Axiomatic (37 page)

On his way to the delicatessen, he passed
that
bookshop, as always. A lurid new poster in the window caught his eye, a naked young man stretched out on a bed in a state of postcoital languor, one corner of the sheet only just concealing his groin. Emblazoned across the top of the poster, in imitation of a glowing red neon sign, was the book’s title:
A Hot Night’s Safe Sex.
Shawcross shook his head in anger and disbelief. What was wrong with people? Hadn’t they read his advertisement? Were they blind? Stupid?

Arrogant? Safety lay
only
in the obedience of God’s laws.

After eating, he called in at a newsagent that carried several foreign papers. The previous Saturday’s editions had arrived, and his advertisement was in all of them, where necessary translated into the appropriate languages. Half a page in a major newspaper was not cheap anywhere in the world, but then, money had never been a problem.

ADULTERERS! SODOMITES!

REPENT AND BE SAVED!

ABANDON YOUR WICKEDNESS
NOW

OR DIE AND BURN FOREVER!

He couldn’t have put it more plainly, could he? Nobody could claim that they hadn’t been warned.

* * * *

In 1981, Matthew Shawcross bought a tiny, run-down cable TV station in the Bible belt, which until then had split its air time between scratchy black-and-white film clips of fifties gospel singers, and local novelty acts such as snake handlers (protected by their faith, not to mention the removal of their pets’ venom glands) and epileptic children (encouraged by their parents’ prayers, and a carefully timed withdrawal of medication, to let the spirit move them). Matthew Shawcross dragged the station into the nineteen eighties, spending a fortune on a thirty-second computer-animated station ID (a fleet of pirouetting, crenellated spaceships firing crucifix-shaped missiles into a relief map of the USA, chiselling out the station logo of Liberty, holding up, not a torch, but a cross), showing the latest, slickest gospel rock video clips, ‘Christian’ soap operas and ‘Christian’ game shows, and, above all, identifying issues —

communism, depravity, godlessness in schools — which could serve as the themes for telethons to raise funds to expand the station, so that future telethons might be even more successful.

Ten years later, he owned one of the country’s biggest cable TV networks.

John Shawcross was at college, on the verge of taking up palaeontology, when AIDS first began to make the news in a big way. As the epidemic snowballed, and the spiritual celebrities he most admired (his father included) began proclaiming the disease to be God’s will, he found himself increasingly obsessed by it. In an age where the word
miracle
belonged to medicine and science, here was a plague straight out of the Old Testament, destroying the wicked and sparing the righteous (give or take some haemophiliacs and transfusion recipients), proving to Shawcross beyond any doubt that sinners could be punished in this life, as well as in the next. This was, he decided, valuable in at least two ways: not only would sinners to whom damnation had seemed a remote and unproven threat now have a powerful, wordly reason to reform, but the righteous would be strengthened in their resolve by this unarguable sign of heavenly support and approval.

In short, the mere existence of AIDS made John Shawcross feel
good,
and he gradually became convinced that some kind of personal involvement with HIV, the AIDS virus, would make him feel even better. He lay awake at night, pondering God’s mysterious ways, and wondering how he could get in on the act. AIDS research would be aimed at a cure, so how could he possibly justify involving himself with
that?

Then, in the early hours of one cold morning, he was woken by sounds from the room next to his. Giggling, grunting, and the squeaking of bed springs. He wrapped his pillow around his ears and tried to go back to sleep, but the sounds could not be ignored — nor could the effect they wrought on his own fallible flesh. He masturbated for a while, on the pretext of trying to manually crush his unwanted erection, but stopped short of orgasm, and lay, shivering, in a state of heightened moral perception. It was a different woman every week; he’d seen them leaving in the morning. He’d tried to counsel his fellow student, but had been mocked for his troubles. Shawcross didn’t blame the poor young man; was it any wonder people laughed at the truth, when every movie, every book, every magazine, every rock song, still sanctioned promiscuity and perversion, making them out to be normal and good? The fear of AIDS

might have saved millions of sinners, but millions more still ignored it, absurdly convinced that
their
chosen partners could never be infected, or trusting in
condoms
to frustrate the will of God!

