Genometry

by Gardner Dozois

  “Molecular biology. Enzyme structure. That was all a long time ago.”

  The young man grimaced. “I guess it will have to do.”

  “I’d rather not know anything,” Cameron said. Holroyd’s nervousness was affecting him. There was something not quite right about the young man, hidden depths of duplicity. “It’s dangerous to know too much.”

  Holroyd laughed.

  The cash was in US dollars. It took a whole sheaf of wrinkled green notes to pay for half a day’s hire of a bubblecar. For a couple of hours, Cameron weaved in and out of crowded Piccadilly, looped around Soho. They weren’t being followed. He parked the bubblecar at a public recharger near the arcades of Covent Garden and tipped a mudlark to look after it.

  They drank cappuccino in one of the open air cafes, and since his client was paying, Cameron devoured half a dozen ham and cheese sandwiches as well. He needed all the protein he could get; it was hard to keep up his muscle-bulk while living a knife-edge from the nirvana of total poverty.

  Holroyd was beginning to sweat, even though he had left his jacket in the bubblecar. His cup chattered in its saucer each time he set it down, and his eyes darted here and there, taking in recycling stalls piled with everything from cutlery to crowbars, food stalls swarming with flies, big glass tanks where red-finned carp swam up and down, the ragged half-naked children running everywhere through the milling crowds. After a while he began to talk about kinship, the way organisms recognized siblings and mates. “We’ve this crocodile in the basement of our brains, know it? The limbic cortex. The archipallium. All the later mammalian improvements are jerry-rigged around it. It snarls and grumbles away beneath our consciousness, hating the new situations that the cortex keeps throwing up. It needs appeasing. That’s what social ritual is all about, trying to fool the paranoid crocodile that strangers are okay, they’re not a threat. When ritual breaks down you get murder, war. All this is old theory, right, but I see it all around me. Those kids running around. I mean, who looks after them.”

  “The mudlarks? They have to look after themselves.”

  “Yeah. The way I was brought up, I know all about that.” Holroyd’s coffee cup rattled in its saucer. “Ever hear about the Ik?”

  Cameron had, but didn’t say so. He was there for whatever the client wanted. If the client wanted to fuck a donkey or direct his very own snuff video, Cameron was there to go fetch the boy or girl or whatever, to make sure he got an animal that was retrovirus free. And he would probably do it, too. He had given up making moral judgments long ago. In his line of business, they were an unaffordable luxury.

  So while Holroyd talked about this African tribe whose ethical system had broken down entirely after they’d been displaced from their homeland and their way of life, children running wild, old people dying for want of care, Cameron faked attention and watched the crowds and thought of what he could do with the fee and now and then glanced at his watch. It was more than three hours since he and Holroyd had left Komarnicki’s office.

  “I think I’ll have to arrange a new meet,” Holroyd said at last.

  “If they were expecting only you, I might have queered the pitch.”

  “You make me feel safe.”

  They walked back through the crowds to the hired bubblecar. Halfway there, Cameron glimpsed a shabbily dressed man pawing at the vehicle, and he started forward just as the hatch swung up. Holroyd caught his arm and in that moment the man and the bubblecar vanished in a sheet of flame that blew across the crowded street.

  “Mau-mau,” Holroyd said distinctly, and then his eyes rolled up and he fainted.

  ###

  For three days after the assassination attempt, Cameron tended his dying client in a room that Komarnicki sometimes used for his less salubrious deals. It was in what had once been a hotel at the western edge of Wreckers Heaps, an area that Cameron knew all too well: the Meatrack. The building’s concrete panels were crumbling and stained with the rust of steel underpinnings; its cantilevered balconies hung at dangerous angles or had fallen away entirely; its rooms had been subdivided with cheap pressed-fiber panels. Their room was scarcely wide enough for the stained mattress on which Holroyd sweated passively in the fetid heat, but at least it had a window, and Cameron kept it open for any chance breeze. The cries and conversations of prostitutes and the muffled throb of the sound systems along the Bayswater Road drifted through it day and night, punctuated every hour by the subsonic rumble of a capsule rising into orbit along the skyhook. It was said you could buy anything anytime in the Meatrack, even love. It never slept.

