Читать книгу Darwin’s Radio - Greg Bear - Страница 12

Lado and Tamara and Zamphyra and seven other scientists and students gathered around the two wooden tables on the south end of the main laboratory building. They all lifted their beakers of brandy in toast to Kaye. Candles flickered around the room, reflecting golden sparkles within the amber-filled glassware. The meal was only halfway finished, and this was the eighth round Lado had led this evening, as tamada, toastmaster, for the occasion. ‘For darling Kaye,’ Lado said, ‘who values our work … and promises to make us rich!’

Rabbits, mice, and chickens watched with steady sleepy eyes from their cages behind the table. Long black benches covered with glassware and racks and incubators and computers hooked to sequencers and analyzers retreated into the gloom at the unlighted end of the lab.

‘To Kaye,’ Tamara added, ‘who has seen more of what Sakartvelo, of Georgia, has to offer … than we might wish. A brave and understanding woman.’

‘What are you, toastmistress?’ Lado demanded in irritation. ‘Why remind us of unpleasant things?’

‘What are you, talking of riches, of money at a time like this?’ Tamara snapped back.

‘I am tamada!’ Lado roared, standing beside the oak folding table and waving his sloshing glass at the students and scientists. Above slow smiles, none of them said a word in disagreement.

‘All right,’ Tamara conceded. ‘Your wish is our command.’

‘They have no respect!’ Lado complained to Kaye. ‘Will prosperity destroy tradition?’

The benches made crowded V’s in Kaye’s narrowing perspective. The equipment was hooked into a generator that chugged softly out in the yard beside the building. Saul had supplied two sequencers and a computer; the generator had been supplied by Aventis, a huge multi-national.

City power from Tbilisi had been shut off since late that afternoon. They had cooked the farewell dinner over Bunsen burners and in a gas oven.

‘Go ahead, toastmaster,’ Zamphyra said in affectionate resignation. She waved her fingers at Lado.

‘I will.’ Lado put down his glass and smoothed his suit. His dark wrinkled face, red as a beet with mountain sunburn, gleamed in the candlelight like rich wood. He reminded Kaye of a toy troll she had loved as a child. From a box concealed under the table he brought out a small crystal glass, intricately cut and beveled. He took a beautiful silver-chased ibex horn and walked to a large amphora propped in a wooden crate in the near corner, behind the table. The amphora, recently pulled from the earth of his own small vineyard outside Tbilisi, was filled with some immense quantity of wine. He lifted a ladle from the amphora’s mouth and poured it slowly into the horn, then again, and again, seven times, until the horn was full. He swirled the wine gently to let it breathe. Red liquid sloshed over his wrist.

Finally, he filled the glass to the brim from the horn, and handed it to Kaye. ‘If you were a man,’ he said, ‘I would ask you to drink the entire horn, and give us a toast.’

‘Lado!’ Tamara howled, slapping his arm. He almost dropped the horn, and turned on her in mock surprise.

‘What?’ he demanded. ‘Is the glass not beautiful?’

Zamphyra rose to her feet beside the table to waggle a finger at him. Lado grinned more broadly, transformed from a troll into a carmine satyr. He turned slowly toward Kaye.

‘What can I do, dear Kaye?’ Lado said with a flourish. More wine dripped from the tip of the horn. ‘They demand that you must drink all of this.’

Kaye had already had her fill of alcohol and did not trust herself to stand. She felt deliciously warm and safe, among friends, surrounded by an ancient darkness filled with amber and golden stars.

She had almost forgotten the graves and Saul and the difficulties awaiting her in New York.

She held out her hands, and Lado danced forward with surprising grace, belying his clumsiness of a few moments before. Not spilling a drop, he deposited the ibex horn into her hands.

‘Now, you,’ he said.

Kaye knew what was expected. She rose solemnly. Lado had delivered many toasts that evening that had rambled poetically and with no end of invention for long minutes. She doubted she could equal his eloquence, but she would do her best, and she had many things to say, things that had buzzed in her head for the two days since she had come down from Kazbeg.

‘There is no land on Earth like the home of wine,’ she began, and lifted the horn high. All smiled and raised their beakers. ‘No land that offers more beauty and more promise to the sick of heart or the sick of body. You have distilled the nectars of new wines to banish the rot and disease the flesh is heir to. You have preserved the tradition and knowledge of seventy years, saving it for the twenty-first century. You are the mages and alchemists of the microscopic age, and now you join the explorers of the West, with an immense treasure to share.’

Tamara translated in a loud whisper for the students and scientists who crowded around the table.

