Bred to Kill (39 page)

“So you and Chimaux decided to test out your competing theories by inseminating women here in this country.”

Noland's jaws tightened.

“Chimaux had an outsized ego. He always thought he was right, but he was pathetically indecisive. The whole thing was
my
idea.
I
was the one who made the hard choices. It's
my
name people should remember, not his.”

“Oh, people will remember it, all right.”

The scientist pressed his lips together.

“The only thing Chimaux had to do was gain control of the Ururu. That's where the measles came in—
my
idea. I was the one who filmed those wasted bodies, not him. I was the one who did the dirty work so that he could take over the tribe.”

Small bubbles of spittle had formed on his lips. Sharko knew he was facing one of the most perverse expressions of human folly: men who wasted their superior intelligence solely to do evil. The fabled figure of the mad scientist was right there before him.

“Then . . . Well, yes, I inseminated women without their knowledge. Cryogenics has existed since the 1930s; the frozen Ururu sperm traveled thousands of miles to get here. Good French couples came to see me because they couldn't conceive. Some of the women wanted to be inseminated with their husbands' seed. It was so easy for me to substitute the sperm of an Ururu. It was undetectable—the Indians were white-skinned and their features were Caucasian; the babies would all be born as Europeans. Only the lactose intolerance could give it away. And of course, the fact that the child didn't look like the father. But even then, the families always found resemblances . . .”

Sharko's hand tightened on the grip of his gun. Never had he had such a desire to pull the trigger.

“You even inseminated your own wife.”

“Don't be so quick to judge. For your information, I never loved my wife. You know nothing about me or my life. You have no idea what the words ‘obsession' or ‘ambition' can mean.”

“How many innocent women did you inseminate?”

“I tried to inseminate several dozen, but the failure rate was huge. It didn't work all that well—the technique was still in its infancy. It's also possible the sperm samples didn't hold up well in transit. Ultimately it only worked on three women.”

“Your wife . . . the grandmother of Grégory Carnot, and one other, is that right?”

“Yes. Those three women each had a child, but they were all girls.”

“So one of those girls was Amanda Potier, Grégory Carnot's mother, and the other was your daughter Jeanne, who produced Coralie and Félix . . .”

He nodded.

“Three girls with Ururu genes, who carried the virus, and who in turn gave birth to seven children among them—three boys and four girls.”

The generation of children whose genetic fingerprints were inscribed in Terney's book, thought Sharko.

“As far as I was concerned,
that
was the generation that told the tale. Félix Lambert, Grégory Carnot, and five others. Seven grandchildren with Ururu genes, born into good families, who were raised with love and who, nonetheless, reproduced the tribal pattern. Their mothers died if they gave birth to sons, or lived if they didn't. The male children turned violent when they reached maturity. It started just about a year ago. Grégory Carnot was the first to demonstrate what I'd been waiting to see for so long. Carnot, age twenty-four . . . Lambert, age twenty-two . . . It seems the virus takes effect a few years quicker in our society, closer to twenty than to thirty. No doubt the mix with Western genes slightly modified its behavior.”

He sighed.

“I was right all along: culture had nothing to do with it. It was purely a matter of genetics. Even more than genetics, because I later learned it was actually a retrovirus with an incredibly effective strategy, that had managed to find the ideal host in that quasi-prehistoric tribe.”

Despite the tension, his eyes shone continuously. He was the kind of fanatic who would remain so all his life, who would believe to the bitter end, whom no prison could truly hold.

“What was Terney's part in all this?” asked Sharko.

“At the time, I didn't know the virus existed. I couldn't understand what was killing the mothers. I thought it had something to do with the immune system, maybe some sort of exchange between the mother and the fetus during pregnancy. Terney was a fanatic, and paranoid to boot, but he was a genius. He knew DNA and the mechanics of procreation backward and forward. He helped me understand it all. He's the one who discovered the retrovirus. Imagine how I felt the first time I saw it under the microscope . . .”

Sharko thought of the vile Portuguese man-of-war floating in its liquid. A killer of humans.

