The Darwin Strain

by Bill Schutt

  Denigrating Darwin as “survival of the fittest” capitalism was how Lysenko had sold his ideas to Stalin, along with a promise that in only one generation—“perhaps at most, two generations”—he could force-engineer plants, animals, and even the Russian people to begin “stretching out,” to create superior crops and superior soldiers.

  “And then we can stretch our hand out across the world,” he had promised the people, “and become its breadbasket.”

  Lysenko knew he could quickly stretch the abilities of sheep to survive Siberian winters and create wheat that would produce grain all year round, by introducing new stresses in the lab and then throwing his specimens out into the cold. He knew it would work, and those under his command made sure that what he knew was made right . . . at least on paper.

  Even Lysenko did not notice, yet, that much of the paperwork he received was full of falsified results. Few historians would blame the authors. They only wanted to stay alive, and keep their families from “being disappeared.”

  “Things are getting better,” he announced proudly to the nation’s only newspaper. “Things are getting better all the time.” . . . Except for one or two ugly facts: When he prepared microscope slides and counted chromosomes in plants and animals, Lysenko came up with a different wrong count every time. And he became frustrated. And he disappeared a twenty-year-old microscopist’s whole family.

  Lysenko’s frightened and obedient underlings “made it better” for him. They were now writing reports that denied the importance (and even the existence) of chromosomes. They renounced the practice of cross-pollinating the strongest wheat strains to produce newer and more bountiful hybrids. A robust new strain—Norin Ten—was snuck in from Japan, and had almost made it to a farmer’s field when Lysenko discovered the agricultural sleight-of-hand. The hybrid wheat was burned, and the traitor too.

  “Bounty is just around the corner,” the crop reports announced. This kept Trofim Lysenko happy, and it all looked very good on paper. Sadly, people could not live by eating paper.

  While the famine tightened its grip, Stalin’s man who knew everything knew that he needed to hurry.

  Having Stalin’s support and issuing a scientific decree had failed to change reality. Stalin was getting old, and if he died, Lysenko understood that his own rise to power would be forfeit, unless his view of life could literally produce fruit. He knew he would succeed, but he needed to prove his “theory” quickly. He was beginning to fear that Stalin’s frail health might fail completely any day and that he might not be quick enough . . . until the Santorini miracle came along.

  “Santorini changes everything,” he said to the Mediterranean wind.

  Ahead, on that island, nature was making revolutionary, Stalinist leaps forward. It did not matter that the island’s sudden reflection of Lysenkoism was only an illusion. Lysenko was a particularly stubborn illusionist.

  At this moment in history, he truly believed that, by enduring this rough sea and this damnable ship, he was stretching himself out, evolving his own descendants against seasickness, simply by being seasick.

  All of my present suffering, he thought, will be worth it to them. And the secret of Santorini can only ensure it.

  A pale and sweaty third officer climbed down from the bridge and gestured for Lysenko’s attention.

  “There’s another message, sir. From our contact on Kos. It’s about Dmitri Chernov,” the officer said. “He’s gone missing, somewhere on that island.”

  July 4, 1948

  Dusk

  Base Camp #3 Sentry Perimeter, Santorini

  “How’s about you tell me?” Yanni asked. “What do you know about them?”

  Dmitri, his hands bound behind him, continued, as Yanni had ordered, to stare out into the night, watching for Kraken.

  Though the wind was too dry (presumably) to allow the monsters to move about comfortably on land, the Americans and the French had agreed that they needed every set of watchful eyes they could get. Presuming that Dmitri possessed an enlightened self-interest in not getting disk-slashed and ink-squirted or eaten, even an adversary’s eyes would serve.

  “Mrs. Thorne—aside from my knowing that if they’ve spread beyond the lagoon, they’ll outlive us all,” Dmitri said, “why are you asking me about them? You’re the one who—what? Listens to them? Tries to talk to them? But you won’t even look me in the eye when you talk.”

