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Soon! THE MORAL VIROLOGIST Virologist Greg Egan Out on the street, in th sunshine of a warm Atlanta morning, a dozen young children were playing. Chasing, wrestling, and hugging each other, laughing and yelling, crazy and jubilant for no other reason than being alive such a day. Inside the gleaming white building, though, behind double-glazed windows, the air was slightly chilly - the way John
Shawcross preferred it - and nothing could be heard but the
air-conditioning, and a faint electrical hum. The schematic of t protein molecule trembled very slightly. Shawcross grinned, already certain of success. As the pH displayed in the screen's top left crossed the critical value - the point at which, according to his
calculations, the energy of conformation B should drop below that of conformation A - the protein suddenly convulsed and turned completely inside-out. It was exactly as he had predicted, and his binding studies had added strong support, but to see the transformation (however complex
the algorithms that had led from reality to screen) was naturally the most satisfying proof. He replayed the event, backwards and forwar
several times, utterly captivated. This marvellous device would eas be worth the eight hundred thousand he'd paid for it. The salesp had provided several impressive demonstrations, of course, but this the first time Shawcross had used the machine for his own work. of proteins in solution! Normal X-ray diffraction could only work crystalline samples, in which a molecule's configuration often bore little resemblance to its aqueous, biologically relevant, form. An ultrasonically stimulated semi-ordered liquid phase was the key, no mention some major breakthroughs in computing; Shawcross couldn't follow all the details, but that was no impediment to using the machine. He charitably wished upon the inventor Nobel Prizes in chemistry, physics and medicine; viewed the stunning results of hi experiment once again, then stretched, rose to his feet, and went in search of lunch. On his way to the delicatessen, he passed bookshop, as always. A lurid new poster in the window caught his naked young man stretched out on a bed in a state of postcoital languor, one corner of the sheet only just concealing his groin. Emblazoned across the top of the poster, in imitation of a glowi neon sign, was the book's title: A Hot Night's Safe Sex. Shawcro shook his head in anger and disbelief. What was wrong with peopl Hadn't they read his advertisement? Were they blind? Stupid? Arrog Safety lay only in the obedience of God's laws. After eating, called in at a newsagent that carried several foreign papers. The previous Saturday's editions had arrived, and his advertisement was all of them, where necessary translated into the appropriate langu Half a page in a major newspaper was not cheap anywhere in the but then, money had never been a problem. ADULTERERS! SODOMITES!
REPENT AND BE SAVED! ABANDON YOUR WICKEDNESS NOW
BURN FOREVER! He couldn't have put it more plainly, could he? could claim that they hadn't been warned. In 1981, M Shawcross bought a tiny, run-down cable TV station in the Bible which until then had split its air time between scratchy
black-and-white film clips of fifties gospel singers, and local novelty
acts such as snake handlers (protected by their faith, not to mention the removal of their pets' venom glands) and epileptic children (encouraged by
their parents' prayers, and a carefully timed withdrawal of medication, t let the spirit move them). Matthew Shawcross dragged the station
on a thirty-second pirouetting, crenellated
spaceships firing crucifix-shaped missiles into a relief map of th USA, chiselling out the station logo of Liberty, holding up, not torch, but a cross), showing the latest, slickest gospel rock vid clips, "Christian" soap operas and "Christian" game shows, and, ab all, identifying issues - communism, depravity, godlessness in scho
- which could serve as the themes for telethons to raise funds expand the station, so that future telethons might be even more successful. Ten years later, he owned one of the country's bigg cable TV networks. John Shawcross was at college, on the verg taking up paleontology, when AIDS first began to make the news i way. As the epidemic snowballed, and the spiritual celebrities he admired (his father included) began proclaiming the disease to be will, he found himself increasingly obsessed by it. In an age wh word miracle belonged to medicine and science, here was a plague, straight out of the Old Testament, destroying the wicked and spar the righteous (give or take some haemophiliacs and transfusion recipients), proving to Shawcross beyond any doubt that sinners co be punished in this life, as well as in the next. This was, he valuable in at least two ways: not only would sinners to whom d had seemed a remote and unproven threat now have a powerful, wor reason to reform, but the righteous would be strengthened in thei resolve by this unarguable sign of heavenly support and approval.
