Daryl Gregory - The Devil's Alphabet

“The white-scarf girls, obviously. She’s making it sound all hypothetical, but it’s them. Weygand seems clueless. Did he even know that she was a beta?”

“He said he suspected it,” Deke said. “Though he didn’t know until after the funeral.”

“So they weren’t that close,” Marla said.

Deke almost smiled. “No, not that close.” Donna had told him that Marla was in love with Jo Lynn, and he hadn’t believed it, until now. He shouldn’t have been surprised. Everyone fell in love with Jo.

Deke said, “So the white-scarf girls, the talk about stoning. I can’t tell if Jo was really afraid of them, or-”

“Not afraid,” Marla said. “She just knew what they were capable of.”

“Are you talking about the effigy?” Deke asked. “Come on, Marla. A fire’s one thing, but murder-”

“You don’t think they wanted me dead?” Marla said. “They tried to torch my house while I was asleep.”

He felt his phone vibrate in his pants pocket but ignored it. Had to be Rhonda again. She’d called him twice already this morning.

“They’re kids,” Deke said. “They got carried away. They weren’t trying to burn down the house.” A straw figure-dressed in a white doctor’s coat with a wooden knife taped to its hand-had been lit and thrown against the wall of Marla’s house. The flames had scorched the paint, little more, before Deke and some of the boys arrived to put the fire out. After Marla threatened to bring in the police, three teenage beta girls, white scarves in place, presented themselves to the reverend. The reverend promised to punish them, and Deke talked Marla into not pressing charges. She’d held that against him ever since.

“It’s one step from bombing a clinic, Deke. You don’t understand these girls. They’re different.”

“Because they don’t have sex? Do you believe this separate species stuff too-the teleportation stuff, the parallel universes, all that?”

“It’s one theory.”

“Jo’s theory,” he said. “That she got from real scientists, right?”

“Yes, there are reputable people who think quantum calculation could explain what happened,” Marla said. “Most of the evidence is circumstantial, though. Statistical. TDS changed the chromosome so completely that they say it’s impossible to see how the new order could arise from the old. It’s like running a dictionary through a leaf shredder and spraying out Hamlet on your front lawn.”

“You’re talking about introns.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You’ve been reading up.”

“I got it from Weygand. Didn’t make any sense to me.”

“Introns are the part of DNA that don’t code for proteins. Because they’re not needed, they can mutate faster than other parts of the DNA where a change in the protein could kill the creature. You can look at intron sequences within proteins to tell small differences between related species, like the differences between humans and chimps. Both may produce the same hemoglobin protein, and their DNA is mostly the same, but the introns are very different. Between the clades, we’ve found differences in every protein sequence we’ve looked at: hemoglobin chains, cytochromes, histones…”

“Really,” Deke said. She wasn’t looking at him, and hadn’t heard the smile in his voice.

“So while the sequences are a mystery, there’s no need to invoke quantum weirdness. Most people are looking for a more realistic, testable mechanism that would cause those changes-a retrovirus, maybe, something small we’ve overlooked. My bet is that it’ll be a variant of something we already know about, maybe a bacterial plasmid we’ve been carrying around dormant for thousands of years-something that’s been unable till now to inject its own set of genetic instructions. See, plasmids can’t usually get out of the cell they’re trapped in, so they require-why are you laughing?”

Deke shook his head, still smiling. “This is what I felt like when I talked to Jo. You guys are just-” He fanned the top of his head. “Whoosh.” He got to his feet.

“You asked,” she said.

Not for all that, he thought, but let it pass.

Marla handed back the bag of bottles and the papers. “How’s Donna doing?” she asked. “Is she okay?”

“She’s fine,” he said. Then shrugged. “The waiting is hard.”

“Jo Lynn was right about one thing,” Marla said. “Asexual reproduction would be a lot simpler.”

“Amen,” he said.

Rhonda’s Cadillac was parked in front of his shop. He sighed heavily, then pulled in beside the car.

Rhonda stepped out from the passenger side. Everett, behind the wheel, lifted a hand in hello. “I didn’t see you in church,” Rhonda said. “Donna said you were working. I called, but you didn’t answer your phone.”

“I was doing some errands,” Deke said. He unlocked the bay door and pushed it open. “Come on inside.”

He flipped on the main lights and led Rhonda across the shop floor toward his plastic-draped office area. He planned to put up real walls, but he’d hadn’t gotten around to it yet.

Rhonda stopped at the first row of pews. “When you get these done you’ll have no excuse for backsliding,” she said. She rubbed the glossy back of one of the finished pews. “You do beautiful work, Deke. All your boys do.” She looked up at him. “Do you know who the Shakers were?”

“Like Shaker furniture?”

“Your work reminds me of theirs. Do you know why there aren’t any Shakers anymore?”

He shrugged. “I didn’t know they were gone.”

“They didn’t believe in sex,” she said. “Not just premarital sex-any kind. That was kind of shortsighted, don’t you think? And they weren’t much good at evangelizing either. So when they started to get old and die off, that was it for the whole religion.” She smiled. “Left behind some beautiful furniture, though.”

“So. You think argos should evangelize.”

“Ha! I wish you could. Just do some preaching and have people start growing. You remember Ernest Angley? TV healer. He’d slap people’s foreheads-whap!-and they’d flop over, quivering like fish.” She hooted in laughter. “I used to love watching him. It was like professional wrestling for Baptists.” She wiped at an eye, still chuckling. “Oh law. Is this sturdy?” She touched a bookcase turned onto its side, one of the few things in the shop low enough for her to sit on.

“Go ahead,” Deke said.

He thought they’d talk in his office, but if Rhonda wanted to talk out here, then fine. He took a seat opposite her on one of the unfinished pews. “You said you wanted to talk about the school?”

“The reverend’s on me again about her Co-op school. She wants to use part of the loan for the high school for it. She called it a ‘branch campus’ of the high school, so it wouldn’t be considered a separate expenditure.”

“Is that legal? The grant’s for one school: the loan’s for one school…”

“Oh, it may be unusual, but I looked into it and it’s legal. I found some other high schools that do it. Usually they’re for tech-ed programs or special ed, but there are also these ‘alternative schools’-for problem students, nontraditional learners. I think the betas would qualify as nontraditional.”

“The whole town qualifies,” Deke said.

“And if we think it will cause problems with the grant, we use the grant for the main school, and part of the loan for the Co-op school. Of course the town council would have to vote on it.”

“Two separate schools,” Deke said evenly. “One for charlies, one for betas.”

“I know, I know,” Rhonda said. “I told the reverend, it’s like a slap in the face to the argos. We’ve been telling everybody that the school is for everyone, that someday the argos are going to have children. But this way it looks too much like two clades grabbing all the money and telling the argos to go hang-and that’s not the way it’s intended. Still, you know how people are. I don’t like what that would do to the town. If I were you, I wouldn’t vote for it.”