Flinx in Flux

by Alan Dean Foster

  “Our debt to you, young man, is real. You know that Clarity here is irreplaceable.”

  “I know. She told me—several times.”

  Vandervort laughed at that, a hard but in no way masculine chuckle. “Oh, she’s not shy, our Clarity. With all she’s accomplished already, she has no need for false modesty. Whoever carried out this execrable act did their research well. Clarity’s the one member of our scientific staff we can’t afford to lose. Now that you’re back among us,” she added grimly, “we won’t lose track of you again.”

  “I’m not worried. It looks like you’ve shut everything down tight, Amee.”

  “That we have.” She hesitated. “Would you feel more comfortable with a full-time bodyguard?”

  “I already have one.” Clarity reached up to pet Scrap, secure in his place beneath her sidetail.

  Vandervort issued another of her soft grunts and turned to Flinx. “Clarity’s told you what we’re doing here?”

  “You’re working with malleable local lifeforms to produce commercially viable offshoots.”

  She nodded. “Genetically, Longtunnel is a mine whose shafts have already been dug for us. We haven’t been set up here very long. Barely begun to classify, much less extensively select, breed, and gengineer. Even so we’ve managed to come up with several successful products.”

  “Clarity mentioned your Verdidion Weave.”

  “That’s been our big success thus far, but not the only one.” She reached behind her and opened a drawer in a metal cabinet. Sweet smells filled the room as she withdrew something and placed it on the desk in front of her.

  The shallow pan of blue metallic glass was filled with cubes of jelly: red, yellow, and purple. They did not shimmer when she slid the pan across the desk top.

  “Have a bite.” Flinx studied the jelly uncertainly. “Oh, go on, dear.” Vandervort selected a purple cube, popped it in her mouth, and chewed enthusiastically.

  “Go on, Flinx.” Clarity helped herself to a pink-hued square. “They’re wonderful.”

  Hardly able to sit and cower in terror while the two women munched away, Flinx chose a bright green cube and cautiously put it in his mouth. Anticipating a lime or gooseberry taste, he was startled by the explosion of flavors that shocked his taste buds. The cube’s density was another surprise. It was tougher than gelatin, closer to rubber in consistency. Yet once he broke it down, it dissolved readily in his mouth. The multiple flavors lingered powerfully long after he had swallowed the last bite.

  He helped himself to another green cube, then a purple one. The flavor burst was as different and exciting the third time as it had been with the first two. It occurred to him as he was chewing the fourth cube that he might be consuming some extremely valuable products, though Vandervort hadn’t withdrawn the tray. On the contrary, she appeared to delight in his enjoyment.

  “Remarkable stuff, isn’t it, young man? When people have exhausted their purchasing power on electronic gadgets and labor-saving devices and art, there isn’t much left to dally over except food. A new taste sensation is worth more than the most powerful new personal computing device. Whether intended for mind or stomach, entertainment is always more valuable than anything the gengineers can invent.”

  “What is it?” a sated Flinx asked, licking his fingers.

  “Almost as nutritious as it is tasty, for one thing.” Clarity was wearing her prideful smile again. “It tastes like it’s packed with sugars, but it’s a sham. In reality it’s almost solid protein.”

  Vandervort took obvious delight in identifying it for him. “It’s a pseudoplasmodium slug.”

  Flinx stopped licking his fingers. Vandervort’s smile grew wider. “A slime mold, young man.”

  Flavors began to fade rapidly. “I don’t follow you.”

  “A pseudoplasmodium is an amoebeic aggregate. Strange lifeform, slime molds. When grouped together they behave as a single entity, but if you take them apart, shake them around in water or something, they break down into individual clusters quite capable of sustaining life.” She gestured at the half-empty tray. “We don’t know what we’re going to call it yet. I don’t deal with advertising and publicity.”

  “I’m sure they’ll call it something like Flavor Cubes,” Clarity said.

