Parasite (Parasitology) (28 page)

My eyes widened and I glanced to Nathan, alarmed. How would he be taking this?

With absolute calm, apparently. He was leaning against the counter, sipping his tumbler of grape juice. He smiled a little when he caught my look, a wry twist to his lips. “I knew she wasn’t dead,” he said. “I even knew she was Shanti Cale, and that she’d disappeared after leaving SymboGen. When she
didn’t get into contact with either me or Dad, I figured it was because she knew something we didn’t.”

“I knew it still wasn’t safe,” said Dr. Cale. “I always wanted to reach out to you, but there wasn’t a way to do it without endangering you.”

“Aren’t you endangering him now?” I asked, looking back to her. “And me? If being around you endangers people, aren’t you endangering me?”

“You’re part of what made it so dangerous to contact Nathan,” said Dr. Cale. “SymboGen was watching you, and that meant I couldn’t reach out to him until I knew whether you could be trusted. And before you ask the next question, no. No, Nathan didn’t know I was watching you; no, he didn’t get involved with you because I asked him to. He did it because he is a man, and you’re a very pretty girl. I like you. I’ve seen a great deal of security footage, and I approve of the way you treat my son.”

There was a clank behind me. I turned to see that Nathan had set his tumbler on the counter and was covering his face with his hand. “Mom,” he said, sounding embarrassed.

“What? I’m still your mother. I get to pass judgment on your dates. I admit, getting involved with an amnesiac is a little unorthodox, but your father was a teaching assistant in one of my math classes while I was in school, so I suppose being a little unorthodox runs in the family.” Dr. Cale’s resemblance to Nathan was much more pronounced when she grinned.

“Can we get back to the point, please?” asked Nathan, sounding put-upon.

“Where were we? Oh, yes—SymboGen was blackmailing me to get me to join their big secret project. More precisely, Steven was blackmailing me, and if I’m being entirely honest, he didn’t have to blackmail very hard. I loved my husband very much. I loved my son. But they were offering me the chance to do the research I’d been dreaming of for my entire life, and in
the end, I wasn’t strong enough to refuse. Maybe that makes me a bad person. It certainly made me a bad mother. But I was always the woman who said, ‘Yes, I’ll go.’ I was always the one who went out alone, no matter how many warnings I got. No matter how many people reminded me that I couldn’t necessarily go back again.”

“Okay,” I said slowly. “This is all really interesting, and sort of weird, since we’re in an old bowling alley in the middle of nowhere and everything, but what does this have to do with you calling me here? What is it you know that we need to know?”

“ ‘If you ask the questions…’ ” quoted Dr. Cale, a warning note in her voice.

“We want to know,” said Nathan.

She nodded. “All right. If you’re sure. Follow me, both of you.” She gripped the wheels of her chair, turning herself around before rolling toward the door. We followed Dr. Cale out of the office and back into the makeshift lab filling the bowling alley.

She talked as we made our way across the main room, explaining what the various lab stations were for and what the various lab-coated people were doing there. Some were technicians, working to keep other people’s research from collapsing in their absence. Others were doing research of their own, so caught up in their little worlds that they barely noticed us passing. One woman was milking a large brown snake into a jar, cooing sweet nothings at it as she pressed down on the top of its triangular head.

Dr. Cale caught me looking at the snake handler and said, “That’s Dr. Hoffman. She’s a herpetologist, specializing in reptile parasites. She’s been with me for about seven years now. The snake’s name is Kyle. He’s an Australian coastal taipan. She’s been doing some really remarkable things with his venom recently…” She began rambling again, talking about
the neurotoxic properties of taipan venom and its effects on various types of tapeworms. I didn’t tune her out—I was listening as hard as I could—but it was like the days right after I first woke up in the hospital, when everyone around me was talking, and I couldn’t understand a word.

Dr. Cale led us to the far lane, where a light box the length of the wall had been set up, allowing for the display of a variety of X-ray films. She stopped near the middle of the lane. There was nowhere for Nathan and me to sit, so we stood, looking at her expectantly.

“I was, in a very real way, the reason the Intestinal Bodyguard was able to succeed. Steven was smart and ambitious, but he was looking in the wrong direction. The official literature says that he started work on
Diphyllobothrium yonagoensis
, a species of tapeworm that preferentially parasitizes fish.”