  Cameron had been through Holroyd’s pockets as a matter of course. Nothing but a bunch of useless credit chips, a fat roll of dollar currency notes, and a stack of canceled airline dockets, none more than a week old, that detailed a weird round-the-world itinerary. Bancock, Macao, Zanzibar, Cairo, Istanbul, Leningrad, Geneva, Manchester. No sign of any stolen data. Maybe it existed only inside Holroyd’s head.

  The biologist grew weaker by the hour, feverish and unable to eat, sometimes vomiting thin green bile. Lack of complicated template proteins in his diet, a dependency to ensure his loyalty, had triggered an RNA virus lodged in his every cell.

  There was no cure for it, he said, but Cameron needed him to stay alive, long enough at least to tell him what he had stolen. It was the dream ticket, the chance, the way out. Cameron had been without a chance for so long that he was determined not to let it go. He washed away Holroyd’s fever-sweat with expensive filtered water; helped him to the stinking toilet every other hour. He bought black-market antibiotics to counter secondary infection, antipyretics and a tailored strain of E. coli to ease the symptoms of general metabolic collapse, a sac of glucose and saline which he taped to the renegade biologist’s arm. Once it had settled its proboscis into a vein the thing pulsed slowly and sluggishly, counterpoint to the frantic flutter of Holroyd’s pulse in his throat, but it didn’t seem to do much good.

  “I thought I might have lasted a little longer,” Holroyd said, with a wry smile. He looked very young, there on the bed. His blond hair, sticky with sweat, was spread around his white face like a dirty halo. “I’ve always had this tendency to overestimate what I can do. Part of my training.” Sold into service by his parents at the age of eight, he’d been brought up a company child, selected for research, running his own laboratory by age fifteen, his own project by twenty. That project was why he had run, because it had worked too well. Holroyd was vague on just what the project had been about, but Cameron gathered that it had been intended to produce some kind of indoctrination virus, a way of infecting workers with loyalty rather than crudely enforcing it. Holroyd had gone beyond that, though precisely what he had produced wasn’t clear.

  “I tried it on rats first. It was a major operation keeping them in their colony afterwards, we had to sacrifice them in the end. That’s when I knew it wasn’t safe to let the company have it. I came up out of the streets. I remember what that was like. Having nothing to compete with, always dependent, always running scared. That’s the way it would be with everyone if I’d let the company keep it. It would be like a new species suddenly arising, a volk. Luckily, my bosses didn’t want it used on people until a kink had been put in it to limit its spread. The way they kinked my metabolism. So I took it out under their noses before it got near a bioreactor.”

  “Tell me what it is,” Cameron said, leaning close to Holroyd. “Quit talking around it and just tell me straight.”

  Holroyd was staring past him at the cracked ceiling. “What are you going to do, hurt me again?”

  “No, man. That was a mistake. I’m sorry.” He was, too. He had begun to care for Holroyd, something beyond simply keeping him alive just long enough. Care for him in a way he hadn’t cared for anyone since the farm, since losing Maggie.

  Looking down at his big, square hands, knuckles scarred and swollen, Cameron said, “I know you want me to understand what you did. And I want to know.”

  “You’ll get it.�
�� Holroyd’s smile was hardly there, a quiver. “You’re already getting it.”

  Cameron bit down his frustration. He was pushing forty; maybe this was his last chance. This, or ending up in some alley with mudlarks ripping off his clothes before he had even finished dying. “If it’s made you so smart, how come you can’t figure out a way to cure yourself?”

  “It doesn’t make you smarter. I thought I explained—” Holroyd broke off, racked by a rattling cough that turned into a spasm of vomiting. After a while, paler than ever, he said, “I knew they’d send the mau-maus after me, so I changed my pheromone pattern, kept a vial of my old scent signature. It was in the jacket. I broke it when we were driving around. I was pretty sure one of them would pick it up and follow it to its source. Let them think I’m dead . . .” Suddenly he was blinking back tears. “I suppose a lot of people were caught. In the explosion.”

