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way servants smile at rich people and gave her an envelope containing her key.
"I don't own this, you know," she said.
"Doesn't matter a bit to me, ma'am," he replied with the same cheerful
deference.
She rode the sleek steel and glass elevator through the atrium of the shopping
arcade to the residential floors, tapping her fingers on the handrail. She was
alone in the elevator. I am protected, provided for, kept busy going from
meeting to meeting, no time to think. I wonder who I am anymore.
She doubted that any scientist had ever felt so rushed as she felt now. Her
conversation with Christopher Dicken at the NIH had pushed her onto a
sidetrack having little to do with the development of SHEVA therapies. A
hundred different elements of her research since postgraduate days had
suddenly floated to the surface of her mind, shuffled around like swimmers in
a water ballet, arranged themselves in enchanting patterns. Those patterns had
nothing to do with disease and death, everything to do with the cycles of
human life-or every kind of life, for that matter.
She had less than two weeks before Cross's scientists would present their
first candidate vaccine, out of twelve-at last count-being developed around
the country, at Americol and elsewhere. Kaye had underestimated the speed with
which Americol could work-and had overestimated the extent to which they would
keep her informed. I'm still just a figurehead, she thought.
In that time, she had to make up her mind about what was actually happening-
what SHEVA actually represented. What would finally happen to Mrs. Hamilton
and the other women at the NIH clinic.
She emerged on the twentieth floor, found her number, 2011, fitted the
electronic key into the lock, and opened the heavy door. A rush of clean, cool
air, smelling of new carpet and furniture, of something else rosy and sweet,
wafted out to greet her. Soft music played: Debussy, she could not remember
the name of the piece, but she liked it a lot.
A bouquet of several dozen yellow roses spilled over from a crystal vase on
the top of the low etagere in the hall.
The condominium was bright and cheerful, with elegant wood accents,
beautifully furnished with two couches and a chair in suede and sunset gold
fabric. And Debussy. She dropped the bag onto a couch and walked into the
kitchen. Stainless-steel refrigerator, stove, dishwasher, gray granite
countertops edged with rose-colored marble, expensive jewel-like track
lighting throwing little diamond glows around the room...
"Damn it, Marge," Kaye said under her breath. She carried the bag into the
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bedroom, unzipped it on the bed, pulled out her skirts and blouses and one
dress to be hung in the closet, opened the closet, and stared at the wardrobe.
Had she not already met two of Cross's handsome young male companions, she
would have been sure, at this point, that Marge Cross had designs on her other
than corporate. She quickly flicked through the dresses, suits, silk and linen
blouses, looked down at shoe racks supporting at least eight pairs for all
occasions- even hiking boots-and that was enough.
Kaye sat on the edge of the bed and let out a deep, quavering sigh. She was in
way over her head socially as well as scientifically. She turned to look at
the reproduction Whistler prints over the maple dresser, at the oriental
scroll beautifully framed in ebony with brass finials that hung on the wall
over the bed.
"Little hothouse posy in the big city." She felt her face screwing up in
anger.
The phone in her purse rang. She jumped, walked into the living room, opened
the purse, answered.
"Kaye, this is Judith."
"You were right," Kaye said abruptly.
"Beg pardon?"
"You were right."
"I'm always right, dear. You know that." Judith paused for effect, and Kaye
knew she had something important to say. "You asked about transposon activity
in my SHEVA-infected hepatocytes."
Kaye felt her spine stiffen. This was the stab in the not-so-dark she had made
two days after speaking with Dicken. She had pored over the texts and
refreshed herself with a dozen articles in six different journals. She had
gone through her notebooks, where she had scribbled down mad little moments of
extreme speculation.
She and Saul had counted themselves among the biologists who suspected that
transposons-mobile lengths of DNA within the genome-were far more than just
selfish genes.
Kaye had written a solid twelve pages in the notebook on the possibility that
these were very important phenotype regulators, not selfish but selfless; they
could, under certain circumstances, guide the way proteins became living
tissue. Change the way proteins created a living plant or animal. Retrotrans-
posons were very similar to retroviruses-and thus the genetic link with SHEVA.
All together, they could be the handmaids of evolution.
"Kaye?"
"Just a moment," Kaye said. "Let me catch my breath."
"Well you should, dear, dear former student Kaye Lang. Transposon activity in
our SHEVA-infected hepatocytes is mildly enhanced. They shuffle around with no
apparent effect. That's interesting. But we've gone beyond the hepatocytes.
We've been doing tests on embryonic stem cells for the Taskforce."
Embryonic stem cells could become any sort of tissue, very much like early
growth cells in fetuses.
"We've sort of encouraged them to behave like fertilized human ova," Kushner
said. "They can't grow up to be fetuses, but please don't tell the PDA. In
these stem cells, the transposon activity is extraordinary. After SHEVA, the
transposons jump around like bugs on a hot griddle. They're active on at least
twenty chromosomes. If this were random churning, the cell should die. The
cell survives. It's as healthy as ever."
"It's regulated activity?"
"It's triggered by something in SHEVA. My guess is, something in the LPC-the
large protein complex. The cell reacts as if it's being subjected to
extraordinary stress."
"What do you think that means, Judith?"
"SHEVA has designs on us. It wants to change our genome, maybe radically."
"Why?" Kaye grinned expectantly. She was sure Judith would see the inevitable
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connection.
"This kind of activity can't be benign, Kaye."
Kaye's smile collapsed. "But the cell survives."
"Yes," Kushner said. "But as far as we know, the babies don't. It's too much
change all at once. For years I've been waiting for nature to react to our
environmental bullshit, tell us to stop overpopulating and depleting
resources, to shut up and stop messing around and just die. Species-level
apop-tosis. I think this could be the final warning-a real species killer."
"You're passing this on to Augustine?"
"Not directly, but he'll see it."
Kaye looked at the phone for a moment, stunned, then thanked Judith and told
her she would call her later. Kaye's hands tingled.
Not evolution, then. Perhaps Mother Nature had judged humans to be a malignant
growth, a cancer.
For a horrible moment, that made more sense than what she and Dicken had
talked about. Yet what about the new children, the ones born of the ova
released by the intermediate daughters? Were they going to be genetically
damaged, born apparently normal, but dying soon after? Or would they simply be
rejected during the first trimester, like the interim daughters?
Kaye looked through the wide glass doors over the city of Baltimore, the late
morning sun glittering on wet rooftops, asphalt streets. She imagined every
pregnancy leading to another equally futile pregnancy, to wombs clogged with
endless, horribly distorted first-trimester fetuses.
Shutting down human reproduction.
If Judith Kushner was correct, the bell had just tolled for the whole human
race.
38
Americol Headquarters, Baltimore
FEBRUARY 28
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