Blood Music

by Greg Bear

  Vergil leaned forward in his chair, troubles momentarily forgotten. Streamers appeared and shot through the fluctuating tunnel of concentric circles.

  “Blood flow through the artery,” Ernesto chimed in.

  The journey down the rat artery lasted thirty seconds. Vergil’s arm-hair prickled. If his lymphocytes could see, this was what they would experience, traveling down a blood vessel…A long irregular tunnel, blood smoothly coursing, getting caught in little eddies, the artery constricting—smaller and smaller circles, jerks and nudges as the biochip bounced against the walls—and finally, the end of the journey, as the biochip wedged into a capillary.

  The sequence ended with a flash of white.

  The room filled with cheers.

  “Now,” Rothwild said, smiling and raising his hand to return order. “Any comments, before we show this to Harrison and Yng?”

  Vergil bowed out of the celebration after one glass of champagne and returned to his lab, feeling more depressed than ever. Where was his spirit of cooperation? Did he actually believe he could tackle something as ambitious as his lymphocytes, all by himself? So far, he had—but at the expense of having the experiment discontinued, perhaps even destroyed.

  He slid the notebooks into a cardboard box and sealed the box with tape. On Hazel’s side of the lab, he found a masking tape label on a dewar flask—“Overton, do not remove”—and peeled it off. He applied the label to his box and put the box in a neutral territory beside the sink. He then set about washing the glassware and tidying his side of the lab.

  When the time came for an inspection, he would be the meek supplicant; he would give Harrison the satisfaction of victory.

  And then, surreptitiously—over the next couple of weeks-he would smuggle out the materials he needed. The lymphocytes would be removed last; they could be kept for some time at his apartment, in the refrigerator. He could steal supplies to keep them viable, but he wouldn’t be able to do any more work on them.

  He would decide later how he could best continue his experiment.

  Harrison stood in the lab door.

  “All clear,” Vergil said, properly repentant.

  CHAPTER THREE

  They watched him closely for the next week; then, concerned with the final stages of MABs prototype testing, they called off their watchdogs. His behavior had been beyond reproach.

  Now he set about the last steps in his voluntary departure from Genetron.

  Vergil hadn’t been the only one to step beyond the bounds of Genetron’s ideological largesse. Management, again in the person of Gerald T. Harrison, had come down on Hazel just last month. Hazel had gone off on a sidetrack with her E. colt cultures, trying to prove that sex had originated as a result of the invasion of an autonomous DNA sequence—a chemical parasite called the F-factor—in early prokaryotic life forms. She had postulated that sex was not evolutionarily useful—at least not to women, who could, in theory, breed parthenogenetically—and that ultimately men were superfluous.

  She had gathered enough evidence for Vergil, peeping into her notebooks, to agree with her conclusions. But Hazel’s work did not meet the Genetron standards. It was revolutionary, socially controversial. Harrison had given the word; she had stopped that particular branch of research.

  Genetron did not want publicity or even a tinge of controversy. Not yet. It needed a spotless reputation when it made its stock public and announced it was manufacturing functional MABs.

  They had not been concerned with Hazel’s papers, however. They had allowed her to keep them. That Harrison had retained his file bothered Vergil.

  When he was certain their guard was down, he went into action. He requested access to the company computers (he had been put on restriction indefinitely); quite properly, he said he needed to check his figures on structures of denatured and unfolded proteins. Permission was granted, and he logged onto the system in the share lab one evening after eight.

  Vergil had grown up a little too early to be classified as an eighties whizkid, but in the last seven years he had revised his credit records at three major firms and made an entry into the records of a famous university. That entry had practically guaranteed his getting the Genetron position. Vergil had never felt guilty about these intrusions and manipulations.

  His credit was never going to be as bad as it had once been, and there was no sense hi being punished for past indiscretions. He knew he was fully capable of doing Genetron’s work—his fake university records were just a show for personnel directors who needed lights and music. Besides, Vergil had believed—until the past couple of weeks—that the world was his personal puzzle, and that any riddlings and unravelings he could perform, including computer hacking, were simply part of his nature.

