Our Dried Voices (16 page)

XXVI

S
amuel returned to the colony before the evening meal.
The sun was low in the sky and sinking toward the mountains behind him, and his shadow raced ahead to touch the fence line before he reached it himself. He pulled himself wearily over the fence, and when he set foot on the other side, he stopped for a moment and waited. The dozen white halls rose up, polished and monolithic, above the velvet meadow. He could not even think of where he wanted to go. He rambled aimlessly, hoping to avoid anything that might remind him of everything he had given up by leaving the other colony behind.

Then he heard a shout from across the meadow. He turned and saw a figure in the distance, near the top of a hill. She ran down the slope, reached the bottom and sprinted toward him across the meadow, her arms and legs pumping smooth and straight, her feet skimming lightly over the grass. Samuel moved toward her, his stride quickening as he grew nearer. Penny leapt on top of him and he staggered backward as she threw her arms around him and hugged him even harder than when he had left.

She opened her mouth to speak, and Samuel expected the words to rush out of her all at once. But she swallowed and composed herself and said, “You came back.”

“Yes,” he said. “I told you I would.”

She flung her arms out to the meadow around them. “And you fixed it. Everything. At midday I went to pass out the meal cakes and they were all the same size. And the sky—”

“You passed out the meal cakes?” he asked. “This whole time?”

Her face brightened with pride. “Yes, of course. And at the midday meal today they were all the same size again, so I took the boxes away. But tell me everything. What happened to you?”

Samuel hesitated, not sure where to begin, not sure he wanted to begin. The sound of bells interrupted his thoughts.

“You must be hungry,” she said. “Let’s go eat.” And she linked her arm under his and began to pull him toward the nearest meal hall. “Let’s get our food and you can tell me what happened.”

They ate their evening meal together on top of a hill and watched the sun sink behind the mountains. Penny asked many questions, and Samuel answered them as briefly as he could. He felt numb and entranced, and his experiences of the past few days seemed to race too quickly through his mind for him to see them clearly. Or perhaps they moved too slowly, interminably slow, so that he could not recognize them for what they were, as a person looking at a sprouting seedling will not know it as a flower. Somewhere in the background Penny’s voice ran on and his own answered from time to time, and he saw the hand of the sun recede behind the black mountains, saw its bright fingers reach across the wide expanse of the meadow from the distant peaks to the hill where they sat in no time at all, then gently fall back to the mountains and fade behind them as the night rolled in.

* * *

They stayed up quite late that night, for Samuel did not feel at all tired, and when Penny’s eyelids began to flutter shut, they went to a sleeping hall and lay down in adjacent beds. She fell asleep at once, but he stayed awake the whole night, scarcely able to close his eyes. He rose as soon as the first rays of sun melted through the windows of the sleeping hall. Penny lay sound asleep in the next bed, her chest barely rising with her easy, measured breaths. He watched her for a moment, then stripped the sheets from his bed and carried them out into the meadow. He walked across the soft grass still damp with early morning dew to the greenhouse at the back of the nearest meal hall, found the concealed doorway and went inside.

Samuel fought to block out the low groans of distress from the cows in the cage to his left and went immediately to the rows of plants that occupied most of the room. Choosing four different rows, he removed one box of plants from each row. He spread the two bedsheets on the floor and placed two boxes in the middle of each sheet, then gathered the corners of the sheets and tied them together to form two bundles. He left them on the floor of the greenhouse and returned to the sleeping hall, sat on his empty bed and waited for Penny to wake. She stretched and yawned and grinned at him through half-closed eyes.

“Good morning,” she said.

“Good morning.”

She lay in bed for a moment, luxuriating in the starchy sheets wrapped around her body. The sound of the bells drifted faintly through the windows of the hall.

“Are you hungry?” he asked. She yawned again and nodded, and they stood together and walked to the door. They went to the nearest meal hall, received their meal cakes, carried them outside and ate as they strolled through the meadow.

At last Samuel spoke. “Penny, if I left this place, today, now, would you come with me?”

She paused a moment and looked at him, as if trying to determine if he was serious. “Yes,” she said.

His gaze flashed toward the meadow beyond her as if distracted by something she could not see. “Finish your food,” he said, “and then we will go.”

Samuel led her to the greenhouse he had visited earlier that morning. The two sheets with the plants wrapped inside waited where he had left them. Samuel went to the cage, opened the door and allowed four cows to exit. He grabbed one of the bundles of plants and hoisted it over his shoulder. Penny did the same. Then he directed the four cows out into the meadow and closed the greenhouse door behind him.