The trouble was, vast segments of the population
had,
in spite of their wantonness, remained uninfected, and the use of condoms, according to the studies he’d read,
did
seem to reduce the risk of transmission. These facts disturbed Shawcross a great deal. Why would an omnipotent God create an imperfect tool?

Was it a matter of divine mercy? That was possible, he conceded, but it struck him as rather distasteful: sexual Russian roulette was hardly a fitting image of the Lord’s capacity for forgiveness.

Or — Shawcross tingled all over as the possibility crystallised in his brain — might AIDS be no more than a mere prophetic shadow, hinting at a future plague a thousand times more terrible? A warning to the wicked to change their ways while they still had time?
An example to the righteous as to how they
might do His will?

Shawcross broke into a sweat. The sinners next door moaned as if already in Hell, the thin dividing wall vibrated, the wind rose up to shake the dark trees and rattle his window. What was this wild idea in his head? A true message from God, or the product of his own imperfect understanding? He needed guidance! He switched on his reading lamp and picked up his Bible from the bedside table. With his eyes closed, he opened the book at random.

He recognised the passage at the very first glance. He ought to have; he’d read it and reread it a hundred times, and knew it almost by heart.
The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

At first, he tried to deny his destiny: He was unworthy! A sinner himself! An ignorant child! But everyone was unworthy, everyone was a sinner, everyone was an ignorant child in God’s eyes. It was pride, not humility, that spoke against God’s choice of him.

By morning, not a trace of doubt remained.

Dropping palaeontology was a great relief; defending Creationism with any conviction required a certain, very special, way of thinking, and he had never been quite sure that he could master it. Biochemistry, on the other hand, he mastered with ease (confirmation, if any was needed, that he’d made the right decision). He topped his classes every year, and went on to do a PhD in Molecular Biology at Harvard, then postdoctoral work at the NIH, and fellowships in Canada and France. He lived for his work, pushing himself mercilessly, but always taking care not to be too conspicuous in his achievements. He published very little, usually as a modest third or fourth co-author, and when at last he flew home from France, nobody in his field knew, or would have much cared, that John Shawcross had returned, ready to begin his real work.

* * * *

Shawcross worked alone in the gleaming white building that served as both laboratory and home. He couldn’t risk taking on employees, no matter how closely their beliefs might have matched his own. He hadn’t even let his
parents
in on the secret; he told them he was engaged in theoretical molecular genetics, which was a lie of omission only — and he had no need to beg his father for money week by week, since for tax reasons, twenty-five per cent of the Shawcross empire’s massive profit was routinely paid into accounts in his name.

His lab was filled with shiny grey boxes, from which ribbon cables snaked to PCs; the latest generation, fully automated, synthesisers and sequencers of DNA, RNA, and proteins (all available off the shelf, to anyone with the money to buy them). Haifa dozen robot arms did all the grunt work: pipetting and diluting reagents, labelling tubes, loading and unloading centrifuges.

At first Shawcross spent most of his time working with computers, searching databases for the sequence and structure information that would provide him with starting points, later buying time on a supercomputer to predict the shapes and interactions of molecules as yet unknown.

When aqueous X-ray diffraction become possible, his work sped up by a factor of ten; to synthesise and observe the actual proteins and nucleic acids was now both faster, and more reliable, than the hideously complex process (even with the best short cuts, approximations and tricks) of solving Schrödinger’s equation for a molecule consisting of hundreds of thousands of atoms.

Base by base, gene by gene, the Shawcross virus grew.

* * * *

As the woman removed the last of her clothes, Shawcross, sitting naked on the motel room’s plastic bucket chair, said, ‘You must have had sexual intercourse with hundreds of men.’

‘Thousands. Don’t you want to come closer, honey? Can you see OK from there?’

‘I can see fine.’

