He greeted me through my phone display without a smile, as if he were about to deliver sad news. Perhaps one of his parents had become ill. His was the closest family I’d ever met.
“Peng, you’re back online.”
“I’ve been helping fight a virus. How are you?” I sat down, ready for bad news.
“Do you know what’s going on?”
“Very generally.”
“How did the mutiny do this?”
“Do what?” I thought I might know what he meant, but life had been full of surprises lately. I would work through this slowly and carefully with him.
“How did it make the viruses?” he said, glancing around as if he were somewhere unsafe. “I mean, it doesn’t even make sense. If you get one cold, you don’t get the other. That’s not how vaccines work. They’re trying to kill us, the mutiny people, and I don’t know why because I hate the government, too. They’re just insane with hate.”
All my sleepless hours crashed onto my shoulders. Noah had always been a reasonable man who paid attention to the world with a business-based intelligence. If he believed the mutiny was trying to kill him, we were doomed.
But I owed a patient duty to the truth. “This will be a complex story,” I said. “I will leave out nothing, and there’s a lot of guilt to go around.” He listened, eyes growing wide, mouth slowly gaping, and sweat beading on his face.
At one point, his eyes shifted, as if he were looking out of a window. A siren went down his street. “Hey,” he said, “can I open the window?”
I knew he lived on the fifth floor. “Yes, you can, unless sick people start skydiving and coughing into your apartment. And you still might be okay. What are things like where you are?”
“No one is on the street. No cars, no nothing. I hear there’s fighting in some places.… Do you know, is it true, the Prez was shot by a firing squad?”
“I have no idea.” I could ask the colonel, although he seemed to be busy with warlike activities at that moment. “I admit I wouldn’t mind if it’s true, although he should have been properly tried and convicted first, then shot. How are your parents?”
“Here with me. We want to know the right thing to do.”
“What have you heard?”
“They say stay home and don’t go outside if you can. They say if you sneeze a lot and feel okay, you are okay and don’t worry. If you cough and feel like crap and have a fever, you’re in trouble and should get help right away.”
“That sounds about right.”
“I can trust the government?”
“Your local health department, yes. If they’re dressed in purple. The mutiny is on your side. We’re looking for medicines to treat the illness, and we’re making progress.”
“We?”
“Yes, I’m part of the mutiny, too.” I hadn’t thought about it much. Some decisions didn’t actually need to be made, merely executed.
“I checked on your bird yesterday,” he said, “but not today. Gave him lots of food and water just in case.”
“Thank you. He can fend for himself for a while. I care more about you.”
He had more questions, including about garlic soup, and I answered them with the same patience I hoped health-care providers were offering the sick and the worried well, because the truth was a weapon of resistance against abusive self-interests. “Eating well is always a good idea but never a magic cure. Soup is good food. Garlic is delicious.”
“Breathing pine smoke?” he asked. “I don’t believe it, but I’m hearing it.”
“That would do more harm than good, since the cold would limit lung function already.”
“Fresh lemon in hot water?”
“Same as garlic soup.” I could offer little other advice besides remaining at home until the situation settled down. Larger forces were afoot, and they would decide all our fates, and I realized I was a bit of a fatalist: whatever hit the fan would not be distributed equally or fairly, and all we could do was try to duck at the right moment.
“So the mutiny is okay?” he asked again.
“It’s on your side.”
He thanked me. We wished each other continued safety.
Someday we’d have enough data to know exactly how much harm had been inflicted. The truth would be history’s long, anguished job to find, and its outlines might repeat those of other tragedies. We would always learn too little, too late.
What more could I do in the short term? Perhaps find a third drug to keep a virus out of a human cell. We were at the mercy of our cells and their surface receptor molecules that the virus could bind to. And then I slowly remembered how, long ago, I’d had a cold, and its misery developed into a tiny but satisfying vendetta against not just that particular coronavirus but every coronavirus on Earth.
How could I have forgotten? Because I, Peng, designer of life and master of its language, was an idiot. In my defense, I’d designed those perfectly ordinary women more than a quarter century ago, and the intervening years had done nothing but deliver repeated and powerful distractions, but I loved my children and under no circumstances should have forgotten.
I called a mother whom I also counted as a friend. Celia Ruiz’s phone accepted the call, but the face and the voice that answered were those of her daughter, a young woman consumed with sorrow. There could only be one reason, and it sliced my soul in half.
“Irene?”
“No. I’m Avril. Who are you?”
I could guess who Avril might be. “I’m Peng.” Would she know that name? “I … I work with DNA.”
“Oh, that Peng,” she said, her voice full of recognition. Around her, people were talking and shouting. She looked soiled and sweaty and tired, and flashing red lights illuminated her face. She stared at me on her phone display with uncertainty, even fear, as if I might tell her something to make her bad situation worse.
“I have very good news for you,” I