  “Yes, dear. ‘Flavor Cubes from the taste mines of Longtunnel.’ Or some such drivel to appeal to the popular taste.” Vandervort sounded almost bitter. “They certainly will not market it as slime mold.”

  “I take it the stuff is reasonable to produce,” Flinx murmured.

  “More than reasonable. It’s a saprobe. It lives by decaying other organic matter. Some are parasites. These—” She indicated the tray again. “—are easily managed. The organism thrives on garbage and waste. How’s that for a practical food resource? A new food that tastes good, is visually appealing, and is good for you. And all it needs for growth is a little dampness and garbage.”

  “It grows naturally here?” Flinx asked.

  “No, dear, but something very like it does. We intensified the colors, the rate of growth, and greatly manipulated the natural flavors. We’ll be ready to commence production on a limited basis in a couple of months. Not right here: This will always be a research facility. A pair of large virgin caverns are being developed off to the west. It’ll be sold as a luxury item at first, like the Verdidion Weave. We’ll expand gradually into the mass market.”

  What’s in a name? he mused as he gazed at the tray of slime mold. The Commonwealth was rife with foodstuffs no one would touch if he or she had an inkling of their origins. That was what advertising existed for: to make the impractical and unappetizing irresistible. If Vandervort had allowed it, he would gladly have emptied the entire tray.

  “Clarity mentioned someone named Maxim. Is he a gengineer, too?”

  “No. Max is our head mycologist. Not everything we’re working with down here is fungi, though. Longtunnel’s subterranean world is alive, with astonishing lifeforms. You wouldn’t think to find so much variety thriving in darkness. Plenty of mammals or close relations.”

  “I’ve seen the floats and the photomorphs.”

  Vandervort nodded approvingly. “There are a few creatures the taxonomists haven’t figured out how to classify. Distant relations of deep-sea dwellers on Earth and Cachalot. Their ancestors lived next to sulfurous vents. The sulfides were metabolized by bacteria that lived in the creature’s gills, or by special organs; microbes broke down the sulfide compounds and used the resultant energy to make carboyhdrates, proteins, and liquids.

  “When the oceans here on Longtunnel receded, exposing the limestone and creating the caverns, these ocean dwellers didn’t die out. Instead they became air-breathing land creatures, and food for others. Many of them occupy the same ecological niche underground that chlorophyllous plants do topside. We expected to find a simple food chain here, and instead we stumbled into something wondrous and complex. To top it all, the entire ecosystem is particularly amenable to gengineering.” She leaned back in her chair and regarded her guests speculatively.

  “I’ll see to arranging some sort of suitable reward for you, young man.”

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  “It really isn’t,” Clarity told her supervisor. “He’s not short of resources. He has his own ship.”

  Vandervort’s expression was unreadable. Flinx noted that her eyebrows had been neatly and recently plucked, then dyed to match the rest of her hair.

  “His own ship, you say? I am impressed. But we must give you something for returning our Clarity to us, young man. I suppose we could carpet a room or two on your vessel. You would be astonished to learn what our first rolls of Verdidion Weave sell for on places like Earth and New Riviera. It would be a suitable gift.”

  “Thanks, but I like the floors on my ship just the way they are. If you’re going to insist, though, I wouldn’t mind having a few trays of that.” He nodded at the lustrous pseudoplasmodium.

  Vandervort chuckled, picked
up the tray, and returned it to the refrigeration unit concealed in the cabinet behind her desk. “As I mentioned, we’re not at the production stage yet. But I’ll talk to the lab and see what can be done. Feeding you doesn’t seem like much of a reward, but if that’s what interests you, we have a couple of other new ingestible bioproducts on the shelves that might tickle your taste buds. Clarity can show them to you. She’s already breached most of our security regulations, anyway.”

  “He saved my life!” Clarity reminded her supervisor.

