Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (457 page)

“Yeah, I think so,” he said. “They can take better care of me. I’m getting cleaned up, go over there this evening. Bernard’s picking me up in his limo. Style. From here on in, everything’s style.”

The pinkish color in the water didn’t look like soap. “Is that bubble bath?” I asked. Some of it came to me in a rush then and I felt a little weaker: what had occured to me was just one more obvious and necessary insanity.

“No,” Vergil said. I knew that already.

“No,” he repeated, “it’s coming from my skin. They’re not telling me everything, but I think they’re sending out scouts. Astronauts.” He looked at me with an expression that didn’t quite equal concern; more like curiosity as to how I’d take it.

The confirmation made my stomach muscles tighten as if waiting for a punch. I had never even considered the possibility until now, perhaps because I had been concentrating on other aspects. “Is this the first time?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. He laughed. “I’ve half a mind to let the little buggers down the drain. Let them find out what the world’s really about.”

“They’d go everywhere,” I said.

“Sure enough.”

“How…how are you feeling?”

“I’m feeling pretty good now. Must be billions of them.” More splashing with his hands. “What do you think? Should I let the buggers out?”

Quickly, hardly thinking, I knelt down beside the tub. My fingers went for the cord on the sunlamp and I plugged it in. He had hot-wired doorknobs, turned my piss blue, played a thousand dumb practical jokes and never grown up, never grown mature enough to understand that he was just brilliant enough to really affect the world; he would never learn caution.

He reached for the drain knob. “You know, Edward, I—”

He never finished. I picked up the fixture and dropped it into the tub, jumping back at the flash of steam and sparks. Vergil screamed and thrashed and jerked and then everything was still, except for the low, steady sizzle and the smoke wafting from his hair.

I lifted the toilet lid and vomited. Then I clenched my nose and went into the living room. My legs went out from under me and I sat abruptly on the couch.

After an hour, I searched through Vergil’s kitchen and found bleach, ammonia, and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. I returned to the bathroom, keeping the center of my gaze away from Vergil. I poured first the booze, then the bleach, then the ammonia into the water. Chlorine started bubbling up and I left, closing the door behind me.

The phone was ringing when I got home. I didn’t answer. It could have been the hospital. It could have been Bernard. Or the police. I could envision having to explain everything to the police. Genetron would stonewall; Bernard would be unavailable.

I was exhausted, all my muscles knotted with tension and whatever name one can give to the feelings one has after—

Committing genocide?

That certainly didn’t seem real. I could not believe I had just murdered a hundred trillion intelligent beings. Snuffed a galaxy. It was laughable. But I didn’t laugh.

It was not at all hard to believe I had just killed one human being, a friend. The smoke, the melted lamp rods, the drooping electrical outlet and smoking cord.

Vergil.

I had dunked the lamp into the tub with Vergil.

I felt sick. Dreams, cities raping Gail (and what about his girl friend, Candice?). Letting the water filled with them out. Galaxies sprinkling over us all. What horror. Then again, what potential beauty—a new kind of life, symbiosis and transformation.

Had I been through enough to kill them all? I had a moment of panic. Tomorrow, I thought, I will sterilize his apartment. Somehow. I didn’t even think of Bernard.

When Gail came in the door, I was asleep on the couch. I came to, groggy, and she looked down at me.

“You feeling okay?” she asked, perching on the edge of the couch. I nodded.

“What are you planning for dinner?” My mouth wasn’t working properly. The words were mushy. She felt my forehead.

“Edward, you have a fever,” she said. “A very high fever.”

I stumbled into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. Gai was close behind me. “What is it?” she asked.

There were lines under my collar, around my neck. White lines, like freeways. They had already been in me a long time, days.

“Damp palms,” I said. So obvious.

* * * *

I think we nearly died. I struggled at first, but within minutes I was too weak to move. Gail was just as sick within an hour.

I lay on the carpet in the living room, drenched in sweat. Gail lay on the couch, her face the color of talcum, eyes closed, like a corpse in an embalming parlor. For a time I thought she was dead. Sick as I was, I raged—hated, felt tremendous guilt at my weakness, my slowness to understand all the possibilities. Then I no longer cared. I was too weak to blink, so I closed my eyes and waited.

There was a rhythm in my arms, my legs. With each pulse of blood, a kind of sound welled up within me. A sound like an orchestra thousands strong, but not playing in unison; playing whole seasons of symphonies at once. Music in the blood. The sound or whatever became harsher, but more coordinated, wave-trains finally canceling into silence, then separating into harmonic beats.

The beats seemed to melt into me, into the sound of my own heart.

First, they subdued our immune responses. The war—and it was a war, on a scale never before known on Earth, with trillions of combatants— lasted perhaps two days.

