HEAL THYSELF
by Orson Scott Card
There's a limit to how much you can shield your children from the harsh
realities of life. But you can't blame parents who try. Especially when
it's something you have to go out of your way to discuss. My parents assure
me that they would have talked about it someday, but it's not like the birds
and the bees-there's not a certain age when you have to know. They were
letting it slide. I was a curious kid. I had already asked questions that
could have led there. They dodged. They waffled. I understand.
But then my childhood friend, Elizio, died of complications from his leukemia
vaccination. I had been given mine on the same day, right after him, after
jostling in line for twenty-minutes with the rest of our class of ten-year-olds.
Nobody else got sick. We didn't know anything was wrong with Elizio, either,
not for months. And then the radiation and the chemotherapy; primitive
holdovers from an era when medicine was almost indistinguishable from the
tortures of the Inquisition. Nothing worked. Elizio died. He was eleven by
then. A slow passage into the grave. And I demanded to know why.
They started to talk about God, but I told them I knew about heaven and I
wasn't worried about Elizio's soul. I wanted to know why there wasn't some
better way to prevent diseases than infecting us with semi-killed
pseudoviruses mixed with antigen stimulants. Was this the best the human
race could do? Didn't God give us brains so we could solve these things?
Oh, I was full of righteous wrath.
That was when they told me that it was time for me to take a trip to the
North American Wild Animal Park What did that have to do with my question?
It will all become clear, they said. But I should see with my own eyes. Thus
they turned from telling me nothing to telling me everything. Were they wise?
I know this much: I was angry at the universe, a deep anger that was born of
fear. My dear friend Elizio had been taken from me because our medicine was
so primitive. Therefore anyone could die. My parents. My little sisters.
My own children someday. Nothing was secure. And it pissed me off. The way
I felt, the way I was acting, I think they believed that nothing but a
complete answer, a visual experience, could restore my sense that this was,
if not a perfect world, then at least the best one possible.
We left Saltillo that weekend, taking the high-speed train that connected
Monterrey to Los Angeles. We got off in El Paso, the southern gateway to
the park During the half-hour trip, I tried to make sense of the brochures
about the park, all the pictures, the guidebooks. But it was dear to me,
even at the age of eleven, that something was being left out. That I was
getting the child's version of what the park contained. All that the
brochures described was a vast tract of savannas, filled with wild animals
living in their natural habitat, though it was an odd mixture of African,
South American, European, and American fauna that they pictured. Of course,
to protect the animals against the dangers of straying and the far greater
menace of poaching, the park was fenced about with an impenetrable
barrier-not illustrated in the brochures-of fences, ditches, wires,
walls. The thing that made no sense at all, however, was the warning about
absolute biosecurity All observations of the park inside the boundaries were
to take place from within completely biosealed buses, and anyone who tried
to circumvent the bioseal would be ejected from the park and prosecuted. They
did not say what would happen to anyone who succeeded in getting out into
the open air.
Biosealed buses suggested a serious biohazard. And yet there was nothing in
the brochures to indicate what that biohazard might be. It's not as if herds
of bison could sneak onto the buses if you cracked the seal.
The answer to this mystery was no doubt the answer to my question about why
Elizio died, and I impatiently demanded that my parents explain.
They urged me to be patient, and then took me right past the regular buses
and on to a nondescript door with the words --in small letters-- "Special Tours."
"What's so special?" I asked.
They ignored me. The clerk seemed to know without explanation exactly what my
parents wanted. Then I understood that my parents must have called ahead.
It was a private tour. And not on a bus. We were taken down an elevator into
a deep basement, and then put aboard a train on which we rode for more than
an hour-longer than the trip from Saltillo to El Paso, though I suspect we
were going much slower. Underground, who can tell?
We came up another elevator, and, like the underground train, this one had no
trappings of tourism. This was a place where people worked; gawking was only
a secondary concern.
We were led by a slightly impatient-looking woman to a smallish room with
windows on four sides and dozens of sets of binoculars in a couple of boxes.
There were also chairs, some stacked, some scattered about almost randomly.
As if someone hadn't bothered to straighten up after a meeting.
"Are they close?" asked Mother.
"We're here because the water is nearby," said the woman. "If they aren't
close now, they will be soon."
"Where's the water?" asked Father.
The woman pointed vaguely in a direction. It's clear she didn't want us there.
But Mother and Father had the gift of patience. They were here for me, and
bore the disdain of the scientist. If that's what she was.
The woman went away.
My parents picked up binoculars and searched. I also picked out a set and
tried to figure out how to focus it.
"It senses your vision automatically," Father explained. "Just look, and it
will come into focus."
"Bacana," I said. I looked.
There was a lot of dry grassy land, interspersed with drier, sagebrushy land.
In one direction were some trees. That must be where the water was.