  “Take it easy, dear. I was only teasing.” She smiled ingratiatingly at Flinx. She was very good at what she did, he knew. The “harmless kindly aunt” act was excellent. The feelings he felt emanating from her suggested someone a good deal more calculating and professional. As a connoisseur of emotions, he always applauded a skilled performance. She took his smile for indifference.

  “You aren’t interested in our little industrial secrets, anyway. Are you, young man?”

  “I’m a student, but not of those. Anything secret stays with me. I’m interested in knowledge for its own sake. Not for sale.”

  “What a quaint notion. Well, if you’re good enough for our Clarity, you’re good enough for me.” She smiled and extracted the narcostick, which despite appearances was not permanently affixed to her lower lip.

  “I leave it to Clarity to exercise proper judgment. Under her supervision you may have the run of our facility. It’s the least we can do. Just promise me you’re not wearing any concealed recording devices. How long do you plan to stay with us?”

  “I don’t know how long I’m going to stay, and I’m not wearing anything except what you can see,” he replied, knowing full well he probably had been scanned for concealed instrumentation as soon as he’d emerged from the shuttle.

  “Very, well, then. Enjoy your visit.” She was smiling an entirely different kind of smile as she glanced back at Clarity. “Do you think we can find suitable lodgings for our young man, my dear?”

  “I think so,” Clarity managed to reply with a straight face.

  Vandervort rose as she spoke. It was a gesture of dismissal. “Just remember, young man, that she has an unbreakable long-term contract here, and now that we have her back, I have no intention of letting her leave, voluntarily or otherwise.”

  “I’ve no intention of interrupting my work here, Amee.”

  “I’m glad to hear that, my dear. I am aware of other incentives to travel besides wealth and fame, and I’m not so old that I don’t remember how powerful they can be.”

  Chapter Nine

  The following day she formally checked in with her colleagues and fellow workers. When they heard her story, Flinx was battered by a barrage of friendly backslaps and congratulatory handshakes. Everyone was grateful to him for what he had done. He bore their gratitude patiently.

  He tried to involve himself in their conversations, but the technical terms were outside his range of experience and study, though Clarity was obviously in her element. A short, swarthy, and perpetually nervous young man introduced himself as Maxim. He was not much older than Flinx. His lab was overflowing with an extraordinary array of chlorophyll-less growths. A few were quite mobile. Maxim clearly enjoyed the role of teacher and tour guide.

  “We still aren’t sure whether the fungi derived from the algae or the protozoans, but there are genotypes on this world that blow most of our traditional theories all to hell.”

  Flinx listened enthusiastically, as he did to every new piece of information that came his way. Nor was the tour only of labs and libraries. There was time and the means to relax as well. Individual food service, undated entertainment on disk and chip, even occasional live performances that made the rounds of the various company facilities. Everything, Flinx thought, to make life underground as pleasant and endurable as possible.

  “Small compensation,” Clarity said, “when you realize we never get to see the sun or the sky. Coldstripe does its best, though. We’re the biggest research outfit on Longtunnel. The others are small and just getting started. Most of them are just doing pure research. We’re the only ones who’ve gone as far as developing a salable product. The House of Sometra is trying, but they have no real production facilities as yet. Once the Flavor Cubes join Verdidion Weave on the market, everyone will stop asking where Longtunnel is. The plan is to export directly through Thalia Major. But I don’t imagine you’re very interested in the economics of it.”

  “I’m interested in everything,” he told her quietly.

  It was fascinating to watch her in the lab. When working, she underwent a complete transformation. The smiles disappeared, laughter became muted, and she was all seriousness and attention to business when trying to analyze the genetic structure of some new fungus or sulfide eater.

  She rarely worked with the actual lifeform. That was left to the surgeons and manipulators. Her career and work were bounded by the limits of a twenty-by-twenty infinite-screenfront Hydroden Custom Designer, with several billion megabytes of online storage in a supercoduct Markite Cylinder Tap. Without touching a living cell, she could take entire complex organisms apart and reassemble them on demand, could run an entire evolutionary schematic in a few hours. Only after a possible recombinant had been simulated and overchecked would it finally be tried in vivo.

