The,Giving,Plague,-,David,Brin

　The Giving Plague

　 David Brin, 1987

　1.

　 You think you"re going to get me, don"t you? Well, you"ve got another think coming,

　"cause I"m ready for you.

　That"s why there"s a forged a card in my wallet saying my blood group is AB negative,

　and a MedicAlert tag warning that I"m allergic to penicillin, aspirin, and phenylalanine.

　Another one states that I"m a practicing, devout Christian Scientist. All these tricks ought to

　slow you down when the time comes, as it"s sure to, sometime soon.

　Even if it makes the difference between living and dying, there"s just no way I"ll let

　anyone stick a transfusion needle into my arm. Never. Not with the blood supply in the state

　it"s in.

　And anyway, I"ve got antibodies. So you just stay the hell away from me, ALAS. I won"t

　be your patsy. I won"t be your vector.

　I know your weaknesses, you see. You"re a fragile, if subtle devil. Unlike TARP, you can"t

　bear exposure to air or heat or cold or acid or alkali. Blood to blood, that"s your only route.

　And what need had you of any other? You thought you"d evolved the perfect technique,

　didn"t you?

　What was it Leslie Adgeson called you? The perfect master? The paragon of viruses?

　I remember long ago when HIV, the AIDS virus, had everyone so awed with its subtlety

　of lethal design. But compared with you, HIV is just a crude butcher. A maniac with a

　chainsaw, a blunderer that kills its hosts and relies for transmission on habits humans can,

　with effort, get under control. Oh, old HIV had its tricks, but compared with you? An

　amateur!

　Rhinoviruses and flu are clever, too. They"re profligate, and they mutate rapidly. Long ago

　they learned how to make their hosts drip and wheeze and sneeze, so the victims spread the

　misery in all directions. Flu viruses are also a lot smarter than AIDS "cause they don"t

　generally kill their hosts, just make "em miserable while they hack and spray and inflict fresh

　infections on their neighbors.

　Oh, Les Adgeson was always accusing me of anthropomorphizing our subjects. Whenever

　he came into my part of the lab, and found me cursing some damned intransigent

　leucophage in rich, Tex-Mex invective, he"d react predictably. I can just picture him now,

　raising one eyebrow, commenting dryly in his Winchester accent.

　"The virus cannot hear you, Forry. It isn"t sentient, nor even alive, strictly speaking. It"s

　only a packet of genes in a protein case, after all."

　"Yeah, Les," I"d answer. "But selfish genes! Given half a chance, they"ll take over a

　human cell, force it to make armies of new viruses, then burst it apart as they escape to

　attack others. They may not think. All that behavior may have evolved by blind chance. But

　doesn"t it all feel as if it"s planned? As if the nasty little things were guided, somehow, by

　somebody out to make us miserable ... ? Out to make us die?"

　"Oh, come now Forry." He would smile at my New World ingenuousness. "You wouldn"t be

　in this field if you didn"t find phages beautiful, in their own way."

　Good old smug, sanctimonious Les. He never did figure out that viruses fascinated me for

　quite another reason. In their rapacious insatiability I saw a simple, distilled purity of

　ambition that exceeded even my own. The fact that it was mindless did little to ease my

　qualms. I"ve always imagined we humans over-rated brains, anyway.

　We"d first met when Les visited Austin on sabbatical, some years before. He"d had the

　Boy Genius rep even then, and naturally I played up to him. He invited me to join him back

　in Oxford, so there I was, having regular amiable arguments over the meaning of disease

　while the English rain dripped desultorily on the rhododendrons outside.

　Les Adgeson. Him with his artsy friends and his pretensions at philosophy -- Les was all

　the time talking about the elegance and beauty of our nasty little subjects. But he didn"t fool

　me. I knew he was just as crazy Nobel-mad as the rest of us. Just as obsessed with the

　chase, searching for that piece of the Life Puzzle, that bit leading to more grants, more lab

　space, more techs, more prestige ... to money, status and, maybe eventually, Stockholm.

　He claimed not to be interested in such things. But he was a smoothie, all right. How else,

　in the midst of the Thatcher massacre of British science, did his lab keep expanding? And

　yet, he kept up the pretense.

