“Stand, brother mine,” Mee^hao¡ said.
Noah stood. Mee^hao¡ did something with the rod, and the energy shield dissolved around Noah.
Not only a baptism—an operation.
The first breath of World air almost made him vomit. No, the queasiness was excitement, not the air. It tasted strange, and with the second panicky breath he felt he wasn’t getting enough of it. But he knew that was just the lower oxygen content. The Embassy was at sea level; the O2 concentration of World matched that at 12,000 feet. His lungs would adapt. His marrow would produce more red corpuscles. The Worlders had evolved for this; Noah would evolve, too.
The air smelled strange.
His legs buckled slightly, but before Llaa^moh¡, whom he had once known as Jones, could step toward him, Noah braced himself and smiled. He was all right. He was here. He was—
“Brother mine” went around the circle, and then the formalities were over and they all hugged him, and for the first time in 150,000 years, Terran skin touched the skin of humans from the stars.
The security officer met Marianne and Evan in their lab and conducted them to a euchre game in the observation area outside the BSL4 lab.
From the first time she’d come here, Marianne had been appalled by the amateurishness of the entire setup. Granted, this was a bunch of scientists, not the CIA. Still, the Denebs had to wonder why euchre—or backgammon or chess or Monopoly, it varied—was being played here instead of at one of the comfortable Commons or cafeterias. Why two scientists were constantly at work in the negative-pressure lab even when they seemed to have nothing to do. Why the euchre players paid more attention to the screens monitoring the scientists’ vitals than to the card game.
Dr. Julia Namechek and Dr. Trevor Lloyd. Both young, strong, and self-infected with spore disease. They moved around the BSL4 lab in full space suits, breathing tubes attached to the air supply in the ceiling. Surely the Denebs’ energy suits would be better for this kind of work, but the suits had not been offered to the Terrans.
“When?” Marianne murmured, playing the nine of clubs.
“Three days ago,” said a physician whose name Marianne had not caught.
Spoor disease (the name deliberately unimaginative, non-inflammatory) had turned up in mice after three days. Marianne was not a physician, but she could read a vitals screen. Neither Namechek nor Lloyd, busily working in their space suits behind glass, showed the slightest signs of infection. This was, in fact, the third time that the two had tried to infect themselves by breathing in the spores. Each occasion had been preceded by weeks of preparation. Those times, nothing had happened, either, and no one knew why.
Physicians experimenting on themselves were not unknown in research medicine. Edward Jenner had infected himself—and the eight-year-old son of his gardener—with cowpox to develop the smallpox vaccine. Jesse William Lazear infected himself with yellow fever from mosquitoes, in order to confirm that mosquitoes were indeed the transmission vector. Julio Barrera gave himself Argentine hemorrhagic fever; Barry Marshall drank a solution H. pylori to prove the bacterium caused peptic ulcers; Pradeep Seth injected himself with an experimental vaccine for HIV.
Marianne understood the reasons for the supposed secrecy of this experiment. The newspapers that came in on the mail runs glowed luridly with speculations about human experimentation aboard the Embassy. Journalists ignited their pages with “Goebbels,” “Guatemalan syphilis trials,” “Japanese Unit 731.” And those were the mainstream journalists. The tabloids and fringe papers invented so many details about Deneb atrocities on humans that the newsprint practically dripped with blood and body parts. The online news sources were, if anything, even worse. No, such “journalists” would never believe that Drs. Namechek and Lloyd had given spore disease to themselves and without the aliens’ knowing it.
Actually, Marianne didn’t believe that, either. The Denebs were too intelligent, too technologically advanced, too careful. They had to know this experiment was going on. They had to be permitting it. No matter how benign and peaceful their culture, they were human. Their lack of interference was a way of ensuring CYA deniability.
“Your turn, Dr. Jenner,” said Syed Sharma, a very formal microbiologist from Mumbai. He was the only player wearing a suit.
“Oh, sorry,” Marianne said. “What’s trump again?”
Evan, her partner, said, “Spades. Don’t trump my ace again.”
“No table talk, please,” Sharma said.
Marianne studied her hand, trying to remember what had been played. She had never been a good card player. She didn’t like cards. And there was nothing to see here, anyway. Evan could bring her the results, if any, of the clandestine experiment. It was possible that the two scientists had not been infected, after all—not this time nor the previous two. It was possible that the pathogen had mutated, or just hadn’t taken hold in these two particular people, or was being administered with the wrong vector. Stubbins Firth, despite heroic and disgusting measures, had never succeeded in infecting himself with yellow fever because he never understood how it was transmitted. Pathogen research was still part art, part luck.
“I fold,” she said, before she remembered that “folding” was poker, not euchre. She tried a weak smile. “I’m very tired.”
“Go to bed, Dr. Jenner,” said Seyd Sharma. Marianne gave him a grateful look, which he did not see as he frowned at his cards. She left.
Just as she reached the end of the long corridor leading to the labs, the door opened and a security guard hurried through, face twisted with some strong emotion. Her heart stopped. What fresh disaster now? She said, “Did anything—” but before she could finish the question he had pushed past her and hurried on.
Marianne hesitated. Follow him to hear the news or wait until—
The lab exploded.
Marianne was hurled to the floor. Walls around her, the tough but thin membrane-like walls favored by the Denebs, tore. People screamed, sirens sounded, pulsing pain tore through Marianne’s head like a dark, viscous tsunami.
Then everything went black.
She woke alone in a room. Small, white, windowless, with one clear wall, two doors, a pass-through compartment. Immediately, she knew, even before she detected the faint hum of blown air: a quarantine room with negative pressure. The second door, locked, led to a BSL4 operating room for emergency procedures and autopsies. The explosion had exposed her to spores from the experimental lab.
Bandages wreathed her head; she must have hit it when she fell, got a concussion, and needed stitches. Nothing else on her seemed damaged. Gingerly she sat up, aware of the IV tube and catheter and pulse oximeter, and waiting for the headache. It was there, but very faint. Her movement set off a faint gong somewhere and Dr. Ann Potter, a physician whom Marianne knew slightly, appeared on the other side of the clear glass wall.
The doctor said, her voice coming from the ceiling as if she were just one more alien, “You’re awake. What do you feel?”
“Headache. Not terrible. What… what happened?”
“Let me ask you some questions first.” She was asked her name, the date, her location, the name of the president—
“Enough!” Marianne said. “I’m fine! What happened?” But she already knew. Hers was the only bed in the quarantine room.
Dr. Potter paid her the compliment of truth. “It was a suicide bomber. He—”
“The others? Evan Blanford?”