"He wants to see you," Pabst admitted. "He always wants to see you, Alejandro. But he won't like to see you like this."
"I think he's past shock by this time, don't you? Let's get this over with."
Pabst led Alex to his father.
Guillermo Unger was a tall, slight man in his late fifties, with carefully waved artificial blond hair the very color of the finest-quality creamery butter. He had blue and very watery eyes behind very thick glasses, the unfortunate legacy of a prolonged experiment with computer-assisted perception. Beneath his medicated pancake makeup, the acne from the hormone treatments was flaring up again. He was wearing a tropical linen suit. His mood seemed-not good, you could never call it good-but positive.
"So you're back," he said.
"I've been staying with Juanita."
"So I understand."
"I think she's dead, papa."
"She's not dead," his father said. "Dead women don't read their E-mail." He sighed. "She's still shacked up with that big dumb bastard of a mathematician! He's taken her off somewhere in New Mexico now. A failed academic, for Christ's sake. A crazy man. She's thrown it all over, she's let him smash her whole career. God only can help her, Alejandro. Because God knows I can't."
Alex sat down. He put his hands to his head. His eyes filled with tears. "I'm really glad she's still alive."
"Alejandro, look at me. Why the paper suit, like a bum off the street? Why the dirt, Alejandro? Why do you come into my office looking this way, couldn't you at least get dean? We're not poor people, we have baths."
"Pa pd, I'm clean as I'm going to get. I've been inside a big tornado. The dirt lodges deep in your skin. You can't wash it out, you just have to wait till it grows out. Sorry."
"Were you in Oklahoma City?" his father asked, with real interest.
"No, Dad. We were out where the storm set down at first. We were tracking it and we saw where it started."
"Oklahoma City was very heavily mediated," his father said, reflectively. "That was a rather important event."
"We weren't inside Oklahoma City. Anyway, they all died there."
"Not all of them," his father said. "Hardly more than half of them."
"We didn't see that part. We only saw the beginning of the F-6. We-the Troupe-they wanted to track the storm from the beginning, for scientific reasons, to understand it.
"Understand it, eh? Not very likely! Do they know why the storm stopped so suddenly, right after Oklahoma City?"
"No. I don't know if they understand that. I doubt they understand it." Alex stared at his father. This was going nowhere. He didn't know what to tell the man. He had nothing left to tell him. Except the ugly news that he was very near death, and someone in the family had to watch him die now. Just for formal reasons, basically. And he didn't want Jane to have to do that. And his father was the only one left.
"Well," his father said, "I've been wondering when you'd come back here, back to sense and reason."
"I'm back, papa."
"I tried to find you. Not much luck there, not with your sister hiding you from me."
"She, uh . . Well,, I can't defend her, papd. Juanita's very stubborn.
"I had good news for you, that's why I wanted to talk to you. Very good news. Very good medical news, Alex."
Alex grunted. He slumped back in his chair.
"I don't know how to tell you the details myself, but we've had Dr. Kindscher on retainer for some time, so when I heard you had arrived, I called him." He gestured above a lens inset in his desk.
Dr. Kindscher arrived in the office. Alex got the strong impression that Dr. Kindscher had been kept waiting for some time. Just a matter of medical etiquette, a way to establish whose time was more important.
"Hello, Alex."
"Hello, Doctor."
"We've had new results from Switzerland on your genetic scan."
"1 thought you'd given up that project years ago."
Dr. Kindscher frowned. "Alex, it's not an easy matter to scan an entire human genome right down to the last few centimorgans. Doing that for a single individual is a very complex business."
"We had to subcontract that business," his father said. "Bits and pieces.
"And we found a new bit, as Mr. Unger has said," Dr. Kindscher said, radiating satisfaction. "Very unusual. Very!"
"What is it?"
"It's a novel type of mucopolysaccharidosis on chromosome 7-Q-22."
"Could I have that in English?"
"Sorry, Alex, the original lab report is in French."
"I meant give me the upshot, Doctor," Alex croaked. "Give me the executive report."