“But the Intestinal Bodyguard
is
based off… what you just said,” I protested. I recognized the name from the lectures I’d been forced to sit through, even if I couldn’t pronounce it correctly. “They used a fish tapeworm.”

“No, dear,” said Dr. Cale, almost gently. “
I
used a fish tapeworm.
They
used
Taenia solium
, the pork tapeworm. I was able to keep very little of their research once I came on board, because they’d been using an inherently dangerous parasite. Not that any parasites are completely safe—the one we eventually went with had its dangers even before we started tinkering with the building blocks of its DNA. I think you’ll find that very little about the official history of
D. symbogenesis
is actually true. Most of it is pretty fictions and lies that can’t be disproven this late in the game. The Intestinal Bodyguard worked the way that it was supposed to, Steven Banks became a hero, and the rest of the development team became… expendable. We were a liability. Richard was consumed with guilt over what we’d done, and I was considered too likely to talk. By that
point, you see, Steven had created this whole backstory for us. We met in college, we were the best of friends, and so on, and so on. So if he did anything to hurt my family, I could discredit him by revealing his lies. It was the nuclear option, for both of us. We quietly agreed that I would fade into the background.” She pursed her lips, looking unhappy. “Not that I intended for it to be quite such a long absence, but life does have its way of throwing you little curveballs when you let yourself get too cocky.”

“Is this leading into why you’re in the wheelchair now?” asked Nathan.

Dr. Cale smiled. “I was wondering if you’d noticed that I was suddenly shorter. Then again, you’re a lot taller. Maybe you just thought this was what happened to all mothers as their sons grew up.”

“I’m a doctor, Mom,” Nathan said. “I understand human anatomy.”

“And have I told you yet how proud I am of you?” Dr. Cale rolled herself closer to the wall, pressing a button on the base of the light box. The nearest piece of wall began to glow a steady white, backlighting the four X-ray films displayed there. All four showed a human spine, from different angles—front, back, left side, and right side. I thought it might be the same spine, although I didn’t know enough about anatomy to be sure.

In all four images, a white mass obscured the lower part of the spine, just above the pelvis. It looked like someone had taken correction fluid and scribbled on the negative, wiping away large parts of the spine.

Nathan frowned, stepping closer to the light box. “Is this a tumor?” he asked, indicating the white mass.

“Not quite,” said Dr. Cale. She sighed. “Human testing was a priority at SymboGen. We weren’t supposed to test on ourselves, naturally, and I didn’t. I might be fond of cutting
corners, but I wasn’t a fan of risking my own life when I had volunteers perfectly willing to risk theirs.”

“Are you telling me this is a
tapeworm
?”

“Let me get there, Nathan. I know you. If I don’t give you the background now, you’ll go racing off and never give me the chance to explain. I need to take things at my own pace. Can you let me do that?”

Nathan frowned at her, the light flashing off his glasses obscuring his eyes so completely that I couldn’t tell whether or not he was annoyed. I answered for both of us, saying, “We can be patient.”

“That remains to be seen.” Dr. Cale settled back in her chair, folding her hands in her lap. “The Intestinal Bodyguard went through several generations, with a wide variety of different genetic makeups. The generation that eventually went on the market was less… robust… than some of the early worms had been, and that was good, because those early worms had a tendency to grow more than they were supposed to. Because they grew so fast, they demonstrated the potential dangers of the Intestinal Bodyguard—primarily, that the tapeworm could endanger the host if it reached a certain size. The growth of
D. symbogenesis
was retarded to guarantee that it would reach that size only after more than two years had passed, creating a ‘safety margin’ where balance could be maintained between parasite and host.”

“That’s why the two-year replacement requirement,” said Nathan. “That never made sense to me. Nature doesn’t work on such a tidy schedule.”

“Exactly. They don’t die after two years. They never did. The antiparasitic drugs take care of the old tapeworm, and a new one is put in place without anyone realizing that there was ever a risk.” Dr. Cale shook her head. “If it had ever gotten out, it would have been the end of SymboGen.”

“And a lot of people would have been hurt,” I said.

Dr. Cale seemed to wave my concerns away, continuing, “Everyone was meant to forget about the early generations, even though the final product was heavily influenced by their design. When Steven sent the word that the IPO was coming, I saw the writing on the wall. Eventually, there’d be so much money in the picture that everyone who had been there in the early stages would be in danger. We’d know too much. Well, I knew I’d need some kind of insurance if I was going to guarantee my safety—and by extension, yours, Nathan. Since I didn’t participate in the human testing, I was a suitable host.”

