Beggars and Choosers

by Nancy Kress

  Go forth and multiply, but only to a predetermined point. Too bad the whole human race hadn’t done that. The history of the previous century—and the cataclysmically Malthusian one before that—might have been entirely different. God forgot the “off” switch. Huevos Verdes didn’t.

  “Five—The Cell Cleaner contains a proprietary device referred to in Case 1892-A as ‘biomechanical nanocomputing technology.’ Under laboratory conditions, this technology has demonstrated the capacity to identify seven cells of the same functional type from a mass of cells of varying functional types, and to compare the DNA from these seven cells to determine what constitutes standard DNA coding for that type of cell. Furthermore, the Cell Cleaner is said to be able to enter subsequent cells and compare their DNA structure to its determined standard.”

  If that was true—and there was no way the opposition would have agreed to it if there were the slightest doubt—it was astounding. No other biotech firm on Earth could do that. But I noticed the careful wording: “is said to be able.” Stipulations were supposed to be demonstrated fact. Why were mere claims by Huevos Verdes allowed in at this point? Unless they were necessary prerequisites to something that had been demonstrated.

  “Six—Under laboratory conditions, the Cell Cleaner has demonstrated the capacity to destroy any cells whose DNA does not match what it has determined to be standard coding.”

  Bingo.

  Even the journalists looked excited. In Washington.

  “Seven—Under laboratory conditions, the Cell Cleaner has demonstrated the capacity to thus destroy each of the following types of aberrant cells: cancerous growths, precancerous dysphasia, deposits on arterial walls, viruses, infectious bacteria, toxic elements and compounds, and cells whose DNA has been altered by viral activity resulting in DNA splices. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that under laboratory conditions, such dissembled cells can be handled by normal bodily-waste-removal mechanisms.”

  Cancer, arteriosclerosis, chicken pox, herpes, lead poisoning, tourista, cystitis, and the common cold. All gone, dissembled and washed away by your own team of customized internal cleaning ladies. I felt a little dizzy.

  But what the hell could those “laboratory conditions” have been like?

  The spectators buzzed loudly. Moderator Yongers glared at us until the room quieted.

  “Eight—Under laboratory conditions, the Cell Cleaner has demonstrated the capacity to avoid destroying certain bacterial cells even though their ‘genetic fingerprint’ does not match the host tissue’s DNA. These cells include, but are not limited to, bacteria normally found in the human digestive tract, vagina, and upper respiratory tract. It is noted for the record that Huevos Verdes Corporation attributes this selectivity in dissembling nonstandard DNA to ‘preprogramming the protein nanocomputer to recognize symbiotic bacterial DNA.’”

  Kill off the harmful, spare the useful. Huevos Verdes was offering the world’s first immune-system enhancer with computerized Darwinian morality. Or maybe Arthurian morality: Replace ‘Might makes right’ with ‘Right makes life.’ I suddenly pictured legions of little Cell Cleaners in shining white armor, and I had to grin. The journalist in the next seat shot me an edgy look.

  “Nine—No significant studies have been carried out concerning the Cell Cleaner’s performance or effects inside whole, living, fully functional human beings.”

  There it was: the inevitable spoiler. Without long-term studies of its effects on real people, Huevos Verdes had no more chance of marketing Case 1892-A than of marketing powdered unicorn horn. Even if the Science Court permitted further study, I was not going to have my own private Cell Cleaner anytime soon.

  I sat exploring how I felt about that.

  Another buzz swept over the audience: disappointment? Satisfaction? Anger? It seemed to be all three.

  “The following points,” Moderator Yongers said, raising her voice, “are in dispute,” The chamber quieted.

  “One—The Cell Cleaner will cause ho harm to healthy human cells, tissues, or organs.”

  She stopped. That was it—one point in dispute. But that point, her face clearly said, was everything. Who wanted a cleaned, repaired, dead body?

  “The first opening argument will be presented by the opposition. Dr. Lee?”

