On My Way to Paradise (37 page)

I began laughing, a hollow laugh that turned into
great, wracking sobs. I fell at Tamara’s feet, groveled at her
ankles, and cried in self-pity. She reached down and smoothed her
hands through my hair until I quieted.

I jacked out.

I was last to jack out of the simulator. Kaigo
replayed the battle, and the tiny holo showed us scuttling about on
the floor. It showed us skim through the salt marsh, retreat from
the Yabajin into the woods. I was knocked from the back of the
hovercraft, removed my broken helmet, stood and walked to the edge
of the marsh—just in time to meet the Yabajin.

They shot me down and chased my compadres. It took a
long while for me to die in the simulation.

Tamara had removed all evidence of her conversation
with me.

Kaigo rehearsed the run with us, pointing out our
errors.

He missed several obvious ones that he’d have
normally caught, and seemed inattentive. He jacked us into a second
simulation and we found ourselves gliding over the sea. We were
only in the simulation for a few minutes when Kaigo jacked me
out.

The others sat slumped in their chairs, still trapped
in their illusion—dragonfly pupae.

Master Kaigo stood by the hovercraft. He appeared
distracted. Cultural Envoy Sakura stood behind him. Master Kaigo
said, "Take off your armor and follow Envoy Sakura
immediately."

I wondered what I’d done wrong, and began stripping
from my armor. Sakura helped undress me—an unusual act. The
Japanese had scrupulously avoided touching me on all occasions, and
I’d wondered if they felt they’d become defiled by the act.

Sakura spoke quickly as he worked. "You are a
morphogenic pharmacologist, no? You know how to run a gene
splicer? You are knowledgeable about viruses?"

"Of course," I said.

"Do you know about military viruses? The kinds used
in biological warfare?"

I hesitated. No one spoke about those viruses. They
were far too dangerous. The hair raised on the back of my neck. I
didn’t like this conversation.

They want me to make a virus, I thought. They’ve
heard bad news from Baker, and they want to wipe out everything.
Start over.

"I know something of viral weapons. I don’t know how
to create them," I lied. I had a basic idea of how to create
them.

"Ah. We don’t want you to create them, we want you to
destroy them. We have a viral outbreak on Module B. It is very
bad."

My heart began pounding. I couldn’t imagine someone
turning us into a plague ship. Most of the time, I knew, we were
sealed off from that module. But I’d seen a worker moving between
the airlock only the day before.

"How much of the ship is contaminated?" I asked.

"We don’t know. Workers on module B report several
fatalities, all in the past three hours, and the disease has spread
quickly. They don’t believe they can last more than a day. No one
here shows any symptoms."

I finished stripping my armor and Sakura led me down
the halls to the ladder. We reached level eight and Sakura thumbed
a transmitter and opened the lower airlock; we went below. This
section of the ship was larger than I’d anticipated. There were
rooms to handle large machinery for cooking, cleaning, laundry,
water purification, air recycling. We went to a small room crammed
with three other Latin Americans sitting at computer terminals with
their feet up, watching the computers work. They wore worried
expressions, yet they seemed to be in no hurry. This relieved some
of my tension.

The room was supplied with two x-ray microscopes and
a couple of DNA synthesizers. It was obviously an ancillary
medical facility meant to be used in conjunction with the infirmary
upstairs. A communications channel on the computer was open, piping
in sounds from the infirmary in module B. I could hear people
coughing and crying in delirium while others spoke urgently in the
foreground.

Sakura headed back upstairs.

"I’m Fidel, from immunology. That’s José—" a small
man said from the nearest terminal. He nodded toward a chimera with
silver eyes, very much like Abriara’s. "He’s done some work
engineering his younger brothers in Chile. And our friend Juan
Pedro over there is in food services."

I looked at Juan Pedro, a tall thin man with kinky
hair.

