Daryl Gregory - The Devil's Alphabet

“I should have left you tied up,” Dr. Fraelich said. She sat at the desk and began moving stacks of paper to the side of the desk farthest from him.

He sat down on a chair. “So all these forms, you’re kind of in charge of these research studies?”

“I’m just the field administrator. I help them collect their data.”

“I kind of expected more scientists to be living in town,” he said. “When I was a kid, right after the Changes, there were doctors and scientists all over the place.”

“You don’t need to live in Chernobyl to study radiation poisoning,” she said.

“Is that what you think? It was radiation?”

“That was a metaphor, Mr. Martin.”

“Please stop calling me that. It’s Pax. And you are?”

“Dr. Fraelich.”

He laughed, hurting his throat. “You know, you’re not very warm for a doctor.”

“Have you met any doctors?”

He laughed again, and she looked away. Had he gotten her to smile? Not quite. But he’d come close.

“Okay, so what caused it?” Pax asked. “The Changes. I’m a little out of touch with the latest theories.”

“You all are,” she said. In the newly cleared space in front of her she rolled a pen under her palm. “The people in Switchcreek seem so incurious about what happened. I just don’t understand it. You’re in the middle of one of the great scientific mysteries of the century and all of you act as if the Changes were, I don’t know, a hurricane or something. Bad weather. An act of God.”

“What are we supposed to do? We’re not scientists,” he said. “And they couldn’t tell us how it happened anyway. Sure looked like an act of God. So we just went on with our lives.”

“You don’t have to be scientists to show some interest,” she said. “TDS is a completely new class of disease-a cancer that’s not just trying to replicate its own cells, but hijack the transcription process to rewrite an entire genome, while keeping the host alive. Not just alive, but healthy. Hox genes start spitting out new instructions, adult stem cells start acting like embryonic stem cells-it’s unprecedented. Yet none of you even seem to wonder how this happened to you. The only one of you who seemed at all curious is-” He felt sure she was about to say “dead.” She waved a hand. “Never mind.”

“Are you talking about Jo Lynn? Did you know her?”

“Of course I did. I was her doctor.” There was something too casual in her voice.

“You were friends.”

Dr. Fraelich said nothing.

“I didn’t see you at the funeral,” he said.

“And I didn’t see you.”

“I came in-” He didn’t want to say “late.” “Well, there were a lot of people. All those betas. I met her daughters, and their father.”

The doctor frowned. “Tommy’s not their father. The betas reproduce through parthenogenesis.”

“Yeah, I know that.” Though he’d never understood exactly what the word meant: sex without sex, he supposed. “I just thought that the beta women-some of them, right?-had already had sex before the Changes, and that they’d stored up the sperm. Or the eggs. Later they released them when-what?”

The doctor was shaking her head. “Nobody’s thought that for years. They had to toss out that theory with the first guaranteed virgin birth. There was a girl who was eight when she changed, with no evidence of previous sexual activity. She had twins when she was thirteen. Definitely no sperm involved.”

“But there are male betas,” Pax said.

“There are no ‘male’ betas, not really. Only men who contracted TDS-B during the Changes. Males who caught the B strain died at much higher rates than females. The men who survived, chemically and hormonally are practically female. TDS didn’t make them grow ovaries, but it halted their sperm production completely. Penises shriveled, testicles receded. They’re sterile and impotent.”

“Jesus,” Pax said. He felt a twinge of sympathy for Tommy Shields. “Okay, no male betas, but there’s sex with other people-”

“What other people?”

“The other clades,” he said. “Or, uh, skipped people.”

He felt his face flush. The doctor looked at him oddly. “Clades can’t breed with the unchanged, Pax. And they can’t interbreed either. We’ve known this for a decade. Charlies breed with charlies, and argos-well, we’re not sure what’s happening there.”

“But if there’s no sperm at all, then how are they-how does it work? And don’t say, ‘When a beta loves herself very, very much…’”

The doctor didn’t laugh. “No one knows. All women are born with all the eggs they’re ever going to have. The Changes allowed beta women to fertilize those eggs somehow. Or maybe they’re like aphids, born pregnant. Parthenogenesis happens in sharks and lizards and who knows how many other species, but nobody knows how it works exactly. It’s just a Greek word for ‘We don’t know what the hell is happening.’”

Paxton sat back, rubbed a hand across his face.

She said, “You look… lost.”

“Nothing. It’s nothing.” He stood, thinking of Jo’s daughters. For some reason he was disappointed. When he was sent away from Switchcreek, Pax had thought that the girls were his, or maybe Deke’s, or maybe both of theirs. And later, when people on the news started talking about parthenogenesis, he’d held on to the theory that maybe, just maybe, he was still the father. It was stupid, he knew.

He said, “I better get back to bed.”

Dr. Fraelich tapped the pen against the desk. “We’ll do one final checkup in the morning, but I think you’re good enough to go home. I’ll call the Chief and tell him you’re ready for pick-up.”

“Wait a minute-Chief?”

“Deke. I’ll call Deke.”

“Oh, right.” He had a dim memory of someone else calling Deke the Chief. “Try to get some sleep, Doc.”

The next morning Pax heard a deep argo voice vibrating through the walls, and thought, Deke. He sat up quickly, and his eyes blurred with tears. Jesus, tears? What was that about?

He quickly got dressed and made his way to the reception area. He felt stronger than yesterday but still shaky. He’d finally eaten, finishing off a granola bar and a bottle of orange juice that Dr. Fraelich had brought him.

In the reception area Deke leaned on the counter talking to the doctor, a collection of orange prescription bottles on the surface between them. Doreen, the charlie girl who’d bathed him, sat at a desk behind the doctor, staring down at an open magazine, pretending to ignore the conversation. She looked up as Pax entered and quickly looked down again, embarrassed.

Deke abruptly stopped whatever he was saying to the doctor and said to Pax, “Hey there, sleepyhead.”

Pax smiled faintly. “Howdy, Chief.”

Dr. Fraelich seemed upset, the blotches on her face angrier. She picked up the bottles and put them into a plastic bag.

Pax said, “Do you need my insurance or something? I remember signing a lot of papers.”

Deke looked at Dr. Fraelich, and she said, “You’re covered. Courtesy of Aunt Rhonda.”

“Really?” Pax said.

“Just drink plenty of water,” Dr. Fraelich said to him. Whatever familiarity they’d developed last night had been packed away.

“That’s it?” Pax said. “Three days of drug-induced coma and all I get is water?”

“A coma would have been a lot quieter and a lot easier on all of us,” she said. “You’re detoxing. Eat some fruit if you want. Just stay away from male charlies of a certain age.” She took the plastic bag of medicine and walked away before he could respond. Doreen kept her head down.

“That was… weird,” Pax said. He felt like everyone was moving at double speed, flashing signals he couldn’t detect.