The hours of talking on the equinox took root. We had direct evidence of that because, swiftly, word began to return to us. Sightings of Aurelius and his people. Rumors of where, exactly, the Long Frog pub and others like it were located.
The location of a pub might sound like a simple matter, for any pub wanted people to find it and frequent it. But these pubs were unofficial, Old Races places, and they shifted locations frequently, before human authorities could object to a business run by Old Ones, for Old Ones, on a cashless basis. Unlike Canada, which had declared the Old Races to be not dead, but not human, either, Britain and the Union still considered the Old Ones dead in legal terms. Which meant they couldn’t run businesses or earn livings—the problem we had been grappling with since I’d moved to Toledo.
We British like our pubs. They remain a central community and social feature. Yet Old Ones aren’t legally allowed to step into them and wouldn’t have been welcomed by the humans in them if they had. They couldn’t buy a drink and couldn’t eat the food. It was almost inevitable that an underground circuit of pop-up pubs just for the Old Races would set itself up.
We just had to tap into the Old Races network of knowledge and find them. Only the information was zealously and closely guarded. No Old One who liked their evenings at a pub wanted to risk having the pubs shut down.
Still, we persisted in the hunt, because it was the back door to finding Aurelius and his people, who were using the pubs to find Old Ones sympathetic to Aurelius’ ambitions.
Reports on Aurelius’ location were easier to follow up—and made even easier still after I objected to Ketill and Jamie galivanting about southern Britain chasing rumours. “There is a whole forest of Old Ones who can track down these locations and look into them for us,” I pointed out. “Give them a burner phone and a BritRail pass each.”
“Old Races can’t buy BritRail passes,” Ketill pointed out grumpily.
“And you shouldn’t be driving the Citroen, either,” I answered testily. “The law says Old Races can’t buy passes. Doesn’t mean they can’t be given one. They won’t even be lying.”
So the Old Ones in the forest were given assignments and sent out across Britain to check on Aurelius.
“It has a nice secondary bonus, too,” Magorian told me. “They’ll meet other Old Ones out there, and tell their story, about life in the forest, about Aurelius being public enemy number one, which will push the communications network into higher speeds…and if there isn’t an influx of new forest residents in the next few weeks, I’ll be stunned.”
Magorian was only partially right, as it turned out. Two weeks later, Haul let us know that a forest was growing in Devon, almost directly south of Carmarthen across the Bristol Channel, on the western edge of Dartmoor, near Tavistock. “I’m sending a few people over to help them get settled,” Haul added. “The timing couldn’t be better. We’re getting new people here every day, and I don’t want us to be overcrowded.”
In early January, I got an email from Simon that from anyone else would have read as an invitation. But even in written English, Simon’s communication style was forceful, and his suggestion that I come and speak with Buster Blue Rose at her lab in Cardiff felt like an imperial command.
I fired off a reply and on the appointment date, drove Magorian and Ketill down to Cardiff, where we presented ourselves and our credentials before being passed through security and into the inner sanctums of the laboratories. Someone had greased the way ahead of us, for Ketill was passed through with barely a raised brow.
Simon took us to Buster’s laboratory, which was fronted by a warm, low-lit office with a long narrow window showing the sterile laboratory beyond. Buster rose to her feet as we trooped in, attired in jeans and a lilac sweater, with an immaculate white coat over it, and a warm smile.
Ketill looked up…and up. Then he grinned at her. “Do you arm wrestle?”
Buster laughed and rested her hand on his shoulder, without a shimmer of hesitation. “I wouldn’t want to hurt you.”
Magorian coughed and Simon just flat out laughed.
It broke the ice. We settled on chairs around the front of Buster’s desk, while she resettled herself.
“I’d show you around the lab,” she said, with a note of apology. “But we’ve got equipment running and experiments that need total isolation…I hope you understand.”
“I’ve been in enough labs that missing one isn’t an issue,” I assured her.
“We understand,” Magorian said, using his most pleasant modulation. “I’m more curious to know why you wanted to speak to us.”
“Actually, it wasn’t my idea. Simon was insistent I tell you about this. It’s a silly thing, really, but he was quite firm about it.”
Simon wasn’t sitting in a chair, but leaning against the wall, his arms crossed. From his position, his view of Magorian would be unobstructed. “None of them is stupid, Buster. They’ll understand if you give them the context.”
