We Install

by Harry Turtledove

  “I talked to the couple who had the damaged baby—mostly to the father, because the mother’s still wiped out,” the human said.

  Miss Murple had heard somewhere that delivering a baby was difficult and unpleasant for a human female. She’d never expected to need to know that, but life was full of surprises. “Any leads?” she asked.

  “No known enemies or business rivals. No known trouble with the Snarre’t,” the other detective replied. “They got blindsided, in other words.”

  She heard the human idiom as The sun rose in their faces. “That doesn’t make this any easier,” she said.

  “Tell me about it!” the human replied. “It’ll take lots of legwork, trying to nail down everybody they dealt with around the time she got pregnant.”

  “That may not have anything to do with it,” Miss Murple said. “Some hoxbombs are planted in a parent’s genes years before the affected offspring are born.”

  “Oh, my aching back!” the human detective said. “How do you ever catch a perp in a case like that?”

  “You said it yourself,” Miss Murple replied. “A lot of legwork—and a lot of lab work.”

  “This is a mess, Kling,” Reiko Kelly said. “You’ve got to pin it on somebody, or there’ll be hell to pay.”

  “Okay,” Kling said obligingly. He stabbed out a forefinger at the lieutenant. “Why’d you do it?”

  “What?” Then Lieutenant Kelly got it. “Oh. Funny. See? I’m laughing. How about nabbing the bastard who really did it?”

  “Yeah. How about that?” John Paul Kling was not a happy man. “From what the Furball says, it could be anybody who ever had anything to do with the Cravaths. That’s sure what it sounded like, anyhow. Happy day, happy day.”

  “It could be anybody, uh-huh. It could be, but it isn’t. It’s somebody, somebody in particular. Who had a reason to give them grief? Grief!” Kelly shook her head. Long auburn hair flipped back and forth. “What do you do with a kid like that? What do you do for a kid like that? You know the worst part? No matter how scrambled it is, it’s pretty much healthy. It could be around for a lot of years. How would you like to be Mommy and Daddy, knowing what Junior’s like all that time?”

  “How’s it supposed to eat or talk? You see that thing it’s got for a tongue?” Kling said.

  “I saw.” The lieutenant shuddered. “But surgery can probably fix that. Surgery can fix … quite a bit, maybe.” She sounded like someone trying to make herself believe it.

  John Paul Kling didn’t believe it, not for a minute. “And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men / Couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again,” he quoted grimly.

  “Yeah, well, if we don’t solve this one, that’s what Lacanth C is liable to be like,” Kelly said. “Plenty of humans will want to pay the Snarre’t back for this. Then they’ll have an excuse for paying us back, and then. …” She spread her hands.

  “We don’t even know they did it,” Kling pointed out.

  “No, but everybody human here will sure think they did. A hoxbomb? My God!” Kelly rolled her eyes. “Do you want to risk escalation?”

  “Nope. If this is such an important case, how come a dumb sergeant catches it?” Kling asked.

  “So I can cut your nuts off if you screw up,” his superior said brutally.

  “You sure know how to pump a guy up so he’ll work hard,” Kling said.

  “What? You think my nuts—well, my tits—aren’t on the line, too? Get real,” Kelly said.

  “Happy day,” Kling said again. “Okay, I’ll start the legwork. I’m going to assume Beverly Cravath caught the hoxbomb around the time she got pregnant—”

  “What if she didn’t?” Kelly broke in.

  “Then either we’re screwed or the case takes a lot longer to solve unless we get lucky,” Kling answered. “But I can get a pretty good handle on who all they both had anything to do with from surveillance cameras and stuff. I’ll do that first, check those people out, and see what the lab can figure out about the hoxbomb. Maybe they’ll be able to work out if it’s one of ours or straight from the Snarre’t, and how long it was in Mrs. Cravath and Junior.” He flinched. No, he didn’t like thinking about Junior. Who would?

  Grimacing, the lieutenant nodded. “Yeah, go ahead. That’s about all you can do, I guess. You think the Snarre’t will really help, or are they just blowing smoke?”

