The Second Cure

by Margaret Morgan

  ‘Sorry. Do you want a drink?’ Marion lurched back across the room to an open bottle on the sideboard, and Tricia realised that she’d had quite a bit already. Why had she been so frightened? This was a drunk, broken woman.

  ‘Not for me, thanks,’ she said, more sharply than she intended.

  Marion refilled her glass and sat heavily back on the sofa.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Tricia asked.

  Marion laughed, a dry snort. ‘Not my best day, no.’

  ‘Did you know?’ It burst out of her.

  Marion looked at her, then patted the sofa next to her. ‘Depends which bit you’re asking about.’

  ‘I’m talking about the babies. They’re saying we killed babies.’

  ‘Come and join me!’ Reluctantly, Tricia did.

  Marion took another sip. ‘So it seems my son has betrayed his family and betrayed his country. I didn’t see that coming.’

  ‘Did you know about your husband?’

  ‘That he was infected? I knew.’

  Tricia tried to absorb that. Tried to absorb the implications. ‘Weren’t you worried about the … effects? Weren’t you worried about his mind?’

  ‘You mean, was I worried that he’d lost his faith? Of course I was. And I was right to be. He became an atheist.’

  Tricia hoped her gasp wasn’t audible, but it was.

  ‘Yes, yes, I know.’ Marion was laughing and it was bleak. ‘And you know you’re the first person I’ve told this to? I just hope the faith I put in you was wise.’

  ‘It was, I promise. It is,’ said Tricia, trying to disguise her disgust. Pastor Effenberg, unclean. Pastor Effenberg, an atheist. It was incomprehensible. But worse, far worse … the babies.

  ‘He confessed it all to me,’ Marion continued. ‘He told me soon after he became Queensland premier. He knew he was infected. He’d had lots of the symptoms, like the synaesthesia. His was taste, would you believe? Taste turned into sound for him. So he’d eat a steak and each mouthful would sound like a screaming monkey, he said. Everyone was so impressed by him losing weight, but he just couldn’t bear the noise of most of the things he ate. He was so glad when the Cure came along. It meant he could eat steak again. His faith never returned, though.’ She took another swallow of whisky. ‘So, there I was. Jack Effenberg didn’t believe in God any longer. And God was the essence of everything we did. So what do you think I did?’

  Tricia was glad she didn’t seem to be expected to answer.

  ‘I said to him, “Jack, this is our secret. This is our secret forever. You will tell no one this, or I will leave you and all your power will collapse into dust.” He believed me. He obeyed.’ Marion shook her head. ‘Oh, don’t gape at me like that, Tricia. What else could I do? I knew it was God’s will that my husband become impure and who was I to question God? I realised that my service to God needed Jack, and Jack needed God and me to get what he wanted in politics. So there was no question, really.’

  Her glass was empty and she refilled it, spilling a little whisky on the arm of the lounge.

  ‘So, there we are.’ She turned to Tricia. ‘Now you know. I exploited my husband’s weakness, but I did so only to further our Lord’s mission. You understand that, don’t you, Tricia?’

  But it wasn’t enough. ‘And the babies?’ asked Tricia. She silently prayed that Marion would be innocent, she must be innocent. She was the Mother. Please be innocent.

  ‘What do you want me to say?’ Marion turned to her, furious, her eyes full of cold fire. ‘Those babies were infected. They had the Devil’s curse upon them. Shouldn’t we try to Cure them? Give them the chance of experiencing God’s love? Of course the science isn’t perfect. It never is. But does that mean we shouldn’t try? Is that what you want?’ Her voice softened again, smooth and beguiling. ‘You’ve told me about your friend Winnie. Your daughter, Faith. Her poor, poor baby. You don’t want more people martyred to this evil plague?’

  Tricia began to cry then. She folded over, her face in her hands, her hands between her knees. She cried for her own grief, for the people she’d loved and lost. And she cried for herself, for the betrayals against her and against her faith.

  ‘I want to believe,’ she told Marion. ‘I want to believe that this is God’s plan. I want to!’ She wept. She wanted to believe in Marion, to drown in Marion’s voice.