"Spotted them yet?" Mother asked.
"To the left of the trees?" asked Father.
"There too?"
"Where did you see them?"
"In the shade of that rock"
I searched and finally found what they were looking at.
Men and women. Long-haired. Filthy. Naked.
My straitlaced parents brought me here to see naked people?
Then I looked again, more closely. They weren't exactly people after all.
"Neanderthals," I said.
"Homo neanderthalensis," said Father.
"They've been extinct forever!"
"For about twenty thousand years, most conservative guess," said Father.
"Maybe longer."
"But there they are," I said.
"There was a long debate," said Father. "About how the Neanderthals died out."
"I thought that Homo sapiens wiped them out."
"It wasn't so simple. There was plain evidence of communities of sapiens and
neanderthalensis living in close proximity for centuries. It wasn't just a
case of 'kill-the-monsters.' So there were several theories. One was that
the two species interbred, but Neanderthal traits were discouraged to such
a degree that they faded out. Like round eyes in China."
"How could they interbreed?" I asked. I was proud of my scientific erudition,
as only eleven-year-olds can be. "Look at how different they are from humans."
"Not so different," said Mother. "They had rudimentary language. Not the
complicated grammar we have now basically just imperative verbs and labeling
nouns. But they could call out to each other across a large expanse and give
warning. They could greet each other by name."
"I was talking about how they look."
"But I was talking about brain function," said Mother, "which is much more
to the point, don't you think?"
"Another theory" said Father, "was that Homo sapiens evolved from the
Neanderthals. That one was discredited and then revived several times.
It turns out that was the closest theory to being right."
"You know, none of this explains why there are Neanderthals out here in
the North American Wild Animal Park."
"You surprise me, Son," said my father. "I thought you would have leaped
to at least some conclusion. Instead you seem to be passively awaiting
our explanation."
I hated it when Father patronized me. He knew that, so he did it whenever
he wanted to goad me into thinking. It always worked. I hated that, too.
"You brought me here because of the way I reacted to Elizio's death," I said.
"And because you're famous scientists yourselves, you got to pull strings
and get me a special tour. Not everybody sees this, right?"
"Actually, anybody can, but few want to," said Father.
"And the biohazard stuff-that suggests some kind of disease agent. What
you said about the evolved-from-Neanderthals scenario being close to correct
suggests ... there's some disease loose in the wild here that causes regular
people to turn into cavemen?"
Father smiled wanly at Mother. "Smart boy," he said.
I looked at Mother. She was crying.
"Just tell me," I demanded. "No more guessing games."
Father sighed, put his arm around Mother, and began to talk It didn't take
long to explain.
"The greatest breakthrough in the medical treatment of disease was the germ
theory, but it took an astonishingly long time for doctors to realize that
almost all human ailments were caused by infectious agents. A few were
genetic-such as cystic fibrosis and sickle-cell anemia but those all seemed
to be recessive genes that conferred a benefit when you had one of them,
and killed you only if you had two. All the others--heart disease, dementia,
schizophrenia, strokes, nontraumatic cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, most
cancers, even some crimes-all were actually diseases. What disguised them
from researchers for so long was the fact that these diseases were passed
along in the womb, across the placenta, mostly by disease agents composed
of proteins smaller than DNA. Some were passed along in the ovum. So we had
no way to compare a clean, healthy organism with an infected one until we
finished mapping the human genetic code and realized that these diseases
weren't there. When we finally tracked them down as loose proteins in the
cells, we--"
"We?" I asked.
"I speak of our forebears, of course," said Father. "Our predecessors."
"You aren't in medical research."
"Our colleagues in science," said Father. "We've come a long way to have
you quibble about my choice of pronouns. And anthropology is the science
of which medicine is merely a subset."
I had a snappy retort about how nobody ever asks if there's an anthropologist
in the house, but I kept it to myself, mostly because I didn't want to win
points here, I wanted to hear the story.
"How do you inoculate an organism against in utero infection?" asked Mother
rhetorically. "How do you cleanse an ovum that has already been infected?"
"What we developed," Father began, then interrupted himself. "What was
developed."
"What emerged from the development process," said Mother helpfully.
"Was," said Father, "an elegant little counterinfection. Learning from the
way these protein bits worked, the researchers came up with a protein complex
that hijacked the cell's DNA just the way these infectious agents did. Only,
instead of destroying the host cell, our little counterinfection caused the
human DNA to check aggressively inside the cell for proteins that didn't
belong there. There are already mechanisms that do bits and parts of that,
but this one worked damn near perfectly. Nothing was in that cell that
didn't belong there. It even detected and threw out the wrong-handed proteins
that caused spongiform encephalopathies."
"Now you're showing off, my love," said Mother.