The Intestinal Bodyguard was fiercely territorial, and wouldn’t tolerate the presence of another worm in the body. Supposedly, this meant that a second tapeworm introduced into the body would just fail to thrive, and would eventually starve to death. According to some of the stories Nathan had told me, the first tapeworm would actually attack and devour the second. I wasn’t clear on how that happened, since tapeworms weren’t supposed to be that intelligent. I was pretty sure I didn’t want to know.

Nathan, on the other hand, did want to know. “What did you do, Mom?” he almost whispered.

“I went back into my lab and got one of the early versions of
D. symbogenesis
out of cold storage. And then I implanted it in myself, so that I could carry it out of the building without anyone the wiser. Most of the employees already had Intestinal Bodyguards by that point, so testing for parasites wouldn’t give me away, and I suppose Steven just assumed I knew better than to risk ingesting an early-generation worm. He didn’t count on the power of sentiment.” Dr. Cale smiled wistfully. “That was my Adam. He was my first, and greatest, creation. You know, Nathan, he had just as much of my genetic material in him as you did? He was virtually your brother.”

“I don’t know whether I should be flattered or feel sick,” said Nathan. He looked like he was leaning toward the second
option. I stepped closer to him, trying to lend support through proximity. He smiled at me a little, looking strained, and didn’t say anything. There wasn’t really anything to say.

“Feel like your mother is a genius, and be glad I was willing to share my genes with you, not just with your brother,” said Dr. Cale. She sighed. “I didn’t have a choice, Nathan. Steven was going to destroy my work, and he was going to do it so that if things went wrong with the worms, he could claim there’d never been any indication of a potential risk to human health. He was going to pin it all on me, and by extension, he was going to pin it all on you. How long do you think our connection would have stayed secret after I became the person who recklessly endangered the lives of millions?”

“Still,” said Nathan. He was staring at the white mass on the X-ray like he could find the outline of the worm in the blur. “It was a big risk.”

“And I paid for it.” Dr. Cale spoke with absolute calm. “I ingested Adam and left the lab. I had to wait a month for him to grow long enough that we’d be able to extract segments without killing him. We needed to keep him alive, as proof that there had been earlier generations—that
D. symbogenesis
didn’t somehow spring fully developed from a test tube and a set of irresponsible testing procedures.”

“Didn’t you take your antiparasitics after that?” I asked.

Dr. Cale nodded. “I did, because I am not a complete idiot, current evidence aside. Unfortunately for me, we’d never tested Adam’s generation inside a human host, and we didn’t realize what the results would be.”

“There was too much human DNA in the early generations,” said Nathan. “The antiparasitics might have made the worm sick, but they couldn’t kill it without being increased to a level where they’d kill you, too.”

“That’s exactly right. Sadly for me, we didn’t realize that at the time. I took my pills like a good girl, and I passed enough
dead tapeworm segments that I was sure we’d managed to clear Adam entirely out of my digestive system. We had our samples, and that meant that we could re-create the living worm at any time if we needed it to prove what SymboGen had been doing. You have to remember, I developed the Intestinal Bodyguard. It was more my baby than anyone else’s, no matter how much Steven may try to rewrite history. I didn’t approve of the way he was going about things, but I truly wanted to see
D. symbogenesis
thrive. If people could find a way to coexist peacefully with the worms, everyone would benefit.”

“SymboGen more than anyone else,” said Nathan. “What
happened
?”

“I’m getting there.” For the first time, Dr. Cale’s voice was sharp, holding the snap of authority she needed to organize her own underground lab and control this many people. “What happened, Nathan, is that we didn’t realize the antiparasitics hadn’t worked until I began losing feeling in my legs. It was intermittent at first, just pins and needles. Bit by bit, it turned into a numbness that didn’t go away. It could still have been sciatica, brought on by hard living and exacerbated by stress. I thought I was working too hard. I thought I was getting old. I didn’t think that the antiparasitics might have driven my stolen tapeworm out of my intestine and into my abdomen. He was very clever in what he did and didn’t chew through—instinct is a powerful thing, and he didn’t want to kill his host—but when he reached my spine, he didn’t have anywhere else to go. He was too large to migrate upward at that point, which is the only reason I’m alive today. So he compressed my spinal cord more and more tightly, until the day he permanently compromised the nerves. I collapsed in the middle of the lab.