Relic (Pendergast, #1)

by Douglas Preston

Perhaps, to be fair, he’d had a little more objective distance than those who’d been inside the Museum that night, fighting the beast in the dark. But whatever the reason, there seemed to be small defects with the solution: little problems, minor contradictions that everyone had missed. Everyone except Kawakita.

the supreme challenge had been growing the plant from a single fiber. It had taxed all his abilities, his knowledge of botany and genetics. But he was channeling all his ferocious energies into one thing now—thoughts of tenure vanished, a leave of absence taken from the Museum.

now he had a large and steady supply growing in the tanks, fully inoculated with the reovirus. The strange reovirus that dated back sixty-five million years. It had proven to be a perversely attractive type of lily pad, blooming almost continuously, big deep-purple blossoms with venous appendages and bright yellow stamens. The virus was concentrated in the tough, fibrous stem.

a double-arrow pendant belonging to John Whittlesey in the creature’s lair. Proof, they said, that the monster had killed Whittlesey. Proof. What a joke. Proof, rather, that the monster was Whittlesey.

The reovirus in the plant was astonishing. Chances are, it had existed relatively unchanged since the Mesozoic era. In sufficient quantities, it had the power to induce morphological change of an astonishing nature.

By eating the fibers and becoming infected with the reovirus, Whittlesey had turned into Mbwun.

But then civilization came anyway, with all its terrors. Kawakita imagined the day it happened: the Whittleseything, crouched in the jungle, seeing the fire come falling from the sky, burning the tepui, the Kothoga, the precious plants. He alone escaped. And he alone knew where the life-giving fibers could still be found after the jungle was destroyed: He knew, because he had sent them there. Or perhaps Whittlesey was already gone when the tepui was burned. Perhaps the Kothoga had been unable to control, once again, the creature they had created. Maybe Whittlesey, in his pitiful, terrible condition, had set his own agenda, which hadn’t included sticking around as the Kothoga’s avenging angel. Perhaps he’d simply wanted to go home.

turned a human victim into a terrible killing machine. No, the word victim did not fairly describe one infected with the virus. A better word might be symbiont. Because it was a privilege to receive the virus. A gift. A gift from Greg Kawakita.

And already, Kawakita had ideas for improvements. New genes the reovirus could insert into its host.

for Kawakita, this side effect had provided cash from which to finance his research. He hadn’t wanted to sell the drug originally, but the financial pressures he’d experienced had made it inevitable. He smiled as he thought of how easy it had been. The drug had already been given a name by the select coterie of eager users: glaze.

who needed a Nobel Prize, when the whole world was suddenly there for the plucking?