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candidates in detail, and had planned to move on to a list of thousands of
possibly related genes.
Kaye was considered an expert, but what she was an expert in, compared to the
huge world of human DNA, was a series of broken-down and seemingly abandoned
shacks in a number of small and almost forgotten towns. The HERV genes were
supposed to be fossils, fragments scattered through stretches of DNA less than
a million base pairs long. Within such small distances, however, genes could
recombine-jump from position to position-with some ease. The DNA was
constantly in ferment-genes switching locations, forming little knots or
fistulas of DNA, and replicating, a series of churning and twisting chains
constantly being rearranged, for reasons no one could yet completely fathom.
And yet SHEVA had remained remarkably stable over millions of years. The
changes she was looking for would be both slight and very significant.
If she was right, she was about to overturn a major scientific paradigm,
injure a lot of reputations, cause the scientific fight of the twenty-first
century, a war actually, and she did not want to be an early casualty because
she had come to the battlefield in half a suit of armor. Speculation about the
cause was not sufficient. Extraordinary claims required extraordinary
evidence.
Patiently, hoping it would be at least an hour before anyone else entered the
lab, she once again compared the sequences found in SHEVA with the six other
candidates. This time she looked closely at the transcription factors that
triggered expression of the large protein complex. She rechecked the sequences
several times before she spotted what she had known since yesterday must be
there. Four of the candidates carried several such factors, all subtly
different.
She sucked in her breath. For a moment she felt as if she stood on the brink
of a tall cliff. The transcription factors would have to be specific for
different varieties of LPC. That meant there would be more than one gene
coding for the large protein complex.
More than one station on Darwin's radio.
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Last week Kaye had asked for the most accurate available sequences of over a
hundred genes on several chromosomes. The manager of the genome group had told
her they would be available this morning. And he had done his work well. Even
scanning by eye, she was seeing interesting similarities. With so much data,
however, the eye was not good enough. Using an in-house software package
called METABLAST, she searched for sequences roughly homologous with the known
LPC gene on chromosome 21. She requested and was authorized to use most of the
computing power of the building's mainframe for over three minutes.
When the search was completed, Kaye had the matches she had hoped for-and
hundreds more besides, all buried in so-called junk DNA, each subtly
different, offering a different set of instructions, a different set of
strategies.
LPC genes were common throughout the twenty-two human autosomes, the
chromosomes that did not code for sex.
"Backups," Kaye whispered, as if she might be overheard, "alternates," and
then she felt a chill. She pushed back from the desk and paced around the lab.
"Oh, my God. What in hell am I thinking here?"
SHEVA in its present form was not working properly. The new babies were dying.
The experiment-the creation of a new subspecies-was being thwarted by outside
enemies, other viruses, not tame, not co-opted ages ago and made part of the
human tool kit.
She had found another link in the chain of evidence. If you wanted a message
delivered, you would send many messengers. And the messengers could carry
different messages. Surely a complex mechanism that governed the shape of a
species would not rely on one little messenger and one fixed message. It would
automatically alternate subtle designs, hoping to dodge whatever bullets might
be out there, problems it could not directly sense or anticipate.
What she was looking at could explain the vast quantities of HERV and other
mobile elements-all designed to guarantee an efficient and successful
transition to a new pheno-type, a new variety of human. We just don't know how
it works. It's so complicated...it could take a lifetime to understand!
What chilled her was that in the present atmosphere, these results would be
completely misinterpreted.
She pushed her chair back from the computer. All of the energy she had had in
the morning, all the optimism, the glow from her night with Mitch, seemed
hollow.
She could hear voices down the hall. The hour had passed quickly. She stood
and folded the printout of the candidate sites. She would have to take these
to Jackson; that was her first duty. Then she had to talk with Dicken. They
had to plan a response.
She pulled her coat from the drying rack and slipped it on. She was about to
leave when Jackson stepped in from the hall. Kaye looked at him with some
shock; he had never come down to her lab before. He looked tired and deeply
concerned. He, too, held a slip of paper.
"I thought I should be the first to let you know," he said, waving the paper
under her nose.
"Let me know what?" Kaye asked.
"How wrong you can possibly be. SHEVA is mutating."
Kaye finished the day in a three-hour round of meetings with senior staff and
assistants, a litany of schedules, deadlines, the day-to-day minutiae of
research in a small part of a very large corporation, mind-numbing at the best
of times, but now almost intolerable. Jackson's smug condescension at the
delivery of the news from Germany had almost goaded her into a sharp
rejoinder, but she had simply smiled, said she was already working on the
problem, and left...To stand for five minutes in the women's rest room,
staring at herself in a mirror.
She walked from Americol to the condominium tower, accompanied by the ever-
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watchful Benson, and wondered if last night had just been a dream. The doorman
opened the big glass door, smiled politely at them both, and then gave the
agent a brotherly nod. Benson joined her in the elevator car. Kaye had never
been at ease with the agent, but had managed in the past to keep up polite
conversation. Now she could only grunt to his inquiry about how her day had
gone.
When she opened the door at 2011, for a moment she thought Mitch was not
there, and let out her breath with a small whistle. He had gotten what he
wanted and now she was alone again to face her failures, her most brilliant
and devastating failures.
But Mitch came out of the small side office with a most pleasing haste and
stood in front of her for a moment, searching her face, estimating the
situation, before he held her, a little too gently.
"Squeeze me until I squeak," she said. "I'm having a really bad day."
That did not stop her from wanting him. Again the love was both intense and
wet and full of a marvelous grace she had never felt before. She held on to
these moments and when they could go on no more, when Mitch lay beside her
covered with beads of sweat and the sheets beneath her were uncomfortably
damp, she felt like crying.
"It's getting really tough," she said, her chin quivering.
"Tell me," he said.
"I think I'm wrong, we're wrong. I know I'm not but everything is telling me
I'm wrong."
"That doesn't make sense," Mitch said.
"No!" she cried. "I predicted this, I saw it happening, but not soon enough,
and they aced me. Jackson aced me. I haven't talked with Marge Cross, but..."
It took Mitch several minutes to work the details out of her, and even then,
he could only half follow what she was saying.
The short form was that she felt new expressions of SHEVA were stimulating
new varieties of LPCs, large protein complexes, in case the first signal on [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]