“You exaggerate.”
“I was visiting my grandparents,” said Dash. “They were scared to death. Everyone was.”
“Not everyone.”
“It was a lesson,” said Cav. “What we will and won’t permit. Playing to our greatest fear.”
“Annihilation,” said Dash.
“Enslavement,” said Gunjita.
“Invasion,” said Cav. “Ironic, considering what we harbor in our own bodies. How many alien species at last count? How many alien cells? At least half of who we are is nonhuman.”
“Your point?” asked Gunjita, who feared a rambling speech.
“We wouldn’t be alive were it not for them. They wouldn’t be alive were it not for us. We should be more tolerant. We’re bigger than we behave. Harmony is woven into our DNA.”
“That’s very beautiful, Cav,” said Dash. “Very eloquent. But you know what they say about harmony.”
“What do they say?”
“It’s like smoke.”
“Who says that?”
“Disharmony does. Second law of thermodynamics. You want it to last, you’ve got to tighten the screws. Recognize threats. Protect and defend. That’s also woven in. Bad things happen when we don’t.”
“A balance, of course. But how sad if we let ignorance and fear govern us. How counterproductive. We could miss the very things we’re looking for. Or could be looking for. Listen to this. Stop me if you’ve already heard.
“Our retrovirome is what? Eight percent of our genome? Sequences inserted randomly, or nonrandomly, as far back as fifty million years ago. A group has excised it in its entirety, piece by piece, and knitted the pieces together. And guess what? The chain is biologically active. It makes a virus of its own. Brand new, never before seen.”
“I don’t believe it,” said Gunjita. “What’s this virus do?”
“It reproduces.”
“That’s it?”
“They’re being very cautious. Very careful.”
“No doubt. Mice?”
He nodded.
“And?”
“The sample size is extremely small.”
“You’re stalling. What’s it do?” she asked.
“Hair on the tongue.”
“Say again?”
“Little tufts. Presumably because mice have little tongues.”
“Human hair?”
He hesitated. “Baboon.”
She was less than impressed. “You know these people?”
“I know the journal.”
“What’s it called?”
It had a long name, sprinkled with the words “Proceedings,” “Archive,” “Academy,” and “Experimental.”
“Never heard of it,” she said, who had heard of everything.
“Radical stuff,” said Cav.
She gave him a look. “Hair on the tongue? You think so? Maybe you want to join forces with them. Work on this radical project. Help them out. No. Wait. I’m sorry. We have our own work. How silly of me. You have a job to do here.”
“She means Gleem,” said Cav. “They’re expecting a miracle.”
“They’ve been more than generous. They deserve one.”
“What they’re doing is a crime. What they deserve is our contempt.”
“Really? In what sense is it a crime?” She hated him when he was like this. Sanctimonious. Naive.
“H82W8 is unnecessary. A waste of resources. In that sense. It’s redundant. Reiterative. What good will it do, and for whom?”
“Not for us to decide. Not as long as they’re paying the bills.”
“How is it redundant?” asked Dash. “You juved.”
“Once.”
“One time or a hundred. The principle’s the same.”
“I disagree.”
“Are you sorry? Do you regret it?”
“No. Not at all. I don’t.”
“Neither do I,” said Dash. “Some things are overrated. I think we’d all agree. Being young isn’t one of them. Look at me. What do you see? A black Viking god, I know. Apart from that.”
“What could we possibly see apart from that?” asked Gunjita, all innocence.
“My apologies. I’m blindingly bright, it’s true. Cover your eyes if you have to. Not you, Cav. Look at me. Look at Gunjita.”
“I know what youth looks like,” said Cav.
“Do you remember how it feels?”
“How can I forget, with the two of you to remind me? It’s a beautiful thing. Truly. I couldn’t be happier for you.”
“Then do it. Juve. What’s stopping you?”
Cav heaved a sigh. He had no ready reply. All he could think of was them—Gunjita, Dashaud—and the worry he was causing.