In short, the mere existence of AIDS made John Shawcross feel good, and he gradually became convinced that some kind of personal involvement with
HIV, the AIDS virus, would make him feel even better. He lay awake at night, pondering God's mysterious ways, and wondering how he could get in
on the act. AIDS research would be aimed at a cure, so how could he possibly justify involving himself with that? Then, in the early of one cold morning, he was woken by sounds from the room next Giggling, grunting, and the squeaking of bed springs. He wrapped pillow around his ears and tried to go back to sleep, but the could not be ignored - nor could the effect they wrought on his fallible flesh. He masturbated for a while, on the pretext of tr manually crush his unwanted erection, but stopped short of orgasm lay, shivering, in a state of heightened moral perception. It was different woman every week; he'd seen them leaving in the morning tried to counsel his fellow student, but had been mocked for his troubles. Shawcross didn't blame the poor young man; was it any
people laughed at the truth, when every movie, every book, every magazine, every rock song, still sanctioned promiscuity and perversion,
making them out to be normal and good? The fear of AIDS might have saved millions of sinners, but millions more still ignored it, absurdly
convinced that their chosen partners could never be infected, or trusting
in condoms to frustrate the will of God! The trouble was, va segments of the population had, in spite of their wantonness, rem uninfected, and the use of condoms, according to the studies he'd did seem to reduce the risk of transmission. These facts disturbe Shawcross a great deal. Why would an omnipotent God create an im tool? Was it a matter of divine mercy? That was possible, he co but it struck him as rather distasteful: sexual Russian roulette
hardly a fitting image of the Lord's capacity for forgiveness. Shawcross tingled all over as the possibility crystalised in his
- might AIDS be no more than a mere prophetic shadow, hinting at a future plague a thousand times more terrible? A warning to the wicked to change their ways while they still had time? An example to the righteous
as to how they might do His will? Shawcross broke into a swea sinners next door moaned as if already in Hell, the thin dividin vibrated, the wind rose up to shake the dark trees and rattle h
window. What was this wild idea in his head? A true message fro or the product of his own imperfect understanding? He needed guid He switched on his reading lamp and picked up his Bible from th bedside table. With his eyes closed, he opened the book at rando He recognised the passage at the very first glance. He ought to have;
he'd read it and reread it a hundred times, and knew it almost by heart.
The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. At first, he tried to d destiny: He was unworthy! A sinner himself! An ignorant child! Bu everyone was unworthy, everyone was a sinner, everyone was an ign child in God's eyes. It was pride, not humility, that spoke agai God's choice of him. By morning, not a trace of doubt remained Dropping paleontology was a great relief; defending Creationism with any conviction required a certain, very special, way of thinking, and he had
never been quite sure that he could master it. Biochemistry, on the other hand, he mastered with ease (confirmation, if any was needed, that he'd
made the right decision). He topped his classes every year, and went on to do a PhD in Molecular Biology at Harvard, then postdoctoral work at the NIH, and fellowships in Canada and France. He lived for his work, pushing himself mercilessly, but always taking care not to be too conspicuous in his achievements. He published very little, usually as a modest third or
fourth co-author, and when at last he flew home from France, nobody in h field knew, or would have much cared, that John Shawcross had returned ready to begin his real work. Shawcross worked alone in t
gleaming white building that served as both laboratory and home. couldn't risk taking on employees, no matter how closely their be might have matched his own. He hadn't even let his parents in o secret; he told them he was engaged in theoretical molecular gene which was a lie of omission only - and he had no need to beg for money week by week since, for tax reasons, twenty-five percen the Shawcross empire's massive profit was routinely payed into acc in his name. His lab was filled with shiny grey boxes, from w ribbon cables snaked to PCs; the latest generation, fully automate synthesisers and sequencers of DNA, RNA, and proteins (all availab off the shelf, to anyone with the money to buy them). Half a d robot arms did all the grunt work: pipetting and diluting reagent labelling tubes, loading and unloading centrifuges. A Shawcross spent most of his time working with computers, searching databases for the sequence and structure information that would pr him with starting points, later buying time on a supercomputer to
predict the shapes and interactions of molecules as yet unknown. aqueous X-ray diffraction become possible, his work sped up by a of ten; to synthesise and observe the actual proteins and nucleic
was now both faster, and more reliable, than the hideously complex process (even with the best short-cuts, approximations and tricks) of solving Schrödinger's equation for a molecule consisting of hundreds of
thousands of atoms. Base by base, gene by gene, the Shawcross grew. As the woman removed the last of her clothes, Shawcross, s naked on the motel room's plastic bucket chair, said, "You must had sexual intercourse with hundreds of men." "Thous you want to come closer, honey? Can you see okay from there?"
