Scuzzworms (27 page)

“A totally unauthorized transfer of...”

Imelda interrupted.  “We have another emergency, Kreiss.  I left Post in charge.  If you would...”

“Doctor Imelda, please don’t interrupt.  Emergency, indeed.”

Imelda promptly interrupted again.  “The decontamination, I’m afraid that it didn’t work.  At least, it looks like...”  The impact of what had happened suddenly hit her, freezing her vocal cords.  She closed her eyes, shuddering.

Kreiss stared at her, alarmed by her reaction as much as by what she had said.  “Imelda, what’s going on?  Was one of the cultures positive?

Her voice a little more under control, Imelda started to answer.

Trefarbe interrupted her.  “Of course not.  They were trying to fly up unauthorized specimens, completely against CHA rules.  Now we all know that Imelda loses touch with reality quite frequently and exaggerates things.  Right, Dr. Hiebass?”

Imelda glanced at Fish, who opened his mouth hesitantly. “Um, well, no, she understands reality rather well.  She just offends people and doesn’t take care of herself.”

Trefarbe glared murderously at Hiebass, who was watching Imelda worriedly.  Imelda was caught completely off guard.  Hiebass was the last person she expected to receive support from.

Imelda plunged ahead.  “The specimens we found, they look human, incredibly so.  I don’t know how it happened but the borgettes may be able to copy genotypes somehow.  We won’t know for sure until we get a look at the genetics but...”

“Human?” Kreiss said blankly.    She walked over to his desk and tied in to her workstation.  “You should do this more often,” she scolded him.    

Kreiss’s face turned red.  “I, I don’t have an access code,” he stuttered.

Camille was speaking excitedly. “Type A+!  Blood type A+! I told you!  This is a human baby!  Look at the histocompatibility analysis!  Absolutely human!”

Kreiss stared at Imelda with stark terror in his eyes. “The Iagans can manufacture humans?”

“Not very well,” she answered.  “Human babies are just as helpless down there as they are on earth.  These were almost dead.”

Post interrupted.  “Look at the cellular organization! Earth organelles, not Iagan.  Iagan cells are totally different!  These babies have got to be human!”

Imelda, frowning, punched the intercom button. “Postman.  Check and see if you can find a histocompatibility match on the station with the babies. And start the transfusions.  I want to get a good look at the other baby.”

Minutes passed as Post complied, finally programming the medicomputer for the difficult task of hatching the second infant.  Trefarbe sniffed, arguing with Kreiss as they waited.  “This is ridiculous.  She’s totally incapable of making any competent decisions.  I’m telling you…”

“Pleister!  They both match Pleister!  Look, the second baby is identical to the first!”

A stunned silence greeted Camille’s statement.  Imelda cursed.  “Dammit!”  Then louder, “Dammit!  I should have known!  Goddamn scuzzworms!  The bastards!  Damn them!”

She had left the intercom on and Post asked. “What do you mean?”

She stared at Kreiss, her face creased with worry.  “The lifecycle!  They are the missing link!  Animal dies; scuzzworm eats it.  Scuzzhog eats scuzzworm.  Scuzzhog grows new animal.  Get it?  The goddamn scuzzworms are the vector, or the sperm, or the carrier, or whatever in oblivion you call it.  THAT’S how genetic selection is practiced.  An animal has to live long enough to be eaten before it can be reproduced!  Those aren’t storage cells under the skin, those are egg cells!”

A dozen or more voices made static on the intercom. Imelda sat down, covering her eyes, thinking furiously.    

“The eggs bled.  That means that more human cells are being spread down there.  With maybe more babies.  We have no idea of how many other borgettes are already contaminated.”  She looked up at Kreiss mutely, unable to say more.

His face was white.  Fish and Trefarbe were both silent for a change, dumbstruck.

“B
-but, that means there could be lots of babies being born down there!  What will we do with all those babies?”

Silence reigned over the intercom.  In the specimen bins, Pleister’s twin infants kicked and squalled lustily.