  ‘And God is hearing you!’ said Marion, taking Tricia’s hands, her own tears now spilling onto her cheeks. ‘God understands our fears and our sadnesses. God loves us. God is with us now, Tricia. Do you feel His presence? I feel His presence!’

  ‘Yes.’ Tricia nodded. ‘Yes, I feel it! I feel Him!’ And she did. She felt His love pouring into her through Marion.

  ‘He is here, Tricia. He is here with us. God is with us. He feels our devotion. He knows our love.’

  As one, they subsided onto the carpet below, kneeling together, facing each other, their hands knotted together in supplication. Tricia was rocking gently.

  ‘Yes, yes. Praise him!’

  ‘Even if we feel alone, we’re not alone, not alone because we have Him! Let’s pray, Tricia. Let us pray.’

  Together they intoned.

  ‘Our father in heaven …’

  As the prayer ended, Tricia’s words tumbled out between the sobs. ‘I have to confess … I have not been pure of heart. I have sinned.’

  ‘Talk to me,’ said Marion.

  ‘Seth. I didn’t tell you the truth. He wasn’t wearing his vocomm. That day.’

  She swallowed, trying to get the words out between the tears that were choking her.

  ‘You sent me to look for him. He’d left it behind in his room when he went out. I found it, then he came back.’ She coughed, gagging on emotion. ‘He made me promise not to tell you. He must have been meeting with that woman, with Brigid Bayliss. He was betraying you and I said nothing.’

  Her crying was now racking her. She could see Marion’s anger and outrage, but she couldn’t stop her confession, not now. ‘And it’s worse. I saw them, I saw Brigid and Charlie Zinn, I was there on an Intervention, and let them go. I let it all happen …’

  She fell into silence, broken by the few sobs she had left in her. She was drained and she felt Marion regarding her. Now would come her punishment. Now.

  But there was no punishment. When Marion’s words finally came, they were soft, almost a whisper. ‘I knew Seth had lost his faith. At least, I suspected. I didn’t want to know, so I just pretended. It was either that, or – well, he’s my son. He’ll always be my son. It wasn’t your fault any more than it was mine, Tricia. You weren’t to know, but what matters now is your faith, your commitment …’

  Tricia’s guilt poured out into the air between them in heaving sobs, and she was so grateful to be purged of it that she would happily have died at that moment.

  Marion pulled Tricia’s hands back into hers and they faced each other again, knees touching.

  ‘I forgive you. God forgives you. You are pure, Tricia, you are pure and God loves you for your devotion.’

  Tricia squeezed her eyes tight, expelling the last of her tears. A sign, dear God, a sign, she silently begged. Tell me that I am on the right path and I will ask nothing of you again.

  The lights flickered and they were surrounded by darkness. Then, moments later, the light returned. Some might have called it coincidence, but Tricia knew better.

  She had her answer. Her destiny was bound to Marion’s. In the name of Jesus Christ. The two women held each other close. Close to each other. Close to their God.

  Sydney

  It was like a shopping list. Together, Charlie and Shadrack had decided which precise features they wanted, arguing over some, compromising and finally agreeing. They began by ruling out the unwanted physiological effects: Cotard’s. Miscarriage and stillbirth, and foetal deformities. Endocrine disruption in cats. Broad synaesthetic effects they left to automatic selective processes within the hosts. They didn’t see any reason to dictate which would persist
. They would ensure the shutting down of suppression of neurological cross-talk, while allowing the synaptic links between senses to be strengthened relatively randomly.

  The question of maintaining epigenetic effects was more fraught, but they decided to go with it. The symptoms would not only survive any cure of the parasite within an individual, they would also be passed onto the next generation, whether or not the parasite was present. But to limit the possibility of a cure and thus increase the prospect of it becoming a pandemic, they included three separate mechanisms to create resistance to likely attempts to breach the integrity of the protozoan. These wouldn’t just be parasites. They’d be super-parasites. They would outcompete the other parasites and they would prevail.