"I can see fine." She lay back, still for a moment with her cupping her breasts, then she closed her eyes and began to slide palms across her torso. This was the two hundredth occasion on Shawcross had paid a woman to tempt him. When he had begun the desensitising process five years before, he had found it almost unbearable. Tonight he knew he would sit calmly and watch the wo achieve, or skilfully imitate, orgasm, without experiencing even a flicker of lust himself. "You take precautions, I suppose."
She smiled, but kept her eyes closed. "Damn right I do. If a man won't wear a condom, he can take his business elsewhere. And I put it on, he
doesn't do it himself. When I
changed your mind?"
in full, in advance, for the act he did not perform, and always explained to the woman, very clearly at the start, that at any might weaken, he might make the decision to rise from the chair join her. No mere circumstantial impediment could take any credit his inaction; nothing but his own free will stood between him an mortal sin. Tonight, he wondered why he continued. The "temptati had become a formal ritual, with no doubt whatsoever as to the
No doubt? Surely that was pride speaking, his wiliest and most persistent enemy. Every man and woman forever trod the edge of a precipice over the inferno, at risk more than ever of falling to hungry flames when he or she least believed it possible.
Shawcross stood and walked over to the woman. Without hesitation, he
placed one hand on her ankle. She opened her eyes and sat up, regarding
him with amusement, then took hold of his wrist and began to drag his hand along her leg, pressing it hard against the warm, smooth skin.
above the knee, he began to panic - but it wasn't until his fingers struck moisture that he pulled free with a strangled mewling sound, and staggered back to the chair, breathless and shaking. That was m like it. The Shawcross virus was to be a masterful piece of bio clockwork (the likes of which William Paley could never have imag and which no godless evolutionist would dare attribute to the "bl watchmaker" of chance). Its single strand of RNA would describe, one, but four potential organisms. Shawcross virus A "anonymous" form, would be highly infectious, but utterly benign. would reproduce within a variety of host cells in the skin and membranes, without causing the least disruption to normal cellular functions. Its protein coat had been designed so that every expos site mimicked some portion of a naturally occurring human protein; immune system, being necessarily blind to these substances (to avo attacking the body itself), would be equally blind to the invader
Small numbers of SVA would make their way into the blood stream, infecting T-lymphocytes, and triggering stage two of the virus's genetic program. A system of enzymes would make RNA copies of hundreds of genes from every chromosome of the host cell's DNA, and these copies would then
be incorporated into the virus itself. So, the next generation of the
virus would carry with it, in effect, a genetic fingerprint of the host in which it had come into being. Shawcross called this second
the C standing for "customised" (since every individual's unique genetic profile would give rise to a unique strain of SVC), or "celibate" (because, in a celibate person, only SVA and SVC would present). SVC would be able to survive only in blood, semen an vaginal fluids. Like SVA, it would be immunologically invisible, b with an added twist: its choice of camouflage would vary wildly person to person, so that even if its disguise was imperfect, an antibodies to a dozen (or a hundred, or a thousand) particular s could be produced, universal vaccination would remain impossible.
