The 13th Science Fiction MEGAPACK®: 26 Great SF Stories!
Page 54
“There’s nothing—uh, our own feline subjects tolerated the phage very well—”
She closed her eyes slowly, as if infinitely offended.
He blurted, “Are you experiencing any discomfort? I mean personally? I could come to the station and examine you, I’m a physician, you know, I don’t want you to feel in peril with this perfectly safe treatment.”
“Don’t you understand, my dear bad, bad doctor? We love our cats. They are, how shall I say? The soul of our culture.”
“But some of them are running around without masters, infesting your vacant tunnels—“
“You mean the feral cat community?” She blinked slowly at him. “On Earth, I believe there are actually more wild animals than domestic. We have reproduced that condition in miniature here in Gari Babakin.” She leaned forward, pursed her lips. “I have an idea. I think you should come, as my guest of course, and experience first-hand this culture your corporate masters condemn.”
Godfrey blanched. “You mean allow myself to be infected with toxoplasmosis? I’m afraid that’s out of the—“
“But not at all! Your virus has wiped out the oocysts. The death of all our sweet pusskins shows that to be true. Come, you can stay in our charming little guesthouse. You’ll be perfectly safe. Or with me, if you like.”
Surely he’s not that stupid.
But he was nodding yes. Eagerly.
* * * *
Godfrey’s head was spinning when he turned off the call. She wanted to see him. Of course his motive was entirely scientific. He wanted to check the progress of the cure. Were the personality changes going to be obvious? His team had been monitoring internal and external communications from Gari Babakin for seven years. Text analysis, algorithm driven, had demonstrated marked deviation from normalcy. But he had actually met three victims of the disease: the mayor Jean-Marie Lafayette: Benoît Bussy, the mayor’s research liaison; and of course the mayor’s interesting assistant, Lucile.
He would be able to see first-hand if her personality had changed. Had she become less obsessed with fashion and personal appearance? That outfit she was wearing the sol he had been there—provocative, in a way he couldn’t describe. Was she less effusive? Most of all, had she been cured of that regrettable promiscuity suggested by her secret smile?
The cure for promiscuity was without question the best feature of the virus cure. Except maybe for saving infants from blindness and encephalitis. And yet! She was interested in him, he could see from the look in her violet eyes that she wanted to see him . Perhaps—
He wasn’t interested in romancing an experimental subject. Of course not.
He just wanted to see how the treatment (don’t call it an experiment!) had turned out.
From ground level.
Of course if she and he decided to see each other socially, after the experiment was over—
The danger of becoming infected with toxoplasmosis was vanishingly small now, according to the computer model of how his virus cure had spread. And if he did become infected, he could just use the virus cure on himself.
A rocket plane was scheduled to go to Gari Babakin on Thursday. He would be aboard.
Plenty of time for him to make an appointment with his barber.
* * * *
Lucile liked scientists. Since they spent most of their time with their eyes glued to a microscope or a computer output, they lacked the social lubrication of the public servants in the circles she moved in. Scientists were often charmingly direct. Unsophisticated, in the sense of lacking sophistry. She wasn’t sure where this would go, but it would be no great chore flirting with Godfrey until she got whatever information she could out of him.
This time, she flinched inwardly when he took off his helmet. His scalp showed through in two places where the barber had apparently not been paying attention. But his eager smile, along with his scent of clean sweat, melted her heart.
“Now,” he said, “let’s discuss this issue with the feline side effects.”
She took his helmet from him, helped him with the fasteners on his suit. “Where are your two associates, by the way?”
“They had other commitments.”
Lucile smiled inwardly. But of course. He hadn’t even told them he was coming.
* * * *
Less than twenty four and a half hours later, they were in Lucile’s bed, eating foie gras that Étienne Bergère had grown from duck liver cells. Lucile was always hungry after she consummated a seduction.
“You are not going back to the guest house tonight,” she told him as he licked the last morsels off her fingers. “I can order breakfast in tomorrow morning. Shall I speak the lights out?”
They settled into the bed. Lucile was always a bit uncomfortable sleeping with a new partner, but the bed was big, and she did like Godfrey. He’d let go a few of the secrets of the virus, including calling up a genomic profile from Marsnet. It was proprietary, but he had a password and went into NutriTopia Ares’ file system. She’d copied it and tucked a duplicate into her own private files.
The wonderful thing was, she could just sit back and not do anything.
Mars itself would do the work.
Lucile was pleasantly dozing when she heard Bon Bon hacking up a hairball on the carpet. The coughing went on too long to be just a hairball. Bon Bon had been extra affectionate lately. Cats with kidney issues often sought the heat of human flesh. She switched on a light.
Bon Bon was convulsing on the floor by her bed. As she watched in horror, the little cat quivered one last time, then lay still.
Without answering Godfrey’s sleepy “What’s wrong?” she scooped the cat up, bundled on a trench coat, and ran to the emergency medical clinic.
The medico on duty worked on the little cat for over twenty minutes, but it was quite dead.
“The virus?” she said.
