That last was said in the same steady, reasonable voice as the rest, without emphasis. For a moment Jason wasn’t even sure he’d heard it. But he had; Lindy was letting the need show in her eyes.
So she was braver than he was, after all.
“Right now, you must sleep. I’m going to give you something for that. Hillson can conduct his investigation and then you can… do what is necessary. You have to have Dolin executed, don’t you? Yes. I’m sorry. But I’ll tell you this—he didn’t kill Winfield over any fight in a brothel over a girl or money or drink or whatever else anybody claims. Dolin was after Kandiss because some of your soldiers blame the star-farers for bringing the virophage to the base and causing the v-comas. They can’t reach Marianne or Jane or the other comatose because you have guards on the infirmary, but they could reach Kandiss. And Dolin wouldn’t have even tried it if he didn’t have more soldiers ready to lie for him about it.”
“I know.”
She smiled, a complex smile he couldn’t read. “Of course you do. Jason, you’re doing the best possible job under the worst possible circumstances. Now, take these.”
She handed him two pills. He took them without water, a pointless piece of macho toughness, and sagged into a chair. Lindy stood over him. He closed his eyes, but she was still there.
“Lindy,” he managed to choke out, “Lindy…”
She went still beside him.
He reached out, groped for her, and pulled her down on top of him, even as he rolled both of them off the chair and onto the floor.
“Lindy…”
“Shhh,” she said.
“I can’t… I want… You’ve always been…”
“Shhhhh.” She reached for his belt, tugging with her small, strong hands at the buckle.
It took a while for the sleeping pills to work.
CHAPTER 19
Zack watched Toni. It was unsettling to not know what he was seeing. He was unwilling to admit that he had become a little afraid of her.
He saw his old friend and colleague, looking physically unchanged. Toni wore the same tee and many-pocketed pants she had always favored, although now they hung on her; during the v-coma she had lost weight. Her gray-streaked brown hair was pinned back in its usual careless bun. She bent over the lab bench with the same round-shouldered stoop.
He saw her unchanged concern and love for Nicole, whom Toni visited three or four times a day, each time striding from the lab to the v-coma ward to stand wordlessly at the end of Nicole’s pallet. Toni never stayed more than a few minutes. Once, she whispered something in Nicole’s ear. The comatose body on the bed didn’t stir.
He saw Toni’s intense concentration as she worked, as she had always worked. The researchers in the next lab, Drs. Sullivan and Vargas, worked on the samples taken from Toni’s and Belok^’s bodies. Toni worked on the avian gene drive. To carry out her experiments, she’d commandeered as many lab techs as she could. The problem was that she couldn’t work with them. Zack saw her frustration that not even he could follow what she was doing.
Toni would bark out a sentence—sometimes just the fragment of a sentence—about her work. The problem, Zack eventually figured out, was that she was giving a report that left out several things: the intermediate steps to get to her process, the results of those steps, the scientific hypotheses that had led her to those processes in the first place. It was as if she expected Zack and the assistants to grasp those from what she’d said. And none of them could.
“Go back, Toni,” he said, so often that he grew even more impatient than he was afraid. “Start at the beginning of what you did, and why.” And she would look at him as if he were a not-very-bright fifth-grader instead of her department head. Explain? her look said. Why would I need to explain to you how to add sixteen and seventeen: add the six and seven to get thirteen, put down the three and carry the one…
Then she would try to explain, and that was even worse. She was apparently holding several different strands of thought at once—that’s what she called them, “strands”—as graphics in her mind, enormously complicated and detailed graphics. That let her see connections among them that she was pursuing both mathematically and experimentally, each step of which changed a graphic in ways that in turn changed all the others. She couldn’t, or wouldn’t, draw it for him: “Too complicated.” And he could follow only a small part of it.
It made him humble.
It made him resentful.
Humbly and resentfully, he worked the intricate process of modifying DNA. The genes they modified would be injected into sparrows in the subterranean bird lab; the gene drive would incorporate itself into the sparrows’ reproductive machinery. The birds, artificially brought into mating readiness, would copulate and lay eggs. If Toni succeeded, embryos inside the eggs would carry a gene drive that would render all male offspring sterile.
If.
“Denatured random coil one sixty-four, with molecule fifteen,” Toni said, and Zack was supposed to know what she wanted him to do about the engineered folding of a protein he had never known existed.
Then all of it—proteins, genes, eggs—fled from his mind. An Army nurse entered the lab, protected by his scrubs from Toni’s scowl. “Dr. McKay,” he said, “your daughter is waking up.”
Caity had climbed off her bed and onto Susan’s, trailing her IV. When Zack dashed into the cubicle, she looked up at him fearfully. “Daddy! Mommy won’t wake up!”
He lifted Caity in his arms. “Yes, she will, honey. She needs to sleep now. Come on, let Mommy get her rest. Nurse, can this line come out of her arm? Can she… oh, Caity!”
The nurse detached Caity. Zack carried his daughter—where? There was no place to take her in this crowded makeshift coma ward, where now even the corridor held sleeping figures on gurneys. Zack clutched Caitlin as if she, not he, were a life raft. Her little body felt hot in his arms; she smelled of soap and a wet diaper, although she was far too old for diapers. He ducked with her into a supply closet, its shelves ominously bare.
The nurse followed, alarmed. “Dr. McKay, we need to… she must be examined! I’ve sent for Dr. Patel!”
“A minute… just give me a minute!”
“Daddy, I feel funny.”
Alarm shot through him. “Funny how? Nurse! Come back!”
Caitlin vomited all over him.
Toni and Belok^ hadn’t done that when they woke—had they? “Nurse!”
Then Claire was there, taking Caitlin from him, laying her on a clean bed somewhere—how had they gotten to this cubicle? Zack, paralyzed with fear, didn’t remember. But Claire was saying, “It’s all right, Caitlin, your tummy just hurt for a minute…. Zack, there was almost nothing in her anyway, I’m not finding anything abnormal…”
Caitlin lay quiet on the bed, gazing solemnly at the three adults clustered around her, at the small crowd visible in the corridor beyond. This was an event: a third v-coma victim had revived, the first child to do so.
Claire said gently, “How do you feel now, Caitlin?”
“Good.”
That same unblinking gaze, Caity’s eyes traveling from Claire to Zack to the nurse, from the nurse to Zack to Claire. The stillness of her small body, as if everything in her was concentrated in her eyes, or what was going on behind her eyes. The adults all holding their breaths, waiting… for what?