The Girl with All the Gifts

67

Dr Caldwell works on through the night, feverishly busy. The fever is literal, and it’s currently running at 103 degrees.

Extracting the hungry boy’s brain takes a lot longer without Dr Selkirk to help – and Dr Caldwell’s hands are so clumsy that it’s virtually impossible to take it out without damaging it. She does the best she can, removing most of the skull in inch-wide jigsaw pieces before she finally screws up her courage and severs the brain stem.

When she lifts it out, although her hands tremble violently, it comes clean.

She powers up the microtome and takes slices from the brain, choosing cross-sections that will allow her to examine most major structures. She mounts her slides, awed at how perfectly the microtome has done its job. The slices are exquisite, with no crush damage or smearing despite their ethereal thinness.

Caldwell labels each slide, and then examines them in sequence – a virtual tour of the hungry boy’s brain beginning at its base and proceeding upwards and forwards.

She finds what she expected to find. The null hypothesis is shot to pieces. She knows what the children are, and where they came from, their past and their future, the nature of their partial immunity, and the extent (close to a hundred per cent) to which her own labours over these past seven years have been a waste of time.

She feels a moment of pure happiness. If she’d died yesterday, she would have died blind. This discovery redeems everything, even if what she’s found is so bleak and absolute.

A sound from close by dynamites her train of thought and brings her instantly to her feet. It’s an innocuous enough sound – just a few clicks and whispers – but it’s coming from inside Rosie!

Dr Caldwell is not given to excessive flights of imagination. She knows that Rosie’s doors are sealed, and that anything powerful enough to open them would have been loud and protracted, alerting her long before this. But she’s still trembling a little as she follows the sound forwards, through the crew quarters to the cockpit.

There’s a lit-up section of the console, off to the right-hand side, and that’s where the sound is coming from. From the radio. She slips into the seat and leans her head forward to listen.

There’s not much to hear. Mostly static, pops and hisses and whoops of sound, like the chaos between stations on an ancient analogue wireless set. But a few words stand clear of the aural swamp. “…days out from Beacon… saw your… identify…” The voice is hollow, inhuman, warped by echo and distortion.

The beam of an electric torch moves quickly across the cockpit’s forward shield, and then it’s gone again. No sounds penetrate from outside, but she sees movement. Just a shadow, thrown down momentarily by the torch’s moving beam. A figure moving briskly down Rosie’s left flank.

“…just a wreck… think there’s any…”

Caldwell heads quickly for the midsection door. Halfway there, she realises she could have gone out through the cockpit. She stops, turns around. But she knows the midsection door’s mechanism better. The sounds from the cockpit radio fizzle and die. With a yelp of alarm, Caldwell runs back to the console and replies on the same channel on which the voice came through.

“Hello?” she cries. “Who’s there? This is Caroline Caldwell of base Hotel Echo, in region 6. Who’s there?”

Just static.

She tries the other channels in turn, and gets the same response.

She runs through to the midsection again. But when she gets there, she’s irresolute. She hasn’t applied any e-blocker since the day before, and she can smell her own sweat. If she opens that door, she might bring the hungries down on herself and her would-be rescuers.

The cupboard next to the airlock contains six biohazard suits. Caldwell was trained in their use back when she was still on the expedition list, and although it takes her ten minutes to put one on, she’s confident that she’s done it correctly. Her scent is completely masked, and her body heat at least temporarily contained.

When she pushes the door open, she sees nothing moving outside. “Hello?” she calls. She steps out into the street. Nobody. But the light is at Rosie’s aft end now, and it’s still moving, flicking to left and right.

“Hello?” Caldwell says again. Perhaps the suit’s helmet is muffling her voice. She walks on shaky legs down the flank of the vehicle, the skin of her neck prickling. She rounds the aft end. The light is in her eyes for a moment. She speaks to whoever is behind it. “My name is Caroline Caldwell. I’m a scientist attached to base Hotel Echo in region 6. I’m here with…”

The light turns away from her, and Caldwell runs out of words. Nobody is carrying the torch. It’s just been attached by its strap to a metal rail on Rosie’s rear. It’s moving in the wind, not in someone’s hands.

Fury at the childish trick gives way to the pure terror of realisation. This is an ambush. And since nobody is attacking her, the target must be Rosie. The doctor takes to her heels and runs back the way she came, sprinting for the midsection door, expecting a cadre of junkers, or perhaps Sergeant Parks, to burst out from hiding (except where would they hide?) and race her for the prize.

Nothing moves. She gets inside and slams the door, engages the lock and the failsafes. Then the airlock, for good measure. And then the bulkhead door that seals off the weapons station.

Finally she stops shaking. There’s no sound, no sign of anyone. She’s safe. Whoever was outside went away and just left the torch. Perhaps it really was a search-and-rescue team from Beacon. Perhaps they got eaten. Caldwell has no idea, but whatever happens, she’s not leaving Rosie again. Not for the siren song of a voice on the radio, not for actual humans showing their actual faces, not for marching bands and ticker-tape parades. She walks through into the lab, loosening the seals on the environment suit’s helmet as she goes.

