before the massive Georgian house.
No lights were on. I don’t know if Sandy Kirk was sleeping or not
home.
We unloaded the sheet-wrapped corpses and piled them at his front
door.
As we drove away, Bobby said, “Remember when we came up here as kids-to
watch Sandy’s dad at work?”
“Yeah.”
“Imagine if one night we’d found something like that on his
doorstep.”
‘Cool.”
There were days of cleanup and repairs to be undertaken at Bobby’s
place, but we weren’t ready to bend to that task. We went to Sasha’s
house and passed the rest of the night in her kitchen, clearing our
heads with more beer and going through my father’s account of the
origins of our new world, our new life.
My mother had dreamed up a revolutionary new approach to the
engineering of retroviru. ses for the purpose of ferrying genes into
the cells of patients-or experimental sub’ects. In the secret facility
at Wyvern, a world-class team of big brows had realized her vision.
These new microbe delivery boys were more spectacularly successful and
selective than anyone had hoped.
“Then comes Godzilla,” as Bobby said.
The new retroviruses, though crippled, proved to be so clever that they
were able not merely to deliver their package of genetic material but
to select a package from the patient’s-or lab animal’s-DNA to replace
what they had delivered. Thus they became a two-way messenger,
carrying genetic material in and out of the body.
They also proved capable of capturing other viruses naturally present
in a subject’s body, selecting from those organisms’ traits, and
remaking themselves. They mutated more radically and faster than any
microbe had ever mutated before. Wildly they mutated, becoming
something new within hours. They had also become able to reproduce in
spite of having been crippled.
Before anyone at Wyvern grasped what was happening, Mom’s new bugs were
ferrying as much genetic material out of the experimental animals as
into them-and transferring that material not only among the different
animals but among the scientists and other workers in the labs.
Contamination is not solely by contact with bodily fluids. Skin
contact alone is sufficient to effect the transfer of these bugs if You
have even the tiniest wound or sore: a paper cut, a nick from
shaving.
aid In the years ahead, as each of us is contaminated, he or she will
take on a load of new DNA different from the one that anybody else
receives. The effect will be singular in every case. Some of us will
not change appreciably at all, because we will receive so many bits and
pieces from so many sources that there will be nofocused cumulative
effect. As our cells die, the inserted material might or might not
appear in the new cells that replace them. But some of us may become
psychological or even physical monsters.
To paraphrase James Joyce: It will darkle, tinct-tint, all this our
funanimal world. Darkle with strange variety.
We know not if the change will accelerate, the effects become e widely
visible, the secret be exposed by the sheer momentum of the
retrovirus’s work-or whether it will be a process that remains subtle
for decades or centuries. We can only wait. And see.
Dad seemed to think the problem didn’t arise entirely because of a flaw
in the theory. He believed the people at Wyvern-who tested my mother’s
theories and developed them until actual organisnis could be
produced-were more at fault than she, because they deviated from her
vision in ways that may have seemed subtle at the time but proved
calamitous in the end.
However You look at it, my mom destroyed the world as we know it-but,
for all that, she’s still my mom. On one level, she did what she did
for love, out of the hope that my life could be saved. I love her as
much as ever-and marvel that she was able to hide her terror and
anguish from me during the last years of her life, after she realized
what kind of new world was coming.
My father was less than half-convinced that she killed herself, but in
his notes, he admits the possibility. He felt that murder was more