She nodded and smoothed down the lapels of her lab coat. “Some time ago, a project was set up at Mount Sinai in New York, with the aim to discover why some people more than others are able to resist or recover from challenges to their health.”
“Like resisting the common cold?” Magorian asked, his tone polite.
“More than that,” Buster replied. “People with high LDL cholesterol, but show no sign of cardiovascular disease. People exposed repeatedly to the AIDS virus, but don’t become HIV positive. People who have the activating gene for Alzheimer’s, but don’t develop the disease. The project was a DNA catalogue cross-reference—to see if there was a common feature among all these lucky people.”
“And was there?” I asked, my interest peaked.
“Common to all risk-resistant subjects?” Buster clarified. She shook her head. “No, there was no single common factor. But the indexing did reveal something else.”
She shifted on her chair. She was easing up to the silliness she was reluctant to share. Then she grimaced and said, “They found an x gene.”
Aaahhh. I suddenly understood why Buster was so acutely uncomfortable. An x gene was the subject of movie franchises and fantasy.
“Add the kicker,” Simon said softly.
Buster pressed her lips together, thinning them. Then she said; “It was a review of DNA already catalogued. Some of the DNA included in the project was from humans who are now Old Ones.”
I leaned forward. “Everyone who is now an Old One has the x gene?”
She nodded and blew out her breath.
“But it’s missing in the DNA of the humans in the study?” Magorian asked.
“In some of the humans in the study it was absent,” Buster confirmed.
“Did those humans who are missing the gene contract Tutu?” I asked.
“Answering that was not part of the project,” Buster said. “Sorry.”
“Can I access the study data?” I pressed. “Do you know any of the scientists who worked on it? This x gene could determine whether humans are vulnerable to Tutu. It might let us predict when TuTu patients will change. Or even if they change.”
Buster smoothed down her coat once more. “It’s possible I can get you an overview of the data, if you have computer facilities sufficient to handle the bandwidth.”
That sobered me. I didn’t have anything close to the computational power I would need to juggle DNA data, not here in Britain. Not even my set up in Toledo would be sufficient without some additional hardware and memory.
Magorian said, “How old is the x gene? Can you tell when it was introduced to human DNA?”
Simon smiled. “And I just won a free lunch.”
Buster rolled her eyes at him, then pulled her attention back to Magorian. “Simon said one of you would get around to asking about the age of the gene. You have to understand, though, that dating specific genes and their introduction into DNA is challenging. One must estimate intricate series of evolutionary events, focusing on eukaryotic gene families.”
“But it can be done?” Magorian pressed.
“Advances in computational biology and genome sequencing have made it possible to explore—just to explore,” she emphasized, “the connection between gene age and function, right across the animal kingdom.”
“And what did exploring the x-gene uncover?” I asked.
Buster hesitated. “The x-gene first appeared in human DNA in the sub-Roman period, in Western Europe. It dispersed from there and travelled the globe. No other species has it, not even chimpanzees.”
•
We spent two hours combing through the copy of the dataset that Buster had acquired from the New York study. Hers was a complete set, and I had a small moment of envy over the computational facilities at her disposal, that allowed her to filter and array the data in almost any combination or search pattern she wanted.
Finally, reluctantly, I dragged myself away from the monitors, and the five of us ate lunch at the laboratory’s cafeteria. We managed to keep the conversation strictly social, although it took effort. Ketill led the way, there. He could be garrulous when he was relaxed, and Buster’s physicality fascinated him. He knew a little about professional wrestling, enough to get Buster talking about her second passion in life.
Afterwards, the return drive to Carmarthen was virtually silent. I had been handed a lot to think about, and so had Magorian. If nothing else, the dating of the x-gene—even the computational estimate that Buster had reluctantly given us – was a confirmation for both Magorian and I that all the historical sources we had been consulting for years were the right sources. They were from the right period and area. Which meant that all the logic we’d built on top of those historical sources was sitting upon solid ground.
It was the first time we’d received any corroboration, and it was reassuring.
On the other hand, I regretted I wasn’t in a position to dive into the research data, because I suspected that it would provide answers; why people caught Tutu or didn’t. Why those who recovered from TuTu sometimes phased into Old Ones, and why some people were still human, years later.
Perhaps, if the project could be expanded, we could answer even more troubling questions; why some people survived the phase shift, and others didn’t. Who would shift…and when. These were questions every human wanted answered, craved to have answered, in order to bring some certainty back into their lives.