“I hate the thought of losing you,” he said. “I love you both so much.”
This stopped them in their tracks. Neither of them knew what to say.
Cav welcomed the silence. Then it got to be too much, their speechlessness and abashed, imploding faces yet another responsibility.
He had to distance himself. “You look different,” he told Dash.
Gunjita refused to be sidetracked. “You don’t have to.”
“You don’t,” said Dash.
“Paler. You look paler. Are you ill?”
“Not ill. Lighter-skinned. Just a shade or two.”
Gunjita had noticed at once. She shifted her attention. “Deliberately?”
“No. Why would I do that?”
Inevitably, she thought of his mother. No one prouder of her heritage than Ruby Kincaid, nor as outspoken against racism, which still festered in pockets around the globe, like untreated sewage. Not nearly as bad as it had been. The Hoax, ironically, had united people like never before.
But “not as bad” was not good enough, not by a long shot, not for people like Ruby Kincaid, a tolerant woman except when it came to bigotry and prejudice. Who could be tolerant, much less safe, when certain of humanity’s citizens “remained at war with themselves, drunk on some cockeyed, manufactured pecking order, clucking around like crazy chickens, lacking the decency to keep their mouths shut, and barring that, the common courtesy to have their heads cut off?”2
“The enhancement,” said Cav.
Dash nodded.
“Interfered with melaninization.”
Another nod. “More Meissner’s, Merkel’s, and Pacinian’s, less melanocytes. Crowded them out.”
“You took a risk,” said Cav.
“What are you talking about?” asked Gunjita.
Five minutes later, after a spirited lesson that began with mechanoreceptors—pressure and motion detectors—in the skin, and ended with one of them, the Meissner corpuscle, named for its discoverer, an accomplished researcher and illustrator, who studied electric fish, developed a technique to preserve organs for years without putrefaction (thereby advancing by leaps and bounds the science of antisepsis), and loved music, Dash returned to Cav’s comment about risk.
“A thousand to one.”
“Nonetheless,” Cav replied haughtily.
Dash was having none of it. “There’s a risk anytime you do anything. That includes doing nothing.”
“Words of wisdom,” said Gunjita. “Are you listening, sweetheart?”
He was, mostly to his own intuition. He sensed a subtle change in Dash, a shyness, a whisper of unhappiness and insecurity.
“Are you pleased with the outcome?” he asked, hoping the answer was yes.
Dash responded by studying his hand, front and back. He’d been so preoccupied with the change in sensation he hadn’t spent much time thinking about anything else. He was blessed with good looks and a strong sense of self. Too handsome by half. Mindful and proud of his roots. All this before juving. Now he looked like he’d been rinsed in skim milk.
A mild shock, like waking from a deep sleep. He felt exposed, defensive.
“I am,” he told Cav, puffing out his chest. “Completely satisfied. One hundred percent.”
“Then I’m gl
ad. I have a question. Please don’t think me rude. You know me better than that.”
Dash did, and had no reservations about anything Cav might ask. Happy, even eager, to bare his soul.
Didn’t feel quite the same with Gunjita present.
His fingertips had started to throb, as though to remind him that his heart was beating rather hard and fast. At the same time the throb felt independent of his heart, his fingertips an entirely separate organ, restless, hungry for further stimulation and experience, desperate to touch something.
He glanced at Gunjita. Sensibly, kept his hands to himself, though not without an effort.
Focused on Cav.“Ninety percent,” he said, coming clean and braving embarrassment.
Cav, who had suspected as much, merely nodded. “My question is this: can you feel the difference?”
“What difference is that?”
“In color. Tint. Shade. Before and after.”
Leave it to Cav.
Who proceeded to elaborate. “Our visitor . . . sometimes it looks yellowish-green, sometimes greenish-yellow. I want to know how it’s doing that. If it’s doing that, if it’s truly changing.”