  He found it ridiculously easy to break the Rinaldi code used to conceal Genetron’s confidential files. There were no mysteries for him in the Gödel numbers and strings of seemingly random digits that came up on the screen. He slid into the numbers and information like a seal into water.

  He found his file and switched a key equation for the code in that section only. Then he decided to play it safer-there was always the possibility, however remote, of someone being just as ingenious as he was. He deleted the file completely.

  Next on his agenda was locating the medical records for Genetron employees. He altered his insurance designation and hid the alteration. Queries from outside sources would find him fully covered even after his termination, and there would never be any question about his not paying premiums.

  He worried about such things. His health was never completely satisfactory.

  He thought for a moment about other mischief that could be worked, and decided against it. He was not vindictive. He shut the terminal off and unplugged it

  Surprisingly little time—two days—passed before the deletion was noticed. Rothwild confronted him in the hall early one morning and told him his lab was off limits. Vergil protested mildly that he had a box of personal belongings he wanted to take with him.

  “Fine, but that’s it. No biologicals. I want to inspect everything.”

  Vergil calmly agreed. “What’s wrong now?” he asked.

  “Frankly, I don’t know,” Rothwild said. “And I don’t care to know. I vouched for you. So did Thornton. You’re a great disappointment to us all.”

  Vergil’s mind raced. He had never removed the lymphocytes; they had seemed safe enough disguised in the lab refrigerator, and he had never expected the boom to be lowered so quickly. “I’m out?”

  “You’re out. And I’m afraid you’re going to find it hard getting employment in any other private lab. Harrison is furious.”

  Hazel was already at work when they entered the lab. Vergil picked up the box in the neutral zone beneath the sink, covering the label with his hand. He hefted it and surreptitiously removed the tape, balling it up and dropping it into the trash basket “One more thing,” he said. “I have some lab failures laced with tracer that should be disposed of. Properly. Radionucleides.”

  “Oh, shit,” Hazel said. “Where?”

  “In the fridge. Not to worry—just carbon 14. May I?” He looked at Rothwild. Rothwild gestured for the box to be put on a counter so he could inspect it “May I?” Vergil repeated. “I don’t want to leave anything around that could be harmful.”

  Rothwild nodded reluctantly. Vergil went to the Kelvinator, dropping his lab coat on the counter. His hand brushed over a box of hypodermics, palming one.

  The lymphocyte pallet was on the bottom shelf. Vergil kneeled and removed a tube. He quickly inserted the syringe and drew up twenty cc’s of the serum. The syringe had never been used before and the cannule should therefore be reasonably sterile; he had no time for an alcohol swab, but he had to take that risk.

  Before he inserted the needle under his skin, he wondered briefly what he was doing, and what he thought he could gain. There was very little chance the lymphocytes would survive. It was possible that his tampering had changed them sufficien
tly for them to either die in his bloodstream, unable to adapt, or do something uncharacteristic and be destroyed by his own immune system.

  Either way, the life span of an active lymphocyte hi the human body was a matter of weeks. Life was hard for the body’s cops.

  The needle went in. He felt a dull prick, a brief sting, and the cold fluid mixing with his blood. He withdrew the needle and lay the syringe in the bottom of the refrigerator. Pallet of tubes and spinner bottle in hand, he stood and shut the door. Rothwild watched nervously as Vergil put on rubber gloves and one by one poured the contents of the tubes into a beaker half-filled with ethanol. He then added the fluid in the spinner bottle. With a small grin, Vergil stoppered the beaker and sloshed its contents, then placed it into a protected waste box. He slid the box across the floor with his foot. “It’s all yours,” he said.

  Rothwild had finished turning through the notebooks. “I’m not sure these shouldn’t remain in our possession,” he said. “You spent a lot of our time working on them.”