　Viruses have their good side," Les kept saying. "Sure, they often kill, in the beginning. All

　new pathogens start that way. But eventually, one of two things happens. Either humanity

　evolves defenses to eliminate the threat or ... "

　Oh, he loved those dramatic pauses.

　"Or?" I"d prompt him, as required.

　"Or else we come to an accommodation, a compromise ... even an alliance."

　That"s what Les always talked about. Symbiosis. He loved to quote Margulis and Thomas,

　and even Lovelock, for pity"s sake! His respect even for vicious, sneaky brutes like HIV was

　downright scary.

　"See how it actually incorporates itself right into the DNA of its victims?" he would muse.

　"Then it waits, until the victim is later attacked by some other disease pathogen. The host T

　cells prepare to replicate, to drive off the invader, only now some chemical machinery is

　taken over by the new DNA, and instead of two new T cells, a plethora of new AIDS viruses

　results."

　"So?" I answered. "Except that it"s a retrovirus, that"s the way nearly all viruses work."

　"Yes, but think ahead, Forry. Imagine what"s going to happen when, inevitably, the AIDS

　virus infects someone whose genetic makeup makes him invulnerable!"

　"What, you mean his antibody reactions are fast enough to stop it? Or his T cells repel

　invasion?"

　Oh, Les used to sound so damn patronizing when he got excited.

　"No, no, think!" he urged. "I mean invulnerable after infection. After the viral genes have

　incorporated into his chromosomes. Only in this individual certain other genes prevent the

　new DNA from triggering viral synthesis. No new viruses are made. No cellular disruption.

　The person is invulnerable. But now he has all this new DNA ... "

　"In just a few cells -- "

　"Yes. But suppose one of these is a sex cell. Then suppose he fathers a child with that

　gamete. Now every one of that child"s cells may contain both the trait of invulnerability and

　the new viral genes! Think about it, Forry. You now have a new type of human being! One

　who cannot be killed by AIDS. And yet he has all the AIDS genes, can make all those

　strange, marvelous proteins ... Oh, most of them will be unexpressed or useless, of course.

　But now this child"s genome, and his descendants", contains more variety ... "

　I often wondered, when he got carried away this way. Did he actually believe he was

　explaining this to me for the first time? Much as the Brits respect American science, they do

　tend to assume we"re slackers when it comes to the philosophical side. But I"d seen his

　interest heading in this direction weeks back and had carefully done some extra reading.

　"You mean like the genes responsible for some types of inheritable cancers?" I asked

　sarcastically. "There"s evidence some oncogenes were originally inserted into the human

　genome by viruses, just as you suggest. Those who inherit the trait for rheumatoid arthritis

　may also have gotten their gene that way."

　"Exactly. Those viruses themselves may be extinct, but their DNA lives on, in ours!"

　"Right. And boy have human beings benefited!"

　Oh, how I hated that smug expression he"d get. (It got wiped off his face eventually,

　didn"t it?)

　Les picked up a piece of chalk and drew a figure on the blackboard.

　HARMLESS -- > KILLER! -- > SURVIVABLE ILLNESS -- >

　INCONVENIENCE -- > HARMLESS

　"Here"s the classic way of looking at how a host species interacts with a new pathogen,

　especially a virus. Each arrow, of course, represents a stage of mutation and adaptation

　selection.

　"First, a new form of some previously harmless microorganism leaps from its prior host,

　say a monkey species, over to a new one, say us. Of course, at the beginning we have no

　adequate defenses. It cuts through us like Syphilis did in Europe in the sixteenth century,

　killing in days rather than years ... in an orgy of cell feeding that"s really not a very efficient

　modus for a pathogen. After all, only a gluttonous parasite kills off its host so quickly.

　"What follows, then, is a rough period for both host and parasite as each struggles to

　adapt to the other. It can be likened to warfare. Or, on the other hand, it might be thought

　of as a sort of drawn out process of negotiation."

　I snorted in disgust. "Mystical crap, Les. I"ll concede your chart; but the War analogy is

　the right one. That"s why they fund labs like ours. To come up with better weapons for our

　side."

　"Hmm. Possibly. But sometimes the process does look different, Forry." He turned and

　drew another chart.