"Well, since your birth, this genetic defect that you suffer from has been periodically blocking proper cellular function in your lungs, proper expression of fluids. A very rare syndrome. Only four other known cases in the world. One in Switzerland-we were quite lucky in that eventuality, I think-and two in California. Yours is the first known in Texas."
Alex looked at the doctor. Then at his father. Then at the doctor again. It was no joke this time. There wasn't any of the usual hedging and mumbo jumbo~ and alternate prognoses. They really thought they had it this time. They did. They had it. This time they actually had the truth.
"Why?" he croaked.
"Mutagenic damage to the egg cell," Dr. Kindscher said. "It's a very rare syndrome, but all five of them diagnosed so far have -involved maternal exposure to an industrial solvent, a very particular industrial solvent no longer in use.
"Chip assembly,"-his father said. "Your mother used to do chip assembly in a border factory, long before you were born."
"What? That's it, that's all there was to it?"
"She was young," his father said sadly. "We lived on the border, and I had just begun the start-up, and your mother and I, we didn't have much money."
"So that's it, eh? My mother was exposed to a mutagen in a maquiladora plant. And all this time I've really been sick."
"Yes, Alex." Dr. Kindscher nodded. He seemed deeply moved.
"I ~
"And the best news of all is, there's a treatment."
"I might have known."
"Illegal in the U.S.," his father said. "And far too advanced for any border clinica. But this time it sticks, son. This time they really have the root of it."
"We have a clinic contacted already, and they're ready to take you, Alex. Genetic repair. Legal in Egypt, Lebanon, and Cyprus."
"Oh . . ." Alex groaned. "Not Egypt, I hope."
"No, Cyprus," his father said.
"Good, I heard there's a bad staph strain in Egypt." Alex stood up and walked, painfully, to the doctor's side. "You're really sure about it, this time?"
"As sure as I've ever been in my career! Intron scans don't lie, Alex. You can depend on this one. The flaw is written in your genes, obvious to any trained technician, and now that we've spotted the exact position right down to the branch of the chromosome, any lab can verify that for you. I've already verified it twice!" He beamed. "We've beaten this thing at last, Alex. We're going to cure you!"
"Thanks a lot," Alex said. "You son of a bitch." He hit Dr. Kindscher in the face.
The doctor staggered and fell. He scrambled up, amazed, holding his cheek, then turned and fled the office.
"That's going to cost me," Alex's f~ther observed.
"Sorry," Alex said. He leaned onto the table, shaking. "Really sorry."
"It's all right," his father said, "a son of a bitch like that pest, you can't hit him just once."
Alex began weeping.
"I want to do this for you, Alejandro. Because now I know, it was never your fault, my boy. You were damaged goods right out of the box."
Alex wiped his tears away. "Same old papd," he croaked.
"I don't know if things will change when you are no longer a mutant," his father declared, nobly, "but maybe you will. Who knows? I'm your father, my boy, I feel I owe you that chance at life." He frowned. "But no more foolishness this time! None of these sc
andals like that shameful business in Nuevo Laredo! Alejandro, those people have lawyers on me! You are going to Cyprus, and you're going right away, and you're going to stay there. No talking, no phone calls, no charge cards, and you do just as you're told! And no more nonsense from you, and especially none from your damn fool of a sister."
"All right," Alex said. He sat in the chair, half collapsing. "You win. I give up. Call the ambulance." He began giggling.
"Don't laugh, Alex. Gene replacement therapy-they tell me it really hurts."
"It always hurts," Alex said, laughing. "It all hurts. Everything hurts. For as long as you can still feel it."
EPILOGUE
Austin, Texas, had once been called the "City of the Violet Crown," back when the city had been small enough to fit within its bowl of hills. That bowl of hills was alleged to serve as protection from local tornadoes. Of course the Violet Crown no longer did that, if in fact it ever had, and even the oldest central section of Austin had been ravaged by an F-2 within the past five years.
The spike had tracked right through the city's oldest northern suburb, an ancient residential district just north of The University of Texas. The area was now part of The University's privately managed, and privately policed, urban demesne. There was not much overt sign left of the spike damage, except for some ancient and now spectacularly crippled trees. Big old pecans mostly; some dead and replaced by saplings, but many of them maimed and left upright.