She had volunteered for the job, she reminded herself.  Someone had to do it.  But why did she have to be the one?  Fish would have been a better choice.  Trouble was, he refused to speak to Fish anymore.  Why were difficult things so deucedly difficult to do?  

Blindly, abstractedly, she followed the halls to the doorway
that led to the isolation chambers.  Entering, she stopped in front of the sealed apartment where Pleister paced.  His expression was haggard, his face slightly puffy from his enforced lack of activity.

“Hi,” she said.

“Imelda!” he cried, walking to the glass door.  “I heard that you were back.  I’m glad you came to see me.  I never got a chance to talk to you after the accident.”

She was surprised at his ready welcome.  She smiled.  “It’s good to see you out of intensive care.”  They sat down on chairs placed conveniently on either side of the glass.

“How’s it going?” she asked, knowing that any optimistic-sounding answer was a lie.

“Okay, I guess.  Well, no, pretty rotten, actually.  I would rather be abandoned on a lost planet.  At least then I could walk in a straight line for more than a hundred feet.  I never thought I could hate video upstuff this much.  I want outa here, and all they give me is more video upstuff.”

Imelda smiled sadly.  “Too much video upstuff can be worse that the reason it was prescribed.”  She paused, wondering how to proceed.  “I spoke with Jimsliche.  Your wound has looked good since the debridement.  No more Iagan cells.  Caldwell spoke with CHA about you. They haven’t issued a directive yet.  There’s nothing saying that you won’t be allowed to join humanity again.”

Pleister shook his head.  “And there’s nothing saying that I will, either, Dr. Imelda.  I’m in maintenance, remember?  I know how tough the rules are on Biosphere contamination.”  He grinned evilly.  “One thing for sure.  If I do get out of here, I have my first order of business planned.”

Imelda looked at him sharply.  “You sound ominous.  I hope you only plan on a hot night with Mernick.”

He stared at the floor.  “No, that’s my second order of business.  My first has to do with a certain bitchy friend of ours.”

“Forget it.  She sleeps with Jinks, among a few others.  A big power circle.  Punching her out will only put you back in a cell.”

“I don’t care.  Why the devil didn’t she listen to you?  DDT’s residue, you told her to cancel!  So what if we wasted a tank of fuel!  Because of her stupidity, Biotech has spent a few million credits keeping me in a fishbowl and airlifting half the planet into orbit! Doesn’t she know how to listen to her own experts?”

A wry smile on her face, Imelda leaned back, shaking her head.  “No, we’re hired to listen to them, I’m afraid.”  Her expression went solemn.  “Pleister, you’re not going to like what I tell you next.”

His eyes narrowed.  Imelda had never really gotten a good look at him before. She remembered him mainly as an unhappy face inside a spacesuit.  He was a husky sort, built rather like a grizzly bear.  His face was plain, open, and gregarious. Slightly receding curly black hair sturdily resisted any attempts at careful grooming.  She wondered briefly what an entire world filled with Pleisters would be like.

She drew in a breath.  “Do me a favor.  Smile sweetly, and insist on staying inside your glass castle until Caldwell returns.  Don’t allow anyone to break isolation just yet.”

Pleister’s expression darkened  “I thought you just said that my wound was clean?”

Imelda kept her expression neutral.  “Has anyone told you of the report I just filed a few hours ago?”

“What report?” he asked suspiciously.

She paused.  How could she say this?  Bluntly, like she usually did?  She squirmed inwardly.  Her mouth opened and somehow words came out.  “Iago harbors an incredible variety of wildlife, the most so that we have ever explored. Many of the species have evolved the same enzymatic systems as have Earth mammalian forms.”  His face, as she watched it, was puzzled and impatient.  “It appears that earth cells can survive down there.”  There, she’d said it.

He shrugged.  “That’s no big news.  Iago is very similar to earth.”

He hadn’t understood.  Okay, bluntness.  “One of the Scuzzhogs just gave birth to a couple of babies.  Human babies.”