　HARMLESS -- > KILLER! -- > SURVIVABLE ILLNESS -- >

　INCONVENIENCE -- > BENIGN PARASITISM -- > SYMBIOSIS

　"You can see that this chart is the same as the other, right up to the point where the

　original disease disappears."

　"Or goes into hiding."

　"Surely. As E. coli took refuge in our innards. Doubtless long ago the ancestors of E. coli

　killed a great many of our ancestors before eventually becoming the beneficial symbionts

　they are now, helping us digest our food.

　"The same applies to viruses, I"d wager. Heritable cancers and rheumatoid arthritis are

　just temporary awkwardnesses. Eventually, those genes will be comfortably incorporated.

　They"ll be part of the genetic diversity that prepares us to meet challenges ahead. Why, I"d

　wager a large portion of our present genes came about in such a way, entering our cells first

　as invaders ... "

　Crazy sonovabitch. Fortunately he didn"t try to lead the lab"s research effort too far to the

　right on his magic diagram. Our Boy Genius was plenty savvy about the funding agencies.

　He knew they weren"t interested in paying us to prove we"re all partly descended from

　viruses. They wanted, and wanted badly, progress on ways to fight viral infections

　themselves.

　So Les concentrated his team on vectors.

　Yeah, you viruses need vectors, don"t you. I mean, if you kill a guy, you"ve got to have a

　life raft, so you can desert the ship you"ve sunk, so you can cross over to some new hapless

　victim. Same applies if the host proves tough, and fights you off -- gotta move on. Always

　movin" on.

　Hell, even if you"ve made peace with a human body, like Les suggested, you still want to

　spread, don"t you? Big-time colonizers, you tiny beasties.

　Oh, I know. It"s just natural selection. Those bugs that accidentally find a good vector

　spread. Those that don"t, don"t. But it"s so eerie. Sometimes it sure feels purposeful ...

　So the flu makes us sneeze. Salmonella gives us diarrhea. Smallpox causes pustules

　which dry, flake off and blow away to be inhaled by the patient"s loved ones. All good ways

　to jump ship. To colonize.

　Who knows? Did some past virus cause a swelling of the lips that made us want to kiss?

　Heh. Maybe that"s a case of Les"s "benign incorporation" ... we retain the trait, long after the

　causative pathogen went extinct! What a concept.

　So our lab got this big grant to study vectors. Which is how Les found you, ALAS. He drew

　this big chart covering all the possible ways an infection might leap from person to person,

　and set us about checking all of them, one by one.

　For himself he reserved straight blood-to-blood infection. There were reasons for that.

　First off, Les was an altruist, see. He was concerned about all the panic and unfounded

　rumors spreading about Britain"s blood supply. Some people were putting off necessary

　surgery. There was talk of starting over here what some rich folk in the States had begun

　doing -- stockpiling their own blood in silly, expensive efforts to avoid having to use the

　Blood Banks if they ever needed hospitalization.

　All that bothered Les. But even worse was the fact that lots of potential donors were

　shying away from giving blood because of some stupid rumors that you could get infected

　that way.

　Hell, nobody ever caught anything from giving blood ... nothing except maybe a little

　dizziness and perhaps a zit or spot from all the biscuits and sweet tea they feed you

　afterwards. And as for contracting HIV from receiving blood, well, the new antibodies tests

　soon had that problem under control. Still, the stupid rumors spread.

　A nation has to have confidence in its blood supply. Les wanted to eliminate all those silly

　fears once and for all, with one definitive study. But that wasn"t the only reason he wanted

　the blood-to blood vector for himself.

　"Sure, there are some nasty things like AIDS that use that vector. But that"s also where I

　might find the older ones," he said, excitedly. "The viruses that have almost finished the

　process of becoming benign. The ones that have been so well selected that they keep a low

　profile, and hardly inconvenience their hosts at all. Maybe I can even find one that"s

　commensal! One that actually helps the human body."

　"An undiscovered human commensal," I sniffed doubtfully.

　"And why not? If there"s no visible disease, why would anyone have ever looked for it!

　This could open up a whole new field, Forry!"

　In spite of myself, I was impressed. It was how he got to be known as a Boy Genius, after

　all, this flash of half-crazy insight. How he managed not to have it snuffed out of him at

　OxBridge, I"ll never know, but it was one reason why I"d attached myself to him and his lab,

　and wrangled mighty hard to get my name attached to his papers.