Like SVA, it would not alter the function of its hosts - with one minor exception. When infecting cells in the vaginal mucous membrane, the
prostate, or the seminiferous epithelium, it would cause the manufacture and secretion from these cells of several dozen enzymes specifically designed to degrade varieties of rubber. The holes created by a brief
exposure would be invisibly small - but from a viral point of view, they'd be enormous. Upon reinfecting T-cells, SVC would be capable
making an "informed decision" as to what the next generation woul Like SVA, it would create a genetic fingerprint of its host cell would then compare this with its stored, ancestral copy. If the fingerprints were identical - proving that the customised strain h remained within the body in which it had begun - its daughters
be, simply, more SVC. However, if the fingerprints failed to ma implying that the strain had now crossed into another person's bo (and if gender-specific markers showed that the two hosts were no the same sex), the daughter virus would be a third variety, SVM, containing both fingerprints. The M stood for "monogamous", or "marriage certificate". Shawcross, a great romantic, found it almos unbearably sweet to think of two people's love for each other be expressed in this way, deep down at the subcellular level, and o and wife, by the very act of making love, signing a contract of
faithfulness until death, literally in their own blood. SVM woul externally, much like SVC. Of course, when it infected a T-cell would check the host's fingerprint against both stored copies, and either one matched, all would be well, and more SVM would be pr
Shawcross called the fourth form of the virus SVD. It could ar two ways; from SVC directly, when the gender markers implied that homosexual act had taken place, or from SVM, when the detection third genetic fingerprint suggested that the molecular marriage contract had been violated. SVD forced its host cel secrete enzymes that catalysed the disintegration of vital structur proteins in blood vessel walls. Sufferers from an SVD infection w undergo massive haemorrhaging all over their body. Shawcross had f that mice died within two or three minutes of an injection of
pre-infected lymphocytes, and rabbits within five or six minutes;
timing varied slightly, depending on the choice of injection site.
SVD was designed so that its protein coat would degrade in air, or in solutions outside a narrow range of temperature and pH, and its RNA alone
was non-infectious. Catching SVD from a dying victim would be almost impossible. Because of the swiftness of death, an adulterer would have no
time to infect their innocent spouse. The widow or widower would, of course, be sentenced to a life of celibacy, but Shawcross did not think this too harsh: it took two people to make a marriage, he reasoned, and some small share of the blame could always be apportioned to the other
partner. Even assuming that the virus fulfilled its design goals precisely, Shawcross acknowledged a number of complications:
Blood transfusions would become impractical until a foolproof method of killing the virus in vitro was found. Five years ago this would have been
tragic, but Shawcross was encouraged by the latest work in synthetic and cultured blood components, and had no doubt that his epidemic would cause
more funds and manpower to be diverted into the area. Transplants were less easily dealt with, but Shawcross thought them somewhat frivolous
anyway, an expensive and rarely justifiable use of scarce resources. Doctors, nurses, dentists, paramedics, police, undertakers . . . well, in
fact everyone, would have to take extreme precautions to avoid exposure to other people's blood. Shawcross was impressed, though of course not
surprised, at God's foresight here: the rarer and less deadly AIDS virus had gone before, encouraging practices verging on the paranoid in dozens
of professions, multiplying rubber glove sales by orders of magnitude. Now the overkill would all be justified, since everyone would be infected
with, at the very least, SVC. Rape of virgin by virgin would sort of biological shot-gun wedding; any other kind would be murd suicide. The death of the victim would be tragic, of course, but near-certain death of the rapist would surely be an overwhelming deterrent. Shawcross decided that the crime would virtually disappe
Homosexual incest between identical twins would escape punishment, since the virus could have no way of telling one from the other omission irritated Shawcross, especially since he was unable to fi any published statistics that would allow him to judge the preval of such abominable behaviour. In the end he decided that this mi flaw would constitute a necessary, token remnant - a kind of mor fossil - of man's inalienable potential to consciously choose evil
It was in the northern summer of 2000 that the virus was completed, and tested as well as it could be in tissue culture experiments and on
laboratory animals. Apart from establishing the fatality of SVD (created by test-tube simulations of human sins of the flesh), rats, mice and
rabbits were of little value, because so much of the virus's behaviour was tied up in its interaction with the human genome. In cultured human cell lines, though, the clockwork all seemed to unwind, exactly as far, and
never further, than appropriate to the circumstances; generation after generation of SVA, SVC and SVM remained stable and benign. Of course more
experiments could have been done, more time put aside to ponder the consequences, but that would have been the case regardless. It time to act. The latest drugs meant that AIDS was now rarely fatal
least, not to those who could afford the treatment. The third mi was fast approaching, a symbolic opportunity not to be ignored.
