The Home Front

  Brian Stableford

  NOW that we have lived in the security of peace for more than thirty years a generation has grown up to whom the Plague Wars are a matter of myth and legend. Survivors of my age are often approached by the wondering young and asked what it was like to live through those frightful years, but few of them can answer as fully or as accurately as I.

  In my time I have met many doctors, genetic engineers, and statesmen who lay claim to having been in “the front line” during the First Plague War, but the originality of that conflict was precisely the fact that its real combatants were invading microbes and defensive antibodies. All its entrenchments were internal to the human body and mind. It is true that there were battlegrounds of a sort in the hospitals, the laboratories, and even in the House of Commons, but this was a war whose entire strategy was to strike at the most intimate locations of all.

  For that reason, the only authentic front was the home front: the nucleus of family life.

  Many an octogenarian is prepared to wax lyrical now on the reelings of dread associated with obligatory confinement. They will assure you that no one would risk exposure to a crowd if it could possibly be avoided, and that every step out of doors was a terror-laden trek through a minefield. They exaggerate. Life was not so rapidly transformed in an era when a substantial majority of the population still worked outside the home or attended school, and only a minority had the means or the inclination to make all their purchases electronically.

  Even if electronic shop-pimg had been universal, that would have brought about a very dramatic increase in the number of people employed in the deliv-ery business, all of whom would have had to go abroad and inter-act vith considerable numbers of their fellows.

  For these reasons, total confinement was rare during the First Plague War, and rarely voluntary. Even I, who had little choice in the matter after both my legs were amputated above the knee following the Paddington Railway Disaster of 2119, occasionally sallied forth in my electrically-powered wheelchair in spite of the protestations of my wife Martha. Martha was almost as firmly anchored as I was, by virtue of the care she had to devote to me and to our younger daughter Frances, but it would have taken more than rumors of war to force Frances’

  teenage sister Petra to remain indoors for long.

  The certainty of hindsight sometimes leads us to forget that the First Plague War was, throughout its duration, essentially a matter of rumor, but such was the case. The absence of any formal declaration of war, combined with the highly dubious status of many of the terrorist organizations which competed to claim responsibility for its worst atrocities, sustained an atmosphere of uncertainty that complicated our fears. To some extent, the effect was to exaggerate our anxieties, but it allowed braver souls a margin of doubt to which they could dismiss all inconvenient alarms.

  I suppose I was fortunate that the Paddington Disaster had not disrupted my career completely, because I had the education and training necessary to set myself up as an independent share-trader operating via my domestic unit. I had established a reputation that allowed me to build a satisfactory register of corporate and individual clients, so I was able to negotiate the movement of several million euros on a daily basis. I had always been a specialist in the biotech sector, which was highly volatile even before the war started—and it was that accident of happenstance more than any other which placed my minuscule fraction of the home front at the center of the fiercest action the war produced.

  Doctors, as is only natural, think that the hottest action of the plague wars was experienced on the wards which filled up week by week between 2129 and 2133 with victims of hyperflu, assertive MSRA, neurotoxic Human Mosaic Virus and plethoral hemorrhagic fever. Laboratory engineers, equally understandably, think that the crucial battles were fought within the bodies of the mouse models housed in their tripleX biocontainment facilities. In fact, the most hectic action of all was seen on the London Stock Exchange, and the only hand-to-hand fighting involved the sneakthieves and armed robbers who continually raided the nation’s greenhouses during the six months from September 2129 to March 2130: the cruel winter of the great plantigen panic.

  I never laid a finger on a single genetically modified potato or carrot, but I was in the thick of it nevertheless. So, perforce, were my wife and children; their lives, like mine, hung in the balance throughout. That is why my story is one of the most pertinent records of the First Plague War, as well as one of the most poignant.

  Although my work required fierce concentration and a readiness to react to market moves at a moment’s notice, I was occasionally forced by necessity to let Frances play in my study while I worked. It was not safe to leave her alone, even in the adjacent ground-floor room where she attended school online. She suffered from an environmentally induced syndrome which made her unusually prone to form allergies to any and all novel organic compounds.

  In the twentieth century such a condition would have proved swiftly fatal, but, by the time Francis was born in 2121, medical science had begun to catch up with the problem. There were efficient palliatives to apply to her occasional rashes, and effective ways of ensuring that she received adequate nutrition in spite of her perennial tendency to gastric distress and diarrhea. The only aspects of her allergic attacks which seriously threatened her life were general anaphylactic shock and the disruption of her breathing by massive histamine reactions in the throat.

  It was these possibilities that compelled us to keep very careful control over the contents of our home and the importation of exotic organic molecules. By way of completing our precautions, Martha, Petra and I had all been carefully trained to administer various injections, to operate breathing apparatus, and—should the worst ever come to the worst—to perform an emergency tracheotomy.

  Frances was very patient on the rare occasions when she had to be left in my sole care, and seemed to know instinctively when to rnaintain silence, even though she was a talkative child by nature. When business was slack, however, she would make heroic attempts to understand what I was doing.

