by Greg Bear
“I’m still on Geneva time. Ben Tice sends his regards.”
Freedman saluted briskly. “Europe on the case,” she called out dramatically. “How is Ben?”
“Dead tired. They did coat proteins last week. Tougher than they thought. SHEVA doesn’t crystallize.”
“He should have talked to me,” Marian said.
Dicken took off his scarf and coat. “Got some hot coffee?”
“In the lounge.” She guided him down a concrete corridor painted a bizarre orange and motioned him through a door on the left.
“How’s the building?”
“It sucks. Did you hear the inspectors found tritium in the plumbing? This was a medical waste processing facility last year, but somehow or other, they got tritium in their pipes. We didn’t have time to object and start looking again. What a market! So…It costs us ten grand to put in monitors and retrofit. Plus we have to guide a radiation inspector from the NRC through the building with his sniffer every other day.”
Dicken stood by a bulletin board in the lounge. The board was divided into two sections, one a large whiteboard, the smaller, on the left, a corkboard studded with notices. “Wanted to share: cheaper apartment!” “Can someone pick up my dogs in quarantine at Dulles next Wednesday? I’m on all day.” “Anyone know day care in Arlington?” “Need a ride to Bethesda Monday. Someone from metabolic or excretion preferred: we need to talk anyway.”
His eyes misted over. He was tired, but seeing the evidence of this thing coming alive, of people coming together, moving families and changing lives, traveling from around the world, deeply affected him.
Freedman handed him his coffee in a foam cup. “It’s fresh. We do good coffee.”
“Diuretic,” he said. “Should help you shed that tritium.”
Freedman made a face.
“Have you induced expression?” Dicken asked.
“No,” Freedman said. “But simian scattered ERV is so close to SHEVA in its genome that it’s scary. We’re just proving what we already assumed: this stuff is old. It entered the simian genome before we and the vervets parted ways.”
Dicken drank his coffee quickly and wiped his mouth. “Then it isn’t a disease,” he said.
“Whoa. I didn’t say that.” Freedman took his cup and disposed of it for him. “It expresses, it spreads, it infects. That’s a disease, wherever it comes from.”
“Ben Tice has analyzed two hundred rejected fetuses. Every single one of them contained a large follicular mass, similar to an ovary but containing only about twenty follicles. Every single one—”
“I know, Christopher. Three or fewer erupted follicles. He sent me his report last night.”
“Marian, the placentas are tiny, the amnion is just a thin little sack, and after the miscarriage, which is incredibly easy — many of the women don’t even feel pain — they don’t even shed their endometrium. It’s as if they’re still pregnant.”
Freedman was becoming very agitated. “Please, Christopher—”
Two other researchers, both young black men, came in, recognized Dicken, though they had not yet met, nodded greetings, then went to the refrigerator. Freedman lowered her voice.
“Christopher, I am not going to stand between you and Mark Augustine when the sparks fly. Yes, you’ve shown that the Georgian victims had SHEVA in their tissues. But their babies were not these misshapen egg-case things. They were normally developing fetuses.”
“I would love to get one of them for analysis.”
“Take it somewhere else, then. We are not a criminal lab, Christopher. I’ve got one hundred and twenty-three people here and thirty vervets and twelve chimpanzees and we are dedicated to a very focused mission. We are exploring endogenous virus expression in simian tissues. That’s it.” She spoke these last words in a low whisper to Dicken near the door. Then, more loudly, “So come and take a look at what we’ve done.”
She led Dicken through a small maze of cubicle offices, each with its own little flat-screen display. They passed several women in white lab coats and a technician in green overalls. The air smelled of antiseptic until Marian opened the steel door to the main animal lab. Then, Dicken smelled the old-bread smell of monkey chow, the tang of urine and feces, and again, the smells of soap and disinfectant.