Shawcross was doing God's work; what need did he have for quality control?
True, he was an imperfect human instrument in God's hands, and at every stage of the task he had blundered and failed a dozen times before
achieving perfection, but that was in the laboratory, where mistakes could
be discovered and rectified easily. Surely God would never permit anything less than an infallible virus, His will made RNA, out into the world.
So Shawcross visited a travel agent, then infected himself with SVA. Shawcross went west, crossing the Pacific at once, saving his own continent for last. He stuck to large population centres: Tokyo, Beijing,
Seoul, Bangkok, Manilla, Sydney, New Delhi, Cairo. SVA could survive indefinitely, dormant but potentially infectious, on any surface that wasn't intentionally sterilised. The seats in a jet, the furniture in a
hotel room, aren't autoclaved too often. Shawcross didn't visit prostitutes; it was SVA that he wanted to spread, and SVA was n venereal disease. Instead, he simply played the tourist, sight-seei shopping, catching public transport, swimming in hotel pools. He relaxed at a frantic pace, adopting a schedule of remorseless
recreation that, he soon felt, only divine intervention sustained.
surprisingly, by the time he reached London he was a wreck, a s zombie in a fading floral shirt, with eyes as glazed as the mul lens of his obligatory (if filmless) camera. Tiredness, jet lag, endless changes of cuisine and surroundings (paradoxically made wor by an underlying, glutinous monotony to be found in food and cities
alike), had all worked together to slowly drag him down into a muddy, dreamlike state of mind. He dreamt of airports and hotels and jets, and woke in the same places, unable to distinguish between memories and
dreams. His faith held out through it all, of course, invulnera axiomatic, but he worried nonetheless. High altitude jet travel me extra exposure to cosmic rays; could he be certain that the viru mechanisms for self checking and mutation repair were fail-safe? G would be watching over all the trillions of replications, but sti would feel better when he was home again, and could test the st he'd been carrying for any evidence of defects. Exh stayed in his hotel room for days, when he should have been out jostling Londoners, not to mention the crowds of international tou making the best of the end of summer. News of his plague was only
beginning to grow beyond isolated items about mystery deaths; health authorities were investigating, but had had little time to assemble all
the data, and were naturally reluctant to make premature announcements. It
was too late, anyway; even if Shawcross had been found and quarantined at once, and all national frontiers sealed, people he had infected so far
would already have taken SVA to every corner of the globe. H his flight to Dublin. He missed his flight to Ontario. He ate a slept, and dreamt of eating, sleeping and dreaming. The Times arrived
each morning on his breakfast tray, each day devoting more and more space
to proof of his success, but still lacking the special kind of headline he
longed for: a black and white acknowledgement of the plague's divine purpose. Experts began declaring that all the signs pointed to a
biological weapon run amok, with Libya and Iraq the prime suspects; sources in Israeli intelligence had confirmed that both countries had greatly expanded their research programs in recent years. If any epidemiologist had realised that only adulterers and homosexuals were
dying, the idea had not yet filtered through to the press. Eve Shawcross checked out of the hotel. There was no need for him t through Canada, the States, or Central and South America; all the showed that other travellers had long since done his job for him.