His job on ship would be to engineer various proteins
to flavor the algae mixes we ate, a tedious job requiring little
knowledge of genetic engineering, since all the proteins he made
were on file and the DNA synthesizers could handle the job, but he
would still be familiar with the equipment. "So you are the one who
makes our food?" I joked. "Remind me to kill you later."

Juan Pedro lowered his head. "Everybody always says
that."

Fidel waved me over to his keyboard and punched in
some commands. "This is what we’re dealing with."

 A virus came up on· screen, typical in
appearance—a tiny clear oval about 24 microns in diameter—except
that it had a tail, the kind usually reserved for viruses that
attack bacteria. Inside was a simple circle of genetic material
that twisted in upon itself, something in the order of 40,000 amino
acids long.

"A chimera?" I asked. The term
chimera
refers
to any creature engineered so that it carries the traits of the
member of another species—whether it is a bacteria engineered to
produce insulin or something as complex as Perfecto or Abriara.

"It looks that way," Fidel said. "It doesn’t invade
its host by ejecting its DNA through the tail, though, so it’s not
a complex chimera. The host cell absorbs the virus. Its tail is
used only to speed movement."

A virus reproduces by injecting its own DNA into the
cell of its host. In viruses that attack animals, the virus often
releases chemicals that cut up sections of the host’s DNA, which
the virus then uses in creating its offspring. When the viruses are
ready to leave the host cell, they can either "bud" off, or simply
burst the cell wall completely. In either case, the host cell often
dies. Since this particular virus was a biological weapon, it was a
good bet the host cell would burst, releasing several hundred or
thousands of copies of the virus.

One window in the corner of the computer screen
showed a dozen different antibodies, explaining how they’d attach
to the virus to mark it for destruction by lymphocytes. The
information on the computer seemed to explain why everyone was
resting. It looked as if they were simply waiting for the DNA
synthesizer to create the antibodies.

"It looks as if I got here too late," I said. "All
the work is done already."

"
Sí
,"
Fidel said. "The geneticists in
module B have been working on this all night. The work is done
already. "He punched a button and the computer screen called up the
DNA sequences on the virus that gave directions for the
capsid,
the outer membrane of protein of the virion, the
virus cell.

Next to it was a comparison chart showing the outer
membrane of a neuron, a human nerve cell. They were nearly the
same. The viral capsid marvelously counterfeited the nerve cell.
The implications were obvious—anything that we did to attack the
virus would also attack the patient’s nervous system.

"When we first discovered the virus," Fidel said, "it
seemed untouchable. None of our antibodies would bind it. At first
I wondered if it was so alien in composition that our immune system
just couldn’t recognize it. But our analysis shows that it is so
similar in composition to the human neuron that our antibodies just
don’t see it as a threat. Any antibodies or chemicals we use to
attack the virus will also kill the host. Any ideas?"

My thoughts race. I immediately thought of
subviruses, tiny parasites that can attack and destroy viruses, but
I felt sure that they’d tried them. I’d once heard of a doctor who
created an artificial immune system—creating bacteria that
destroyed viruses. Soon after the viral infection had ended, a
simple antibiotic could kill the bacteria.

But any artificial immune system that I created would
also destroy the human neurons.

A general announcement came over the com-line on the
computer. It was aimed at those in Module B. "Anyone who has not
had a drink of water in the past 24-hours and does not have an
elevated temperature, please report to level eight for induction
into the cryotanks. All other remain in your rooms. Do not go to
the infirmary."

I looked to Fidel. "They’re going to freeze the ones
who are healthy," he said, "hoping that we’ll find a way to cure
them."

I asked, "How many cryotanks do they have?"

 "About three hundred on their module. We might
be able to save three hundred."

José laughed derisively. "I told Fidel we should blow
the seals on that module and let everyone get sucked into space
right now. It would be faster than what they’re going through.
We’ve already tried all the antiviral drugs—nothing. We’ve given up
on antibodies. We’ve tried some common subviruses—but this little
beast has its own immune system. Any subvirus that tries to attach
to the virus just gets chopped up and eaten for dinner. We won’t
get anywhere with them. We need something more ... elegant." His
tone was hopeless.

