Panacea (21 page)

“You're getting all grumpy again. I can tell.”

“Well, why not? This was their land. They deserve a piece of the pie.”

“Deserve?” He snorted again. “‘Deserve' is something people make up in their heads. Like ‘fair.' There is no ‘fair,' only what people agree is fair and can enforce. People don't get what they deserve, they only get what's coming to them.”

This was interesting. Not in a good way—she hated the sentiment—but it offered a peek past his bluff, soldier-of-fortune fa
ç
ade.

“Hey, the Maya are good, decent, peace-loving people—”

“And ‘good, decent, peace-loving people' tend to get just what's coming to them.”

“Oh? And what would that be?”

“You see that roadkill we just passed? That's what's coming to good, decent, peace-loving people.”

She remembered whizzing by a lump of brown fur on the shoulder and felt herself getting steamed.

“Nice view of the world, Mister Hayden.”

“An eyes-open view. I didn't make it that way. And just because I see it doesn't mean I like it. The people in power make the rules. But look around: Do you see your good, decent, peace-loving people in power? No. Why not? Because they don't run for office. Or if they do, they lack that core of ruthlessness necessary to win.” He glanced at her. “You strike me as a good person. Would you run for office?”

The question took her by surprise, as did the “good person” remark. Yesterday he'd called her “good people.” Sincere? Or just stroking her?

“I-I've never even considered it.”

“I rest my case. You'd rather be bioprospecting. Which I still don't understand.”

Okay. She was glad to get off this topic—whatever it was.

“It involves lots of terms—ethnobotanist is a favorite—but it comes down to investigating how native peoples use local plants and such to make medicines. Some of those folk medicines really work, and there are firms out there that want to develop them into commercial products and make lots of money.”

“Sounds like PhD work. How does an MD get involved?”

“When she's just ‘too perfect' not to be involved.”

He gave her a wry smile. “Am I ever gonna hear the end of that one?”

“Not while I'm around. Anyway, when I was in my fourth year of med school, someone heard from someone who'd heard from someone—you know how that goes—that I was half Mayan and spoke Yucatec. An ethnobotanical research company—”

“There's a mouthful.”

“—approached me and offered
big
bucks if I'd help investigate medicinal plants and practices in Mesoamerica. The money was too good to turn down. I could put off my residency—I'd been planning on neurology—and build up my r
é
sum
é
along with my savings while possibly making a breakthrough discovery. I mean, the anti-lymphoma drug vincristine was developed from the rosy periwinkle found on Madagascar. If I could come up with something like that … well, the positives far outweighed the negative of delaying my residency. In fact, if I was successful at all, I could name my residency.”

“And did you?”

“Make the breakthrough discovery?” She shook her head, saddened by the memories. “Turned out the company that hired me was more into biopiracy. They'd find something useful, patent it, and license it to one of the big pharmas without giving a dime back to the people they'd stolen it from. I blew the whistle on them and got out.”

He pointed to her. “See? You're one of the good guys. And now you're back, hunting for the panacea.” He waved at the surrounding countryside. “You think it might have originated here?”

“No. Because—and I thought I'd made this crystal clear to Mister Stahlman—I don't believe it exists.”

He finished loading the magazine, then shoved it into the Glock's grip. She noticed that he didn't chamber a round before stowing it in the glove compartment.

“
Some
thing is going on.”

As he spoke he pulled a large, black-handled jackknife from the box. He unfolded and refolded a wicked looking four-inch blade, then stowed it in a side pocket of his jacket.

“I won't argue that,” she said. “And I'll admit that I don't have an answer as to what is
really
going on. But I‘m not going to fill the void with a mythical cure-all.”

“You ever think that the panacea might exist because we're able to have the opinion that it can't?”

“Can't what?”

“Exist.”

Was she hearing right?

“Could you repeat that?”

“Okay. Did you ever think the panacea might exist because we're able to have the opinion that it
can't
exist?”

It made even less sense the second time.

“Just what is that supposed to mean?”

He sighed. “It's complicated.”

Was this one of the “interesting conversations” Stahlman had mentioned?

“We've got plenty of time.”

“Nah.” He looked almost embarrassed. “Let's keep our eye on the prize.” He checked his phone again. “We're headed for…” He shook his head. “No idea how to say this. Don't your Mayan folk believe in vowels?”

“We have lots of vowels. Show me.”

“Not while you're driving. But at least I can pronounce the name of the medicine man or
curandero
we're supposed to see.”

“It's
ah-men
in the old tongue.”

“As in ‘amen to that'? Anyway…” He squinted at his phone's screen. “This guy's name is Mu—”

“Mulac? I know him.”

Rick gave her a wide-eyed stare. “And there it is.”

“What?”

“One degree of separation again. Why should I be surprised you know this guy? This whole scenario has been arranged.”

So he was back to that now? “You said that yesterday. It was ridiculous then and it's ridiculous now.”

“Really? Guy who was terminally ill returns from Maya country in perfect health and dispenses an ‘impossible' cure to an incurably ill little boy known to a certain deputy medical examiner who happens to be half Mayan. The healer guy dies as a result of what looks like foul play and ends up on the autopsy table of said deputy ME who happens to have traveled extensively in the area where the dead man visited and just happens to know the medicine man to whom the dead man has been connected.”

Put that way, Laura found it … startling. More than a little.

“Okay, you've got a point. An amazing string of coincidences, but nothing more. I mean, how could anyone
arrange
that chain of events?”

“Not talking about just anyone.”

“Then who? God?”

He looked uncomfortable. “Not sure I want to get into this.”

They reached the junction with Route 293 then. She turned onto it, heading on a northwest course along the narrower, two-lane blacktop.

“Go ahead. We've still got a ways to go before we go off road. Hit me.”

