Virus: The Day of Resurrection (49 page)

“I’ll send you a postcard from Washington.”

“For such a nice young man to have to die.” Irma’s hazel eyes grew moist.

“Three and a half billion people died,” said Yoshizumi. “And now the last ten thousand survivors are about to die as well. Too many have died already.”

Suddenly, Irma covered her face and burst into tears. The flesh of her bare shoulders trembled.

“Don’t cry, please.” Yoshizumi hesitantly put a hand on Irma’s shoulder.

“I’m sorry. To be honest, I’m tired,” said Irma, sniffling and tearful. “I’m the oldest of all the mamas. It’s not just women that come to my place; there are hairy-faced men too. Every single day, so many men. As the cheerful older lady, as the mother, I’ve always seen very clearly what people are like inside and out. And I’m a middle-aged lady who knows all about the ways of love as well. About men who are growing exhausted, despondent, and hysterical. Every day—every single day—encouraging them, comforting them with my body like a holy whore, I’ve been with thousands of men by this point. And going forward, I just think, ‘How much longer will this go on?’ These dismal nights that last half the year in a world where there’s nothing except ice and snow.”

Yoshizumi quietly stroked the hair of the sobbing Irma. “How about resting for a bit?” he said. “You have a body that’s much more important than mine. From now on, for how long I can’t say, but from now on, we’ll need you to cheer and encourage the men.”

“I’m sorry. I was supposed to cheer you up on your last night, but …” Irma finally wiped away her tears and lifted up her face. “You sure you don’t wanna sleep with me, kid?”

“Sex is not such an intrinsic part of being human,
Mama
,” Yoshizumi said, smiling. “The idea that sex is an important part of life is a delusion of novelists.”

“You’re talking to me like I’m a child,” Irma said, laughing even as she cried. “When I came to Antarctica on navy duty, I used to talk big, as if I’d just got into college.”

“There is something I’d like to ask you to do for me,” Yoshizumi stammered.

“What?”

“My father died young, but my mother was healthy and lived in the country with my brother and his wife.” Yoshizumi suddenly felt something welling up in his own throat, and hurriedly coughed to clear it. “I was often away on long trips, and when I’d occasionally come back for a visit, I’d rub my mother’s shoulders. Mom always looked forward to that.”

Irma looked up at him. She had cried her gray eyes out, but now they brimmed with a kind of light.

“What a nice boy,” Irma whispered. “Are all Japanese so kind to their parents?”

“Can I give you a shoulder rub?” Yoshizumi said with feeling. “It’s the last thing I’ll ever ask of you.”

Irma stared fixedly at Yoshizumi’s face and suddenly moved herself facedown on the bed. A sob made its way out from the pillow where her face was pressed.

Yoshizumi approached Irma’s back and silently, gently began to rub her shoulders. They were rough with golden down, sprinkled with specks, freckles, and spots, and the flabby flesh was white—and tinged slightly purple—completely unlike the thin little shoulders of his mother. But even so, he massaged them with all his heart. It was a strange sight indeed. In a locked room on a frozen Antarctic night under rippling auroras, a nearly naked man and a naked woman—young man who was to die gently, carefully massaging the naked flesh of an overweight middle-aged woman. Irma began lightly snoring into the still-damp pillow. Tears had washed the makeup from a face that was covered in tiny wrinkles. On her forehead one deep, vertical crease was drawn tight.

3. Return to the Dead Capital

It was nearing high noon on the following day when two black shadows began swimming silently northward across the mist-shrouded waters of Hope Bay, pushing their way through the crust of pack ice that had begun to form on its surface. At last, they were putting behind them the long winter and the night that lasted half the year. Mist blew against the dark shapes of the men on the cliffs who had come to see them off, while heavy, lead-colored snow continued to fall in the midst of the Weddell Sea. Although it was natural that those who were leaving behind the solid white world closed off by night and cold, who were bound for a world drenched in sunlight and green, should feel joyful at this time, everything was now reversed. Those who were seeing them off were overwhelmed by a grim sense of melancholy, as though they were watching a pair of coffins being carried away in a funeral procession, and those who were headed north had their heads hung low in sorrow. These two coffins, carrying four sacrifices for the bloodthirsty gods that had survived the destruction of mankind, who ruled over uninhabited lands, were some ways off from the middle of the bay when they were swallowed up in the swirling fog and lost from view of the shore. Only the sounds of two sirens rang out beyond those mists—sharply, wistfully—echoing off the ice shelf and the icebergs, signaling both submersion and farewell. Even after their lingering reverberations had faded, the people atop the cliffs stood still in gloomy, motionless silence until the low sun that announced the arrival of winter showed its face just briefly from across the sea of ice, then hurriedly dipped below the horizon again.

In an out-of-the-way spot amid the Antarctic Circle, the two submarines called out to one another again with their sirens, and there their courses parted.
Nereid
could head north along the Atlantic coast of South America, cross the equator, and reach North America, but the Moscow-bound
T-232
would have a much longer journey, since in order to reach Moscow, it had to travel farther north, enter the North Sea by way of the English Channel, circle around the peninsula of Denmark, enter the Baltic Sea, then the Gulf of Finland, then by way of the canal from Leningrad enter Lake Ladoga, Lake Onega, and Rybinsk Reservoir before heading south, taking the canal from Kalinin on the headwaters of the Volga, and crossing through a part of the Valdai Hills before finally arriving in Moscow. For that reason,
T-232
was traveling fast—at a speed of twenty-seven knots.

“If
T-232
keeps up that kind of speed, I have to wonder if they’ll have enough fuel for the return voyage,” Slim wondered aloud as he watched the receding point of light on the underwater radar board.