To Alex's eye, the damage track was easy to spot. You'd be driving under an even canopy of flourishing, pampered, C02-glutted streetside giants, and then there would be this tortured Goyaesque mutant breaking out all up and down with scrawny little green sapling limbs, maybe one original crooked branch left as a kind of beckoning finger. He pointed this out to his companion.
"We never have tornadoes in Boston," she said.
His sister was living in a little crackerbox place. A little brown-and-white shack that looked a hundred years old, if it was a day. Back in the early 2020s, when the practice had been in vogue, somebody had sprayed the outside of the entire building with a weatherproof lacquer. The white housepaint beneath the lacquer looked unnaturally clean and sprightly.
When Alex stepped up to the concrete porch, he could see that the housepaint trapped beneath the lacquer had given up the ghost and shattered into tens of millions of tiny paint flakes no bigger than fine dust. It didn't matter. The dust wasn't going anywhere. That lacquer was there for the ages.
JANE LOOKED THROUGH the security glass at her door and saw a short, plump young blond man in a suit and tie. And a very odd-looking woman. A tiny, witchy-looking boho student type, in a slashed silk dress and striped stockings and red ankle-tied sandals. Half her face-ear, cheeks, temple-was disfigured by a huge purple tattoo.
They didn't look armed, though. And not very dangerous. Anyway, there was rarely much civil trouble around The University. Because The University had massive heaps of data and attention, and even some money, and more importantly, it had a large paramilitary phalanx of armed, disciplined, and enthusiastically violent students.
Jane opened the door. "Hello?"
"Janey?"
"Yeah?"
"It's me."
Jane stared at him. "Christ! Alex."
"This is Sylvia," Alex said. "Sylvia Muybridge. She's traveling with me. Sylvia, this is my sister, Jane Unger."
"How do you do," Jane said. "Actually, I go by Jane Mulcahey these days. It's simpler, and besides, it's legal." She held up her hand with the gold ring.
"Yes," Alex said, pained, "I knew you had a married name, but I thought you still networked professionally as Jane Unger."
"Yeah, well, I'm probably gonna change that too."
Alex paused. "Can we come in?"
"Oh hell, yes!" Jane laughed. "Come on in."
She knew that the place looked disastrous. It was astrew with printouts, textbooks, and heaps of disks. There was a giant framed multicolored chart on the wall reading UNITED STATES FREQUENCY ALLOCATIONS: THE RADIO SPECTRUM.
Jane threw a cat off the couch-a paper-covered futon and cleared a small space for them to sit. "Are you still allergic to cats?"
"No. Not anymore," Alex said.
"How long has it been, Alex?"
"Eleven months," he said, sitting. "Almost a year."
"Damn," Jane said. "What can I get y'all?"
Sylvia spoke up for the first time. "You got any ibogame?"
"What's that?"
"Never mind, then."
Jane touched her brother's shoulder. "They must have been pretty good to you in Cyprus, because you look pretty fine, Alex."
"Yeah," Alex said, "they tore out all my seams and rewove me, in Nicosia. They tell me I'm supposed to be this fat. Metabolically, I mean. Genetically, I'm supposed to be a big fat blond guy, Janey. Of course, I'll never get over being stunted in my youth." He laughed.
"I'm sorry I didn't recognize you at first. Mostly it was that suit."
"No," he said. "No, I'm completely different now, I know that. Genetics, it's the core of everything, Janey, it's mega witchcraft. Just look at my hands! It was supposed to change my lungs, and it did that, my lungs are like rock now. But look at my hands! They never looked like this."
Jane held her own hand out and placed it gently against his. "You're right. They look just like my hands now. They're not all . . . well, they're not all thin."
"It's simple, really," Alex said. "I didn't have a life before they rewove me, and now, after this, after everything I went through, I actually have a life! I'm just like anyone else, now. The curse is lifted. It's been erased, wiped out. I'm probably gonna live a really long time."
Jane glanced at Alex's girlfriend. She~assumed this was a girlfriend. Normally a woman wouldn't dress so provocatively and travel alone with a guy unless there was something happening. Her being here could only mean that Alex was deliberately showing her off.