By the time I regained enough strength to get to the kitchen faucet, I could feel them working on my brain, trying to crack the code and find the god within the protoplasm. I drank until I was sick, then drank more moderately and took a glass to Gail. She sipped at it. Her lips were cracked, her eyes bloodshot and ringed with yellowish crumbs. There was some color in her skin. Minutes later, we were eating feebly in the kitchen.

“What in hell was
that?”
was the first thing she asked. I didn’t have the strength to explain, so I shook my head. I peeled an orange and shared it with her. “We should call a doctor,” she said. But I knew we wouldn’t. I was already receiving messages; it was becoming apparent that any sensation of freedom we had was illusory.

The messages were simple at first. Memories of commands, rather than the commands themselves, manifested themselves in my thoughts. We were not to leave the apartment—a concept which seemed quite abstract to those in control, even if undesirable—and we were not to have contact with others. We would be allowed to eat certain foods, and drink tap water, for the time being.

With the subsidence of the fevers, the transformations were quick and drastic. Almost simultaneously, Gail and I were immobilized. She was sitting at the table, I was kneeling on the floor. I was able barely to see her in the corner of my eye.

Her arm was developing pronounced ridges.

They had learned inside Vergil; their tactics within the two of us were very different. I itched all over for about two hours—two hours in hell—before they made the breakthrough and found me. The effort of ages on their timescale paid off and they communicated smoothly and directly with this great, clumsy intelligence which had once controlled their universe.

They were not cruel. When the concept of discomfort and its undesirability was made clear, they worked to alleviate it. They worked too effectively. For another hour, I was in a sea of bliss, out of all contact with them.

With dawn the next day, we were allowed freedom to move again; specifically, to go to the bathroom. There were certain waste products they could not deal with. I voided those—my urine was purple—and Gail followed suit. We looked at each other vacantly in the bathroom. Then she managed a slight smile. “Are they talking to you?” she asked. I nodded. “Then I’m not crazy.”

For the next twelve hours, control seemed to loosen on some levels. During that time, I managed to pencil the majority of this manuscript. I suspect there was another kind of war going on in me. Gail was capable of our previous limited motion, but no more.

When full control resumed; we were instructed to hold each other. We did not hesitate.

“Eddie…” she whispered. My name was the last sound I ever heard from the outside.

Standing, we grew together. In hours, our legs expanded and spread out. Then extensions grew to the windows to take in sunlight, and to the kitchen to take water from the sink. Filaments soon reached to all corners of the room, stripping paint and plaster from the walls, fabric and stuffing from the furniture.

By the next dawn, the transformation was complete.

I no longer have any clear view of what we look like. I suspect we resemble cells—large, flat and filamented cells, draped purposefully across most of the apartment. The great shall mimic the small.

I have been asked to carry on recording, but soon that will not be possible. Our intelligence fluctuates daily as we are absorbed into the minds within. Each day, our individuality declines. We are, indeed, great clumsy dinosaurs. Our memories have been taken over by billions of them, and our personalities have been spread through the transformed blood.

Soon there will be no need for centralization.

I am informed that already the plumbing has been invaded. People throughout the building are undergoing transformation.

Within the old time-frame of weeks, we will reach the lakes, rivers, and seas in force.

I can barely begin to guess the results. Every square inch of the planet will teem with thought. Years from now, perhaps much sooner, they will subdue their own individuality—what there is of it.

New creatures will come, then. The immensity of their capacity for thought will be inconceivable.

All my hatred and fear is gone now.

I leave them—us—with only one question.

How
many times has this happened elsewhere?
Travelers never came through space to visit the Earth. They had no need.

They had found universes in grains of sand.

* * * *

Copyright © 1983 by Davis Publications, Inc..

Shortly after telescopes first offered us up-close views of the planets, microscopes let us look deep into ourselves—where we were surprised to find smaller beings moving independently inside our blood. James Alan Garner’s story “Three Hearings on the Existence of Snakes in the Human Bloodstream” (1997) proposes an alternate history of Anton Leeuwenhoek’s discovery of such “animalcules” in the early 1600s, imagining a world where the discovery contradicted scripture and thus led to debates over original sin. The religious specifics of the debate, of course, are fictional, but the invention of microscopes did lead to scientific disputes in actual history, with scientists arguing over the nature and function of the microscopic organisms they saw (not termed “germs” or “microbes” until the 1870s). By the late 1800s, however, a series of experiments by figures such as Robert Koch of Germany and Louis Pasteur of France combined to produce the new “Germ Theory,” proposing that the “animalcules” actually cause illness. From that point forward, the germ theory became the dominant medical understanding of the source of disease, and almost at the same time science fiction began responding to its possibilities.