Samuel and Penny led the cows out to the fence line where Samuel had removed the cross poles. They passed between two naked support posts and out into the meadow beyond the colony.

“Where are we going?” Penny asked.

Samuel raised his chin toward the open meadow. “Wherever we want.”

They turned to the right and walked across stiff green grass under a clean blue sky. The mid-morning sun cast their long shadows behind them. Samuel felt a tremor race through his body as the sun washed away the cool morning breeze. Looking to his side, he saw Penny’s eyes fixed straight ahead, the light full on her face. He gazed forward once more. The meadow before them was vast and untouched. There was nothing between them and the mountains in the distance, save a wide field of grass and a few scattered trees.

From the handwritten manuscript
“The Early History of the pearl colony”

In the year 2153, the scourge of cancer was eradicated from the face of Earth. A team of British oncologists led by Dr. Thomas Greene first developed a prototype cure for the host of diseases in 2089 by engineering an enzyme (later named epidermal growth factor receptor-mediated endonuclease III) to target cells that overexpressed the epidermal growth factor receptor, a trait common to metastasizing cancer cells. This synthetic enzyme selectively infiltrated the targeted cells and cleaved the cells’ DNA. Dr. Greene and his staff employed their treatment with abundant success in clinical trials on lung and breast cancer patients in the same year, and by 2091 modifications of the enzyme could be used in therapies against all forms of cancer. In 2096, the pharmaceutical company Omega Laboratories purchased the rights to Dr. Greene’s patented enzyme and began worldwide distribution of the drug under the trade name Neoplastase. Within fifteen years Omega could manufacture Neoplastase at such little cost that it could be sold at a profit to any hospital, pharmacy or health clinic in the world.

Yet even with an effective cure so widely available, human beings continued to contract cancer. Indeed in the world’s poorer nations, cancer remained an affliction until the late 2140s. But the combined forces of heredity and human endeavor would eventually take their toll. The turn of the 22nd century saw the continued homogenization of race and ethnicity, a consequence stemming not only from technological advances in communication and transportation that brought human beings together from across the globe, but also from the steady erosion of strict cultural and religious values. And while highly polarized blocs of religious extremists and cultural conservatives remained in regions such as western Asia, northern Africa, Central America, northern South America and southeastern North America, by and large humans became increasingly willing to unite outside once-rigid social boundaries. The combination of these conditions resulted in the gradual amalgamation of once-diverse peoples into homogeneous, brown-skinned, multiracial individuals, large numbers of which first appeared in southern Africa and southwestern North America. But of course these phenotypic convergences were merely the consequence of genotypic tendencies toward a stable norm. Evolution had been at work since the dawn of humankind to drive those few sequences with a cancerous or otherwise malignant predisposition out of the gene pool, and as the faces of mankind became one, so too did their genetic makeup.

Even so, nature is never hasty, and outbreaks of cancer continued to arise from genetic mutations engendered either by sheer caprice or by the ever-growing abundance of carcinogens produced by so-called human progress. But in 2128, a group of Indian oncologists led by Dr. Ashakiran Avani discovered a general vaccination that could prevent mutation by carcinogenic agents. The key for Dr. Avani and her staff was the discovery, identification and isolation of a particular protein from the maitake mushroom (
Grifola frondosa
). This protein, coined “frondosavani,” proved to be both mildly oncogenic and common to all known carcinogens. In clinical trials on rats, subjects injected with small doses of frondosavani experienced minor benign neoplastic tumors that disappeared without any trace within a few weeks. Furthermore, once treated, these subjects proved immune to any hint of cancerous infection even after exposure to a variety of common mutagens. In 2135, after years of further testing, Dr. Avani’s laboratory made frondosavani available as an anti-cancer vaccination. By 2141, it was prevalent throughout all corners of the world. And finally, on the morning of June 6, 2153, the Global Health Organization (GHO) in London announced that cancer had at long last been cured.

