I said, “She’s already had wide-spectrum antibiotic and antiviral from a K-model medunit. The unit said this was an unknown virus, outside the cofiguration of any known tailored microorganism, you’d have to build it fresh if you can—”
I was babbling. Miranda didn’t look up. “This is the Cell Cleaner, Dr. Turner. But I think you already guessed that.” There was something deliberate about her speech, as if the words were chosen carefully, and yet she felt they were completely inadequate to whatever she wanted to say. I hadn’t noticed that in Washington, where her speeches to the Science Court must have all been carefully prepared in advance. The slowness was in marked contrast to the way she’d spoken to “Jon.”
Annie watched the needle disappear into Lizzie’s neck. Annie was completely still, kneeling on the hem of her muddy parka, smearing dead leaves across the featureless white floor.
The moment was surreal. Miranda hadn’t even hesitated. I choked out, “Aren’t you even going to explain it to them give them a choice…”
Miranda didn’t answer. Instead she pulled a second syringe from her pocket and injected Billy.
I thought crazily of all the fatty deposits in the arteries of his heart, all the lethal viral copies that can lie in wait for years in lymph nodes until the body weakens, all the toxic mismultipli-cations of normal DNA over the sixty-eight years of Billy’s bone and flesh and blood … I couldn’t speak.
Miranda pulled out a third syringe and turned to Annie, who put out a warding-off hand. “No, ma’am, please, I ain’t sick—”
“You will be,” Miranda said, “without this. Soon.” She waited.
Annie bowed her head. It looked to me like prayer, which suddenly enraged me for no reason I could understand. Miranda injected Annie.
Then she turned to me.
“How toxic is the mutated vir—”
“Fatal. Within twenty-four hours. And easily transmitted. You will become infected.”
“How do you know? Did your people engineer and release the virus? Did you?”
“No,” she said, as calmly as if I’d asked her if it was raining. But a pulse beat in her throat, and she was taut as harpstrings, and as ready to vibrate at a touch. I just didn’t know whose. I stared at the syringe in her hand: long, thin, black, the fluid hidden inside. What color was it? That fluid had already gone into Lizzie, into Billy, into Annie.
I whispered, before I knew I was going to, “But I’m a donkey—”
Miranda said, “I have already been injected myself. Months ago. This is not an untested procedure.”
She had missed completely what I had meant. It lay outside her range of vision. Apparently, then, some things did. I said, “You’re so—” without knowing how I was going to finish the sentence.
“We don’t have much time. Lower your head, please, Dr. Turner.”
I blurted out — this is to my everlasting shame, it was so inane, and at such a moment — “I’m not really a licensed doctor!”
For the first time, she smiled. “Neither am I, Diana.”
“Why don’t we have much time? What’s going to happen? I’m not sick yet, you’re going to alter my entire biochemistry, let me at least think a moment—”
A screen suddenly appeared on the wall. Even though this — unlike the door — was certainly a normal technology, I nonetheless jumped as if an angel had appeared with flaming sword. But the angel was in front of me, staring at the screen as if in pain, and the sword trembled in her hand, and I was going to die not because I’d eaten of this particular genetically-engineered apple, but because I didn’t.
She didn’t give me a choice. The screen showed a plane landing where no plane should have been able to land, a folded thing setting straight down like a rotorless coptor but far more precisely than any coptor, on the same small flat patch of ground between stream and mountain where I had screamed for Eden to open. The same naked birch tree, shivering white. The same tattered oak. I raised my head to stare at the four men climbing out of the unfolded cylinder of the government plane, and Miranda pushed the syringe into my neck. With her other hand on my shoulder, she held me still while the fluid drained.
She was very strong.
Somehow, that one fact cleared my head, which just shows how crazed was the whole situation. I said, almost as if we were coconspirators, “They can’t get in, can they? They couldn’t even find it before, they blew up the wrong installation. They must have followed us here, Billy and Annie and Lizzie and me — oh, I’m sorry, Miranda—”
She wasn’t listening. To my complete shock — it was the weirdest thing that had happened yet, because after all, I’d known about the Cell Cleaner, I’d seen her explain it in Washington — to my utter shock, tears glittered in her eyes. She circled the fingers of her right hand around her left. Covering the ring.
A fifth man was helped out of the plane, and into a powerchair someone else swiftly unfolded. I saw with yet another shock that it was Drew Arlen, the Lucid Dreamer.
He put his hand on the birch tree. I didn’t know — and never found out — if it was to steady himself, or if it was part of the entry procedure, an activator or a skin-recognition system or just a failsafe of some unimaginable kind. Then he spoke a series of words, very clear, in that famous voice. The door above our heads opened.
Miranda made no effort to stop him, if she could have. Of course she could have. There must have been shields, counter-shields, something. They were SuperSleepless.
The four GSEA agents came down the stairs as if this were a root cellar in Kansas. They had drawn their guns, which filled me with sudden contempt. Drew Arlen stayed outside.
“Miranda Sharifi, you are under arrest for violations of the Genetic Standards Act, Sections 12 through 34, which state—”
She completely ignored them. She pushed past the four men as if they weren’t there, a sudden fire glowing around her that had to be some sort of electrified personal shield. One of the agents reached for her, cried out, and cradled his burned hand, his face distorted by pain. The agent blocking the steps hesitated. I saw him think for half a second about firing, and then change his mind. I could almost see the report later: “Civilians were present, making it inadvisable to—” Or maybe they realized that whoever officially killed Miranda Sharifi was dead himself careerwise, forever, a scapegoat. The agent moved off the steps.
Miranda ascended them slowly, heavily, the tears sparkling in her dark eyes. Three of the agents followed. After a stunned moment I bolted after them.
Drew Arlen sat in the cold November woods in a powerchair. Miranda faced him. A slight wind shook the oak tree, and the dead leaves rattled. A few fell.
“Why, Drew?”
“Miri — you don’t have the right to choose for 175 million people. Not in a democracy. Not without any checks and balances. Leisha said—”
“Kenzo Yagai did. He chose. He created cheap energy, and changed the world for the better.”
“You could have stopped the duragem dissembler. And didn’t. People died, Miranda!”
“Not as many as if we had stopped it. Not in the long run.”
“That wasn’t your reason! You just wanted control of the situation! You Supers, who don’t ever have to die!”
There was a noise behind me. I didn’t turn around. What I was looking at was more important than any noise. The questions Drew and Miranda hurled at each other were the same public question I had struggled with ever since I’d seen the Cell Cleaner in Washington: Who should control radical technology? Only they were making of it a private weapon, as lovers can make private weapons of anything. Who should control technology…
And — make no mistake — technology is Darwinian. It spreads. It evolves. It adapts. The most dangerous wipes out the less fit.
The GSEA had hoped to keep radical tech from falling into the wrong hands. But Huevos Verdes was the right hands: the hands that used nanotech to strengthen human beings, not destroy them. That was what the GSEA could not admit. It wasn’t their place to judge, they claimed; they only carried out the law. Maybe they were right.