“We decided to call the virus by the same name as the insemination project: Phoenix. I knew Terney would take the bait, that he couldn't refuse the chance to treat a mother who was carrying in her body a pure product of evolution. I had kept track of Amanda Potier; I knew she was pregnant. She was the living embodiment of Terney's entire quest, all his research . . .
G
régory
A
rthur
TA
nael
CA
rnot was in a way
his
child . . . With his reputation and contacts, it was easy for him to obtain blood samples of the seven children after their births, so that he could give me a better understanding of Phoenix.”

“Tell me about Phoenix. How does that filth work?”

 • • • 

The Ururu male blew a powder into his wife's face, making her eyes immediately bulge out and turn glassy. Then he made her bite into a stick. Chimaux watched the macabre spectacle in fascination.

“The newborn will immediately be handed over to another woman of the village, who will then raise him. And so life is perpetuated among the Ururu. It's cruel, but this tribe has come down through the millennia with these rites. If it still exists, it's because, somehow, a natural evolutionary balance has been established. The Ururu tribe has not experienced the same decadence as the rotting societies of the West. It has not felt this absurd need to reproduce later and later, to prolong its life span for no real purpose, to live in the familial model we know all too well. Just look at the damage this has caused in your world: illness upon illness past the age of forty. Do you think Alzheimer's is a new disease? What if I told you it has always existed, but that it never declared itself because people died too young? It sat quietly in our cells, awaiting its moment. Today, everyone can know his genome, his predisposition to diseases like cancer. Vile probabilities guide our future. We're becoming insane hypochondriacs. Evolution no longer has a say in any of it.”

“Why Louts . . .” murmured Lucie in a flash of consciousness.

“Louts came here with a remarkable theory, which might have been my own about twenty years ago: the combative culture of a population ‘imprints' the trait of left-handedness on their DNA, thus forcing the descendants to be left-handed as well, so that they too will be better fighters. A collective memory that modifies DNA. She shared my concept of evolution. She was just like me.”

He lowered the waist of his fatigues to show a large wound on his groin.

“I nearly died five years ago. Noland wanted to take this way too far. When he and Terney identified the virus and figured out how it worked, he started talking about this large-scale project. If you'd known him, you'd know what words like that can mean in his mouth. I wouldn't go along with it, because this time it wasn't just about a few dead, but about injecting a living virus into the genetic heritage of the entire human race. A kind of AIDS to the tenth power, that would clean everything out. So he tried to kill me. Since then, I haven't left the jungle.”

He readjusted his clothes and took another sip. Lucie struggled to memorize his words. A virus . . . Noland . . . She had to fight it, but the fog enveloped her, devoured her thoughts, erased her memories.

“When Louts came to see me, I had an idea. I wanted to know if the first symptoms of the virus had struck any young adult males. If some of them had become ultraviolent, and if Terney and Noland's theories had panned out. So I used her; I asked her to go visit the prisons, to find young, violent left-handed offenders who had complained of balance problems. All she had to do was bring me back a list of names and their photos; I knew I'd be able to recognize the Ururu grandchildren, and if so, that Noland had been right. When she didn't come back, I knew she'd succeeded too well. Her perseverance had cost her her life. Noland had killed her.”

Lucie was floundering. Images continued to overlap in her head. Everything was mixed up, while the sound of female screaming rose from near the fire. Clear voices from the past blended with those of the present. Cops shouting, charging toward a house. Trembling, soaked, Lucie clearly saw herself rushing forward with the lawmen. They broke down the door and Lucie followed them in. Carnot flat on the ground . . . She ran up the stairs, met the odor of charred flesh. A door, a room. Another body, its eyes still open.

Juliette, dead, lying before her, with wide staring eyes.

Lucie rolled on her side, hands clutching at her face, and let out a long scream.

Her fingers clawed at the ground, her tears mixed with the ancestral earth, while in front of her blood-soaked hands lifted high the newborn ripped from its mother's womb. In a final flash of lucidity, she saw Chimaux leaning over her and heard him murmur in an icy voice:

“And now, I shall inhale your soul.”