Perhaps the most noteworthy early example is H. G. Wells’
War of the Worlds
(1898), in which Wells postulates an attack by Martians foiled not by human effort, but by the Martians’ vulnerability to Earth’s microbe population. Describing bacteria as “the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth,” Wells (who trained as a science teacher and whose first book was a biology textbook) accounts for the Martians’ total annihilation by disease as resulting from the evolution of human immune systems:

These germs of disease have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of things—taken toll of our prehuman ancestors since life began here. But by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting power; to no germs do we succumb without a struggle…But there are no bacteria in Mars.
(187)

Wells’ novel, like so many first-contact narratives, echoes historical encounters among human cultures, but Wells revises the impact of disease—particularly compared to the European colonization of the “new world,” where indigenous peoples of the Americas, who had limited resistance to European diseases such as smallpox, were reduced to as little as 20% of their original populations after the encounter, in essence conquered as much by germs as by superior technology. Wells’ novel, then, is unusual not only in its inversion of historical experience, but in its casting of germs as heroes rather than as villains.

For half a century after the germ theory took hold, however, scientists and doctors offered only rather undramatic solutions to the threats germs posed: good hygiene, and sterilization of medical instruments. Such techniques did not tend to inspire science fiction writers, and science fiction focused on germs did not become a central feature of the SF genre either during its heyday in the pulps (the 1920s and 1930s), or during its so-called “Golden Age” (the 1930s through 1950). However, once medical scientists moved from the most basic of vaccines to more sophisticated and powerful antibiotics in the 1940s and ‘50s, germs once again became prominent in science fiction, in novels such as Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954, with multiple movie versions following) and perhaps most famously in Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain (1969; movie 1971). With the possibility of curing rather than simply preventing disease, doctors could take the center stage occupied by scientists in other subgenres of SF, with medicines or vaccines substituting for more engineering-based forms of technology. The doctor-against-disease plotline also entered mainstream fiction and nonfiction with such bio-thrillers as Robin Cook’s Outbreak (1987 book, 1995 movie) or Robert Preston’s nonfiction work The Hot Zone (1994), and the plotline continues its popularity in mainstream television series centered on doctors or hospitals.

One feature of
The Andromeda Strain
reflected in other SF as well as early space science lay in the extraterrestrial origin of the initial pathogen. Early astronauts were quarantined following space missions—including moon missions—to prevent inadvertent spread of any extraterrestrial microbes they might encounter (modern astronauts are now more often quarantined before lift-off to make certain they themselves do not fall ill while in space, or transmit earth pathogens to other environments). But the premise—that astronauts might carry deadly plagues back to earth—became a feature in a number of science fiction novels, including Harry Harrison’s Plague from Space (1965), Octavia Butler’s Patternist Series (Patternmaster, 1976; Mind of My Mind, 1977; Survivor, 1979; Wild Seed, 1980; Clay’s Ark, 1984), or more recently Paul McAuley’s The Secret of Life (2001) and Bill Clem’s Microbe (2007).

In Butler’s novels, the plague from Alpha Centauri produces not simply biological change, but social evolution as well—or perhaps devolution, as many stories see post-plague society adjusting backward to earlier models of political and social structures. This feature tends to appear even in the earliest post-plague apocalypse novels such as Mary Shelley’s
The Last Man
(1826), Jack London’s
The Scarlet Plague
(1912), and George R. Stewart’s
Earth Abides
(1949). Diseases producing social transformations became a standard trope in feminist science fiction as well, but feminist stories often imagine more positive social outcomes. Stories such Joanna Russ’s “When It Changed” (1972) and
The Female Man
(1975), James Tiptree Jr.’s “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” (1976), and more recently Nicola Griffith’s
Ammonite
(1992) posit worlds in which infection has eradicated men, clearing the way for women to step outside of confining gender roles or even to create utopian societies. Of course, such stories have not always required disease per se, even when microbes are involved. Joan Slonczewski (herself a practicing microbiologist) writes A Door into Ocean (1986) and Daughter of Elysium (1993) about the Sharers, an all-female community living on an ocean-moon, who create a nonviolent, eco-sustainable society in part due to their symbiosis with a microbe that enables them to process oxygen more efficiently (and also to enter into a trance state where they cannot be made to feel pain).

