Rabies (1st part)

Novel published in Serbian as "Besnilo", Sveučilišna Naklada Liber, 1983, Zagreb, © Borislav Pekić; English translation © by Bernard Johnson.

Peste si grande viendra a la grande gousse
Proche secours, est bien loinge les remedes,
Nostradamus

Mrs. Andrea Milliner of Stroud, Gloucestershire, died two months after being bitten by a dog while on holiday in India… Fifteen people have died from rabies in Britain since 1945. Mrs. Milliner's death was the firs for three years.
The Guardian, 9th October, 1981.

PROLOGUE – RHABDOVIRUS

Penetrating into the live cell of a foreign body, the virus substitutes its own for the cell's substance and transforms it into a factory for the production of new viruses. The changes which it brings about in this way in the life medium of the cell are incomparably deeper and more dramatic than man can ever hope to bring about in his own milieu.

The virus is the most perfect being in the cosmos. Its biological organization is nothing less than a machine for producing life in its purest sense. The virus is the summit of natural creative evolution.

The summit of artificial creative evolution is – an intelligent virus. A creation with the form of a man and the nature of a virus, the vitality of a virus and the intelligence of a man.
A symbiosis of a virus, divested of its lack of purpose and of man, freed of his limitation would rule over nature, which both otherwise serve only as refuse.
Professor Frederick Liebermann

When in the 8th Book of the Iliad, through the mouth of Aias Teucros Homer describes Trojan Hector as 'Kion lisitir' – mad dog, man did not yet know of It. Seen for the first time under the electron microscope in 1962, it was bullet-shaped, bulging outwards at the top on an elongated base. It measured approximately 180 milicrons in length and 75 across. It was three hundred times smaller than the animal in which it was born, and sixty million times smaller than the man it would kill.

It lived in a cosmos called a Neuron which was five thousand times its size. It was smaller than any other living thing, but this injustice was of no importance, for, paradoxically, it was more powerful than anything else alive.

It was a wonder of nature, its origins shrouded in mystery, as are the origins of all mysteries. But its purpose was beyond doubt, and beyond hope. It devastated all its native surroundings with the same treacherous, diseased, savage heedlessness with which man abuses and ravages his own environment. It was the murderous black sun of its cosmos, destined to become the sun of all others.

In his persecution of Its ancestors, man had disguised It under the imprecise and innocent-sounding designation of a helical ribonicleoprotein acid in a lipoprotein membrane with a glikoprotein casing.

But in that ancient war there was nothing for It to fear, for it came into the world with yet a third casing which so far had no name. When that name was given, it would mean that It was impenetrable and indestructible. For It was a mutant, the first of its breed.

It was alone, but It had no sense of loneliness. It had an inborn affinity for large numbers. In twenty-four hours there had been six thousand of its ancestors; in ninety-six human hours – two hundred thousand; in two weeks – twenty million. But in Its likeness in twenty-four human hours there would be forty million others. Its multiplication was ruled by a progression which lost itself in incalculable infinity.

And by then no one could know where It would be.

It would journey through its microcosm as man journey through the macrocosm. Its wanderings would take It through places with names which are mysterious for modern man as are the Hindukush Mountains, the desert of Karakum, the primeval forests of Amazon; as mysterious for mankind of the future, if there were a guarantee of his continuing existence, as the mists of Andromeda, the constellation of Aldebaran, the star Proxima Centauri… Its cosmic entry ports would be the Nervus Sciaticus, the Ammon's Horn, the Cerebellum, the Hyppocampus, the Salivarna Glandula; its transgalactic route would be by way of the spinal cord, its final detination – the Brain.

Wherever It passed, worlds would be transformed by cataclysms more terrible than any earthquake that had ever struck the Planet since its very beginnings.

Wherever It passed It would transmit fear, hatred and frenzy to those with the misfortune not to go mad at once from its touch; to those lucky enough to go mad it would transmit some other consciousness whose very nature no one would ever be able to penetrate.

It would once again become what It was created to be, what arrogant man had for some short time disputed: the smallest, yet the most powerful, the most dangerous, the most pitiless living creation in the Universe, incomprehensible to the unity of worlds to which its Neuron belonged. Born to die only when It alone would be left, and when there would be no more death for It to live on.

This time man would not be able to stand against It. Only Aristaeus, the son of Apollo, could have done so, but there was no belief left in the old gods any more.
And so It set off calmly to fulfill its destiny; to annihilate and to die.