The medico washed off her handfilm and shook her head. “Poor little thing. We think it may be like heartworm: kill the parasite, kill the host.”
Lucile was more than horrified. Her cat, her companion for eight Mars years, which had listened to her secrets and mirrored her slinking and her primping like a tiny mime, was cooling on a clinic table.
“Are you saying it could kill humans?” This was a nightmare!
At this point she realized that Godfrey had fumbled into his clothes and followed her to the clinic.
“No, no, no,” said Godfrey. “The human test was completely successful! No ill effects whatever.”
She turned on him with the fury of a global storm. “Then what killed my cat?”
He smiled unconvincingly. “It has to do with taurine enzymes. Uh, I don’t think you’d understand—”
Oh, she was furious. “Try me!”
He buttoned one more button of his shirt. “The thing is, nobody completely understands it. We just know it works, because of the enzyme-blocking, you see.”
The clinic medico said, “It’s not really a parasite, like other protozoans. When a parasite evolves long enough with a species, it is no longer useful for it to kill the host. It eventually offers benefits to the host. When rats eat cat feces, the rats become infected. The rats’ brains are changed. We think it might emulate a dopamine reuptake inhibitor. The rats begin to love cats. They are even attracted to the smell of cat urine.”
“And this helps the cat.” Lucile stroked the fur of her dead Bon Bon, who seemed asleep with half-open eyes. “Godfrey, how does the virus work? How do you know it won’t kill everybody on this station? Even you!”
“The discovery was an accident. We were looking for a bacteriophage for a different disease.”
She lowered her voice an octave and stalked closer to him. “How does the virus work?”
He backed away. “We—aren’t sure.”
“I didn’t—”
“Something was wrong. You must have known.”
“All right!” he barked. “All right! We didn’t test it on cats! We tested it on hamsters because hamsters are cheaper. Hamsters are like cats, aren’t they? Small, furry, warm-blooded? And we tested it on Fred Remaura, and he did just fine.”
Lucile could barely contain her fury. “This is really true? You tested this virus on hamsters and one man, and then you unleashed it on two thousand innocent people and—oh my god—we have over five thousand cats here.”
“I’m sorry,” he said meekly.
“You’ll be sorrier,” she said with icy calm, “if you’re not off this station tonight. Within the hour.”
“I can’t—there’s no rocketplane until—“
“So call Utopia for emergency evacuation. No, wait, I’ll call Jean-Marie. We have a rocketplane we use for light delivery. It isn’t pressurized, so you’ll have to stay suited up the whole flight, but I won’t have to look at your lying face tomorrow. Or ever.”
Godfrey got all stiff. “You forget that NutriTopia Ares owns every molecule of this station, right down to—“
“And this is relevant how?”
“I am a stockholder in NutriTopia Ares! I have rights here.”
“How delightful for you! But it won’t do you much good if you’re here beyond tomorrow morning.”
Godfrey deflated. “Why not?”
“Because you’ll be dead.”
He backed off, shaking his head and staring at her. She locked eyes with him until he turned and fled.
She stroked the still body of Bon Bon and wept.
* * * *
She told Jean-Marie, “The feral cats will save us. They inhabit the upper tunnels, where there is less protection from surface radiation. We have to do everything we can to ensure that some survive.”
They fed and watered the feral cats. The cats died by the dozens, the hundreds. But Lucile, Benoît, and Jean-Marie fed them and took the bodies away.
* * * *
Jean-Marie’s cat Aristide Brewpub did die. And so did the cats Benoît kept, Coeurl and her kittens, Albedo One and Chimère, rare albinos.
Lucile herself went through a horrible patch, ill with headaches and jaundice (“Been hitting the wine a bit much, Lucile?” Benoît had fleered, and then she had whacked him on the shoulder with her personal office.) She checked herself once more for toxoplasmosis, and the test said she was still positive, but a more expensive test, ordered from Utopia, said no, she was clear of the oocysts. She threw into the recycler silky heaps of expensive lingerie and stiletto-heeled boots with built-in gyro stabilizers to prevent a twisted ankle. She mourned the woman she had been.
How could she have enjoyed being the slave of that microscopic tyrant, the puppet of that parasite? How tragic to be human, to ride the waves of passion steered by the wayward blood. Who was the real Lucile, the manic flirt, in love with color, self-adornment, and complex flavors on the tongue, or the sad rational woman cured of her infection?
Benoît did indeed remember the multiplication tables again, and proved to be such a finicky organizer of her life and Jean-Marie’s that she could barely tolerate the glare of clean desk surfaces.
She wanted a kitten. She wanted to be sexy. She didn’t want sex, she just wanted to be crazy and attractive again.
She wanted to be a kitten.
* * * *
It took an entire Mars year for the die-offs to cease.
But.
As hard as it was, Lucile and the others had only one weapon: time.
Time, and the extreme environment of Mars.
The very harsh environment that forced the people of Gari Babakin to live under meters of regolith proved to be their friend.
It was just as she had learned from the notes in the NutriTopia Ares files.
