2184

by Martin Parish

  “So what's happened?” Kamal asked me as I approached him. “Is she ok?”

  “She's moved. Down to south London,” I said. “I don't really know where.”

  “Then that's all right. I thought maybe for a minute something'd happened to her. But that's different. You can find her after tomorrow.” After Marengo, in other words. As if a bioterror attack were just another item on a checklist. I didn't understand him at all.

  “Here,” I said, “let's go back upstairs. We can camp out for the night.”

  “You ok?” he asked me.

  “Yeah, I'm fine. Just surprised. I thought she'd still be here for some reason.”

  pan> “Something must've come up, you know, we were gone four and a half months anyhow. That's all it is.” He was right; she hadn't vanished, there was no real reason for me to be alarmed. But an innate instinct, like the sense that awakens an animal to danger, warned me her disappearance concealed an unpleasant secret. Why had she moved to south London? She liked where we were, she'd told me that several times before. Then what impelled her to move after I vanished?

  I felt horribly uneasy now. I knew there was something wrong.

  What did Becky think had happened to me – or what had happened to her? I already half-guessed what had happened; I felt that with an effort I could decipher the riddle but I recoiled from the attempt, like a child afraid to open the door to the night-time and its fears. Moreover, the dilemma that confronted me now was impossible.

  Could I carry out Shelley's plan before I'd found Becky? before I knew for certain what transpired in those four and a half months while I was away? Knowing that as soon as the outbreak began, the Mods would retaliate and London degenerate into a living hell?

  I remembered Shelley dying in the mud of the landfill. Marengo. The battle that began in defeat and ended in victory, human history summed up in a word, a phrase, a hope. I saw Becky's face in my mind's eye, I remembered the touch of her hand, her eyes, her voice.

  And I wished I didn't have to choose.

  “Listen,” I said. “Kamal. I still don't have a clue how I'm going to do this tomorrow.”

  “We'll figure it out,” he said. “Better off not talking about it though. You never know.” He nodded at me and pointed to the walls.

  I turned away. “Yeah, I know. I know.” The same sun that smiled on us in the morning seemed to mock me now as I shut the door.

  Chapter 13

  We spent the night in the empty bedsit. I slept little; I was wracked with doubt. Several times I stood by the window and watched the ghostly phosphorescence that lingered around the Mods' buildings, their activity continuing unabated during the night, a tiny blue tongue of fire jetting into the sky near where Charing Cross used to be. I tried to imagine the world riven by another brutal war. My heart was no longer in it. My hatred of them had faded to distaste, like a keen edge worn blunt by a sanding block. I wondered whether I had any right to commit an act of cold-blooded terrorism. An act that might lose me everything I cared about. Marengo was less an opportunity than a burden now.

  But at that point I stopped myself. I was thinking about it the wrong way. The real question was whether I had any right not to use Marengo. Had Shelley really wanted to spend twenty years working to fight the Mods? Responsibility comes unbidden. I'd been entrusted with the knowledge, it was my duty to use it, like a soldier carrying out orders against his will.

  Remember how they called you Mongrel, I reminded myself. They spat it at you like a curse. They despise us, they're planning to get rid of us. It's only a matter of time until they turn to genocide. I mulled it over in my mind and I gradually realized I had no choice. This was our last chance. The Mods had supplanted us, evolution was on their side. Either we struck them a single, devastating blow, or homo sapiens would gradually recede into the background of history, like the Neanderthals before us. Evolution destroys what it creates.

  Unless you fight back.

  “All right, I'm ready, let's go,” Kamal yawned. I was brittle with tension like stage fright; I could tell Kamal felt ill at ease.

  “Let's do it.” I closed the door of the empty flat and we headed north along the main street.

  “How far is it?”

  “Not too far. It's in Holloway, near where we were yesterday. You don't think we're being followed, do you?”

  “You mean because of that biorobot yesterday?

  “Exactly.”

