The Giving Plague Read online

way the ALAS virus forced its hosts to feel their need to “give”. He’d wax eloquent, effusive over elegant mechanisms that he ascribed to random selection, but which I could not help superstitiously attributing to some incredibly insidious form of intelligence. The more subtle and effective we found its techniques to be, the more admiring Les became, and the more I found myself loathing those little packets of RNA and protein.

  The fact that the virus seemed so harmless -- Les thought even commensal -- only made me hate it more. It made me glad of what I had planned. Glad that I was going to stymie Les in his scheme to give ALAS free reign.

  I was going to save humanity from this would-be puppet master. True, I’d delay my warning to suit my own purposes, but the warning would come, nonetheless, and sooner than my unsuspecting compatriot planned.

  Little did Les know that he was doing background for work I’d take credit for. Every flash of insight, his every “Eureka!”, was stored away in my private notebook, beside my own columns of boring data. Meanwhile, I sorted through all the means at my disposal.

  Finally, I selected for my agent a particularly virulent strain of dengue fever.

  3

  There’s an old saying we have in Texas. “A chicken is just an egg’s way of makin’ more eggs.”

  To a biologist, familiar with all those latinized-graecificated words, this saying has a much more “posh” version. Humans are “zygotes”, made up of diploid cells containing forty-six paired chromosomes ... except for our haploid sex cells, or “gametes”. Males’ gametes are sperm and females’ are eggs, each containing only twenty-three chromosomes.

  So biologists say that “a zygote is only a gamete’s way of making more gametes.”

  Clever, eh? But it does point out just how hard it is, in nature, to pin down a Primal Cause... some center to the puzzle, against which everything else can be calibrated. I mean, which does come first, the chicken or the egg?

  “Man is the measure of all things,” goes another wise old saying. Oh yeah? Tell that to a modern feminist.

  A guy I once knew, who read science fiction, told me about this story he’d seen, in which it turned out that the whole and entire purpose of humanity, brains and all, was to be the organism that built starships so that houseflies could migrate out and colonize the galaxy.

  But that idea’s nothing compared with what Les Adgeson believed. He spoke of the human animal as if he were describing a veritable United Nations. From the E. coli in our guts, to tiny commensal mites that clean our eyelashes for us, to the mitochondria that energize our cells, all the way to the contents of our very DNA... Les saw it all as a great big hive of compromise, negotiation, symbiosis. Most of the contents of our chromosomes came from past invaders, he contended.

  Symbiosis? The picture he created in my mind was one of minuscule puppeteers, all yanking and jerking at us with their protein strings, making us marionettes dance to their own tunes, to their own nasty, selfish little agendas.

  And you, you were the worst! Like most cynics, I had always maintained a secret faith in human nature. Yes, most people are pigs. I’ve always known that. And while I may be a user, at least I’m honest enough to admit it.

  But deep down, we users count on the sappy, inexplicable generosity, the mysterious, puzzling altruism of those others, the kind, inexplicably decent folk... those we superficially sneer at in contempt, but secretly hold in awe.

  Then you came along, damn you. You make people behave that way. There is no mystery left, after you get finished. No corner remaining impenetrable to cynicism. Damn, how I came to hate you!

  As I came to hate Leslie Adgeson. I made my plans, schemed my brilliant campaign against both of you. In those last days of innocence, I felt oh, so savagely determined. So deliciously decisive and in control of my own destiny.

  In the end it was anticlimactic. I didn’t have time to finish my preparations, to arrange that little trap, that sharp bit of glass dipped in just the right mixture of deadly micro-organisms. For CAPUC arrived then, just before I could exercise my option as a murderer.

  CAPUC changed everything.

  Catastrophic Auto-immune PUlmonary Collapse... acronym for the horror that made AIDS look like a minor irritant. And in the beginning it appeared unstoppable. Its vectors were completely unknown and the causative agent defied isolation for so long.

  This time it was no easily identifiable group that came down with the new plague, though it concentrated upon the industrialized world. Schoolchildren in some areas seemed particularly vulnerable. In other places it was secretaries and postal workers.