  It was mesmerizing and disquieting to watch—because it was too easy for him to empathize with the lowly creatures whose genetic codes were being played with like a child’s blocks, even if they were lifeforms as simple as fungi and slime molds. Because it was all too easy for him to imagine a cluster of faceless strangers bent over similar devices, moving molecules of DNA around with electronic probes, inserting proteins and removing genes. Because it was all too easy to envision the end product of their dispassionate and emotionless work as himself.

  Clarity disquieted him in another fashion entirely. For someone who had recently vowed not to involve himself any further in the problems of a frivolous and uncaring humanity, he was powerfully attracted to the young gengineer. She had already willingly demonstrated how attracted she was to him.

  He delighted in observing her with her colleagues. When working, she was no longer the frightened, exhausted woman he had hauled out of the Ingre jungle—she added a decade in maturity and self-confidence.

  Their relationship had begun to settle. It was not as if she had turned cool toward him. If anything, she was more relaxed in his company than ever before. But with the return of her self-assurance had come a slight and welcome distancing. If he pressed the issue, he did not doubt that she would respond readily. That was plain to see in her eyes, unmistakable in her voice. It was simply that she was no longer dependent on him for her continued survival. Better this way, he told himself.

  Unfortunately, her increased confidence and self-assurance in their relationship were marked by a steady decline in his own. While he was the intellectual equal or superior of any of her male acquaintances, in matters of social interaction he had less experience than the average nine teen-year-old.

  Well, he had always been a loner, probably always would be. He tagged along as she made the rounds and performed her work, content with the moments in between when they could talk of other things.

  Clarity was deeply involved with something called a Sued mold. It looked like a cross between a mushroom and a jelly. The mold itself was useless, but its mature spores smelled like fresh-mown clover. More important, when properly applied, the powder had the ability to mask human body odor completely. The effect lasted only a few hours.

  If Clarity and her colleagues could reengineer the mold to produce spores whose odor-killing ability would last for at least twenty hours, or two or three days, they would have a new cosmetic product that could readily compete in Commonwealth markets. Tests showed the spores were harmless and had no side effects, being a natural product, whereas many deodorants contained metals that were potentially dangerous when absorbed by the human body. Clarity had tried it on herself, with no
ill effects.

  She turned away from the designer. “Not very glamorous, is it? Bringing all the resources of modern gengineering to bear on the problem of body odor. Amee say sometimes the products that make the most profit are the ones that address the simplest problems.

  “Derek and Hing are working on another slime mold that exists in semiliquid form. It can metabolize toxic chemicals and turn them into useful fertilizer. If its natural metabolic rate can be speeded up and it can be raised cheaply enough and in sufficient quantity, we can spread it over half the restricted dumps in the Commonwealth. Imagine being able to literally transform poison into peaches. Sludge and stinks—that’s what we’re about down here.”

  “Very money-oriented.”

  “Does that upset you?”

  He turned away. “I don’t know. I just have a lingering problem with altering the natural order of things purely for profit.”

  “Now you sound like my kidnappers,” she said, chiding him gently. “Flinx, every business since the beginning of time has altered the natural order of things for profit. We just begin at the source. There’s no pollution here because we’re working within Longtunnel’s established ecosystem. We aren’t setting up smelly factories or dumping toxins down pristine tunnels. On the contrary, we’re working on products like the kind you’ve seen that are designed to reduce and clean up pollution on other worlds. A whole new industry is starting up here. If our plans pan out, this formerly useless world is going to become the source of a host of new purifying products. We’re working with one ecosystem to improve dozens of others.

  “Until Vandervort and her backers decided to take a chance on Longtunnel, this world was nothing but a thin file in Commonwealth galographics. Now that we’re actually established here, we’re discovering dozens of new and exciting possibilities every day.”

  “And who benefits ultimately?”