Now I knew there was a possible DNA component driving the emergence of the Old Races, it gave me a direction to search for even more answers—answers we had been without since the first TuTu patient had rolled into my ward.
We reached the outskirts of Carmarthen, when Ketill stuck his head through the front seats. “Still say I could have taken her down, you know.”
I laughed. “Of course you could have.”
“Right. Long as that’s clear.” He sat back.
Magorian stirred. “I think the x-gene is the gene of the old gods.”
“In our DNA?” I said, startled.
“Why not?” Magorian said, with a reasonable tone. “Agrona had eight children that we know of. The other gods likely indulged themselves with their followers, too. That’s a lot of demi gods running around…and they would have mingled with humans and Old Ones as adults, too. The dispersal pattern Buster showed us fits almost perfectly.”
That was a troubling idea. “If the x-gene does make humans vulnerable to TuTu and is the reason they become Old Ones,” I said, “then where did the original Old Ones – Felix and Hardwin, just to begin – where did they come from? Was there a TuTu pandemic back then, too?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think we’ll ever know, because the sources don’t tell us,” Magorian replied heavily. “The only conclusion we can make out of any of it, right now, is that if a human doesn’t have the x-gene, they won’t become an Old One.”
Clearly, Magorian’s thoughts had wandered down far different paths from mine since we’d left Cardiff. “And I was thinking that the data could tell us much more, if we properly researched it,” I said lightly.
“The research has clearly already been done,” Magorian said dismissively.
I glanced at him, startled.
“The North Koreans,” Magorian said. “The compulsion drugs they used on the Old Ones, that the Chinese government gave to us…in hindsight, I can see that the drugs have to be DNA specific—or DNA group specific, at least. They typed DNA according to what race they wanted to manipulate.”
“The European strategy group will confirm that,” I pointed out, for we had given the vials to that group of heads of state dealing with the Old Races crisis in Europe. Magorian and I were both nominally members of the group, but we were mere crumbs on the carpet beneath a table of luminaries that included the King of Spain.
“They don’t have to confirm it,” Magorian said. “The drugs work. Therefore, the DNA sensitivity was correctly set. The North Koreans got it right.”
“Yeah, I still don’t get why they made that shit,” Ketill said. He had seen the videos of dragons compelled to turn their fire breath upon a cellar of Old Ones, too. “What’s the point of it?”
“Control over the Old Races,” Magorian replied.
“They already control us,” Ketill said flatly. “So long as I’m not legally a person, they control every fucking thing in my life.”
“The North Koreans took it a step further,” Magorian said. “They want shock troops.”
“Are you still extrapolating, or has that been confirmed?” I asked, for I had not accessed the European group’s reports for weeks.
“Nothing coming out of North Korea is confirmed,” Magorian said. “But the paper I read was written by one of the world’s top experts on North Korea. The North Koreans are worried about South Korea and the western allies striking North Korea first. They always have been. Everything North Korea does is to counter that possible first strike, up to and including striking before we do. And for that, the Old Race shock troops are perfect. Or so North Korea thinks. It will leave their nuclear arsenal as a second-strike weapon for farther range targets.”
There was something in Magorian’s voice, a sour note, that prompted me to say, “But you don’t believe that.”
Magorian glanced at me. “No.”
I reminded myself that Magorian read widely and deeply, that the histories he consumed gave him a unique perspective on modern affairs. “What do you think they want the shock troops for?”
Magorian turned in the seat so he was looking at me properly. “North Korea using their nuclear arsenal as a follow up strategy doesn’t make sense, not when you look at what weapons they’ve got.”
“They’ve got nukes,” Ketill said dryly. “What else do we need to know?”
“They’ve got limited nukes,” Magorian replied. “The bulk of North Korea’s weapons are short and medium range missiles. They can’t reach North America with them, and the very few long-range weapons they have weren’t successful when tested. They wouldn’t rely on short range missiles as a backup—they’re useless for that. Besides, Kim Jong-un is paranoid. He thinks the United States is just waiting for him to lower his guard for one second, and they’ll leap. Everything he’s built is designed to hit back, if he can’t smack the US first….which he can’t, right now.”
“So the Old Race shock troops are for…what, exactly?” Ketill prompted.
Magorian remained silent for a very long time, then said reluctantly, “I don’t know…but every time I think about it, that Hieronymus Bosch triptych settles in the back of my mind and crackles like a fire.”