wines to banish the rot and disease the flesh is heir to. You have preserved the tradition and knowledge of seventy years, saving it for the twenty-first century. You are the mages and alchemists of the microscopic age, and now you join the explorers of the West, with an immense treasure to share.’
Tamara translated in a loud whisper for the students and scientists who crowded around the table.
‘I am honored to be treated as a friend, and as a colleague. You have shared with me this treasure, and the treasure of Sakartvelo – the mountains, the hospitality, the history, and by no means last or least, the wine.’
She lifted the horn with one hand, and said, ‘Gaumarjos phage!’ She pronounced it the Georgian way, pbah-gay. ‘Gaumarjos Sakartvelos!’
Then she began to drink. She could not savor Lado’s earth-hidden, soil-aged wine the way it deserved, and her eyes watered, but she did not want to stop, either to show her weakness or to end this moment. She swallowed gulp after gulp. Fire moved from her stomach into her arms and legs, and drowsiness threatened to steal her away. But she kept her eyes open and continued to the very bottom of the horn, then upended it, held it out, and lifted it.
‘To the kingdom of the small, and all the labors they do for us! All the glories, the necessities, for which we must forgive the … the pain …’ Her tongue became stiff and her words stumbled. She leaned on the folding table with one hand, and Tamara quietly and unobtrusively brought down her own hand to keep the table from upsetting. ‘All the things to which we … all we have inherited. To bacteria, our worthy opponents, the little mothers of the world!’
Lado and Tamara led the cheers. Zamphyra helped Kaye descend, it seemed from a great height, into her wooden folding chair.
‘Wonderful, Kaye,’ Zamphyra murmured into her ear. ‘You come back to Tbilisi any time. You have a home, safe away from your own home.’
Kaye smiled and wiped her eyes, for in her sodden sentiment and relief from the strain of the past days, she was weeping.
The next morning, Kaye felt somber and fuzzy, but experienced no other ill effects from the farewell party. In the two hours before Lado took her to the airport, she walked through the hallways in two of the three laboratory buildings, now almost empty. The staff and most of the graduate student assistants were attending a special meeting in Eliava Hall to discuss the various offers made by American and British and French companies. It was an important and heady moment for the institute; in the next two months, they would probably make their decisions on when and with whom to form alliances. But they could not tell her now. The announcement would come later.
The institute still showed decades of neglect. In most of the labs, shiny thick white or pale green enamel had peeled to show cracked plaster. Plumbing dated from the 1960s, at the latest; much of it was from the twenties and thirties. The brilliant white plastic and stainless steel of new equipment only made more obvious the Bakelite and black enamel, or the brass and wood of antique microscopes and other instruments. There were two electron microscopes enshrined in one building – great hulking brutes on massive vibration isolation platforms. Saul had promised them three new top-of-the-line scanning tunneling microscopes by the end of the year – if EcoBacter was chosen as one of their partners. Aventis or Bristol Myers Squibb could no doubt do better than that.
Kaye walked between the lab benches, peering through the glass doors of incubators at stacks of petri dishes within, their bottoms filled with a film of agar swept and clouded by bacterial colonies, sometimes marked by clear circular regions, called placques, where phage had killed all the bacteria. Day after day, year after year, the researchers in the institute analyzed and catalogued naturally occurring bacteria and their phage. For every strain of bacteria there was at least one and often hundreds of specific phage, and as the bacteria mutated to throw off these unwanted intruders, the phage mutated to match them, a never-ending chase. The Eliava Institute for Phage Research kept one of the largest libraries of phage in the world, and they could respond to bacterial samples by producing phage within days.
On the wall over the new lab equipment, posters showed the bizarre spaceship-like geometric head and tail structures of the ubiquitous T-even phage – T-4, T-6, and T-8, so designated in the nineteen twenties – hovering over the comparatively huge surfaces of Escherichia coli bacteria. Old photographs, old conceptions – that phage simply preyed upon bacteria, hijacking their DNA merely to produce new phage. Many phage did in fact do just that, keeping bacterial populations in check. Others, known as lysogenic phage, became genetic stowaways hiding within the bacteria and inserting their genetic messages into the host DNA. Retroviruses did something very similar in larger plants and animals.
Lysogenic phage suppressed their own expression and assembly and were perpetuated within the bacterial DNA, carried down through the generations. They would jump ship when their host showed clear signs of stress, creating hundreds or even thousands of phage offspring per cell, bursting from the host to escape.
Lysogenic phage were almost useless in phage therapy. They were far more than mere predators. Often these viral invaders gave their hosts resistance to other phage, even to antibiotics. Sometimes they carried genes from one cell to the next, genes that could transform the cell. Lysogenic phage had been known to take relatively harmless bacteria – benign strains of Vibrio, for example – and transform them into virulent Vibrio cholerae. Outbreaks of deadly strains of E. coli in beef had been attributed to transfers of toxin-producing genes by phage. The institute worked hard to identify and eliminate these phage from their preparations.
Kaye, however, was fascinated by them. She had spent much of her career studying lysogenic phage in bacteria and retroviruses in apes and humans.
Hollowed-out retroviruses were commonly used in gene therapy and genetic research as delivery systems for corrective genes, but Kaye’s interest was less practical. Many metazoans – non-bacterial life forms – carried the dormant remains of ancient retroviruses in their genomes. As much as one third of the human genome was made up of these so-called endogenous retroviruses.
She had written three papers about human endogenous retroviruses, or HERV, suggesting they might contribute to novelty in the genome – and much more. Saul agreed with her. ‘Everyone knows they carry little secrets,’ he had once told her, when they were courting.
Their courtship had been odd and lovely. Saul himself was odd and sometimes quite lovely and kind; she just never knew when those times would be.
Kaye paused for a moment by a metal lab stool and rested her hand on its Masonite seat. Saul had always been interested in the bigger picture; she, on the other hand, had been content with smaller successes, tidier chunks of knowledge. So much hunger had led to many disappointments. He had quietly watched his younger wife achieve so much more. She knew it hurt him. Not to have immense success, not to be a genius, was for Saul a major failing.
Kaye lifted her head and inhaled the air: bleach, steam heat, a waft of fresh paint and carpentry from the adjacent library. She liked this old lab with its antiques and humility and decades-old story of hardship and success. The days she had spent here, and on the mountain, had been among the most pleasant of her recent life. Tamara and Zamphyra and Lado had not only made her feel welcome, they had seemed to open up instantly and generously to become family to a wandering foreign woman.
Saul might have a very big success here. A double success, perhaps. What he needed to feel important and useful.
She turned and through the open doorway saw Tengiz, the stooped old lab caretaker, talking to a short, plump young man in gray slacks and a sweatshirt. They stood in the corridor between the lab and the library. The young man looked at her and smiled. Tengiz smiled as well, nodded vigorously, and pointed to Kaye. The
