The Nirvana Plague (40 page)

Marley took a second look at the crowd. The police had blocked the street on either side. Crowds jammed close against the barriers on both sides, watching them.

“Actually,” he said, “there a
lot
more people out here now.”

They looked strange, but he didn’t know why. Something about their faces was off. Or maybe there were just too many of them.

“Yes. And local news is broadcasting live. I think the national media is picking it up too. And they know it’s about IDD. We need to get this thing resolved as soon as possible.”

And the weather was getting worse. The grey canvas of cloud hung lower and darker. The chilly mist had become a thin cold drizzle. A few umbrellas had appeared in the crowded street.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” Marley said, shaking his head.

Benford’s tone became low and urgent: “Doctor, look at me. — Get yourself oriented to this situation. It’s a goddamned circus, but this is the situation we are in. It’s real. We — and I mean
nobody,
have ever seen anything like this before. We don’t know how to deal with it. And it is dangerously close to getting completely out of control.”

“All right, colonel.”

“Now look, we’ve been talking too long. You better get back inside.”

As he turned to go back in, he heard her say to someone: “Put us back on comm now, please.”

Marley walked back through the purple and blue diner like a drunk faking sobriety. He came to the booth, sat down beside Delacourt, and laid the clunky phone on the table.

“Call Karen, Roger.”

He thought his voice sounded unsteady. Firm up, he told himself.

Roger picked up the phone, studied it curiously.

“Do you remember her number?” Marley said.

Roger smiled an indulgent smile. “Yes.” He turned the phone on and dialed with his thumb.

Marley and Delacourt waited nervously.

Roger put the phone to his ear, listened.

In the back of a sanitary service vehicle near the end of its rounds in a small Wisconsin town, an abandoned phone chimed beneath two tons of trash.

Roger let it ring a long time, while everyone else on the line waited.

“No answer,” he said at last.

So much for that, Marley thought. He listened for Benford in his ear. What next, colonel? But she did not speak.

“Why don’t you try again in a few minutes?” Delacourt said.

“All right.”

“Roger has been telling me the IDD story,” Delacourt said to Marley. “While you were outside.”

“The IDD story?” Marley said.

He couldn’t shake his feeling of detachment.

“That is how your mind works there,” Roger said, pointing at Marley. “That mind invents stories. When you have the story of something, you feel you understand it. That’s how that mind there functions. That is what it does.” He looked back at Delacourt again. “You want to know what IDD is. So I was giving you a story to understand.”

This is as good a way to kill time as any, Marley thought. Until the shooter arrives with his dart gun.

“But your mind works differently?” she said.

“This mind here isn’t my mind,” he said, pointing at himself — then at her: “That mind there isn’t your mind, but it tells you that it is. That is the story of you. This mind here doesn’t tell that story.”

Roger was talking only to Delacourt. Marley was irrelevant. Marley was an eavesdropper.

“What story does it tell?” she said.

Roger didn’t answer for a moment. His eyes focused far away. Then he began: “A long time ago, chemistry began to be alive on this planet. It was probably deep in the oceans, in the mineral columns that form around thermal vents. Of course, at that stage, there wasn’t much to it yet. Senseless molecules mindlessly replicating whenever they floated up against the right kinds of chemical catalysts. Follow me so far?”

Delacourt looked genuinely interested. “Yes.”

“That was the humble beginnings of what you see before you today.”

He smiled and puffed out his chest. The pinnacle of creation.

“Yet, in fact, life has no beginning. Life is just a way of thinking about stuff.”

Marley was wondering how many people were listening to this “story.”

“You were trained as a paleo-biologist, weren’t you?” Delacourt said.

“Astro-biologist,” Marley said automatically.

“You’re not paying attention,” Roger said to Marley. “You should listen. This is the story of IDD. I’ve been thinking about it a lot.”

“You have?”

“Of course. I’m the poster child.”

“The poster child?”

Roger nodded toward the screens behind the bar.

“Yes,” Marley said, without looking.

Delacourt nudged him. “Carl, look.”

Marley looked up. The garish façade of The Purple Pony filled the silent screens. Newsline had picked up the local station’s feed. Running captions gave the muted voiceover:

“Negotiators have been inside for nearly an hour…”

Marley felt something twist in his chest. “Oh, no.”

But Roger seemed uninterested. “Now where was I?” he said. “Life, so-called, begins. That was about four billion years ago.
Billion
. With a B. A
very
long time. A lot has changed since then. And it’s changing faster all the time.”

Delacourt nodded.

“That’s significant,” Roger said. “It’s changing
faster
all the time. The pace of life’s development has been accelerating since the very beginning. Just like those epidemiological charts you have on IDD. A typical geometric progression curve. It goes a long time hardly rising at all. Then the curve gets a little steeper. Then
quite
steep. Then all of a sudden it’s going straight up.”