  The final issue, the one that caused them the greatest disagreement, was whether to incorporate the symptom that set Charlie’s infection apart. They’d quickly isolated the genetic sequence that caused her mirror-touch synaesthesia and established what mechanisms it used in brain regions including the right supramarginal gyrus, the anterior cingulate cortex, and the fusiform gyrus. That was the easy part. Shadrack was concerned that they had too few data points describing Charlie’s condition to safely extrapolate. How could they be confident that the effect would be consistent across infections? But Charlie was adamant, more so than Shadrack had ever seen her. Simply decreasing conservatism through affecting the amygdala, as most instances of infection did, was insufficient, and without inducing the empathy associated with mirror-touch synaesthesia, it wasn’t even worth proceeding. When she insisted that he couldn’t understand why because he wasn’t affected, he realised he wasn’t going to win that battle. He capitulated.

  Charlie essentially had at her disposal a menu of gene sequences drawn from all the variants, natural and otherwise, of Toxoplasmosis pestis, and she could select those which translated into the proteins, which in turn activated the desired traits. Once they were programmed into the bio-synthesiser, it was a matter of sitting back and waiting as the machine spliced together the designer genome. Then they initiated the polymerase chain reaction, creating multiple copies of the genome to insert into the empty nuclei of the many thousand oocyst structures they’d manufactured. Shadrack knew he was far behind in his understanding of synthetic biology and hadn’t realised just how much of it was completely automated now. His fascination with it all, he told her, helped him quash his qualms.

  ‘I was afraid you’d say no,’ she said. ‘I was afraid you’d see it as …’

  ‘A betrayal?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I love this, Charlie. You have no idea how much I’ve missed this. Working with you, throwing ideas around.’

  She shook her head, smiling. ‘Come on, there’s critters to be made here.’

  They had worked three nights in succession, waiting until the labs were empty in the evenings before setting up, and catching sleep when they could. Whenever Shadrack suggested taking a break or ending the night’s work more than an hour before dawn, Charlie refused. She was driven.

  Charlie hadn’t hesitated in deciding that Shadrack was the one she needed. He had the connections, after all, and she assumed that his recent experiences would make him as enthusiastic as she was. He had, however, taken some persuading. It was a leap to go from passive resistance to this. Persuaded he was, though, and now they were nearly finished. The synthesised oocysts were ready for storage.

  Charlie had rented the truck. Given that Shadrack was still living offline and was in Australia without official sanction, he didn’t have the identification needed by the auto company. It was an old-fashioned vehicle, one requiring a driver, but they’d decided it would be less likely to attract attention than a modern modular auto-truck. He had lined up the canisters, three thousand of them. They were lightweight metal and small enough for two hundred to fit into each backpack. When they hit the water they’d open automatically, expelling their contents. Six hundred for their target, the rest divided up among the other teams.

  They began siphoning the oocyst medium into the canisters. It would be a long night. Charlie caught Shadrack grinning at her.

  ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘Good work, Dr Zinn.’

  She laughed. ‘Why thank you, Dr Zinn.’

  They were drunk. Not falling-over drunk, but the sort of drunk that made them grateful there was such a thing as self-driving cars.

  Juliette had taken Brigid to her favourite French restaurant, L’Édito. Vegetarianism and French cuisine weren’t as alien to each other as they had been, but finding somewhere that combined them well wasn’t easy. She’d rung ahead, cajoling the chef, Jean-Luc, to create a dish just for Brigid. They’d made a pact not to discuss work or politics or parasites, and instead concentrated on food and wine and each other. Towards the end of their meal, Juliette made the same joke twice about the restaurant’s name, laughing about how appropriate it was, given it meant ‘the editorial’ and Brigid was a journalist. Brigid forgave her. She was in love. Right now, she’d forgive her anything.

  And she loved being drunk right now. She loved being anaesthetised against what she’d been contemplating since the Capricornian crackdown. The uprising was being put down. Brutally. She didn’t want to think about what was happening to the people there she knew and loved. She certainly didn’t want to feel.

  After a final, complimentary Armagnac, they poured themselves into the Auto2. It was only midnight and it seemed foolishly early to end the night.

  ‘Show me your office,’ said Brigid. ‘I want to see the place you spend so much of your life.’

