Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [55]
“Is it possible,” Damon said, trying not to sound too hostile, “that the viruses which caused the plague of sterility really were manufactured, by someone? Was it really a Third Plague War, as the judge said? Could the Crash have been deliberately caused?” He didn’t expect an honest answer, but he figured that if a man like Hiru Yamanaka could set such store by eye-to-eye interrogation, there must be something in the theory.
Karol met his eye again, pugnaciously. “Of course it could,” he snapped, as if it ought to have been perfectly obvious. “History simplifies. There weren’t two plague wars, or even three—there was only one, and it involved more battles than anyone ever acknowledged. All that stuff about one war launched by the rich against the poor and another by the poor against the rich is just news-tape PR, calculated to imply that the final score was even. It wasn’t.”
Damon wasn’t at all surprised by this judgment, although he hadn’t expected to hear it voiced by a man like Karol Kachellek. He was familiar with the thesis that all wars were waged by the rich, with the poor playing the part of cannon fodder.
“Are you saying that all the new and resurgent diseases were deliberately released?” Damon asked incredulously. “All the way back to AIDS and the superbacs?”
“No, of course I’m not,” Karol said, scrupulously reining in his cynicism. “There were real problems. Species crossovers, antibiotic-immune strains, new mutations. There really was a backlash against early medical triumphs, generated by natural selection. I don’t doubt that there were accidental releases of engineered organisms too. There’s no doubt that the first free transformers were spontaneous mutations that allowed genetherapy treatments to slip the leash of their control systems and start a whole new side branch in the evolutionary tree. Maybe ninety-nine out of every hundred of the bugs that followed in their wake were products of natural selection—and nine out of ten were perfectly harmless, even benign—but the people who made good transformers by the score were perfectly capable of making not-so-good ones too.”
“And they could get paid to do it, I suppose? They weren’t too proud to take defense funding.”
“Everybody took defense funding in the twenty-first century, Damon. Purely for the good of science, you understand—for the sake of the sacred cause of progress. There must have been thousands who wrung their hands and howled their lamentations all the way to the bank—but they took the money anyway. That’s not the point. The point is that nobody knows for sure where any of the bad bugs came from—not even the ones whose depredations were confidently labeled the First and Second Plague Wars. The principal reason why the Crash wasn’t called a plague war at the time was that nobody was excluded from it. No one seemed to have any defense ready; everybody seemed to be a victim. That doesn’t mean that no one had any reason to release viruses of that type. As Conrad said in that clip the Eliminator dropped into his little comedy, it forced us to do what we’d needed to do for a hundred years but never contrived to do—to bring human fertility under careful control.”
“Not so much a war of the rich against the poor, then, as a war of the few against the many.”
“No. If it was any kind of plague war at all it was a war to end that kind of warfare. It was humankind against the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—the last stand against the negative Malthusian checks.”
“So if it was deliberate, the people responsible would have had your wholehearted support?”
“You don’t understand, Damon,” Karol said, in a tone of voice that Damon had heard many times before. “People don’t talk about it nowadays, of course, because it’s not considered