The Parasite Read online

  Jack nodded then said, ‘But surely that kind of behaviour is caused by pretty simple damage – is not so purposeful?’

  Jane held up her hand. ‘Purpose doesn’t come into it, only selection. But take the brain worm. It’s transmitted from an ant to a sheep. It burrows into the ant’s brain and alters its behaviour in such a way that during the cool periods of the day the ant will climb up to the top of a grass stalk, cling on, and wait to be eaten by a passing sheep. There’s another that is passed from a certain type of snail to birds. It causes the snail to lay itself out like a dinner.’

  Jack bowed his head. ‘They never act in the best interests of their hosts.’

  ‘That is what separates parasitism from symbiosis and mutualism. A parasite obtains nutriment to the detriment of its host. Symbiosis is interdependence.’

  ‘Mutualism?’

  ‘Somewhere between the other two. It’s sometimes difficult to draw definite lines between them all.’

  ‘Could it be that this one is not necessarily a parasite?’

  Jane gazed out of the window for a moment before replying. ‘At the moment it seems to be, since not very many of those infected have lived through it. Some of them died from the allergic reaction, nerve disorders, or self-destructed because of the psychological stress. I wonder if it’s likely that any of the victims will survive either it or the military.’ She paused reflectively for a moment. ‘But really we’re overstepping the mark by trying to give it any of those labels.’

  Chris leant forward. ‘It is an extra-terrestrial organism.’

  Jane stared at him as if she could not believe what he had said. Jack leant back in his seat and studied Chris, but could make nothing from his expression.

  ‘You’re probably right,’ he said, knowing that they were. Should I tell them? He wondered. But reinforced instinct kept him quiet. He did not want to become a subject for study.

  As they moved down the exit ramp, Jane noted that they had lost their intense companion, but did not let it bother her. Her concern was mainly for the samples they had brought back and the reaction of Her Majesty’s Customs, since the samples could be classed as dangerous biological materials. She considered lying, but thought that with Chris with her she would not get away with it. He did not belong to her. He had just been provided by World Health.

  ‘Well at least the parasite hasn’t reached here yet,’ she said, breathing the monoxide free air.

  ‘I think that perhaps it has,’ said Chris.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Your samples of course.’

  Jane studied him suspiciously. He’s a machine, she thought, but I must not forget just how complex a machine he is.

  ‘I must find out about your programming someday,’ she said, taking out her passport.

  Likewise, Chris removed his passport. It was easier that way, she had been told, and Chris would probably take exception to travelling with the luggage. What is the difference anyway, she wondered, and answered herself immediately: I am a complex machine pre-programmed by my genes for their transmission. He is a complex machine programmed by us and by AIs. I can beat my programming, contraception is one example, but can he? The question seemed to slink off in her mind like a wounded rat, hidden, but she knew it was still there.

  Once outside the airport Jack smiled to himself with relief. There had been a bad moment there in customs, but there were no currency restrictions on the Ecu. What had made the customs officials suspicious was that his entire luggage was full of wads of them. He supposed they had thought him a drugs baron escaping from the situation in Brazil with his ill-gotten gains. They had searched him and found nothing, checked his passport and found it valid, and then reluctantly let him go.

  With the low, bone vibrating hum of gas turbines an aircab wafted down to him. He climbed inside and the driver, a strikingly attractive brunette, peered round at him.

  ‘Where would you like to be taken?’ she asked.

  He stared at her for a moment, taking in the contrast of this to his most recent taxi ride in Sao Paulo, then he told her, ‘Take me towards Maldon Island.’

  Once it had been a coastal town on the river Blackwater. Now it stood on a peninsular jutting out from sea defences, surrounded by the sea. It amused Jack to think how badly penny-pinching councillors had erred. Much relieved to finally realize that they were not about to be swamped by melting ice caps, plans for building up and repairing of the sea wall had been shelved. However, the steady sea level rise since the last Ice Age and the steady subsidence of the East Coast had caught them out. That was all twenty years in the past now. The councillors were gone, and his house stood in a prime position on the new ten million pounds a mile sea defences.

  ‘Please put your safety harness on.’

  Jack obliged, the driver pulled back on her joystick and with a whining roar of turbines the taxi surfed into the sky. For the first time in quite a while Jack felt near to contentment. As the taxi hummed along under flocks of white clouds he gazed down at the familiar landscape with its patchwork of fields, scars of scraped out roads, and garden-roofed factory complexes. He was home. He had been away for far too long.

  Soon the quarter-of-a-mile-wide mound that kept the sea out came into sight. Beyond it Jack could see the top branches of trees reaching from the water like pleading fingers, and surf breaking on the roofs of houses. The cab turned to run parallel to the wall on the way towards Maldon and Jack realized with a pang how close to home he was. He leant forward.

  ‘Do you see that slab-laying machine?’ he asked.

  The brunette turned her head and squinted at the seaward side of the wall where a monstrous yellow beetle of a machine crawled on caterpillar treads along the forty-five degree face of the wall.

  ‘I see it.’

