The Silk Code

by Paul Levinson

  “Business,” I said, and handed the customs official my passport.

  “Oh? What kind of business?” He looked up at me for the first time.

  “I’m a research scientist. I’m going over to the University of Toronto for a special seminar.” That’s the way Lum had insisted on doing it—strictly off the record, out of the spotlight, he’d said.

  “What’s the seminar about?”

  “Well…it’s about the impact of communications media on DNA research.”

  “You mean like cloning?”

  “That’s right,” I replied.

  “Will there be Canadian scientists at this seminar? Are you taking into account the contributions that Canadians have made in this area?”

  What was this guy’s problem? “I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, I’m sure Canadians have made important contributions. But I don’t know for sure who will be at the seminar.”

  “Who invited you here?”

  “Derrick de Kerckhove, Director of the McLuhan Program at the University of Toronto.” At least I was safe on that score—de Kerckhove was out of town, Lum had said.

  “McLuhan—what does he have to do with DNA?”

  “Uh…media. McLuhan studied the impact of media. DNA is a medium,” I said quickly. “The medium of life.”

  The customs official looked up at me again, studied my face. “Do you have a letter of invitation?”

  “No,” I said. “I was just invited to come up here on the phone.” I of course had no letter because there was no seminar.

  “I see.” He proceeded to write copiously on some kind of form.

  He finally looked up at me again. “You understand that you’re not permitted to accept any employment while in Canada, Dr. D’Amato. We’re quite happy with our own doctors and our own health system.”

  “I’m just going to the seminar.”

  “Enjoy your stay in Canada.”

  I hurried out of the airport. I was dying for a cup of tea, but was sure that if I tarried I would be hauled off to some Canadian prison somewhere for entering the country on false pretenses. What was the law here? Were you even innocent until proven guilty?

  “39a Queen’s Park, Crescent East,” I told the cabbie. “The McLuhan Coach House at the University of Toronto.”

  “Very good, Mister.” He had some sort of vague Asian accent.

  I opened my wallet, to make sure I had the address right.

  “Don’t worry, I take American money.”

  “That’s OK,” I said. “I have Canadian currency.” Tesa Stewart had given me some before I’d left for Lancaster. She had been in Canada in February. I exhaled slowly—life, as strange as it always seemed to me, had felt a lot more normal in February.

  “You come from New York City! I recognize the accent!”

  I smiled. “You got it, buddy!”

  “New York is a wonderful city! Everyone is equal! Everyone is free!”

  “You think so?”

  “Oh yes,” the cabbie replied, enthusiastically. “I lived there for several years, in New York City. I was equal there, like everyone else. No one looked at me different! Not like here, in Toronto. It’s a nice place, don’t mistake me. But people look at me—he’s Indonesian! It’s not the same. It’s prejudice. Prejudice. In Paris, too. It’s a nice city. But people see me there—I’m different. Only in New York City is everyone the same people!”

  The cab pulled up to a sidewalk.

  I squinted through the dirt-encrusted window. “It says ‘Medieval’ on the building.”

  “Don’t worry—McLuhan stands behind it. You’ll see.”

  “OK,” I said. “Keep the change.” I handed the cabbie a twenty-dollar bill, Canadian.

  The Coach House was indeed behind the Medieval Studies Building.

  I opened its creaky door.

  “Hello?” I stuck my head in.

  “Hello!” A woman with short dark hair was on her feet, and smiled at me. “I recognize you from the fax. He’s inside,” she said and pointed to another room, “waiting for you. You two will have the place to yourselves. I’m late for a meeting.”

  “Thank you,” I said, as the woman left the building.

  I walked into the other room.

  “Phil!” H.-T. Lum jumped up from a couch. His outstretched hand of greeting protruded from a green silken shirt. “Sorry we have to meet in such circumstances—but my office at the Centre for Forensic Sciences is no place for this.”

  I shook his hand, and sat down on a dusty couch perpendicular to his.