  “Half a dozen killed, twice that hurt. Mostly after the cops turned the whole thing into a riot, not in the explosion. There never was going to be a meeting, was there?”

  “You’re catching on. Appropriate, really, the mau-maus. The virus that transforms their rinocephalum, the place in the brain which controls the sense of smell? Prototype of part of my thing. Use it on lobotomized criminals, replace the marrow in their long bones with TDX. They reach the locus of the scent . . . Well, you saw. Comes from an old colonial war, back in Africa last century. Guerrillas used to train dogs to eat under vehicles, then they’d send the dogs out into Army compounds, only with explosives on their backs, triggered by a length of bent wire . . .”

  There was a measure of unbreakable will in Holroyd, like a steel wire running down his spine. Sometimes when he rambled feverishly he came close to explaining, but always he stopped himself. His blue eyes would focus and he would clamp his mouth. He would turn his head away. It was like a game he was playing, or some kind of test.

  Of course, Cameron could have walked away. The thought returned whenever he went out to get something to eat at the food stalls, pushing his way through the prostitutes thronged up and down the Bayswater Road. Many had been so radically modified that you couldn’t tell what sex they were; a good proportion didn’t even look human. The brief clothing of others clung to graphically enlarged male or female genitals, sometimes both. One had an extra set of arms grafted to his rib cage; another sat in a kind of cart like a beached seal, leg stumps fused together, flipperlike arms crossed on his naked chest. Clients walked on the far side of the road, in the shadow of the Heaps, only a few looking openly at the sexual smorgasbord on display. Most of the business seemed to depend on a kind of mutual ESP. Occasionally, a black limo would be drawn up, a beefy bare-armed man or woman standing beside it and scanning the crowd for their employer’s choice.

  This throng of human commerce brought Cameron back to himself after the confines of the room. He could think about what he had gotten himself into. The prize was unknown. Perhaps it would not even be worth anything. And the chance that Holroyd’s owners would find their hiding place increased asymptotically with every hour that passed. But something other than logic compelled him. Carrying his little package of noodles or vegetable stew, he would return to Holroyd with a measure of relief. He found himself caring about the dying man more and more, and he had not cared for anyone since the fall of Birmingham.

  Holroyd had got him to talk about his past; in the long watches of the evening, the dying biologist lay as still as a wax figure while Cameron mumbled over memories of university and the barricades, the commune farm he’d helped set up afterwards in the hills of North Wales. There had been a price on his head, and rather than continue the fight he had dropped out, a luxury he had not regretted then. In place of futile bloody struggle there had been misty days of shepherding, learning karate. Always the rush of the stream at the bottom of the steep valley, the squeak of the handmade turbine fans which trickle-charged the batteries. A peaceful span of days in the midst of a civil war. Until the night the machines came, squat lumbering autonomic monsters grubbing up the byres and barn, knocking through drystone walling, flattening the wooden turbine-tower.

  The next day, the commune had split what little they had saved and had gone their separate ways. Cameron had managed to get as far as Birmingham with Maggie, but then he had lost her in the riots, his last glimpse of her by the falling light of a flare, across a street crowded with refugees. The smell of burning or the rattle of gunfire always brought that memory back. Much later it occurred to Cameron that no one had known the commune was there, that the machines were simply carrying out some central plan of reforestation. All over the country, gene-melded pines were being planted to produce long-chain polymers for the plastics industry. But at the time it had seemed like a very personal apocalypse.

  “I understand,” Holroyd said. “The way it is with the combines, most of the world is invisible, not worth thinking about. So we don’t. Now I’ve changed, I know. I begin to know.” Tears were leaking from his eyes as he stared fixedly at the ceiling. “I saw a way to break the cycle open, you see, and I grabbed it. Or maybe it grabbed me. Ideas have vectors, like diseases, ever think that? They lie dormant until the right conditions come along, and then they suddenly and violently express themselves, spread irresistibly. The rats . . . never could figure out whether they were trying to escape, or if they were driven from within by what I’d given them . . . Oh Christ. I didn’t realize that caring would hurt so much.”