  ‘Landward of that and about half a mile further on there’s a row of beach houses, amongst the trees.’

  ‘Got them.’

  ‘Take me there please.’

  The aircab turned into the reflected glare from the sea. The driver put on a pair of sunglasses and began to hum to herself. In a moment they were spiralling down to the houses.

  ‘That house,’ said Jack, pointing to a house with plastic bank seals across the windows and doors and a garden returned to wilderness. The aircab set down on the overgrown lawn.

  ‘I’ll only be a moment.’ He handed her a hundred Ecu note. ‘Wait here please.’ She took the note as if he had handed her a dirty postcard, glanced at the credit-card reader, then frowned. Jack got out of the car.

  The house needed paint and the garden needed a lot of work. Trudging through the long grass Jack had to step round his robot mower, rusting where it had failed. Five years without maintenance had probably been too much to expect of it, or perhaps the power had been turned off. He did not know. He walked around to the back of the house, leant against a tilted stone sun dial and gazed out past a row of nettle elms to the sea. He felt nostalgia like pain. Five years. He had certainly paid for his wealth. He returned to the cab, noting that the meter had been turned off. Cash job. Things were not so different from Sao Paulo.

  ‘Into Maldon please. Near as you can to the Ecubank.’

  The aircab rose into the sky blasting leaves about it.

  Jane Ulreas glanced aside from the screen of the nanoscope to the second screen with its multicoloured computer generated image from the x-ray diffractor. She blinked once or twice as if unsure of what she was seeing, then sat back in her chair and observed with chagrin the way the buttons of her old lab coat pulled against her breasts and stomach. The days of her voluptuousness were ending she decided. She was now definitely running too fat.

  ‘Protein, protein, protein.’ She shook her head, rested her fingers below the touch console, then sneezed. That was all she needed; a cold on top of everything else.

  ‘Anything solid?’ Chris asked in his smoothly modulated voice.

  Jane repressed a bitter laugh as she peered down at her lab coat. God, did sh
e need to lose weight.

  ‘There are signs of snipping but it’s difficult to tell what’s been snipped out,’ she said. ‘We saw no sign of cancers or serious mutation so I would say it’s only selfish DNA that’s been snipped – the freeloaders on the genome. Chromosome length has definitely been shortened.’

  Chris sat down next to her. ‘What about the alleles?’

  ‘Again: difficult to tell.’

  ‘One would have thought the parasite would not have been able to tell the difference. It is logical to suppose that to increase its survivability in the organism it would make no distinction between selfish DNA and the alleles.’

  ‘Don’t be so pompous. It’s not like you. We are, as you say, dealing with an ETO. It’s capable of extremely complex manipulation yet it’s killing its hosts. We cannot make—’ Jane halted in mid-sentence and leant forward. That word: survivability. How could she have been so blind?

  Fatals, my god! The fatals!

  Her fingers blurred across the touch console and diffraction images flashed onto the screen next to Chris one after another, colours kaleidoscoping across his face.

  ‘You have seen something,’ he said.

  Jane sat back again. ‘The parasite can be called a protein engineer. Altered proteins are the cause of that killing allergic reaction. Now we know that it uses protein spliced RNA to alter the genome – to snip DNA – which in turn alters the RNA by transcription and the proteins that manufactures by translation. It’s got its fingers in every pie to alter the entire vector of its host and increase its own survivability, or rather to try to increase its own survivability. That is if we forget about the dead for a moment,’ which she could not do. ‘What would you say would be the optimum thing for it to do to its host’s DNA?’

  There was a pause while Chris considered this. Jane had never known him to delay so long and because of this she knew that he had known before entering the room and had been edging her towards this.

  ‘Optimum alteration would be for it to delete the fatals, or potential fatals; increasing its host’s survivability would increase its own.’

  ‘Right,’ said Jane, trying to conceal her irritation, ‘now scan this sample for known fatals.’

  Chris reached for the console and the diffraction images became a flickering blur. Jane went on.

  ‘Check them all: MS, susceptibility to known cancers – you know.’

  The screen flickered to a standstill.

  ‘I can find none.’

  ‘Crafty little parasite,’ said Jane. ‘I bet its RNA templates cut down on copying errors as well.’ She peered at the name at the corner of the screen. ‘Poor bastard. If it hadn’t killed him it might have made him live forever.’

  ‘You suggest that it is trying to make its host ageless? What about its procreative process?’

  Jane him suspiciously. He sounded pompous again.

  ‘You tell me,’ she said.

  ‘If what you say is true then its procreative process must be through the human meiosis.’

  ‘That’s all we need; for this to be sexually transmitted. It’ll make AIDS VII look like the common cold.’ She sneezed. ‘There have been no signs of it being passed on that way though. How about the faeces? Did scatology find anything in those samples we sent to them?’

  ‘Fluke eggs and encysted cercariae. There are some unidentified samples but they suspect them to be pollen grains.’

  ‘So we still don’t know its vector.’

  ‘Perhaps we are looking in the wrong place.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He knew something, or had worked something out, she was sure, but why was he being so cagey? Her feelings?