In 2189, the GHO announced a cure for
human immunodeficiency virus
/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS ), another dreaded disease of the 21st century. Dr. Kameko Yamashita and her team of Japanese virologists engineered the first clinically successful vaccine against HIV in 2147, after a decade of research based on the early 22nd century work of a group of South African virologists. The South Africans, led by Dr. Christian van de Saal, had been employed by a wealthy Capetonian horse breeder in 2108 to find a cure for the equine infectious anemia virus (EIA, better known as “swamp fever”) endemic to horses in that region. While recombining viral RNA in search of a vaccine against EIA, Dr. van de Saal and his team stumbled upon a new strain of the virus capable of infecting cattle. At first, Dr. van de Saal feared this new variant, which he named bovine infectious anemia (BIA), might do serious damage to the South African cattle industry if ever transmitted on a large scale; however, subsequent tests showed that the virus was only present in cattle in the subacute form, could not be transmitted from mother to calf and was nonlethal. Consequently, BIA was largely ignored, and Dr. van de Saal continued with his previous EIA research.

When Dr. Yamashita came across Dr. van de Saal’s work in 2135, HIV/AIDS researchers had resorted to the random recombination of various retroviruses in hopes of stumbling upon a potential vaccine. When she infected a test group of cattle with BIA, Dr. Yamashita discovered that these cows developed immunity to bovine immunodeficiency virus (BIV), a disease that emerged among cattle in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. These promising results led Dr. Yamashita to suspect that some recombinant form of BIA might serve as a vaccine against HIV. In 2147, after twelve years of research, Dr. Yamashita announced the first successful human trials of her HIV vaccine. The key step in the development of the vaccine was the synthesis of an entire viral membrane for the modified BIA virus. The synthetic membrane consisted of the gp120 envelope glycoprotein characteristic of the membrane of HIV, as well as receptors specifically designed to stimulate human immune responses in the form of both cytotoxic T lymphocytes and memory B cells, thereby triggering the body’s production of the necessary antibodies to stave off HIV infection. After two more years of experimental trials, Dr. Yamashita released her HIV vaccine for global distribution in 2149.

By that time, AIDS was no longer the terror it had been throughout most of the 21st century. The incipient cancer cure, as well as cures for a multitude of other human maladies, ensured that AIDS—itself a mostly nonlethal disease—resulted in far fewer deaths than in decades past. Still, some complications remained. Japan reported zero incidences of AIDS in 2156, and near exterminations were reported in the United States and several European nations during that same decade. But the disease persevered in other parts of the globe, most notably in certain northern and central African nations, where militant dictators regulated the distribution of the vaccine as part of a vicious ploy to maintain political power. Eventually, the situation improved under the combined influence of internal revolutions and sustained external political pressure, but in 2163, the German government announced an outbreak of AIDS at a hospital in Munich. The virus, perhaps one of the most adaptive the world had ever known, had mutated. The race for a cure was on once more. Finally, in 2183, a joint effort from virologists and pathologists around the globe produced a series of vaccines that neutralized all known strains of the virus. And on September 30, 2189, the long-awaited GHO announcement came: AIDS was dead.

As was mentioned earlier, science had made significant progress in the fight against several of humanity’s previously uncured diseases throughout the 22nd century. A complete account of the development of every cure would require more time and space than is necessary to devote to these annals. Instead, the author of this brief history simply offers the following list of many such illnesses and the year in which they were declared to be cured.

-polio: 2056

-Huntington’s disease: 2087

-muscular dystrophy: 2094

-osteoporosis: 2116

-cystic fibrosis: 2143

-cancer: 2153

-Ebola virus: 2160

-Tay-Sachs disease: 2162

-amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig’s
disease): 2178

-influenza: 2181

-multiple sclerosis: 2186

-HIV/AIDS: 2189

-Alzheimer’s disease: 2192

-diabetes mellitus: 2195

-acute viral nasopharyngitis (common cold): 2207

Thus by the early 23rd century, science had all but rid the Earth of those many diseases that had plagued humankind throughout its existence. Geneticists continued to explore the hereditary aspects of such maladies, and in 2234, the first genetically enhanced, disease-resistant human child was born. From that point on, man had no more reason to fear death or discomfort from the world that existed beyond his sight.

Yet at the dawn of that first day without human ailment, the day when all the brilliant microbiologists and virologists and oncologists woke up to find themselves idle and obsolete, who can ever say whether that new world was better served to the comfort of humankind than the old one of disease and pestilence and plague? Some millennia ago, the great thinker Plato wrote that all kings should be philosophers. But perhaps in truth it would have been better that all kings had been scientists, for there were more than a handful of politicians of that time who, believing themselves capable of understanding the world’s intricate and myriad connections and synapses, would have willingly sacrificed millions of Somalis, Swazis, Haitians and Afghanis to disease, starvation and eventual death in the perhaps disillusioned hope that the world would be a better place for the survivors.