  “No, I don't think so. If they are following us,” he said, nodding as if he were talking about the weather, “then they are.”

  We retraced yesterday's route north past Finsbury Park before we reached the cross-street Shelley had named. We turned right into a maze of little-used side lanes, searching for the building she'd described. She'd seemed to think it would be obvious, but I didn't realize why until I saw it.

  At the end of a brick terrace, the second and third stories of a house had crumbled over a first floor crouching beneath them, partially supporting their weight. Scattered bricks lay strewn about the building. There was no front gate and the steps led straight to the door, secured with a padlock and keypad. I paused a moment.

  “You've got the code?”

  “Is there anyone coming?” I said.

  “No.” I dialled the code I'd memorized months before and the padlock fell open. Inside, the first floor ceiling had collapsed in places, and the staircase and living room door were half-buried by piles of bricks, plaster and beams. Above us rifts in the ruins revealed the blue of the early morning sky.

  “Are you sure this is it?” Kamal asked, dubious.

  “Yes. Look down there.” Past the remains of the stairs another flight descended to a basement or lower level.

  “I'm amazed they didn't use a DNA key or something.”

  “Well, the thing is this,” I speculated, talking to keep my mind off the job ahead. “They didn't want anyone to just wander in here, but they didn't want to draw attention to it, either. If you saw a ruined building with a DNA key lock, you'd think, what's going on?”

  “True.” We paused for a second at the entrance to the basement. Another padlock, but this one needed a letter code. Marengo.

  “Good thing we got that torch,” Kamal said.

  “Maybe the lights work.” I flicked the switch and a soft incandescence spread through the room.

  “How-”

  “They've got an artphoto panel somewhere on the property. It's pretty well set-up.” Their equipment appeared deceptively ordinary. The basement was small and narrow; next to a disused water heater stood a table, and atop it two items, both connected to a cord snaking down the wall. A computer and keypad – thin and lightweight, probably weighing only five pounds at most; and a GeneWrite, a tall grey “tower” with a translucent case and a complex interior. From it protruded a short arm with a ring at the end to hold a test tube, the receptacle for the products of the machine. On the floor at the foot of the table rested a box, probably containing whatever supplies were needed for the GeneWrite.

  “I have no idea how to use one of these things,” I admitted. I approached it carefully, intimidated like a man approaching a snake-charmer's box. Here within this machine lay the power to unleash wars, topple empires, alter history. In the presence of that power I dwindled away into insignificance. I was only the feeble agent of an idea greater than myself.

  “Me neither. But I thought you said she'd got some files on the computer – maybe there'll be a ReadMe or something, or something that makes it obvious what you've got to do.”

  “We'll just have to figure it out, I suppose,” I said, feeling jittery and nervous. The doorway at my back made me uneasy – if anyone had followed us we'd have no warning until they entered. Nonetheless, I pressed the button on the side of the computer and waited while it slowly signed on. “Searching...no terminal found. No network.” The computer not only printed the words but spoke them, and I jumped.

  “No. No sound,” I said, irritated. “Sound off. Volume 0.”<
br />
  “OK.” The voice subsided into silence.

  “You don't want voice-operate?” Kamal asked me.

  “No, I don't.” The files were all stored under a directory named Marengo – whatever Shelley's faults, inconsistency wasn't among them. “Imagine naming the folder the same thing as the fucking password,” I said. “Can you believe it. They used that name Marengo far too often, I'm surprised no one else knew it. Oh, well. They probably figured if someone found their computer the game was up anyway. All right... Here we go.” I removed my hand from the mouse for a moment and noticed that my fingers were shaking.

  “It's 100 pages long,” Kamal grumbled.

  “Brevity wasn't their strong point. And they spent twenty years on this.” The first few paragraphs quickly waded into the slough of jargon that characterizes old journal articles, phrases like, “The mechanism of action of the protein kinase in regulating this pathway is incompletely understood...detailed kinetic analysis revealed that the pair is limited by facile synthesis...the proteolytic processing of transmembrane substrates.” The words began to blur together and I started scrolling, page after page, hoping to find an intelligible paragraph buried amidst all the gibberish.

