50
The fourth day is the day of the miracle, which falls on Caroline Caldwell out of a clear sky.
Except that it’s not clear, really. Not any more. The weather has turned. A thin rain is soaking through their clothes, there’s no food left, and everyone is in a dismal, surly mood. Parks is worried about the e-blocker, and taking it out on everybody. They’re running low on the stuff, and had to go sparingly when they anointed themselves before unlocking the door. And they’ve still got at least three days’ journey ahead of them. If they don’t manage to restock at some point, they’ll be in dead trouble.
They’re still walking south, with the whole of north London and central London and south London to get through. Even for the young private, Caldwell sees, some of the shock and awe has drained away. The only one who’s still looking at every new thing they pass with indefatigable wonder is test subject number one.
As for Caldwell, she’s thinking about lots of things. Fungal mycelia growing in a substrate of mammalian body cells. The GABA-A receptor in the human brain, whose widespread and vital operation concerns the selective conduction of chloride ions across the plasma membranes of specific neurons. And the more immediate issue of why they’re seeing so few hungries now, when yesterday morning they were seeing clusters of several hundred at a time.
Caldwell hypothesises a number of possible answers to this question: deliberate clearance by uninfected humans, competition from an animal species, the spread of a disease through the hungry population, an unknown side effect of Ophiocordyceps itself, and so on. Obviously the existence of the fallen, fruiting hungries is a factor–they’ve seen a lot more since they set out that morning, so many that new sightings arouse no comment–but it’s unlikely that this is the sole explanation. For that, there would have to be hundreds of thousands of the things, not just dozens. To Caldwell’s intense annoyance, she comes across no observational evidence that would help her to choose between the various scenarios she’s theorised.
Moreover–and this distresses her even more–she’s finding it hard to concentrate. The pain from her damaged hands is now a persistent and agonising throbbing, as though she had an extra heart beating in each of her palms in very imperfect synchrony. The ache in her head tries to keep pace with both at once. Her legs feel so weak, so insubstantial, she can hardly believe that they’re carrying her weight. It’s more like her body is a helium balloon, bobbing along above them.
Helen Justineau says something to her, the rising inflection suggesting a question. Caldwell doesn’t hear, but nods her head in order to prevent any further repetition.
Perhaps Ophiocordyceps induces different behaviours in the mature stage than in its neotenous, asexual form. Migratory behaviours or sessile ones. Morbid photosensitivity or some parallel to the height-seeking reflex of infected ants. If she knew where the hungries had gone, she could begin to construct a model of the mechanism, and that might lead her to an understanding of how the fungus–neuron interface ultimately functions.
The day has a drifting, dreamlike feel. It seems to come to Caldwell from a great distance, only reporting in occasionally. They find a cluster of fallen hungries, who have fruited in the same way as the others–but in this case, they’ve lain down so close together that the trunks or stems that grow out of their chests are now joined together by rafts of mycelial threads.
While the others stare at the fungal glade in sick fascination, Caldwell kneels and picks up one of the fallen sporangia. It looks and feels solid enough, but weighs very little. There’s a pleasing smoothness to its integument. Nobody sees as she slips it, very carefully, into the pocket of her lab coat. The next time Sergeant Parks glances around at her, she’s fidgeting with her bandages again and looks as though she’s been doing it the whole time.
They walk on endlessly. Time elongates, fractures, rewinds and replays in stuttering moments that–while they have no coherent internal logic–all seem drearily familiar and inevitable.
The GABA-A receptor. The hyperpolarisation of the nerve cell, occurring after the peak of its firing and determining the lag time before it’s ready to reach action potential again. So precariously balanced a mechanism, and yet so much depends on it!
“Approach with caution,” Sergeant Parks is saying now. “Don’t assume it’s empty.”
In her lab at the base, Caldwell has a voltage clamp of the SEVC-d variety, which can be used to measure very small changes in ion currents across the surface membranes of living nerve cells. She never trained herself to use it properly, but she knows that the Cordyceps-infected display both different levels of excitation from healthy subjects and different rates of change in electrical activity. Variation within the infected community is large, though, and unpredictable. Now she’s wondering whether it correlates with another variable that she’s failed to detect.
A hand touches her shoulder. “Not yet, Caroline,” Helen Justineau says. “They’re still checking it out.”
Caldwell looks on down the road. Sees what’s standing there, a hundred yards ahead of them.
She’s afraid at first that she might be hallucinating. She knows she’s suffering from extreme fatigue and mild disorientation, arising either from the infection contracted when she injured her hands at the base or (less likely) from the untreated water they’ve been drinking.
Ignoring Justineau, she walks forward. In any case, the sergeant rounds the side of the thing now, and gives the all-clear. There’s no reason to hang back.
She raises her hand and touches the cool metal. In curlicues of raised chrome, from under its mantle of dust and filth, it speaks to her. Speaks its name.
Which is Rosalind. Rosalind Franklin.
51
Caroline Caldwell was brought up to believe in the second law of thermodynamics. In a closed system, entropy must increase. No ifs or ands or buts. No time off for good behaviour, since time’s arrow always points in the same direction. Through the gift shop to the exit, with no stamp on your hand, nothing that would let you come round and have another ride.
It’s twenty years now since Charlie and Rosie went off the grid. Twenty years since they launched–without her–and lost their way in a disintegrating world. And now here’s Rosie staring Caroline Caldwell in the eye, as demure as you please.
Rosie is a refutation of entropy just by being here. So long as she’s still virgo intacta, not looted or torched.
“Door’s locked,” Sergeant Parks says. “And nobody’s answering.”
“Look at the dust,” Justineau offers. “This thing hasn’t moved in a long, long time.”
“Okay, I think we should take a look inside.”
“No!” Caldwell yelps. “Don’t! Don’t force the door!”
