Reliquary

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MARGO STARED AT the titration, scarcely blinking. As each clear drop trembled and fell into the solution, she waited expectantly for a color change. The sound of Frock’s low breathing behind her—as he, too, stared at the apparatus—reminded her that she was unconsciously holding her breath.

Suddenly the solution blossomed a bright yellow color. Margo turned the glass stopcock, stopping the flow of solution, and recorded the level on the graduated cylinder.

She took a step back, aware that an unpleasantly familiar feeling was settling over her: a sense of unease, even dread. Standing motionless, she remembered the drama that had played out in another laboratory, a mere hundred feet down the hall and eighteen months into the past. It had been just the two of them that time as well: crowded around Greg Kawakita’s genetic extrapolator, watching as the program listed the physical attributes of the creature that would come to be known as Mbwun, the Museum Beast.

She remembered almost cursing Julian Whittlesey, the scientist whose expedition had been lost in the depths of the Amazon. Whittlesey, who had inadvertently used a certain aquatic plant as packing fibers for the specimens he’d sent back to the Museum. Unknown to Whittlesey—unknown to all of them—the Mbwun beast had been addicted to the plant. It needed the hormones in the plant in order to survive. And when its own habitat was destroyed, the beast went in search of the only remaining source of the plant: the packing fibers in the crates. But by a supreme irony, the crates were later locked in the Museum’s secure area, forcing the creature to go after the closest substitute to the plant hormones it could find: the hypothalamus of the human brain.

As Margo stared at the yellow solution, she realized that she was feeling something else besides dread: dissatisfaction. There was something strange here, something unexplained. She had felt the same way after the carcass of the Mbwun beast had been taken away following the slaughter of the Superstition exhibition’s opening night. Taken away, in a van with government plates, and never seen again. Though she’d never wanted to admit it, she’d always sensed, somehow, that they’d never gotten to the bottom of the story, never really understood what Mbwun was. At the time, she’d hoped to see autopsy results, a pathology report—something that could explain how the beast had known to come to the Museum in the first place. Or why the creature showed such a high proportion of human genes. Something, anything, that could bring the story to a close; even, perhaps, lay her own nightmares to rest.

She realized now that Frock’s own theory of Mbwun being an evolutionary aberration had never completely convinced her. Against her will, she forced herself to think back to those few moments she’d actually seen the beast: charging down the darkened hallway toward herself and Pendergast, triumph in its feral eyes. To her, it had looked more like a hybrid than an aberration. But a hybrid of what?

The sound of Frock shifting in his wheelchair chased her thoughts away. “Let’s try it once again,” he said. “To be sure.”

“I’m already sure,” Margo replied.

“My dear,” Frock said with a smile, “you are too young to be sure of anything. Remember, all experimental results must be reproducible. I don’t mean to disappoint you, but I fear that this will all turn out to be a waste of time better spent examining the Bitterman corpse.”

Margo began setting up the titration again, swallowing her irritation. At the rate they were going, they wouldn’t have results on her finds at Kawakita’s ruined lab for weeks. Frock was famous for the care and precision of his scientific experiments, and he seemed—as usual—supremely unaware that time was of the essence. But then, like most great scientists, he was self-absorbed, much more interested in his own work and his own theories than anyone else’s. She remembered the conferences they’d had while he was her dissertation advisor, in which he would tell one story after another about his adventures in Africa, South America, or Australia, in the days before he became crippled—devoting more time to his own tales than to discussing her research.

They had been working for hours on titrations and linear regression programs, trying to coax some kind of results out of the plant fibers she’d found at the site. Margo watched the solution, massaging the small of her back. D’Agosta had been certain there was some kind of psychoactive drug in the fibers. But so far they had found nothing to support that theory. If only we’d kept some of the original plant fibers, Margo thought, we could do cross-comparison studies. But the CDC had demanded that all traces of the original fibers be destroyed. They’d even insisted on incinerating her handbag, which she’d once used to transport some of the fibers.

That was another thing. If all the remaining fibers had been destroyed, how had Greg Kawakita obtained some of his own? How had he managed to grow them? And above all else: why?