 • • • 

Noland spoke calmly, sponging the arch of his brow with small, precise dabs.

“Phoenix emerged from the womb of evolution and contaminated generations of Cro-Magnon, some thirty thousand years ago. I think that, in some way, it contributed to the extinction of the Neanderthals through a genocide wrought by infected Cro-Magnons, but that's another matter. Regardless, the competition between virus and humans, in the nascent Western societies, favored humans: the retrovirus became harmless over the centuries and was fossilized in our DNA. Nonetheless, it persisted in the Ururu tribe, with only slight mutations, as that isolated, quasi-prehistoric tribe slowly evolved. In Western societies, culture moves too fast; it guides genes, orients them, and gains the upper hand over nature. But not in the jungle. There, genes always stay ahead of culture.”

“How does the virus work?”

“You just need a carrier, man or woman, for the child to be infected. Phoenix hides on chromosome two, near the genes that account for hand dominance. Its presence is what accounts for making the hosts left-handed. But to awaken and begin reproducing, Phoenix needs a key. And that key is something that any male on this planet has, his Y chromosome.”

Sharko thought of Terney's title. There was no doubt it alluded to the Phoenix virus. More sleight-of-hand.

“When I inseminated the healthy mothers, more than forty years ago, they gave birth to an infected child—generation G1—since the virus was in the Ururu sperm, and thus in the child's genetic heritage. Let's suppose the G1 child turns out to be a girl, as was indeed the case every time, such as with Coralie's mother, Jeanne.”

He was talking about the girl who was supposed to be his daughter, but who had none of his paternal genes. A stranger in his eyes, simply the product of an experiment.

“So Jeanne is a carrier of the virus. Some twenty years later, when her oocyte is fertilized by the spermatozoon of a Western male, it's up to chance to decide if the new fetus is female or male. Jeanne first has a girl, Coralie, and then a boy, Félix. Two infected children of the second generation, G2. In Coralie's case, the Western father has transmitted his X chromosome and the virus isn't triggered in Jeanne; the lock has remained shut—though this does not prevent Phoenix from being transmitted genetically to Coralie through chromosome two. In Félix's case, the father donates his Y chromosome. The Y enters into the composition of the placenta, which interacts with Jeanne's organism. At that point, the lock that is holding back the virus on Jeanne's chromosome two snaps open. Proteins are manufactured in the mother's body, and the virus proliferates with just one goal: ensure its own survival and its propagation in another body. The expression of the virus is characterized by a hypervascular placenta, alongside a sharp decrease in the mother's vital functions. The virus has won it all: it kills its host and propagates itself via the fetus, thus guaranteeing its own survival . . . you know the rest. Félix grows up, becomes an adult, probably has sexual relations. He transmits the virus in turn, if there are any children. Then the same thing happens that happened to the G1 mother: the virus reproduces inside Félix and kills him, this time attacking the brain. The same pattern obtains in every scenario, whether it's the mother or father who's infected, a boy or girl who's born. Phoenix has applied the same strategy as any other virus or parasite: survive, spread, kill. If it survived in the Ururu, it's because both humans and the virus found the advantages outweighed the drawbacks. A young, strong tribe, evolving slowly, its size self-regulated, experiencing no need other than to survive and ensure its continuity. The rest—especially old age—is merely . . . superfluous.”

He sighed, eyes toward the ceiling. Sharko felt like disemboweling him.

“I've written all this down, apart from a few details. The analyzed sequences of Phoenix in both its mutated state and the nonmutated version from thirty thousand years ago. You can't possibly imagine the impact the discovery of the Cro-Magnon had, a year ago in that cave. An isolated individual who had massacred Neanderthals . . . the upside-down drawing . . . I had there an expression of the original form of a virus that only three people in the world even knew existed, and on which we'd been laboring for years. Stéphane Terney made arrangements to steal the mummy and its genome.”