  ‘In all the samples the parasite has reached a certain point in its growth before the host self-destructed.’

  Jane thought about that and came up with an answer she suspected Chris was waiting for from her.

  ‘Are you suggesting none of them were mature?’

  He nodded.

  Of course!

  She quickly said, ‘That would account for the lack of eggs or any other transmission vector. We haven’t found out how it reproduces because we have yet to find an adult parasite. But how were these people infected?’

  Chris was silent.

  Carefully Jane said, ‘Carriers. There must be carriers of mature parasites that we haven’t come across yet. Perhaps one carrier who is aware of what he is, who wasn’t killed by the parasite, and all these,’ she gestured at the screen, ‘are the first to be infected.’

  Chris studied her mildly. ‘That seems plausible.’

  ‘It would be nice to know how he survived the parasite’s growth,’ she said. She watched Chris uneasily. ‘How would we find this carrier, or these carriers?’

  ‘We know the parasite is an ETO.’

  ‘Somebody who has been off planet.’

  ‘That too, seems plausible.’

  Chapter 5

  The bank seals were no problem, since May had been provided with a chip card by one of the grey departments of World Health that should deal with them. Thoughtfully she pressed it home in its slot and waited. After a moment the lock issued a solid click and the card poked back out at her.

  ‘Help me with this,’ she told Carl and took hold of one side of the sealing bar.

  ‘That’s okay,’ he said and lifted the bar from its dogs as if it was made of paper and propped it beside the door. She studied him speculatively, but could detect no sign of macho boastfulness.

  ‘You’re very strong,’ she suggested.

  He nodded his shaven head as if quite used to hearing this.

  ‘Bring in the equipment,’ she instructed him. ‘Best to get set up as soon as possible. No telling when he’ll be back.’

  Carl nodded in acquiescence and headed back for the air car. May shook her head wonderingly, before inserting a skeleton key in the main door lock and quickly opening it. She stepped into the beach house, wrinkling her nose at the musty smell as she moved on inside. The interior was much as she expected: tastefully decorated and furnished, but a dusty and scattered here and there with black mildew from lack of occupancy. She studied her surroundings wondering where it would be best to set up the stun cannon and the wire guns. Shortly Carl returned carrying a heavy packing case.

  ‘Put it down in the kitchen,’ said May, wondering at his ability to take orders unquestioningly. Then he surprised her by asking a question.

  ‘This will be sufficient to stop a man with cybernetic implants?’

  ‘It ought to be. Do you know why we want him?’ She was as yet unsure of what Carl knew, just as she was unsure of his rank.

  ‘Something to do with illegal biologicals...’

  He knew no more than her. She found this gratifying and at the same time rather worrying. She had been told that the subject was augmented, potentially very dangerous, and must be captured, put under maximum restraint and taken to headquarters. She knew no more than that.

  It took very little time to set up the cannon and the wire guns, and once this was done May moved to the door.

  ‘I’ll go round the back now and short out the seals on any other doors. We don’t want him coming in behind us. You set up the motion detectors.’

  Carl nodded and smiled and May felt herself flush. He was damned attractive and so ... mild. She stepped out of the front door and set off along the slab path leading around to the back of the house. Illegal biological. She wondered precisely what they were to get World Health to take such steps as this. She had never been involved in an action without police sanction, and that worried her.

  The single back door lay inside a conservatory in which much of the glass was broken. She climbed in through one of the windows and studied the seal. This was the test. She removed a second chip card and inserted it. The seal issued a loud buzz, then a click, and did not return the card. It had shorted, most certainly, but hopefully it had not set off an alarm in the local police station. She would not know whether or not i
t had until it was too late. Then ... movement caught her eye, and she peered through the tinted glass of the door into the kitchen and through the open front door. There were two people out there with Carl. For a moment she thought they might be the police, but surely they could not have got here so quickly. As quietly as she could she climbed out of the conservatory window and crept round the side of the house. As she drew nearer she heard voices.

  ‘I must ask again who you are and what you are doing here?’ asked Carl.

  May waited nervously for the reply. For a moment there was silence, then a woman’s dead voice replied, ‘That is a question I must ask you.’

  ‘Obviously you are not police. Or are the police being issued with proscribed weaponry now?’

  A man’s voice said, ‘Two wire guns and a stun cannon. There are also ceramal restraints in the box.’

  May crept to the corner of the house.

  The woman said, ‘You are working with World Health, I take it?’

  Carl was silent.

  ‘I will count to three then I will blow your leg off if you do not reply.’

  Christ! Answer her Carl!

  ‘One, two-’

  May stepped round the corner. ‘We are with World Health. There’s no need for violence.’

  The man and woman standing before Carl wore identical businesswear. They both had cropped blond hair and their emotionless features were nearly identical. May abruptly realised she had made the wrong move. These two had killer stamped all over them. The woman held a flat black pistol. The man held a portable anti-photon gun. May had only ever seen pictures of this weapon since mere possession of such was punishable by mindwipe and, in some countries, by physical death.