  As if he had searched for and with surgical precision found a weak spot, Dmitri’s words made Yanni feel, again, like the witch of her tribe, like a human creature born abnormally. Even among the other abnormal children of humanity—including the scientists and musicians of Brooklyn—many considered her impolite or detached. She could not understand why it was somehow a prerequisite of being human to stare into the irises and pupils of anyone with whom you were not in love.

  Even if she had not been declared inadequate and chased out of a village by her own people, she would have found human society confusing, curiously alien, and at times overwhelming. She suspected Dmitri already knew the answer to his question, before he asked it—as any good adversary, by logic, would. But she was not about to confirm anything for him.

  He can see me, Yanni understood. Like a beluga whale seeing into my lungs and my heart with its sonar, can he really sense how I see the world?

  She hoped not. It was a world she did not know how to share—and even if she did know how, there was only one person left alive with whom she would try. The last person on her list would be this Russian.

  It was, after all, her private world. If feeling less like the outcast witch, if being more normal meant seeing even a little less of the beauty in her universe—presumably to be more successful and “more happy” around people—Yanni wanted no part of it. Even now, as she kept watch on both the rising night and the Russian, memories of the animals’ vibrant waves and sequenced patterns were playing like a Technicolor movie against the back of her skull. Ever since she first saw it, the bioluminescent chatter of the Kraken had been running through her head over and over, often coalescing into something like musical scores—and still an elusive puzzle to be solved. What would seem alien to Dmitri, and to most people, was perfectly natural for Yanni: to see melodies in her head. And, though she could not yet adequately translate it, she saw in the Siren’s call—the Kraken’s call—the music of the words.

  Clouds were now racing across a backdrop of brightening stars, but the breeze remained dry and oppressively hot. Yanni stayed silent.

  “What do you know about them?” Dmitri asked.

  “What do you know about the red plumes?” Mac asked, stepping up from behind to join them on the night shift.

  “I’m pretty sure Dmitri’s got samples hidden somewhere,” Yanni said. “We’ll have to keep an eye out for that.”

  “And what am I to suppose your people will do with the plume material?” Dmitri asked. “Miracle cures? And that’s assuming you can get a boat in there without something squishing wetly up the bilge pumps to bite your head off.”

  Mac nodded. “To cure a very many diseases? It may be worth the risk.”

  “Oh, come on now, Mr. MacCready. You don’t seem to me a ‘beat their swords into plowshares’ type of American. And even if you are, someone, somewhere in your country, is going to pull a little think tank together to try and figure out how to make a red-dust bomb.”

  “That would be pretty stupid, don’t you think? Or don’t you?” Mac said.

  But Yanni realized that she did not have to think much farther ahead, herself, than what Nesbitt’s man—“Black Sun” Hata—might have tried to do.

  “Swords, plowshares, Isaiah,” Dmitri said. “Your president and his General MacArthur know as well as anyone that he who beats his swords into plowshares and his spears into fishing hooks usually ends up plowing and fishing for those who kept their swords.” The Russian paused, and studied the night. “As for these Kraken you’re so interested in, they need to die by the sword.”

 
; “Before we really know anything about them?” Yanni asked. “Each question about the Kraken, when I think we have begun to answer it, is like a door opening into ten new mysteries. The more we learn, the less we understand and—it . . . It is beautiful.”

  Dmitri glanced up at the stars. “So, MacCready—which one of those does she really come from?”

  “Right here. Earth,” Mac said. “But this is where it gets—ha! A little spooky.”

  “Right,” the Russian said acidly. “She tries to talk with those things—and I saw you try, also. You two really think you know everything about the creatures of the sea? But, no. You’re blind to the real danger. You spend your lives living among animals but clearly you have not spent enough time looking at them.”

  One of Nesbitt’s people stepped up behind the Russian and double-checked that his hand bindings were secure. “Do you want to know what my people know about the Kraken?” Dmitri continued. “No harm to my side in telling it.”