She lay back, still for a moment with her hands cupping her breasts, then she closed her eyes and began to slide her palms across her torso.

This was the two hundredth occasion on which Shawcross had paid a woman to tempt him. When he had begun the desensitising process five years before, he had found it almost unbearable. Tonight he knew he would sit calmly and watch the woman achieve, or skilfully imitate, orgasm, without experiencing even a flicker of lust himself.

‘You take precautions, I suppose.’

She smiled, but kept her eyes closed. ‘Damn right I do. If a man won’t wear a condom, he can take his business elsewhere. And
I put
it on, he doesn’t do it himself. When I put it on, it stays on. Why, have you changed your mind?’

‘No. Just curious.’

Shawcross always paid in full, in advance, for the act he did not perform, and always explained to the woman, very clearly at the start, that at any time he might weaken, he might make the decision to rise from the chair and join her. No mere circumstantial impediment could take any credit for his inaction; nothing but his own free will stood between him and mortal sin.

Tonight, he wondered why he continued. The ‘temptation’ had become a formal ritual, with no doubt whatsoever as to the outcome.

No doubt?
Surely that was pride speaking, his wiliest and most persistent enemy.
Every
man and woman forever trod the edge of a precipice over the inferno, at risk more than ever of falling to those hungry flames when he or she least believed it possible.

Shawcross stood and walked over to the woman. Without hesitation, he placed one hand on her ankle. She opened her eyes and sat up, regarding him with amusement, then took hold of his wrist and began to drag his hand along her leg, pressing it hard against the warm, smooth skin.

Just above the knee, he began to panic — but it wasn’t until his fingers struck moisture that he pulled free with a strangled mewling sound, and staggered back to the chair, breathless and shaking.

That was more like it.

* * * *

The Shawcross virus was to be a masterful piece of biological clockwork (the likes of which William Paley could never have imagined — and which no godless evolutionist would dare attribute to the ‘blind watchmaker’ of chance). Its single strand of RNA would describe, not one, but
four
potential organisms.

Shawcross virus A, SVA, the ‘anonymous’ form, would be highly infectious, but utterly benign. It would reproduce within a variety of host cells in the skin and mucous membranes, without causing the least disruption to normal cellular functions. Its protein coat had been designed so that every exposed site mimicked some portion of a
naturally occurring
human protein; the immune system being necessarily blind to these substances (to avoid attacking the body itself), would be equally blind to the invader.

Small numbers of SVA would make their way into the bloodstream, infecting T-lymphocytes, and triggering stage two of the virus’s genetic program. A system of enzymes would make RNA copies of hundreds of genes from every chromosome of the host cell’s DNA, and these copies would then be incorporated into the virus itself. So, the next generation of the virus would carry with it, in effect,
a
genetic fingerprint
of the host in which it had come into being.

Shawcross called this second form SVC, the C standing for ‘customised’ (since every individual’s unique genetic profile would give rise to a unique strain of SVC), or ‘celibate’ (because in a celibate person, only SVA and SVC would be present).

SVC would be able to survive only in blood, semen and vaginal fluids. Like SVA, it would be immunologically invisible, but with an added twist: its choice of camouflage would vary wildly from person to person, so that even if its disguise was imperfect, and antibodies to a dozen (or a hundred, or a thousand)
particular
strains could be produced, universal vaccination would remain impossible.

Like SVA, it would not alter the function of its hosts — with one minor exception. When infecting cells in the vaginal mucous membrane, the prostate, or the seminiferous epithelium, it would cause the manufacture and secretion from these cells of several dozen enzymes specifically designed to degrade varieties of rubber. The holes created by a brief exposure would be invisibly small — but from a viral point of view, they’d be enormous.

Upon reinfecting T cells, SVC would be capable of making an ‘informed decision’ as to what the next generation would be. Like SVA, it would create a genetic fingerprint of its host cell. It would then compare this with its stored, ancestral copy. If the two fingerprints were identical — proving that the customised strain had remained within the body in which it had begun — its daughters would be, simply, more SVC.