  “Well, they sent a Furball over in the middle of the day, so that’s something,” Kling replied. “He—she—it—whatever—didn’t seem to like the idea of a hoxbomb much. I sure hope like hell they help. Their genetics labs beat ours six ways from Sunday.”

  “You’re not supposed to say stuff like that,” Kelly told him.

  “Why not? Isn’t it true?” Kling made as if to spit in disgust. “You didn’t see us inventing goddamn hoxbombs, did you?”

  “We’re as smart as they are,” Lieutenant Kelly insisted.

  “Sure we are. Who says we’re not? We do some stuff better than they do. But they do some stuff better than we do, too. Electronics? Yeah, we wallop the snot out of them. Biotech? You know the answer as well as I do.”

  Reiko Kelly didn’t argue with him. Maybe that meant he was unquestionably right. Maybe it meant he’d stuck himself in deep kimchi. Maybe it meant both at once. Sergeant Kling was mournfully certain which way he’d bet.

  Miss Murple managed to obtain a tissue sample from the baby human who’d been hoxbombed. The human doctors wouldn’t let her take the sample herself—as if she could do anything to the baby now that hadn’t already happened to it! She wasn’t happy when they did it. Bald Ones knew about as much about genetics as Snarre’t knew about popup-blocking software. She only hoped they wouldn’t mess up the sample.

  She rode her caitnop—a faster though slightly stupider beast than a drof—back to the Snarre’i side of town with nothing but relief. The laboratory, of course, stayed open all hours of the day and night. She turned over the sample to the chief technician on duty: we can call him Louie Pasture. He smelled unhappy when she told him the provenance of the sample.

  “Why didn’t you take it yourself, so we’d know it was done right?” Louie demanded.

  “Because I damn well couldn’t,” Miss Murple answered. “It was their jurisdiction. It was their chemical-stinky, glareblind hospital. One of their physicians did it. They don’t like us any better than we like them.”

  “Chemical-stinky is right,” Louie Pasture said scornfully. “They try to do analysis like that, you know? With machines and electricity and I don’t know what. They make everything as complicated as they can. Amazing they ever got anywhere, when they don’t understand bacteria at all.”

  The Snarre’l word for bacteria actually meant something more like one-celled chemical factories you can train to do your work for you. That’s a lot to pack into one word, but the Snarre’t packed a lot into the technology. Bacteria, on their home planet and on Earth, were much more versatile biochemically than plants or animals or fungi or slime molds. From a bacterium’s point of view, all the bigger, more highly organized forms of life represented a couple of boring variations on a theme. Either they photosynthesized or they ate things that photosynthesized. But there were more tricks in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in their philosophies.

  Some varieties of bacteria used oxygen. Some got along without it very nicely. Quite a few preferred temperatures close to that of boiling water. Those were some of the most valuable, because their biochemistry was so robust. If it weren’t, they would have cooked. When you used enzymes and other proteins derived from them down at room temperature, those were often much more potent than the ones taken from less thermophilic beasties.

  Miss Murple’s race had understood that for a lot of years, and centered an elaborate technology of selective breeding and deliberate mutation on it. Human DNA analysis had scratched the surface of such t
echniques. From a Snarre’ perspective, that was about all humans had done along those lines.

  “Well, we’ll see what we’ve got,” Louie Pasture said, and placed the sample in a preliminary checking bath, one that searched for contaminants. His nostril slits widened as he sniffed the bath. “Not … too bad.” His voice was grudging. “And they gave you a big enough sample, didn’t they?”

  “They measured it by their standards,” Miss Murple answered. “If they need this much to know anything—”

  “Then they aren’t likely to find much no matter what kind of sample they take,” Louie finished for her. “Makes it easier for us, though.”

  He prepared several more baths. Each was a culture of a bacterium primed and tweaked to react to the genetic presence of a particular hoxbomb that hit humans. Miss Murple didn’t know whether the bacteria were originally from her own homeworld or from Earth. For all she cared, some could have come from one planet and some from the other. The only thing that mattered was what they told her—or rather, told Louie Pasture.

