Axiomatic (38 page)

However, if the fingerprints failed to match, implying that the strain had now crossed into another person’s body,
(and
if gender-specific markers showed that the two hosts were
not
of the same sex), the daughter virus would be a third variety, SVM, containing both fingerprints. The M stood for

‘monogamous’, or ‘marriage certificate’. Shawcross, a great romantic, found it almost unbearably sweet to think of two people’s love for each other being expressed in this way, deep down at the subcellular level, and of man and wife, by the very act of making love, signing a contract of faithfulness until death, literally in their own blood.

SVM would be, externally, much like SVC. Of course, when it infected a T cell it would check the host’s fingerprint against
both
stored copies, and if
either
one matched, all would be well, and more SVM

would be produced.

Shawcross called the fourth form of the virus SVD. It could arise in two ways; from SVC directly, when the gender markers implied that a homosexual act had taken place, or from SVM, when the detection of a third genetic fingerprint suggested that the molecular marriage contract had been violated.

SVD forced its host cells to secrete enzymes that catalysed the disintegration of vital structural proteins in blood vessel walls. Sufferers from an SVD infection would undergo massive hemorrhaging all over their body. Shawcross had found that mice died within two or three minutes of an injection of pre-infected lymphocytes, and rabbits within five or six minutes; the timing varied slightly, depending on the choice of injection site.

SVD was designed so that its protein coat would degrade in air, or in solutions outside a narrow range of temperature and pH, and its RNA alone was non-infectious. Catching SVD from a dying victim would be almost impossible. Because of the swiftness of death, an adulterer would have no time to infect their innocent spouse; the widow or widower would, of course, be sentenced to celibacy for the rest of their life, but Shawcross did not think this too harsh: it took two people to make a marriage, he reasoned, and some small share of the blame could always be apportioned to the other partner.

Even assuming that the virus fulfilled its design goals precisely, Shawcross acknowledged a number of complications:

Blood transfusions would become impractical until a foolproof method of killing the virus
in vitro
was found. Five years ago this would have been tragic, but Shawcross was encouraged by the latest work in synthetic and cultured blood components, and had no doubt that his epidemic would cause more funds and manpower to be diverted into the area. Transplants were less easily dealt with, but Shawcross thought them somewhat frivolous anyway, an expensive and rarely justifiable use of scarce resources.

Doctors, nurses, dentists, paramedics, police, undertakers . . . well, in fact
everyone,
would have to take extreme precautions to avoid exposure to other people’s blood. Shawcross was impressed, though of course not surprised, at God’s foresight here: the rarer and less deadly AIDS virus had gone before, encouraging practices verging on the paranoid in dozens of professions, multiplying rubber glove sales by orders of magnitude. Now the overkill would all be justified, since
everyone
would be infected with, at the very least, SVC.

Rape of virgin by virgin would become a sort of biological shotgun wedding; any other kind would be murder and suicide. The death of the victim would be tragic, of course, but the near-certain death of the rapist would surely be an overwhelming deterrent. Shawcross decided that the crime would virtually disappear.

Homosexual incest between identical twins would escape punishment, since the virus could have no way of telling one from the other. This omission irritated Shawcross, especially since he was unable to find any published statistics that would allow him to judge the prevalence of such abominable behaviour. In the end he decided that this minor flaw would constitute a necessary, token remnant — a kind of moral fossil

— of man’s inalienable potential to consciously choose evil.

* * * *

It was in the northern summer of 2000 that the virus was completed, and tested as well as it could be in tissue culture experiments and on laboratory animals. Apart from establishing the fatality of SVD (created by test-tube simulations of human sins of the flesh), rats, mice and rabbits were of little value, because so much of the virus’s behaviour was tied up in its interaction with the human genome. In cultured human cell lines, though, the clockwork all seemed to unwind, exactly as far, and never further, than appropriate to the circumstances; generation after generation of SVA, SVC and SVM remained stable and benign. Of course more experiments could have been done, more time put aside to ponder the consequences, but that would have been the case regardless.