He stared at her a long minute.  “Come again?”

“Your twin brothers.  Clones.  The genetics are the same as yours.  We flew them up; they’re right down the hall.  Real, live, screaming baby boys.”

His face paled in disbelief.  “You’re kidding! How?”

She launched into a quick description of the rather unusual life cycle that had developed on Iago IV. “Trefarbe is pretending that all will now go back to normal. The entire department of Biology has been officially told to keep their mouths shut, that this is just a fluke and it won’t happen again. I am afraid, however, that she might be very wrong.

“She would also like for you to be officially announced ‘clean’ so that your isolation can be ended.  Jimsliche wants to keep you here a little longer for bone marrow surveys.  He’s afraid that if human cell can grow inside an Iagan, then...” she tailed off, suddenly realizing that he might not accept her insinuation in quite so detached a manner as had Jimsliche.

His face paled as the meaning of her words sunk in.  “You mean that one of those things might start growing inside me?”

She hastily interrupted.  “Actually I don’t really believe that they could.  I am only suggesting that you give Trefarbe a firm negative if she sneaks in here pronouncing you free.   CHA has the final authority on clearing you.  She seems to think we are a bit too compulsive in following their directives.  I wouldn’t want you to be misled into a noncompliance.  We are in enough hot water as it is.”

His face darkened.  “Don’t worry.  I wouldn’t do anything that bitch told me to anyway.  Thanks for the warning, Doctor.”

“Sure.”  Imelda sat quietly, unable to think of anything else to say.

“Hey, Imelda,” he began, and then paused, thinking.

“What?” she asked, peering at his face cautiously.  She had just unloaded a bomb in his lap.  He was only slowly realizing how large a bomb it was.

“Do you think I could see...?  I mean...   The babies.  Are they really me?  Or from me, I mean?”

She smiled.  “Press channel 443 on your monitor.  I cleared you for it.  If anybody deserves to see them, you do.”

He glanced at her uncertainly and turned to select the channel.  A picture of sleeping infants appeared on the monitor.  His expression remained unreadable for a long time as he watched the image, then changed to a brief smile as one baby shifted in his sleep, lips pursing.

“I feel like a daddy,” he said wonderingly, rubbing his forehead.

Imelda smiled.  “Face it.  You’re the closest thing that those babies have to a daddy.”

“Damn,” he said expressively.

#

Her next stop was at the window of the infants’ isolation chamber.  Gladys, the volunteer babysitter for that shift, was just reaching in with her gloves to change one of the babies’ diapers.

Gladys glanced at her and continued with her task.  Tags on the window announced that the babies had been given names.  CHA probably wouldn’t approve since their computers usually assigned names to newborns, but these were rather special births.  Or hatchings.

Imelda mutely watched the very normal appearing squirms and grunts of disagreement with the diapering process.  It was hard to suppress a tear for all concerned, for Iago IV, Pleister, the babies, and all that had happened.    What future lay ahead for them?  This was only the beginning of their disaster.  CHA rules couldn’t predict a situation like this.  The past had happened.  They were the captives of fate.  She couldn’t undo this mess.

Back to business, she told herself sternly.  Living their horror with them wouldn’t help them escape it.  THINK. 

Iagan cells did not appear to have mixed with the babies’ cells.  The human immune system was too accustomed to dealing with foreign invaders to treat Iago’s communal cells kindly. She felt reasonably certain that the babies and Pleister were safe, although the cells found in Pleister’s wound were extremely worrisome.  Pleister and the babies must be kept in isolation until they were sure they posed no threat, but for how long?  What about Iago IV itself?  What would happen to the human contagion down there?  The cold knot in her gut tightened.

#

Post paced angrily.  “What we need is a magic bullet, something that kills human cells and nothing else. Not a general toxin.  If we limit ourselves to simply picking up every scuzzmom that spits out a few human cells, we’ll be orbiting half the continent with us before long. The planet will lose most of its genetic material to our biospheres.  I don’t think the ecology can survive this.  We need a more elegant solution.”

