“Sure,” Kaye said. “I am almost cheered by this.” She dropped the folder on her small, crowded desk.
“I’m off to check our arrays, and then I’m going home,” Liz called out as she pushed through the door with the tray. “I’ve been working all night. You in for the week?”
“Until they fire me,” Kaye said. She rubbed her nose reflexively. “I need to look over the fragile site studies from last week.”
“Prepped and digitized. They’re on the photobase,” Liz said. “There’s some leftover spaghetti in the fridge.”
“Heavenly,” Kaye said.
“Bye,” Liz called as the door swung closed behind her.
Kaye got up and rubbed her nose again. It felt slightly stuffy, not unpleasantly so. The lab smelled unusually sweet and fresh, not that it ever smelled dirty. Liz was a stickler for cleanliness.
The scent was hard to place, not at all like perfume or flowers.
There was a long day’s work ahead, preparing for tomorrow’s morning meeting. Kaye closed her eyes, hoping to find her calm spot; she needed to focus on the chromosome results from last week. Get the sour clamp of Washington off her gut.
She pulled the stool over to the workstation and entered her password, then called up the tables and photos of chimpanzee chromosome mutations.
Early-stage embryos modified for lab work had had all of their single-copy ERVs deleted, but all multicopy ERVs, LINEs, and “defective” ERVs left intact. They had then been allowed to develop for forty-eight hours. The chromosomes, bunched up by mitosis, were removed, photographed, and crudely sequenced. What Kaye was looking for were anomalies around fragile sites and hot spots in the chromosomes—regions of genes that responded quickly to environmental change, suggesting rapid adaptive response.
The modified chimp chromosomes were severely distorted—she could tell that just by looking at the photos. The fragile sites were all screwed up, broken and rearranged incorrectly. The embryos would never have implanted in the womb, much less gone to term. Even single-copy ERVs were important to fetal development and chromosome adaptation in mammals, perhaps especially so in primates.
She looked over the analysis and saw random and destructive methylation of genes that should be actively transcribing, necessary lengths of DNA mothballed like a fleet of old ships, curling the chromatin into an agony of alternating misplaced activity and dark, inactive lassitude.
They looked ugly, those chromosomes, ugly and unnatural. The early-stage embryos, growing under the tutelage of such chromosomes, would die. That was the story of everything they had done in the lab. If, by rare chance, the ERV-knockout embryos managed to implant and begin development, they were invariably resorbed within the first few weeks. And getting that far had required giving the chimp mothers massive drug regimens developed for human mothers at fertilization clinics to prevent miscarriages.
The ERVs served so many functions in the developing embryos, including mediating tissue differentiation. And it was already obvious that TLV—the Temin-Larsson-Villarreal conjecture—was correct. Highly conserved endogenous retroviruses expressed by the trophectoderm of the developing embryo—the portion that would develop into the surrounding amnion and placenta—protected against attacks by the mother’s immune system. The viral envelope proteins selectively subdued the mother’s immune response to her fetus without weakening the mother’s defenses against external pathogens, an exquisite dance of selectivity.
Because of the protective function of legacy retroviruses, ERV knockout—the removal or stifling of most or all of the genome’s “original sins”—was invariably fatal.
Kaye vividly remembered the chill she had felt when Mitch’s mother had described SHEVA as “original sin.” How long ago had that been—fifteen years? Just after they had conceived Stella.
If SHEVA and other ERV constituted original sin, then it was starting to look as if all placental mammals, perhaps all multicelled life forms, were filled with original sin, required it, died without it.
And wasn’t that what the Garden of Eden was all about? The beginning of sex and self-knowledge and life as we know it.
All because of viruses.
“The hell with that,” Kaye muttered. “We need a new name for these things.”
12
ARIZONA
Roll call was Stella’s least favorite time of day, when the girls were all gathered together and Miss Kantor walked between the rows under the big tent.
Stella sat cross-legged and drew little figures of flowers and birds in the dust with her finger. The canvas flapped with the soft morning breeze. Miss Kantor walked between the lines of seated, cross-legged adolescents and leafed through her daybook. She relied entirely on paper, simply because losing an e-pad or laptop in the reserve was a severe offense, punishable by dismissal.
The dormitories held no phones, no satellite feeds, no radios. Television was limited to educational videos. Stella and most of the other children here had come to abhor television.
“Ellie Ann Garcia.”
“Here.”
“Stella Nova Rafelson.”
“Here,” Stella called out, her voice silvery in the cool desert air.
“How’s your cold, Stella?” Miss Kantor asked as she walked down the row.
“Done,” Stella answered.
“Eight days, wasn’t it?” Miss Kantor tapped her pen on the daybook page.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“That’s the fifth wave of colds we’ve had this year.”
Stella nodded. The counselors kept careful and tedious track of all infections. Stella had spent several hours being examined, five days ago; so had two dozen other children with similar colds.
“Kathy Chu.”
“Here!”
Miss Kantor walked by Stella again after she had finished. “Stella, are you scenting?”
Stella looked up. “No, Miss Kantor.”
“My little sensor tells me you are.” She tapped the nosey on her belt. Stella was not scenting, and neither was anybody around her. Miss Kantor’s electronic snitch was wrong, and Stella knew why; Miss Kantor was having her period and that could confuse the nosey. But Stella would never tell her that.
Humans hated to be clued when they produced revealing odors.
“You’ll never learn to live in the outside world if you can’t control yourself,” Miss Kantor said to Stella, and knelt in front of her. “You know the rules.”
Stella got to her feet without being prompted. She did not know why she was being singled out. She had done nothing unusual.
“Wait over by the truck,” Miss Kantor said.
Stella walked to the truck, brilliant white under the morning sun. The air over the mountains was intense and blue. It was going to be hot in a few hours, but it might rain heavily later; that would make the late-afternoon air perfect for catching up. She did not want to miss that.
Miss Kantor finished her count and the kids filed off to the morning classes in the trailers and bungalows scattered over the dusty grounds. The counselor and her assistant, a quiet, plump young woman named Joanie, walked across the gravel to the truck. Miss Kantor would not look straight at Stella.
“I know it wasn’t just you,” Miss Kantor said. “But you’re the only one I could catch. It has to stop, Stella. But I’m not going to punish you this time.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Stella knew better than to argue. When things went her way, Miss Kantor was reasonable and fairly easygoing, but any show of defiance or contradiction and she could get harsh. “Can I go to classes now?”
“Not yet,” Miss Kantor said, placing her notepad in the truck. She opened the rear door of the truck. “Your father is visiting,” she said. “We’re going back to the infirmary.”