Collected short fiction.., p.15
Collected Short Fiction of Greg Egan, page 15
“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 bête 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.
For identical twins, in the end we hadn’t done too bad a job of pursuing separate lives. She had left home at sixteen, to tour central Africa, filming the wildlife, and—at considerably greater risk—the poachers. Then she’d gone to the Amazon, and become caught up in the land rights struggle there. After that, it was a bit of a blur; she’d always tried to keep me up to date with her exploits, but she moved too fast for my sluggish mental picture of her to follow.
I’d never left the country; I hadn’t even moved house in a decade.
She came home only now and then, on her way between continents, but we’d stayed in touch electronically, circumstances permitting. (They take away your SatPhone in Bolivian prisons.)
The telecommunications multinationals all offer their own expensive services for contacting someone when you don’t know in advance what country they’re in. The advertising suggests that it’s an immensely difficult task; the fact is, every SatPhone’s location is listed in a central database, which is kept up to date by pooling information from all the regional satellites. Since I happened to have “acquired” the access codes to consult that database, I could phone Paula directly, wherever she was, without paying the ludicrous surcharge. It was more a matter of nostalgia than miserliness; this minuscule bit of hacking was a token gesture, proof that in spite of impending middle age, I wasn’t yet terminally law-abiding, conservative and dull.
I’d automated the whole procedure long ago. The database said she was in Gabon; my program calculated local time, judged ten twenty-three p.m. to be civilized enough, and made the call. Seconds later, she was on the screen.
“Karen! How are you? You look like shit. I thought you were going to call last week—what happened?”
The image was perfectly clear, the sound clean and undistorted (fibre-optic cables might be scarce in central Africa, but geosynchronous satellites are directly overhead). As soon as I set eyes on her, I felt sure she didn’t have the virus. She was right—I looked half-dead—whereas she was as animated as ever. Half a lifetime spent outdoors meant her skin had aged much faster than mine—but there was always a glow of energy, of purpose, about her that more than compensated.
She was close to the lens, so I couldn’t see much of the background, but it looked like a fibreglass hut, lit by a couple of hurricane lamps; a step up from the usual tent.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t get around to it. Gabon? Weren’t you in Ecuador—?”
“Yes, but I met Mohammed. He’s a botanist. From Indonesia. Actually, we met in Bogota; he was on his way to a conference in Mexico—”
“But—”
“Why Gabon? This is where he was going next, that’s all. There’s a fungus here, attacking the crops, and I couldn’t resist coming along…”
I nodded, bemused, through ten minutes of convoluted explanations, not paying too much attention; in three months’ time it would all be ancient history. Paula survived as a freelance pop-science journalist, darting around the globe writing articles for magazines, and scripts for TV programmes, on the latest ecological troublespots. To be honest, I had severe doubts that this kind of predigested eco-babble did the planet any good, but it certainly made her happy. I envied her that. I could not have lived her life—in no sense was she the woman I “might have been”—but nonetheless it hurt me, at times, to see in her eyes the kind of sheer excitement that I hadn’t felt, myself, for a decade.
My mind wandered while she spoke. Suddenly, she was saying, “Karen? Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?”
I hesitated. I had originally planned to tell no one, not even her, and now my reason for calling her seemed absurd—she couldn’t have leukaemia, it was unthinkable. Then, without even realizing that I’d made the decision, I found myself recounting everything in a dull, flat voice. I watched with a strange feeling of detachment the changing expression on her face; shock, pity, then a burst of fear when she realized—far sooner than I would have done—exactly what my predicament meant for her.
What followed was even more awkward and painful than I could have imagined. Her concern for me was genuine—but she would not have been human if the uncertainty of her own position had not begun to prey on her at once, and knowing that made all her fussing seem contrived and false.
“Do you have a good doctor? Someone you can trust?”
I nodded.
“Do you have someone to look after you? Do you want me to come home?”
I shook my head, irritated. “No, I’m all right. I’m being looked after, I’m being treated. But you have to get tested as soon as possible.” I glared at her, exasperated. I no longer believed that she could have the virus, but I wanted to stress the fact that I’d called her to warn her, not to fish for sympathy—and somehow, that finally struck home. She said, quietly, “I’ll get tested today. I’ll go straight into town. Okay?”
