“We let our guard down. We were tired after the mess over Pasco man. It was wrong.” She looked again at Mitch. “I know you.”
“Mitch Rafelson,” he said, and held out his hand.
Champion did not accept it. “You ran us a merry chase, Mitch Rafelson.”
“I feel the same way,” Mitch said.
Champion shrugged. “Our people gave in against their deeper feelings. We felt sandbagged. We need the folks in Olympia and last time we upset them. The trustees sent me here because I’m trained in anthropology. I didn’t do such a good job. Now everybody’s angry.”
“Is there anything more that we can do, out of court?” Ripper asked.
“The chairman told me that knowledge isn’t worth disturbing the dead. You should have seen the pain in the board meeting when I described the tests.”
“I thought we explained the whole procedure,” Ripper said.
“You disturb the dead everywhere. We ask only that you leave our dead alone.”
The women stared at each other sadly.
“They aren’t your dead, Sue,” Ripper said, her eyes drooping. “They aren’t your people.”
“The council thinks NAGPRA still applies.”
Ripper lifted her hand; no use going over old battles. “Then there’s nothing we can do but spend more money on lawyers.”
“No. This time you are going to win,” Champion said. “We have other troubles now. Many of our young mothers are ill with Herod’s.” Champion brushed the edge of the canvas cover with one hand. “Some of us thought it was confined to the big cities, maybe to the whites, but we were wrong.”
Merton’s eyes gleamed like eager little lenses in the flickering firelight.
“I’m sorry to hear that, Sue,” Ripper said. “My sister has Herod’s, too.” She stood and put her hand on Champion’s shoulder. “Stay for a while. We have hot coffee and cocoa.”
“Thank you, no. It’s a long drive back. We will not bother with the dead for a while. We need to take care of the living.” A slight change came over Champion’s features. “Some who are ready to listen, like my father and my grandmother, say that what you have learned is interesting.”
“Bless them, Sue,” Ripper said.
Champion looked down at Mitch. “People come and go, all of us come and go. Anthropologists know that.”
“We do,” Mitch said.
“It will be hard to explain to others,” Champion said. “I will let you know what our people decide to do about the illness, if we know any medicine. Maybe we can help your sister.”
“Thank you,” Ripper said.
Champion looked around the group under the canvas canopy, nodded deeply, then gave several additional shallow nods, showing she had had her say and was prepared to leave. She climbed the trail to the lip of the bluff with the burly intern lighting the way.
“Extraordinary,” Merton said, eyes still gleaming. “Privileged insight. Maybe even native wisdom.”
“Don’t let it get to you,” Ripper said. “Sue’s good people, but she doesn’t know what’s happening any more than my sister does.” Ripper turned to Mitch. “God, you look ill,” she said.
Mitch did feel a little queasy.
“I’ve seen that look on cabinet ministers,” Merton observed quietly. “When they were stuffed full of too many secrets.”
37
Baltimore
Kaye swung her small bag out of the backseat of the cab and slipped her credit card through the driver’s-side reader. She craned her head to look at Baltimore’s newest tower condo development, Uptown Helix, thirty floors poised on two broad quadrangles of shops and theaters, all in the shadow of the Bromo-Seltzer Tower.
The remains of a dusting of snow from earlier in the morning lingered in slushy patches along the sidewalk. To Kaye, it seemed this winter was lasting forever.
Cross had told her that the condo on the twentieth floor would be fully furnished, that her belongings would be moved in and arranged, there would be food in the refrigerator and pantry, a running tab at several restaurants downstairs: everything she desired and needed, a home just three blocks from Americol’s corporate headquarters.
Kaye presented herself to the doorman in the resident’s lobby. He smiled the way servants smile at rich people and gave her an envelope containing her key. “I don’t own this, you know,” she said.
“Doesn’t matter a bit to me, ma’am,” he replied with the same cheerful deference.
She rode the sleek steel and glass elevator through the atrium of the shopping arcade to the residential floors, tapping her fingers on the handrail. She was alone in the elevator. I am protected, provided for, kept busy going from meeting to meeting, no time to think. I wonder who I am anymore.
She doubted that any scientist had ever felt so rushed as she felt now. Her conversation with Christopher Dicken at the NIH had pushed her onto a sidetrack having little to do with the development of SHEVA therapies. A hundred different elements of her research since postgraduate days had suddenly floated to the surface of her mind, shuffled around like swimmers in a water ballet, arranged themselves in enchanting patterns. Those patterns had nothing to do with disease and death, everything to do with the cycles of human life—or every kind of life, for that matter.