Whether he could or couldn’t differentiate wavelengths of light with his new biology had never entered Dash’s mind. Now, of course, he was curious.
He raised two fingers, and gently touched his cheek. Was halted by the bristle, which felt like a bed of nails. Pressed past it, onto his skin itself, which was warm, feathery, and giving. Pillow-soft, barely any resistance, as though it were backing away from his touch, receding. Was it lighter colored than before? Nothing to compare it to. But he felt something.
Amazing.
Also possible: he was making it up. Not his sense of touch at all, but his imagination.
How to distinguish between the two? Gunjita would run an experiment. Cav might run one, too, though just as likely take what he said at face value.
Nothing quite as good as working with Cav.
Who was watching him now. Thinking of the Ooi. Hoping for good news. “Yes? No?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“Yes. Maybe.”
“Weak or solid?”
“Not weak.”
“Then solid.”
“Yes. Solid. Definitely. A solid maybe.”
Cav did not conceal his joy. He took Dash by the arm. “Maybe’s good enough for now. Come this way, you beautiful man. Let’s put your new talent to work.”
1 From The Western Fruit-Growers’ Association Handbook, chapter 7, “Preventing Spoilage.”
2 From one of Ruby’s, aka Kleptomania’s, performances, for which she dressed as a white Leghorn hen. Gunjita was in the audience. She had been invited by her colleague and friend, Bjorn Mickelson, who was dating Ruby at the time. For Gunjita, it was love at first sight. The spectacle of a beaked and feathered grown woman strutting around and mouthing off had her rolling in the aisle. An eye-popping, mind-blowing, life-altering experience.
–SEVEN–
How do we know a thing? The age-old question. How to arrive at a mutual, shared understanding? Belief and conviction come too easily to some; to others, they’re as hard to induce as laughter from a stump.1
Face-to-face with it, Dash thought that Cav was pulling his leg. That he’d gotten him up under false pretenses, for a different, as-yet-unannounced purpose.
“You’re saying that’s alive?”
“Working hypothesis.”
“Is it even organic?”
“Best guess: yes.”
“It looks like puke.”
“So I’ve been told.”
They were suited, helmeted, and gloved. Cav extended a hand and draped it lightly atop the Ooi, as he had done previously. All living things on Earth had a pulse of some kind. It varied enormously, and in the long, fruitful history of describing and categorizing life on Earth had often been missed, and a living thing had been taken for nonliving, or possibly once living, now dead. Human perception was limited. Human imagination was also limited: perceptions went unrecognized simply because they had nowhere to go. Add to this the hugeness of the universe, where a creature might exist without a pulse, or with a pulse that beat once every million years. You just never knew.
“You try,” he said, removing his hand.
Dash started with a finger, then two, then all five. He felt more glove than anything at first, and pressed slightly harder. Suddenly the Ooi sprang to life with contour and dimensionality: he felt peaks, valleys, ridges, draws, craters. He felt hardness, too, and roughness in spots, smoothness in other spots. All very rocklike. No softness, no give, no inner plasticity or suppleness.
He glanced at Cav, gave a shrug.
“Try closing your eyes. Empty your mind of preconceptions.”
He did this, stilled his breathing, and alerted himself to the faintest, weakest signal.
He waited.
And waited.
At length he felt something.
Or almost something. An incipient something, like a secret about to be spoken, a feint followed by a gradual retreat, an impending sneeze, or rather the suggestion of a sneeze, a sneeze that fizzles. Like that. Present for the briefest time, then gone.
“What?” asked Cav. “What is it?”
“It disappeared.”
“What disappeared?”
He tried to describe it.
“Movement? A pulse of some kind?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. Probably nothing. Probably me, not it. I need to touch it with my bare skin. Without gloves.”
“Yes. Me, too. And smell it. And taste it.”
Dash gave him a look. “Your tongue? Really?”
“Or yours.”
A joke, from anyone else.
“Is it more sensitive, too?”
