Things were going too well. Not in any way superstitious, Kate still had twinges of anxiety that the balance of pain in the universe would reassert itself soon.
And then, late on Sunday the 22nd of September just another workday as far as she was concernedthe calendar in her Wizard electronic organizer told her that the next day was the autumnal equinox, that Tuesday was Joshua's birthday, or at least the day they had chosen to celebrate his birthdayand that Father Michael O'Rourke would be visiting before the end of the week.
Kate knew thateven without compromising the details of the projectshe would have wonderful things to tell him. What she did not know was that within the week her life would be changed forever.
Chapter Eighteen
Kate came home early on Tuesday to celebrate Joshua's elevenmonth “birthday.” These monthly celebrations had been Julie's idea: at a time when she was not sure that the baby would survive another week, much less another month, it seemed important to mark every milestone. Kate had chosen the twenty-fourth at random, although she did like the evenness of the number.
“The CBS Evening News” carried a story of miners running amok in Romania, commandeering trains to take them to Bucharest, where the rioting continued in some sort of unfocused protest against the government. Kate remembered that the current regime had used “miners”many of whom were Securitate agents in miners' coverallsto brutalize their own people the year before. She watched the video images of men smashing windows, tossing Molotov cocktails at buildings, using crowbars against doors, and she wondered what was really going on in that miserable country. She was glad that she and O'Rourke were out of there and hoped that Lucian and his family were lying low.
Joshua loved his cake. Not waiting for the slow spoonsful offered by Kate or Julie, he tore into his piece of cake with his hands, soon smearing enough on his face to equal the amount still on his highchair tray. Later, cleaning his face with a washcloth and then setting him down on the floor so he could play with his woodenpenguin toy, Kate looked at her adopted son with a clinical, if not critical, eye.
On the surface, Josh was the picture of health: chubby, rosycheeked, brighteyed, and beginning to show real hair rather than just a nimbus of dark fuzz. But Kate knew that this was a manifestation of the last segment of what she thought of as his “healthymanic” swing; in a week or less, the diarrhea and listlessness would return, followed by more serious lethargy and infection. Until the next transfusion.
Kate watched her baby lie on his back and wrestle with the wooden toytwo penguins on a wooden dolly, their rubbery flippers moving and beaks clacking as the wheels turned. Not a sophisticated toy in an age when Nintendo ruled, but one which fascinated Joshua for some reason.
Kate knew from her baby books and conversations with other mothers that an elevenmonthold should be sitting and standing by himself, perhaps even walking. Joshua was just mastering crawling. She knew that “normal” elevenmontholds could pull on some of their own clothes, lift a spoon, say several words including “Mama,” and understand the word “No.” Joshua could not handle clothing or a spoon, did not speak other than the occasional gibberish and rarely had to be told “no. “ He was a hesitant child, physically and socially. While obviously comfortable and happy with Kate and Julie, it had taken him weeks before he would relax with Tom.
Joshua dropped the penguin toy, rolled over onto his stomach, and began halfcreeping, halfcrawling toward the dining room.
“He's been exploring more,” said Julie, her mouth half-full of cake. “This. morning he headed for the front door when I let him out of his crib.”
Kate smiled. Neither she nor Julie thought that Joshua suffered from mental retardation as a result of his deprived infancy, merely delayed development. Kate had sought out opinions from at least three childhood development specialist friends, and each had different opinions on the longterm effects that five months in a Romanian orphanage or hospital would have on a child. Two of the specialists had seen Joshua, and both agreed that the boy seemed normal and healthy enough, merely small for his age and slow in development. So now, watching her son creep across the living room carpet and make noises rather similar to an airplane, Kate saw the behavior of a happy eight or ninemonthold rather than the elevenmonthold whose “birthday” they were celebrating.
Later, tucking him in his bed in her own bedroom, Kate lifted Joshua one final time and patted his back, smelling the talcumandbaby scent of him, feeling the fuzz of his hair against her cheek. His tiny hand curled against her face. His breathing showed that he was already asleep, drifting into whatever dreams elevenmontholds dreamt.
Kate set him on his stomach, pulled the covers up, and went out to talk to Julie for a while before each woman went back to her own computer terminal and her own studies.
On Wednesday the three RSProject teams came together in the windowless meeting room near the imaging lab. In addition to the team leaders and their top assistants, Director Mauberly and two other top CDC administrators were there.
Bob Underhill and Alan Stevens opened with their presentation on the absorption organ. When they were finished, the room was filled with a shocked silence.
Ken Mauberly broke the silence. “What you're saying is that this child . . . Joshua . . . has a specially mutated adaptation of the stomach lining which can absorb blood for nutritional purposes.”
Underhill nodded. “But that purpose is secondary, we think. The primary reason for this mutation's existence is to break down the blood into its constituent parts so that the retroviruswhat Chandra and Neuman are calling the Jviruscan most efficiently begin the distribution of the borrowed RNA for immunoreconstruction purposes.”
Mauberly chewed on his expensive fountain pen. “But for this to work, the child would have to ingest blood.”
Alan Stevens shook his head. “No. Blood is directed through the capillaries of the absorption organ no matter how it enters the body. We estimate that it actually would take several hours. longer for it to begin working there via ingestion rather than transfusion, but of course we haven't experimented with this . . . .” He paused, looked at Kate, and then looked down at his notes. Stevens cleared his throat. “No one wishes to give the patient blood to ingest, although if we are to continue the analysis of the absorption organ, this would be necessary.”
Mauberly was frowning. “I don't . . . I can't see the survival value in drinking blood. I mean, it makes one think of . . . well . . . “
Kate stood up. “Vampires?” she said. “Bela Lugosi?”
There was a ripple of nervous laughter.
“We've all made or heard those jokes since the project began,” said Kate, smiling, defusing the tension, “and it's obvious given the fact of where Joshua was born. Transylvania. Vampire country. And there may be a reason for that.” She nodded to Chandra.
The virologist stood up and used a remote control to turn out the lights and advance a slide on the projector. “These charts show a projected family or clan over twenty generations, since approximately fifteen hundred A.D. to the present, illustrating the spread of the Jvirus mutation within that family. Given the trait's recessiverecessive nature plus the high mortality rate one would assume with the immunodeficiency disorder which goes with the trait, you see that even if we might consider it a relatively benign mutation, its spread would not be too considerable . . . .”
Everyone worked at decoding the long strands of hypothetical family growth, the Jvirus mutation strands helpfully drawn in red. After thirty seconds it was Bob Underhill who whistled. “I thought that the mutation must be new or we would have seen it before, but this shows that it could be around for centuries without spreading too widely.”