by Greg Bear
His mother stood on the porch, silk gown flowing in the slight morning breeze, and Vergil waved at her as he pulled the car away. Normality. Wave at your mother. Drive away.
Drive away, knowing that your father never existed, and that your mother was a witch, and what did that make you?
He shook his head until his ears rang, somehow managing to keep the car going in a straight line down the street.
A white ridge lay across the back of his left hand, like a tiny thread glued to the skin with mucilage.
CHAPTER EIGHT
An uncharacteristic summer storm had left the sky ragged with clouds, the air cool, and the apartment’s bedroom window flecked with drops of water. The surf could be heard from four blocks away, a dull rumble topped with hiss. Vergil sat before his computer, heel of one hand resting against the edge of the keyboard, finger poised. On the VDT was a twisting, evolving molecule of DNA surrounded by a haze of protein. Flickering separations of the double helix’s phosphate-sugar backbones indicated high-speed intrusions by enzymes, spreading the molecule for transcription. Labeled columns of numbers marched along the bottom of the screen. He watched them without paying much attention.
He would have to talk with somebody soon—somebody besides his mother, and certainly besides Candice. She had moved in with him a week after he returned from his mother’s house, apparently intent on domesticity, cleaning up the apartment and fixing his meals.
Sometimes they shopped together, and that was enjoyable. Candice enjoyed helping Vergil pick out better clothes, and he went along with her, even though the purchases drained his already low bank account.
When she asked about things she didn’t like, his silences grew prolonged. She wondered why he insisted they make love in the dark.
She suggested they go to the beach, but Vergil demurred.
She worried about his spending time under the new lamps he had bought.
“Verge?” Candice stood in the bedroom doorway, wrapped in a terrycloth robe embroidered with roses.
“Don’t call me that. My mother calls me that.”
“Sorry. We were going to ride up to the animal park. Remember?”
Vergil lifted his finger to his mouth and chewed on the nail. He didn’t seem to hear.
“Vergil?”
“I’m not feeling too well.”
“You never go out. That’s why.”
“Actually, I’m feeling fine,” he said, turning in his chair. He looked at her but offered no further explanation.
“I don’t understand.”
He pointed to the screen. “You’ve never let me explain it to you.”
“You get all crazy and I don’t understand you,” Candice said, her lip quivering.
“It’s more than I ever thought possible.”
“What Vergil?”
“The concatenations. The combinations. The power.”
“Please, make sense.”
“I’m trapped. Seduced but hardly abandoned.”
“I didn’t just seduce you—”
“Not you, sweetums,” he said abstractedly. “Not you.”
Candice approached the desk slowly, as if the screen might bite. Her eyes were moist and she chewed her lower lip. “Honey.”
He jotted down numbers from the bottom of the screen.
“Vergil.”
“Hmm?”
“Did you do something at work, I mean, before you left, before we met?”
He swiveled his head around and looked at her blankly. “Like with the computers? Did you get mad and screw up their computers?”
“No,” he said, grinning. “I didn’t screw them up. Screwed them over, maybe, but nothing they’ll ever notice.”
“Because I knew this guy once, he did something against the law and he started acting funny. He wouldn’t go out, he wouldn’t talk much, just like you.”
“What did he do?” Vergil asked, still jotting numbers.
“He robbed a bank.”
The pencil stopped. Their eyes met Candice was crying.
“I loved him and I had to leave him when I found out,” she said. “I just can’t live with bad shit like that.”
“Don’t worry.”
“I was all ready to leave you a few weeks ago,” she said. “I thought maybe we’d done all we could together. But it’s just crazy. I’ve never met anyone like you. You’re crazy. Crazy smart, not crazy shit-headed like other guys. I’ve been thinking if we could just loosen up together, that it would be really wonderful. I’d listen to you when you explain things, maybe you could teach me about this biology and electronics stuff.” She indicated the screen. “I’d try to listen. I really would.”