She brought him into a large concrete-walled room with three female chimpanzees, each in separate sealed plastic and steel enclosures. Each enclosure was supplied with air by its own ventilation system. A lab worker had inserted a bar clamper into the nearest enclosure, and the chimp was busily trying to push past the restraining steel posts. Slowly, the clamper closed, ratcheted down by the worker, who waited, whistling tunelessly, as the chimp finally acquiesced. The clamper held her almost flat; she could no longer bite, and only one arm waved through the bars, away from where the lab technician was going to do her work.
Marian watched, face blank, as the restrained chimp was withdrawn from the enclosure. The clamper swung around on rubber wheels and a technician took blood and vaginal swabs. The chimp shrieked protests and grimaced. Both the worker and the technician ignored her shrieks.
Marian approached the clamper and touched the chimp’s extended hand. “There, Kiki. There, girl. That’s my girl. We’re sorry, sweety.”
The chimp’s fingers brushed Marian’s palm repeatedly. The chimp grimaced and squirmed but no longer shrieked. When she was returned to her enclosure, Marian swiveled to face the worker and the technician.
“I’ll can the next son of a bitch that treats these animals as if they’re machines,” she said in a low, harsh growl. “You understand? She’s socializing. She’s been violated and she wants to touch somebody to feel reassured. You’re the closest thing she’s got to friends and family. Understand me?”
The worker and technician sheepishly apologized.
Marian steamed past Dicken and jerked her head for him to follow.
“I’m sure it’s going great,” Dicken said, distressed by the scene. “I trust you implicitly, Marian.”
Marian sighed. “Then come back to my office and let’s talk some more there.”
The corridor back to the office was empty, doors closed at both ends. Dicken made broad gestures as he spoke. “I’ve got Ben on my side. He thinks this is a significant event, not just a disease.”
“So will he go up against Augustine? All our funding is predicated on finding a treatment, Christopher! If it isn’t a disease, why find a treatment? People are unhappy, sick, and they think they’re losing babies.”
“These rejected fetuses aren’t babies, Marian.”
“Then what in hell are they? I have to go with what I know, Christopher. If we get all theoretical—”
“I’m canvassing,” Dicken said. “I want to know what you think.”
Marian stood behind her desk, put her hands on the Formica top, tapped her short fingernails. She looked exasperated. “I am a geneticist and a molecular biologist. I don’t know shit about much else. It takes me five hours each night just to read a hundredth of what I need to keep up in my own field.”
“Have you logged on to MedWeb? Bionet? Virion?”
“I don’t get on the net much except to get my mail.”
“Virion is a little informal netzine out of Palo Alto. Private subscription only. It’s run by Kiril Maddox.”
“I know. I dated Kiril at Stanford.”
This brought Dicken up short. “I didn’t know that.”
“Don’t tell anybody, please! He was a brilliant and subversive little shmuck even then.”
“Scout’s honor. But you should check it out. There are thirty anonymous postings there. Kiril assures me they’re all legitimate researchers. The buzz is not about disease or treatment.”
“Yes, and when they go public, I’ll join you and march in to Augustine’s office.”
“Promise?”
“Not on your life! I am not a brilliant researcher with an international reputation to protect. I’m an assembly-line kind of gal w
ith split ends and a lousy sex life who loves her work and wants to keep her job.”
Dicken rubbed the back of his neck. “Something’s up. Something really big. I need a list of good people to back me when I tell Augustine.”
“Try and set him straight, you mean. He will kick your ass right out of CDC.”
“I don’t think so. I hope not.” Then, with a twinkle and a squint, Dicken asked, “How do you know? Did you date Augustine, too?”
“He was a medical student,” Freedman said. “I stayed the hell away from medical students.”
Jessie’s Cougar was half a flight down from the street, fronted by a small neon sign, a cast faux-wood plaque, and a polished brass handrail. Inside the long, narrow showroom, a burly man in a fake tux and black pants served beer and wine at tiny wooden tables, and seven or eight naked women, one after another, made generally unenthusiastic attempts to dance on a small stage.