  Vergil’s idiot grin didn’t change. “I’ll sue Genetron and spread dirt hi every journal I can think of. Not good for your upcoming position in the market, no?”

  Rothwild regarded him with half-lidded eyes, his neck and cheeks pinking slightly. “Get out of here,” he said. “We’ll send the rest of your stuff later.”

  Vergil picked up the box. The cold feeling in his forearm had passed now. Rothwild escorted him down the stairs and across the sidewalk to the gate. Walter accepted the badge, his face rigid, and Rothwild followed Vergil to the parking lot.

  “Remember your contract,” Rothwild said. “Just remember what you can and cannot say.”

  “I am allowed to say one thing, I believe,” Vergil said, struggling to keep his words dear through his anger.

  “What’s that?” Rothwild asked.

  “Fuck you. All of you.”

  Vergil drove by the Genetron sign and thought of all that had happened within those austere walls. He looked at the black cube beyond, barely visible through a copse of eucalyptus trees.

  More than likely, the experiment was over. For a moment he felt ill with tension and disgust. And then he thought of the billions of lymphocytes he had just destroyed. His nausea increased and he had to swallow hard to keep the taste of acid out of his throat.

  “Fuck you,” he murmured, “because everything I touch is fucked.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Humans were a randy bunch, Vergil decided as he perched on a stool and watched the cattle call. Mellow space music powered the slow, graceful gyrations on the dance floor and flashing amber lights emphasized the pulse of packed bodies, male and female. Over the bar, an amazing array of polished brass tubing hummed and spluttered delivering drinks—mostly vintage wines by the glass—and forty-seven different kinds of coffees. Coffee sales were up; the evening had blurred into early morning and soon Weary’s would be turning off and shutting down.

  The last-ditch efforts of the cattle call were becoming more obvious. Moves were being made with more desperation, less finesse; beside Vergil, a short fellow in a rumpled blue suit was plighting his one-night troth to a willowy black-haired girl with Asiatic features. Vergil felt aloof from it all. He hadn’t made a move all evening, and he had been in Weary’s since seven. No one had made a move on him, either.

  He was not prize material. He shambled a bit when he walked—not that he had left the stool for any purpose but to go to the crowded restroom. He had spent so much time in labs the past few years that his skin was the unpopular shade of Snow White. He didn’t look enthusiastic, and he wasn’t willing to expend any amount of bullshit to attract attention.

  Mercifully, the air conditioning in Weary’s was good enough that his hay fever had subsided.

  Mostly, he had spent the evening observing the incredible variety—and underlying sameness—of the tactics the male animal used on the female. He felt out of it, suspended in an objective and slightly lonely sphere he wasn’t inclined to reach beyond. So why, he asked himself, had he come to Weary’s in the first place? Why did he ever go there? He had never picked up a woman at Weary’s—or any other singles bar—in his life.

  “Hello.”

  Vergil jumped and turned, eyes wide.

  “Excuse me. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  He shook his head. She was perhaps twenty-eight, golden-blonde, slender to the edge of skinny, with a pretty but not gorgeous face. Her eyes, large and clear and brown, were her best feature—except possibly for her legs, he amended, looking down on instinct.

  “You don’t come in here often,” she said. She glanced back over her shoulder. “Or do you? I mean, I don’t either. Maybe I wouldn’t know.”

  He shook his head. “Not often. No need. My success rate hasn’t been spectacular.”

  She turned back with a smile. “I know more about you than you think,” she said. “I don’t even need to read your palm. You’re smart, first off.”

  “Yeah?” he said, feeling awkward.

  “You’re good with your hands.” She touched his thumb where it rested on his knee. “You have very pretty hands. You could do a lot with hands like that. But they’re not greasy, so you’re not a mechanic. And you try to dress well, but…” She giggled a three-drink giggle and put her hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry. You do try.”

  He looked down at his black and green checked cotton shirt and black pants. The clothes were new. What could she complain about? Maybe she didn’t like the Topsiders he was wearing. They were a little scuffed.

