by Greg Bear
He nodded and wiped up the last perfection of semisolid yoke with the last bite of toast. He didn’t particularly care to know how many men she had been to bed with. Quite a few, by the sound of things.
Vergil had had three conquests in his entire life, only one moderately satisfactory. The first at seventeen—an incredible stroke of luck—and the thud a year ago. The third had been the satisfactory one and had hurt him. That was the occasion that had forced him to accept his status as a hell of a mind but not much for looks.
“That sounds horrible, doesn’t it?” she asked. “I mean, about the cabs and everything.” She kept staring at nun. “You made me come six times,” she said.
“Good.”
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-two,” he said.
“You act like a teenager-in bed, I mean. Stamina.”
He hadn’t done nearly so well as a teenager.
“Did you enjoy it?”
He put his fork down and looked up, musing. He had enjoyed it too much. When would the next time be? “Yes, I did.”
“You know why I picked you out of the crowd?” She had barely touched her single egg, and now chewed the end from her lone Beefstrip. Throughout the night, her nails had emerged unmarred. At least she hadn’t scratched him. Would he have liked that?
“No,” he said.
“Because I knew you were a techie. I’ve never screwed—I mean, made love with a techie before. Vergil. That’s right isn’t it? Vergil Ian Ull-am.”
“Oo-lam,” he corrected.
“I would have started sooner if I’d known,” she said, she smiled. Her teeth were white and even, if a touch large. Her imperfections endeared her to him even more.
“Thank you. I can’t speak…or whatever for all of us. Them. Techies. Whoever.”
“Well, I think you’re very sweet,” she said. The smile faded, replaced by serious speculation. “More than sweet. Honest to God, Vergil. You’re the best fuck I ever had. Do you have to go to work today?”
“No,” he said. “I work my own hours.”
“Good. Done with your breakfast?”
Three more before noon. He couldn’t believe it.
Candice was sore when she left. “I feel like I’ve just trained a year for the pentathlon,” she said as she stood at the door, coat in hand. “Do you want me to come back tonight? I mean, to visit?” She looked anxious. “I couldn’t make love any more. I think you’ve brought on my period early.”
“Please,” he said, reaching for her hand. “That would be nice.” They shook hands rather formally and Candice walked out into the spring sunshine. Vergil stood at the door for a while, alternately smiling and shaking his head in disbelief.
CHAPTER FIVE
Vergil’s taste in food began to change a week into his relationship with Candice. Until then, he had stubbornly pursued sweets and starches, fatty meats and bread and butter. His favorite food was a garbage pizza; there was a parlor nearby that cheerfully loaded pineapple and prosciutto on top of the anchovies and olives.
Candice suggested he cut down his intake of grease and fat—she called it “that oily shit”—and increase his greens and grains. His body seemed to agree.
The amount of food he ate also declined. He reached satiety faster. His waistline diminished perceptibly. He felt restless around the apartment.
Along with his changing taste buds came a change in his attitude toward love. Nothing unexpected there; Vergil was savvy enough about psychology to realize that all he really needed was a fulfilling relationship to correct his nervous misogyny. Candice provided that.
Some nights he spent exercising. His feet didn’t hurt quite so much. Everything was turning around. The world was a better place. His back pains gradually faded, even from memory. They were not missed.
Vergil attributed much of this to Candice, just as adolescent rumor attributed the improvement of bad skin conditions to the loss of virginity.
Occasionally the relationship became stormy. Candice found him insufferable when he tried to explain his work. He approached the topic with barely concealed anger and seldom bothered to simplify technicalities. He almost confessed about injecting himself with the lymphocytes but stopped when it became obvious she was already thoroughly bored. “Just let me know when you find a cheap cure for herpes,” she said. “We can make a bundle from the Christian Action League just to keep it off the market.”
While he no longer worried about venereal disease—Candice had been up front about that and convinced him she was clean—he did break out in a rash one evening, a peculiar and irritating series of white bumps across his stomach. They went away by morning and did not return.
Vergil lay in bed with the smooth white-sheeted form breathing softly next to him, fanny like a snow-covered hill, back unveiled as if she wore a seductive low-cut evening gown. They had finished making love three hours ago and he was still awake, thinking that he had made love to Candice more times in the past two weeks than he had with all other women in his life.
This caught his fancy. He had always been interested in statistics. In an experiment, figures charted success or failure, just as in a business. He was now beginning to feel that his “affair” (how strange that word was in his mind!) with Candice was moving over the line into success. Repeatability was the hallmark of a good experiment, and this experiment had—
And so on, endless night ruminations somewhat less productive than dreamless sleep.
Candice astonished him. Women had always astonished Vergil, who had had so little opportunity to know them; but he suspected Candice was more astonishing than the norm. He could not fathom her attitude. She seldom initiated lovemaking now, but participated with sufficient enthusiasm. He saw her as a cat searching for a new house, and once finding it, settling down to purr, with little care for the next day.
Neither Vergil’s passion nor his life-plan allowed for that kind of sated indifference.
