Нэнси Кресс - Terran Tomorrow

“Tell Dr. Farouk…” What? Nothing that Marianne could put into a neat, short message for Lindy to carry.

Lindy waited.

“Tell Dr. Farouk I have something new about time.”

Lindy’s forehead wrinkled. “Time? What do you mean?”

“Just tell him. And that it’s urgent.”

“I don’t see how the—oh, Ryan.”

Marianne’s son thumped into the cubicle as fast as his cane would let him. “Mom?”

“I’m fine, Ryan.”

“They told me that you—”

“I’m fine. Really.” But before she turned her attention to Ryan, Marianne directed a long look at Lindy.

“Please. Dr. Farouk. Now.”

Zack was frustrated. He’d carefully repeated to Toni all of Marianne’s speculations about the ASPM gene, the mutation carried by all the v-coma victims, and human accelerated region 1. Toni had barely listened—or maybe she had. How would Zack know what this mentally enhanced Toni was doing? Maybe she was capable of following multiple pathways of thought at once. Or even all possible pathways, like electrons in an uncollapsed state. Or maybe she really wasn’t listening to him.

He finished with, “So maybe we should look more closely at the ASPM gene.”

“Okay.”

“‘Okay’? That’s it?”

“You look at it,” Toni said, and went back to her own work. If her attention had ever really left it in the first place.

He started to work, but after only an hour, Claire Patel came into the lab. “Zack—”

He knew. From the tone of her voice, the wideness of her eyes, his own half-dread, half-eager anticipation. He said, “Susan is awake.”

“Yes. She’s asking for you.”

“Is she all right?” Is she still Susan? Caitlin, to his immense relief, had emerged from her coma a brighter, more thoughtful child, but still Caitlin. She had pouts, she had tantrums, she liked snuggles, she still carried around Bollers, who now had stuffing oozing out of his fuzzy neck. But Caitlin was four. Her brain was expected to be highly plastic, her personality in flux. Susan was… Susan was his heart. What if she had changed in some important way other than intellectually, what if she no longer needed him, what if…

Claire said, “She’s as healthy as someone can be who’s been in a coma this long.”

Not what he’d meant. Zack rose on suddenly unsteady legs. “Tricia, can you finish this?”

The lab tech nodded. “Sure.”

When Zack reached the infirmary, someone had already brought Caitlin to her mother. Susan sat up in bed, Caity nestled beside her, and Zack thought his heart would split along its seam. Susan was thinner, her cheekbones sharp beneath shadowed eyes. She smiled at him.

“Zack.”

“Is it you?”

What a dumb thing to say! But she seemed to understand.

“Yes, it’s me.”

“How do you feel?” Also pretty dumb, but complexity seemed to have deserted him. There was something in her eyes… Claire tactfully withdrew.

Caitlin said, “Mommy is awake now, too. But she can already read good.”

“So I can,” Susan said. “Zack…” She stopped but not, it seemed to Zack, because she didn’t know what to say, or how to say it. She was waiting for him.

He walked carefully, as if something in him might break, to the side of the bed. There was no chair so he stood, putting his hand on her shoulder, looking down at her. Please, Sue—help me.

She did, just as she always had. “I feel fine, Zack. Shaky physically and mentally, but I’m hoping both will pass. I just need to get used to thinking… like this.”

He wasn’t yet ready to ask what “like this” meant for her, or to compare it to what had been said by those who’d awakened before her. That wasn’t what he wanted to know, anyway.

Susan continued, “What are you afraid of?”

He blurted out, “That now I won’t be smart enough for you.”

Her eyes widened; he’d surprised her. That he could do that was oddly reassuring. She wasn’t omniscient.

She said, “Of course you are. But I didn’t marry you for your admittedly formidable intellect, you know. That was never why I loved you. It still isn’t, and I still love you.”

Caity hugged Bollers, listening hard.

Susan added, “Nothing will change that. Not even if I were Einstein—which I’m not—and you were a block of wood.”

Caity said seriously, “If Daddy was a block of wood then he couldn’t talk.”

Zack said, “And from what I remember, Einstein didn’t treat his wives particularly well.” Relief filled his body, sweet as fresh strawberries in the sun, light as helium.

“Mommy, I want to write a story about a block of wood that talks. Where’s my tablet?”

Susan said, “She can write now?”

“A little,” Zack said, “and read a lot. Oh, Sue—”

“Yes,” she said. “Now tell me everything that’s happened since I fell asleep. Then I’ll try to describe what this is like for me.”

“Mommy, Daddy, I want you to help me with my tablet!”

“You will have to wait your turn,” Susan said in her no-nonsense, don’t-mess-with-me voice. That, even more than what she’d said, reassured Zack. Susan had always been the one to discipline Caity, Zack the one to spoil her.

They were still all themselves. They were still all here. They could ride out Marianne’s leap of punctuated evolution, or anything else. Together.

“Zack,” Tricia said, barging through the curtain. “Oh, hello, Ms. McKay. Zack, sorry to intrude, but Toni says you should come to the lab right away.”

“Not now.”

“Now,” Tricia said.

Lab techs did not command department heads. Zack looked up, irritated until he saw Tricia’s face. He hadn’t known the usually quiet woman could look like that. “What is it? What’s happened?” Another Awakened gone crazy, like the man who’d attacked Marianne? An escape of live sparrows with RSA? A breach of the dome by New America?

Tricia said, “Toni says she’s made the gene drive. To wipe out the birds. She’s got it, and it works.”

“We were tinkering with the wrong thing,” Toni said. “We were trying to modify the DNA in the gametes. I modified the histones instead.”

Zack scanned the rest of her notes. She’d done an amazing job. Histones, spool-shaped proteins around which the DNA in a eukaryote was strung, were more tractable than genes. Histone modification could radically alter the activity of a gene without altering its DNA sequence. When the cells divided, the alterations were passed on to the daughter cells. Virology already possessed a gamut of proteins capable of altering histones, but Toni had found a new one. More: she had found a way to exploit epistasis, the effects of genetic mutations that depend on other mutations. Her notes—much clearer than before she’d Awakened!—showed how her modified histones affected other histones, changing the behavior of cell signaling, pasting the genemod into two copies of all cells.

He said, “The birds…”

“Yes. I’ve been inserting trial gene-drive mods into frozen sparrow embryos. They paste themselves beautifully into both chromosomes. I mated the offspring with another nest brought into artificial readiness. From the males—nada. Nothing. Zilch. The males are sterile. The females reproduced, and of their offspring, all the males were healthy but sterile. We’ll get a selective sweep, Zack. Within a few decades, there will be no more sparrows left in North America—and no RSA. Eventually, the disease will be gone from the entire world.”

He had to sit down. It wasn’t her conclusion that staggered him—they had known that was what a successful gene drive would do—it was her science. How had she done that so fast ? She’d had to breed two generations of sparrows… of course, sparrows mated very young, and hormones could bring them into fertility out of season. Still, she must have had viable gene candidates ready to go shortly after she awakened.