  There was another printout to summarize Dr. Lee’s points, which was fortunate because he couldn’t. Every sentence came trailing clouds of evidence, qualifiers, and equations, all of which he clearly considered glory. The technical panel listened closely, taking notes. Everybody else consulted the printout. It summarized his windy points:

  In dispute: “The Cell Cleaner will cause no harm to healthy human cells, tissues, or organs.”

  In rebuttal: There is no way to assure that the Cell Cleaner will not cause harm to healthy cells, organs, or tissues.

  Laboratory tests do not necessarily predict the effects of biosubstances on live, functional human beings. See CDC Hypertext File 68164.

  No partial-being studies have included the effect of the Cell Cleaner on the brain. Brain chemistry can behave much differently from grosser body tissue. See CDC Hypertext File 68732.

  The long-term effects submitted cover only two years. Many biosubstances reveal erratic side effects only after longer time periods. See CDC Hypertext File 88812.

  The list of so-called “pre-programmed symbiotic bacterial DNA” that the Cell Cleaner will not destroy may or may not be congruent with a complete list of useful foreign organisms in a living, functional human being. The human body includes some ten thousand billion billion protein parts interacting in intensely complex ways, including hundreds of thousands of different kinds of molecules, some only partially understood. The so-called “pre-programmed list” could leave out vital organisms which the Cell Cleaner would then destroy, possibly causing tremendous functional upset, including death.

  Over time, the Cell Cleaner itself might develop replication problems. Since it introduces what is in essence competing DNA into the body, it displays the potential to become an artificially induced cancer. See CDC Hypertext File 4536.

  I wondered at the quirk in the printing program that had made the word “cancer” darker than the rest.

  Dr. Lee took the entire rest of the morning for his opening argument, which seemed shut pretty tight to me. At no point did I question his sincerity. The argument seemed to go like this: The Cell Cleaner couldn’t be proved safe without a decade—at least—of tests on real, whole human beings. (I decided not to look up “partial-being studies.” I didn’t really want to know.) It was, however, inhumane to subject real human beings to such risks. There was therefore no way to prove the Cell Cleaner safe. And if it was unsafe, the potential for widespread disaster was spectacular. Including, in the curious phrasing of the printout, “tremendous functional upset, including death.”

  Therefore, the opposition would recommend that the Cell Cleaner not be licensed, not be approved for further study within the United States, and be placed on the Banned List of the International Genetic Modification Advisory Council.

  Apparently we had already left the fact-finding stage and were well into the political-recommendation stage. Washington is Washington. Facts are political; politics is a fact.

  It was a quarter to twelve when Dr. Lee finished. Moderator Yongers leaned over her bench. “Ms. Sharifi, it’s nearly time to break for lunch. Would you prefer to postpone your opening statement until this afternoon?”

  “No, Madame Moderator. I’ll be brief.” Why hadn’t Leisha Camden told Miranda to leave off the red hair ribbon? It gave her an Alice-in-Wonderland youthfulness that was a liability. Her voice was calm and dispassionate.

  “The patent you are considering today is the greatest life-saving medical development since the discovery of antibiotics. Dr. Lee speaks of the dangers to the body if the Cell Cleaner nanomachinery fails, or is inaccurately programmed, or produces unknown side effects. He does not mention the people who will die premature or painful deaths without this
innovation. You would rather keep one person from dying with the Cell Cleaner than have hundreds of thousands die without it. That is morally wrong.

  “You are morally wrong, all of you. The whole purpose of this so-called scientific Forum is to protect drug company profits at the expense of the sick and dying. You are moral Fascists, using the strength of government to harm those already weak and powerless, in order to keep them powerless and so keep yourselves in power. And I except none of you from these charges, not even the scientists, who conspire with profit and power and so deliver science to them.

  “With the Cell Cleaner, Huevos Verdes offers you life. Even though you do not deserve to live. But Huevos Verdes does not distinguish between the deserving and the undeserving when it offers a product. You do, every time your regulations stifle genetic or nanotech research, every time that lost research deprives someone of life. You are killers, all of you. Political and economic mercenaries, no better at judging true science than the jungle animals whose morality you emulate. Nonetheless, Huevos Verdes Corporation offers you the Cell Cleaner, and I will prove to you here its essential safety, even though I’m not sure any of you has the capacity to understand the science I will explain.”