Melanie is sitting in her chair, in front of the microscope, reading her notes. She looks up. “Hello, Dr Caldwell,” she says politely.

Caldwell has stopped dead in the doorway. Her first thought is: Is she alone, or did the others arrive with her? Her second: What can I use as a weapon? The cylinder of phosgene gas is still screwed into place in the airlock’s feed chamber. Since she’s still wearing the environment suit, she’d be immune to its effects. If she could get to that…

“I’ll stop you,” Melanie says, in the same courteous and level tone, “if you move. I’ll stop you if you pick up a gun or anything that’s sharp, or if you try to run away, or if you try to shut me in the cage again. Or if you do anything else that I think might be meant to hurt me.”

“That… that was you?” Caldwell asks her. “On the radio?”

Melanie indicates with a nod the walkie-talkie sitting beside her on the work surface. “I kept trying all the different channels. It took a long time before you answered.”

“And then… then you…?”

“I lay down underneath the door. You stepped out over me. As soon as you went past me, I came inside.”

Caldwell takes off the helmet and sets it down, very gently, on a work surface. A few feet away is the squat bulk of the microtome lathe, an exquisitely engineered guillotine. If she could trick Melanie into walking close to it, and topple her on to its cutting bed, this could be over in an instant.

Melanie frowns and shakes her head, seeming to guess her intentions. “I don’t want to bite you, Dr Caldwell, but I’ve got this.” She holds up a scalpel, one of the ones that Caldwell used in the dissection of the hungry specimen and hasn’t yet found time to disinfect. “And you know how fast I can move.”

Caldwell considers. “You’re a good girl, Melanie,” she essays. “I don’t think you’d really hurt me.”

“You tied me to a table so you could cut me up,” Melanie reminds her. “And you cut up Marcia and Liam. You probably cut up lots of children. The only reason I ever had for not hurting you was that Miss Justineau and Sergeant Parks probably wouldn’t have liked it. But they’re not here. And I don’t think they’d mind so much now, even if they were.”

Caldwell is inclined to believe this. “What do you want from me?” she asks. It’s clear from Melanie’s agitated manner that she wants something, has something on her mind.

“The truth,” Melanie says.

“About what?”

“About everything. About me, and the other children. And why we’re different.”

“Can I take off this suit?” Caldwell temporises.

Melanie gestures for her to go ahead.

“I have to do it in the airlock,” Caldwell says.

“Then keep it on,” Melanie says.

Caldwell gives up on the idea of retrieving the phosgene. She sits down on one of the lab chairs. As soon as she does so, she realises how exhausted she is. Only willpower and bloody-mindedness have kept her going this long. She’s close to crashing now – too weak to resist this hectoring monster child. She has to gather her strength and choose her time.

She’s expecting Melanie to interrogate her, but Melanie continues to read the notes: the observations Caldwell has jotted down about her two sets of brain tissue samples, and about the sporangium. She seems particularly fascinated by the sporangium notes, lingering over Caldwell’s labelled diagrams.

“What’s an environmental trigger?” she demands.

“It defines any factor external to the sporing body that causes or predisposes towards the onset of sporing,” Caldwell says coldly. It’s the tone she uses to put Sergeant Parks in his place, but Melanie takes it very much in her stride.

“Anything outside?” she paraphrases. “Anything outside the pod that makes the seeds come out of the pod?”

“That’s right,” Caldwell says grudgingly.

“Like the Amazon rainforest.”

“I’m sorry?”

“There are trees in the Amazon rainforest that only shed their seeds after a bushfire. The redwood and the jack pine do that too.”

“Do they?” Caldwell’s tone is brittle. It’s actually a perfectly good example.

“Yes.” Melanie sets the notes down. She’s looked at each page exactly once, stopped when she got to the front of the stack again. “Miss Mailer told me, back at the base.”

She holds Caldwell’s gaze with her unblinking, bright blue eyes.

“Why am I different?” she asks.

“Narrow down the question,” Caldwell mutters.

“Most of the hungries are more like animals than people. They can’t think or talk. I can. Why are there two kinds of hungries?”

“Brain structures,” Caldwell says.

But she’s at war with herself. Part of her wants to guard the secret, to give away no more than she’s asked, to force Melanie to dive deep for every pearl. The other part is desperate to share. Caldwell longs for an auditorium of geniuses, sages both living and dead. She gets a child who’s neither, or both. But the world is winding down, and you take what you’re given.

“The hungries,” she says, “including you, are infected with a fungus named Ophiocordyceps.” She assumes no prior knowledge, because there’s no telling what Melanie has understood, or failed to understand, from those notes. So she begins by describing the family of hot-wiring parasites – organisms that fool the host’s nervous system with forged neurotransmitters, hijacking the host’s living brain and making it do what the parasite needs it to do.

Melanie’s questions are infrequent, but right on topic. She’s a smart kid. Of course she is.

“But why am I different?” she presses again. “What was special about the children you brought to the base?”

“I’m coming to that,” Caldwell says testily. “You’ve never studied biology or organic chemistry. It’s hard to put this stuff in words you can understand.”