  “Ah. This is more like it. Suggested methods of use.”

  “We'll have to go back through and read the whole thing,” Kamal said.

  “Let me read this first, it's actually in English. Hold on.” I read the following lines out loud.

  “Waterborne transmission is preferable as the primary means of introduction, in order to increase the infection rate amongst the target homo excellens population. The water supply, however, is concentrated in the water recycling plants at Westminster and is difficult to access, nor will upstream introduction serve, since the filters used by the water recycling plants remove pathogens from the supply.”

  “Good point,” I remarked sarcastically. “So what's plan B.” I kept reading:

  “Should introduction into the water supply prove infeasible, the surest method will be for a volunteer to act as a carrier. Since homo sapiens is invulnerable to the pathogen, a volunteer may ingest the virus and remain contagious for 72 hours, without suffering any ill effects besides fever and the other normal consequences of an immune reaction.”

  I paused for a moment. It was already clear. Shelley omitted to tell me one thing:

  Her plan was a suicide mission. Whoever carried it out would die.

  Once the virus began to spread the origin of the disease would be obvious. I would mark myself for destruction. Even if I did escape death, in the chaos that followed the outbreak I would never find Becky again.

  And that thought rekindled all my doubts and fanned them to fever pitch. I grew restless. I played fingers across the keys, my heart pounding.

  “Kamal. You see that? What it says.”

  “Yes, I see it.” He nodded. Outwardly he seemed unmoved. I didn't understand why.

  “I didn't know if I read that right for a minute. Believe me, I didn't know or I'd have told you.”

  “Let me read some more, hold on a sec.”

  For whom were we doing this? I asked myself. For Humankind? What was Humankind? The nebulous abstraction embodied by the word dwindled away into a handful of individuals. The cannibals. Jason. Scott Peters. The farmer near Reading. Ben. Martin. Criminals, swindlers, cowards, fools. I would sacrifice everything I wanted to benefit them?

  In a flash I remembered the face of the Mod who had caught Kamal and I crossing the fence. The look in his eyes had been as human as if he'd been one of us.

  It was pity. The pity of the future looking at the past, of a man looking at an animal. The man's mind is larger than the animal's, but in some way they are akin, the battle they face is one and the same: the struggle to survive for a few days, years, decades in the face of an indifferent universe. In a million years there will be no sign that humankind ever walked the earth; evolution destroys what it creates. With or without the Mods our extinction was inevitable. And the Mods might destroy us and our history, but they would perish in their turn. Whether Mod or Mongrel or animal, time grants the same end to us all. Eventually we are all forgotten.

  Then why would I attack the Mods for – what? I said to myself angrily. The Mods were the future, our own creations, we Mongrels were the past. Why would I fight the future – at the expense of everything I cared about? What was I, a saint? I recalled Kamal's arguments about the Mods; the ideas of the Heavenward seemed unexpectedly alluring now.

  But then my sense of duty reasserted itself. This was a responsibility. A duty to my own kind, to all of us that were to come, to our entire history. They were going to wipe us out. Slaughter us.

  I wavered, blinded by a fever of indecision, perfectly balanced between two choices like a pin standing on a fulcrum and ready to fall either way. I thought of Shelley dying in the camp. I thought of the brutal war that would follow a bioterror attack. How could I possibly make a choice like that? Who appointed me arbiter to decide?

  If I'd had someone like Shelley standing beside me, someone who could have marshalled the right arguments, spurred me like a jockey flogging a horse across the finish, I might have gone through with it. But I suddenly realized that Kamal was no longer reading the file. He was watching me. And without knowing why, I shuddered.

  “Kamal,” I said softly. “What is it?”