A small hand-lettered sign on a music stand beside the empty cage said that the cougar was sick this week, so Jessie wouldn’t be performing. Pictures of the limp cat and its pumped-up, smiling blond mistress lined the wall behind the small bar.
The room was cramped, barely ten feet across, and smoky, and Dicken felt bad the moment he sat down. He looked around the gawker’s side of the floor and saw older men in business suits in groups of two or three, young men in denims, alone, all white, nursing beers in small glasses.
A man in his late forties approached a dancer just going off stage and whispered something to her and she nodded. He and his companions then filed off to a back room for some private entertainment.
Dicken had not had more than a couple of hours to himself in a month. By chance, he had this evening free, no social connections, nowhere to go but a small room at the Holiday Inn, so he had walked to the club district, past numerous police cars and a few beat cops on bike and on foot. He had spent a few minutes in a big chain bookstore, found the prospect of spending his free night just reading almost unbearable, and his feet had moved him automatically where he knew he had intended to go in the first place, if only to look upon a woman he was not connected with by business.
The dancers were attractive enough, in their early to late twenties, startling in their blunt nudity, breasts rarely natural, as far as he could judge, with pubic hair shaved to a universal small exclamation point. Not one of them looked at him as he entered. In a few minutes it would be money smiles and money eyes, but from the start, there was nothing.
He ordered a Budweiser — the choices were Coors or Bud or Bud Lite — and leaned back against the wall. The woman currently on stage was young, thin, with dramatically projecting breasts that did not match her narrow rib cage. He watched her with little interest, and when she was finished with her ten-minute gyration and a few marble-eyed glances around the room, she donned a rayon thigh-high robe and descended the ramp to mingle.
Dicken had never quite learned the ropes in these clubs. He knew about the private rooms, but not about what was allowed there. He found himself thinking less about the women and the smoke and his beer than about the Howard University Medical Center tour the next morning, and about the meeting with Augustine and the new team members in the late afternoon…Another very full day.
He looked at the next woman on stage, shorter and a little more filled out, with small breasts and a very narrow waist, and thought of Kaye Lang.
Dicken finished his beer and dropped a couple of quarters on the scuffed little table and pushed his chair back. A half-naked redheaded woman offered him her stocking for money, her robe draped over a lifted leg. Like a fool, he stuffed twenty into the garter belt and looked up at her with what he hoped was nonchalant command, and what he suspected was nothing more than a stiff little glance of uncertainty.
“That’s a start, honey,” she said, her voice small but assured. She looked around quickly. He was the biggest unaccompanied fish currently swimming in the pool. “You been working too hard, haven’t you?”
“I have,” he said.
“A little private dance is all you need, I think,” she added.
“That would be nice,” he said, his tongue dry.
“We got a place,” she said. “But you know the rules, honey? I do all the touching. Management wants you to stay in your seat. It’s fun.”
It sounded awful. He went with her anyway, into a small room near the back of the building, one of eight or ten on the second floor, each the size of a bedroom and empty of furniture except for a small stage and a folding chair or two. He sat in the folding chair as the woman let slip her robe. She wore a tiny thong.
“My name is Danielle,” she said. She put her finger to her lips when he started to speak. “Don’t tell me,” she said. “I like mystery.”
Then, from a small black purse on her arm, she withdrew a limp plastic package and unwrapped it with a practiced little sweep of her wrist. She slipped a surgical mask over her face. “Sorry,” she said, voice even smaller now. “You know how it is. The girls say this new flu cuts through everything — the pill, rubbers, you name it. You don’t even have to be, you know, nasty to get in trouble anymore. They say all the guys carry it. I got two kids already. I don’t need time off from work just to make a little freak.”
Dicken was so tired he could hardly move. She got up on stage and took a stance. “You like fast or slow?”
He stood, accidentally kicking the chair over with a loud clatter. She frowned at him, eyes narrowing and brows knitting over her mask. The mask was medicine green.
