Marianne stared at Sissy. An infiltrator from one of the hate groups? It had been tried before. “Who do you work for?”
Sissy gave her a thousand-watt smile. “For you, Dr. Jenner. And brotherhood with Denebs. What’s wrong with people that they cain’t see how huge it is that we ain’t alone in the universe?” When Sissy got excited, her correct English slipped into something else. Her intelligence and idealism, however, were unwavering. Even before the exhaustive background check, Marianne knew she would hire her. This girl had something. This girl was something.
Sissy had proved as efficient as she claimed. Their friendship, however, crossing generational and racial and educational lines, had nothing to do with Sissy’s job.
In the backseat, Tim stirred. “We there yet?”
“No,” Sissy said. “Go back to sleep. You’re amazing, the way you sleep anywhere.”
“Wish I didn’t. Sleep’s a waste of time.”
“But how else will you dream of me?”
Tim laughed. “Pull over—my turn to drive.”
They all changed places. City lights shone by the time they reached New York. The Holland Tunnel was no longer safe; the city had limited money for infrastructure repair. The Lincoln Tunnel now closed at 10:00 p.m. Tim drove over the George Washington Bridge and headed south to Columbia University.
“God, I’m tired,” Marianne said.
Sissy turned to smile at Tim. Neither of them looked at all tired. Sissy was thirty-two, Tim thirty-seven. Marianne caught Sissy’s half-lowered eyelids, her hand creeping toward his neck. “Marianne, we’ll drop you first and bring the car back in the morning, okay?”
“Sure,” Marianne said brightly. Jealousy of the night ahead of them was stupid, juvenile, contemptible. She felt old.
Harrison was awake, waiting for her in their apartment in the security-fortified area near Columbia. He sat sipping scotch and frowning at something on his tablet. “How did it go?”
“Fine. Some trouble at Notre Dame, but nothing Tim couldn’t handle.” She said it lightly; Harrison didn’t like Tim, although he had never said so. But Marianne knew, and knew why. Harrison was the most intelligent man Marianne had ever met, decent and kind. But he was fifty-nine, spent his days in a lab, and was losing his hair. Tim was thirty-seven, worked out two hours a day at the gym, and had hair that hung thickly to his shoulders.
Nobody was above jealousy.
Moved to affection, she sat on the arm of Harrison’s chair and hugged him. “I missed you. What happened here?”
“Some disturbing data.” He pulled away from her, and she removed herself to another chair.
“What data? On the mice?”
“No. This study in Nature. Karcher is the lead researcher.” He held out the tablet.
Marianne didn’t take it. Nature was one of the most respected multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journals in the world, and James Karcher was a Nobel Laureate in medicine. But she was tired, and Harrison’s tiny rejection hurt. There would be no sex tonight. Like most other nights.
More guilt. She only felt juiced up because of Tim’s disturbing, utterly forbidden presence. “Tell me what Karcher says.”
“It’s a statistical analysis, so I suspect his postdocs did it and his name is on it mostly so it will be noticed. Which it should be. It’s about a significant increase both in reported agitation and in hearing problems among children born since the spore cloud. We knew about the hearing issues, of course, but nobody has quantified the data and related it to infant agitation.”
“How is that related to R. sporii?”
“Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? We know hardly anything about its genetic effects on fetuses. It’s only been two and a half years, and very few infants have brain surgery or MRIs.”
“Why are you especially interested?”
Harrison put the tablet onto a side table and poured himself another scotch. Marianne was startled. Harrison seldom drank more than one, and never when alone. Was this his second, or more?
“Two reasons I’m interested,” he said. “First of all, Sarah is pregnant. Second, while you were gone, two more P. maniculatus were exposed.”
Sarah was Harrison’s daughter, as difficult a child as Elizabeth, and nearly forty. A dozen deer mice, Peromyscus maniculatus, were among the precious plague-free specimens salvaged by Columbia. In the years since, they had been bred in their negative-pressure pens; there were now plenty of mice for research. Not that it had helped much. If the mice were given spore disease, they died. If not, they lived. Nothing so far had altered that. But Harrison’s tone was serious. She said, “Go on.”
“It was tricky. We got two does pregnant, let them carry partway, and exposed them to R sporii. We let the pregnancies continue until the mice showed symptoms, then took the fetuses before the mothers died. So did all but three of the pups, and we only got a viable three because the gestation period is so short. We put them to nurse with another mouse. Communally living females will do that, you know. One of those died and we autopsied it. Really difficult, on such a small and incompletely developed brain.”
“So I should imagine.” Despite her tiredness, Marianne was fascinated. Between speeches she served as lab tech for Harrison, but as a theoretical geneticist, she had nothing like his polymath skill in biology. “What did the autopsy show?”
“Again, hard to be sure. But certain parts of the cortex seem enlarged. Sue is preparing slides. And the two surviving pups are just hanging on. They nurse, which is good, but they also seem agitated and edgy.”
“How does a tiny mouse seem agitated?”
Harrison smiled. “The same way Sissy does. Twitchy unfocused energy.”
This was unfair; Sissy’s great energy was very focused except when she didn’t have enough to do. Those times, she danced in place, snapped her fingers, sang off-key. Marianne had learned to keep her busy all the time. But she let Harrison’s remark go; he was genuinely upset.
She said gently, “Twitchy mice don’t mean that anything will be wrong with Sarah’s baby. Some kids are just born very reactive, like Connie’s youngest. How far along is Sarah? Has there been an ultrasound?”
“Four months, and yes. The ultrasound looks normal. I’m going to bed, Marianne. But I’m glad you’re back.” He drained his scotch and went into the bedroom.
“But I’m glad you’re back.” That “but” said it alclass="underline" I’m glad you’re back, but I have too much on my mind for sex. Well, she already knew that.
She checked her e-mail, giving Harrison time to pretend to be asleep. Nothing interesting except the latest photo from Connie of Marianne’s two grandsons. They stood side by side in the backyard in their little red parkas, beside a bare-branched sapling no taller than Colin. Jason’s arm was around his little brother. Jason smiled; Colin looked ready to burst into tears. Only thirteen months apart—what had Connie been thinking? The boys didn’t look alike. Jason was slim and brown-eyed. Colin was a little Ryan, short and round, his two-year-old face pudgy around huge gray eyes.
Ryan pulling Noah on a sled, both of their faces red with cold and excitement: “Come on, let’s slide down again!” “Mommy, I love this so much!”
Marianne closed the e-mail and turned on the news. Tornados in Oklahoma and Kansas. Building of the US spaceship still halted; a conservative Congress had been arguing over funding for two years. The private firms trying to build spaceships did not give interviews, or release pictures, not since the NCWAK, No Contact with Alien Killers, had blown up Richard Branson’s effort. Starvation in Africa, war in northern China, dead zones in the ocean…