  “I’m sorry,” Lum said again, and gestured around the room. “I know this is peculiar. But we need to be careful—my colleagues can’t know that I’m meeting you. It was a bit of a walk for me—from Grosvenor Street to here—but I’ve still got my energy. And how was your flight?”

  “Fine,” I replied. “You’re afraid of your colleagues finding out—”

  “Wouldn’t you be?” Lum asked. “Gerry Moses dead. You practically dead… I’m sorry—”

  “It’s OK,” I said. “I mean, not that I nearly died in Lancaster—though I much prefer that to the alternative—but it’s OK for us to talk about it. That’s what I’m here for—I appreciate your seeing me.”

  Lum leaned back on the couch, and appeared to relax a little. “Even before your illness, I wasn’t willing to talk to you or anyone about this on the phone—you never know who may be listening. There are bugs all over—even in my office, I’m sure of it. But here it’s safe—no one pays attention to McLuhan anymore. I attended the last of McLuhan’s seminars in the 1970s. It’s a shame people don’t appreciate the great contribution of the man—it’s a shame. But at least it’s safe here now—we can take advantage of the public’s ignorance of McLuhan.” Lum offered a quavering smile.

  “Makes sense,” I said. “And I’m sorry that my illness delayed my visit. So tell me what you had on your mind.”

  “That Gerry Moses did not die of a heart attack,” Lum said.

  “I suspected as much.”

  “Oh, that’s what we put on the death certification,” Lum said. “You’d be surprised how often the cause of death gets listed as cardiac arrest—because, after all, the heart does eventually stop beating—but the real insult that provokes the heart attack is something else.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said, seriously as well as sarcastically. “What was the real insult to Gerry Moses?”

  “He had a very bad case, worse than the flu,” Lum replied. “It came on very suddenly, and nothing had any effect. He tried all the meds—all the antibiotics—and they were no help. So he knew it wasn’t bacterial. That’s why he went down to Chautauqua.”

  “He had enough strength to drive? I was barely able to walk when mine hit me.”

  “Someone drove him,” Lum said.

  “You?”

  Lum nodded.

  “And what happened in Chautauqua?” I prodded.

  “We went there to seek the Amish cure,” Lum said.

  “You knew about the silk?”

  “Yes,” Lum said.

  “And it didn’t work for Gerry?” Either he got a defective cure, or maybe he was suffering from something else. I apparently had been in the best hands in the world when my illness struck.

  “We got there too late,” Lum said. “Gerry thought his illness was somehow connected to the DNA,” Lum said, “some kind of viral substance, some tiny piece of genetic bad news—that’s what Sir Peter Medawar called viruses; I took his seminar in London too in the 1970s. But this mutant nucleotide, or whatever it was, attached itself to the DNA in many of Gerry’s cells, so that the next time they reproduced, that was their last. Gerry thought it turned the clock all the way forward in his cells, to the point that the DNA broke down, didn’t survive in its proper form in the next reproduction…”

  “Sounds like he died of instant old age.” I shuddered.

  Lum nodded, tears in his eyes. “He just fell apart. The Amish couldn’t help him—the
y said he was too far gone. There was nothing I could do.”

  “Did Gerry have any idea where he picked up this virus or whatever it was?” I asked, though I thought I had a pretty good idea.

  “Yeah,” Lum said, hoarsely. “Gerry was sure he was infected by the Neanderthal corpse.”

  “But weren’t you also exposed to the Neanderthal…” I began to ask.

  “Yes, of course.” Lum nodded. “But some of us have a natural immunity—that was Gerry’s theory…”

  H.-T. Lum was apparently a survivor, if a frightened one. As was I—at least, apparently, for now…

  Natural immunity—the enigma of medicine since the earliest days of germ theory. There seemed to be at least three fates afoot for the Neanderthal flu. One, some people exposed to it—such as Gerry Moses—died horribly. Two, some people—such as Lum—had a natural immunity, whatever exactly that was. And there was a third possible outcome for this illness. There was some kind of silken cure—the Amish cure—that worked on some people exposed to the Neanderthal virus. It had saved my life. But it hadn’t worked for Gerry. And although Lapp had given me extra packets of the cure to give to everyone on this case—including Lum—the Amishman had been unable or unwilling to tell me exactly what it was…which left me almost as much in the dark as I had been to begin with about just what the damn illness was…

  “Gerry thought the virus sheared off the telomere,” Lum finally offered. “Without the telomere, the cell can no longer divide.”