‘I am honored to be treated as a friend, and as a colleague. You have shared with me this treasure, and the treasure of Sakartvelo – the mountains, the hospitality, the history, and by no means last or least, the wine.’

She lifted the horn with one hand, and said, ‘Gaumarjos phage!’ She pronounced it the Georgian way, pbah-gay. ‘Gaumarjos Sakartvelos!’

Then she began to drink. She could not savor Lado’s earth-hidden, soil-aged wine the way it deserved, and her eyes watered, but she did not want to stop, either to show her weakness or to end this moment. She swallowed gulp after gulp. Fire moved from her stomach into her arms and legs, and drowsiness threatened to steal her away. But she kept her eyes open and continued to the very bottom of the horn, then upended it, held it out, and lifted it.

‘To the kingdom of the small, and all the labors they do for us! All the glories, the necessities, for which we must forgive the … the pain …’ Her tongue became stiff and her words stumbled. She leaned on the folding table with one hand, and Tamara quietly and unobtrusively brought down her own hand to keep the table from upsetting. ‘All the things to which we … all we have inherited. To bacteria, our worthy opponents, the little mothers of the world!’

Lado and Tamara led the cheers. Zamphyra helped Kaye descend, it seemed from a great height, into her wooden folding chair.

‘Wonderful, Kaye,’ Zamphyra murmured into her ear. ‘You come back to Tbilisi any time. You have a home, safe away from your own home.’

Kaye smiled and wiped her eyes, for in her sodden sentiment and relief from the strain of the past days, she was weeping.

The next morning, Kaye felt somber and fuzzy, but experienced no other ill effects from the farewell party. In the two hours before Lado took her to the airport, she walked through the hallways in two of the three laboratory buildings, now almost empty. The staff and most of the graduate student assistants were attending a special meeting in Eliava Hall to discuss the various offers made by American and British and French companies. It was an important and heady moment for the institute; in the next two months, they would probably make their decisions on when and with whom to form alliances. But they could not tell her now. The announcement would come later.

The institute still showed decades of neglect. In most of the labs, shiny thick white or pale green enamel had peeled to show cracked plaster. Plumbing dated from the 1960s, at the latest; much of it was from the twenties and thirties. The brilliant white plastic and stainless steel of new equipment only made more obvious the Bakelite and black enamel, or the brass and wood of antique microscopes and other instruments. There were two electron microscopes enshrined in one building – great hulking brutes on massive vibration isolation platforms. Saul had promised them three new top-of-the-line scanning tunneling microscopes by the end of the year – if EcoBacter was chosen as one of their partners. Aventis or Bristol Myers Squibb could no doubt do better than that.

Kaye walked between the lab benches, peering through the glass doors of incubators at stacks of petri dishes within, their bottoms filled with a film of agar swept and clouded by bacterial colonies, sometimes marked by clear circular regions, called placques, where phage had killed all the bacteria. Day after day, year after year, the researchers in the institute analyzed and catalogued naturally occurring bacteria and their phage. For every strain of bacteria there was at least one and often hundreds of specific phage, and as the bacteria mutated to throw off these unwanted intruders, the phage mutated to match them, a never-ending chase. The Eliava Institute for Phage Research kept one of the largest libraries of phage in the world, and they could respond to bacterial samples by producing phage within days.

On the wall over the new lab equipment, posters showed the bizarre spaceship-like geometric head and tail structures of the ubiquitous T-even phage – T-4, T-6, and T-8, so designated in the nineteen twenties – hovering over the comparatively huge surfaces of Escherichia coli bacteria. Old photographs, old conceptions – that phage simply preyed upon bacteria, hijacking their DNA merely to produce new phage. Many phage did in fact do just that, keeping bacterial populations in check. Others, known as lysogenic phage, became genetic stowaways hiding within the bacteria and inserting their genetic messages into the host DNA. Retroviruses did something very similar in larger plants and animals.

Lysogenic phage suppressed their own expression and assembly and were perpetuated within the bacterial DNA, carried down through the generations. They would jump ship when their host showed clear signs of stress, creating hundreds or even thousands of phage offspring per cell, bursting from the host to escape.

Lysogenic phage were almost useless in phage therapy. They were far more than mere predators. Often these viral invaders gave their hosts resistance to other phage, even to antibiotics. Sometimes they carried genes from one cell to the next, genes that could transform the cell. Lysogenic phage had been known to take relatively harmless bacteria – benign strains of Vibrio, for example – and transform them into virulent Vibrio cholerae. Outbreaks of deadly strains of E. coli in beef had been attributed to transfers of toxin-producing genes by phage. The institute worked hard to identify and eliminate these phage from their preparations.