"Have you tried heating the virus," I asked,
"subjecting it to ultraviolet radiation, those things?"

"Yes. It reproduces best just a few degrees above
body temperature. Of course, all the patients have elevated
temperatures, which just makes the virus breed faster. We can kill
it with radiation, and we’ve already cleared up their air and
water, but it doesn’t help the patients in module B. They got it
through their water sometime yesterday. And they’ve all got it. One
of their samurai was an agent for the Yabajin. He was carrying a
subdural bio-cache of the virus; he must have dug the cache out
from under his skin and introduced it into the drinking water. He’s
already been executed. Most of the victims got double doses of the
virus of course—as soon as their fevers began to rise, they drank
more heavily.

"The infections are fairly disseminated: the virus
attacks a wide range of organs with equal vitality. It causes
severe damage to the lungs, liver, skin. It’s also causing lesions
in the arteries, with internal swelling. Several patients have died
of stroke caused by clots breaking free from other areas and
floating to the brain."

"At least the assassin died before his victims," I
said.

I’m sure the Yabajin considered it a privilege. He’d
traded one life for four thousand.

"Anyway," Fidel said, "we can’t kill the virus, but
we may be able to sterilize it. That’s what we’re working on now.
The computer is checking to see how it subverts the reproductive
system of its host cells. We thought we might be able to introduce
a subvirus that could infiltrate the virus—using a prion as a
vector—and at least try to neuter these puppies."

Their idea seemed to be halfway decent—a prion is a
subvirus that actually inserts its DNA into its host virus to
reproduce, just as a virus will insert its own genetic material
into a human host cell to reproduce.

In my work in morphogenics I often develop viruses to
infiltrate a human host and insert new information into the
patient’s genetic code. Such viruses are called vectors, and one
can do marvelous things with them. It’s possible to use a subvirus
such as a prion for a vector to insert new information into the
genetic code of a virus, but in practice it is very difficult, for
prions are very small bits of living matter, often with just a few
dozen pairs of amino acids. They’re barely alive, and I thought it
would be difficult to create one large enough to be useful as a
vector in redesigning the virus. It would be doubly difficult since
this particular virus was designed as a weapon and had already
proven immune to other subviruses.

Its creator had taken years to perfect it. Yet we’d
have only hours to defeat it. Perhaps if we’d had a few months we
could have come up with something. As it was, Fidel simply said,
"You’re welcome to wait and see if you come up with any ideas."

I waited with them for the computer’s report on the
viral reproductive system. Occasionally the intercom carried the
sound of someone’s hacking cough, the footsteps of nurses walking
from patient to patient. They spoke softly to one another, telling
the stories of their lives and the people they loved as they
prepared to die.

There was one woman there, and I could hear her going
from bed to bed, speaking with the ill, offering comfort and
consolation. She would say, "My name is Felicia, would you like
some water, a blanket?" and then she would begin talking about good
things—a day she spent on the beach burning sandalwood, or how her
father had taught her to make her own shoes.

It sounded like idle chatter at first, yet it calmed
the ill well.

This woman seemed wise and strong, and I found myself
listening to her intently, wishing I could be like her, wishing I
could make her live.

Twice a Japanese announced over a loudspeaker in
module B that the ill should "resist the illness by a supreme act
of will." It was a brave gesture.

It took the computer nearly two hours to finally
unravel the virus’s method of reproduction. We all knew that the
results of the study would be useless before they arrived: the
virus sent chemical messengers telling the cell it was time to
commence mitosis, to form RNA, split, and grow.

We could shut down the reproductive system of the
virus by using any of three drugs, but we’d also shut down the
reproductive system of all the victim’s cells. Blindness and a
quick death would follow.

We immediately began developing a vector
subvirus—the creature we hoped would be "elegant" enough to defeat
the virus’s defense mechanisms.