It was time to act. The latest drugs meant that AIDS was now rarely fatal — at least, not to those who could afford the treatment. The third millennium was fast approaching, a symbolic opportunity not to be ignored. Shawcross was doing God’s work; what need did he have for quality control? True, he was an imperfect human instrument in God’s hands, and at every stage of the task he had blundered and failed a dozen times before achieving perfection, but that was in the laboratory, where mistakes could be discovered and rectified easily. Surely God would never permit anything less than an infallible virus, His will made RNA, out into the world.

So Shawcross visited a travel agent, then infected himself with SVA.

* * * *

Shawcross went west, crossing the Pacific at once, saving his own continent for last. He stuck to large population centres: Tokyo, Beijing, Seoul, Bangkok, Manila, Sydney, New Delhi, Cairo. SVA could survive indefinitely, dormant but potentially infectious, on any surface that wasn’t intentionally sterilised. The seats in a jet, the furniture in a hotel room, aren’t autoclaved too often.

Shawcross didn’t visit prostitutes; it was SVA that he wanted to spread, and SVA was not a venereal disease. Instead, he simply played the tourist, sightseeing, shopping, catching public transport, swimming in hotel pools. He relaxed at a frantic pace, adopting a schedule of remorseless recreation that, he soon felt, only divine intervention sustained.

Not surprisingly, by the time he reached London he was a wreck, a suntanned zombie in a fading floral shirt, with eyes as glazed as the multicoated lens of his obligatory (if filmless) camera. Tiredness, jet lag, and endless changes of cuisine and surroundings (paradoxically made worse by an underlying glutinous monotony to be found in food and cities alike) had all worked together to slowly drag him down into a muddy, trancelike state of mind. He dreamt of airports and hotels and jets, and woke in the same places, unable to distinguish between memories and dreams.

His faith held out through it all, of course, invulnerably axiomatic, but he worried nonetheless. High-altitude jet travel meant extra exposure to cosmic rays; could he be certain that the virus’s mechanisms for self-checking and mutation repair were fail-safe? God would be watching over all the trillions of replications, but still, he would feel better when he was home again, and could test the strain he’d been carrying for any evidence of defects.

Exhausted, he stayed in his hotel room for days, when he should have been out jostling Londoners, not to mention the crowds of international tourists making the best of the end of summer. News of his plague was only now beginning to grow beyond isolated items about mystery deaths; health authorities were investigating, but had had little time to assemble all the data, and were naturally reluctant to make premature announcements. It was too late, anyway; even if Shawcross had been found and quarantined at once, and all national frontiers sealed, people he had infected so far would already have taken SVA to every corner of the globe.

He missed his flight to Dublin. He missed his flight to Ontario. He ate and slept, and dreamt of eating, sleeping and dreaming.
The Times
arrived each morning on his breakfast tray, each day devoting more and more space to proof of his success, but still lacking the special kind of headline he longed for: a black-and-white acknowledgement of the plague’s divine purpose. Experts began declaring that all the signs pointed to a biological weapon run amok, with Libya and Iraq the prime suspects; sources in Israeli intelligence had confirmed that both countries had greatly expanded their research programs in recent years. If any epidemiologist had realised that only adulterers and homosexuals were dying, the idea had not yet filtered through to the press.

Eventually, Shawcross checked out of the hotel. There was no need for him to travel through Canada, the States, or Central and South America; all the news showed that other travellers had long since done his job for him. He booked a flight home, but had nine hours to kill.

* * * *

‘I will do no such thing! Now take your money and get out.’

‘But—’

‘Straight sex,
it says in the foyer. Can’t you read?’

‘I don’t want sex. I won’t touch you. You don’t understand. I want you to touch
yourself.
I only want to be
tempted
—’

‘Well, walk down the street with both eyes open, that should be temptation enough.’ The woman glared at him, but Shawcross didn’t budge. There was an important principle at stake.
‘I’ve paid
you!’ he whined.

She dropped the notes on his lap. ‘And now you have your money back. Goodnight.’