Kaye, however, was fascinated by them. She had spent much of her career studying lysogenic phage in bacteria and retroviruses in apes and humans.

Hollowed-out retroviruses were commonly used in gene therapy and genetic research as delivery systems for corrective genes, but Kaye’s interest was less practical. Many metazoans – non-bacterial life forms – carried the dormant remains of ancient retroviruses in their genomes. As much as one third of the human genome was made up of these so-called endogenous retroviruses.

She had written three papers about human endogenous retroviruses, or HERV, suggesting they might contribute to novelty in the genome – and much more. Saul agreed with her. ‘Everyone knows they carry little secrets,’ he had once told her, when they were courting.

Their courtship had been odd and lovely. Saul himself was odd and sometimes quite lovely and kind; she just never knew when those times would be.

Kaye paused for a moment by a metal lab stool and rested her hand on its Masonite seat. Saul had always been interested in the bigger picture; she, on the other hand, had been content with smaller successes, tidier chunks of knowledge. So much hunger had led to many disappointments. He had quietly watched his younger wife achieve so much more. She knew it hurt him. Not to have immense success, not to be a genius, was for Saul a major failing.

Kaye lifted her head and inhaled the air: bleach, steam heat, a waft of fresh paint and carpentry from the adjacent library. She liked this old lab with its antiques and humility and decades-old story of hardship and success. The days she had spent here, and on the mountain, had been among the most pleasant of her recent life. Tamara and Zamphyra and Lado had not only made her feel welcome, they had seemed to open up instantly and generously to become family to a wandering foreign woman.

Saul might have a very big success here. A double success, perhaps. What he needed to feel important and useful.

She turned and through the open doorway saw Tengiz, the stooped old lab caretaker, talking to a short, plump young man in gray slacks and a sweatshirt. They stood in the corridor between the lab and the library. The young man looked at her and smiled. Tengiz smiled as well, nodded vigorously, and pointed to Kaye. The man sauntered into the lab as if he owned it.

‘Are you Kaye Lang?’ he asked in American English with a distinct Southern drawl. He was shorter than her by several inches, about her age or a little older, with a thin black beard and curly black hair. His eyes, also black, were small and intelligent.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Pleasure to meet you. My name is Christopher Dicken. I’m from the Epidemic Intelligence Service of the National Center for Infectious Diseases in Atlanta – another Georgia, a long way from here.’ He spoke with a lilting southern accent.

Kaye smiled and shook his hand. ‘I didn’t know you were going to be here,’ she said. ‘What’s the NCID, the CDC –’

‘You went out to a site near Gordi, two days ago,’ Dicken interrupted her.

‘They chased us away,’ Kaye said.

‘I know. I spoke with Colonel Beck yesterday.’

‘Why would you be interested?’

‘Could be for no good reason.’ He thinned his lips and lifted his eyebrows, then smiled again, shrugging this off. ‘Beck says the UN and all Russian peacekeepers have pulled out of the area and returned to Tbilisi, at the vigorous request of the parliament and President Shevardnadze. Odd, don’t you think?’

‘Embarrassing for business,’ Kaye murmured. Tengiz listened from the hall. She frowned at him, more in puzzlement than in warning. He wandered away.

‘Yeah,’ Dicken said. ‘Old troubles. How old, would you say?’

‘What – the grave?’

Dicken nodded.

‘Five years. Maybe less.’

‘The women were pregnant?’

‘Yesss …’ She dragged her answer out, trying to riddle why this would interest a man from the Centers for Disease Control. ‘The two I saw.’

‘No chance of a misidentification? Full-term infants impacted in the grave?’

‘None,’ she said. ‘They were about six or seven months along.’

‘Thanks.’ Dicken held out his hand again and shook hers politely. He turned to leave. Tengiz was crossing the hall outside the door and hustled aside as Dicken passed through. The EIS investigator glanced back at Kaye and tossed a quick salute.

Tengiz leaned his head to one side and grinned toothlessly. He looked guilty as hell.

Kaye sprinted for the door and caught up with Dicken in the courtyard. He was climbing into a small rental Nissan.

‘Excuse me!’ she called out.

‘Sorry. Gotta go.’ Dicken slammed the door and turned on the engine.

‘Christ, you sure know how to arouse suspicions!’ Kaye said loudly enough for him to hear through the closed window.

Dicken rolled the window down and grimaced amiably. ‘Suspicions about what?’

‘What in hell are you doing here?’

‘Rumors,’ he said, looking over his shoulder to see if the way was clear. ‘That’s all I can say.’