  “And the cure works how,” I asked, “by inserting telomerase to safeguard the tips of the DNA strands?”

  Lum nodded.

  “But how could the Amish possibly have accomplished such insertions?”

  “Gerry thought it might be with another virus—”

  “Natural gene splicing?”

  “I guess you could call it that,” Lum said.

  I looked at him. “Why the hell didn’t you say something about this sooner? Look, we don’t know each other very well, so I hope you won’t mind my being blunt. You had no way of knowing anyone else had your natural immunity—jeez, we could have all wound up dead, like Gerry.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lum said, quietly. “It was just a theory—I can’t confirm what Gerry died of. I’m new at this job—I have to be careful what I say to colleagues…”

  “Sometimes being careful can kill you,” I replied.

  MY PLANE LANDED in the splashing rain at La Guardia. I hailed a taxi home.

  “You goddamn bastard!” Jenna pulled away after we’d kissed and cried. “Why didn’t you call me sooner? Let me know what was going on?” She pounded on my chest. “Why the hell do you always have to be the hero, trying out these cures on yourself?”

  “I didn’t exactly volunteer for this,” I replied.

  Jenna was not mollified.

  “I guess it wouldn’t help if I told you I didn’t know what we were dealing with—I still don’t know, completely—and I didn’t want you exposed?” I added.

  “Right. It wouldn’t help. You still could have told me and trusted me to do the right thing,” Jenna replied.

  I stroked her face with my hand.

  She pulled my hand away.

  “I knew you would come after me,” I said. “I knew you would do that, whatever I said. You might have traced my call, some way, and found me. I didn’t want that. Let’s say I was contagious—”

  “The virus comes from the corpses—”

  “We can’t know that for sure,” I said. “It’s still too soon for definite conclusions.” Too soon for some. I hoped not too late for others.

  “You’re OK?” She suddenly put her arms back around me, and pressed her face against my chest. “You’re OK?” she murmured, and kissed me.

  “Yeah, I think so.” I kissed her head. Her hair smelled good, made my eyes blur.

  “The cure didn’t work for Gerry Moses,” Jenna said.

  “I know.”

  “I took the cure you sent along,” she said.

  “Good.”

  “That damn Lapp! I left a message at the number you have for him, and he never even responded!”

  “Lapp’s smart to be protective,” I said, and ran my lips along her ear. “Being suspicious of outsiders is what saved his culture, their wisdom. Now it may be all we have.”

  “It saved you,” Jenna said, and turned her face up to mine.

  I kissed her lips, moved my hands down her face, her shoulders, her dress. When I got to the bottom of the dress, I moved my hands inside and up to her soft cotton panties. I slid them off…

  “Your back feels silky,” I said to Jenna later, as she snuggled against me, my fingers running down her spine, in our favorite very-late-night position.

  She shivered. “I’m not even going to ask if that has some significance,” she said. “I’m too happy to have you home.”

  “The Chinese must’ve understood it,” I said, anyway. “They punished the export of the silkworm not because they wanted to keep their monopoly on luxurious fabrics, but their monopoly on life—or its preservation. And then the secret was lost, or forgotten, but not by everyone. It’s never by everyone. And the Amish—somehow with their farming, I don’t know, they picked it up. Or Lapp’s splinter group did.”

  “Is that what he told you?”

  “No, it’s what I surmised—based on what happened to me in Pennsylvania, and what Lum said. My guess is the Amish have a virus with elements of Bombyx mori DNA that can spread through the human system in less than a day, and repair damaged telomeres. They don’t call it a virus—they’ve never seen it under an electron microscope because they don’t have those things. They just know that it works. They’re part of some kind of worldwide sub rosa agricultural society out there—like a Masonry of farmers. It’s very old—part of what I ran into last year… Sweetheart?”