And then there was the mystery of the flask at his lab marked ACTIVATED 7-DEHYDROCHOLE. The missing piece was obviously sterol: she’d looked it up, and had to laugh at her own stupidity. Of course she knew at once why it sounded so familiar—it was the most common form of vitamin D₃. Once she had that figured out, it didn’t take long to see that the organic chem equipment in Kawakita’s lab had been a little setup hastily improvised for synthesizing vitamin D. But why?

The solution turned yellow, and she marked the level: exactly the same, as she knew it would be. Frock, putting away some equipment on the far side of the lab, took no notice. She hesitated a moment, deciding what to do next. Then she moved to the stereozoom, where she carefully teased yet another small fiber from their rapidly dwindling sample.

Frock rumbled over as she manipulated the microscope stage. “It’s seven o’clock, Margo,” he said gently. “Forgive me, but I think you’ve been working too hard. May I suggest we break for the evening?”

Margo smiled. “I’m almost done, Dr. Frock. I’d like to do one last thing, then I’ll call it a day.”

“Ah. And what might that be?”

“I thought I’d just freeze-fracture a specimen and get a ten-angstrom SEM image.”

Frock frowned. “Toward what end?”

Margo stared at the specimen, a tiny dot on the glass stage. “I’m not really sure. When we first studied this plant, we knew it carried a reovirus of some kind. A virus that coded for both human and animal proteins. I wanted to see if this virus might be the source of the drug.”

A low rumble shook Frock’s capacious front, finally erupting as a chuckle. “Margo, I would say it is definitely time for a break,” he said. “This is wild speculation.”

“Perhaps,” Margo said. “But I’d prefer to call it a hunch.”

Frock looked at her a moment, then sighed deeply. “As you wish,” he said. “But I, for one, need my rest. I’ll be at Morristown Memorial tomorrow, enduring that annual battery of tests they seem to force on you in retirement. See you Wednesday morning, my dear.”

Margo said good-bye, watching as Frock wheeled himself out into the corridor. She was beginning to realize that the famous scientist did not enjoy being crossed. When she’d been his graduate student, timid and compliant, he’d always been utterly charming, the soul of gentility. But now that Frock was emeritus and she was a curator in her own right, expressing her own ideas, he sometimes seemed less than pleased with the new assertiveness.

She brushed the tiny sample into a specimen well and carried it to the freeze-fracture machine. Inside the machine, it would be encased in a small plastic block, frozen to nearly absolute zero, and cleaved in two. Then the scanning electron microscope would make an extremely high-resolution picture of the fractured surface. Frock was right, of course: under normal circumstances, a procedure such as this would have no bearing on their research. She’d called it a hunch, but in reality it was for lack of anything else to try.

Soon, a green light appeared on the cryogenic machine. Handling the block with an electronic cradle, Margo moved it onto the cleaving stage. The diamond cleaver descended with a smooth motion, there was a faint click, and the block separated. Placing one of the halves in the SEM, she carefully adjusted the mount, scanning controls, and electron beam. In a few minutes, a crisp black and white image appeared on the adjoining screen.

Staring at it, Margo felt her blood run cold.

As expected, she could make out small hexagonal particles: the reovirus that Kawakita’s extrapolation program had originally detected in the plant fibers eighteen months earlier. But here, it existed in an unbelievably high concentration: the plant organelles were literally packed with it. And surrounding the particles were large vacuoles that held some kind of crystallized secretion—that could only come from the reovirus itself.

She breathed out slowly. The high concentrations, the crystallized secretions, could mean only one thing: this plant, Liliceae mbwunensis, was only a carrier. The virus made the drug. And the reason they couldn’t find traces of the drug was because the drug was encapsulated inside the vacuoles.

Well then, she thought. The answer was simple. Isolate the reovirus, grow it in a medium, and see what drug it produces.

Kawakita must have thought of this.

Perhaps Kawakita hadn’t been trying to genetically engineer the plant, at all. Perhaps he was genetically engineering the virus. If that were the case…

Margo sat down, her mind working furiously. At last, things seemed to be dovetailing: the old research and the new; the viral matter and its host plant; Mbwun; the fibers. But it still didn’t explain why Kawakita had left the Museum to do this. And it didn’t explain how the Mbwun creature could have come all that distance from the Amazon rain forest, in search of the plants that the Whittlesey expedition had…

Whittlesey.

In an instant she was on her feet, hand pressed to her mouth, the lab chair clattering to the linoleum floor.

Suddenly, everything had become perfectly, terrifyingly clear.