Someone had tried it, and then another. Someone else had said, “That feels like cocaine!” and tried to explain how millions once had snorted white powder through narrow tubes, rolled dollar bills, rolled … Governments had been powerless as drug money fueled a criminal empire that stretched from South America around the world. But then the parasites had killed almost all the marks. There were very few left who preferred their coke the old-fashioned way. Fortunately, she had once dated one of them.
“Let’s try a leaf!” She had plucked one, rolled it, inserted it into her nose, and gasped. Her current boyfriend had made a hit when he suggested that the leaves might be applied elsewhere to good effect, and it had not been long before the lawyer’s three plants were reduced to stumps. Chowdhury had had to reassure him that they would quickly regrow from their roots, though he had not confessed his role in the plant’s creation.
But his markers had not been destroyed. Someone else had called. A new master who would hold them as a club, while doling out money enough to buy a new Roachster, and talk of fame and wealth, if only he would produce a hedonic pet or two. They wanted genimals, this time. Something cute, perhaps. Something that only he, gengineer par excellence, could possibly create.
* * * *
He looked at his aquarium again. In it floated a small jellyfish. If it were wild, its tentacles would be studded with cnidoblasts. Some cnidoblasts, when touched, would expel minute threads to entangle prey. Others would expel sticky tubes. Still others would discharge barbed needles loaded with paralyzing toxin. His jellyfish had only the third type of cnidoblast. Its needles he had smoothed of barbs and filled with heroin. If he petted it …
He didn’t think his masters from the underworld—did anyone still call it the Mafia? the Cosa Nostra?—would like the jellyfish. He would show it to them, but he expected they would prefer his tiny asp, its venom sacs loaded with drugs, the snake just of a size to coil around a lady’s throat and, on command, bite her pretty earlobe. Soon he would have a rattlesnake, a coral snake, a mamba. Drugs to be worn. Drugs as fashion. Perhaps he would try a bee, or a spider.
If only his masters were Indian, or half Indian, like himself. Whites reminded him of the verdammt Boers, while blacks …
Ah! The stories he had grown up on! His parents, young then, shoulder to shoulder with all the oppressed blacks and coloureds, resisting the Boers, giving them the Cape Town necklaces of flaming rubber tires, expelling them, those that survived, from the country. And then, with help from America, Europe, Russia, China, everywhere, rebuilding the nation’s shattered economy.
His parents had not been there to see success. Through all of Africa, the merchants derived from India, China, and Southeast Asia were hated only a little less than the whites. And with the whites gone, the blacks had turned on their allies. The Chowdhurys had been among the few to escape the pogroms.
He had chosen his technicians carefully. None were white. None were kaffirs, schwartzers. One, Chand, was of Indian ancestry. Potonegra was from Guatemala. Dong was Chinese. They were safe. He could work with them, unlike Emily Gilman, or her technician, Alan Bryant, the black.
He became aware of a thread of music. One of his technicians—there, where Potonegra had been sitting—had left her radio on when she had obeyed his banishment order. He rose from his stool to turn it off. He preferred silence.
When he returned to his desk, he activated the computer terminal. He called up the appropriate data base, and he found that Emily had been quite right. Armadillos did indeed jump straight upward when startled, and on highways that reflex did indeed lead to many deaths.
He had his own copy of the armadillo genome, with every gene labeled. He called it up, found the genes that specified the neural circuits behind the reflex. Then he checked the Armadon genome. He shook his head when he found the same genes there. It must have the same circuitry, the same reflex. A quick simulation confirmed that an Armadon did not have the strength to jump, but, yes, it could tear its own wheels off. Just what the customer would want in an emergency. He chuckled.
With the simulator, he explored the effects of modifying or deleting various genes and bits of circuitry. One change left the Armadon unable to move its legs at all. Another limited its speed. Still another … Finally, he found the change that removed only the startle reflex. He would have Micaela implement it immediately. Then they could grow another prototype, and he would have his fame and fortune without the underworld.
Chapter Six
Some things never change. Emily Gilman’s grandmother would have been bewildered by what now passed for airplanes and automobiles. But she would have felt quite at home in her granddaughter’s kitchen. The sink was stainless steel, and on the shelf above it sat a plastic bottle of lemon-scented detergent and a potted plant, a crown of thorns with two tiny blossoms the size, shape, and color of drops of blood. The table was wood, bright curtains flanked the windows, and the refrigerator, its top a repository for paper napkins and books and old gloves, was covered with kiddy art, notes, coupons, and lists, all held in place by magnetic fruit, lambs, and clowns. The rest of the appliances were all as recognizable —the dishwasher that roared its indigestion every evening, the blender, the coffee maker, the mixer, the range, the microwave, the toaster oven. The only changes that had come over the decades were in size and shape and placement of the knobs.
That wasn’t fair, thought Emily. There were other changes as well. For one thing, it had been her grandmother who ruled her kitchen. Here and now, it was Nick, and this kitchen was far more his than hers. Almost the only thing she did in there was make bread. And she didn’t do that often enough, for it was less a way to feed her family than to sublimate aggression and work off frustration.
