Willow sighed as she ran her fingers along the tender stems. Poor plants, she thought, they don’t know what they are and don’t remember what they’re supposed to be. The only choice they have is to grow blindly in every direction, whipped by viruses that changed them with their alien will. Tumorously.
Willow caressed the fabric of the caftan, gingerly tracing the pattern of blue and orange stripes. It seemed too loud, too boisterous. Expensive, too, ever since all cotton had to be imported from Canada. Nonetheless, she put it on.
“It looks good,” said the store clerk the moment Willow stepped from behind the curtain of the dressing room.
The woman in the mirror seemed as foreign as the caftan that slithered along her body, shifting and shimmering with every breath. The woman with dark glossy skin. Willow did not belong inside either of them; she could not take off her skin, and so it was the dress that had to go.
“Didn’t like it?” said the store clerk when Willow, back in her white blouse and blue slacks, handed her the caftan. “Too bad; it looked really good on you.” She smiled wistfully, a pale freckled girl. “I wish I could pull off wearing something like that.” She clamped her hand over the startled ‘o’ of her mouth. “I didn’t mean it in a bad way.”
“I know,” Willow said, smoothing her short hair. “Don’t apologize. And it’s a nice dress, but I couldn’t wear it for work. And I don’t go anywhere else.”
The store clerk nodded. “I understand. And I’m sorry.”
Willow bought a white blouse and a pair of long, jangly earrings to combat her guilt. She felt fake, undeserving.
She walked home. In these high latitudes, darkness all but disappeared in the summer. Nine P.M., and the sun still shone through the thick haze surrounding it. Even at night there was no respite from the radiation.
Willow hated to imagine what happened to the rest of the country. With Florida submerged and Pennsylvania a thirsty, cracked desert, with dustbowls and tornadoes, they were lucky to have a place to go. After Alaska, there would be nothing left. They had to make do.
Science can fix everything; didn’t they promise her that? Didn’t she become a scientist because she believed that scientists solved problems? Survival, she reminded herself. They had to feed what was left of the population-twenty million? Ten? The government didn’t publish the latest census data. They had trouble enough keeping the trains running between Alaska and Canada, and trading what remained of the oil in the former ANWR for goods and research funding. Suddenly, science wasn’t a search for truth; it became a search for food and for continuing life. What could be more important than that?
When she got home, she tried her new earrings on and cried. Her tearstained eyes glanced at her hand, and she contemplated it a while-deeper dark around the fingernails and in the creases of the joints, lightening at the phalanxes, and pink at the palm. Tiny moons of her fingernails seemed to hover above the darkness of her fingers. She cried for herself and for her poor corn plants, which she could not make better. The plants whose soul was eaten away by the viruses, and nothing could restore it to them, not even viruses themselves. They died because there was nothing for them to be; she feared to continue this thought and played with her earrings instead.
The next day she came to work early and ran the labyrinth of glass corridors and elevators to the safety of her lab like a gauntlet. She wanted to be in the comfort of her equipment, in the shared misery of her plants. Before she could turn the thermocycler on, someone knocked at the door.
Willow jolted upright and fought a sudden urge to cover her face with her hands. Through the glass door, she saw the smiling face of Emari from the transposon lab down the hall.
“Come in,” Willow said.
Emari grinned and entered. “Going to the conference in Anchorage next week?”
Willow shook her head. “I have nothing to present. The dwarves wouldn’t stabilize. What about you?”
“I’m going,” Emari said. “We found some freaky stuff with Mu21. It just loves that UV light. Loves it. And I think if we move to transposable mutagenesis, we might be able to dispense with viral vectors altogether.”
“Trying to put me out of work?”
Emari laughed. “Of course not; we’d never lose such a good gene jockey as you. What do you care about the vector? Just make us new mutations, and our little Mu will take care of them.” She grew serious. “Besides, Andre tells me that you’ve had some thoughts about viruses that were… let’s say, not very flattering.”
“Uh huh.”
“Want to get some tea?”
“Okay. But let’s go outside.”