  ‘My office. Non, it is boring. It is just a boring office with boring furniture. Pas du tout intéressant.’ The more Juliette had to drink, the more her conversation turned French, and the more Brigid melted.

  ‘Then your lab. Come on, I’ve never actually been in a real lab. I just want to see your world. The bit that isn’t overpriced French restaurants.’ She giggled.

  Juliette relented. ‘D’accord. Just don’t blame me if we meet up with a panicked post-grad trying desperately to make a western blot work.’

  Brigid had no idea what that meant, but told the car their destination and nestled into Juliette’s arms.

  ‘So, this is a bench. And this is a computer. And this is a Petri dish. Oh, and this is a centrifuge. Et, voila! Ici! This is a microscope!’

  ‘Don’t mock me,’ said Brigid. ‘It’s not my fault I quit science in Year Ten.’

  ‘It probably is, you know,’ said Juliette, smiling.

  There was a crashing sound coming from down the corridor and both women became immediately sober.

  ‘Merde, what was that?’

  ‘One of your post-grads?’

  ‘I was joking about that.’

  They walked quietly down the hallway in the green gloom of the emergency exit signs. Turning a corner, they saw a shaft of light spilling onto the floor from one of the labs.

  Juliette started to stride, her footsteps no longer silent. Brigid noted the change in attitude and followed behind.

  They reached the doorway and looked in. Charlie. Shadrack.

  And their faces. Startled, caught out.

  Guilty.

  ‘What is this?’ Juliette demanded. ‘What are you doing here?’

  Brigid took in the pallets of canisters, the tube that was filling them. She saw the look on Juliette’s face. Something wasn’t right.

  ‘This isn’t Charlie’s lab,’ Juliette told her. ‘This isn’t your lab,’ she said to Charlie, accusingly. ‘What are you doing here? What are you doing here?’ she asked Shadrack.

  Charlie and Shadrack were mute, immobile. Juliette pushed him aside and woke up the display of the program they’d been using. She scrolled through the commands.

  ‘What the fuck is this?’ she demanded. ‘You’re making parasites?’

  The guilt was apparent on Charlie and Shadrack’s faces. They had no answer.

  ‘Charlie?’ asked Brigid. ‘What’s going on?’
r />   ‘I’ll tell you what is happening,’ said Juliette, still working the computer. ‘They’ve made a new variant of Toxoplasmosis pestis, with a lot of specific characteristics. And they’ve synthesised it, they’ve made a whole –’ She looked at the neatly stacked rows of canisters. ‘How many of these have you made? What are you going to do with them?’ Juliette was furious.

  Charlie leant back against the bench.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Okay.’

  Shadrack seemed to subside next to her, sinking onto a stool. ‘Okay,’ he breathed.

  Charlie opened her arms, capitulating. ‘We’re making a variant of pestis, yes. My variant. The one that brings empathy. The one that makes you feel. We’re taking it to Capricornia. We’re going to release it.’

  ‘Christ,’ said Brigid. ‘So this is … biological sabotage.’

  ‘No.’ Charlie was shaking her head.

  ‘Of course it is,’ said Juliette.

  ‘It is, Charlie. That’s exactly what it is.’ Shadrack put a hand on her arm. ‘It might be right, but it’s still what it is.’

  Charlie was silent. She took her time composing herself, and then nodded again.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘But you see what’s happening in Capricornia. And not just there. It’s happening across the world. Look at America, what’s left of it; look at what’s left of the UK. Look at Africa. Look at the Middle East. Look at Indonesia and the Philippines! People are killing each other! We can stop it. We can start with Capricornia, but it can spread, the program will spread like a virus: it can change things. We can do it. We can change our history. With this!’ She gestured at the canisters. ‘Knowing we can do it, that we can save lives, give people their freedom, how can we not? How is it moral not to?’

  ‘This is so wrong, Charlie,’ said Juliette. ‘You aren’t giving them any choice. That isn’t freedom. It’s just wrong.’

  But Brigid was absorbing Charlie’s words.

  ‘Is it wrong?’ she asked Juliette.

  ‘Of course it is! We are scientists. We aren’t idiots with Molotov cocktails. We’re meant to be objective, we’re meant to observe, not change things.’