　So I kept watch over his work. It sounded so dubious, so damn stupid. And I knew it just

　might bear fruit, in the end.

　That"s why I was ready when Les invited me along to a conference down in Bloomsbury

　one day. The colloquium itself was routine, but I could tell he was near to bursting with

　news. Afterwards we walked down Charing Cross Road to a pizza place, one far enough from

　the university area to be sure there"d be no colleagues anywhere within earshot -- just the

　pretheater crowd, waiting till opening time down at Leicester Square.

　Les breathlessly swore me to secrecy. He needed a confidant, you see, and I was only too

　happy to comply. "I"ve been interviewing a lot of blood donors lately," he told me after we"d

　ordered. "It seems that while some people have been scared off from donating, that has

　been largely made up by increased contributions by a central core of regulars."

　"Sounds good," I said. And I meant it. I had no objection to there being an adequate

　blood supply. Back in Austin I was pleased to see others go to the Red Cross van, just so

　long as nobody asked me to contribute. I had neither the time nor the interest, so I got out

　of it by telling everybody I"d had malaria.

　"I found one interesting fellow, Forry. Seems he started donating back when he was

　twenty-five, during the Blitz. Must have contributed thirty-five, forty gallons, by now."

　I did a quick mental calculation. "Wait a minute. He"s got to be past the age limit by

　now."

　"Exactly right! He admitted the truth, when he was assured of confidentiality. Seems he

　didn"t want to stop donating when he reached sixty-five. He"s a hardy old fellow ... had a

　spot of surgery a few years back, but he"s in quite decent shape, overall. So, right after his

　local Gallon Club threw a big retirement fest for him, he actually moved across the county

　and registered at a new blood bank, giving a false name and a younger age!"

　"Kinky. But it sounds harmless enough. I"d guess he just likes to feel needed. Bet he flirts

　with the nurses and enjoys the free food ... sort of a bimonthly party he can always count

　on, with friendly, appreciative people."

　Hey, just because I"m a selfish bastard doesn"t mean I can"t extrapolate the behavior of

　altruists. Like most other user-types, I"ve got a good instinct for the sort of motivations that

　drive suckers. People like me need to know such things.

　"That"s what I thought too, at first," Les said, nodding. "I found a few more like him, and

　decided to call them "addicts." At first I never connected them with the other group, the one

　I named "converts.""

　"Converts?"

　"Yes, converts. People who suddenly become blood donors -- get this -- very soon after

　they"ve recovered from surgery themselves!"

　"Maybe they"re paying off part of their hospital bills that way?"

　"Mmm, not really. We have nationalized health, remember? And even for private patients,

　that might account for the first few donations only."

　"Gratitude, then?" An alien emotion to me, but I understood it, in principle.

　"Perhaps. Some few people might have their consciousnesses raised after a close brush

　with death, and decide to become better citizens. After all, half an hour at a blood bank, a

　few times a year, is a small inconvenience in exchange for ... "

　Sanctimonious twit. Of course he was a donor. Les went on and on about civic duty and

　such until the waitress arrived with our pizza and two fresh bitters. That shut him up for a

　moment. But when she left, he leaned forward, eyes shining.

　"But no, Forry. It wasn"t bill-paying, or even gratitude. Not for some of them, at least.

　More had happened to these people than having their consciousnesses raised. They were

　converts, Forry. They began joining Gallon Clubs, and more! It seems almost as if, in each

　case, a personality change had taken place."

　"What do you mean?"

　"I mean that a significant fraction of those who have had major surgery during the last

　five years seem to have changed their entire set of social attitudes! Beyond becoming blood

　donors, they"ve increased their contributions to charity, joined parent-teacher organizations

　and Boy Scout troops, become active in Greenpeace and Save The Children ... "

　"The point, Les. What"s your point?"

　"My point?" He shook his head. "Frankly, some of these people were behaving like addicts

　... like converted addicts to altruism. That"s when it occurred to me, Forry, that what we

　might have here was a new vector."

　He said it as simply as that. Naturally I looked at him, blankly.

