Greg Bear - Darwin's Radio

“SHEVA has designs on us. It wants to change our genome, maybe radically.”

“Why?” Kaye grinned expectantly. She was sure Judith would see the inevitable connection.

“This kind of activity can’t be benign, Kaye.”

Kaye’s smile collapsed. “But the cell survives.”

“Yes,” Kushner said. “But as far as we know, the babies don’t. It’s too much change all at once. For years I’ve been waiting for nature to react to our environmental bullshit, tell us to stop overpopulating and depleting resources, to shut up and stop messing around and just die. Species-level apop-tosis. I think this could be the final warning — a real species killer.”

“You’re passing this on to Augustine?”

“Not directly, but he’ll see it.”

Kaye looked at the phone for a moment, stunned, then thanked Judith and told her she would call her later. Kaye’s hands tingled.

Not evolution, then. Perhaps Mother Nature had judged humans to be a malignant growth, a cancer.

For a horrible moment, that made more sense than what she and Dicken had talked about. Yet what about the new children, the ones born of the ova released by the intermediate daughters? Were they going to be genetically damaged, born apparently normal, but dying soon after? Or would they simply be rejected during the first trimester, like the interim daughters?

Kaye looked through the wide glass doors over the city of Baltimore, the late morning sun glittering on wet rooftops, asphalt streets. She imagined every pregnancy leading to another equally futile pregnancy, to wombs clogged with endless, horribly distorted first-trimester fetuses.

Shutting down human reproduction.

If Judith Kushner was correct, the bell had just tolled for the whole human race.

Marge Cross stood at stage left of the auditorium as Kaye formed a line with six scientists, prepared to field questions on the announcement.

Four hundred and fifty reporters filled the auditorium to capacity. Americol’s public relations director for the eastern U.S., Laura Nilson, young, black, and very intent, tugged at the hem of the jacket of her trim olive wool suit, then took over the questions.

The health and science reporter for CNN was first in the queue. “I’d like to direct my question to Dr. Jackson.”

Robert Jackson, head of the Americol SHEVA vaccine project, lifted his hand.

“Dr. Jackson, if this virus has had so many millions of years to evolve, how is it possible that Americol can announce a trial vaccine after less than three months of research? Are you smarter than Mother Nature?”

The room buzzed for a moment with mixed laughter and whispered comment. The excitement was palpable. Most of the young women in the room wore gauze masks, though that precaution had been proven ineffective. Others sucked on special mint and garlic lozenges claimed to prevent SHEVA from gaining a hold. Kaye could smell this peculiar odor even on the stage.

Jackson came to the microphone. At fifty, he looked like a well-preserved rock musician, loosely handsome, with suits only barely pressed and unruly brown hair graying at the temples.

“We began our work years before Herod’s flu,” Jackson said. “We’ve always been interested in HERV sequences, because, as you imply, there’s a lot of cleverness hidden there.” He paused for effect, favoring the audience with a small smile, showing his strength by expressing admiration for the enemy. “But in truth, in the last twenty years, we’ve learned how most diseases do their dirty work, how the agents are constructed, how they are vulnerable. By creating empty SHEVA particles, increasing the retrovirus failure rate to one hundred percent, we make a harmless antigen. But the particles are not strictly empty. We load them with a ri-bozyme, a ribonucleic acid with enzymatic activity. The ribozyme locks on to, and cleaves, several fragments of SHEVA RNA not yet assembled in an infected cell. SHEVA becomes the delivery system for a molecule that blocks its own disease-causing activity.”

“Sir—” the CNN reporter tried to break in.

“I’m not done answering your question,” Jackson said. “It is such a good one!” The audience chuckled. “Our problem until now has been that humans do not react in any strong fashion to SHEVA antigen. So our breakthrough came when we learned how to emphasize the immune response by attaching glycoproteins associated with other pathogens for which the body automatically mounts a strong defense.”

The CNN reporter tried to ask another question, but Nilson had already moved on down the long list. Next up was Sci-Trax’s young on-line correspondent. “Again for Dr. Jackson. Do you know why we are so vulnerable to SHEVA?”

“Not all of us are vulnerable. Men demonstrate a strong immune response to SHEVA they do not themselves produce. This explains the course of Herod’s flu in men — a quick, forty-eight-hour sort of thing, when it happens at all. Women, however, are almost universally open to the infection.”

“Yes, but why are women so vulnerable?”

“We believe that SHEVA’s strategy is incredibly long-term, on the order of thousands of years. It may be the first virus we’ve seen that relies on the growth of populations rather than individuals for its own propagation. To provoke a strong immune response would be counterproductive, so SHEVA emerges only when it seems that populations are either under stress, or because of some other triggering event we don’t yet understand.”

The science correspondent for the New York Times was next. “Drs. Pong and Subramanian, you’ve specialized in understanding Herod’s flu in Southeast Asia, which is reporting over a hundred thousand cases so far. There has even been rioting in Indonesia. There were rumors last week that this was a different provirus—”

“Completely wrong,” Subramanian said, smiling politely. “SHEVA is remarkably uniform. May I make a slight correction? ‘Provirus’ refers to the viral DNA inserted into the human genetic material. Once expressed, it is simply a virus or a retrovirus, although in this case, a very interesting one.”

Kaye wondered how Subramanian could focus solely on the science, when her ears caught the singular and frightening word “riots.”

“Yes, but my next question is, why do human males mount a strong immune response to the viruses of other males, but not to their own, if the glycoproteins in the envelope, the antigens, according to your press announcement, are so simple and invariant?”

“A very good question,” Dr. Pong said. “Do we have time for a daylong seminar?”

Mild laughter. Pong continued, “We believe that male response begins after cell invasion, and that at least one gene within SHEVA contains subtle variations or mutations, which cause production of antigens on the surfaces of certain cells prior to a full-bore immune response, thereby acclimating the body to—”

Kaye listened with half her mind. She kept thinking of Mrs. Hamilton and the other women in the NIH clinic.

Human reproduction shutting down. There had to be extreme reactions to any failure; the burden on the scientists was going to be enormous.

“Oliver Merton, from the Economist. Question for Dr. Lang.” Kaye looked up and saw a young red-haired man in a tweed coat holding the remote microphone. “Now that the genes coding for SHEVA, on their different chromosomes, have all been patented by Mr. Richard Bragg…” Merton glanced at his notes. “Of Berkeley, California…Patent number 8,564,094, issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office on February 27, just yesterday, how will any company hoping to create a vaccine proceed without licensing and paying royalties?”