  And Miranda Sharifi sat down.

  The panel looked stunned, as well they might. More interestingly, Leisha Camden also looked stunned. Evidently this was not what she’d expected to hear her protégée say. She whispered frantically into Miranda’s ear.

  “I have never heard such unprofessional bullshit!” Martin Davis Exford, Nobel laureate in molecular physics, on his feet behind the panelists’ table. His powerful voice outshouted everyone else. Maroon veins pulsed below the surface of his neck.

  “I deeply resent, Ms. Sharifi, your perversion of this Forum. We’re here to determine scientific fact, not indulge in ad hominem attacks!”

  A journalist in fashionable yellow stripes yelled from the front row of the press box, “Ms. Sharifi—are you trying to lose this case?”

  Slowly I turned my head in his direction.

  “Hey, Miranda, look this way!” a Liver-channel reporter, his robocam floating beside him. “Smile pretty!”

  “Order, please! Order!” Moderator Yongers, her glasses gone, banging her metal water pitcher since she had no gavel because of course this wasn’t really a court.

  “Smile, Miranda!”

  “—an outrage to professional discourse and—”

  “Please sit down,” said several seats, “others may have trouble seeing over you. Please sit—”

  “I will have order in this Forum!”

  But the pandemonium grew. A man broke from the public section and charged down the inclined aisle toward the Forum floor.

  I had a clear view of his face. It twisted with the terrible rigidity of hate, a rigidity that no amount of reason can relax and that takes years to calcify. Miranda Sharifi’s insults today hadn’t created that face. The man ran toward her, pulling something from his jacket. Seventeen robocams and three security ’bots zoomed toward him.

  He hit the invisible Y-energy shield in front of the participants’ tables, and spread-eagled against it with an audible crack of skull or other bone. Dazed, the man slid down the shield exactly as down a brick wall. A security ’bot dragged him away.

  “—restore order to these proceedings now—”

  “A smile, Miranda! Just one smile!”

  “—unwarranted assumption of moral superiority, and contempt for United States law, when in reality—”

  “—and it looks, newsgrid viewers, as if the fracas were deliberately created by Miranda Sharifi for hidden Huevos Verdes motives about which we can only—”

  Miranda Sharifi never moved.

  Eventually Moderator Yongers, having no real choice, recessed for lunch.

  I pushed my way to the front of the chaotic Forum chamber, trying to shadow Miranda Sharifi, which was of course impossible. The Y-shield stood between us, and spectacularly built bodyguards muscled her and Leisha Camden out a rear door. I caught sight of them again on the roof, having knocked over four people to get there. They climbed into an aircar. Several other cars followed in close pursuit, but I was convinced it wasn’t going to do any of them—reporters, GSEA, FBI, rogue geneticists, whoever—any good. They weren’t going to learn any more than I had.

  What had I learned?

  The journalist in yellow stripes was right. Miranda Sharifi’s performance had just ensured that Case 1892-A was dead. She had insulted not only the intellectual and technical competence of eight scientists, but their characters as well. I had cursorily researched three of those scientists, the Nobel laureates, and I knew they were not venial sellouts but people of integrity. Miranda must know that, too. So—why?

  Maybe, despite any research she’d done, she genuinely believed all Sleepers were corrupt. Her grandmother, a brilliant woman, had believed it. But somehow I didn’t think Miranda did.

  Maybe she believed the five non-laureate scientists, mediocrities with good political connections, would inevitably outvote the impartial laureates. But if so, why alienate her three potential allies? And why agree to seating the five mediocrities in the first place? All panelists had been agreed upon by both sides.

  No. Miranda Sharifi wanted to lose this case. She wanted a decision against the Cell Cleaner.

  But maybe I was being too anthropomorphic. Miranda Sharifi was, after all, completely different from me. Her mental processes were different, which included her motives. Maybe she’d alienated the panel to…what? To make it harder to obtain official approval for the patent. Maybe she only valued victory if it was hard won. Maybe making everything as difficult as possible was part of some Sleepless Code of Honor, built upon the fact that things came so easily to them. How the fuck would I know?