　"A vector!" he whispered, urgently. "Forget about typhus, or smallpox, or flu. They"re

　rank amateurs! Wallies who give the show away with all their sneezing and flaking and

　shitting. To be sure, AIDS uses blood and sex, but it"s so damned savage, it forced us to

　become aware of it, to develop tests, to begin the long, slow process of isolating it. But

　ALAS -- "

　"Alas?"

　"A-L-A-S." He grinned. "It"s what I"ve named the new virus I"ve isolated, Forry. It stands

　for "Acquired Lavish Altruism Syndrome." How do you like it?"

　"Hate it. Are you trying to tell me that there"s a virus that affects the human mind? And in

　such a complicated way?" I was incredulous and, at the same time, scared spitless. I"ve

　always had this superstitious feeling about viruses and vectors. Les really had me spooked

　now.

　"No, of course not," he laughed. "But consider a simpler possibility. What if some virus

　one day stumbled on a way to make people enjoy giving blood?"

　I guess I only blinked then, unable to give him any other reaction.

　"Think, Forry! Think about that old man I spoke of earlier. He told me that every two

　months or so, just before he"d be allowed to donate again, he tends to feel "all thick inside."

　The discomfort only goes away after the next donation!"

　I blinked again. "And you"re saying that each time he gives blood, he"s actually serving

　his parasite, providing it a vector into new hosts ... "

　"The new hosts being those who survive surgery because the hospital gave them fresh

　blood, all because our old man was so generous, yes! They"re infected! Only this is a subtle

　virus, not a greedy bastard, like AIDS, or even the flu. It keeps a low profile. Who knows,

　maybe it"s even reached a level of commensalism with its hosts -- attacking invading

　organisms for them, or ... "

　He saw the look on my face and waved his hands. "All right, far-fetched, I know. But

　think about it! Because there are no disease symptoms, nobody has ever looked for this

　virus, until now."

　He"s isolated it, I realized, suddenly. And, knowing instantly what this thing could mean,

　career-wise, I was already scheming, wondering how to get my name onto his paper, when

　he published this. So absorbed was I that, for a few moments, I lost track of his words.

　" ... And so now we get to the interesting part. You see, what"s a normal, selfish Tory-

　voter going to think when he finds himself suddenly wanting to go down to the blood bank

　as often as they"ll let him?"

　"Um," I shook my head. "That he"s been bewitched? Hypnotized?"

　"Nonsense!" Les snorted. "That"s not how human psychology works. No, we tend to do

　lots of things without knowing why. We need excuses, though, so we rationalize! If an

　obvious reason for our behavior isn"t readily available, we invent one, preferably one that

　helps us think better of ourselves. Ego is powerful stuff, my friend."

　Hey, I thought. Don"t teach your grandmother to suck eggs.

　"Altruism," I said aloud. "They find themselves rushing regularly to the blood bank. So

　they rationalize that it"s because they"re good people ... They become proud of it. Brag

　about it ... "

　"You"ve got it," Les said. "And because they"re proud, even sanctimonious, about their

　newfound generosity, they tend to extend it, to bring it into other parts of their lives!"

　I whispered in hushed awe. "An altruism virus! Jesus, Les, when we announce this ... "

　I stopped when I saw his sudden frown and instantly thought it was because I"d used that

　word "we." I should have known better, of course. For Les was always more than willing to

　share the credit. No, his reservation was far more serious than that.

　"Not yet, Forry. We can"t publish this yet."

　I shook my head. "Why not! This is big, Les! It proves much of what you"ve been saying

　all along, about symbiosis and all that. There could even be a Nobel in it!"

　I"d been gauche, and spoken aloud of The Ultimate. But he did not even seem to notice.

　Damn. If only Les had been like most biologists, driven more than anything else by the lure

　of Stockholm. But no. You see, Les was a natural. A natural altruist.

　It was his fault, you see. Him and his damn virtue, they drove me to first contemplate

　what I next decided to do.

　"Don"t you see, Forry? If we publish, they"ll develop an antibody test for the ALAS virus.

　Donors carrying it will be barred from the blood banks, just like those carrying AIDS and

　syphilis and hepatitis. And that would be incredibly cruel torture to those poor addicts and

　carriers."

