“What about logistics?” Marta asked, serious again. “Once production rises, can the existing pipelines handle the increased output?”
“Good point. We’ll need to make some upgrades but I think with the proper management, there’ll be enough transport capacity by the time the plant is ready.”
“Is that realistic?” asked Jim. “There must be thousands of miles of pipelines to carry water. If we up the production by a factor of ten, are we going to be able to get the water where it’s needed? It’s like expecting, oh, I don’t know...like expecting a bike path to handle a highway’s worth of traffic.”
“Actually, it is realistic. When the plant was built, the promoters overstated what RO could produce. Overstated it big time. So there’s been excess capacity since day one. We’ll need to do some building but nothing extreme.” Eva paused and looked to make sure she had their attention. The side of her mouth curled up in a half grin. “Besides, NMech just purchased the two local suppliers of pipeline and fittings so there’ll be some additional revenue.”
“Of course we did,” Jim laughed. “Great plan, Eva.”
The compliment cracked Eva’s impassive expression and a smile stole across her face and hovered for an instant like a hummingbird at a flower. A second later, her features resumed their characteristic impassivity.
“Well, I’m in, I guess,” Marta said. “But I want to get back together in, say, six months and look at what we accomplished. Lessons learned and all that.”
“Okay,” said Eva. “Anything else?”
“One thing,” said Marta. “I want you to meet an old friend of mine. She’s the developer of morphing nanocouture. I think there might be a place for her at NMech.”
“We have our own textiles division.”
“Exactly. But that’s military textiles. They’re tough and self-repairing, and the uniforms don’t change much. So that division is becoming less profitable. Think of nanocouture as cash flow. Styles change, and that means constant new business.” Marta smiled, her excitement evident at the opportunity to present a business case. “It also means that we’ll have a peaceful use for some of our military technology, and that’s important to me.”
“Well, well,” said Eva. “Listen to who’s talking like a business-woman. I like that. So you’ve got, what, a model for us? A fashion queen?”
“No, a scientist who’s interested in fashion. She’s an old friend of the family and I was waiting for just the right moment to suggest she join us.”
“You’ve known her long?” Eva sounded half-interested.
“She’s a close family friend. In fact, Dana calls her Aunt Colleen. But I’m suggesting you talk with her because of her science, not our friendship. Morphing couture can be huge, but she doesn’t have the capital to develop it and to compete with the established fashion houses.”
“What the heck is morphing couture?” asked Jim.
“It’s a way to use datasleeve and software rather than needle and thread. A command to a datasleeve and Colleen’s pieces reconfigure into various styles. Right now, you can only change the color and texture of a garment. With morphing couture, a single garment changes into a designer’s newest styles. It’ll be like nano-customized prêt-à-porter,” Marta said, her voice rising in excitement. “The styles can even be programmed to expire when each new line comes out. That means customers make multiple purchases.”
Marta said to Eva, “I told Colleen to meet me here so I could to introduce you two. She’s got a PhD in nanotextile materials engineering from Harvard. That’s where we met.”
Eva shrugged and returned to her model of the Paraguaná RO plant. Marta subvocalized and a moment later the boardroom door opened.
A young woman entered the boardroom and smiled. A lush cascade of auburn hair in a loose braid served to accent her slender neck. She’d brushed delicate metallic streaks into her hair that projected tiny electrical emissions like a subtle halo. They glowed and flickered to draw attention to an elegant face. Her features were precisely symmetrical—full lips, captivating green eyes, and an aquiline nose. The distance from eyes to lips formed a pleasing proportion.
Eva looked up and gasped involuntarily. She was looking at a woman who could have doubled for Gergana. The wide smile, the innocent eyes, the full hips, the perfect facial features. Eva blanched.
“Eva,” Marta began, “I’d like you to meet Dr. Colleen Lowell.”