  All this ratiocination translated itself into self-disgust. Despite the heat, it was a gorgeous day in Washington, one of those clear-blue-sky-and-golden-light afternoons that seem to have blown in from some more favored city. I walked along the mall, attracting attention: the crazy donkey dressed like a gone-native Liver. Drug dealers and lovers and gravboarding teenagers left me alone, which was just as well. I was having one of those brief, sharp self-questionings that leave you both enervated and embarrassed afterwards. What was I doing skulking around in these silly plastic clothes, trying to manufacture some difficult personal meaningfulness out of following around people who were clearly my superiors?

  For the Sleepless were my superiors, and in more than intelligence. In discipline, in sheer sweep of vision. In the enviable certainty that accompanies purpose, even if I didn’t know what that purpose was, whereas all I had was an aimless, drifting alarm about where my country was headed. An alarm set off by a semisentient pink dog hurling over a terrace railing. When I thought of that now, it sounded silly.

  I couldn’t even define where I thought my country ought to head. I could only impede, not propel, and I wasn’t even sure what I was impeding. It was sure as hell more than Case 1892-A.

  I didn’t know what the Sleepless were trying to do. Nobody knew. So what made me so damn sure I should be stopping them from doing it?

  On the other hand, nothing I had done so far, or seemed likely to do in the near future, had had the slightest effect on Miranda Sharifi’s plans. I had not reported on her to the GSEA, not kept her under constant surveillance, not even reached a coherent conclusion about her in the private and unsought-after recesses of my mind. I was completely irrelevant. So there was nothing for me to regret, nothing to agonize over doing or not doing, nothing to change. Zero, whatever you multiply or divide it by, is still zero.

  Somehow this failed to cheer me up.

  The next four days were a letdown. People primed for scientific theater—I include myself—instead received hours of incomprehensible graphs, tables, equations, explanations, and holomodels of cells and enzymes and such. Much time was given to the tertiary and quaternary structure of proteins. There was a spirited and incomprehensi
ble debate on Worthington’s transference equations as applied to redundant RNA coding. I fell asleep during this. I was not alone. Fewer people showed up each day. Of those who did, only the scientists looked rapt.

  It didn’t seem fair, somehow. Miranda Sharifi had told us we were looking at the greatest medical breakthrough in two hundred years, and to most of us it looked like alchemy. THE PEOPLE MUST CONTROL SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY. Yes, right. How do churls make decisions about wizardry we can’t understand?

  In the end, they rejected it.

  Two of the Nobel laureates wrote dissenting opinions, Barbara Poluikis and Martin Exford. They favored allowing beta testing on human volunteers, and didn’t rule out possible future licensing. They wanted the scientific knowledge. You could see, even through the formal wording of their brief, joint opinion, that they panted for it. I saw Miranda Sharifi watching them carefully.

  The majority opinion did everything but print copies of itself on the American flag. Safety of United States citizens, sacred trust, preservation of the identity of the human genome, blah blah blah. Everything, in fact, that had led me to join the GSEA the day Katous hurled himself off my balcony.

  At some deep level, I still believed the majority opinion was right. Unregulated biotech held the potential for incredible disaster. And nobody could really regulate Huevos Verdes biotech because nobody could really understand it. SuperSleepless intelligence and American patent protection combined to ensure that. And if you can’t regulate it, better to keep it out of the country entirely.

  Nonetheless, I left the courtroom profoundly depressed. And immediately learned that my ignorance about cellular biology was not my only, or worst, ignorance. I’d thought I was a cynic. But cynicism is like money: somebody else always has more of it than you do.

  I sat on the steps of the Science Court, my back to a Doric column the thickness of a small redwood. A light wind blew. Two men paused in the shelter of the column to light sunshine pipes; I’d noticed that Easterners like it smoked. In California, we preferred to drink it. The men were genemod handsome, dressed in the severe sleeveless black suits fashionable on the Hill. Both ignored me. Livers noticed instantly that I wasn’t one of them, but donkeys seldom looked past the jacks and soda-can jewelry. Sufficient grounds for dismissal.