Нэнси Кресс - Tomorrow's Kin

Dear Mom—I can’t come. I’m sorry. I love you. Noah

S minus 4 months

The work—anybody’s work—was not going well.

It seemed to be proceeding at an astonishing pace, but Marianne—and everyone else—knew that was an illusion. She sat in the auditorium for the monthly report, Evan beside her. This time, no Denebs were present—why not? She listened to Terence Manning enumerate what, under any other circumstances, would have been incredibly rapid triumphs.

“We have succeeded in isolating the virus,” Manning said, “although not in growing it in vitro. After isolation, we amplified it with the usual polymerase processes. The virus has been sequenced and—only a few days ago!—captured on an electromicrograph image, which, as most of you know, can be notoriously difficult. Here it is.”

A graphic appeared on the wall behind Manning: fuzzy concentric circles blending into each other in shades of gray. Manning ran his hand over his head, now completely bald. Had he shaved his last three hairs, Marianne wondered irrelevantly. Or had they just given up and fallen out from stress?

“The virion appears to be related to known paramyxoviruses, although the gene sequence, which we now have, does not exactly match any of them. It is a negative-sense single-stranded RNA virus. Paramyxoviruses, to which it may or may not be directly related, are responsible for a number of human and animal diseases, including parainfluenza, mumps, measles, pneumonia, and canine distemper. This family of viruses jumps species more easily than any other. From what we have determined so far, it most closely resembles both Hendra and Nipah viruses, which are highly contagious and highly virulent.

“The genome follows the paramyxovirus ‘Rule of Six,’ in that the total length of the genome in nucleotides is almost always a multiple of six. The spore virus consists of twenty-one genes with 21,648 base pairs. That makes it a large virus, but by no means the largest we know of. Details of sequence, structure, envelope proteins, et cetera, can be found on the LAN. I want to especially thank Drs. Yu, Sedley, and Lapka for their valuable work in identifying Respirovirus sporii .”

Applause. Marianne still stared at the simple, deadly image behind Manning. An unwelcome thought had seized her: The viral image looked not unlike a fuzzy picture of a not-too-well-preserved trilobite. Trilobites had been the dominant life-form on Earth for three hundred million years and comprised more than ten thousand species. All gone now. Humans could be gone, too, after a much briefer reign.

But we survived so much! The Ice Age, terrible predators, the “bottleneck event” of seventy thousand years ago that reduced Homo sapiens to mere thousands…

Manning was continuing. This was the bad news. “However, we have made little progress in figuring out how to combat R. sporii . Blood from the infected mice has been checked against known viruses and yielded no serological positives. None of our small number of antiviral drugs were effective, although there was a slight reaction to ribavirin. That raises a further puzzle, since ribavirin is mostly effective against Lassa fever, which is caused by an arenavirus, not a paramyxovirus.” Manning tried to smile; it was not a success. “So, the mystery deepens. I wish we had more to report.”

Someone asked, “Are the infected mice making antibodies?”

“Yes,” Manning said, “and if we can’t manage to develop a vaccine, this is our best possible path to a postexposure treatment, following the MB-003 model developed for Ebola. For you astronomers—and please forgive me if I am telling you things you already know—a successful postexposure treatment for Ebola in nonhuman primates was developed before the actual Ebola vaccine. When administered an hour after infection, MB-003 yields a one hundred percent survival rate. At forty-eight hours, the survival rate is two-thirds. MB-003 was initially developed in a mouse model and then produced in plants. That work took ten years. Then it was replaced by the vaccine, which also took decades to reach clinical trials.”

Decades… The Embassy scientists had less than five months left, and there would be no clinical trials.

Maybe the Denebs knew faster ways to produce a vaccine from antibodies, exponentially increase production, and distribute the results. But the aliens weren’t even at this meeting. They had surely been given all this information already, but even so—

How the hell could the aliens be anyplace more important than this?

Marianne felt ridiculous. She and Evan leaned close over the sink in the lab. Water gushed full-strength from the tap, making noise that, she hoped, covered their words. The autoclave hummed; a Bach concerto played tinnily on the computer’s inadequate speaker. The whole thing felt like a parody of a bad spy movie.

They had never been able to decide if the labs, if everywhere on the Embassy, were bugged. Evan had said Yes, of course, don’t be daft. Max, with the hubris of the young, had said no because his computer skills would have been able to detect any surveillance. Marianne and Gina had said it was irrelevant since both their work and their personal lives were so transparent. In addition, Marianne had disliked the implication that the Denebs were not their full and open partners. Gina had said—

Gina. Shot down, her life ended just as Jason William Jenner’s had begun. And for how long? Would Marianne even get to see her grandson before everything was as over as Gina’s life?

Dangerous to think this way. Their work on the Embassy was a thin bridge laid across a pit of despair, the same despair that had undoubtedly fueled Gina’s killers.

“You know what has to happen,” Marianne whispered. “Nobody’s saying it aloud, but without virus replication in human bodies, we just can’t understand the effect on the immune system and we’re working blindly. Mice aren’t enough. Even if we could have infected monkeys, it wouldn’t be enough. We have to infect volunteers.”

Evan stuck his finger into the flow of water, which spattered in bright drops against the side of the sink. “I know. Everyone knows. The request has been made to the powers that be.”

“How do you know that?”

“I talk to people on the other teams. You know the laws against experimentation on humans unless there have first been proper clinical trials that—”

“Oh, fuck proper trials, this is a crisis situation!”

“Not enough people in power are completely convinced of that. You haven’t been paying attention to the bigger picture, Marianne. The Public Health Service isn’t even gearing up for mass inoculation or protection—Director Robinson is fighting it with claw and tusk. FEMA is divided and there’s almost anarchy in the ranks. Congress just filibusters on the whole topic. And the president just doesn’t have the votes to get much of anything done. Meanwhile, the masses riot or flee or just pretend the whole thing is some sort of hoax. The farther one gets from New York, the more the conspiracy theorists don’t even believe there are aliens on Earth at all.”

Marianne, still standing, pulled at the skin on her face. “It’s all so frustrating. And the work we’ve been doing here—you and I and Max and Gina”—her voice faltered—“is pointless. It really is. Identifying members of Smith’s so-called clan? Who cares? I’m going to volunteer myself to be infected.”

“They won’t take you.”

“If—”

“The only way that could happen is in secret. If a subgroup on the Spore Team decided the situation was desperate enough to conduct an unauthorized experiment.”