“Why didn’t you save any adult springtimers? Weren’t you curious? Didn’t you expect questions if rescue came?”
“They only live a few weeks. Everything was going crazy and I just didn’t think…” Shanks cradled his head in his hands. “My lab was useless without power. Anyway, I was the insect expert. Dena had a better handle on human biology. I never thought anyone would come for me. I lived day-to-day.”
“But you saved the bodies. Bagged and buried.”
He nodded. “The colony fell apart without the robots—no refrigeration—so underground was the best place for them. Cool, thermally stable. I couldn’t get a message out and I didn’t want it to happen again to anyone else. I couldn’t fix it, but maybe someone who came later could. At least you’d know what happened. Was Mom still alive when you left Tau Ceti?”
Mike was taken aback for a moment, but he’d spent a good part of the night reviewing the records. “She’s teaching at Alexigrad University, on South Continent.” We should have brought her, Mike thought; hindsight was perfect. “That quote from Isaac Watts? Why’d she teach it to you?”
Shanks shrugged. “It’s from ‘Against Idleness.’ She said I should use it on Dad the next time he accused me of being too lazy to finish my own work. One bee, lots of flowers.”
Mike thought that one over for a minute, trying to fit it in with the diary he’d spent the night reading. “Weren’t you sick once? Your dad mentioned it in the diary; he thought you were malingering.”
“That was when my mother taught me the quote… I was in bed and had time to read.” Shanks’s eyes widened. “You see, I’d been transplanting some of her flowers from the forest when one of the caterpillars bit me. I had a reaction.”
“They aren’t supposed to bite, Shanks. Why do the caterpillars bite?”
He stared at the floor. Finally he said, “To protect the Wendy flowers.”
“Your parents didn’t do that, did they? If they had, it would have gone through the review process and been documented.”
He looked away for what seemed minutes, then sighed. “OK. Mom kept saying the flowers were so pretty they’d have to be protected, or people would pick them. So I took some genes from the collared peripatus and made a small modification. Just that and inactivating the code that keeps insects here from biting large animals. It bit, all right—I was down a few days. It was an idiosyncratic reaction, an accident, don’t you see? That’s all. I didn’t plan to be immune to a plague I didn’t make!”
Mike shook his head. “You were also a boy genius, and creative. It hurt you and you wanted to fix it, didn’t you? So you did something more.”
Shanks looked away.
“Please,” Mike pressed. “We need to know what you changed. There are lives at stake, which, if we were in our right minds, we would want to keep. Do you want to go through it all again? The blood? The graves? It wasn’t a mutation; it was something you engineered, wasn’t it? Before the genome was recorded. What? How?”
Shanks stared at the floor.
Mike tried again. “Nobody’s going to hurt you, Shanks; it’s gone well beyond anything that can be fixed by punishing you. Dena would forgive you, Shanks.” Like hell, he thought. But this wasn’t the time to stand on accuracy. “She was my sister, I knew her that well. Do it for her. Tell us.”
The revelation got Shanks to talk. “Your sister? God, I’m sorry.”
Mike waited.
Shanks’s eyes pleaded.
Mike stared.
Finally, Shanks said, “Yeah. I… made another little change—something to take the sting out of the bite. I found a virus in the insects’ saliva—normally, it doesn’t touch people. I changed its protein sheath to let it survive in human blood and made it soluble in lipids to get it past the blood-brain barrier—like it was food. That change didn’t show up until the second generation. It worked fine on my computer models, so I slipped the code into the gene design data base.
“The virus doesn’t lyse brain cells, but once in there it drops the code I made into the genes of brain cells it infects. Usually it does nothing, but in the back of the hypothalamus, it causes synapse growth between pain, smell, and endorphin cue areas, so that when something smells good, pain feels good.”
He shook his head and there were the beginnings of tears in his eyes. “It just releases a few endorphins if you get bit when picking a Wendy flower so the bite doesn’t hurt so much. It doesn’t block pain—you still feel it. You just interpret it differently.
“The adults aren’t supposed to bite. There must have been a mutation of one of the seed stock before we scanned the final genome. A very simple one—neoteny, the retention of some juvenile characteristics. In its descendants, the adults still bit people.”
A mutation? No, Mike thought, an error. He paused for a moment, struggling with memories of Dena. For her sake, he had to beat this. “Did you try to exterminate them?”
He sighed. “We were all bitten before we realized what was happening. People stopped trying. They became addicted, literally addicted, to damaging their bodies. So did the horses and the other large mammals. Commander Tanner, you know what was worst?”
Mike shook his head. What could possibly be worse?
“All this ecstasy around me. People transported in joy as they destroyed themselves. And I couldn’t be part of it, couldn’t feel it at all. I should have died, too, for what I did. But I couldn’t.” He half laughed and half sobbed. “I was immune.”
The frail, guilt-wracked survivor seemed more like a frightened man-child than a mass murderer. Mike thought of events of ages past—mass hysteria, witch burnings, cult suicides, thousands of people raising their arms and yelling, “Sieg heil,” people getting carried away with endorphin rewards when their minds knew better. How much, Mike wondered, was in Shanks’s retrovirus, and how much was already there?
“Shanks, we can’t bring back the dead, but maybe we can save our lives and this planet’s ecology so that it can still be settled. Help us.”
Mike waited the longest minute he’d ever waited in his life.
Then Shanks nodded slowly. “I’ll work with you—tell you everything I remember.” For Mike it seemed as if a veil had fallen away. Shanks’s inflection, indeed his whole attitude, seemed more adult.
“OK. I’m going to put you in touch with our medical people. They want to try to construct a countervirus.”
Mike decided to let Nadine sleep and got Dr. Bailey out of his orbital bed. The conversation was far too esoteric for Mike to follow, but it sounded like Shanks and Bailey might be able to trace the changes he’d made as a teenager over two dozen years ago. Despite the importance, Mike was suddenly too tired to pay attention. When they were done, he went back to his room and fell asleep instantly.
The call came while Mike was deep in dream. He was a Roman martyr being shot full of arrows while tied to a stake, freed from his flesh to ascend. He grew lighter and lighter, joy spreading through him…
“Commander, it’s Harrison. Mike, Mike?”
“Yes—Ian. What?”
“I’m at the pad. Mills sealed himself in on the command deck, disabled the shuttle’s computers, and says he’s going to fly it manually and crash into the settlement. Fry bloody everything and everyone if the antimatter containment goes. I’m trying overrides through the old colony launch support system, but they’re not compatible, so far. Or he’s blocked it somehow. Bloody out of his mind, he is.”
Damn, who wasn’t? Kendu Mills had shown no sign of any effect. But, Mike realized, it was just human nature to fight admitting that something like this was eating away inside you, even to yourself. “Tell him it isn’t necessary. We know what it is. We can fix it. Just hang on a few more hours.”