.
“I was just thinking,” Phillips admits. “I wonder what we look like from space.”
McQueen looks around at the rust-brown scrub and general desolation. “Like two ants on a turd,�
�� he grunts.
“They reckon you used to be able to see the Wall of China from the moon,” Phillips pursues, refusing to be sidetracked. “But by the time it all went to bits, there would have been lots of human stuff you could see, wouldn’t there?”
They’ve reached the cache by this time. They lean against the rock to rest up for a few seconds before they get busy again. “Cities and towns would have been big grey areas,” Phillips says. “Going on for miles. Only now they’re not, are they? The forests have gone in and taken over again. From a hundred miles up or so, it would all look the same. London would just be more jungle.”
“So?”
“So here we are up on a mountain. And I bet this bright orange dot here is one of the last human things you could still see from all the way up there.”
McQueen gives a snort. The condensed breath hangs in front of his face, a visible index of his emotion. Most of the satellites fell out of the sky long ago so this is academic in any case, but he doesn’t see what’s so great about leaving your mark on things. You have a life and then it ends and you’re dead. Living it is the point, not proving to other people that you were there. The whole thing is really just water pouring down a plughole, but that’s absolutely fine. Standing water gets stagnant.
“Let’s get this done,” he says.
He opens up the cache and takes out the first of the cylinders. The seal seems to be intact but there’s nothing growing inside the glass jar: just a smear of brown jelly at the base of it. He’s seen enough of them by now to know that that’s wrong.
“Bloody waste of time,” he mutters.
“What? Why?”
McQueen shakes his head. It’s not worth explaining. The cold is starting to bite into him and the way down is going to be harder because they’ll have to be careful not to damage the specimen jars. “Come on,” he says. “Load up.”
There are twelve jars. They take six each, stowing them in their packs between layers of wadded towels. Phillips dawdles, distracted by the view and by unprofitable thoughts. When they’re done, he’s still eyeing up the cache itself. McQueen can tell he’s thinking about history and the point where he butts up against it. He’s about to snap his fingers under the private’s nose, but then an idea occurs to him and very much to his own surprise he voices it.
“Leave your dogtags.”
Phillips gives him a sidelong glance, alarmed at having his mind read so easily.
“For future generations,” McQueen says. “In case there are any. Why the fuck not?”
“The colonel will have my guts.”
“The colonel won’t care. I doubt he’ll even notice. Go on, if you want to. We haven’t got time for you to write a personal message.”
Phillips nods slowly. He unfastens his dogtags and sets them down in the bottom of the cache. He fastens the lid back on carefully, testing it to make sure that it will hold against the insistent easterly wind.
“All right?” McQueen tries to keep all inflection out of his voice.
“Yeah.”
“Then for fuck’s sake let’s go.”
He gives the plastic crate a ringing kick. It stays where it is: steel brackets at each corner have been driven down into the rock, holding it firmly in place.
“You’re all good, Phillips. That’s what eternity sounds like.”
Normally Greaves finds the lab a calming and comforting place to be. It’s a place full of certainties, and it’s a place where new certainties can be hammered out.
But today he can’t find comfort and can’t make himself be calm. He keeps seeing Rina falling backwards, her face twisted in pain and shock; hearing the sharp huff of breath as she hits the floor. His perfect memory torments him with perfect reproduction.
She could have died. In many different ways, the fall was potentially fatal.
Her head could have hit one of the storage or base units, causing a haematoma, intraparenchymal haemorrhage or crush injury to the brain.
The shock of the impact could have brought on an early labour, with significant risk of death from post-partum bleeding, infection or hypertensive disorders.
Conversely, she could have suffered a miscarriage, necessitating surgical removal of the dead foetus in an environment in which medical support and expertise are limited.
Greaves runs through all the scenarios he can think of that would have ended with Rina lying dead at his feet. There are dozens. Though none of them happened, he feels them clustering around him, thickening the air in the lab until he starts to hyperventilate. His vision darkens.
If Rina were to die, what would he do?
