There were any number of explanations. Someone could have been using the virus as a carrier in genetic surgery, replacing its dangerous parts with genes that it could insert into a chromosome. They did not grow freaks at that outpost, but they might have made the virus stocks that the freaks were infected with when they were no more than one-cell zygotes. Someone could have been careless with their sterile technique, especially if they had not been told what the virus was used for and how dangerous it was.
The looming green virus particle, as absurd and obscene that size as the magnified head of a fly, dimmed. The computer was almost through the block. Lais had been in the company of machines so long that they seemed to have as much personality as people; this one muttered and grumbled at her for stealing its time. It lumbered to stop her, a hippopotamus playing crocodile.
Lais had dug the virus up outside in the dirt, free, by chance, and there was a lot of it. If it were infectious-- and it seemed complete-- it could be infecting people at and around the outpost, not very many, but some, integrating itself into their chromosomes, eradicating the effects of clean-gening. It might wait ten or fifteen or fifty years, or forever, but when injury or radiation or carcinogen induced it out, it would begin to kill. It would be too late to cure people of it then, just as it was for Lais; the old, crippling methods, surgery, radiation, might work for a few, but if the disease were similar to hers, fast-growing, metastasizing, nothing would be much use.
The light on the screen began to go out. She moved quickly and stored the map programs, the maps, the drone data.
She hesitated. In a moment it would be too late. She felt the vengeful animals of memories trying to hold her back. She jabbed with anger at the keyboard, and sent the control data into storage with the rest as the last bright lines faded from the screen.
The data was there, for them to notice and fear, or ignore and pay the price. She would give them that much warning. The normals might find a way to clean-gene people after they were grown; they might even set Fellows to work on the problem, and let them share the benefits. Lais wondered at her own
naivete, that after everything a small part of her still hoped her people might finally be forgiven. She left it all behind, even the data cubes, and went back out onto the mall.
* * *
A hovercar whirred a few streets back; sharp beams from its searchlights touched the edges and corners of buildings. She walked faster, then ran painfully past firmly shut doors to a piece of sculpture that doubled as a sitting-park. She crawled into the deepest and most enclosed alcove she could reach. Outside she could hear the security car intruding on the pedestrian mall. The sucks passed without suspecting her presence, not recognizing the sculpture as a children's toy, a place to hide and climb and play, a place for transients to sleep in good weather, a place that, tonight, was Lais' alone.
There was a tiny window by her shoulder that cut through a meter of stone to the outside. Moonlight polished a square of the wall that narrowed, crept upward, and vanished as the moon set;
Lais put her head on her knees and focused all her attention on herself, tracing lines of fatigue through her muscles to extrapolate her reserves of stamina, probing at the wells of pain in her body and in her bones. She had become almost accustomed to betrayal by the physical part of herself, but she was still used to relying on her mind. The slight tilt from a fine edge of alertness was too recent for her to accept. Now, forcing herself to be aware of everything she was, she was frightened by the changes to the edge of panic. She closed her eyes and fought it down, wrestling with a feeling like a great gray slug in her stomach and a small brown millipede in her throat. Both of them retreated, temporarily. Tears tickled her cheeks, touched her lips with salt; she scrubbed them away on her rough sleeve.
She felt marginally better. It had occurred to her that she felt light-headed and removed and hallucinatory because of hunger, not because of advancing pathological changes in her brain; that helped. It was another matter of relying on feedback from a faulty instrument. The thought of food was still nauseating. It would be harder to eat the longer she put it off, but, then, perhaps it was too late to matter anymore.
The sitting-park restored her, as it was meant to; for her it was the silence and isolation, the slight respite from cold and the clean twisting lines of it, whatever reasons others had for responding. She would have liked to stay.
She walked a long way toward the edge of the bazaar. Her knees still hurt-- it took her a few minutes to remember when she had fallen, and why; it seemed a very long time before-- and her legs began to ache. Resting again, she sat on a wall at the edge of the bazaar, at the edge of the mountaintop, looking down over a city of pinpoint lights (holes in the ground to hell? but the lights were gold and silver, not crimson). The lights led in lines down the flanks of the mountain, dendrites from the cell of the city and its nucleus of landing field. She knew she could get out of Highport. She believed she could run so far that they would not catch her until too late; she hoped they would never find her, and she hoped her body would fail her before her mind did, or that she would have courage and presence enough to kill herself if it did not or if the pain grew great enough to break her. All she really had to do was get to the bottom of the mountain, and past the foothills, until she reached lush jungle and great heat and a climate like an incubator, where life processes are faster and scavengers prowl, and the destruction of decomposition is rapid and complete. The jungle would conspire with her to deny the Institute what she considered most precious, knowledge. She slipped off the wall and started down the hill. Before her the sky was changing from midnight blue to gray and scarlet with the dawn.
Published by Alexandria Digital Literature. (http://www.alexlit.com/)
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