But scientists and politicians are two different sorts of men and the will of nature is beholden to neither. For if the human world may be likened to a house, then the scientists are the builders, the fixers, the problem solvers, shortsighted perhaps but persistent and unfailing in their aims, while the politicians are the architects, the foremen, the overseers, all with an apparently flawless blueprint in their hands but perhaps lacking the insight or foresight to realize their great plan. Yet little unity exists between the builders and architects, as the builders fix every problem in their own way and ignore the shrieking demands of the architects, who are constantly revising the blueprint, sometimes adding a new wing for good measure or perhaps filling in the basement when the foundation seems weak, despite the builders’ tireless contentions that a solution is always possible. However, nature is not some passive collection of wood and brick and mortar to be shaped by humans into whatsoever they desire. Nature builds the house of the world herself, and so the scientists, politicians, nature and the rest of humanity are always at odds as to the final form of the edifice.

So as the reader of this history will undoubtedly surmise, Earth’s human population skyrocketed in the late 22nd century. By that time, global population had climbed steadily for some centuries, having surpassed 10 billion people in 2050. The growth rate declined slightly in the next half century as several countries passed laws to limit the number of childbirths per family. But these measures were not enforced in nations where they were perhaps most necessary—for example, the population of sub-Saharan Africa continued its dramatic climb—and it was also these nations that were most dramatically affected by cures for the world’s diseases. In 2100, global population hovered around 13 billion, but it would nearly double in the next century, with the most significant boom following the cure of AIDS. In 2198, the world’s population reached 24 billion people. From 2050 to 2200, the population of Africa more than tripled, reaching 6 billion people in 2196. Two centuries earlier there had been only 6 billion people in the entire world.

In 2213, war broke out in central Africa, among what one British political theorist had termed the “gamma states” at the end of the Third World War.
1
Throughout the region, victims of poverty and famine revolted against their respective governments in a series of popular rebellions that claimed nearly 200,000 lives and were punctuated by the horrific bombing of the American embassy in Kinshasa. The American and South African governments immediately denounced the attacks as acts of terrorism. But while South Africa verbally supported the gamma governments while attempting to negotiate with the rebels, the United States deployed 200,000 troops to Kinshasa overnight, as well as an additional 500,000 to the rest of the region. Leaders of the powerful Islamic bloc in western Asia and northern Africa, the so-called “beta states,” condemned this rapid military escalation as yet another example of overbearing American imperialism. In response, the beta governments began the covert delivery of weapons manufactured in the “mini-beta” Islamic states of Southeast Asia to the African rebels. Over the next several months, the militaries of the gamma states (aided by the Americans) and the African rebels fought pitched battles throughout central Africa, with little direct intervention from the world’s other nations.

But in early 2214, a Japanese intelligence report found that the beta states had started to send their own generals to Africa to lead the revolts. South African intelligence later confirmed these reports and recorded footage of one such general ordering his troops to use XR nerve gas, a lethal chemical weapon, against the civilian population of a city still loyal to its national government. The news galvanized the remaining allies of the United States, the so-called “alpha states,” into joining the war. Japan, the United Kingdom and South Africa all declared war in February (against whom they declared war remains unclear since every battle of the conflict was fought in Africa), and Germany, France, Russia, Mexico and Brazil joined their allies in the following months. The beta states, most significantly Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Sudan, Algeria, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, declared war on the United States around the same time (and later against the other alpha states); the mini-betas, led by India, soon joined their allies in the effort. World War IV had begun.

Detailed descriptions of the battles and stratagems of the war are superfluous to this account, but suffice it to say the war lasted for eleven years and claimed 289 million lives. Of those 289 million, 53 million were soldiers of the alpha states, 44 million were from beta militaries and 192 million were civilians—almost all of them African. The combatants set off two pure fusion bombs, with payloads of 84 and 96 kilotons. To this day, it remains unknown which side detonated these weapons, as both accused the other of doing so. By 2219, the African nations on whose land the war had been waged were begging for peace, desperate to accept almost any terms proposed. Sadly, these nations played little part in the war aside from being the primary suppliers of its victims. In 2221, South Africa, the leader of the African Union and a prominent member of the alliance of alpha states, withdrew its soldiers from the battle front. The next year, its government condemned the war as “the worst atrocity committed by humankind against humankind in the history of this Earth.” But still the war raged on for two more years.