booked a flight home, but had nine hours to kill. "I will do n thing! Now take your money and get out." "But -"
sex, it says in the foyer. Can't you read?" "I don't want sex touch you. You don't understand. I want you to touch yourself. I want to be tempted -" "Well, walk down the street with both e that should be temptation enough." The woman glared at him, but Shawcross didn't budge. There was an important principle at stake. "I've paid you!" he whined. She dropped the notes on his lap. you have your money back. Good night." He climbed "God's going to punish you. You're going to die a horrible death leaking out of all your veins -" "There'll be blood leaking ou if I have to call the lads to assist you off the premises." "Haven't you read about the plague? Don't you realise what it is, what it
means? It's God's punishment for fornicators -" "Oh, get out, blaspheming lunatic." "Blaspheming?" Shawcross was stunned. "You d know who you're talking to! I'm God's chosen instrument!"
scowled at him. "You're the devil's own arsehole, that's what you
Now clear off." As Shawcross tried to stare her down, a peculi dizziness took hold of him. She was going to die, and he would responsible. For several seconds, this simple realisation sat unchallenged in his brain, naked, awful, obscene in its clarity. waited for the usual chorus of abstractions and rationalisations t rise up and conceal it. And waited. Finally he k couldn't leave the room without doing his best to save her life. "Listen to me! Take this money and let me talk, that's all. Let me talk
for five minutes, then I'll go." "Talk about what?" plague. Listen! I know more about the plague than anyone else on the planet." The woman mimed disbelief and impatience. "It's true! I'm an expert virologist, I work for, ah, I work for the Centres for Disease Control, in Atlanta, Georgia. Everything I'm going to tell you will be
made public in a couple of days, but I'm telling you now, because you're at risk from this job, and in a couple of days it might be too late." He explained, in the simplest language he could manage, the four stages
of the virus, the concept of a stored host fingerprint, the fatal consequences if a third person's SVM ever entered her blood. She sat
through it all in silence. "Do you understand what I've said?" "Sure I do. That doesn't mean I believe it." He leapt to his shook her. "I'm deadly serious! I'm telling you the absolute trut is punishing adulterers! AIDS was just a warning; this time no s will escape! No one!" She removed his hands. "Your God and my don't have a lot in common." "Your God!" he spat.
aren't I entitled to one? Excuse me. I thought they'd put it in
United Nations Charter: Everyone's issued with their own God at b though if you break Him or lose Him along the way there's no free replacement." "Now who's blaspheming?" She shrugged. God's still functioning, but yours sounds a bit of a disaster. M might not cure all the problems in the world, but at least he bend over backwards to make them worse." Shawcross was indignant few people will die. A few sinners, it can't be helped. But thi what the world will be like when the message finally gets throug
unfaithfulness, no rape; every marriage lasting until death -"
She grimaced with distaste. "For all the wrong reasons." "No! I start out that way. People are weak, they need a reason, a self reason, to be good. But given time it will grow to be more than
habit, then a tradition, then part of human nature. The virus wo matter any more. People will have changed." "Well, maybe; if mo is inheritable, I suppose natural selection would eventually -" Shawcross stared at her, wondering if he was losing his mind, then
screamed, "Stop it! There is no such thing as 'natural selection'!" He'd never been lectured on Darwinism in any brothel back home, but then what could he expect in a country run by godless socialists? He calmed down slightly, and added, "I meant a change in the spiritual values of the
world culture." The woman shrugged, unmoved by the outburst. "I you don't give a damn what I think, but I'm going to tell you You are the saddest, most screwed-up man I've set eyes on all w you've chosen a particular moral code to live by; that's your ri and good luck to you. But you have no real faith in what you'r you're so uncertain of your choice that you need God to pour do and brimstone on everyone who's chosen differently, just to prove you that you're right. God fails to oblige, so you hunt through natural disasters - earthquakes, floods, famines, epidemics - winno out examples of the 'punishment of sinners'. You think you're pro that God's on your side? All you're proving is your own insecuri