“When do we hit the jungle?”

She gestured at the trees crowding closer to the road. “This is it.”

He stared out at the leafy hardwoods of various shapes and sizes. “Really? You call this a jungle?”

“It
is
. You were expecting ferns and palms—a rain forest, right?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Rain forests are a subset of jungles, but not all jungles are rain forests.”

“Duly noted. So I shouldn't expect to see monkeys swinging from branch to branch and I can't grab a banana whenever I feel like it?”

“You might catch sight of a spider monkey, but banana palms prefer wetter feet than they can get here. Rain on the peninsula averages maybe forty, fifty inches a year—about the same as Long Island. Enough for hardwoods like these. The really tall ones with the big buttress roots you see are ceiba trees, the smaller ones are baalch
é
and copal.”

“Spoken like a true ethnobotanist.”

“Right. But now let's get back to how this was all
arranged
.”

“Okay. But prepare yourself for some weirdness—at least what most people would consider weird.”

She shook her head. “You wouldn't believe the weirdness I've seen people do to themselves and to each other. It takes a lot to weird me out.”

“This'll leave everyday weirdness in the dust. So here goes: What if … what if humanity's sentience, our consciousness, our self-awareness is an anomaly?”

“An anomaly?”

“Yeah … an aberration. What if we started out genetically geared to be dumb forest dwellers, hanging from trees and eating insects and fruit? But something went wrong. Some errant gamma ray got through the magnetosphere and collided with some proto-chimp's chromosomes and its brain started to change.”

He sounded erudite, and that surprised her—like he'd done some research.

“That's not a terribly far-out what-if,” she said. “It might very well have happened that way, though probably not. But I can go with it for the sake of discussion.”

“Doesn't have to be a gamma ray. Can be a random mutation—anything that changes a primate's genome and affects its brain. Now, those brain changes, through millions of years and stages of developmental modifications and evolutionary dead ends, they eventually result in a
mind
—sentience, sapience, self-awareness, reasoning, imagination.”

He'd changed as he spoke. The flat, almost dead eyes had come alive. Wherever this was going, he was into it.

“Okay,” she said, “the hominid chain leads to
Homo sapiens
. Us. That's pretty well accepted.”

“Right. But the next is a bit of a leap for most people: What if sapience and self-awareness are an anomaly in the universe?”

“Okay. Stop right there. That's hard to buy. No, impossible to buy. The universe is unimaginably huge. Our galaxy alone contains over four hundred billion—that's with a ‘b' as in boy—stars. If you imagine the Milky Way as the continental U.S., our sun, Sol, is the size of a white blood cell in Colorado. As for the universe, with its
billions
of galaxies—again with a ‘b'—the experts figure there are a septillion stars out there.”

“Never even heard of a septillion.”

“Think of a ten with twenty-four zeroes after it. With that many stars, and all the possible planets circling them, I don't see sapience and self-awareness being the least bit rare.”

“What about Fermi's paradox?”

“Fermi the physicist?”

“Yeah. One of the so-called fathers of the atomic bomb.”

“Well, I've heard of him, but didn't know he had a paradox.”

“Also known as the Great Silence. It accepts what you said about all the billions of stars and planets in our galaxy, but it asks: With all those potential civilizations out there, many so much older than ours, why haven't we heard from anyone?”

“I … I don't know.” She'd never really thought about it.

“The conclusion I draw is that we're either alone, or that sapience is extremely rare—you might say, vanishingly rare. Look, we've got a million and a half vertebrates and invertebrate species on the planet. How many are sapient and self-aware? You can make a case in a very limited sense for dolphins and some apes maybe, but only one species has built a civilization. Sure, lots of stars and lots of planets out there, and no doubt lots of species spread all over the universe, but what if the human level of sapience is so rare that when it occurs it attracts … attention.”

“Attention from what?”

“From larger intelligences—‘intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic,' as Wells put it.”

“H. G.?”

“The same.”

“A
War of the Worlds
scenario? You're not seriously going there.”

He shook his head. “Nothing so trite or obvious. You've heard of the Chinese curse, right?”

“‘May you live in interesting times'? Sure.”

“A multipart curse. That's only the first of three. The next one is ‘May you come to the attention of those in authority.'”

She hadn't heard that one. Like the first, in typical Asian fashion, it could be taken in either a positive or negative way. But since it was a curse …

“Yeah, I can see that. Better to stay off the radar.”

“Exactly. But what if our sapience has brought us to the attention of ‘vast, cool and unsympathetic' intellects in authority?”

A crazy concept … and not a comfortable one.

“Your what-ifs are starting to creep me out.”

“Just asking questions.”

“Are you talking about God … or gods?”

He shook his head. “Bad word. ‘God,' whether uppercase or lowercase, conjures up the supernatural and the spiritual. Gets you into religion or H. P. Lovecraft territory, and that just muddies the water. I'm talking about entities, vast intelligences. Don't dress them up any more than that.”

This was so off the wall, but Laura had to admit he had her attention. “Okay. We've been noticed by … entities. Now what?”

“That's the big question. Here we are, an aberration that calls itself
Homo sapiens,
a curiosity on the radar and under the cosmic microscope. How are we viewed? Simply as curiosities? Or as playthings … toys?”

“Curiosities, I would hope. Where's all this going?”

“Right back to this panacea we're hunting. You yourself have said it's scientifically impossible.”

“It is.”

“Impossible is merely an opinion.”

“No, impossible is impossible.”

“Like putting a man on the moon and bringing him back alive?”

“Okay. I stand corrected. Many people were of the opinion it was impossible when they should have said ‘not feasible.' Because in theory nothing about a round trip to the moon broke the laws of physics and biology. A panacea smashes them to bits and pieces.”