He was reluctant to think of Candice as being his intellectual inferior. She was reasonably witty at tunes, and observant and fun to be around. But she wasn’t concerned with the same things he was. Candice believed in the surface values of life—appearances, rituals, what other people were thinking and doing. Vergil cared little what other people thought, so long as they didn’t actively interfere with his plans.
Candice accepted and experienced. Vergil sparked and observed.
He was deeply envious. He would have enjoyed a respite from the constant grinding of thoughts and plans and worries, the processing of information to glean some new insight. Being like Candice would be a vacation.
Candice, on the other hand, undoubtedly thought of him as a mover and shaker. She led her own life with few plans, without much thought and with no scruples whatsoever…no bites of conscience, no second thoughts. When it had become clear that this mover and shaker was unemployed, and not likely to be employed again soon, her confidence had remained strangely unshaken. Perhaps, like a cat, she had little comprehension of these things.
So she slept, and he ruminated, going back and forth over what had happened at Genetron; chewing at the implications, the admittedly weird behavior of injecting his Lymphocytes back into his bloodstream, his inability to focus on what he was going to do next.
Vergil stared up at the dark ceiling, then scrunched his eyes to observe the phosphene patterns. He reached up with both hands, brushing Candice’s bottom, and pressed his index fingers against the outer orb of each of his eyelids to heighten the effect. Tonight, however, he could not entertain himself with psychedelic eyelid movies. Nothing came but warm darkness, punctuated by flashes as distant and vague as reports from another continent.
Beyond rumination, isolated from childhood tricks and still wide awake, Vergil settled into watchfulness, watching nothing, and thought with no object
really trying to avoid
—waiting until morning.
trying to avoid
thoughts of all things lost
and all recently gained that could be
lost
he isn’t ready
and still he moves and shakes
losing
On the Sunday morning of the third week:
Candice handed him a hot cup of coffee. He stared at it for a moment. Something was wrong with the cup and her hand. He fumbled for his glasses to put them on but they hurt his eyes worse. “Thanks,” he mumbled, taking the cup and lurching up in bed against the pillow, spilling a bit of the hot brown liquid across the sheets.
“What are you going to do today?” she asked. (Look for work? implied, but Candice never stressed responsibility, and never asked questions about his means.)
“Look for work, I suppose,” he said. He squinted through his glasses again, holding them by one flopping temple piece.
“I,” she said, “am going to take ad copy down to the Light and shop at that little vegetable stand down the street. Then I am going to fix dinner by myself and eat it alone.”
Vergil looked at her, puzzled.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
He put the glasses aside. “Why alone?”
“Because I think you’re beginning to take me for granted. I don’t like that. I can feel you accepting me.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing,” she said patiently. She had dressed and combed her hair, which now hung long and shining across her shoulders. “I just don’t want to lose the spice.”
“Spice?”
“Look, every relationship needs a scratch of the kitten now and then. I’m beginning to think of you as an available puppy-dog, and that’s not good.”
“No,” said Vergil. He sounded distracted.
“Didn’t sleep last night?” she asked.
“No,” Vergil said. “Not much.” He looked confused.
“So what else?”
“I’m seeing you just fine,” he said.
“See? You’re taking me for granted.”
“No, I mean…without my glasses. I can see you just fine without my glasses.”
“Well, good for you,” Candice said with feline unconcern. “I’ll call you tomorrow. Don’t fret.”
“Oh, no,” Vergil said, squeezing his temples with his fingers.
She closed the door softly behind her.
He looked around the room.
Everything was in marvelous focus. He hadn’t seen things so clearly since the measles had stricken his eyesight when he was seven.
It was the first improvement he was positively convinced he could not attribute to Candice.
“Spice,” he said, blinking at the curtains.
CHAPTER SIX
Vergil had spent weeks, it seemed, in just such offices as this: pastel earth-colored walls, gray steel desk surmounted by neat stacks of papers and in-out baskets, man or woman politely asking psychologically telling questions. This time it was a woman, zaftig and well-dressed, with a friendly, patient face. Before her on the desk was his employment record and the results of a psych profile test. He had long since learned how to take such tests: When they ask for a sketch, avoid drawing eyes or sharp, wedge-shaped objects; draw items of food or pictures of pretty women; always state one’s goals in sharp, practical terms, but with a touch of overreaching; exhibit imagination, but not wild imagination. She nodded over his papers and looked up at him.
“Your record is remarkable, Mr. Ulam.”
“Vergil, please.”
“Your academic background leaves a bit to be desired, but your work experience could more than make up for that I suppose you know the questions we’ll ask next”
He widened his eyes, all innocence.
“You’re a bit vague about what you could do for us, Vergil. I’d like to hear a little more about how you’d fit in with Codon Research.”
He glanced at his watch surreptitiously, not looking at the hour, but at the date. In a week there would be little or no hope of recovering his amplified Lymphocytes. Really, this I was his last chance.
“I’m fully qualified to perform all kinds of lab work, research or manufacturing. Codon Research has done very well with Pharmaceuticals, and I’m interested in that, but I really believe I can help out with any biochip program you’re developing.”
The personnel manager’s eyes narrowed by the merest millimeter. Bullseye, he thought. Codon Research is going to jump into biochips.