“They’re carrying all the fuel they can,” said Mihailovich, who—off duty—was standing behind Slim. “I know all about that kind of sub. The nuclear reactor is the same kind as
Nereid
’s—a pressurized light water reactor. Still, if you keep driving it at full power, waste products start building up a lot faster.”

“And if that happens,
T-232
might not be able to make it back?”

“Captain Zoshchenko understands,” Mihailovich murmured, holding his head in his hands. “Most likely, everyone on board knows. They just won’t talk about it.”

Thus their long, dull, isolated voyage began. In no time, the temperature of the air inside the submarine began to warm up, and the air conditioner was switched over from “warm” to “cool.” After rounding Cape Blanco, their heading changed from north by northeast to north by northwest, then the vessel crossed the equator and headed into the northern hemisphere. The two sacrificial lambs—Yoshizumi and Major Carter—were treated as guests on the ship. Both of them were given private cabins, and both of them kept themselves locked away inside them, almost never seeing one another or other crewmembers face-to-face. No one knew what Major Carter was doing in his room, but Yoshizumi had brought a portable computer into his room and continued his calculations day after day. The longer he continued, the more impatient he became.

They passed east of the Lesser Antilles, and soon after—about the time they were crossing the Tropic of Cancer—Yoshizumi received a visit from Dr. de la Tour. Dr. de la Tour was both a medical doctor and an expert on microbiology. He sat down in a chair in Yoshizumi’s cramped cabin, and for a long moment, looked downward, rubbing his fingers.

“What is it, Doctor?” Yoshizumi asked when he could wait no longer. “Do you have some mysterious secret you want to talk about?” He laughed at his own little joke.

“Actually, I do,” the doctor said, looking up from his hands. “The experimental phase has been terribly short, but since you’re on a kamikaze mission, this is hard to just come out and say, but …”

“What is it?”

“It isn’t right, calling it the ‘Linskey virus.’ ‘Linskey nucleic acids’ would be all right, but …” The doctor was stumbling all over his words. “I’ve only been at it for the one month since this voyage began, so I don’t have much confidence, but I’ve made a kind of variant form of the host bacteria. WA5PS.”

“The host bacteria for the Linskey nucleic acids?”

The doctor nodded. “If it’s variants you’re looking for, there have been dozens of them made before now. Nothing that looked like it might be good for anything, though. If it was a virus, we could kill it with pharmaceuticals or weaken its toxicity and make it into a vaccine. But when it comes to these reproducing nucleic acids, there’s just no way to synthesize
individual proteins
, is there?”

“And so?”

“I thought about making a variant with chemicals and tried a number of different things, but no matter what I tried, it never went very well. At any rate, we’re rather short on microbiological research facilities in Antarctica. It was like fumbling around blindly. Even this last time, it was nothing more than a shot in the dark—”

“What are you getting at?”

“To make nucleic acid mutants, I tried using beams of neutrons.” Dr. de la Tour’s eyes suddenly shone. “Even before now, bacterial and viral mutants have been made using radiation, but those experiments used primarily gamma rays and X-rays—just stuff on the electromagnetic spectrum. That’s because electromagnetic waves are easy to make. When it comes to particle beams, electron rays—beta rays—are the beginning and end of it. There have hardly ever been any experiments using beams of heavier particles, like protons and neutrons.”

“Would the source of a neutron beam be a nuclear reactor?”

“Yes, that’s exactly right. Even in our research, we’ve occasionally done gamma ray irradiations using cobalt-60 as the source of the beam, but we didn’t get much for our efforts. Still, these bacteria and nucleic acids are utterly bizarre little fellows, so when I hit them with fairly dense, fairly high-speed neutrons, a very strange mutation took place. Naturally, most of them died under bombardment. However, there was an interesting little fellow among the diehard holdouts that survived.” Dr. de la Tour suddenly lowered his voice. “Hot neutrons—that is to say, neutrons at low or middling speed—are no good. I tried it using the breeder reactor at Shackleton Station.”

“Weird little fellows, you say?” said Yoshizumi, just to show he was listening.

“Incredibly weird little fellows! High speed neutrons, of all things—I don’t know about outer space, but this is something that absolutely does not exist on Earth.”

“Electromagnetic radiation doesn’t work, but hit it with a beam of heavy particles and it mutates—why on earth is that?”

“I haven’t the slightest,” said the doctor. “Living things only mutate via chemical changes, so I’d thought that any kind of radiation that was strong enough to spark chemical reactions on the genetic level would work as well as any other. I guess we’ll have to proceed from molecular biology to nuclear biology now. For example … suppose it happened because there’s some element in the nucleic acid that absorbed neutrons and became an unstable radioactive isotope, then decayed rapidly into something else.”

“And? What kind of mutant did you make?”

“Well, up until now, it was a reproducing nucleic acid, but very suddenly, it started acting more like a virus,” said the doctor, leaning forward. “All around the nucleic acid, small particles of a protein called capsomere began to attach themselves. It became something midway between a living virus and the bare nucleic acid. And then it—it stopped invading human cells, and became a mere bacteriophage.”

“You say it doesn’t invade human cells?”

“Exactly … when WA5PS bacteria are replicating in an inorganic system, the Linskey nucleic acid is in the form of a prophage, as it were, hiding in the bacteria’s chromosomes. Then, when the bacteria begin to incorporate foreign proteins and replicate, that serves as a stimulus. The nucleic acid consumes the bacteria and comes bursting out. Then it invades human nerve cells. The mutual antibody-antigen relation between germs and the human body provide the nucleic acids with their one and only stimulus for spreading. However, the mutant Linskey nucleic acid, like a normal phage, destroys
only
the WA5PS bacteria and hardly grows at all inside human cells grown in tissue cultures.”