  “Then spill it,” said Yanni.

  “That bishop at the police station—he knows them. They live among history’s ghosts. Secretive. Deceptive. Sometimes they have attacked for any reason at all—or for no reason at all.”

  “History’s ghosts?” Mac asked.

  “Do you not see it? Egypt? Atlantis? The Minoans? The Greeks? The Romans? Us? Sooner or later, every civilization becomes a ghost story. No matter how high it rises, every civilization is simply this: the substance of archaeology.”

  Mac said nothing.

  “I said us, MacCready.”

  “Yeah, I got that part.”

  “They’ll outlast us, you know. Unless it’s the sword.”

  “Madness,” Mac said. “Madness.”

  “That may be true,” said Dmitri. “But you should never step into a Kraken war with a madman. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that?”

  July 4, 1948

  2:20 p.m., Eastern Standard Time

  Metropolitan Museum of Natural History, New York

  The Russian theremin device had been removed with great haste. When Hendry explained why, Patricia Wynters was surprised, but the logic behind the bugging seemed clear enough, as did most of history’s surprises, when viewed with twenty-twenty hindsight.

  Patricia had been much more surprised to learn that Nesbitt found something “wrong” in Yanni’s blood, and that the Russians might have heard about it through the device. She suspected something was at least equally wrong with her own blood—and that it had been so for a very long time.

  She did not tell anyone.

  Not even her closest friends knew she had no recollection at all of her own childhood or adolescence, but seemed to remember more decades of life than made sense—which rendered her a mystery even to herself. At times Patricia questioned her own ability to remember correctly. She wondered how much of anyone’s memory might be only an illusion. And now along came Nesbitt and her so-called Darwin Strain, and with it the origin of impossible fruit flies. This too makes no sense—it makes no sense at all, she thought. And yet, perhaps it is the only thing that does.

  And if so, Patricia realized, it became possible to believe she might actually have managed to gaslight herself.

  Oh, that would be a good one, she thought, and laughed. Another historic first, in a corner of the museum already too full of scary history.

  For now, in any case, she would keep to herself the ominous joke Nesbitt had made, after searching through old museum scrapbooks: “You age so well. Either you have an incredible skin cream to show me or somewhere among all those mammoth bones in the attic, there’s a portrait that must be looking God-awful by now.”

  Wynters believed that the key difference between her and Nora Nesbitt was that Nesbitt never took pause to assess her own sanity. She also believed there was probably a fine line between paranoia and madness, and that Nesbitt had crossed that line—repeatedly. The Plum Islander’s little “joke” had ended with a Nesbitt-esque suspicion straight out of Kafka: “Mac once told me that you were already here, at the museum, when he arrived as a young student. But he also said it seemed to him that you have always been here.”

  1650 b.c.

  The Lost World of the Keftiu

  5.33 Million Years after the Mediterranean Flood

  “As for these genealogies of yours,” the priests of Egypt would tell Plato’s ancestor, Solon, “they are no better than the tales of children; for in the first place, you remember a single deluge only, whereas there have been many.”

  1650 b.c. was the threshold of a deluge, and also the time of another red bloom in the waters of Santorini.

  The island was not yet called Santorini, and it was much larger than in R. J. MacCready and Patricia Wynters’s time. A beautiful, lushly forested mountain towered almost a mile over what would one day be only a flooded crater. The summit intercepted clouds and produced rains that fed the aqueducts of a harbor city whose homes were provisioned with both hot and cold running water. Sixty feet above the rooftops of an architectural paradise, an eruption pattern set in motion ages before human beings existed was fated to form the very ground on which MacCready would one day establish his Base Camp #3.

  The city’s inhabitants were called, by themselves and by the Egyptians, the Keftiu. Their multi-island empire was the strongest naval and economic power in the eastern Mediterranean. Destined to become one of history’s ghost stories, fading remnants of their civilization would be recorded in the Bible under the names “Sea People” and “Philistines.” To Plato they became a remnant of Atlantis; to archaeologists of MacCready’s time, Minoans.

