“Go on,” said O’Mara.
“During the recent second visitation,” he continued, “I was made aware of the memories of all its previous hosts. Strongest were those of Lioren, Cherxic, and the other members of the Telfi gestalt among whom it was invited to transfer at will. When you think about it, an organized, self-aware, intelligent virus has much in common with a gestalt entity. But it was the Telfi contact telepathy that enabled it, for the very first time, to achieve perfect communication with other sapient beings. Without knowing how or why, this was the ability it had been searching for all of its life. But even more important were the Telfi radiation-based metabolism and experience in adapting their horrendous environment to their needs, together with their promise of long-term cooperation that will, hopefully, enable the virus creature to make another and most hazardous future change of hosts. That was the reason for the initial investigation and experimentation, unsettling for the hospital staff but never life-threatening, that caused the problem with the power-generation and control systems.
“I don’t have the technical vocabulary, but it seems that the structure of the virus is such that it is possible for it to interpenetrate and exert a measure of control on the subatomic level.”
Hewlitt paused for a moment, then moved onto more familiar ground. He said, “I was also given the Morredeth material and, strangely, the feelings of the creature from the time I first became its host as a child. That was a weird experience. Before that there was its time with Lonvellin, and before that a succession of non-sapient hosts stretching far beyond even its own recollection.
“The virus creature is old, very old …”
There was no knowing what environmental influences had caused it to evolve intelligence or if there had ever been other sapient virus creatures; it could well have been a genetic accident and unique of its kind. In the beginning its hosts had been small, and rather than infecting and killing them through uncontrolled proliferation as did normal pathogens, it tried to insure its own longterm survival by maintaining the hosts in optimum physical condition for as long as possible. It transferred when, in spite of its efforts, a host grew too old or was killed by a larger predator, whereupon the predator became the new host.
A great many centuries must have elapsed before the highly intelligent and extremely long-lived explorer Lonvellin visited its home world and, believing that no off-world pathogen could affect it, took no precautions and acquired a most unusual and unique parasite.
Instinctively the virus realized that it had found an organism that could be made to survive for a very long time indeed, but the new host’s body was so massive and strange and complex that it had extreme difficulty adapting to the new surroundings. Lonvellin, however, who must have been subject to many irritating and uncomfortable illnesses during its long life, would have deduced the virus’s presence and capabilities from the fact that the incidence of its former maladies was dropping toward zero. But at that time the virus creature could not communicate with its host, nor was it aware of the reasons why certain obscure metabolic processes were taking place in that massive and confusing body. All it was able to do at the time, and then only with great difficulty, was to maintain its host in the same physiological condition as it had been in when found.
The virus made mistakes.
One of them, its stubborn retention of dying skin material which would normally have been discarded and replaced with new growth, brought Lonvellin to Sector General. Another was allowing the then Senior Physician Conway to trick it into leaving its host and revealing itself as a separate entity. At this stage in its continuing evolutionary development the virus creature was sapient but not very bright.
After it was reclaimed by Lonvellin, it traveled to Etla, where it had a narrow escape from the nuclear detonation that killed its host. That incident came close to killing the creature as well, but instead resulted in a structural mutation which later enabled it to enter and adapt to a radiation-eating Telfi host.
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