They all turn to look at her, surprised by her vehemence. Even test subject number one stares, her blue-grey eyes solemn and unblinking. “It’s a laboratory!” Caldwell says. “A mobile research facility. If we break the seals, we could compromise whatever’s inside. Samples. Experiments in progress. Anything.”
Sergeant Parks doesn’t look impressed. “You really think that’s an issue right now, Doctor?”
“I don’t know!” Caldwell says, anguished. “But I don’t want to take the chance. Sergeant, this vehicle was sent here to research the pathogen, and it was crewed by some of the finest scientific minds in the world. There’s no telling what they found or what they learned. If you smash your way in, you could do untold damage!”
She physically interposes herself between Parks and the vehicle. But she doesn’t need to. He’s not making any move towards the door.
“Yeah,” he says dourly. “Well, I don’t think it’s going to be an issue. That’s some serious plate on that thing. We’re not getting in there any time soon. Maybe if we found a crowbar, but even then…”
Caldwell thinks hard for a moment, sieving her memory. “You don’t need a crowbar,” she says.
She shows him where the emergency external access crank is hidden, cradled in two brackets underneath Rosie’s left flank, right beside the midsection door. Then, with the crank held awkwardly in her bandaged left hand, she goes down on her knees and gropes under the body of the vehicle, close to the forward wheel arch. She remembers–she thinks she remembers–the position of the socket into which the crank will fit, but it’s not where she expects it to be. After a few minutes of blind rummaging, watched in bemused silence by the others, she finally locates the slot and is able to insert the end of the crank into it. There’s an override control, but it was only meant to be engaged in conditions of actual siege. The vehicle’s designers anticipated a range of situations in which it would be necessary to enter Rosie from the outside without compromising her interior spaces by blasting or forcing a way in.
“How do you know about all this?” Justineau asks her.
“I was attached to the project,” Caldwell reminds her tersely. She’s lying by omission, but she doesn’t blush. The pain of these memories runs much deeper than the embarrassment, and nothing would induce her to explain further.
To reveal that she came out twenty-seventh on the list of possible crew members for Charlie and Rosie. Trained for five months in the operation of the on-board systems, only to be told that she wouldn’t, after all, be required. Twenty-six other biologists and epidemiologists had placed higher up the list–had seemed, to the mission’s managers and overseers, to possess more desirable skills and experience than those Caldwell had to offer. Since the full complement of scientists for both labs was twelve, that didn’t even put her on the list of first alternatives. Charlie and Rosie sailed without her.
Until now, she’d assumed that they’d gone down with all hands–lost in some inner-city fastness, unable to advance or retreat, overwhelmed by hungries or ambushed by junker scavengers. That thought had consoled her a little–not to think that those who’d beaten her had then died for their lèse majesté, but because her placing so low on the list had kept her alive.
Of course, that’s only a conceptual stone’s throw from the thought that her survival is a side effect of mediocrity.
Which is nonsense, and will be seen to be nonsense, when she finds the cure. The story of her failing to gain a berth on Charlie or Rosie will be an ironic footnote to history, like Einstein’s alleged bad grades in high-school maths exams.
Only now, the footnote gains an added piquancy. They made this lab for her all along, and they didn’t know it. They sent it here to intercept her journey.
Parks and Gallagher are working the crank, which was too stiff and unyielding to move when Caldwell tried it. The door is sliding back, a half-inch at a time. Stale air leaks out, making Caldwell’s heart beat fast in her chest. The seal is good. Whatever happened here, whatever may have become of Rosie’s crew, her interior environment appears to be sound.
As soon as the gap is wide enough for her to get through, Caldwell steps forward.
Right into Sergeant Parks, who refuses to stand out of her way. “I’m going in first,” he tells her. “Sorry, Doc. I know you’re keen to take a look at this thing, and you will. Just as soon as I check if anyone’s home.”
Caldwell starts to state her reasons for believing that Rosie will be empty, but the sergeant isn’t listening. He’s already gone inside. Private Gallagher stands by the door and watches her warily, clearly afraid that she’ll try to barge past him.
But she doesn’t. If she’s right, there’s no risk, but for the same reason no real need for hurry. And if she’s wrong, if the vehicle has been breached somehow, then the sergeant will certainly deal more effectively with anything that’s inside than she could hope to do. Common sense dictates that she wait for him to complete his search.
But she almost convulses with impatience. This gift is intended for her, and for no one else. There’s nobody else who can use what’s in there. What might be in there, she corrects herself. After so many years, there’s no telling what could have happened to the precious equipment in Rosie’s labs. After all, what conceivable disaster would have taken out the crew without harming anything around them? The most likely explanation for the sealed door and undamaged exterior is that one or more of the crew became infected while on board. She imagines them running amok through the lab, in a feeding frenzy, toppling delicate imaging frames and centrifuges, trampling on Petri dishes full of carefully incubated samples.
Sergeant Parks emerges, shaking his head. Caldwell is so wrapped up in these disaster scenarios that she takes that for a verdict. She cries out and runs for the door, where Parks steadies her with a hand on her shoulder. “It’s fine, Doc. All clear. Only body is in the driving seat, and he seems to have shot himself. But before we go in there, tell me something–because this thing is way outside of my experience. Is there anything in there I should know about? Anything that could be dangerous?”
“Nothing,” Caldwell says, but then–the punctilious scientist–she amends that. “Nothing I’m aware of. Let me look around, and I’ll give you a definitive answer.”
Parks steps aside and she goes in, feeling herself trembling, trying to hide it.
The lab has everything. Everything.
At the far end, facing her, is something she’s only ever seen in photographs, but she knows what it is, and what it does, and how it does it.
It’s an ATLUM. An automated lathe ultramicrotome.
It’s the holy grail.