She glanced at her watch. "Well, your five minutes are long gone, and never talk theology for free. I've got one last question though, if you
don't mind, since you're likely to be the last 'expert virologist' I run into for a while." "Ask." She was going to die. He'd done
to save her, and he'd failed. Well, hundreds of thousands would with her. He had no choice but to accept that; his faith would sane. "This virus that your God's designed is only supposed to adulterers and gays? Right?" "Yes. Haven't you liste the whole point! The mechanism is ingenious, the DNA fingerprint
She spoke very slowly, opening her mouth extra wide, as if addressing a deaf or demented person. "Suppose some sweet, monogamous, married couple
have sex. Suppose the woman becomes pregnant. The child won't have exactly the same set of genes as either parent. So what happens to it? What
happens to the baby?" Shawcross just stared at her. What happen the baby? His mind was blank. He was tired, he was homesick . the pressure, all the worries . . . he'd been through an ordeal could she expect him to think straight, how could she expect him explain every tiny detail? What happens to the baby? What happens the innocent, newly made child? He struggled to concentrate, to organise his thoughts, but the absolute horror of what she was suggesting tugged at his attention, like a tiny, cold, insistent dragging him, inch by inch, towards madness. Suddenly, he burst laughter; he almost wept with relief. He shook his head at the whore, and said, "You can't trick me like that! I thought of ba back in '94! At little Joel's christening - he's my cousin's boy grinned and shook his head again, giddy with happiness. "I fixed problem: I added genes to SVC and SVM, for surface receptors to dozen foetal blood proteins; if any of the receptors are activate next generation of the virus is pure SVA. It's even safe to bre feed, for about a month, because the foetal proteins take a while
replaced." "For about a month," echoed the woman. Then, "What d mean, you added genes . . . ?" Shawcross was alre from the room. He ran, aimlessly, until he was breathless and stumbling, then he limped through the streets, clutching his head, ignoring the stares and insults of passers-by. A month wasn't lon enough, he'd known that all along, but somehow he'd forgotten jus it was he'd intended to do about it. There'd been too many deta
many complications. Already, children would be dying.
to a halt in a deserted side street, behind a row of tawdry ni and slumped to the ground. He sat against a cold brick wall, sh and hugging himself. Muffled music reached him, thin and distorted Where had he gone wrong? Hadn't he taken his revelation of God's purpos
in creating AIDS to its logical conclusion? Hadn't he devoted his whole life to perfecting a biological machine able to discern good from evil? I
something so hideously complex, so painstakingly contrived as his virus, still couldn't do the job . . . Waves of blackness mov
his vision. What if he'd been wrong, from the start?
none of his work had been God's will, after all? Shawcross contemplated this idea with a shell-shocked kind of tranquillity. was too late to halt the spread of the virus, but he could go authorities and arm them with the details that would otherwise ta them years to discover. Once they knew about the foetal protein receptors, a protective drug exploiting that knowledge might be
possible in a matter of months. Such a drug would enable breas feeding, blood transfusions and organ transplants. It would also a adulterers to copulate, and homosexuals to practise their abominati It would be utterly morally neutral, the negation of everything h lived for. He stared up at the blank sky, with a growing sense panic. Could he do that? Tear himself down and start again? He Children were dying. Somehow, he had to find the courage.
it happened. Grace was restored. His faith flooded back like a tide light, banishing his preposterous doubts. How could he have
contemplated surrender, when the real solution was so obvious, so simple?
He staggered to his feet, then broke into a run again, reciting to himself, over and over, to be sure he'd get it right this time: "ADULTERERS! SODOMITES! MOTHERS BREAST FEEDING INFANTS OVER THE AGE OF
FOUR WEEKS! REPENT AND BE SAVED . . ." Originally appea Pulphouse Issue 8. Reprinted pp. 7-17, Eidolon 11, January 1993. Copyright © 1992 Greg Egan. Reprinted with kind permission of the author. 123451020304050100200300400500
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