  Naturally, all the major epidemiology labs got involved. Les predicted the pathogen would turn out to be something akin to the prions that cause shingles in sheep, and certain plant diseases... a pseudo life form even simpler than a virus and even harder to track down. It was a heretical, minority view, until the CDC in Atlanta decided out of desperation to try his theories out, and found the very dormant viroids Les predicted -- mixed in with the glue used to seal paper milk cartons, envelopes, postage stamps.

  Les was a hero, of course. Most of us in the labs were. After all, we’d been the first line of defense. Our own casualty rate had been ghastly.

  For a while there, funerals and other public gatherings were discouraged. But an exception was made for Les. The procession behind his cortege was a mile long. I was asked to deliver the eulogy. And when they pleaded with me to take over at the lab, I agreed.

  So naturally I tended to forget all about ALAS. The war against CAPUC took everything society had. And while I may be selfish, even a rat can tell when it makes more sense to join in the fight to save a sinking ship... especially when there’s no other port in sight.

  We learned how to combat CAPUC, eventually. It involved drugs, and a serum based on reversed antibodies force-grown in the patient’s own marrow after he’s been given a dangerous overdose of a vanadium compound I found by trial and error. It worked most of the time, but the victims suffered great stress and often required a special regime of whole blood transfusions to get across the most dangerous phase.

  Blood banks were stretched even thinner than before. Only now the public responded generously, as in time of war. I should not have been surprised when survivors, after their recovery, volunteered by the thousands. But, of course, I’d forgotten about ALAS by then, hadn’t I?

  We beat back CAPUC. Its vector proved too unreliable, too easily interrupted once we’d figured it out. The poor little viroid never had a chance to get to Les’s “negotiation” stage. Oh well, those are the breaks.

  I got all sorts of citations I didn’t deserve. The king gave me a KBE for personally saving the Prince of Wales. I had dinner at the White House.

  Big deal.

  The world had a respite, after that. CAPUC had scared people, it seemed, into a new spirit of cooperation. I should have been suspicious, of course. But soon I’d moved over to WHO, and had all sorts of administrative responsibilities in the Final Campaign on Malnutrition.

  By that time, I had almost entirely forgotten about ALAS.

  I forgot about you, didn’t I? Oh, the years passed, my star rose, I became famous, respected, revered. I didn’t get my Nobel in Stockholm. Ironically, I picked it up in Oslo. Fancy that. Just shows you can fool anybody.

  And yet, I don’t think I ever really forgot about you, ALAS, not at the back of my mind.

  Peace treaties were signed. Citizens of the industrial nations voted temporary cuts in their standards of living in order to fight poverty and save the environment. Suddenly, it seemed, we’d all grown up. Other cynics, guys I’d gotten drunk with in the past -- and shared dark premonitions about the inevitable fate of filthy, miserable humanity -- all gradually deserted the faith, as pessimists seem wont to do when the world turns bright -- too bright for even the cynical to dismiss as a mere passing phase on the road to Hell.

  And yet, my own brooding remained unblemis
hed. For subconsciously I knew it wasn’t real.

  Then, the third Mars Expedition returned to worldwide adulation, and brought home with them TARP.

  And that was when we all found out just how friendly all our home-grown pathogens really had been, all along.

  4

  Late at night, stumbling in exhaustion from overwork, I would stop at Les’s portrait where I’d ordered it hung in the hall opposite my office door, and stand there cursing him and his damned theories of symbiosis.

  Picture mankind ever reaching a symbiotic association with TARP! That really would be something. Imagine, Les, all those alien genes, added to our heritage, to our rich human diversity!

  Only TARP did not seem to be much interested in “negotiation”. Its wooing was rough, deadly. And its vector was the wind.

  The world looked to me, and to my peers, for salvation. In spite of all of my successes and high renown, though, I knew myself for a second-best fraud. I would always know -- no matter how much they thanked and praised me -- who had been better than me by light years.

  Again and again, deep into the night, I would pore through the notes Leslie Adgeson had left behind, seeking inspiration, seeking hope. That’s when I stumbled across ALAS, again.

  I found you again.

  Oh, you made us behave better, all right. At least a quarter of the human race must contain your DNA, by