  As chance would have it, she was present when I first set up my position in plantigens in July 2129, and it was only natural that she should ask me to explain what I was doing and why.

  “I’m buying lots of potatoes and a few carrots,” I told her, oversimplifying recklessly.

  “Isn’t Mummy doing that?” she asked. Martha was at the supermarket.

  “She’s buying the ones we’ll be cooking and eating. I’m buying ones that haven’t even been planted yet. They’re the kind that have to be eaten raw if they’re to do any good.” “You can’t eat raw potatoes,” she said, skeptically. “They’re not very nice,” I agreed, “but cooking would destroy the vital ingredients of these kinds, because they’re so delicate.”

  I explained to her, as best I could, that a host of genetic engineers was busy transplanting new genes into all kinds of root vegetables, so that they would incorporate large quantities of special proteins or protein fragments into their edible parts. I told her that the recent arrival in various parts of the world—including Britain—of new disease-causing viruses had forced scientists to work especially hard on new ways of combating those viruses. “The most popular methods, at the moment,” I concluded, “are making plantibodies and plantigens.”

  “What’s the difference?” she wanted to know. “Antibodies are what our own immune systems produce whenever our bodies are invaded by viruses. Unfortunately, they’re often produced too slowly to save us from the worst effects of the diseases, so doctors often try to immunize people in advance, by giving them an injection of something harmless to which the body reacts the same way. Anything that stimulates the production of antibodies is called an antigen. Some scientists are producing plants that produce harmless antigens that can be used to make people’s immune systems produce antibodies against the new diseases. Others are trying to cut out the middle by producing the antibodies directly, so that people who’ve already caught the diseases can be treated before they become seriously ill.”

  “Are antigens like allergens?” Frances asked. She knew a good deal about allergens, because we’d had to explain to her why she could never go out, and why she always had to be so careful even in the house.

  “Sort of,” I said, “but there isn’t any way, as yet, of immunizing people against the kind of reaction you have when your throat closes up and you can’t breathe.”

  She didn’t like to go there, so she said: “Are you buying plantigens or plantibodies, Daddy?”

  “I’m buying shares in companies that are spending the most money on producing new plantigens,” I told her, feeling that I owed her a slightly fuller explanation.

  “Why?”

  “Plantigens are easier to produce than plantibodies because they’re much simpler,” I said. “The protection they provide is sometimes limited, but they’re often effective against a whole range of closely related viruses, so they’re a better defense against new mutants. The main reason I’m buying plantigens rather than plantibodies, though, has to do with psychological factors.”

  She’d heard me use that phrase before, but she’d never quite gotten to grips with it. I tried hard to explain that although plantibodies were more useful in hospitals when sick people actually arrived there, ordinary people were far more interested in things that might keep them out of hospitals altogether. As the fear of the new diseases became more widespread and more urgent, people would become increasingly willing—perhaps even desperate—t o buy large quantities of plantigen-containing potatoes and carrots to eat “just in case.” For that reason, I told Frances, the sales of plantigen-producing carrots and potatoes would increase more rapidly than the actual level of threat, and that meant that it made sense to buy shares in the companies that were investing most heavily in plantigen development.

  “I understand,” she said, only a little dubiously. She wanted me to be proud of her. She wanted me to think that she was clever.

  I was proud of her. I did think she was clever. If she didn’t quite understand the origins of the great plantigen panic, that was because nobody really understood it, because nobody really understood what makes some psychological factors so much more powerful than others that they become obsessions.

  No sooner had I taken the position than it began to put on value.

  Throughout August and early September I gradually transferred more and more funds from all my accounts into the relevant holdings—and then felt extremely proud of myself when the prices really took off.

  From the end of September on, the only question anyone in the market was asking was how long the bull run could possibly last—or, more specifically, exactly when would be the best moment to cash the paper profits and get out.

  From the very beginning, Martha was skeptical about the trend. “It’s going to be tulipomania all over again,” she said, at the beginning of November.

  “No, it’s not,” I told her. “The value of tulips was purely a matter of aesthetic and commercial perception, with no utilitarian component at all. At least some plantigens are genuinely useful, and some of the ones that aren’t useful yet will become useful in the future. As each new disease reaches Britain—whether terrorists really are importing them in test tubes or whether the viruses are simply taking advantage of modern population densities to spread from points of natural origin—

  possession of the right plantigens might well be a matter of life or death for some people.”

  “Well, maybe,” she conceded. “But people aren’t actually buying them as a matter of rational choice. It’s not just shares, is it? There are plantigen collectors out there, for Heaven’s sake, and potato theft is becoming as common as car crime.”

  I’d noticed that the items I’d seen on the TV news had begun to lose their initial jokey tone, but I was still inclined to laugh off the lunatic fringe.