Vergil’s mouth hung open slightly. He drew it shut and looked at the screen, blinking rapidly.
“I fell in love with you. When you were gone to visit your mother. Isn’t that weird?”
“Candice—”
“And if you’ve done something really awful, it’s going to hurt me now, not just you.” She backed away with her fist tucked under her chin, as if she were slowly hitting herself.
“I don’t want to hurt anybody,” Vergil said.
“I know. You’re not mean.”
“I’d explain everything to you, if I knew what was happening myself. But I don’t. I haven’t done anything they could send me to jail for. Nothing illegal.” Except tamper with the medical records.
“You can’t tell me something isn’t bothering you. Why can’t we just talk about it?” She pulled a folding chair from the closet and snicked it open a couple of yards from the desk, sitting on it with knees together and feet spread.
“I just said, I don’t know what it is.”
“Did you do something…to yourself? I mean, did you get some disease at the lab or something? I’ve heard that’s possible, doctors and scientists get diseases they’re working with.”
“You and my mother,” he said, shaking his head.
“We’re worried. Will I ever meet your mother?”
“Probably not for some time,” Vergil said.
“I’m sorry I…” She shook her head vigorously. “I just wanted to open up to you.”
“That’s all right,” he said.
“Vergil.”
“Yes?”
“Do you love me?”
“Yes,” he said, and surprised himself by meaning it, though he did not look away from the screen.
“Why?”
“Because we’re so much alike,” he said. He was not at all sure how he meant that; perhaps both were destined to be failures, or at least never amount to much—to Vergil that was the same thing as failure.
“Come on.”
“Really. Maybe you just don’t see it.”
“I’m not as smart as you, that’s for sure.”
“Sometimes being smart is a real pain,” he said. Is that what they’re finding out, his little lymphocytes? The pain of being smart, of surviving!
“Can we go for a drive today, go someplace and have a picnic? There’s cold chicken from last night.”
He jotted down one last column of numbers and realized he now knew what he had wanted to know. The lymphocytes could indeed spread their biologic to other types of cells.
They could very easily do what it seemed they were doing to him. “Yeah,” he said. “A picnic would be great”
“And then, when we come back…With the lights on?”
“Why not?” She’d have to know sooner or later. And he could find some way of explaining the stripe patterns. The ridges had gone down since he had begun the lamp treatments; thank God for small favors.
“I love you,” she said, still in the chair, still watching him.
He saved the computations and graphics and turned off the computer. “Thank you,” he said softly.
METAPHASE
OCTOBER–DECEMBER
CHAPTER NINE
IRVINE, CALIFORNIA
It had been two years since Edward Milligan had last seen Vergil. Edward�
�s memory hardly matched the tan, smiling and well-dressed gentleman standing before him. They had made a lunch appointment over the phone the day before, and now faced each other in the wide double doors of the employee’s cafeteria of Irvine’s new Mount Freedom Medical Center.
“Vergil?” Edward shook his hand and walked around him, a look of exaggerated wonder on his face. “Is it really you?”
“Good to see you again, Edward.” He returned the handshake firmly. He had lost twenty to twenty-five pounds and what remained seemed better-proportioned. At medical school, Vergil had been the pudgy, shock-haired, snaggle-toothed kid who wired doorknobs, gave his dorm floor mates punch that turned their piss blue, and never had a date except with Eileen Termagant, who had shared some of his physical characteristics.
“You look fantastic,” Edward said. “Spend a summer in Cabo San Lucas?”
They stood in line at the counter and chose their food. “The tan,” Vergil said, picking out a carton of chocolate milk, “is from spending three months under a sun lamp. My teeth were straightened just after I last saw you.”
Edward looked closely, lifting Vergil’s lip with one finger. “So they were. Still discolored, though.”
“Yes,” Vergil said, rubbing his lip and taking a deep breath. “Well. I’ll explain the rest, but we need a place to talk in private, or at least with nobody paying attention.”