“Yes,” Delacourt said.

Despite his distraction, Marley found his attention drawn to Roger’s monologue — not to what he was saying but to the quality of the speech, the clarity and connectedness of it. Roger’s intelligence had always been one of the most striking aspects of his personality, but he’d also always been highly disorganized. Even after most of his previous symptoms had been wiped out by IDD, he had continued to be either unable or unwilling to follow a coherent train of thought.

“Where the break is depends on how you scale the graph,” Roger continued. “Any point in time could be the point at which the graph breaks upward. It just depends on how big your units are. We humans look at things in terms of human-scale units of time — days, years, centuries. But suppose there is an alien creature out there in the cosmos somewhere whose lifespan extends over millennia? Suppose the timescale on their graphs of life are in the millions of years. From their point of view, life on earth is still just idling along, still just getting up to speed.”

“Yes.”

“The earth is such a creature. ‘When did life on earth begin?’ is a human-sized question. But when did the life
of
the earth begin? That’s a question with an altogether different scale.”

The shooter is on his way, Marley thought. The clock is ticking. Just killing time telling stories until the end.

“What’s all this got to do with IDD, Roger?”

Roger ignored him. “Gradually these self-replicating molecules down in the ocean became more complex. They combined and differentiated and specialized. Cell walls were a critical early development. Cell walls let them escape from the confines of their mineral rock towers and float free, taking their internal environment with them. Little capsules of RNA molecules. Each one a little chemical machine, a molecular mechanism.”

Marley heard something on comm, but it was muted. He wondered if Delacourt had heard. He looked up at the screens. The talking heads, faces profoundly composed, were commenting on the “standoff in Alaska.” What did it portend for the battle with IDD? What was IDD really? Profile shots of Roger and Marley, captured from the video clip, were set up nose to nose. And now they had names too. Marley vs. Sturgeon. The great facedown. The disease and its maker. Dr. Frankenstein and his monster. Was the Bride of Frankenstein watching, wherever she was?

Roger continued his recitation to Delacourt like he had all the time in the world: “So now that they were floating free, the next big development was environmental reactivity. If a cell could react to environmental changes, it could keep itself together better than a cell that couldn’t. A cell that could snap shut its doors in the presence of toxic substances survived better. Biologists call it ‘irritability.’ Irritability is the humble origin of the five senses. Smell is the oldest sense, most like the original. It was a blind and deaf world in those days. A world of scents and tastes.”

Marley was listening for — and dreading — Benford’s voice in his ear, telling him the shooter was ready. He had no idea how he was going to convince Roger to leave the diner anyway. He didn’t even want to try. But he didn’t know what would happen if he didn’t.

“Why don’t you try Karen again?” he said.

Roger gave him a curious look, a forgiving look, and picked up the phone. But he continued talking as he dialed: “The next big development was motility,” he said, putting the clunky phone to his ear. “We were already
mobile
, thanks to our cell walls. But we were just floating about in the soup. Motility is
deliberate
mobility. At first, it wasn’t even directional. But a capsule that could not only snap its portals shut but also move away when it encountered a hostile environment had an advantage over one that could only lie there and wait till the situation improved. For a capsule that could move, the situation would probably improve
sooner
. Remember what I said about how life is changing faster?”

“Yes, I see what you’re getting at,” Delacourt said.

He turned the phone off again. “No answer.”

“Are you sure you have the number right?” Marley said.

Roger ignored him and continued his tale: “And so it went on. Faster and faster. Many, many improvements were discovered — or invented. Depends on your point of view. Directionality was a big one, early on. Not only to be able to initiate movement, but to be able to move in a particular direction. To be able to move is good, and if you can pick a
particular
direction, even better! And to be
able
to pick a direction we had to be able to sense differences in our surroundings in different directions. That led to the development of different kinds of sensitivity. Not just molecular detection, what we now call taste and smell, but light and heat and, eventually, sound. Another advance came as cells learned to join forces. Colonies evolved into symbiots. Symbiots evolved into eukaryotes, cells with nuclei. Eukaryotes evolved into multi-cellular plants and animals. Each new development was an increase in complexity and sophistication. Which means our interactions with our environment and each other became more nuanced, more subtle and differentiated. In the early years our repertoire of reactions was pretty limited: we either opened our mouths and ate whatever came along, or closed our mouths and waited for better times. Each increase in subtlety came faster than the one before it. Because with complexity comes flexibility. With flexibility comes adaptability. The more we changed, the faster we
could
change. Each change provided the foundation for the next one. See what I mean?”