“We aren’t working on biochips, Vergil. Still, your record in pharmaceutical-related work is impressive. You’ve done extensive culturing; looks to me like you’d be almost as valuable to a brewery as to us.” That was a watered-down version of an old joke among vat culturists. Vergil smiled.
“There is a problem, however,” she continued. “Your security rating from one source is very high, but your rating from Genetron, your last employer, is abysmal.”
“I’ve explained about the personality clash—”
“Yes, and we normally don’t pursue these matters. Our company is different from other companies, after all, and if a potential employee’s work record is otherwise good—as yours appears to be—we allow for such clashes. But I sometimes have to work on instinct, Vergil. And something’s not quite right here. You worked in Genetron’s biochip program.”
“Doing adjunct research.”
“Yes. Are you offering us the expertise you acquired at Genetron?” That was code for are you going to spill your former employer’s secrets?
“Yes, and no,” he said. “First of all, I wasn’t at the heart of the biochip program. I wasn’t privy to the hard secrets. I can, however, offer you the results of my own research. So technically, yes, since Genetron had a work-for-hire clause, I’m going to spill some secrets if you hire me. But they’ll be part and parcel of the work I did.” He hoped that shot landed in some middle ground. There was an outright lie in it—he knew virtually everything there was to know about Genetron’s biochips—but there was truth, also, since he felt the whole concept of biochips was obsolete, stillborn.
“Mm hmm.” she flipped back through his papers. “I’m going to be straight with you, Vergil. Maybe straighter than you’ve been with me. You’re a bit wizardry for us, and a loner, but we’d jump at the chance to hire you…if it weren’t for one thing. I’m a friend of Mr. Rothwild at Genetron. A very good friend. And he’s passed on some information to me that would otherwise be confidential. He didn’t name names, and he couldn’t possibly have known I would ever face you over this desk. But he told me someone at Genetron had broken a handful of NIH guidelines and recombined mammalian nuclear DNA. I strongly suspect you’re that individual.” She smiled pleasantly. “Are you?”
No one else had been fired or even let go at Genetron for over a year. He nodded.
“He was quite upset. He said you were brilliant, but that you’d be trouble for any company that employed you. And he said he threatened you with blacklisting. Now I know and he knows that such a threat doesn’t really mean much with today’s labor laws and the potential for litigation. But this time, just by accident, Codon Research knows more about you than we should know. I’m being up front with you, because there shouldn’t be any misunderstanding. I will deny saying any of these things if pressed. My real reason for not hiring you is your psychological profile. Your drawings are spaced too far apart and indicate an unwholesome predilection for self-isolation.” She handed back his records. “Fair enough?”
Vergil nodded. He took his records and stood up. “You don’t even know Rothwild,” he said. “This has happened to me six times.”
“Yes, well, Mr. Ulam, ours is a fledgling industry, barely fifteen years old. Companies still rely on each other when it comes to certain things. Cutthroat out front, and supportive behind the scenes. It’s been interesting talking with you, Mr. Ulam. Good day.”
He blinked in the sunshine outside the white concrete front of Codon Research. So much for recovery, he thought.
The whole experiment would soon fade away to nothing. Perhaps it was
just as well.
CHAPTER SEVEN
He drove north through white-gold hills dotted with twisted oaks, past cerulean lakes deep and dear with the past winter’s rains. The summer had been mild so far, and even inland, the temperature hadn’t gone over ninety.
The Volvo hummed over the endless stretch of Highway 5 through fields given over to cotton, then through green nut groves. Vergil cut across 580 along the outskirts of Tracy, his mind almost blank, the driving a panacea against his worries. Forests of pylon-mounted propellers turned in harmony on both sides of the highway, each great swinging arm two thirds as wide as a football field.
He had never felt better in his life, and he was worried. He had not sneezed for two weeks, in the middle of a champion allergy season. The last time he had seen Candice, to tell her he was going to Livermore to visit his mother, she had commented on his skin color, which had changed from pallid to a healthy peach-pink, and his freedom from sniffles.
“You’re looking better each time I see you, Vergil,” she had said, smiling and kissing him. “Come back soon. I’ll miss you. And maybe we’ll find more spice.”
Looking better, feeling better—and no excuse for it. He wasn’t sentimental enough to believe that love cured all, even calling what he felt for Candice love. Was it?
Something else.
He didn’t like thinking about it, so he drove. After ten hours, he felt vaguely disappointed as he turned onto South Vasco Road and motored south. He hung a right on East Avenue and drove into downtown Livermore, a small California burg with old stone and brick buildings, old wooden farmhouses now surrounded by suburbs, shopping centers not unlike those in every other town in California…and just outside of town, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where, among many other researches, nuclear weapons were designed.
He stopped at Guinevere’s Pizza Parlor and forced himself to order a medium garbage pizza and a salad and Coke. As he sat down to wait in the pseudo-medieval dining area, he wondered idly whether the Livermore Labs had any facilities he could use. Who was the more Strangelovian—the weapons folks, or good ol’ Vergil I. Ulam?