Her grandmother would have thought the arrangement strange, even though in her time househusbands were not all that uncommon. Perhaps it was. Emily felt at times that their roles were far too reversed. She should be the nurturer, he the bread-winner. When they had met, in college, they had both been sure that that would be their pattern, as soon as his poems, perhaps as songs, or his fiction—would he wind up writing for the veedo?—made him rich and famous. It hadn’t worked out that way.
And how about the computerized voice synthesizer in the toaster oven? She had sliced a bagel, laid it on the rack, and set the knobs for “Dark.” Now it chimed gently and announced in a warmly maternal tone, “I’m getting close.” In a moment, it would say, “I’m ready? Aren’t you? I’ll keep it warm.” If she did not respond, it would do just that, automatically adjusting its temperature to keep the bagel from burning.
Too many of them talked like that. And it could drive you nuts. Of course, the voices could be turned off, but when you had a small child around the house, you let the gadgets talk. He loved it so. And it could save a parent so much nagging, as when the toilet said, “Don’t forget to wash your hands.”
The bagel turned brown behind the toaster’s tiny, oblong window. The appliance spoke its piece, she pressed the latch bar, and it delivered up her breakfast. She spread cream cheese, poured coffee, and began to eat.
Moments later, Andy ran into the kitchen, still in his pajamas, eyes still gummed with sleep, breath smelling of toothpaste, and yelled, “Mommy!” She hugged him with the arm whose hand did not hold half a bagel and offered him a bite.
Nick appeared, hair uncombed, and said, “C’mon, kiddo. You’ve brushed, but you haven’t washed.”
“Unh-unhhh!” Andy twisted away from his mother and threw himself across the room into the chair by the window. He knelt there and peered toward the bird feeder, his nose reinforcing the smudge on the glass. Emily took another bite of her bagel. Nick stepped toward their son, his hand outstretched.
Andy pointed. “Look at that, Daddy! That’s a funny one!”
Nick bent until his head was beside his son’s and he too could see out the window.
“You’re right,” he said. Emily could see his attention withdraw from all thought of getting the boy washed up. “I’ve never seen one like that before. Look, dear.”
Emily didn’t want to look at any goddamn birds. She had seen enough of them lately. She checked the gold-framed digital on her wrist. “I’m running late. Gotta rush.” She sipped her coffee, but then she discovered it was still too hot to drink rapidly.
“Stop and smell the flowers, sweetheart. It’s got long legs and a beak like a dagger. Like a small heron or egret. But gray with orange streaks.” She winced and thought that, yes, he did know how to pause and appreciate the small accidents of life, flowers by the wayside, birds upon the lawn. Once she had been able to do the same. “Where’s the Peterson?” he asked.
He found the bird guide on top of the refrigerator and flipped through the plates. He hesitated, flipped again, turned back, and held the page for her to see. “It’s not here,” he said. “But it looks kind of like a bittern.” The picture by his finger was of a drab brown bird, beady eyes framing a beak held straight upward to aid its camouflage among the reeds of a swamp.
What, she wondered, would a bittern be doing in a suburban backyard? Surely, every swamp in the county had been drained and filled a century ago, or more. Was there some sort of race memory that sent bitterns back to the swamps of their ancestors? Had there once been a swamp beneath their yard? Or was it not really a bittern?
A shadow wheeled across the window, and both the room and the yard outside darkened momentarily. “The Chickadee’s back!” cried Andy’s delighted voice.
Nick turned back to the window. “Hey! It’s grabbin’ for it, Emily! The stranger’s dodgin’, flappin’ its wings, trying to take off!”
“It made it!” Andy crowed. He had a Warbird in his hand, red plastic in the shape of an Eagle bearing a pod bedecked with futuristic weaponry. Now he waved the toy in the air and shrilled a war cry.
“Please!” Finally Emily set down her cup and crossed to the window to see what all the fuss was about. The strange bird was no longer in sight, though a few brown and orange feathers were just sashaying down through the air, settling to the ground. The Chickadee was staring into the sky, cocking its black-capped head toward the house, peering toward the nearest tree, and spinning with amazing lightness to seize a robin that only wanted to find a worm for its own breakfast. Then it proved once more that it was not a pure carnivore by stepping ponderously to the feeder on its post to clean it of its seeds.
Emily felt her gorge beginning to rise. The incident on the expressway had been more than enough to wipe from her mind any tendency she had ever had to find overgrown, jet-assisted carnivores charming, with or without their jets. She swallowed convulsively and sipped coffee to clear the taste from her mouth. Then she tipped her mug to the ceiling and finished the last of it. “I thought you were going to call the airport?”
Nick shrugged. “I did. And they came and got it.”
She glared at him. “Obviously, it got loose again.”
“You’re not going to call them again, are you, Daddy?”
Emily put just a hint of steel in her voice. “You’d better.”
Her husband waved one hand toward the ceiling, palm upward, fingers spread as if he were throwing a handful of bird seed into the air. He made a face that suggested, she supposed, resigned confusion. “But why bother? Andy loves it. “
“Yeah!”
She nodded. “I’d like strange birds to hang around long enough for me to see them.”