Edward steered him to the smoker’s corner, where three die-hard puffers were scattered among six tables. “Listen, I mean it,” he said as they unloaded then trays. “You’ve changed. You’re looking good.”
“I’ve changed more than you know.” Vergil’s tone was motion-picture-ominous, and he delivered the line with a theatrical lift of his brows. “How’s Gail?”
“Doing well. We’ve been married a year.”
“Hey, congratulations.” Vergil’s gaze shifted down to his food—pineapple slice and cottage cheese, piece of banana cream pie. “Notice something else?” he asked, his voice cracking slightly.
Edward squinted in concentration. “Uh.”
“Look closer.”
“I’m not sure. Well, yes. You’re not wearing glasses. Contacts?”
“No. I don’t need them anymore.”
“And you’re a snappy dresser. Who’s dressing you now? I hope she’s as sexy as she is tasteful.”
“Candice,” he said, grinning the old and familiar self-deprecating grin, but ending it with an uncharacteristic leer. “I’ve been fired from my job. Four months now. I’m living on savings.”
“Hold it,” Edward said. “That’s a bit crowded. Why not do a linear breakdown? You got a job. Where?”
“I ended up at Genetron in Enzyme Valley.”
“North Torrey Pines Road?”
“That’s the place. Infamous. And you’ll be hearing more very soon. They’re putting out common stock any second now. It’ll shoot off the board. They’ve broken through with MABs.”
“Biochips?”
He nodded. “They have some that work.”
“What?” Edward’s brows lifted sharply.
“Microscopic logic circuits. You inject them into the human body, they set up shop where they’re told and troubleshoot. With Dr. Michael Bernard’s approval.”
The angle of Edward’s brows steepened. “Jesus, Vergil. Bernard’s almost a saint. He’s had his picture on the cover of Mega and Rolling Stone just the last month or two. Why are you telling me all this?”
“It’s supposed to be secret-stock, breakthrough, everything. I have my contacts inside the place, though. Ever heard of Hazel Overton?”
Edward shook his head. “Should I?”
“Probably not. I thought she hated my guts. Turns out she had grudging respect for me. She gave me a call two months back and asked if I wanted to front a paper for her on F-factors in E. coli genomes.” He looked around and lowered his voice. “But you do whatever the hell you want. I’m through with the bastards.”
Edward whistled. “Make me rich, huh?”
“If that’s what you want. Or you can spend some time listening to me before rushing off to your broker.”
“Of course. So tell me more.”
Vergil hadn’t touched the cottage cheese or pie. He had, however, eaten the pineapple slice and drunk the chocolate milk. “I got in on the ground floor about five years ago. With my medical school background and computer experience, I was a shoo-in for Enzyme Valley. I went up and down North Torrey Pines Road with my resumes, and I was Weed by Genetron.”
“That simple?”
“No.” Vergil picked at the cottage cheese with a fork, then laid the fork down. “I did some rearranging of the records. Credit records, school records, that sort of thing. Nobody’s caught on yet. I came in as hot stuff and I made my mark early with protein assemblies and the preliminary biochip research. Genetron has big money backers, and we were given as much as we needed. Four months and I was doing my own work, sharing a lab but allowed to do independent research. I made some breakthroughs.” He tossed his hand nonchalantly. “Then I went off on tangents. I kept on doing my regular work, but after hours…The management found out, and fired me. I managed to…save part of my experiments. But I haven’t exactly been cautious, or judicious. So now the experiment’s going on outside the lab.”
Edward had always regarded Vergil as ambitious and more than a trifle cracked. In their school years, Vergil’s relations with authority figures had never been smooth. Edward had long ago concluded that science, for Vergil, was like an unattainable woman, who suddenly opens her arms to him before he’s ready for mature love—leaving him afraid he’ll forever blow the chance, lose the prize, screw up royally. Apparently, he had. “Outside the lab? I don’t get you.”