Colleen stepped forward to accept Marta’s introduction. “I’m very honored to meet you, Dr. Rozen. You’re one of my heroes, an inspiration to women scientists, and—”
Colleen stopped and stared at Eva. “Dr. Rozen, are you all right?”
Jim and Marta turned to their colleague. She grimaced, as if in pain, and sat down heavily. She rested her elbows on the cherry wood conference table and held her head in her hands. She looked up again at Colleen.
“No,” muttered Eva, struggling to regain her poise.
“What’s wrong?” said Jim.
Eva looked at the bewildered trio on the other side of the table. She repeated, now in a firm voice, “No.” Then Eva rose and stalked towards the boardroom’s door.
“Eva?” Marta asked, concerned and confused.
Eva said nothing. She paused for a moment, and then turned back and scrutinized Lowell.
“No,” Eva said, for a third time.
“What the—?” Marta said. She turned to Colleen Lowell and spilled out an apology. “I’m sorry, Colleen, but our partner, uh, Dr. Rozen, she can be eccentric every now and then.”
“What’s going on, Marta?’ Lowell asked, an edge to her voice. “You said that NMech would take on my work.”
Before Marta could answer, Eva turned to the young woman. “Settle down, Ms. Lowell,” said Eva, in her customary flat voice. She had regained her composure.
“That’s Dr. Lowell, if you don’t mind,” Colleen huffed. “Materials engineering at Harvard. I believe that’s your alma mater.”
Eva stared at her, unblinking, and then said, “Marta, your idea is a good one. I do not want her up here in the executive suite. I do not want to come in contact with her.” Then, turning back to Lowell, Eva said, “Nothing personal.”
“Not personal? You tell me you don’t want to see me and that’s not personal? Well, it’s personal to me. I don’t care if you’re the smartest woman in the world. You dress like you’re going to a cattle auction—as the livestock. I deal with people in the fashion world who would eat you alive, you ugly runt! Marta, thanks for the invitation. Good luck with Raggedy Ann.”
The words, ugly runt, triggered a flood of memories for Eva. Others had hurled the same words. Mama did. Papa did, especially when he believed she did not hear. Schoolmates did. And Bare Chest did.
Each taunt cried out for recompense and Eva kept a ledger. Recording each offense was an automatic mental process, if not a conscious one. Each offense was tabulated with meticulous precision.
Eva remembered some of the offenses. There was the child—could she have been six? Seven?—who uttered those words. That child soon watched a shiny thing, half-hidden in Eva’s left hand, turn into a pair of scissors. Then she saw a hank of her pretty red hair fall to the playground tarmac...the boy, who returned from soccer practice shower to find every piece of his clothing glued together...the schoolmate who found her hair conditioner replaced by a depilatory.
The foulest and most memorable entry in her ledger was that of Bare Chest—Akexsander Yorkov—accomplice to Gergana’s murder. Eva remembered him clearly, and the price he’d paid.
Colleen’s angry retort may not have triggered a conscious memory of each violation. But it evoked an emotional response from a lifetime catalog of insults. This triggered a series of biological events. Eva’s endocrine system prepared her for fight or flight, flooding her with adrenaline and noradrenaline. Her heart raced and digestion slowed. Glucose pumped into her bloodstream and her pupils dilated.
Years of free-flowing rage found a target, not tw
o feet away.
Eva smiled.
She touched Colleen on the forearm and spoke quietly, even soothingly. “Be careful, dear. You meet the same people coming down as you did when you were going up.” Eva held her hand on Colleen’s arm for a moment longer than necessary to make her point, and a series of software commands flowed from Eva’s sleeve into Colleen’s. She did not need to touch Colleen for the rogue software to jack into Colleen’s sleeve but the unexpected contact distracted the fashionista from Eva’s real purpose
Lowell jerked her arm away and stormed out of the boardroom.
“Well, that worked out nicely,” said Marta. “Thanks, Eva. Real professional. That was a very dear friend you just insulted. And one heck of an income stream you just threw out.”