　"Screw the carriers!" I almost shouted. Several pizza patrons glanced my way. With a

　desperate effort I brought my voice down. "Look, Les, the carriers will be classified as

　diseased, won"t they? So they"ll go under doctor"s care. And if all it takes to make them feel

　better is to bleed them regularly, well, then we"ll give them pet leeches!"

　Les smiled. "Clever. But that"s not the only, or even my main reason, Forry. No, I"m not

　going to publish, yet, and that is final. I just can"t allow anybody to stop this disease. It"s got

　to spread, to become an epidemic. A pandemic."

　I stared, and upon seeing that look in his eyes, I knew that Les was more than an

　altruist. He had caught that specially insidious of all human ailments, the Messiah Complex.

　Les wanted to save the world.

　"Don"t you see?" he said urgently, with the fervor of a proselyte. "Selfishness and greed

　are destroying the planet, Forry! But nature always finds a way, and this time symbiosis

　may be giving us our last chance, a final opportunity to become better people, to learn to

　cooperate before it"s too late!

　"The things we"re most proud of, our prefrontal lobes, those bits of gray matter above the

　eyes which make us so much smarter than beasts -- what good have they done us, Forry?

　Not a hell of a lot. We aren"t going to think our way out of the crises of the twentieth

　century. Or, at least, thought alone won"t do it. We need something else, as well.

　"And Forry, I"m convinced that "something else" is ALAS. We"ve got to keep this secret, at

　least until it"s so well established in the population that there"s no turning back!"

　I swallowed. "How long? How long do you want to wait? Until it starts affecting voting

　patterns? Until after the next election?"

　He shrugged. "Oh, at least that long. Five years. Possibly seven. You see, the virus tends

　to only get into people who"ve recently had surgery, and they"re generally older.

　Fortunately, they also are often influential. Just the sort who now vote Tory ... "

　He went on. And on. I listened with half an ear, but already I had come to that fateful

　realization. A seven-year wait for a goddamn coauthorship would make this discovery next

　to useless to my career, to my ambitions.

　Of course I could blow the secret on Les, now that I knew of it. But that would only

　embitter him, and he"d easily take all the credit for the discovery anyway. People tend to

　remember innovators, not whistle-blowers.

　We paid our bill and walked toward Charing Cross Station, where we could catch the tube

　to Paddington, and from there to Oxford. Along the way we ducked out of a sudden

　downpour at a streetside ice cream vendor. While we waited, I bought us both cones. I

　remember quite clearly that he had strawberry. I had a raspberry ice.

　While Les absentmindedly talked on about his research plans, a small pink smudge

　colored the corner of his mouth. I pretended to listen, but already my mind had turned to

　other things, nascent plans and earnest scenarios for committing murder.

　2.

　 It would be the perfect crime, of course.

　Those movie detectives are always going on about "motive, means, and opportunity."

　Well, motive I had in plenty, but it was a one so far-fetched, so obscure, that it would surely

　never occur to anybody.

　Means? Hell, I worked in a business rife with means. There were poisons and pathogens

　galore. We"re a very careful profession, but, well, accidents do happen ... The same holds for

　opportunity.

　There was a rub, of course. Such was Boy Genius"s reputation that, even if I did succeed

　in knobbling him, I didn"t dare come out immediately with my own announcement. Damn

　him, everyone would just assume it was his work anyway, or his "leadership" here at the

　lab, at least, that led to the discovery of ALAS. And besides, too much fame for me right

　after his demise might lead someone to suspect a motive.

　So, I realized. Les was going to get his delay, after all. Maybe not seven years, but three

　or four perhaps, during which I"d move back to the States, start a separate line of work,

　then subtly guide my own research to cover methodically all the bases Les had so recently

　flown over in flashes of inspiration. I wasn"t happy about the delay, but at the end of that

　time, it would look entirely like my own work. No coauthorship for Forry on this one, nossir!

　The beauty of it was that nobody would ever think of connecting me with the tragic death

　of my colleague and friend, years before. After all, did not his demise set me back in my

　career, temporarily? "Ah, if only poor Les had lived to see your success!" my competitors

　would say, suppressing jealous bile as they watched me pack for Stockholm.

　Of course none of this appeared on my face or in my words. We both had our normal

　work to do. But almost every day I also put in long extra hours helping Les in "our" secret

　project. In its own way it was an exhilarating time, and Les was lavish in his praise of the

　slow, dull, but methodical way I fleshed out some of his ideas.