The argument that followed was mostly hopeless.  Grady had returned from his leave as soon as he had heard that Imelda was back.  Now he sat in a corner quietly, looking crumpled, old.  Imelda was shocked to see the change in him.  The accident had taken its toll in more ways than one.  When he finally spoke, it was with a hint of desperation in his voice.  “If you want a specific killer, a virus would work, but it would have to be a mean virus, cytotoxic for human cells, and highly contagious.”  He sighed.  “Anything that could kill humans that effectively would have eradicated its hosts a long time ago, and we wouldn’t be here.  I suppose we could genetically engineer one just for Iago and bulldoze CHA to get permission to release it down there.” 

Jamison sneered. “You’d have to give the virus to the CHA ethics committee first and eradicate them.  You’re crazy if you think they would ever allow us to release any more biologic material down there.  I already know what they will say:  ‘Natural selective forces will come into play.  A resistant population will emerge.  Iago IV’s ecology will survive but will be changed.  One accidental intervention does not justify a second intentional intervention.’  Dream on, Grady.  Now, think! We need a practical solution.  CHA won’t allow us to tinker with any viral genetics anyway.  It’s too dangerous to even engineer such a thing.  They’d put us in jail and throw away the key.”

Grady argued half-heartedly, knowing it was no use. Post and Jamison didn’t really disagree with him, but they knew that they were supposed to.  Imelda remained silent, listening.  When she left, she was pensive, withdrawn.

Imelda sat alone in her apartment, thinking.  She really didn’t know all that much about viruses, but she did know what a mean one could do.    Viruses could not exist independently.  They were cripples, half alive, half chemical reaction, depending on their host for reproduction and survival.

They could survive only inside plant or animal cells, using their host’s energy and biochemical pathways for reproduction, subverting, usually destroying the cell in the process.    The idea of introducing a virus to the planet that revolved below was unsettling, but the idea of chemical extermination, or mere inaction, she found repugnant.  The blurred face of an infant floating inside a gelatinous shell ate at her consciousness.

Half of the station’s personnel had helped her review the remainder of the bog tapes.  They had found one other small borgette with an erratic egg production.  It had produced a defective egg three standard months ago, which had bled for a long time before finally desiccating and dying.  The contents of the egg were small, deformed, and possibly embryonic. She suspected that the small borgette had been unable to support the growth of a normal infant, producing its eggs long before development was complete.  Unfortunately, blood cells had been eaten by worms and could even now be infecting more borgettes.

At first she had hoped that the worms would remain confined to one bog, only reinfecting local borgettes.  Post’s work had shown that the worms typically traveled widely in search of food until they reached a mature size, at which time they approached the nearest bog to be eaten.

How many more human babies were even now gestating down there, some spit out prematurely, some on time, maybe even some that were being held in limbo for longer periods, beyond the age that the properly incubated human was given birth to?   The borgettes produced eggs when their gestating embryos reached a size that stretched the cavities that supported their growth.  The cavities then detached from the embryos and secreted shells around them, expelling the newly formed eggs almost immediately. 

Not all embryos grew at the same rate, and the borgettes compensated, retaining some embryos longer than others.  It was not inconceivable that one of the borgettes could continue to gestate a human until growth was complete, finally delivering a fully adult (and insane) human into permanent exile.

Maybe some of the borgettes would eventually develop immunologic reactions, antibodies to their alien fetuses, but what if they didn’t?  How long could they afford to wait before intervening?  Until the entire reproductive cycle of Iago IV had been disrupted?

Her gut felt queasy.  She gulped down the rest of the wine in her glass and lit another cigarette from the butt of the one she was smoking.  Inaction was easy.  Hide your head, let somebody, anybody else take over, and damn the consequences, it’s not your fault.

Action?  What could she do?  She couldn’t engineer a magic bullet.  Yet as soon as Grady had said ‘virus’, her heart had skipped a beat.  It was a long shot, but maybe justification for keeping herself alive.