  “You work…let’s see.” she paused, stroking her cheek. Her fingernails were masterpieces of the manicurist’s art, thick and long and shiny bronze. “You’re a techie.”

  “Pardon?”

  “You work in one of the labs around here. Hair’s too long to be Navy, and they don’t come here much anyway. Not that I’d know, you work in a lab and you’re…you’re not happy. Why’s that?”

  “Because—” He stopped. Confessing he was out of a job might not be strategic. He had six month’s unemployment coming; that and his savings could disguise his lack of gainful labor for a while. “How do you know I’m a techie?”

  “I can tell. Your shirt pocket—” She slipped her ringer into it and rugged gently. “Looks like it should hold a nerd pack of pencils. The kind you twist and the lead pokes out.” She smiled deliciously and thrust the pink tip of her tongue out to demonstrate.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. And you’re wearing argyles. Only techies wear argyles now.”

  “I like ’em,” Vergil said defensively.

  “Oh, so do I. What I’m getting at is, I’ve never known a techie. I mean…intimately.”

  Oh, Lord, Vergil thought. “What do you do?” he asked, immediately wishing he could suck the words back.

  “And I’d like to, if you don’t think that’s being too forward,” she said, ignoring his question. “Look, the bar’s dosing in a few minutes. I don’t need any more to drink, and I don’t much like the music. Do you?”

  Her name was Candice Rhine. What she did was accept advertising for the La Jolla Light. She approved of his Volvo sports car and she approved of his living quarters, a two-bedroom second-floor condominium four blocks from the beach in La Jolla. He had purchased it at a bargain price six years ago—just out of medical school—from a UCSD professor who had departed to Ecuador shortly after to complete a study on South American Indians.

  Candice entered the apartment as if she had lived there for years. She draped her suede jacket on the couch and her blouse on the dining table. Her bra she hung with a giggle on the chrome and glass light fixture over the table. Her breasts were small, amplified by a very narrow rib cage.

  Vergil watched all this with awe.

  “Come on, techie,” Candice said, standing naked at the bedroom door. “I like the furs.” He bad a baby alpaca rug over his California king-sized bed. She posed with her finger tips delicately pressed near the top of the door jamb, on
e knee cocked wide, then rotated on one heel and sauntered into the darkness.

  Vergil stood his ground until she turned the bedroom lamp on. “I knew it!” she squealed. “Look at all the books!”

  In the darkness, Vergil thought all too clearly of the perils of sex. Candice slept soundly beside him, the sleep of three drinks and making love four times.

  Four times.

  He had never done so well. She had murmured, before sleep, that chemists did it in their tubes and doctors did it with patience, but only a techie would do it in geometric progression.

  As for the perils…He had seen many times—most often in textbooks the results of promiscuity in a well-and frequently-traveled world. If Candice was promiscuous (and Vergil couldn’t help but believe only a promiscuous girl would be so forward with him) then there was no telling what sort of microorganisms were now setting up shop in his blood.

  Still, he had to smile.

  Four times.

  Candice groaned in her sleep and Vergil jerked, startled. He would not sleep well, he knew that much. He wasn’t used to having someone in his bed.

  Four.

  His brown-speckled teeth gleamed in the dark.

  Candice was much less forward in the morning. She solemnly insisted on making breakfast He had eggs and Beefstrips in his antique round-cornered refrigerator and she did an expert job on them, as if she had once been a short-order cook-or was that simply the way women did things? He had never caught the knack of frying eggs. They always came out with broken yokes and crackling seared edges.

  She regarded him with her wide brown eyes from across the table. He was hungry and ate quickly. Not much on delicacy and manners, he thought. So what? What more could she expect from him—or he from her?

  “I don’t usually stay the night, you know,” she said. “I call a lot of cabs at four in the morning when the guy’s asleep. But you kept me busy until five and I just…didn’t want to. You wore me out”