But then there was that face. That huge blotch on her face. It was really hard to look at. And she'd done something to it too; it wasn't just a giant port-wine-stain birthmark, she'd messed with it too; she'd outlined the edges of it in some kind of very fine and very elaborate stippling. Like dots of rainbow ink, that shimmered. Jane had never seen anything like it. She found it frightening.
"How are the Troupe people doing?"
"Oh, we hear from them sometimes," Jane said. "Buzzard, quite a bit. Rudy and Sam and Peter and Rick have their own team up in Kansas now, they're still chasing. Martha never calls much, but I never got along much with Martha. We see Joe Brasseur socially sometimes, he's got some cushy job in town with the State Water Comnusslon.
"I never got a chance to tell you how sorry I was about Greg and Carol. And Mickey too." -
"Well," she said simply, "Mickey was a good man, and Greg and Carol were my closest friends."
"How is Ed?"
"Well, Ed's got the use of both his arms again. Not like before, but pretty much. Ellen Mae is a lot better too. She's up in Anadarko now...
"How is Jerry doing? Is Jerry here?"
"No. He's at The University. I'm expecting him." She glanced at her watch. "You want some lunch? I'm making tacos, it's easy."
"I'll help," Alex said.
THEY DRIFTED INTO Juanita's cramped and ancient kitchen. Sylvia stayed on the couch. Alex winced as he heard her deftly fire up the TV with a remote. She began methodically combing through Austin's eight hundred available channels, with repeated dabs of her thumb.
He moved beside the electric range and watched the taco mix bubbling in a pan. The top of Juanita's stove was liberally spattered with orange grease. Jane shook some garlic salt at the taco mix, as if trying to choke it into submission. His sister had to be the worst cook in the world.
"You gotta make allowances for Sylvia," he said quietly. "She's not real good with other people, just kind of shy."
"I'm just touched that you would bring your girlfriend along to meet me, Alex."
"I'd kind
of like it, if you and she could get along. She's kind of important to me. The most important woman in my life, really."
"That serious, huh?" -
"I don't have a lot of room to judge there," he said. "I met her on the nets, in a genetic-disorder support group. Sylvia's good on nets. People like Sylvia and me, people who've been through a lot of sickness when young, it tends to narrow our social skills. She had kind of an autism thing, she's had a hard time of life. But she's all rewoven now, and she's okay underneath."
"Boy, it really is that serious," Jane said.
"How is Jerry? Are you getting along?"
"You really want to know?"
"Yes, really."
"He's different. I'm different. We're a lot different than we were a year ago." She looked at him hard, and he could see it there behind her eyes, waiting to pour out.
"Tell me," he said.
"Well, it's since the baby. . . . Alex, he's really good with the baby. The baby really got through to him, he's so good with his little son. It's like . . . he's really good when he has someone he doesn't have to reason with. He's so patient and kind with that little kid, it's really amazing."
"How about you, though?"
"Us? We get along. We don't even have to get along. We're stuck here in this dinky little house, but you wouldn't know it. He's got his little office here with the virching stuff and his university link, and I've got my net-rig in the back in the baby's room, and he does his thing, and I do my thing, and we do our together-thing, and it works out okay, it really does."
"What are you working on these days, exactly?"
"Net-stuff. The usual. Well, not the usual. Mommy net-stuff. The kind of stuff you can do with one hand, while you're wiping warm spit off your forearm." Jane laughed, and poked at her taco mix with a wooden spoon. "Anyway, that data we got-the stuff you recorded when the stream broke down on us? That made itqn three final release disks! We got money for-that. Pretty good money. We bought this house with it."
"Alex, this isn't a big house, I know that, but it's a stand-alone in a really prized area. I've even got a real garden in the backyard, you should see it. And you wouldn't believe the neighborhood politicals here in Austin, they are really fierce. You can walk to campus, and play with your kid right in the parks, anytime day or night, and it's a really pretty area, and it's really safe too. The crime rate is very low here, and you never see a structure hit, never. It's a real enclave here, it's a mega-good place for a little baby to live."
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