I nodded. I felt exhausted, but relieved; for a moment, all the awkwardness between us melted away.
“You’ll let me know the results?”
She rolled her eyes. “Of course I will.”
I nodded again. “Okay.”
“Karen. Be careful. Look after yourself.”
“I will. You too.” I hit the ESCAPE key.
Half an hour later, I took the first of the capsules, and climbed into bed. A few minutes later, a bitter taste crept up into my throat.
· · · · ·
Telling Paula was essential. Telling Martin was insane. I’d only known him six months, but I should have guessed exactly how he’d take it.
“Move in with me. I’ll look after you.”
“I don’t need to be looked after.”
He hesitated, but only slightly. “Marry me.”
“Marry you? Why? Do you think I have some desperate need to be married before I die?”
He scowled. “Don’t talk like that. I love you. Don’t you understand that?”
I laughed. “I don’t mind being pitied—people always say it’s degrading, but I think it’s a perfectly normal response—but I don’t want to have to live with it twenty-four hours a day.” I kissed him, but he kept on scowling. At least I’d waited until after we’d had sex before breaking the news; if not, he probably would have treated me like porcelain.
He turned to face me. “Why are you being so hard on yourself? What are you trying to prove? That you’re super-human? That you don’t need anyone?”
“Listen. You’ve known from the very start that I need independence and privacy. What do you want me to say? That I’m terrified? Okay. I am. But I’m still the same person. I still need the same things.” I slid one hand across his chest, and said as gently as I could, “So thanks for the offer, but no thanks.”
“I don’t mean very much to you, do I?”
I groaned, and pulled a pillow over my face. I thought: Wake me when you’re ready to fuck me again. Does that answer your question? I didn’t say it out loud, though.
· · · · ·
A week later, Paula phoned me. She had the virus. Her white cell count was up, her red cell count was down—the numbers she quoted sounded just like my own from the month before. They’d even put her on the very same drug. That was hardly surprising, but it gave me an unpleasant, claustrophobic feeling, when I thought about what it meant:
We would both live, or we would both die.
In the days that followed, this realization began to obsess me. It was like voodoo, like some curse out of a fairy tale—or the fulfilment of the words she’d uttered, the night we became “blood sisters.” We had never dreamed the same dreams, we’d certainly never loved the same men, but now … it was as if we were being punished, for failing to respect the forces that bound us together.
Part of me knew this was bullshit. Forces that bound us together! It was mental static, the product of stress, nothing more. The truth, though, was just as oppressive: the biochemical machinery would grind out its identical verdict on both of us, for all the thousands of kilometres between us, for all that we had forged separate lives in defiance of our genetic unity.
I tried to bury myself in my work. To some degree, I succeeded—if the grey stupor produced by eighteen-hour days in front of a terminal could really be considered a success.
I began to avoid Martin; his puppy-dog concern was just too much to bear. Perhaps he meant well, but I didn’t have the energy to justify myself to him, over and over again. Perversely, at the very same time, I missed our arguments terribly; resisting his excessive mothering had at least made me feel strong, if only in contrast to the helplessness he seemed to expect of me.
I phoned Paula every week at first, but then gradually less and less often. We ought to have been ideal confidantes; in fact, nothing could have been less true. Our conversations were redundant; we already knew what the other was thinking, far too well. There was no sense of unburdening, just a suffocating, monotonous feeling of recognition. We took to trying to outdo each other in affecting a veneer of optimism, but it was a depressingly transparent effort. Eventually, I thought: when—if—I get the good news, I’ll call her; until then, what’s the point? Apparently, she came to the same conclusion.
All through childhood, we were forced together. We loved each other, I suppose, but … we were always in the same classes at school, bought the same clothes, given the same Christmas and birthday presents—and we were always sick at the same time, with the same ailment, for the same reason. When she left home, I was envious, and horribly lonely for a while, but then I felt a surge of joy, of liberation, because I knew that I had no real wish to follow her, and I knew that from then on, our lives could only grow further apart.