  The lab tech muttered to himself as he diluted some of the tissue sample from the victim and put a small amount in each bath. “How long do we have to wait for results?” Miss Murple asked. She didn’t have much experience with hoxbomb labwork.

  “Depends,” Louie said. “If it’s a common one, we’ll find out right away. If it’s not one I’m set up for with these baths, we’ll have to try some others.”

  He passed a sniffer over each bath in turn. Its nostril slits were vastly more sensitive than his own—for this purpose. The little animal was bred to detect the metabolic byproducts the bacteria in the test bath gave off when they came up against genetic material from their particular hoxbomb type. Humans would have used machines to do the same job. Humans, in Miss Murple’s opinion, were fools. Of course natural selection, given several billion years, could come up with more sensitive detectors than engineers could in a few centuries starting from scratch.

  For brute force, on the other hand, engineering had advantages over natural selection. Human weapons weren’t subtle, which didn’t mean they weren’t strong. Humans might not be able to ravage a biosphere the way the Snarre’t could. But if you could take out a whole planet, or maybe even the star it orbited, what price subtlety?

  The sniffer squeaked. “Ha!” Louie Pasture said. “Was it this bath or that one?” He slowly passed the sniffer above each of them in turn. When it went over the second bath, it squeaked again. He stroked it and gave it a treat. It wiggled with delight in his hand.

  “Which hoxbomb is that?” Miss Murple asked.

  Louie looked at the label on the side of the container, which was a shell bred for internal smoothness and sterility. (The animals that secreted the shells were bred to be tasty. Waste not, want not.) “It’s called Scrambled Egg 7—one of the oldest ones around,” he answered.

  “Could humans have got their hands on it?”

  “Oh, absolutely,” Louie said. “And if they got a sample, they could probably make it themselves. It’s that old and that simple.”

  “Which doesn’t mean it doesn’t work,” Miss Murple said. “All right—thanks, Louie. I’ll pass this on to the Baldy who’s tackling the case from their end. And I’ll see if he’s come up with anything for me.”

  “Good luck,” Louie said. “You know how come humans are bald? ’Cause they’re so dumb, they’d get shit on their fur if they had any.”

  Miss Murple thought that was funny, too. But she did wonder what kind of jokes humans told when no Snarre’t were around to hear them.

  “Scrambled Egg 7?” John Paul Kling wrote it down. When he got a chance, he would google it and see what humanity knew about it. In the meantime … “How common is it?”

  “Very,” the Snarre’i detective answered. “It could have been used by one of our people or by one of yours.”

  “Okay.” Kling respected the Furball for mentioning her—his?—own folk first. “Do you have to use it when the pregnancy is new, or is it one of the ones that can sit for a long time before it does what it does?”

  “You asked the right questions, anyhow.” The alien sounded as uncertain about his competence as he was about its. “Scrambled Egg 7 is designed to damaged a very young fetus, not to lie in wait in an ancestor’s germ plasm for years or centuries.”

  “Okay,” Kling repeated cautiously. An ancestor’s, the Snarre’ said, not a parent’s. The human detective sergeant thought again about a hoxbomb lying dormant not just for years but for centuries. He shivered. That sounded like Revenge with a capital R. It also made him think that, even if you were sure you’d whipped the snot out of the Snarre’t, you would be smart not to count your chickens before they hatched and you could make sure they didn’t have wings growing out of their eye sockets or eighteen legs or anything delightful like that.

  “What have you got for me now?” Even through the babelfish, the Snarre’ sounded challenging.

  “I’ve been making a list of everybody who was in contact with the Cravaths around the time the hoxbombed baby was conceived,” Kling answered.

  “Yes, that seems sensible,” his opposite number allowed. “May I ask you something else? What is the present status of the youngster?”

  “They’re planning surgeries to repair as much as they can,” Kling said.