  “I was just thinking,” Jenna said. “The Neanderthal corpses, how do they fit in?”

  “I’m not sure. Perhaps the Neanderthal corpses all had that silk cure, and that’s why they were able to survive these thirty-thousand years…”

  “I still can’t believe they were that old,” Jenna said.

  “That’s what the carbon-14 says.”

  “So why’d they die?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Something in the Neanderthal DNA, as it reproduced and reproduced all these millennia, eventually reasserted itself, negated the silk cure, so Antonescu—or whoever the guy who died—died immediately. Or, someone, something, deliberately introduced a new genetic agent into the mix, which cancelled the Bombyx mori… I don’t know…viruses preying on viruses preying on viruses…editing of editing gone exponential…”

  “But Antonescu’s alive again now. That means he’s what? A clone?”

  “Dunno.” I shrugged. “Either way, the new DNA in the corpse—the DNA that led to its sudden death—infected me, and Gerry Moses. So that the DNA in our skin and lots of other cells started reaching the end of its rope—pushed our cells up to their Hayflick limit. No one knows exactly how many divides each kind of human cell has in the body. Some cells like brain cells never divide at all after infancy. But human cells grown in test tubes divide about fifty times and then break down. That’s what my cells were doing…”

  “But now that you have the silk fix, you’ve got a lifespan of 30,000 years. And me too, right?” She turned over and gave my neck a playful nip.

  “I wouldn’t mind a second of it, if it was all with you.” I ran my hand down her back one more time, and let my fingers come to rest, lightly…

  ELEVEN

  “Take a look at this, Phil.”

  I was downtown again in Dave Spencer’s examining room.

  He gestured to a young woman, couldn’t have been more than twenty, lying on the table.

  “Take a look at her, Phil. Beautiful, no? So beautiful that her boyfriend or who knows who wanted to sleep with her, but maybe she didn’t want to, so he put some fizz in her drink, fucked her senseless whe
n she was already knocked out, had himself a great time, and, guess what? She never wakes up. She’s dead. The son of a bitch OD’d her on the stuff.”

  I looked at her soft blond hair. She probably had soft blue eyes but her lids were closed. She must have been beautiful. She still was.

  “Take a look at her, Phil—a good look. That’s what our job is—take a look at it. We’re paid to find out who the hell robbed this girl of her life, or help convict the miscreant when the detectives find him, so maybe this doesn’t happen again—at least not with the same guy.”

  “They’re not mutually exclusive,” I objected, “rape isn’t the only crime—”

  “Crime? Where’s the crime with your ape-man? You’ve got a crime right in front of you—this girl was murdered. Raped, murdered, maybe raped again. Where’s the crime in your case? You weren’t feeling well? OK, I’m glad you’re feeling better. Your DNA now seems to have a trace of silk worm? OK, I grant you, that’s interesting, it’s a mystery—but it’s not a crime, Phil!”

  “I was knifed in London—”

  “That’s Michael Mallory’s problem—his crime, his jurisdiction, his problem. Not yours, not mine. Has no connection to the mummies anyway, am I wrong?”

  “And Gerry Moses?”

  “He died,” Dave said. “It happens. The man died.”

  “Lum told me he thinks it’s more.”

  “Well I have trouble understanding much of anything that Lum says these days—he talks in circles,” Dave said. “The job’s probably too much for him. Not that I can completely blame him—sometimes I feel the same way, like more and more lately when I’m talking to you. I’m telling you this as a friend.”

  I just shook my head. I could see this wasn’t going to get much better.

  “Where’s Lum’s evidence? Where’s yours?” Dave pressed his attack. “You think those Neanderthal corpses are spreading some modern plague? Where’s the evidence under the microscope?”

  “Let’s say whatever causes it, whatever it is that re-engineers our DNA, is subviral, too small to be seen with a microscope? Let’s say we’re no more equipped to see this than people were to see bacteria before Leeuwenhoek?”