Emari glanced at the window. Heavy clouds rendered the world grey-low enough UV to venture outside for a few minutes. “Sure.”
The two women strolled along one of the paths that transected the institute’s garden. Initially, it was meant as an enticement for the visitors and the advertisement for the donors, showcasing all of the Institute’s achievements; now, Willow and Emari exchanged a sad smile at the sight of these monstrous plants, violet and bronze, their leaves leathery, their stems bulbous, ill. There was no funding to maintain the garden, and only the ugliest and the most resilient plants persisted, UV light be damned.
The women sipped their tea tasting of grass-the best they grew in Alaska.
“Look at those colors.” Willow pointed out an especially brilliant plant, streaked in florid bronze and dark purple.
“Yeah,” Emari said. “Wild transposons are turning on. I wonder if they would do a better job than us.” She drained her cup and turned to Willow. “So what’s with you and viruses?”
Willow wasn’t sure if she was asking about her skin and shrugged. “Well. Human history was run by viruses. We wouldn’t even be in the Americas if the Spaniards’ viruses didn’t kill off the locals. They wouldn’t need so many slaves, too, so there would be no African Diaspora. The influenza epidemics helped the Allies to defeat Germany in the WWI, so without it… who knows? And if it wasn’t for AIDS and Ebola, we wouldn’t all fit in Alaska.”
“And?”
“And it’s the same with evolution, I think. How many genes were translocated by viruses? Even your transposons are just viruses without anything but the DNA.”
“That’s why I love them,” Emari said. “Transposon is a perfectly abstract parasite.”
“Well. They are good at it, you know? I can’t help but think that we’re just their tools, letting them do what they do best. Bringing them wherever they want to go.”
“So evolution and human history are just a massive viral conspiracy.” Emari was not laughing anymore and looked at Willow with worry in her green eyes.
Willow shrugged. “Do you really feel that in your relationship with transposons you’re the one in control?”
Emari shook her head. “It’s a battle, no doubt. But may I ask why you’re helping them?”
“This?” Willow raised her hand. “I’m just reversing the treatment I had after I was born.”
“Oh. It is quite smart, actually; I hear that melanin offers some protection against UV. Soon, everyone will be doing it.”
Willow cringed. If Emari was right, soon everyone would be like Willow, the color of their skin divorced from meaning or history. It would be just an adaptive trait. Like the violet streaks on the corn.
Willow woke up in the middle of the night, her hair damp with sweat, her thoughts more lucid than ever, the skin on her hands and feet burning. She sat up and stared at the billowing of the white curtains on the windows. The answer came to her in her fevered sleep, and for a while she wasn’t able to accept it.
The cancer, the dying corn, her own misery; it all happened because they had forgotten who was the master in this relationship and who was the servant. Things went bad because people decided to manipulate the viruses without understanding them. From the very first pox-infected blanket, things went wrong. Viruses did not take kindly to their rightful place being usurped.
Her legs wobbled under her as she stood and threw on some clothes. She was going to set things right, to let the viruses roam free like they were meant to, to paint their unfathomable designs in skin and leaves, without interference from human meddlers.
The Institute was empty, except for a security guard who gave her an indifferent look. No doubt, he was used to wild-haired scientists experiencing breakthroughs and running for their sequencers at any hour of the night. Willow waved at him and stumbled for the elevator.
She stopped by the lab to load up a cart with cell cultures that harbored viruses of every stripe with every imaginable corn gene inserted into them, and pushed it to the greenhouse, often stopping to wipe the sweat that ran down her face. She tried not to think about whether it was the virus inside of her that pushed her on, getting giddy at the impending freedom of its brethren… she chased such thoughts away.
In the greenhouse, she flicked on the daylights, illuminating the experimental plants in all their sickly, tumorous nudity. If she didn’t do something, they would never get it right. People would starve. People would burn to the crisp and die. They would poison what remained of the air and the water. It wasn’t their fault; they were just not equipped to do the viruses’ job. She had to trust the viruses to make it better.