Axiomatic (12 page)

Marion and I were returned to our home, unconscious for the duration of the voyage, waking on the bed we’d left six months before. There was a lot of dust about. She took my hand and said, ‘Well. Here we are.’ We lay there in silence for hours, then went out in search of food.

The next day I went to the station. I proved my identity with fingerprints and DNA, and gave a full report of all that had happened.

I had not been assumed dead. My salary had continued to be paid into my bank account, and mortgage payments deducted automatically. The department settled my claim for compensation out of court, paying me three-quarters of a million dollars, and I underwent surgery to restore as much of my former appearance as possible.

It took more than two years of rehabilitation, but now I am back on active duty. The Macklenburg case has been shelved for lack of evidence. The investigation of the kidnapping of the three of us, and Catherine’s present fate, is on the verge of going the same way; nobody doubts my account of the events, but all the evidence against Gustave Lindhquist is circumstantial. I accept that. I’m glad. I want to erase everything that Lindhquist has done to me, and an obsession with bringing him to justice is the exact opposite of the state of mind I aim to achieve. I don’t pretend to understand what he thought he was achieving by letting me live, what his insane notion of my supposed effect on the world actually entailed, but I am determined to be, in every way, the same person as I was before the experience, and thus to defeat his intentions.

Marion is doing fine. For a while she suffered from recurring nightmares, but after seeing a therapist who specialises in de-traumatising hostages and kidnap victims, she is now every bit as relaxed and carefree as she used to be.

I have nightmares, now and then. I wake in the early hours of the morning, shivering and sweating and crying out, unable to recall what horror I’m escaping. Andreas Lindhquist injecting samples of brain tissue into his son? Catherine blissfully closing her eyes, and thanking me for saving her life while her claws rake ray body into bloody strips? Myself, trapped in
The Caress;
the moment of the realisation infinitely, unmercifully prolonged? Perhaps; or perhaps I simply dream about my latest case — that seems much more likely.

Everything is back to normal.

<>

* * * *

BLOOD SISTERS

When we were nine years old, Paula decided we should prick our thumbs, and let our blood flow into each other’s veins.

I was scornful. “Why bother? Our blood’s already exactly the same. We’re
already
blood sisters.”

She was unfazed. “I know that. That’s not the point. It’s the ritual that counts.”

We did it in our bedroom, at midnight, by the light of a single candle. She sterilized the needle in the candle flame, then wiped it clean of soot with a tissue and saliva.

When we’d pressed the tiny, sticky wounds together, and recited some ridiculous oath from a third-rate children’s novel, Paula blew out the candle. While my eyes were still adjusting to the dark, she added a whispered coda of her own: “Now we’ll dream the same dreams, and share the same lovers, and die at the very same hour.”

I tried to say, indignantly, “That’s just not true!” but the darkness and the scent of the dead flame made the protest stick in my throat, and her words remained unchallenged.

* * *

As Dr Packard spoke, I folded the pathology report, into halves, into quarters, obsessively aligning the edges. It was far too thick for me to make a neat job of it; from the micrographs of the misshapen lymphocytes proliferating in my bone marrow, to the print-out of portions of the RNA sequence of the virus that had triggered the disease, thirty-two pages in all.

In contrast, the prescription, still sitting on the desk in front of me, seemed ludicrously flimsy and insubstantial. No match at all. The traditional— indecipherable—polysyllabic scrawl it bore was nothing but a decoration; the drug’s name was reliably encrypted in the barcode below. There was no question of receiving the wrong medication by mistake. The question was,
would the right one help me
?

“Is that clear? Ms Rees? Is there anything you don’t understand?”

I struggled to focus my thoughts, pressing hard on an intractable crease with my thumb. She’d explained the situation frankly, without resorting to jargon or euphemism, but I still had the feeling that I was missing something crucial. It seemed like every sentence she’d spoken had started one of two ways: “The virus…”or “The drug…”

“Is there anything I can do? Myself? To… improve the odds?”