“Disregard it. We have enough on our plate right now,” Eva snapped. “And nobody calls me that name to my face.”
Marta wanted to say, Which name? Ugly? Or runt? but she held her tongue.
Eva left the boardroom fighting to control her emotions. Something tugged hard at her memory, but it was frustratingly out of reach. Eva’s breathing became shallow, rapid breaths that drew in little air. She felt her pulse throb in her neck.
Eva was processing images, memories from her preverbal infancy. Lowell’s sculpted features matched Eva’s stored images of her sister and her onetime caregiver, Gergana, both alive and dead in Eva’s unconscious mind, where past, present, and future were indistinguishable.
Ego structures strained under the reanimated weight of memory and loss. Long-repressed images pushed insistently against the barriers that separated a violent past from a controlled present, like protestors overrunning a police barricade.
The din from the Table of Clamorous Voices had been dormant. Now it was an unquiet phenomenon.
14
___________________________________________
HOME SCHOOLING
FROM THE MEMORIES
OF DANA ECCO
I was almost nine when my parents bought a home in Pill Hill, an upscale Boston suburb, named for its proximity to a cluster of hospitals. My father cycled to work, weather permitting, or rode with my mother in a P-car, a semi-private driverless automobile. Our house backed up against a ribbon of parkland called the Emerald Necklace. That was my western frontier, my Sherwood Forest, my mystical kingdom. If I wanted to meet Robin Hood’s Merry Men, cowboys, or elves, I had merely to walk out the door and into my backyard imagination.
My mother showed me plants in the parkland that were edible or medicinal. Today, when I walk through the parkland along the Muddy River, I can still spot trillium, wild asparagus, leeks, and Solomon’s seal.
My childhood was as ordinary as anyone raised by one of the greatest scientists of her age and tutored by another. I liked to listen to music, to play games—things adolescents have done for centuries—although sports never caught my fancy. I tried to play soccer a few times, and lacrosse just once. Evidently, an easy-going personality doesn’t match up well against big-boned bloodlust.
My playmates were more inclined to fantasy than to football. We found our castles, battlefields, and alien landscapes along the Muddy River. The fens and woodlands were forests and jungles inhabited by wild creatures. What courage, what daring we displayed.
I made friends with children of other scientists at NMech, explorers all. We hunted for treasure and found it, right there at NMech—ancient sensors, induction coils, spectrometers, rheostats, and voltmeters. I doubt that another school, private or corporate, boasted a scanning tunneling microscope, capable of nanoscale resolution, right alongside a considerable pile of building blocks, board games and baseballs.
Eva Rozen took an interest in my adventures. She listened to my tales of gallantry and adventure without once censoring me. I didn’t realize that she thought made-up stories were a fool’s task until I was much older.
Our family life was much like that of other families. I got along with my mother and father, debates over household chores notwithstanding. After my mother became a major stockholder at NMech and she hired the housekeeper I’d lobbied for, we found other duties over which to disagree.
I also lobbied for a dog, but my father surprised me and refused. He said that we’d be away from home too much. When I reminded him that we could take a dog with us to NMech since we owned part of the company, he smiled and said, “I’ll think about it”—the universal parent code for “no.” I think that after Ringer, he decided not to face the certain prospect of loss with another dog. Instead, he poured the part of him that craved primal connections with canines into his devotion to the dogs at Haven, and to my mother and me.
Schoolwork was easy until my parents decided to take over my education. Homeschooling was harder, but more enjoyable. My father, my mother, and Eva were my main teachers. Life sciences, like biology and botany and medicine, how the body works, how nature works was my mother’s area. I learned about the Taíno, about Abuela, but I wasn’t to meet her for a few years.