  “It’s not funny,” Martha insisted. “It was okay when there was still a semblance of medical supervision, but now that it’s becoming a hobby fit for idiots the trade is entirely driven by hype and fraud. Every stallholder on the market is trying to talk up his perfectly ordinary carrots and every white van that used to be smuggling cigarettes through the tunnel is busy humping sackloads of King Edwards around.

  You never get out, so you don’t know what it’s like on the streets. All you ever see are figures on the screen.”

  “Share prices are just as real as anything else in the world,” I said, defensively.

  “Sure they are—and when they go crazy, everything else goes crazy, too. Soon there won’t be a seed potato available that isn’t allegedly loaded with antidotes to everything from the common cold to the black death. Have you seen what’s happening to the price of the stock on the supermarket shelves, since the local wide boys started selling people do-it-yourself transformation kits? It’s ridiculous! I wouldn’t care, but ever since the gulf stream was aborted, the ground’s as hard as iron from October to April. No one who buys a magic potato now can possibly cash in on his investment until next summer, so it’s open season for con men.”

  “That’s one of the factors driving the spiral upward,” I observed.

  “The fact that nobody can start planting for another four or five months is making people all the more anxious to have the right stock ready when the moment comes.”

  “But the hyperflu won’t wait,” she pointed out. “It’ll peak in February just like the old flu used to do, and if the rumors are right about human mosaic viruses, they won’t mind the cold either, because they can crystallize out. If neurotoxic HMV does break out in London, the most useful weapons we’ll have to use against it are imported plantibodies from the places where it’s already endemic. Why aren’t you buying those by the cartload?”

  I had to explain to her that putting money into foreign concerns isn’t a good idea in a time of war, especially when you don’t know who your enemies are.

  “But we know who our friends are,” she objected. “Spain and Portugal, the southern USA, Australia … they’re all on our side.”

  “Perhaps they are,” I said, “but it’s precisely the fact that we’re still semiattached to the old Commonwealth and the European Federation while maintaining our supposedly special relationship with America that puts us in the firing line for practically every terrorist in the world.

  Then again, anxiety breeds paranoia, which breeds universal suspicion—how can we be sure that our friends really are our friends?

  Trust me, love—I know what I’m doing. Whether it’s wise money or not, the big money is flooding into the companies that are trying to develop plantigens against the entire spectrum of HMVs, especially the ones that don’t exist yet although their gene-maps are allegedly pinned to every terrorist’s drawing board. This bubble still has a lot of inflation to do.”

  There’s a world of difference, of course, between wives and clients.

  Martha was worried that I was pumping too much money into a panic that couldn’t last forever, but the people whose money I was handling were worried that I wasn’t committing enough. Most of my individual clients were the kind of people who didn’t even bother to check the closing prices after they finished work in normal times, but the prevailing circumstances changed nine out of every ten of them into the kind of neurotic who programs his cell phone to sing the hallelujah chorus every time a key stock puts on five percent.

  There is something essentially perverse in human nature that makes people who can see themselves growing richer by the hour worry far more about whether they ought to be growing even richer even faster than they do about the possibility of the trend turning turtle. I’d never been pestered by my clients half as much as I was in January and February of 2130, when every day brought news of hundreds more hyperflu victims and dozens more rumors about the killing potential of so-called HMVs and plethoral hemorrhagic fever. The steadily increasing kill-rate of iatrogenic infections didn’t help at all, although there was little evidence as yet of assertive MRSA migrating out of the wards.

  I weathered the storm patiently, at least until Petra decided that it was time to start a potato collection of her own.

  “Everyone’s doing it,” she said, when the true extent of her credit card bills was revealed by a routine consent check. “Not just at the tech, either. The playground at the secondary school’s a real shark’s nest.”

  “Sharks don’t build nests,” I said, unable to restrain my natural pedantry. “And that’s not the point. You don’t know that any of those potatoes has any therapeutic value whatsoever. Even though you’ve been paying through the nose for them, the overwhelming probability is that they haven’t. You’re a bright girl— you must know that.”

  “Well, whether they have or they haven’t, I could sell them all for half as much again as I paid for them,” she said.

  “So do it!” I told her. “Now!” Even that seemed moderate, given that the profits she was contemplating were entirely the produce of misrepresentation. But there were limits to the extent of any holier-than-thou stance I could convincingly maintain, as she knew very well.

  “But you of all people,” she complained, “should appreciate that if I wait until next week I’ll get even more.”

  “You can’t guarantee that,” I told her. “If you hang on to them for one day—one hour—longer than the bubble takes to burst, all you’re left with is debts. Debts that you still have to pay off, even if it takes you years.”

  “I know what I’m doing,” she insisted. “I can judge the mood. I thought you’d be proud of me.”

  If it had been tulips, perhaps I would have been, but I’d meant what I’d said to Martha. Come the evil day, some plantigens would make a life-or-death difference to some people. On the other hand, it was surely safe to assume that none of them would come from potatoes traded in a schoolyard, or even in the corridors of a technical college.

 

1 2