It sounded like something Salah might have taught her. Had Isabelle loved Salah? Marianne didn’t think so, even though they had been sleeping together.
The Rangers had not attended Bourgiba’s burial. Mason Kandiss had watched it from his post on the roof. Leo Brodie had had the good sense, or decency, or something—categories were so confused here—to stay inside the compound. What Brodie had done made possible Kindred’s only hope of planetary survival. It had also killed twenty-four people, ten of them children.
Marianne wondered if, circumstances permitting, Brodie would ever visit that other grave in the mountains, the one that Zoe Berman had told her about. Kandiss had dug the grave and scratched the name on the boulder acting as headstone: LT. OWEN RYAN LAMONT.
However, Marianne didn’t give much thought to Lieutenant Lamont. Her mind was full of the virophage.
How much wind? She rose from her pallet and made her way to Big Lab. In the predawn, Lu^kaj^ho stood guard at the east door. She saw with a little shock that he carried not a clumsy Kindred gun but an Army rifle. Leo Brodie’s? Owen Lamont’s?
“I greet you, Dr. Jenner,” he said in lilting English.
“I greet you, Lu^kaj^ho.”
A lot of wind, fresh and cool, in a starlit sky. In this continent slightly south of Kindred’s equator, winds blew east to west. This couldn’t possibly be better. The virophage would be carried across much of the landmass. If, of course, it was actually an airborne pathogen. If there was enough of it. If it could protect humans as well as leelees. If—
Enough.
Somewhere in Big Lab a baby cried, but no one else seemed awake. Marianne knew better—Branch would already be seated at what remained of their equipment, now all crowded into the leelee lab. The young man apparently never slept, no more than the Rangers did.
In the lab, Branch peered through a Kindred microscope.
“They’re too small to see,” Marianne said, although of course Branch knew that. Even the virophage’s host, R. sporii, was too small to see. They needed an electromicrograph, which of course they did not have.
“Look at this,” Branch said, without preamble. He got up to let Marianne at the microscope.
“Branch, there’s wind.”
He smiled. “I heard it. But look at this, Marianne. It’s tissue from the lung of an infected leelee.”
Marianne sat on the stool. As soon as the smoke cleared around the colony ship, Branch had gone inside, heavily masked. He had come out with sacks of leelees, chittering and smelling just as bad as their planet-bound cousins, even as other leelees found their own way out of the ship. Branch had described an interior full of flourishing plants, teeming fungi, and bodies that were nothing but skeletons, all soft tissue having been microscopically consumed by forty years of hothouse microbes. The whole thing, Branch said, had looked like a terrarium from a horror movie, and Marianne had decided that she didn’t need to experience it. They had the leelees.
Branch had set up fans inside the ship to blow infected air out, but that hadn’t been enough. They had needed wind, and now they had it. The incubation period of R. sporii in humans—Terran humans, anyway—was three days, which was how long the spore cloud had been on Kindred. Not that nonscientists could tell that: the cloud was silent, diffuse, invisible. But those infected would fall sick today.
Unless the virophages protected them—completely, partially, or not at all.
This made Branch’s research pointless, even if he’d had the most sophisticated equipment at the CDC. But research was what drove Branch, just as it drove Marianne, and so he was researching. Cultures with cells grown from sacrificed leelees dotted the room.
The image in the microscope showed three intact lung cells and parts of two others. Somewhere in each cell, too tiny to be seen, was R. sporii, and somewhere inside that was the virophage. The cells looked normal.
“You showed me this before,” Marianne said. “It just shows that the leelees aren’t infected.”
“It shows their lungs aren’t infected with Avenger. Now—”
“Wait—what did you just call the virophage?”
“Avenger. Well, I have to refer to it as something. The first virophage ever discovered was called Sputnik!”
“I know,” Marianne said. Sputnik was Russian for “fellow traveler,” and the researchers who discovered it had an unfortunate penchant for whimsy.
“Anyway, now look at this. They’re neurons from an infected leelee’s brain, from the area that seems to correspond roughly to Terran mammals’ cerebellum.” He removed the slide from the microscope and replaced it with another. “I stained them to emphasize receptors.”
Marianne peered into the ’scope. Four neurons—Branch had always prepared outstanding slides—and none of them looked like the cerebellum neurons of leelees sacrificed from Kindred. There were more axons and more receptors, bristly outgrowths that made the cells look like particularly dense hedgehogs.
She said, “I’m a geneticist, not a neurologist, but that looks like a lot more going on in the leelee brain than in the leelees we’re familiar with.” She glanced at a cage of live leelees, chittering and stinking. “Have you observed any behavioral differences in the ones you captured from the ship?”
“Nothing. And of course there’s no reason to think the virophage is responsible, but still… That’s an awful lot of evolution to have occurred in forty years without some unusual trigger.”
Marianne stood. “If it is evolution. If it is due to the virophage. But it doesn’t matter right now. The only thing that matters right now is the effect the virophage has on R. Sporii in the human body.”
“I know,” Branch said. “But… still… if only I had a gene sequencer and electromicrograph!”
Three days later, in midafternoon, the first Kindred died of R. sporii.
It was an adolescent boy in the camp. Marianne never knew his name. The compound had no doctor now, and when a young girl came running across the perimeter for help, Marianne had none to give. Noah went back with the girl, returning to the compound a half hour later. He looked dazed.
“It happens so fast,” he said.
“I know,” Marianne said. She had seen it on Terra: adult respiratory distress syndrome, a catchall diagnosis. Gasps for air as lung tissue became heavier and heavier with fluid seeping into the lungs. Each breath required more and more effort. An X-ray of lung tissue—if they had that equipment here—would show “whiteout”—so much fluid in the lungs increasing the radiological density that the image looked like a snowstorm.
Noah clutched at Marianne’s arm as if he were a child again and she, his mother, could fix anything wrong. But she couldn’t, and in a moment he dropped her arm.
Marianne scanned the horizon. Trees waved gracefully in a west–east wind. Would this poor boy’s death be an isolated case? An outlier or a harbinger?
Science always proceeded by trial and error, by living with doubt, by refusing to grab prematurely onto certainty. But this was a huge trial, a massive amount of doubt, and devoid of any certainty at all.