She hesitated, but not for long. “No, not really. You’re in excellent health, otherwise. Stay that way.” She began to rise from her desk to dismiss me, and I began to panic.

“But, there must be
something
.” I gripped the arms of my chair, as if afraid of being dislodged by force. Maybe she’d misunderstood me, maybe I hadn’t made myself clear. “Should I… stop eating certain foods? Get more exercise? Get more sleep? I mean, there has to be
something
that will make a difference. And I’ll do it, whatever it is. Please, just
tell
me—” My voice almost cracked, and I looked away, embarrassed.
Don’t ever start ranting like that again
. Not
ever
.

“Ms Rees, I’m sorry. I know how you must be feeling. But the Monte Carlo diseases are all like this. In fact, you’re exceptionally lucky; the WHO computer found eighty thousand people, worldwide, infected with a similar strain. That’s not enough of a market to support any hard-core research, but enough to have persuaded the pharmaceutical companies to rummage through their databases for something that might do the trick. A lot of people are on their own, infected with viruses that are virtually unique. Imagine how much useful information the health profession can give
them
.” I finally looked up; the expression on her face was one of sympathy, tempered by impatience.

I declined the invitation to feel ashamed of my ingratitude. I’d made a fool of myself, but I still had a right to ask the question. “I understand all that. I just thought there might be something I could do. You say this drug might work, or it might not. If I could contribute,
myself
, to fighting this disease, I’d feel…”

What
? More like a human being, and less like a test tube—a passive container in which the wonder drug and the wonder virus would fight it out between themselves. “… better.”

She nodded. “I know, but trust me, nothing you can do would make the slightest difference. Just look after yourself as you normally would. Don’t catch pneumonia. Don’t gain or lose ten kilos. Don’t do
anything
out of the ordinary. Millions of people must have been exposed to this virus, but the reason you’re sick, and they’re not, is
a purely genetic matter
. The cure will be just the same. The biochemistry that determines whether or not the drug will work for you isn’t going to change if you start taking vitamin pills, or stop eating junk food—and I should warn you that going on one of those

‘miracle-cure’ diets will simply make you sick; the charlatans selling them ought to be in prison.”

I nodded fervent agreement to
that
, and felt myself flush with anger. Fraudulent cures had long been my
b
ê
te noir
—although now, for the first time, I could almost understand why other Monte Carlo victims paid good money for such things: crackpot diets, meditation schemes, aroma therapy, self-hypnosis tapes, you name it. The people who peddled that garbage were the worst kind of cynical parasites, and I’d always thought of their customers as being either congenitally gullible, or desperate to the point of abandoning their wits, but there was more to it than that. When your life is at stake, you want to fight for it—with every ounce of your strength, with every cent you can borrow, with every waking moment. Taking one capsule, three times a day, just isn’t
hard enough
—whereas the schemes of the most perceptive con-men were sufficiently arduous (or sufficiently expensive) to make the victims feel that they were engaged in the kind of struggle that the prospect of death requires.

This moment of shared anger cleared the air completely. We were on the same side, after all; I’d been acting like a child. I thanked Dr Packard for her time, picked up the prescription, and left.

On my way to the pharmacy, though, I found myself almost wishing that she’d lied to me—that she’d told me my chances would be vastly improved if I ran ten kilometers a day and ate raw seaweed with every meal—but then I angrily recoiled, thinking: Would I really want to be deceived “for my own good”? If it’s down to my DNA, it’s down to my DNA, and I ought to expect to be told that simple truth, however unpalatable I find it—and I ought to be grateful that the medical profession has abandoned its old patronizing, paternalistic ways.

I was twelve years old when the world learnt about the Monte Carlo project.

A team of biological warfare researchers (located just a stone’s throw from Las Vegas—alas, the one in New Mexico, not the one in Nevada) had decided that
designing
viruses was just too much hard work (especially when the Star Wars boys kept hogging the supercomputers). Why waste hundreds of PhD-years—why expend any intellectual effort whatsoever—when the time-honoured partnership of blind mutation and natural selection was all that was required?