　I made my arrangements slowly, knowing Les was in no hurry. Together we gathered

　data. We isolated, and even crystallized the virus, got X-Ray diffractions, did epidemiological

　studies, all in strictest secrecy.

　"Amazing!" Les would cry out, as he uncovered the way the ALAS virus forced its hosts to

　feel their need to "give." He"d wax eloquent, effusive over elegant mechanisms which he

　ascribed to random selection but which I could not help superstitiously attributing to some

　incredibly insidious form of intelligence. The more subtle and effective we found its

　techniques to be, the more admiring Les became, and the more I found myself loathing

　those little packets of RNA and protein.

　The fact that the virus seemed so harmless -- Les thought even commensal -- only made

　me hate it more. It made me glad of what I had planned. Glad that I was going to stymie

　Les in his scheme to give ALAS free reign.

　I was going to save humanity from this would-be puppet master. True, I"d delay my

　warning to suit my own purposes, but the warning would come, nonetheless, and sooner

　than my unsuspecting compatriot planned.

　Little did Les know that he was doing background for work I"d take credit for. Every flash

　of insight, his every "Eureka!" was stored away in my private notebook, beside my own

　columns of boring data. Meanwhile, I sorted through all the means at my disposal.

　Finally, I selected for my agent a particularly virulent strain of Dengue Fever.

　3.

　There"s an old saying we have in Texas. "A chicken is just an egg"s way of makin" more

　eggs."

　To a biologist, familiar with all those latinized-graecificated words, this saying has a much

　more "posh" version. Humans are "zygotes," made up of diploid cells containing forty-six

　paired chromosomes ... except for our haploid sex cells, or "gametes." Males" gametes are

　sperm and females" are eggs, each containing only twenty-three chromosomes.

　So biologists say that "a zygote is only a gamete"s way of making more gametes."

　Clever, eh? But it does point out just how hard it is, in nature, to pin down a Primal Cause

　... some center to the puzzle, against which everything else can be calibrated. I mean, which

　does come first, the chicken or the egg?

　"Man is the measure of all things," goes another wise old saying. Oh yeah? Tell that to a

　modern feminist. A guy I once knew who used to read science fiction told me about this

　story he"d seen, in which it turned out that the whole and entire purpose of humanity, brains

　and all, was to be the organism that built starships so that houseflies could migrate out and

　colonize the galaxy.

　But that idea"s nothing compared with what Les Adgeson believed. He spoke of the

　human animal as if he were describing a veritable United Nations. From the E. coli in our

　guts, to tiny commensal mites that clean our eyelashes for us, to the mitochondria that

　energize our cells, all the way to the contents of our very DNA ... Les saw it all as a great big

　hive of compromise, negotiation, symbiosis. Most of the contents of our chromosomes came

　from past invaders, he contended.

　Symbiosis? The picture he created in my mind was one of minuscule puppeteers, all

　yanking and jerking at us with their protein strings, making us marionettes dance to their

　own tunes, to their own nasty, selfish little agendas.

　And you, you were the worst! Like most cynics, I had always maintained a secret faith in

　human nature. Yes, most people are pigs. I"ve always known that. And while I may be a

　user, at least I"m honest enough to admit it. But deep down, we users count on the sappy

　generosity, the mysterious, puzzling altruism of those others, the kind, inexplicably decent

　folk ... those we superficially sneer at in contempt, but secretly hold in awe.

　Then you came along, damn you. You make people behave that way. There is no mystery

　left, after you get finished. No corner remaining impenetrable to cynicism. Damn, how I

　came to hate you!

　As I came to hate Leslie Adgeson. I made my plans, schemed my brilliant campaign

　against both of you. In those last days of innocence I felt oh, so savagely determined. So

　deliciously decisive and in control of my own destiny.

　In the end it was anticlimactic. I didn"t have time to finish my preparations, to arrange

　that little trap, that sharp bit of glass dipped in just the right mixture of deadly

　microorganisms. For CAPUC arrived then, just before I could exercise my option as a

　murderer.

　CAPUC changed everything.

　Catastrophic Autoimmune PUlmonary Collapse ... acronym for the horror that made AIDS

　look like a minor irritan...