While such fictional microbes may produce either positive or negative outcomes for the populations that experience them, real-life plagues tend to be less benign—and SF has certainly addressed actual diseases as well as fictional ones. Connie Willis’
The Doomsday Book
(1992) imagines a time-traveling medieval historian stuck in a past ravaged by bubonic plague even as her own time combats an influenza epidemic, while Kim Stanley Robinson’s
Years of Rice and Salt
(2002) offers an alternate history in which the Black Death destroys almost the entire population of Europe, leaving Asia and the Americas to create cultures without Christian or European influences. HIV/AIDS has generated a literary response as well; in fact, scholars theorize that science fiction’s increased focus on disease since the 1980s emerges directly from the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and certainly many SF novels and stories make explicit use of its transmission patterns. Greg Bear’s story “Blood Music” (1983, expanded to the novel
Blood Music
1985) offers a transmission pattern similar to HIV/AIDS but more virulent; the microbes move between victims through any bodily fluid, including sweat, and so are repeatedly described as only “one handshake” away from any other person in the world. Peter Watts’ Rifters series (Starfish [2000], Maelstrom [2002], βehemoth: β-Max [2004], βehemoth: Seppuku [2004]) proposes a similarly aggressive disease that passes through blood or mucus and threatens to destroy life on Earth unless somehow stopped.

Watts’ novels also evoke the idea of germ-based bioterrorism. While humans initially become infected by the biological entity βehemoth by accident when they approach a deep-ocean thermal vent, the central character continues to spread the disease deliberately once she reaches land. Such bioterrorism plots also appear in other novels, even predating 9/11: Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s
Time of the Fourth Horseman
(1976) imagines governments releasing disease as a response to global overpopulation, while in Stephen King’s
The Stand
(1978, film 1994) a weaponized super-flu accidentally escapes the laboratory to destroy most of humanity. Frank Herbert’s
The White Plague
(1982) describes a biochemist releasing a deadly plague targeting only women, producing a worldwide scramble to avoid humanity’s extinction. More recently, Greg Bear’s
Quantico
(2008) has FBI agents chasing a terrorist who responds to contemporary geopolitics with a germ-based “final solution” to religious and cultural differences. Such bioterrorism or government-induced artificial plagues emerge in many recent novels, including Wil McCarthy’s Bloom (1999), Gary Naiman’s PPM—Our Worst Nightmare (2006), its sequel Omega (2009), and Paulo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009), and in films ranging from 12 Monkeys (1995) to Death Without Consent (2007). In some cases, the bio-threat becomes little more than a plot device for a story more thriller than science fiction, as in Mission Impossible: II (2000) or the third season of the television show 24 (2003–2004). But clearly a concern with bioterrorism has long figured in SF generally.

Not all SF addressing microbes assumes disease to be the only possible effect of germs; microbes have also been seen as agents of creativity and evolution. Theodore Sturgeon’s fine story “Microcosmic God” (1941) describes the creation of artificial microbe-like beings who view their inventor-creator as a god, but themselves evolve into remarkable inventors; a similar premise where the inventive microbes are carriers of human culture informs James Blish’s “Surface Tension” (1951). Blish’s microbes are essentially miniaturized humans, a premise that also appears in stories such as Madeline L’Engle’s
The Wind in the Door
(1973), or the movie
Fantastic Voyage
(1966, directed by Richard Fleisher; novelization by Isaac Asimov). Other writers have imagined alien life as intelligent microbes with their own culture; James Tiptree Jr.’s “The Only Neat Thing to Do” suggests that such microbes might be a threat to humanity, while Joan Slonczewski’s
The Children Star (1998) and Brain Plague (2001) offers microbial inhabitants who may also support human creativity. Both Tiptree and Slonczewski imagine microscopic organisms that live in cavities inside the human brain and communicate with their human carriers directly, but Slonczewki’s “Micros” can use their multiple minds and rapid lifespans to solve creative and intellectual problems their human carrier sets before them, fusing with the carrier to create what is functionally a new kind of human. Her new novel, The High Frontier (2011), also posits diseases such as HIV and anthrax harnessed to useful purposes. Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio (2000) and Darwin’s Children (2004) offer a vision of microbe- induced evolution: in his near-future earth, what initially appears to be a disease is actually an evolutionary leap caused by retroviruses activating within the human genetic code. While the novels initially seem to hearken back to the doctors-against-disease model of early germ-based SF, Bear instead asks his readers to reflect on the extent to which human evolution may have always been intertwined with bacteria or viruses.

In such novels, we can see science fiction moving, along with the science itself, beyond the simplest form of the germ theory and toward a more sophisticated understanding of our relation to germs. Indeed, the Human Genome Project suggests that nearly half of our genetic code may derive from viruses, and other research reveals that the very cells in our body depend upon mitochondria, once free-living microbes closely related to the modern bacteria Typhus. Bear and Slonczewski thus suggest that human life depends on our successful interaction with germs, not simply on our efforts to eradicate them. As science’s understanding of germs continues to advance, we can expect the science fiction responding to such theories to advance alongside it—as science fiction always has, sometimes anticipating and sometimes responding to the scientific understandings of its era.

* * * *

Laurel Bollinger
is an associate professor of English at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, where she teaches American literature at the graduate and undergraduate levels. She has published articles on microbes in science fiction in
Extrapolation
and
Science-Fiction Studies.