She had less than two weeks before Cross’s scientists would present their first candidate vaccine, out of twelve—at last count—being developed around the country, at Americol and elsewhere. Kaye had underestimated the speed with which Americol could work—and had overestimated the extent to which they would keep her informed. I’m still just a figurehead, she thought.
In that time, she had to make up her mind about what was actually happening—what SHEVA actually represented. What would finally happen to Mrs. Hamilton and the other women at the NIH clinic.
She emerged on the twentieth floor, found her number, 2011, fitted the electronic key into the lock, and opened the heavy door. A rush of clean, cool air, smelling of new carpet and furniture, of something else rosy and sweet, wafted out to greet her. Soft music played: Debussy, she could not remember the name of the piece, but she liked it a lot.
A bouquet of several dozen yellow roses spilled over from a crystal vase on the top of the low étagère in the hall.
The condominium was bright and cheerful, with elegant wood accents, beautifully furnished with two couches and a chair in suede and sunset gold fabric. And Debussy. She dropped the bag onto a couch and walked into the kitchen. Stainless-steel refrigerator, stove, dishwasher, gray granite countertops edged with rose-colored marble, expensive jewellike track lighting throwing little diamond glows around the room . . .
“Damn it, Marge,” Kaye said under her breath. She carried the bag into the bedroom, unzipped it on the bed, pulled out her skirts and blouses and one dress to be hung in the closet, opened the closet, and stared at the wardrobe. Had she not already met two of Cross’s handsome young male companions, she would have been sure, at this point, that Marge Cross had designs on her other than corporate. She quickly flicked through the dresses, suits, silk and linen blouses, looked down at shoe racks supporting at least eight pairs for all occasions—even hiking boots—and that was enough.
Kaye sat on the edge of the bed and let out a deep, quavering sigh. She was in way over her head socially as well as scientifically. She turned to look at the reproduction Whistler prints over the maple dresser, at the oriental scroll beautifully framed in ebony with brass finials that hung on the wall over the bed.
“Little hothouse posy in the big city.” She felt her face screwing up in anger.
The phone in her purse rang. She jumped, walked into the living room, opened the purse, answered.
“Kaye, this is Judith.”
“You were right,” Kaye said abruptly.
“Beg pardon?”
“You were right.”
“I’m always right, dear. You know that.” Judith paused for effect, and Kaye knew she had something important to say. “You as
ked about transposon activity in my SHEVA-infected hepatocytes.”
Kaye felt her spine stiffen. This was the stab in the not-so-dark she had made two days after speaking with Dicken. She had pored over the texts and refreshed herself with a dozen articles in six different journals. She had gone through her notebooks, where she had scribbled down mad little moments of extreme speculation.
She and Saul had counted themselves among the biologists who suspected that transposons—mobile lengths of DNA within the genome—were far more than just selfish genes. Kaye had written a solid twelve pages in the notebook on the possibility that these were very important phenotype regulators, not selfish but selfless; they could, under certain circumstances, guide the way proteins became living tissue. Change the way proteins created a living plant or animal. Retrotransposons were very similar to retroviruses—and thus the genetic link with SHEVA.
All together, they could be the handmaids of evolution.
“Kaye?”
“Just a moment,” Kaye said. “Let me catch my breath.”
“Well you should, dear, dear former student Kaye Lang. Transposon activity in our SHEVA-infected hepatocytes is mildly enhanced. They shuffle around with no apparent effect. That’s interesting. But we’ve gone beyond the hepatocytes. We’ve been doing tests on embryonic stem cells for the Taskforce.”
Embryonic stem cells could become any sort of tissue, very much like early growth cells in fetuses.
“We’ve sort of encouraged them to behave like fertilized human ova,” Kushner said. “They can’t grow up to be fetuses, but please don’t tell the FDA. In these stem cells, the transposon activity is extraordinary. After SHEVA, the transposons jump around like bugs on a hot griddle. They’re active on at least twenty chromosomes. If this were random churning, the cell should die. The cell survives. It’s as healthy as ever.”
“It’s regulated activity?”
“It’s triggered by something in SHEVA. My guess is, something in the LPC—the large protein complex. The cell reacts as if it’s being subjected to extraordinary stress.”
“What do you think that means, Judith?”
“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 apoptosis. 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.
38
Americol Headquarters, Baltimore
February 28
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 ribozyme, 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 SciTrax’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?”
Nilson leaned toward her podium microphone. “There is no such patent, Mr. Merton.”
“There is indeed,” Merton said with an irritated wrinkle of his nose, “and I was hoping Dr. Lang could explain her deceased husband’s involvement with Richard Bragg, and how that figures in her current association with Americol and the CDC?”
Kaye stood in dumfounded silence.