But that’s the wrong question. What can he do to make sure she doesn’t die? They are surrounded by risks both quantifiable and otherwise. Granted, they are inside an impregnable tank, but outside its hull is a world where life expectancy has dropped back to levels not seen since the early middle ages. Even Beacon isn’t safe, although it is safer than Rosie by several orders of magnitude.
He will have to be vigilant until they get back there, and he will have to make sure that if dangerous situations arise the risks are borne by others. The soldiers for example, who have the best weapons, the most relevant skill set and a specific brief to protect the science team. They should be ready to fight and die to protect Rina if the need arises.
He will be ready, too. He is ready right here and now, and that won’t change. He will keep her safe, no matter what.
With his mood a little restored, he turns his attention to the tissue samples.
But the calm does not last. The samples and the findings he is getting continue to confound him.
Should he classify the dead child as a hungry? Amazingly (and it hurts a little, burrows through his nerves and makes them twinge) he is still undecided.
For: the boy had the Cordyceps infection in an advanced form, and some of the salient behavioural symptoms. Specifically, he had the consuming urge to feed on fresh protein from a living source.
Against: in other ways his behavioural repertoire was more like that of a human being. He was still capable of thought, and of emotional attachment. If he was an animal, he was a social animal. And a tool-using one.
A hungry, then, but with provisos. A hungry of a type that Greaves has never observed or seen described. He notes, with a slight prickle of alarm, that by using the personal pronoun he has partially prejudged the question he is meant to be deciding. That isn’t like him. He watches himself for subjective error all the time, alert for premonitory urgings of presumption or prejudice. His mind is an instrument, and you have to keep all your instruments in balance if you want them to be fit for purpose.
The brain. The explanation for this paradox has to lie in the child’s (no, the specimen’s) brain. Cordyceps is abundantly present there, as Greaves has already verified. But natural brain tissue is healthy and robust. And whereas in a regular hungry the tide of native neurotransmitters has ebbed once and for all, in this brain roughly half of all chemical messengers are present and correct.
So who is in charge here? The human or the fungus? And either way, what is the afferent mechanism that carries orders from the control room—wherever that is—to the nerves and muscles of the body?
Greaves draws off more samples. He adds more stains and reagents, searching all over again for the brain’s missing messengers. Dopamine. Acetylcholine. Adenosine. Noradrenaline.
He doesn’t find them. They’re not there to be found.
But he finds something else.
Checks, finds it again.
And again.
And again.
The brain is swimming in mycoproteins, long-chain molecules manufactured by the fungus. Greaves has dissected and studied the brains of fifty or sixty hungries, and he has never seen any of these molecular structures before.
A suspicion strikes him. A hypothesis.
With a micro-pipetting frame and one of Rosie’s carefully maintained population of Sprague Dawley rats, he is able to stimulate measura
ble brain activity with low concentrations of each of these fungal proteins. The results are consistent, predictable and repeatable.
The mycoproteins are neurotransmitters, running the brain’s errands for it in the absence of the regular staff. Cordyceps is doing good deeds by stealth. Its mere presence messes up the chemical balance of the brain, which is why so many of those native neurotransmitters have dried up, but now it is repairing that imbalance with its own exquisite forgeries.
The mass of fungus in the brain has turned itself into a protein factory. It is manufacturing copies of the missing neurotransmitters in the form of long-chain mycoproteins built to order. The fake, fungal neurotransmitters seem perfectly capable of doing the job the real ones would have done, carrying nerve messages from the human brain tissue to the peripheral nervous system. To the rest of the body. This is the main trick in the Cordyceps repertoire, of course. But in every other hungry he has examined—every hungry ever documented—the result is a hostile takeover. The fungus hijacks the host.
In this boy, Cordyceps was filling in the gaps in brain function caused by its own presence. Building bridges instead of torching buildings. It was helping the brain to think, not tripping it up and hog-tying it.
Greaves feels as though his head is splitting open, not with pain but with the chain reaction of thought on thought on thought. This is a find that vindicates the entire expedition, but it’s so much more than that. It’s—
What?
The Holy Grail.
The philosopher’s stone.
The elixir vitae.
The cure.
If he figures out how to fake it. How to make an uninfected brain do whatever this brain is doing and turn the fungal invader into a friend and fellow traveller. A symbiont.