  Later that night, Holroyd didn’t so much wake as barely drift into consciousness. His voice was a weak unraveling whisper so that Cameron had to bend close to understand. His breath stank of ketones. “I’ve a culture. Dormant now, until it gets into the bloodstream. A gene-melded strain of E. coli, MIRV’d with half a dozen sorts of virus. Gets into lymphocytes, makes them cross the blood/brain barrier, then kicks the main viruses into reproductive gear. A day, two days, that’s it. Some bacteria remain in the blood, spore-forming vector. Breathed out, excreted. Any warm-blooded animal. Spread like wildfire.”

  “And what does it do? You still haven’t told me.”

  “At first I thought of bonding, pheromonal recognition. But bonding, the pack instinct, is the cause of the trouble. And the committee running the center was real enthusiastic about the idea, so I knew I had to take the opposite direction. You know about kinship?”

  “The way animals recognize their relations. You talked about it.”

  “Yeah. One of the viruses turns that into a global function. You recognize everyone as a brother or a sister. It makes you want to make other people happy, to care for them. It gets into the base of the brain, downloads information into cells of the hypothalamus. Subverts the old lizard instincts, the crocodile in the basement. Are you following this?”

  “I think so.” Holroyd’s voice was very weak now; Cameron was kneeling over him to catch every precious word.

  “Infected cells start to produce a variant of an old psychoactive drug, MDMA. What they used to call Ecstasy. A second virus gets into the neurons, makes them act as if they’ve had a close of growth hormone, forces them to grow new synapses. That and the MDMA analog kicks in a higher level of awareness, of connections. The way everything fits together, could fit together . . . You’ll see.” Holroyd clawed at Cameron’s arm. “I want you to take it now, before it’s too late.”

  There was a false varicose vein in his leg. Cameron dug it out with his pocketknife, first sterilizing the blade in a candle-flame.

  ###

  Later, Cameron went out to buy breakfast noodles, pushing past a shabby blank-eyed man on his way into the building in search of thrills. As always, Bayswater Road was busy with prostitutes and prospective clients. Every one of the gallery of grotesques dragged at Cameron’s attention, vibrant with implied history. Everyone an individual, every one human.

  It was then Cameron knew what had happened to him—and at the same time flashed on the blank-eyed client. Mau-mau. Had to be. He turned just as the window of the room where he had l
eft Holroyd blew out. A ball of greasy smoke rolled up the side of the building, and Cameron began to run, dodging through the crowds that thronged Bayswater Road.

  Things were coming together in his head, slabs of intuition dovetailing as smoothly as the finest machine parts. If they had known where to find Holroyd, then they’d be after him, too. Or after the short soft length of tubing, bloated with spore suspension. He headed straight into Wreckers Heaps.

  ###

  Ragged piles of scrap machinery threaded by a maze of paths always turning back on themselves. There was no center, no heart. Gene-melded termites had reared their castles everywhere, decorated with fragments of precious metals refined from junked machines: copper from wiring; selenium and germanium from circuits; even gold, from the lacquer-thin coatings of computer sockets. Glittering like the towers of the Exchange. Sharecroppers picked over the termite castles, turned in the fragments of refined metals for Family scrip. Mudlarks ran wild, hunting rats and pigeons. Nominally owned by the Wasps, the Heaps was a place where even the code of the streets had broken down. No man’s land, an ideal hiding place because no one would think of hiding there. It was too dangerous.

  Cameron had a contact in the Heaps, a supervisor called Fat Tony. They’d done each other a few favors in the past, and Fat Tony was happy enough to let Cameron borrow part of his stretch in exchange for most of what was left of Holroyd’s roll of dollars. He waddled alongside Cameron as they walked down narrow aisles between heaps of rusted-out cars. Useless shit, Fat Tony said, cheap pressed steel not worth the trouble of reclaiming. His hair was slicked back, pulled into a tight ponytail; despite the heat, he wrapped a tattered full-length fur coat around his bulk.

  “I need to talk with the Wasps,” Cameron said.