  During the years before the fall, among the Egyptians and the Keftiu, Semut of Avarice had become the most brilliant mind that a young and insatiably curious royal named Kyri ever met. They had called Semut a word that in later millennia would translate to “scientist.”

  “I was not planning on it ending this way,” Semut told his former student.

  “You do not know what you were planning,” Kyri replied. “You told me so yourself, when you were young. You said it may cure all fevers, as we had used it to cure mine.”

  “I’m sorry. I only wanted there to be a way, for us.”

  Kyri gave the dying man a kiss on the lips and stared out to sea. The two ships she awaited were within view. Crewed mostly by deepwater free divers, both were returning to the volcanic island’s south port, each with no fewer than three bushels of the red potion’s raw material.

  The potion’s effects had been capricious from the start, and were rendered increasingly unpredictable the more Kyri and Semut had tried to refine and strengthen it.

  “I’m sorry,” Semut said again. “I did not appreciate the scope of my own ignorance. To mistake ignorance for knowledge is . . . is . . .”

  “Evil,” Kyri finished for him, apologetically. “You’ve said it before. You’re repeating yourself.”

  “We do not have all the knowledge,” he groaned.

  As indeed we do not, Kyri told herself. Her father had been the first to tamper with the red weed, and to judge from what this strangest of all gifts from the sea had done to him, and then to her, Father could easily have survived Egypt into another century if not for political ambitions that ended with five axe blows to his face.

  When Kyri met Semut, she had been ageless since seventeen, already for two decades. She was almost thirty-seven then. He was a troubled but fascinatingly brilliant child, already fluent in three languages when Kyri rescued him from the streets of Avarice, Egypt. During the two years that followed, she became his tutor, until her father, as he began preparing for expansion of the Nile’s territories, decided that it was time for the two youths to hide among the Keftiu, and for Kyri to give herself a new identity—before someone took notice of how different his child had really become, and started asking the right questions.

  Eventually the priests and the philosophers of the island took notice, that a miracle had been discovered. They studied it, shared it among themselves, and managed t
o keep the secret of the two Egyptians even longer than China’s royal families would be able to hide the secret of silk’s production.

  Kyri taught Semut until she realized she could teach him no more. He had learned everything she could give, and their roles crossed and interchanged; Semut became Kyri’s teacher. By then they were both studying and manipulating the miracle substance.

  The red weed’s origin was a mystery to them, though not the most important one. Although it restored varying degrees of good health to the priests, the scholars, and chief merchants of the island, the cure seemed by some cruel unnatural decree never to have been for Semut. Meanwhile, Kyri evolved from being Semut’s student and colleague, to his confidant, to his life’s one true love, and—by the time he turned sixty and was racked by some hitherto unknown disease—she became at last his caregiving “granddaughter.”

  Semut’s potions had destroyed him. In the end, they were also turning test animals into monstrosities. Semut’s face was hideous. Kyri loved him still.

  “I failed you,” Semut said. She sat next to him on a wood-framed bed and took his hand in hers.

  “Shhhh . . . Semut. What is the first law in this family?”

  “Don’t beat yourself up,” he replied.

  “And the second law?”

  “Don’t beat yourself up.”

  “And the third?”

  “Don’t beat yourself up,” he replied, and forced a smile.

  Kyri returned the smile. She did not notice, as she held his hand tightly, hoping for him to survive, that the two ships bearing the red treasure were never going to make it to the port. In full view of the men who waited on the dock, the ancient Scylla surfaced, its tentacles writhing and grotesque and killing the crews with all-enveloping thoroughness.

  During the years that followed, in what archaeologists of the future would come to call the Late Minoan Marine Style, wall paintings and pottery decorations began preserving a symbol of power and respect rivaling the respect once given by the worshippers of bulls and golden calves. Suddenly images of writhing cephalopods were everywhere.