"It was perfect," said Father. "And best of all, self-replicating yet
nondestructive. Once you introduced it into a mother, it was in every egg in
her body after a matter of days. Any child she bore would have this protection
within it."
"It was perfect," said Mother. "The early tests showed that it not only
prevented diseases, it cured all but the most advanced cases. It was the
ultimate panacea."
"But they hadn't tested it for very long," said Father.
"There was enormous pressure," said Mother. "Not from outside, from
inside the research community. When you have a cure for everything, how can
you withhold it from the human race for ten years of longitudinal studies,
while people die or have their lives wrecked by diseases that could be
prevented with a simple inoculation?"
"It had side effects," I said, guessing the end.
"Technically, no," said Father. "It did exactly what it was supposed to do.
It eradicated diseases with smaller-than-bacteria agents. Period. Nothing else.
The only reason that they didn't immediately spread the counterinfection
throughout the world to save as many lives as possible was because of the
one foreseeable hitch. Can you think of it? It's obvious, really."
I thought. I wish I could say I came up with it quickly, but my parents were
nothing if not patient. And I did come up with it after a few false tries,
which I can't remember now. The correct answer: "Aging is a disease. You get
this counterinfection, you don't die."
"We were concerned about a population explosion," said Mother. "Even if
people completely stopped having children, we weren't sure that the existing
ecosphere could sustain a population in which all the existing children
grew up to be adults while none of the adults died off to make room for them.
Imagine all the children entering the workforce, while the older generation,
newly vigorous and extremely unlikely to die, refused to retire. It was a
nightmare. So, by the mercy of God, the counterinfection was restricted to
a large longitudinal study centered on Manhattan, a smallish college town
in Kansas."
"There was a quarantine of sorts," said Father. "The participants accepted
the rules-no physical contact with anyone outside the city during the two
years of the stud: In exchange, nobody dies of any kind of disease. They
jumped at it."
"The counterinfection got loose!" I said.
"No. Everybody kept to the rules. This was science, not the movies," said
Father. "But in the Manhattan Project, as we inevitably called it, for the
first time the test included infants, newborns, children born after the study
began, children conceived after the study began. We were so interested in the
result with the aging population that it had never crossed our minds
that ... well, it did cure aging. The people who have it would never die of
old age. The trouble was, the children were born--"
"As Neanderthals," I said, making the obvious guess.
"And over time," said Father, "as cells were replaced, the adult bodies also
tried to reshape themselves. It was fatal for them. You can't take an
existing body and make it into something else like that. You had a few years
of perfect health, and then your bones destroyed themselves in the frantic
effort to grow into new shapes. The little ones, the ones who were changed
in the womb, only they survived."
"And that's who I'm seeing out there," I said.
Father nodded. "It took fifteen years to find a way to sterilize them all
without our counterinfection undoing the sterilization. By then there were
so many, of them that to keep them all in their natural habitat required a
vast reserve. It really wasn't all that hard to get the citizens of this area
to evacuate. Nobody wanted to be anywhere near Manhattan, Kansas. So once
again, Homo neanderthalensis has a plot of ground here on Earth. Homo
neanderthalensis, the most intelligent toolmaking species ever to evolve
naturally."
"But how could the counteragent cause us to revert to an earlier stage of
evolution?" I asked.
"You weren't listening," said Father.
I thought for a moment. "Homo neanderthalensis isn't an earlier stage," I
said. "There was no more evolution after that."
"Only a disease," said Father.
It seemed too incredible to me, as an eleven-year-old who prided himself on
understanding the world. "Human intelligence is an infection?"
"Passed from mother to child through the ovum," said Mother. "By a disease
agent that alters the DNA in order to replicate itself. We should have
realized it from the fact that in utero development recapitulates evolution,
but there is no stage in which the fetus passes through a habiline form.
We did not evolve past it. The DNA is hijacked and we are born prematurely,
grossly deformed by the disease. Neotenic, erectstanding, language-mad,
lacking in sense of smell, too feeble to survive on our own even as adults,
in need of clothing and shelter and community to a degree that the
Neanderthals never were. But ... smart."
"So now," said Father, "do you understand why medical science has to rely
on inoculation to fight off cancer, so that a small percentage-far smaller
than ever before in human history, but not zero-a small percentage dies?
Elizio died because the only alternative we've found is for this race of
perfectly healthy, immortal, dim-wilted beings to inherit the Earth."
I stood there for a long time in silence, watching the Neanderthals, trying
to see how their behavior was different from ours. In the years since then,
I have come to realize that there was no important difference. Being smarter
hasn't made us act any differently from the Neanderthals. We make better
tools. We have a longer, more thorough collective memory in the form of
libraries. We can talk much more fluently about the things we do. But we
still do basically the same things. We are Neanderthals, at heart.
But I did not understand this at the time. I was, after all, only eleven.
...
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