The Girl With All the Gifts(15)

An error of judgement. Justineau considers a remark about the reliability of Caldwell’s own judgement, but trading insults isn’t going to win this. “Isn’t it apparent to you by now,” she says instead, “that the children’s responses are all within the normal human range? And mostly displaced towards the top end of that range?”

“You’re talking cognitively?”

“No, Caroline. I’m talking across the board. Cognitively. Emotionally. Associatively. The works.”

Caldwell shrugs. “Well, ‘the works’ would have to include their hard-wired reflexes. Anyone who experiences a feeding frenzy when they smell human flesh isn’t testing entirely within normal parameters, wouldn’t you agree?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes. And you know that you’re wrong.” Caldwell hasn’t raised her voice, shows no sign of being angry or impatient or frustrated. She might be a teacher, exposing a pupil’s sophomoric lapse of logic so that they can correct and improve. “The subjects aren’t human; they’re hungries. High-functioning hungries. The fact that they can talk may make them easier to empathise with, but it also makes them very much more dangerous than the animalistic variety we usually encounter. It’s a risk just having them here, inside the perimeter–which is why we were told to set up so very far from Beacon. But the information that we’re hoping to gain justifies that risk. It justifies anything.”

Justineau laughs–a harsh and ugly spasming of breath that hurts her coming out. It’s got to be said. There’s no way around it. “You carved up two children, Caroline. And you did it without anaesthetic.”

“They don’t respond to anaesthetic. Their brain cells have a lipid fraction so small that alveolar concentrations never cross the action threshold. Which in itself ought to tell you that the subjects’ ontological status is to some extent in doubt.”

“You’re dissecting kids!” Justineau repeats. “My God, you’re like the wicked witch in a fairy tale! I know you’ve got form. You cut up seven of them, didn’t you? Back before I got here. Before you requisitioned me. You stopped because there were no surprises. You weren’t finding anything you didn’t already know. But now, for some reason, you’re ignoring that fact and starting up again. So yeah, I went over your head because I was hoping there might be somebody sane up there.”

Justineau registers her own voice, realises that she’s too loud and too shrill. She falters into silence, waits to be told that she’s cashiered. It will be a relief. It will all be over. She’ll have taken it as far as she can, and she’ll have lost, and they’ll send her away. It will become somebody else’s problem. Of course she’d save the kids if she could, if there was any way, but you can’t save people from the world. There’s nowhere else to take them.

“I’d like you to see something,” Caldwell says.

Justineau doesn’t have any answer. She watches with an eerie sense of dislocation as Caldwell crosses to another part of the lab, comes back with a glass fish tank in which she’s set up one of her tissue cultures. It’s an older one, with several years of growth. The tank is about eighteen inches by twelve by ten inches high, and its interior is completely filled with a dense mass of fine, dark grey strands. Like plague-flavoured candy floss, Justineau thinks. It’s impossible even to tell what the original substrate was; it’s just lost in the toxic froth that has sprouted from it.

“This is all one organism,” Caldwell says, with pride and perhaps even a perverse kind of affection in her voice. She points. “And we know now what kind of organism it is. We finally figured it out.”

“I thought it was pretty obvious,” Justineau says.

If Caldwell hears the sarcasm, she doesn’t appear to be troubled by it. “Oh, we knew it was a fungus,” she agrees. “There was an assumption at first that the hungry pathogen had to be a virus or a bacterium. The swift onset, and the multiple vectors of infection, seemed to point in that direction. But there was plenty of evidence to support the fungal hypothesis. If the Breakdown hadn’t come so quickly, the organism would have been isolated within a matter of days.

“As it was… we had to wait a little while. In the chaos of those first few weeks, a great many things were lost. Any testing that was being done on the first victims was curtailed when those victims attacked, overpowered and fed on the physicians and scientists who were examining them. The exponential spread of the plague ensured that the same scenario was played out again and again. And of course the men and women who could have told us the most were always, by the nature of their work, the most exposed to infection.”

Caldwell speaks in the dry, inflectionless tone of a lecturer, but her expression hardens as she stares down at the thing that is both her nemesis and the focal point of her waking life.

“If you grow the pathogen in a dry, sterile medium,” she says, “it will eventually reveal its true nature. But its growth cycle is slow. Quite astonishingly slow. In the hungries themselves, it takes several years for the mycelial threads to appear on the surface of the skin–where they look like dark grey veins, or fine mottling. In agar, the process is slower still. This specimen is twelve years old, and it’s still immature. The sexual or germinating structures–sporangia or hymenia–have yet to form. That’s why it’s only possible to catch the infection from the bite of a hungry or direct exposure to its bodily fluids. After two decades, the pathogen still hasn’t spored. It can only bud asexually, in a nutrient solution. Ideally, human blood.”