My father tried to teach me social sciences, but he’d ignored those subjects in high school. So it was up to me to learn at my own pace. Instead, we tackled literature and the arts together. We read a lot of the old mystery and science fiction stories—Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories, Raymond Chandler, Asimov, Bradbury, Frank Herbert, and Julian May, for example—and called these the “Classics” to satisfy one of my educational requirements. He taught me what he called the people sciences: how to read body language and predict what people would do, how to pick up clues from their habits and grooming that would tell me about their lives.
My parents could monitor me when I was home or at school through the ever-present commpatch—until Eva showed me how to jack the patch so that I could choose background sounds for them to hear. Then I had a great deal more freedom.
During the years before the Great Washout, Eva was as much a mentor as my mother. I studied chemistry, physical sciences, and computer science with Eva. I thought it was the most natural thing that the soon-to-be-richest woman in the world spent time nearly every week with the juvenile son of her business partner and scientific colleague. Our studies went a bit beyond the traditional sciences. Again, I thought it perfectly natural for my extracurricular activities to be preceded by the warning, “Don’t tell anyone”.
It was always “Eva.” She had said, “You’re like family for me, but don’t give me any ‘auntie’ or ‘sister’ or ‘Mama Eva’ crap. I’m just Eva. Got it? Maybe someday that will change. Maybe I’ll adopt you,” she laughed, “and then one day all this will be yours.” That was a running joke with us, especially when an experiment or a project failed.
So I called her Eva, as if she were an equal, not a teacher, and without realizing that laughter was a rare display and a precious commodity for her. I think she wanted a playmate, a child who could understand her and get excited by the things that made her excited. I can’t imagine her playing with other little girls when she was young. Dolls or tea parties would not have been within her repertoire. I doubt other children were interested in the periodic table of the elements or the Standard Model of particle physics.
I once asked Eva why she liked to play with kids—meaning me. She told me that when we spent time together her mind was quiet. Even so, there’d be times when she’d be distant, mute, and seemed to move under a terrible weight. I imagined that a giant hand pushed down on her. At first, I thought that’s why she was so short.
She was an exciting teacher and companion. She taught by telling the stories of scientific advancement, which was strange because she considered storytelling to be “worthless nonsense.”
The first story she told me was about Richard Feynman, the physicist who started people thinking about what would come to be known as nanotechnology. In December of 1959, he made a famous speech at Caltech and offered a prize of $1000 to anyone who could reduce a line of text to 1/25,000 of its original size. The scale was an inside joke: that was the reduction
needed to be able to fit something called an encyclopedia on the head of something called a pin. I think that the encyclopedia was some kind of book of knowledge, or maybe it was several books. A pin was a fastener with a sharp point. I didn’t quite get the connection, but it was well-understood nearly a century ago when Dr. Feynman issued his challenge.
When a scientist tried to claim the prize, Feynman almost couldn’t pay. He didn’t expect anyone to succeed for years and was hard-pressed for the funds. “But that’s science,” Eva explained. “It moves a lot faster than people expect. Tell a well-educated idiot what science can do right now and he’ll call it science fiction.”
Not only was it hard for Feynman to pay, it was tough for the winner to claim his prize, because the text was so tiny compared to the relative size of the pin that the scientists had to search to find it. “If you ever want to hide something,” Eva told me, “you can leave it right out in the open. In fact, it’s harder to spot in the open. Just make it very, very small—nano-size.”
Eva told me the story of Feynman’s challenge many times and the lesson stuck with me. I liked the idea of hiding in plain sight. As it happened, this lesson mirrored another. My father and I had just read Edgar Allen Poe’s story, “The Purloined Letter.” Poe’s detective, Dupin, finds a letter that several people searched for but missed. The letter was left in plain sight, and overlooked, instead of in a hidey-hole that would have been searched. My father, with his ability to read people and the tiny details surrounding them was like Dupin, or Sherlock Holmes, who solved mysteries with the tiniest clues that nobody else could see until he pointed them out.
The lessons about hiding in plain sight would prove fortunate.
Little Deadly Things Page 17