“So I can,” Susan said. “Zack…” She stopped but not, it seemed to Zack, because she didn’t know what to say, or how to say it. She was waiting for him.
He walked carefully, as if something in him might break, to the side of the bed. There was no chair so he stood, putting his hand on her shoulder, looking down at her. Please, Sue—help me.
She did, just as she always had. “I feel fine, Zack. Shaky physically and mentally, but I’m hoping both will pass. I just need to get used to thinking… like this.”
He wasn’t yet ready to ask what “like this” meant for her, or to compare it to what had been said by those who’d awakened before her. That wasn’t what he wanted to know, anyway.
Susan continued, “What are you afraid of?”
He blurted out, “That now I won’t be smart enough for you.”
Her eyes widened; he’d surprised her. That he could do that was oddly reassuring. She wasn’t omniscient.
She said, “Of course you are. But I didn’t marry you for your admittedly formidable intellect, you know. That was never why I loved you. It still isn’t, and I still love you.”
Caity hugged Bollers, listening hard.
Susan added, “Nothing will change that. Not even if I were Einstein—which I’m not—and you were a block of wood.”
Caity said seriously, “If Daddy was a block of wood then he couldn’t talk.”
Zack said, “And from what I remember, Einstein didn’t treat his wives particularly well.” Relief filled his body, sweet as fresh strawberries in the sun, light as helium.
“Mommy, I want to write a story about a block of wood that talks. Where’s my tablet?”
Susan said, “She can write now?”
“A little,” Zack said, “and read a lot. Oh, Sue—”
“Yes,” she said. “Now tell me everything that’s happened since I fell asleep. Then I’ll try to describe what this is like for me.”
“Mommy, Daddy, I want you to help me with my tablet!”
“You will have to wait your turn,” Susan said in her no-nonsense, don’t-mess-with-me voice. That, even more than what she’d said, reassured Zack. Susan had always been the one to discipline Caity, Zack the one to spoil her.
They were still all themselves. They were still all here. They could ride out Marianne’s leap of punctuated evolution, or anything else. Together.
“Zack,” Tricia said, barging through the curtain. “Oh, hello, Ms. McKay. Zack, sorry to intrude, but Toni says you should come to the lab right away.”
“Not now.”
“Now,” Tricia said.
Lab techs did not command department heads. Zack looked up, irritated until he saw Tricia’s face. He hadn’t known the usually quiet woman could look like that. “What is it? What’s happened?” Another Awakened gone crazy, like the man who’d attacked Marianne? An escape of live sparrows with RSA? A breach of the dome by New America?
Tricia said, “Toni says she’s made the gene drive. To wipe out the birds. She’s got it, and it works.”
“We were tinkering with the wrong thing,” Toni said. “We were trying to modify the DNA in the gametes. I modified the histones instead.”
Zack scanned the rest of her notes. She’d done an amazing job. Histones, spool-shaped proteins around which the DNA in a eukaryote was strung, were more tractable than genes. Histone modification could radically alter the activity of a gene without altering its DNA sequence. When the cells divided, the alterations were passed on to the daughter cells. Virology already possessed a gamut of proteins capable of altering histones, but Toni had found a new one. More: she had found a way to exploit epistasis, the effects of genetic mutations that depend on other mutations. Her notes—much clearer than before she’d Awakened!—showed how her modified histones affected other histones, changing the behavior of cell signaling, pasting the genemod into two copies of all cells.
He said, “The birds…”
“Yes. I’ve been inserting trial gene-drive mods into frozen sparrow embryos. They paste themselves beautifully into both chromosomes. I mated the offspring with another nest brought into artificial readiness. From the males—nada. Nothing. Zilch. The males are sterile. The females reproduced, and of their offspring, all the males were healthy but sterile. We’ll get a selective sweep, Zack. Within a few decades, there will be no more sparrows left in North America—and no RSA. Eventually, the disease will be gone from the entire world.”
He had to sit down. It wasn’t her conclusion that staggered him—they had known that was what a successful gene drive would do—it was her science. How had she done that so fast? She’d had to breed two generations of sparrows… of course, sparrows mated very young, and hormones could bring them into fertility out of season. Still, she must have had viable gene candidates ready to go shortly after she awakened.
He looked at her with awe.
She frowned. “But the other gene drive, the one to eliminate RSA directly instead of going through reproduction—I haven’t cracked that one yet.”
He nodded. She would crack it. All they needed now was time.
“I’m tired,” Toni said abruptly. “I’m going to sleep. Will you come get me if Nicole wakes up?”
Zack nodded again. Toni left. Zack sat still a long time, ignored by everyone working in the lab around him.
He saw what Toni, for all her new brilliance, did not. Toni’s incredible intelligence was focused on science—as it always had been. But there was more than science involved. Inserting this gene drive into more birds and then releasing them into the wild was a political decision, with enormous ecological implications. Look what had happened thirty-eight years ago, when the original R. sporii had nearly wiped out eight species of mice. Entire economies had been shaken.
Probably, given the way things were now, releasing the birds would be a military decision, made at Fort Hood. He didn’t trust military decisions. Not anybody’s, no matter how much “military intelligence” they were based on—
“Oh my God,” he said aloud, suddenly realizing, and everybody in the lab stopped and stared at him.
Hillson said to Jason, “The deranged corporal who attacked Dr. Jenner is under restraint.”
“Good.” They had no psychiatrist at the base, although that was the least of the problems represented by Corporal Douglas Porter. Hillson, however, didn’t yet realize that.
The master sergeant stood by the doorway of the command post, making his twice-daily report. As always, Hillson’s uniform looked rumpled and slightly askew, as if assembled in the dark. Which it might have been; Hillson seemed to need almost no sleep. His homely, intelligent features gave away nothing, but Jason heard volumes in his voice, most of it either bewildered or disapproving.
“The convoy from Fort Hood is still eight days out,” Hillson said. “It was attacked by New America just west of the Los Angeles nuclear zone. Lieutenant Li relayed what the Return picked up of the convoy’s radio signals to Fort Hood.”
Jason, startled, said, “The Return can do that now?”
“Yes,” Hillson said, disapproval lapsing very briefly into Army pride. “Specialist Martin is getting pretty good with that alien hardware. She figured out more of the communications capabilities than that lab tech did. That Branch Carter.”
“Good. What did Li say about the attack?”
“The convoy leader, a Major Highland… do you know him, sir?”
“We were at West Point together.” And Highland had been a prick even then.
“Oh,” Hillson said, with the enlisted man’s disdain for the academy. “Anyway, sir, the convoy wiped out the enemy. But it slowed them, for repairs and medical and burials and such. So eight more days, maybe more.”