“Put it in words you understand,” Melanie suggests, in much the same tone. “If it’s too hard for me, I’ll ask you to explain it again.”

So Caldwell delivers her lecture. Not to Elizabeth Blackburn, Günter Blobel or Carol Greider, but to a ten-year-old girl. That’s humbling, in a way. But only in a way. Caldwell is still the one who made all the connections and found what was there to be found. Who entered the jungle and brought the hungry pathogen back alive. Ophiocordyceps caldwellia. That’s what they’ll call it, now and for ever.

As the sky pales outside, she talks on and on. Melanie stops her every so often with pertinent and focused questions. She’s a receptive audience, despite her lack of a Nobel prize.

To the newly infected, Caldwell says, Ophiocordyceps is utterly without mercy. It batters down the door, breaks and enters, devours and controls. Then finally it turns what’s left of the host into a bag of fertiliser from which the fruiting body grows.

“But we were wrong about how quickly the human substrate is destroyed. The fungus targets different brain areas with differing speed and severity. It shuts down higher-order thought. It enhances hunger and the triggers for hunger. But we’d assumed that all drives outside of that – all behaviours that didn’t serve the parasite’s agenda – were embargoed at the same time.

“When I saw that woman in the street in Stevenage, and the man in the care home, I could see that wasn’t the case. Both of them were still making connections, haphazardly, to their former lives. They were engaging in behaviours – pushing a pram, singing, looking at old photographs – that were completely without function as far as the parasite was concerned.”

Caldwell looks up at Melanie. Her mouth is unpleasantly dry, despite the sweat that’s running freely down her face. “Can I have a glass of water?” she asks.

“When you’ve finished,” Melanie promises. “Not yet.”

Caldwell accepts the verdict. She reads nothing in Melanie’s face that would give her room for negotiation. “Well,” she says, her voice faltering a little, “that made me think. About you, and the other children. Perhaps we’d missed the obvious explanation for why you’re so different.”

“Go on,” Melanie says. Her voice is level, but her eyes betray her fear and excitement. It comforts Caldwell a little – in the absence of the physical control she used to enjoy – to have at least this degree of power over her.

“I realised that you might have been born with the infection. That your parents might already have been infected when you were conceived. We thought that was impossible – that hungries couldn’t have a sex drive. But once I’d seen the survival of other human drives and emotions – mother love, and loneliness – it didn’t seem impossible at all.

“With that in mind, I went back to the cytological evidence. I was fortunate enough to be able to obtain a fresh sample of brain tissue—”

“From a boy,” Melanie says. “You killed him and cut off his head.”

“Yes, I did. And his brain was very different from a normal hungry brain. With the equipment I had back at the base, it was pretty much all I could do to verify and map the presence of the fungus. With this…” – she indicates with a nod of the head the microtome, the centrifuge, the scanning electron microscope – “I could look at individual neurons and how the fungal cells interacted with them. The boy here, and the man from the care home, they were so different there was almost no way to compare them. The fungus utterly wrecks the brain of a first-generation hungry. Goes through it like a train. The chemicals it secretes – the brute-force triggers that turn specific behaviours on and off – they cause terrible damage as they accumulate. And the fungus is drawing nutrients from the brain tissue too. The brain is progressively hollowed out, sucked dry.

“In the second generation – that’s you – the fungus is spread evenly throughout the brain. It’s thoroughly interwoven with the dendrites of the host’s neurons. In some places it actually replaces them. But it doesn’t feed on the brain. It gets its nourishment only when the host eats. It’s become a true symbiote rather than a parasite.”

“Miss Justineau said my mother was dead,” Melanie objects. It’s almost a protest – as though a lie from Helen Justineau is a thing that can have no place in the world.

“That was our best guess,” Caldwell says. “That your parents were junkers or other survivors who’d never made it to Beacon, and that you and they had all been fed on and infected at the same time. We had no model for hungries copulating. Still less for them giving birth in the wild, and the babies somehow surviving. You must be much hardier and more self-sufficient than normal human infants. Perhaps you were able to feed on the flesh of your mother until you were strong enough to—”

“Don’t,” Melanie says sharply. “Don’t talk about things like that.”

But talking is all that Caldwell has left now, and she can’t stop herself. She talks about her observations, her theory, her success (in working out the pathogen’s life cycle) and her failure (there’s no immunity, no vaccine, no conceivable cure). She tells Melanie where to find her slides and the rest of her notes, and who to give them to when they get to Beacon.

When it becomes harder for Caldwell to talk, Melanie comes closer and sits at her feet. The scalpel is still clutched in her hand, but she doesn’t bully or threaten now. She just listens. And Caldwell is full of gratitude, because she knows what this lethargy that’s flooding through her means.

The septicaemia is entering its final phase. She won’t live to write her findings down, to astonish the remaining scientific minds of humanity’s doomed rearguard with the spectacle of her clear-sightedness and their idiocy. It’s just Melanie. Melanie is the messenger sent by providence in her last hour to carry her trophies home.