He spun the car around in the gravel and drove off, maneuvering between the main building and the second lab. Kaye folded her arms and frowned after him.

Lado called from the main building, poking out of a window. ‘Kaye! We are done. You are ready?’

‘Yes!’ Kaye answered, walking toward the window. ‘Did you see him?’

‘Who?’ Lado asked, face blank.

‘A man from the Centers for Disease Control. He said his name was Dicken.’

‘I saw no one. They have an office on Abasheli Street. You could call.’

She shook her head. There wasn’t time, and it was none of her business anyway. ‘Never mind,’ she said.

Lado was unusually somber as he drove her to the airport.

‘Is it good news, or bad?’ she asked.

‘I am not allowed to say,’ he replied. ‘We should, as you say, keep our options open? We are like babes in the woods.’

Kaye nodded and stared straight ahead as they entered the parking area. Lado helped her take her bags to the new international terminal, past lines of taxis with sharp-eyed drivers waiting impatiently. The check-in desk at British Mediterranean Airlines had a short line. Already Kaye felt she was in the middle zone between worlds, closer to New York than to Lado’s Georgia or the Gergeti church or Mount Kazbeg.

As she reached the front of the line and pulled out her passport and tickets, Lado stood with arms folded, squinting at the watery sunlight through the terminal windows.

The clerk, a young blond woman with ghostly pale skin, slowly worked through the tickets and papers. She finally looked up to say, ‘No off going. No taking.’

‘Beg pardon?’

The woman lifted her eyes to the ceiling as if this would give her strength or cleverness and tried again. ‘No Baku. No Heathrow. No JFK. No Vienna.’

‘What, they’re gone?’ Kaye asked in exasperation. She looked helplessly at Lado, who stepped over the vinyl-covered ropes and addressed the woman in stern and reproving tones, then pointed to Kaye and lifted his bushy brows, as if to say, Very Important Person!

The pale young woman’s cheeks acquired some color. With infinite patience, she looked at Kaye and began speaking, in rapid Georgian, something about the weather, hail moving in, unusual storm. Lado translated in spaced single words: hail, unusual, soon.

‘When can I get out?’ she asked the woman.

Lado listened to the clerk’s explanation with a stern expression, then lifted his shoulders and turned his face toward Kaye. ‘Next week, next flight. Or flight to Vienna, Tuesday. Day after tomorrow.’

Kaye decided to re-book through Vienna. There were now four people in line behind Kaye, and they were showing signs of both amusement and impatience. By their dress and language, they were probably not going to New York or London.

Lado walked with her up the stairs and sat across from her in the echoing waiting area. She needed to think, to sort out her plans. A few old women sold Western cigarettes and perfume and Japanese watches from small booths around the perimeter. Nearby, two young men slept on opposite benches, snoring in tandem. The walls were covered with posters in Russian, the lovely curling Georgian script, and in German and French. Castles, tea plantations, bottles of wine, the suddenly small and distant mountains whose pure colors survived even the fluorescent lights.

‘I know, you need to call your husband, he will miss you,’ Lado said. ‘We can return to the institute – you are welcome, always!’

‘No, thank you,’ Kaye said, suddenly feeling a little sick. Premonition had nothing to do with it: she could read Lado like a book. What had they done wrong? Had a larger firm made an even sweeter offer?

What would Saul do when he found out? All their planning had been based on his optimism about being able to convert friendship and charity into a solid business relationship …

They were so close.

‘There is the Metechi Palace,’ Lado said. ‘Best hotel in Tbilisi … best in Georgia. I take you to the Metechi! You can be a real tourist, like in the guide books! Maybe you have time to take a hot spring bath … relax before you go home.’

Kaye nodded and smiled but it was obvious her heart was not in it. Suddenly, impetuously, Lado leaned forward and clutched her hand in his dry, cracked fingers, roughened by so many washings and immersions. He pounded his hand and hers lightly on her knee. ‘It is no end! It is a beginning! We must all be strong and resourceful!’

This brought tears to Kaye’s eyes. She looked at the posters again – Erblus and Kazbeg draped with clouds, the Gergeti church, vineyards and high tilled fields.

Lado threw his hands up in the air, swore eloquently in Georgian, and leaped to his feet. ‘I tell them it is not best!’ he insisted. ‘I tell the bureaucrats in the government, we have worked with you, with Saul, for three years, and is not to be overturned in one night! Who needs an exclusive, no? I will take you to Metechi.’

Kaye smiled her thanks and Lado sat down again, bending over, shaking his head glumly and folding his hands. ‘It is an outrage,’ he said, ‘what we have to do in today’s world.’

The young men continued snoring.