  He spoke slowly, choosing his words carefully. “You don't really want to do this. You know what's going to happen if you do. You'll never see Becky again. You'll be lucky if you're even alive in three weeks. And what'll you do that for To start a war. A war even worse than the last one. Think Armageddon, think the Species War times two.”

  I paused a moment. “I don't know. I've got to think.”

  The hint of a smile played around his lips as the tempter spoke, his voice calm as if his lines had been rehearsed in advance. “Then put the mouse down for a minute and let's talk. There's no point doing this if we don't know what we're doing. We've got time.”

  “I know you didn't want to see this happen, you told me that in the beginning. So why did you come?”

  “It's not about me,” Kamal countered. “If you say you still want to carry out this attack, you can. It's your decision. But I don't believe you want to do it.”

  I remembered Shelley's words. The most important thing of all. Don't tell anyone. There are more traitors on our side than on theirs. “It's my responsibility. It's not for me, it's for us, for all of us. For the human race.”

  “All of us who? The average person doesn't care who's in charge, they don't care about things like freedom or the future. Most people just want peace so they can live and make love and have something to pass on to their children. And the Mods may not think like we do, but they're conscious humans that don't deserve to die either.”

  “Then they should give us equal rights.”

  “So you'll start a war. How many hundreds of millions will that kill? What, you think we'll have equal rights once we're dead?” He shook his head. It was the first time I'd ever seen him angry. “Don't fool yourself into thinking there's some kind of compromise, half of them die then we all sit down and talk. If they get hit with a bioterror attack it'll be war to the death. They won't feel safe as long as any of us are alive. And if we win, we'll need to get rid of every single last Mod on earth.”

  “So we're supposed to let them just slaughter us?” I said defensively, as if I were arguing on Shelley's behalf. “They're going to wipe us out.”

  “So what? It's not as if the human race was going to last forever anyway. The Mods are superior to us, they should be in charge,” he said. “And if you launch a bioterror attack they'll certainly try to wipe us out. So it doesn't make any difference.” I listened with half an ear to the stairs behind me and the front door; we'd shut it, hadn't we?

  “So we should just roll over and let them do whatever they want,” I said. “They put us in work camps, they put us in labs, they shoot us if we break their fu
cking rules, and we're going to let them just do that.” Ironically, arguing with Kamal made me more certain than before. By dissecting my assumptions he forced me to reconsider them.span>

  He shook his head. “Of course they shouldn't treat us like that. But a war won't stop that. It'll just devastate what's left.”

  “But this is our last chance,” I mumbled. “If we throw this away – what's left? Humans will go extinct. We'll be replaced.”

  “Humans have been on the planet for what – a couple hundred thousand years. Everything goes extinct sooner or later. We've had our fun, we've even created our own replacement. So the first question is this. How much hell is it worth to buy us another few centuries? do we need another few centuries? And the other question – the question for you, for Mark Henshaw – is which is worth more to you? Becky, or so-called freedom for a few exhausted survivors?” He nodded. “And I think you already know the answer.”

  I hesitated, wavering in an instant from one choice to another. The future or the present; the here and now or posterity. “But what else would we do with the files?”

  “Everyone who worked on them is dead. All you have to do is delete the files and it'll be as if they never existed.”

  And in an instant I knew. I couldn't imagine the world without the Mods. I'd never really believed it.

  They'd already won. It was my own future that mattered most to me.

  Reluctantly, as if prompted by an irresistible force, I turned back to the computer and picked up the mouse. I deleted the files containing the DNA code. I deleted the notes on the design of the virus. I secure-deleted them to prevent future retrieval.

  In a few seconds I sent Shelley's twenty years of work down the drain. And even as I did it I wondered at the things my hands did, as if they were puppets no longer under my control.

  Kamal watched me in silence. Only once the task was finished did he speak again. “I didn't think you'd want to carry out a terror attack,” he said. “But I came along just to make sure you didn't. I realized that was why God let me escape from the work camp. To stop you.”