Noah knew it would not take much to ignite these desperate people into attacking him, the alien-looking stand-in for the Worlders they had no way to reach.
He said gently to the young man, to all of them, to his absent and injured and courageous mother: “I’m going to explain your real choices. Please listen.”
Something was wrong.
One day passed, then another, then another. Marianne did not get sick. Nor did Ahmed Rafat and Penny Hodgson. Robbie Chavez did, but not very.
The lead immunologist left aboard the Embassy, Harrison Rice, stood with Ann Potter in front of Marianne’s glass quarantine cage, known as a “slammer.” He was updating Marianne on the latest lab reports. In identical slammers, two across a narrow corridor and one beside her, Marianne could see the three other infected people. The rooms had been created, as if by alchemy, by a Deneb that Marianne had not seen before—presumably an engineer of some unknowable building methods. Ahmed stood close to his glass, listening. Penny was asleep. Robbie, his face filmed with sweat, lay in bed, listening.
Ann Potter said, “You’re not initially viremic but—”
“What does that mean?” Marianne interrupted.
Dr. Rice answered. He was a big, bluff Canadian who looked more like a truck driver who hunted moose than like a Nobel Prize winner. In his sixties, still strong as a mountain, he had worked with Ebola, Marburg, Lassa fever, and Nipah, both in the field and in the lab.
He said, “It means lab tests show that as with Namechek and Lloyd, the spores were detectable in the first samples taken from your respiratory tract. So the virus should be present in your bloodstream and so have access to the rest of your body. However, we can’t find it. Well, that can happen. Viruses are elusive. But as far as we can tell, you aren’t developing antibodies against the virus, as the infected mice did. That may mean that we just haven’t isolated the antibodies yet. Or that your body doesn’t consider the virus a foreign invader, which seems unlikely. Or that in humans but not in mice, the virus has dived into an organ to multiply until its offspring burst out again. Malaria does that. Or that the virus samples in the lab, grown artificially, have mutated into harmlessness, differing from their wild cousins in the approaching cloud. Or it’s possible that none of us know what the hell we’re doing with this crazy pathogen.”
Marianne said, “What do the Denebs think?” Supposedly Rice was co-lead with Deneb Scientist Jones.
He said, his anger palpable even through the glass wall of the slammer, “I have no idea what they think. None of us have seen any of them.”
“Not seen them?”
“No. We share all our data and samples, of course. Half of the samples go into an airlock for them, and the data over the LAN. But all we get in return is a thank-you on screen. Maybe they’re not making progress, either, but at least they could tell us what they haven’t discovered.”
“Do we know… this may sound weird, but do we know that they’re still here at all? Is it possible they all left Earth already?” Noah.
He said, “It’s possible, I suppose. We have no news from the outside world, of course, so it’s possible they pre-recorded all those thank-yous, blew up New York, and took off for the stars. But I don’t think so. If they had, they’d have least unsealed us from this floating plastic bubble. Which, incidentally, has become completely opaque, even on the observation deck.”
Marianne hadn’t known there was an observation deck. She and Evan had not found it during their one exploration of the Embassy.
Dr. Rice continued. “Your cells are not making an interferon response, either. That’s a small protein molecule that can be produced in any cell in response to the presence of viral nucleic acid. You’re not making it.”
“Which means…”
“Probably it means that there is no viral nucleic acid in your cells.”
“Are Robbie’s cells making interferon?”
“Yes. Also antibodies. Plus immune responses like—Ann, what does your chart on Chavez show for this morning?”
Ann said, “Fever of 101, not at all dangerous. Chest congestion, also not at dangerous levels, some sinus involvement. He has the equivalent of mild bronchitis.”
Marianne said, “But why is Robbie sick when the rest of us aren’t?”
“Ah,” Harrison Rice said, and for the first time she heard the trace of a Canadian accent, “that’s the big question, isn’t it? In immunology, it always is. Sometimes genetic differences between infected hosts are the critical piece of the puzzle in understanding why an identical virus causes serious disease or death in one individual—or one group—and little reaction or none at all in other people. Is Robbie sick and you not because of your respective genes? We don’t know.”
“But you can use Robbie’s antibodies to maybe develop a vaccine?”
He didn’t answer. She knew the second the words left her mouth how stupid they were. Rice might have antibodies, but he had no time. None of them had enough time.
Yet they all worked on, as if they did. Because that’s what humans did.
Instead of answering her question, he said, “I need more samples, Marianne.”
“Yes.”
Fifteen minutes later he entered her slammer, dressed in full space suit and sounding as if speaking through a vacuum cleaner. “Blood samples plus a tissue biopsy, just lie back down and hold still, please…”
During a previous visit, he had told her of an old joke among immunologists working with lethal diseases: “The first person to isolate a virus in the lab by getting infected is a hero. The second is a fool.” Well, that made Marianne a fool. So be it.
She said to Rice, “And the aliens haven’t… Ow!”
“Baby.” He withdrew the biopsy needle and slapped a bandage over the site.
She tried again. “And the aliens haven’t commented at all on Robbie’s diagnosis? Not a word?”
“Not a word.”
Marianne frowned. “Something isn’t right here.”
“No,” Rice said, bagging his samples, “it certainly is not.”
Nothing, Noah thought, had ever felt more right, not in his entire life.
He raised himself on one elbow and looked down at Llaa^moh¡. She still slept, her naked body and long legs tangled in the light blanket made of some substance he could not name. Her wiry dark hair smelled of something like cinnamon, although it probably wasn’t. The blanket smelled of sex.
He knew now why he had not felt the same shock of recognition at their first meeting that he had felt with Mee^hao¡ and the unnamed New York nurse and surly young Tony Schrupp. After the World geneticists had done their work, Mee^hao¡ had explained it to him. Noah felt profound relief. He and Llaa^moh¡ shared a mitochondrial DNA group, but not a nuclear DNA one. They were not too genetically close to mate.
Of course, they could have had sex anyway; World had early, and without cultural shame or religious prejudice, discovered birth control. But for the first time in his life, Noah did not want just sex. He wanted to mate.
The miracle was that she did, too. Initially he feared that for her it was mere novelty: be the first Worlder to sleep with a Terran! But it was not. Just yesterday they had signed a five-year mating contract, followed by a lovely ceremony in the garden to which every single Worlder had come. Noah had never known exactly how many were aboard the Embassy; now he did. They had all danced with him, every single one, and also with her. Mee^hao¡ himself had pierced their right ears and hung from them the wedding silver, shaped like stylized versions of the small flowers that had once, very long ago, been the real thing.