Нэнси Кресс - Tomorrow's Kin

Physicians experimenting on themselves were not unknown in research medicine. Edward Jenner had infected himself—and the eight-year-old son of his gardener—with cowpox to develop the smallpox vaccine. Jesse William Lazear infected himself with yellow fever from mosquitoes, in order to confirm that mosquitoes were indeed the transmission vector. Julio Barrera gave himself Argentine hemorrhagic fever; Barry Marshall drank a solution of H. pylori to prove the bacterium caused peptic ulcers; Pradeep Seth injected himself with an experimental vaccine for HIV.

Marianne understood the reasons for the supposed secrecy of this experiment. The newspapers that came in on the mail runs glowed luridly with speculations about human experimentation aboard the Embassy . Journalists ignited their pages with “Goebbels,” “Guatemalan syphilis trials,” “Japanese Unit 731.” And those were the mainstream journalists. The tabloids and fringe papers invented so many details about Deneb atrocities on humans that the newsprint practically dripped with blood and body parts. The online news sources were, if anything, even worse. No, such “journalists” would never believe that Drs. Namechek and Lloyd had given spore disease to themselves and without the aliens knowing it.

Actually, Marianne didn’t believe that, either. The Denebs were too intelligent, too technologically advanced, too careful. They had to know this experiment was going on. They had to be permitting it. No matter how benign and peaceful their culture, they were human. Their lack of interference was a way of ensuring CYA deniability.

“Your turn, Dr. Jenner,” said Syed Sharma, a very formal microbiologist from Mumbai. He was the only player wearing a suit.

“Oh, sorry,” Marianne said. “What’s trump again?”

Evan, her partner, said, “Spades. Don’t trump my ace again.”

“No table talk, please,” Sharma said.

Marianne studied her hand, trying to remember what had been played. She had never been a good cardplayer. She didn’t like cards. And there was nothing to see here, anyway. Evan could bring her the results, if any, of the clandestine experiment. It was possible that the two scientists had not been infected, after all—not this time nor the previous two. It was possible that the pathogen had mutated, or just hadn’t taken hold in these two particular people, or was being administered with the wrong vector. In the nineteenth century, a Dr. Firth, despite heroic and disgusting measures, had never succeeded in infecting himself with yellow fever because he never understood how it was transmitted. Pathogen research was still part art, part luck.

“I fold,” she said, before she remembered that “folding” was poker, not euchre. She tried a weak smile. “I’m very tired.”

“Go to bed, Dr. Jenner,” said Seyd Sharma. Marianne gave him a grateful look, which he did not see as he frowned at his cards. Lab tech Alyssa Rosert took her place at the table and Marianne left.

Just as she reached the end of the long corridor leading from the BSL4 lab, the door opened and a security guard hurried through, face twisted with some strong emotion. Her heart stopped. What fresh disaster now? She said, “Did anything—” but before she could finish the question he had pushed past her and hurried on.

Marianne hesitated. Follow him to hear the news or wait until—

The lab exploded.

Marianne was hurled to the floor. Walls around her, the tough but thin membranelike walls favored by the Denebs, tore. People screamed, sirens sounded, pulsing pain tore through Marianne’s head like a dark, viscous tsunami.

Then everything went black.

She woke alone in a room. Small, white, windowless, with one clear wall, two doors, a pass-through compartment. Immediately, she knew, even before she detected the faint hum of blown air: a quarantine room with negative pressure. The second door, locked, led to an operating room for emergency procedures and autopsies. The explosion had exposed her to spores from the experimental lab.

Bandages wreathed her head; she must have hit it when she fell, got a concussion, and needed stitches. Nothing else on her seemed damaged. Gingerly she sat up, aware of the IV tube and catheter and pulse oximeter, and waiting for the headache. It was there, but very faint. Her movement set off a faint gong somewhere and Dr. Ann Potter, a physician whom Marianne knew slightly, appeared on the other side of the clear glass wall.

The doctor said, her voice coming from the ceiling as if she were just one more alien, “You’re awake. What do you feel?”

“Headache. Not terrible. What… what happened?”

“Let me ask you some questions first.” She was asked her name, the date, her location, the name of the president—

“Enough!” Marianne said. “I’m fine! What happened? ” But she already knew. Hers was the only bed in the quarantine room.

Dr. Potter paid her the compliment of truth. “It was a suicide bomber. He—”

“The others? Evan Blanford?”

“They’re all dead. I’m sorry, Dr. Jenner.”

Evan. Dead.

Seyd Sharma, with his formal, lilting diction. Julia Namechek, engaged to be married. Trevor Lloyd, whom everyone said would win a Nobel someday. Alyssa Rosert, who always remembered what trump was—all dead.

Evan. Dead.

Marianne couldn’t process that, not now. She managed to say, “Tell me. All of it.”

Ann Potter’s face creased with emotion, but she had herself under control. “The bomber was dressed as a security guard. He had the explosive—I haven’t heard yet what it was—in his stomach or rectum, presumably encased to protect it from body fluids. Autopsy showed that the detonator, ceramic so that it got through all our metal detectors, was probably embedded in a tooth, or at least somewhere in his mouth that could be tongued to go off.”

Marianne pictured it. Her stomach twisted.

Dr. Potter continued, “His name was Michael Wendl and he was new but legitimately aboard, a sort of mole, I guess you’d call it. A manifesto was all over the Internet an hour after the explosion and this morning—”

“This morning? How long have I been out?”

“Ten hours. You had only a mild concussion but you were sedated to stitch up head lacerations, which of course we wouldn’t ordinarily do but this was complicated because—”

“I know,” Marianne said, and marveled at the calm in her voice. “I may have been exposed to the spores.”

“You have been exposed, Marianne. Samples were taken. You’re infected.”

Marianne set that aside, too, for the moment. She said, “Tell me about the manifesto. What organization?”

“Nobody has claimed credit. The manifesto was about what you’d expect: Denebs planning to kill everyone on Earth, all that shit. Wendl vetted okay when he was hired, so speculation is that he was a new recruit to their cause. He was from somewhere Upstate and there’s a lot of dissent going on up there. But the thing is, he got it wrong. He was supposed to explode just outside the Deneb section of the Embassy, not the research labs. His organization, whatever it was, knew something about the layout of the Embassy but not enough. Wendl was supposed to be restricted to sub-bay duty. It’s like someone who’d had just a brief tour had told him where to go, but either they remembered wrong or he did.”

Marianne’s spine went cold. Someone who’d had just a brief tour…

“You had some cranial swelling after the concussion, Marianne, but it’s well under control now.”

Elizabeth.

No, not possible. Not thinkable.

“You’re presently on a steroid administered intravenously, which may have some side effects I’d like you to be aware of, including wakefulness and—”