Otherness Read Online Free Page B

Stockholm. Ironically, I picked it up in Oslo. Fancy that. Just shows you can fool anybody.

    And yet, I don't think I ever really forgot about you, ALAS, not at the back of my mind.

    Peace treaties were signed. Citizens of the industrial nations voted temporary cuts in their standards of living in order to fight poverty and save the environment. Suddenly, it seemed, we'd all grown up. Other cynics, guys I'd gotten drunk with in the past—and shared dark premonitions about the inevitable fate of filthy, miserable humanity—all gradually deserted the faith, as pessimists seem wont do when the world turns bright—too bright for even the cynical to dismiss as a mere passing phase on the road to Hell.

    And yet, my own brooding remained unblemished. For subconsciously I knew it wasn't real.

    Then the third Mars Expedition returned to worldwide adulation, and brought home with them TARP.

    And that was when we all found out just how friendly all our home-grown pathogens really had been, all along.

4.

    Late at night, stumbling in exhaustion from overwork, I would stop at Les's portrait where I'd ordered it hung in the hall opposite my office door, and stand there cursing him and his damned theories of symbiosis.

    Picture mankind ever reaching a symbiotic association with TARP! That really would be something. Imagine, Les, all those alien genes, added to our heritage, to our rich human diversity!

    Only TARP did not seem to be much interested in "negotiation." Its wooing was rough, deadly. And its vector was the wind.

    The world looked to me, and to my peers, for salvation. In spite of all of my successes and high renown, though, I knew myself for a second-best fraud. I would always know—no matter how much they thanked and praised me—who had been better than me by light years.

    Again and again, deep into the night, I would pore through the notes Leslie Adgeson had left behind, seeking inspiration, seeking hope. That's when I stumbled across ALAS once more.

    I found you again.

    Oh, you made us behave better, all right. At least a quarter of the human race must contain your DNA, by now, ALAS. And in their newfound, inexplicable, rationalized altruism, they set the tone followed by all the others.

    Everybody behaves so damned well in the present calamity. They help each other, they succor the sick, they all give so.

    Funny thing, though. If you hadn't made us all so bloody cooperative, we'd probably never have made it to bloody Mars, would we? Or if we had, there'd have still been enough paranoia around so we'd have maintained a decent quarantine.

    But then, I remind myself, you don't plan , do you. You're just a bundle of RNA, packed inside a protein coat, with an incidentally, accidentally acquired trait of making humans want to donate blood. That's all you are, right? So you had no way of knowing that by making us "better" you were also setting us up for TARP, did you? Did you?

5.

    We've got some palliatives, now. A few new techniques seem to be doing some good. The latest news is great, in fact. Apparently, we'll be able to save 15 percent or so of the children. Up to half of those may even be fertile.

    That's for nations who've had a lot of racial mixing. Heterozygosity and genetic diversity seems to breed better resistance. Those peoples with "pure," narrow bloodlines will be harder to save, but then, racism has its inevitable price.

    Too bad about the great apes and horses. At least all this will give the rain forests a chance to grow back.

    Meanwhile, everybody perseveres. There is no panic, as one reads about happening in past plagues. We've grown up at last, it seems. We help each other.

    But I carry a card in my wallet saying I'm a Christian Scientist, and that my blood group is AB negative, and that I'm allergic to nearly everything. Transfusions are one of the treatments commonly used now, and I'm an important man. But I won't take blood.

    I won't.

    I donate , but I'll never take it. Not even when