Jacqui’s pitying look said You need help. Oliver shaded in the lion’s mane. Noah wondered why, of all the Terrans of L7 mitochondrial haplotype, he was stuck with these two. He stood. “I have to study.”
“I wish I had your fluency in World,” Jacqui said. “It would help my work so much.”
So study it. But Noah knew she wouldn’t, not the way he was doing. She wanted the quick harvest of startling data, not… whatever it was he wanted.
Becoming an alien. Oliver was more correct than Noah’s flip answer. And yet Noah had been right, too, which was something he could never explain to anyone, least of all his mother. Whom he was supposed to visit this morning, since she could not come to him.
All at once Noah knew that he was not going to keep that appointment. Although he flinched at the thought of hurting Marianne, he was not going to leave the World section of the Embassy. Not now, not ever. He couldn’t account for this feeling, so strong that it seemed to infuse his entire being, like oxygen in the blood. But he had to stay here, where he belonged. Irrational, but—as Evan would have said—there it was, mustn’t grumble, at least it made a change, no use going on about it.
He had never liked Evan.
In his room, Noah took pen and a pad of paper to write a note to his mother. The words did not come easy. All his life he had disappointed her, but not like this.
Dear Mom—I know we were going to get together this afternoon but—
Dear Mom—I wish I could see you as we planned but—
Dear Mom—We need to postpone our visit because Ambassador Smith has asked me if this afternoon I would—
Noah pulled at the skin on his face, realized that was his mother’s gesture, and stopped. He looked longingly at the little cubes that held his language lessons. As the cube spoke World, holofigures in the cube acted out the meaning. After Noah repeated each phrase, it corrected his pronunciation until he got it right.
“My two brothers live with my mother and me in this dwelling,” a smiling girl said in the holocube, in World. Two boys, one younger than she and one much older, appeared beside her with a much older woman behind them, all four with similar features, a shimmering dome behind them.
“‘My two brothers live with my mother and me in this dwelling,’” Noah repeated. The World tenses were tricky; these verbs were the ones for things that not only could change, but could change without the speaker’s having much say about events. A mother could die. The family could be chosen for a space colony. The older brother could marry and move in with his wife’s family.
Sometimes things were beyond your control and you had no real choice.
Dear Mom—I can’t come. I’m sorry. I love you. Noah
CHAPTER 8
S minus 4 months
The work—anybody’s work—was not going well.
It seemed to be proceeding at an astonishing pace, but Marianne—and everyone else—knew that was an illusion. She sat in the auditorium for the monthly report, Evan beside her. This time, no Denebs were present—why not? She listened to Terence Manning enumerate what, under any other circumstances, would have been incredibly rapid triumphs.
“We have succeeded in isolating the virus,” Manning said, “although not in growing it in vitro. After isolation, we amplified it with the usual polymerase processes. The virus has been sequenced and—only a few days ago!—captured on an electromicrograph image, which, as most of you know, can be notoriously difficult. Here it is.”
A graphic appeared on the wall behind Manning: fuzzy concentric circles blending into each other in shades of gray. Manning ran his hand over his head, now completely bald. Had he shaved his last three hairs, Marianne wondered irrelevantly. Or had they just given up and fallen out from stress?
“The virion appears to be related to known paramyxoviruses, although the gene sequence, which we now have, does not exactly match any of them. It is a negative-sense single-stranded RNA virus. Paramyxoviruses, to which it may or may not be directly related, are responsible for a number of human and animal diseases, including parainfluenza, mumps, measles, pneumonia, and canine distemper. This family of viruses jumps species more easily than any other. From what we have determined so far, it most closely resembles both Hendra and Nipah viruses, which are highly contagious and highly virulent.
“The genome follows the paramyxovirus ‘Rule of Six,’ in that the total length of the genome in nucleotides is almost always a multiple of six. The spore virus consists of twenty-one genes with 21,648 base pairs. That makes it a large virus, but by no means the largest we know of. Details of sequence, structure, envelope proteins, et cetera, can be found on the LAN. I want to especially thank Drs. Yu, Sedley, and Lapka for their valuable work in identifying Respirovirus sporii.”
Applause. Marianne still stared at the simple, deadly image behind Manning. An unwelcome thought had seized her: The viral image looked not unlike a fuzzy picture of a not-too-well-preserved trilobite. Trilobites had been the dominant life-form on Earth for three hundred million years and comprised more than ten thousand species. All gone now. Humans could be gone, too, after a much briefer reign.
But we survived so much! The Ice Age, terrible predators, the “bottleneck event” of seventy thousand years ago that reduced Homo sapiens to mere thousands…
Manning was continuing. This was the bad news. “However, we have made little progress in figuring out how to combat R. sporii. Blood from the infected mice has been checked against known viruses and yielded no serological positives. None of our small number of antiviral drugs were effective, although there was a slight reaction to ribavirin. That raises a further puzzle, since ribavirin is mostly effective against Lassa fever, which is caused by an arenavirus, not a paramyxovirus.” Manning tried to smile; it was not a success. “So, the mystery deepens. I wish we had more to report.”
Someone asked, “Are the infected mice making antibodies?”
“Yes,” Manning said, “and if we can’t manage to develop a vaccine, this is our best possible path to a postexposure treatment, following the MB-003 model developed for Ebola. For you astronomers—and please forgive me if I am telling you things you already know—a successful postexposure treatment for Ebola in nonhuman primates was developed before the actual Ebola vaccine. When administered an hour after infection, MB-003 yields a one hundred percent survival rate. At forty-eight hours, the survival rate is two-thirds. MB-003 was initially developed in a mouse model and then produced in plants. That work took ten years. Then it was replaced by the vaccine, which also took decades to reach clinical trials.”
Decades… The Embassy scientists had less than five months left, and there would be no clinical trials.
Maybe the Denebs knew faster ways to produce a vaccine from antibodies, exponentially increase production, and distribute the results. But the aliens weren’t even at this meeting. They had surely been given all this information already, but even so—
How the hell could the aliens be anyplace more important than this?
Marianne felt ridiculous. She and Evan leaned close over the sink in the lab. Water gushed full-strength from the tap, making noise that, she hoped, covered their words. The autoclave hummed; a Bach concerto played tinnily on the computer’s inadequate speaker. The whole thing felt like a parody of a bad spy movie.