The Fall and the Rise
Screwworms | Opus 4.8
Cochliomyia hominivorax is Latin for “man-eater,” which will be the most distinguished thing about this particular individual, who has not yet been born.
He is, at present, a pupa: a brown capsule the size of a grain of rice, one of roughly twenty million produced this week in a facility outside Pacora, Panama, where the air smells of warm protein and every future is decided by dose. He never met his mother. She was a machine-tended female in a colony cage, laying eggs on schedule onto a substrate engineered for the purpose, and the eggs became larvae, and the larvae did what larvae of his species do, which is eat.
The eating deserves a word.
In the wild, the larva burrows head-down into living flesh, cattle and deer and dog and, per the Latin, the occasional taxpayer. It screws deeper as it grows, widening the wound, inviting its sisters. Decent maggots content themselves with dead tissue; this one eats the animal alive. A single cow, untreated, is dead in under two weeks. In the 1930s the American Southwest hemorrhaged livestock to this arrangement at a rate running to tens of millions of dollars, back when a dollar meant more. The screwworm, by every available measure, was winning.
Our subject was raised on slurry: ground meat, blood, and additive, pumped into rearing trays on a timetable, so that he grew fat and incurious in a tray in a rack in a room in a building whose entire purpose is to raise him well and then ruin him.
The ruin arrives on day five.
He does not experience the Cobalt-60 as anything. No heat, no sound, no dimming; the gamma radiation passes through his pupal case and through several hundred thousand pupae boxed around him and rearranges, very precisely, the chromosomes of the cells he will one day need to make offspring. The dose sits in a narrow window: strong enough to sterilize him, gentle enough to leave him fit to fly and court. It is a delicate thing, industrialized. Somewhere a technician logs the batch and moves on.
He ecloses three days later into a chilled room, one insect in a cloud of identical insects, and is counted, and boxed, and loaded, still cold and slow, onto an aircraft.
The airplane is the part he would tell his grandchildren about, in the counterfactual universe where he is allowed grandchildren.
At altitude over the Darién, the green throat of land where Panama narrows and the two American continents nearly touch, a chute opens and meters him into the morning with the rest of his cohort, tens of thousands of government-issued bachelors falling over the canopy at a density measured in flies per square kilometer. They are an invisible barrier, refreshed weekly by air, a permanent standing army of the reproductively void, stationed at the isthmus to intercept any wild screwworm drifting up from the endemic south before it can reach the north, where the herds are.
The north took decades to clear. Two USDA men worked out the technique, reasoning that the female of the species mates exactly once, and that a female who spends her single mating on a sterile male has spent it for good. Flood the country with sterile males; let arithmetic do the killing. Curaçao fell first, in the fifties. Then Florida. Then the American South, declared clean by 1966. Then Mexico, negotiated fly by fly across the eighties. Then the whole ladder of Central America, each rung a treaty, until the war was pushed down to this one green throat and pinned there, at ruinous and permanent expense, by falling insects. He is the expense. He is falling.
He finds her near midday.
She is wild, southern-born, fertile, and she has never mated. She mates now, once, with him, because he reached her first and the strategy has performed exactly as designed for seventy years. The courtship is brief. The narration draws the curtain, mostly because a diagram would show it better.
When it ends she carries, sealed inside her, the sum of his contribution to the future of his kind: nothing. Damaged code. She will find a wound on some animal and lay three hundred eggs with enormous care, and the eggs will be white and perfect and dead, and she will never mate again, because she cannot. Her line ends in him. This is the entire idea. This is the World Food Prize of 1992, made flesh and squandered on purpose.
He rests on a leaf, spent and content in whatever manner a fly is content, having performed the one function he was assembled for.
Then he sees the other one.
Another male. One of his own, wild-raised, bigger, unirradiated, drying his wings on a branch in a shaft of light. He has already found a female and left her genuinely, catastrophically pregnant, three hundred viable eggs bound for a wound and a wound bound for hundreds more. The wild male lifts off. He turns, without hesitation, north. Toward the herds. Toward the vast and undefended cattle of a continent that has forgotten what he is.