“I want you to examine me. Give me a thorough physical. Maybe a cancer diagnostic. Then I’ll explain more.”
“You want a ten thousand dollar exam?”
“Whatever you can do. Ultrasound, NMR, PET, thermogram, everything.”
“I don’t know if I can get access to all that equipment, Vergil. Natural-source PET full-scan has only been here a month or two. Hell, you couldn’t pick a more expensive—”
Then ultrasound and NMR. That’s all you need.”
“I’m an obstetrician, Vergil, not a glamour-boy lab tech, OB-GYN, butt of all jokes. If you’re turning into a woman, maybe I can help you.”
Vergil leaned forward, almost putting his elbow into the pie, but swinging wide at the last instant by scant millimeters. The old Vergil would have hit it square. “Examine me closely, and you’ll…” He narrowed his eyes and shook his head. “Just examine me.”
“So I make an appointment for ultrasound and NMR. Who’s going to pay?”
“I have medical. I messed with the personnel files at Genetron before I left. Anything up to a hundred thousand dollars and they’ll never check, never suspect And it has to be absolutely confidential.”
Edward shook his head. “You’re asking for a lot, Vergil.”
“Do you want to make medical history, or not?”
“Is this a joke?”
Vergil shook his head. “Not on you, roomie.”
Edward made the arrangements that afternoon, filling in the forms himself. From what he understood of hospital paperwork, so long as everything was billed properly, most of the examination could take place without official notice. He didn’t charge for his services. After all, Vergil had turned his piss blue. They were friends.
Edward stayed past his usual hours. He gave Gail a bare outline of what he was doing; she sighed the sigh of a doctor’s wife and told him she’d leave a late snack on the table for when he came home.
Vergil returned at ten P.M. and met Edward at the appointed place, on the third floor of what the nurses called the Frankenstein Wing. Edward sat on an orange plastic chair, reading a desk copy of My Things magazine. Vergil entered the small lobby, looking lost and worried. His skin was olive-colored under the fluorescent lighting.
Edwar
d signaled the night supervisor that this was his patient and conducted Vergil to the examination area, hand on his elbow. Neither spoke much. Vergil stripped and Edward arranged him on the paper-covered padded table. “Your ankles are swollen,” he said, feeling them. They were solid, not puffy. Healthy, but odd. “Hm,” Edward said pointedly, glancing at Vergil. Vergil raised his eyebrows and cocked his head; his “you ain’t seen nothing yet” look.
“Okay. I’m going to run several scans on you and combine the results in an imager. Ultrasound first” Edward ran paddles over Vergil’s still form, hitting those areas difficult for the bigger unit to reach. He then swung the table around and inserted it into the enameled orifice of the ultrasound diagnostic unit—the hum-hole, so-called by the nurses. After twelve separate sweeps, head to toe, he removed the table. Vergil was sweating slightly, his eyes closed.
“Still claustrophobic?” Edward asked.
“Not so much.”
“NMR is a little worse.”
“Lead on, Mac Duff.”
The NMR full-scan unit was a huge chrome and sky-blue mastaba-shaped box, occupying one small room with barely enough space to wheel in the table. “I’m not an expert on this one, so it may take a while,” Edward said, helping Vergil into the cavity.
“High cost of medicine,” Vergil muttered, dosing his eyes as Edward swung down the glass hatch. The massive magnet circling the cavity buzzed faintly. Edward instructed the machine to send its data to the central imager in the next room and helped Vergil out.
“Holding up?” Edward asked.
“Courage,” Vergil said, pronouncing it as in French.
In the next room, Edward arranged a large-screen VDT and ordered the integration and display of the data. In the half-darkness, the image took a few seconds to flow into recognizable shapes.
“Your skeleton first,” Edward said. His eyes widened. The image then displayed Vergil’s thoracic organs, musculature, and finally vascular system and skin.
“How long since the accident?” Edward asked, stepping closer to the screen. He couldn’t quite conceal the quiver in his voice.