He climbed to his feet. ‘God’s going to punish you. You’re going to die a horrible death, blood leaking out of all your veins—’

‘There’ll be blood leaking out of
you
if I have to call the lads to assist you off the premises.’

‘Haven’t you read about the plague? Don’t you realise what it is, what it means? It’s God’s punishment for fornicators—’

‘Oh, get out, you blaspheming lunatic.’

‘Blaspheming?’
Shawcross was stunned. ‘You don’t know who you’re talking to! I’m God’s chosen instrument!’

She scowled at him. ‘You’re the devil’s own arsehole, that’s what you are. Now clear off.’

As Shawcross tried to stare her down, a peculiar dizziness took hold of him.
She was going to die, and
he would be responsible.
For several seconds, this simple realisation sat unchallenged in his brain, naked, awful, obscene in its clarity. He waited for the usual chorus of abstractions and rationalisations to rise up and conceal it.

And waited.

Finally he knew that he couldn’t leave the room without doing his best to save her life.

‘Listen to me! Take this money and let me talk, that’s all. Let me talk for five minutes, then I’ll go.’

‘Talk about what?’

‘The plague.
Listen!
I know more about the plague than anyone else on the planet.’ The woman mimed disbelief and impatience. ‘It’s true! I’m an expert virologist, I work for, ah, I work for the Centres for Disease Control, in Atlanta, Georgia. Everything I’m going to tell you will be made public in a couple of days, but I’m telling you
now,
because you’re at risk from this job, and in a couple of days it might be too late.’

He explained, in the simplest language he could manage, the four stages of the virus, the concept of a stored host fingerprint, the fatal consequences if a third person’s SVM ever entered her blood. She sat through it all in silence.

‘Do you understand what I’ve said?’

‘Sure I do. That doesn’t mean I believe it.’

He leapt to his feet and shook her. ‘I’m deadly serious! I’m telling you the absolute truth! God is punishing adulterers! AIDS was just a warning; this time
no
sinner will escape!
No one!’

She removed his hands. ‘Your God and my God don’t have a lot in common.’

‘Your God!’
he spat.

‘Oh, and aren’t I entitled to one? Excuse me. I thought they’d put it in some United Nations Charter: everyone’s issued with their own God at birth, though if you break Him or lose Him along the way there’s no free replacement.’

‘Now who’s blaspheming?’

She shrugged. ‘Well, my God’s still functioning, but yours sounds a bit of a disaster. Mine might not cure all the problems in the world, but at least he doesn’t bend over backwards to make them worse.’

Shawcross was indignant. ‘A few people will die. A few sinners, it can’t be helped. But think of what the world will be like when
the message finally gets through!
No unfaithfulness, no rape; every marriage lasting until death—’

She grimaced with distaste. ‘For all the wrong reasons.’

‘No! It might start out that way. People are weak, they need a reason, a selfish reason, to be good. But given time it will grow to be more than that; a habit, then a tradition, then part of human nature. The virus won’t matter any more. People will have
changed.’

‘Well, maybe; if monogamy is inheritable, I suppose natural selection would eventually—’

Shawcross stared at her, wondering if he was losing his mind, then screamed,
‘Stop it!
There is
no such
thing
as “natural selection”!’ He’d never been lectured on Darwinism in any brothel back home, but then what could he expect in a country run by godless socialists? He calmed down slightly, and added, ‘I
meant
a change in the spiritual values of the world culture.’

The woman shrugged, unmoved by the outburst. ‘I know you don’t give a damn what I think, but I’m going to tell you anyway.
You
are the saddest, most screwed-up man I’ve set eyes on all week. So, you’ve chosen a particular moral code to live by; that’s your right, and good luck to you. But you have no real
faith
in what you’re doing; you’re so uncertain of your choice that you need God to pour down fire and brimstone on everyone who’s chosen differently, just to prove to you that you’re right. God fails to oblige, so you hunt through the natural disasters — earthquakes, floods, famines, epidemics —

winnowing out examples of the “punishment of sinners”. You think you’re proving that God’s on your side? All you’re proving is your own insecurity.’