  “Surgeries?” Either the Snarre’ couldn’t believe what it was hearing or Kling’s babelfish was letting its imagination run away with it. The Furball went on, “I know you do more cutting than we would, but surely not even your surgery can repair everything wrong with that baby.”

  “I’m no expert, but I wouldn’t think so, either,” Kling agreed.

  “Then why do it? Why not put the poor thing out of its misery? Why not make sure its distorted genes—and with Scrambled Egg 7, they are—never enter your gene pool?”

  “Well, I wonder if they’re doing the kid a favor, too,” the detective said. “But if there’s a sound mind inside that—”

  “That mess of a body,” the Snarre’ broke in.

  The alien wasn’t wrong, either. All the same, Kling said, “Machines—and maybe helper animals—can do a lot. The kid’ll never be pretty, but we don’t get rid of people for being ugly. If we did, there’d be a lot fewer humans than there are.”

  “I hardly know where to begin,” his opposite number said. “What you call helper animals … You don’t know the meaning of the words.” That was bound to be true. Humans trained animals to help the disabled. The Snarre’t didn’t just breed them for that—they bioengineered them. This Snarre’ continued, “As for ugly … well, each species has its own standards. But if you are saying you don’t deliberately improve your own looks and smells—why not? We’ve been working on it for thousands of years, and the results are striking.”

  You still don’t do a thing for me, sweetie, John Paul Kling thought. But the Furball was right; that went species by species. He said, “Each race has its own customs. Different societies in the same species can have different customs.”

  What came from the Snarre’ was unmistakably a sigh. “No doubt.” That had to mean he—she?—figured these human customs were odious or stupid. Well, too damn bad. The alien said, “We should discuss this all another time, at leisure. In the meanwhile, tell me about the people who came into contact with either the male or female parent at about the time the latter discovered she was pregnant.”

  “Here’s the list.” Kling sent it to her phone. “As you’ll see, most of them are human, but some are, uh, Snarre’t.” Calling Furballs Furballs in front of a Furball could and would damage your promotion chances.

  He watched his opposite number’s big, bulging eyes go back and forth as the other detective read the names. The Snarre’s phone was supposed to render not only the Roman alphabet but also Snarre’l characters. He hoped it was working up to spec.

  After going through
the list—or so Kling presumed, anyhow—the Snarre’ said, “This is exceedingly comprehensive. How was it generated?”

  “Partly by questioning the Cravaths. That wasn’t such a good bet, though, because so much time’s gone by. The rest came from going through surveillance camera records.”

  “That must have taken a lot of time.”

  John Paul Kling shrugged. “A lot of computer time. Not so much for me. The real art is generating the algorithm that makes the computer identify the victims’ faces and body dimensions. We had a few false positives a real, live human had to sift through, but not that many.”

  “False positives?” the Snarre’ asked.

  “People who looked like the Cravaths to the computer but turned out not to be.”

  “I see. If you added a smellchecker, you could reduce those to zero, or very close to zero.”

  “Maybe,” Kling said. “We haven’t had such an easy time getting our hardware and software to handle smells, though.”

  “You would do better not to involve machines at all,” the Furball said. “If you’re trying to detect organic compounds, you need organic detectors.”

  “Oh, yeah, like I’m really in a position to change policy,” Kling said. “We’ve got a job to do here, not fix the damn world. Suppose you question the Snarre’t on the list, and I’ll take care of the humans. Then we can talk again—compare notes, you know? Do you think you can do it in four days? You don’t have as many of ’em as I do.”

  “I’ll try,” the other detective said. “I will speak to you then.” The screen on Kling’s phone went blank.

  Dealing with her own species, Miss Murple at least got to keep civilized hours. She could go out and talk to people while it was decently dark. She didn’t miss eyecovers, not even a little bit.

  Most of the stalls in the garage of the fancy apartment block where Sharon Rock and Joe Mountain (again, the names are approximate, but they beat the hell out of transcribing funny noises and trying to transcribe smells) lived had caitnops or drofs in them, the way they would have on a Snarre’ night back on the homeworld.