“Sorry,” he said, and handed her another twenty. Then he fled the room, stumbled through the smoke, tripped over a couple of legs near the stage, climbed up the steps, held on to the brass rail for a moment, taking deep breaths.
He wiped his hand vigorously on his pants, as if he were the one who could get infected.
30
The University of Washington, Seattle
Mitch sat on the bench and stretched his arms out in the watery sunshine. He wore a Pendleton wool shirt, faded jeans, scuffed hiking boots, and no coat.
The bare trees lifted gray limbs over a trampled field of snow. Student pathways had cleared the sidewalks and left crisscross trails over the snowy lawns. Flakes fell slowly from the broken gray masses of clouds hustling overhead.
Wendell Packer approached with a narrow smile and a wave. Packer was Mitch’s age, in his late thirties, tall and slender, with thinning hair and regular features marred only slightly by a bulbous nose. He wore a thick sweater and a dark blue down vest and carried a small leather satchel.
“I’ve always wanted to make a film about this quad,” Packer said. He clasped his hands nervously.
“What sort?” Mitch asked, his heart aching already. He had had to force himself to make the call and come to the campus. Mitch was trying to learn to ignore the nervousness of former colleagues and scientist friends.
“Just one scene. Snow covering the ground in January; plum blossoms in April. A pretty girl walking, right about there. Slow fade: she’s surrounded by falling flakes, and they turn to petals.” Packer pointed along the path where students slogged to their classes. He made a swipe at the slush on the bench and sat beside Mitch. “You could have come to my office. You’re not a pariah, Mitch. Nobody’s going to kick you off campus.”
Mitch shrugged. “I’ve become a wild man, Wendell. I don’t get much sleep. I have a stack of textbooks in my apartment…I read biology all day long. I don’t know where I need to catch up most.”
“Yeah, well, say good-bye to elan vital. We’re engineers now.”
“I want to buy you lunch and ask a few questions. And then I want to know if I can audit some classes in your department. The texts just aren’t cutting it for me.”
“I can ask the professors. Any classes in particular?”
“Embryology. Vertebrate development. Some obstetrics, but that’s outside your department.”
“Why?”
Mitch stared out over the quad at the surrou
nding walls of ochre brick buildings. “I need to learn a lot of things before I shoot my mouth off or make any more stupid moves.”
“Like what?”
“If I told you, you’d know for sure that I was crazy.”
“Mitch, one of the best times I’ve had in years was when we went out to Gingko Tree with my kids. They loved it, marching all over, looking for fossils. I was staring down at the ground for hours. The back of my neck got sunburned. I realized that was why you wore a little flap on your hat.”
Mitch smiled.
“I’m still a friend, Mitch.”
“That really means a lot to me, Wendell.”
“It’s cold out here,” Packer said. “Where are you taking me for lunch?”
“You like Asian?”
They sat in the Little China restaurant, in a booth by the window, waiting for their rice and noodles and curry to be brought out. Packer sipped a cup of hot tea; Mitch, perversely, drank cold lemonade. Steam clouded the window looking out on the gray Ave, so-called, not an avenue in actuality but University Street, flanking the campus. A few young kids in leather jackets and baggy pants smoked and stamped their feet around a chained newspaper rack. The snow had stopped and the streets were shiny black.
“So tell me why you need to audit classes,” Packer said.
Mitch spread out three newspaper clippings on Ukraine and the Republic of Georgia. Packer read them with a frown.
“Somebody tried to kill the mother in the cave. And thousands of years later, they’re killing mothers with Herod’s flu.”
“Ah. You think the Neandertals…The baby found outside the cave.” Packer tilted his head back. “I’m a little confused.”
“Christ, Wendell, I was there. I saw the baby inside the cave. I’m sure the researchers in Innsbruck have confirmed that by now, they just aren’t telling anybody. I’ve written letters, and they don’t even bother to respond.”
Packer thought this over, brow deeply wrinkled, trying to put together a complete picture. “You think you stumbled onto a little bit of punctuated equilibrium. In the Alps.”