Toxoplasma gondii was a protozoan similar to Plasmodium, the parasite that, on Earth, causes malaria. The difficulty of wiping out malaria on earth is that the protozoan keeps mutating, so a drug that works one year will lose its efficacy a few years later. The protozoan mutates, develops immunity. On Earth, Toxoplasma gondii never did this, maybe because there was never a concerted effort to wipe it out.
But more likely it was because on Earth, Toxoplasma gondii didn’t mutate very fast.
Mars organisms, all of them, are bathed in constant cosmic radiation. The radiation speeds mutations, and most of these are harmful. But if you’re a parasite, and you reproduce very fast—
So they had only one solution: to take very good care of the cats in the upper tunnels, where the mutations would occur fastest.
The best meat. Carefully formulated meals, with plenty of taurine. Clean water always available, from cat-sized drinking fountains.
“We must be very brave now,” whispered Lucile. She squeezed the hands of Benoît and Jean-Marie.
* * * *
At the end of a Mars year—such a long time!—Lucile roused herself to take Benoît and Jean-Marie up to the tunnels where they had been cosseting the feral cats.
The cats looked different this time. Many of them had been dull-coated and listless the previous times they had visited. Today, there were fewer cats—so many had crawled away to die, and would have to be found and cremated—but those remaining were sleek and lively, fleeing the humans, or turning on them, puffing up with hisses and growls.
Lucile cornered one and picked it up to examine. It struggled fiercely, but she gripped its back paws and soothed it with her hand. Then she peered closely into its eyes. Its mucosa were pink and unblemished, its fear and fury palpable signs of health.
She clipped one of its claws too short and harvested a blood sample to take back to the lab.
It snarled and would have bitten her but for her quick reflexes. She let it go and it streaked away, leaving claw marks on her arms. But she smiled.
Benoît caught her hand up and licked away her blood.
“All we had to do was take care that some of them survived,” she said.
* * * *
The cats were hard to count, but the estimate was that thirty cats were still alive on Gari Babakin station
And the one Lucile had tested bore toxoplasmosis oocysts.
Which meant that they probably all did.
And those oocysts now contained Toxoplasma gondii that were immune to Godfrey’s virus.
* * * *
The surviving feral cats were reproducing. Godfrey Worcester hadn’t dared come back to the station, but he had sent Dr. Hilda Wrothe and Dr. Kermilda Wriothesley, who wrung their hands and scolded, but since cats are easy to hide, they didn’t have much wind in their sails, and besides, there was an outbreak of athlete’s foot in Argyre Planitia City.
Nobody from NutriTopia Ares apologized, and Lucile felt a small cold emerald of hatred in her heart.
* * * *
Benoît gave her a tiny kitten. It clung to his shirt until he detached each of its twenty four claws and handed it to Lucile.
“Where did you get it?”
He raised his eyebrows.
“It has a name?”
“I offer you that honor.”
“Éclair,” she decided. Éclair sank its twenty four tiny needles into the fabric of her jumpsuit and purred. Its body was very warm. Its tongue was very pink.
“The feral cat colony is back in force.” Benoît tried not to smirk.
“I thought everybody would take all the remaining cats for pets, after most of them died.”
He shrugge
d. “Not all cats agree to be pets, just as not all Martians agree to play kiss-ass with the corporate jackboots. Some old toms fought like tigers. They don’t trust humans, after what happened.”
“And they all have toxoplasmosis? The virus has run its course?”
“Apparently. And people are eating raw meat again. They’re raising hamsters to make steak tartare, imagine that.”
She smiled slowly. “What a scandal.”
* * * *
The medico at the clinic which had failed to revive Bon Bon had theories of her own. On earth, toxoplasmosis benefited cats because cats were the top predator in their environment. Humans didn’t count in that environment, because they didn’t prey on either cats or rats. But on Mars—well, certain humans could be top predators. At least, the mutated toxoplasmosis seemed to foster that situation.
But their prey was other humans, those of a different genetic background, in a suave and civilized way. Because NutriTopia Ares failed to understand that the virus hadn’t completely wiped out toxoplasmosis, it spread wherever food was shipped from Gari Babakin.
Those with these secondary infections, with the other genomic background, behaved like prey animals. Prey animals that don’t die, but rather buy. They were infatuated with all the products of Gari Babakin culture.
* * * *
“We are the Paris of Mars,” Lucile said. She twirled, enjoying the swirl of her new red frock. Benoît and she had designed it, and now she was modeling it for a test audience: him and Jean-Marie. Soon she would offer it, as she had other creations, to the wealthy of Mars. Benoît had a flair for design, it turned out, though she didn’t trust him to keep the Chez Raoul company books. She hired a woman for that.
She did, however, trust Benoît to father a child. The two designers did not breathe entirely easily until the little boy had reached his second birthsol and showed no damage from toxoplasmosis.
Étienne LeBouef had opened a small restaurant that required reservations a Mars year in advance. A mysterious vintinière now bottled a wine so exquisite that Terran billionaires paid huge sums to have it shipped to them on Earth.