She slipped out of the ward and asked a startled soldier on his way to the mess, “Where can I find Colin Jenner?”
“Ma’am?”
“Colin Jenner,” she said patiently. “Please find him and then take me to him.”
He hesitated, evidently weighing his choices. She was, after all, the CO’s grandmother. He said, “Yes, ma’am,” and delayed his breakfast long enough to hunt up Colin in his Settler meeting and take Marianne to him.
When Colin had finished his recitation of attacks and counterattacks; of his and Lindy’s supremely stupid, brave attempt to get a message to the signal station; of ship repairs and comas and awakenings, he said, “Grandma, tell me how it feels.”
That was Colin—feeling before all. She said, “It doesn’t ‘feel’ like anything. I just think differently. Faster, more deeply. Colin, do you remember when you were small and were fascinated with elephants?”
“Of course. I drew them all the time.”
“You did more than draw them. You made up stories about them, you talked to pretend elephants, you dreamed about rescuing an elephant in a basement, like in your favorite picture book.”
He smiled. “I remember.”
“I want to tell you about genetic evolution. After all, that’s what I am, an evolutionary geneticist, the only one here at the base. Evolution is a process, but not an evenly paced one.”
“I know that much,” Colin said.
“I’m rehearsing here, Colin—trying to find the one strand to explain it simply.” And each idea—almost each word—led to other strands, other ideas. Her task now was to separate out the ones that would make sense to nonscientists. This was urgent.
He said, “You’re trying to find the words to explain it to Jason, when he’s being Colonel Jenner.”
Even as a child, Colin had been quick to perceive the cues in human relations. Marianne took his hand where it rested on his knee, above the cast on his shattered leg. Her deeply veined hand squeezed his muscular fingers, on which his Settlement sunburn had mostly faded. She unknotted strands of thought in her mind, knotted them again, pruned and simplified.
“There are three parts to what I want to tell you. First, that punctuated evolution led to long periods where nothing much seemed to change in human beings, followed by rapid change. Five or six million years ago, proto-humans diverged from apes. Two hundred thousand years ago, by some estimates, toolmaking began. A hundred thousand years ago, modern humans emerged in Africa. Seventy thousand years ago, the first cloud of R. sporii hit Terra, wiping out most of humanity except those with natural immunity—which is why Worlders aren’t immune. They’d already been taken from Terra to World by the so-called super-aliens. About forty thousand years ago, the Great Leap happened—Colin, are you following this?”
“Every word. I already knew it, you know. And so does Jason.”
“Just bear with me. Humans had had a long period of cultural stagnation. Really long. Then, during the Great Leap Forward, modern humans started burying their dead with funeral rituals, making clothing with bone needles, carving buttons and fishhooks, creating jewelry and art. By thirty-six thousand years ago, they had fertility figurines and cave paintings and musical pipes.
“Some equivalent of the Great Leap must have occurred on World, too, or humans there would have stayed at an earlier stagnant level. I’ll come back to that.”
Colin nodded. He turned his head slightly—hearing something that she could not? Marianne didn’t interrupt herself to find out. She wouldn’t lose her line of thought, but he might.
“That’s the history, or a brief version of it. Second comes the genetic part. This is all known science. Our divergence from apes correlates with multiple mutations in a region of the genome called HAR1—human accelerated region one. The human brain developed a much wrinklier cortex, to mention just one change. Other mutations in other genes correlate with other advances. One of them—this is important—is a gene called ASPM, on chromosome one, which has mutated fifteen times in the last six million years, and the mutations seem to correlate with milestones in human evolution. The last mutation occurred along with the development of agriculture and sophisticated writing. Of course, mutations can be destructive, as well—an ASPM allele causes microcephaly in fetuses, who are born with small brains—in fact, brains exactly the size of Australopithecus africanus a few million years ago. And changes in one gene can affect others. ASPM is seminal. It affects the division of cells in developing brains. It affects other cells. It affects coding in IQ domains of the human genome.”
Colin’s face crinkled in concentration. “So you think that everybody who went into a v-coma had this mutation? In that one gene?”
“Yes, yes. Or maybe in two copies of the gene. I can talk to Zack McKay about that.”
“But what does this have to do with—”
She said, “I think the virophage tweaked the ASPM gene. The v-comas are the next stage in human evolution.”
Colin opened his mouth, then closed it again. When he spoke, the sentiment was pure Colin, the democratic populist. “But not for everybody? That’s not fair.”
“No, dear heart. Evolution never is. This may or may not be evolution, depending on whether it gets into the germ line and can be passed on to the next generation. But there’s one more thing.”
He said unhappily, “Go ahead.”
“Microbes.”
“R. sporii?”
“No, its virophage. The fact that some humans, those with—maybe—a given mutated allele—fall into a coma and others don’t—that means something important. It means we’ve encountered this virophage before, or we wouldn’t have the genes to react to it. And since some of those in comas are Worlders, humanity encountered the virophage before a hundred and forty thousand years ago.”
Colin frowned. “Are you saying that the virophage caused humans to… oh, I don’t know… diverge from apes? Millions of years ago?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure we can know. But that’s the wrong question.”
“Grandma, you look tired. Maybe you should—”
“No, let me finish! We’ve been asking ourselves the wrong question for decades now—ever since Worlders first landed in New York Harbor. We’ve been asking ‘What do we want?’ How can we develop a vaccine against the spore cloud, counteract the virophage, eliminate RSA—they’re all the wrong questions.”
Coin shifted his weight in his powerchair. “What’s the right question?”
Marianne leaned forward, swayed, caught herself. “The right question is ‘What do the microbes want?’”
“Microbes don’t ‘want’ anything! They’re not sentient!”
“No. But natural selection leads to the proliferation of traits that aid their survival. So why select for a strategy that essentially results in rewiring their human hosts’ brains? What does the virophage gain when it does that? There are a lot of potential answers.
“Maybe they need some protein found in neurons or synapses or brain-chemical cascades, and the rewiring causes more of that protein to be made.
“Maybe they’ve evolved to hijack our cellular machinery to aid their reproductive success, as a lot of viruses and parasites have evolved to do with all kinds of animals.
“Maybe they use us to carry them elsewhere so their territory is increased and so their numbers grow. Like cherries, who use mammals to eat their fruit and excrete the seeds in new places, or burdocks that cling to fur to get seeds somewhere else. That’s how both smallpox and measles pathogens got to the United States—humans brought them.”
Colin said, “So which is it? What does the virophage ‘want’?”