“My tongue?”
Cav nodded. “To touch.”
He hadn’t noticed. Taste was such a dominant sense. “Leave it to you to ask.”
Cav was thinking about hair on the tongue, baboon or otherwise, and how it might be put to use.
Dash pressed the tip of his against his teeth. “And the risk of contamination?”
“Use a condom.”
“On my tongue? Wouldn’t that defeat the purpose?”
“We’ll leave taste for last. How’s that?”
* * *
While the HUBIES were thawing, and the men were manning around, Gunjita was in the cupola, debating with herself. They’d been on the station nearly a month, had less than a week remaining, but she wanted to leave at once.
It wasn’t because of Dash. It wasn’t the HUBIES. It wasn’t Cav’s craziness around the Ooi. The craziness was a veil.
It was what was going to happen when the veil came off.
He was planning to end his life. She’d seen the drugs he’d brought and tried to hide. She knew what was going through his mind.
The idea was awful in too many ways to count.
What she didn’t understand: if there was anything Cav hated more than deceit, it was self-deceit. Honesty-Whatever-the-Cost was his nom de guerre. So why was he acting this way? He seemed to be lying to her and to himself. Was he undecided? Did he need more time?
Did it matter? Either way, she was a hostage.
She felt trapped. The tension onboard was like a cage, and she longed to break free of it.
Earth was dark beneath her. Beads and blotches and smears of light glittered the globe. Then sunrise came, and the globe turned blue and white.
Blue for the Indian Ocean, which spooled into view. White for the clouds, which hung like shreds of paper over it. Also over the landmass of southern India, half hiding its parched brown interior, and the fringe of green along the Kerala coast. Sri Lanka, a recent powerhouse in the global economy, appeared to be nosing its way toward the mainland, with the intention of taking a bite.
And now the Himalayas, a long, curved fold in the Earth’s pie crust, sprinkled with powdered sugar. The Ganges snaking south. Rishikesh
, her birthplace, in the foothills, on the great river’s shore.
She thought of her parents, both of them deceased. Her father, a happy, soft-spoken teacher. Her mother, a successful businesswoman, energetic and ambitious. Gunjita took after her mother. Had headed a lab for the better part of two lifetimes. Had shaped and commanded battalions of scientists. Had created a stronghold of research, which had not only withstood the steady assault on science but had become iconic in the field. A safe, protected place. A haven for free but disciplined thinkers. A refuge for the best and the brightest, where failures, by definition, rarely occurred.
She was on leave, could return at any time. Hard to think of anything to rival it, though she could do without the money part. The funding, the begging, the paperwork, the courtship. It was a constant struggle to survive.
But the life of the mind. Of discovery. What could be better? What exercise could come close to the exercise of logic?
She made a fist of her hand. Opened it, closed it. Hardened her abs, and ran her fingers down the ladder.
There wasn’t much of one. The runs were soft and ill-defined. She’d never had the inclination or the time to make them otherwise. Now she thought, why not? Nothing wrong with definition. Might be nice for a change.
She could take one of the shuttles and escape. Become a gym rat instead of a lab rat, or in addition. Widen the scope of her life. Embrace the physical. Add muscle strength and flexibility to what she already mentally possessed.
She could be an athlete.
A dancer.
A reforester. A firefighter. Plenty of work on Earth for both of those.
A cop.
A tunneler. The trans-Pac tube was always looking for muscle and brawn.
Her father had practiced yoga. She could do that, but seriously this time.
Her very first memory was yoga-related. A harsh, irritating smell: smoke, she was told later. Her father had let something burn on the stove. Lost in his head, the story went. Or on his head. Salamba Sirsana. So maybe not that pose.
But there was another smell along with the harsh one, perfumey and sweet. It might have occurred later, or possibly at the same time. The two were interwoven in her mind, indelibly linked: harshness and sweetness. She never asked herself why. But when she got older, she started asking other questions, like what, where, and how.
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