Speeded up substantially, of course.

They’d developed a three-part system: a bacterium, a virus, and a line of modified human lymphocytes. A stable portion of the viral genome allowed it to reproduce in the bacterium, while rapid mutation of the rest of the virus was achieved by neatly corrupting the transcription error repair enzymes. The lymphocytes had been altered to vastly amplify the reproductive success of any mutant which managed to infect them, causing it to out-breed those which were limited to using the bacterium.

The theory was, they’d set up a few trillion copies of this system, like row after row of little biological poker machines, spinning away in their underground lab, and just wait to harvest the jackpots.

The theory also included the best containment facilities in the world, and five hundred and twenty people all sticking scrupulously to official procedure, day after day, month after month, without a moment of carelessness, laziness or forgetfulness. Apparently, nobody bothered to compute the probability of
that
.

The bacterium was supposed to be unable to survive outside artificially beneficent laboratory conditions, but a mutation of the virus came to its aid, filling in for the genes that had been snipped out to make it vulnerable.

They wasted too much time using ineffectual chemicals before steeling themselves to nuke the site. By then, the winds had already made any human action—short of melting half a dozen states, not an option in an election year—irrelevant.

The first rumours proclaimed that we’d all be dead within a week. I can clearly recall the mayhem, the looting, the suicides (second-hand on the TV screen; our own neighbourhood remained relatively tranquil—or numb). States of emergency were declared around the world. Planes were turned away from airports, ships (which had left their home ports months before the leak) were burnt in the docks. Harsh laws were rushed in everywhere, to protect public order and public health.

Paula and I got to stay home from school for a month. I offered to teach her programming; she wasn’t interested. She wanted to go swimming, but the beaches and pools were all closed. That was the summer that I finally managed to hack into a Pentagon computer—just an office supplies purchasing system, but Paula was suitably impressed (and neither of us had ever guessed that paperclips were
that
expensive).

We didn’t believe we were going to die—at least, not within a week—and we were right. When the hysteria died down, it soon became apparent that only the virus and the bacterium had escaped, and without the modified lymphocytes to fine-tune the selection process, the virus had mutated away from the strain which had caused the initial deaths.

However, the cosy symbiotic pair is now found all over the world, endlessly churning out new mutations. Only a tiny fraction of the strains produced are infectious in humans, and only a fraction of those are potentially fatal.

A mere hundred or so a year.

On the train home, the sun seemed to be in my eyes no matter which way I turned—somehow, every surface in the carriage caught its reflection. The glare made a headache which had been steadily growing all afternoon almost unbearable, so I covered my eyes with my forearm and faced the floor. With my other hand, I clutched the brown paper bag that held the small glass vial of red-and-black capsules that would or wouldn’t save my life.

Cancer
. Viral leukaemia. I pulled the creased pathology report from my pocket, and flipped through it one more time. The last page hadn’t magically changed into a happy ending—an oncovirology expert system’s declaration of a sure-fire cure. The last page was just the bill for all the tests. Twenty-seven thousand dollars.

At home, I sat and stared at my work station.

Two months before, when a routine quarterly examination (required by my health insurance company, ever eager to dump the unprofitable sick) had revealed the first signs of trouble, I’d sworn to myself that I’d keep on working, keep on living exactly as if nothing had changed. The idea of indulging in a credit spree, or a world trip, or some kind of self-destructive binge, held no attraction for me at all. Any such final fling would be an admission of defeat. I’d go on a fucking world trip to celebrate my cure, and not before.

I had plenty of contract work stacked up, and that pathology bill was already accruing interest. Yet for all that I needed the distraction—for all that I needed
the money
—I sat there for three whole hours, and did nothing but brood about my fate. Sharing it with eighty thousand strangers scattered about the world was no great comfort.

Then it finally struck me.
Paula
. If I was vulnerable
for genetic reasons, then so was she
.