He sighed. Yes, that was why they had installed the feeder in the first place, so they could watch the birds that came to dine on their offerings. They had always felt an extra thrill when a new kind of bird joined the feathered throng. “If you’d … “
Yes, if she had gotten off her duff and looked when he had first invited her, if she weren’t turned off birds for now, if she hadn’t told herself she had to rush, if … She wasn’t being fair, and she knew it. Still, her voice rang with that stiffer gauge of steel she sometimes used when technicians, especially those who held doctorates as certificates of competence, made a royal mess of something critical: “I want that goddamn Chickadee gone. What normal birds it doesn’t eat, it scares away.” Andy stared at her, his eyes wide; this was a side of his mother he did not often see. She shook her head sharply, her hair swirling around her ears, and turned away. On the job, she could be pure boss, a tyrant on occasion as nasty as even Ralph Chowdhury at his worst. Here, at home, the situation was contaminated by emotions that never arose in the lab. She felt a tremor in her throat and a moistness—tears—hovering behind her eyes.
She checked her watch again. It was time to go. If she lingered to argue, she would be late. “Just call.”
* * * *
“Watch,” said Alan Bryant. “We can get the kangaroo sequence from San Diego.” The only marsupial whose genes the commercial genebanks had proved to carry had been the common opossum; their stock was drawn almost exclusively from plants and animals common in the northern hemisphere. He had had to turn to the zoo’s more specialized bank, which supplied gengineers around the world with the basic components of more exotic species.
He was sitting at the computer workstation in the lab. Emily was leaning over his shoulder, staring at the depiction of the Bioblimp’s genome on the screen. Several lines, each one coiled upon itself to avoid tangling, represented the genimal’s several chromosomes. Individual genes were identified by labels. Alan pointed. “It fits in right here. That puts it under the same control sequences as the tentacles, and then …”
He wore on his right hand a mouse, a glove patterned in swirling arabesques meant to suggest the intricate array of circuitry and accelerometers embedded in the thin fabric. The glove was the lineal descendant of the ancient computer control device that had first borne its name. Now he pointed, used his thumb to press a switch set against the side of his index finger, and pointed again. A line segment, marked “Pouch,” moved into position beside the chromosome he had indicated. The chromosome broke, the “Pouch” gene moved into the gap, and the break resealed. He tapped the keyboard, used the mouse to choose the “Simulation” option on the menu that popped into view, and leaned back in his chair.
An egg divided, and divided again. As the borders of the growing embryo approached the edges of the screen, the computer reset the scale, reducing the image once more to a glowing icon. It enlarged again, reset once more, grew and hollowed, added a dozen tentacles, and began to show grooves in the side of the gasbag above each tentacle’s base. The grooves became slits, and then pouches, and the genimal was complete. A new menu appeared, Alan chose “Animate,” and the tentacles began to flex and twine. A simple cube sprang into existence on the screen. A tentacle picked it up and stuffed it into a pouch.
“We still need sphincters,” he said. “To seal the pouches when they’re full.”
Emily straightened, one hand on the small of her back. “Very pretty,” she said.
Alan rolled his chair back from the terminal to face her. “But,” he said. “I can hear it in your voice.”
She nodded. “You’ve done some real good work. But there are just too many pouches. They’re too small to work for a moving van. Give it just two, one on each side.”
“That’ll violate the symmetry,” he said. As the new design now stood, the Bioblimp’s growth-regulating genes would make it grow a pouch every time it grew a tentacle. Getting around that would be tricky, for it was difficult to mix radial and bilateral symmetries in a single organism.
“You can do it. Give the gene a new control sequence. Let the first two openings set up a gradient that inhibits other openings and breaks down the walls between pouches. Or we can cut the walls later.”
He was nodding when the phone rang. It was Miss Carol at the desk downstairs. Detective Bernie Fischer was there to see Dr.
Gilman. Was she available?
* * * *
By the time Emily led the police officer back into the lab, Alan Bryant was intent on his screen. A glance let her see one hand moving sporadically over the keyboard, the other, the one wearing the mouse, twitching back and forth. He was clearly struggling with the task she had set him, but from the small, satisfied grunts that issued periodically from his lips, he was making progress rapidly enough to please him. She expected it would please her as well.
She was silent as she led the cop to her corner of the lab, pointed him at the seat by the window, and poured coffee. Then, as he set his briefcase on the corner of her desk and began to undo its latches, she said, “You wanted to know about how we control our genimals, Detective Fischer?”
“Call me Bernie, Dr. Gilman.” If voices could be seen and not heard, she thought, his would be a soft and mellow brown. Nick’s, by contrast, would be orange, touched with red, a higher pitch, more brassy.
“Then I’m Emily. But …”
He withdrew from his briefcase a single glossy photo. She took it from his hand, and stared. “It’s a chip,” he said. “A PROM chip. A computer can read it but not write to it, though it is programmable with the right equipment. We have no idea what it does.”
“From the Sparrow?” Her voice shook. She knew, too well, what the Sparrow itself had done.
“That’s right.”
“Where was it?”
“Plugged into the main board—the motherboard—in the cockpit computer. The federal people, from the Air Board, have the original. “
Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK® Page 21