Genometry

by Gardner Dozois

  I was trying, though. The Esmeralda was a lot too much like the other charter boat, the Princess Peta, for me to be at ease, but I really was doing my best to keep that other boat out of my mind. It occurred to me to wonder if, somewhere in my subconscious, I had decided to invite this Edna Buckner along so that I would have company to distract me on the Esmeralda. It then occurred to me that, if that was the reason, my subconscious was a pretty big idiot. Being alone on the boat would have been bad. Being with a rather nice-looking woman was worse.

  The bay was glassy, but when we passed the headland light we were out in the swell of the ocean. I went back to see how my guest was managing. Even out past shelter the sea was gentle enough, but as we were traveling parallel to the waves there was some roll. It didn’t seem to bother Edna Buckner at all. As she turned toward me she looked nineteen years again, and I suddenly realized why. She was enjoying herself. I didn’t want to spoil that for her, and so I sat down beside her, as affable and charming as I knew how to be.

  She wasn’t nineteen. She was forty-one and, she let me know without exactly saying, unmarried, at least at the moment. She wasn’t exactly traveling alone; she was the odd corner of a threesome with her sister and brother-in-law. They (she let me know, again without actually saying) had decided on the trip in the hope that it would ease some marital difficulties—and then damaged that project’s chance of success by inviting a third party. “They were just sorry for me,” said Edna, without explaining.

  Going over the tour group in my mind, I realized I knew which couple she was traveling with. “The man with red hair,” I guessed, and she nodded.

  “And with the disposition to match. You should have heard him in the restaurant last night, complaining because Lucille’s lobster was bigger than his.” Actually, I had. “I will say,” she added, “that he was in a better mood this morning. He even apologized, and he can be a charmer when he chooses. But I wish the trip were over. I’ve had enough fighting to last me the rest of my life.”

  She paused and looked at me speculatively for a moment. She was swaying slightly in the roll of the boat, rather nicely as a matter of fact. I started to open my mouth to change the subject but she shook her head. “Do you mind letting your shipmates tell you their troubles, Jerry?”

  I happen to be a pretty closed-up person—more so since what happened to Marge. I didn’t know whether I minded or not; there were not very many people who had offered to weep on my shoulder in the past eight years. She didn’t wait for an answer, but went on with a rush: “I know it’s no fun to listen to other people’s problems, but I kind of need to say it out loud. Bert was an alcoholic—my husband. Ex-husband. He beat me about once a week, for ten years. It took me all that time to make up my mind to leave him and so, when you think about it, I seem to be about ten years behind the rest of the world, trying to learn how to be a grown-up woman.”

  It obviously cost her something to say that. For a moment I thought she was going to cry, but she smiled instead. “So if I’m a little peculiar, that’s why,” she said, “and thank you for this trip. I can feel myself getting less peculiar every minute!”

  Money’s my game, not interpersonal relationships, and I didn’t have the faintest idea of how to react to this unexpected intimacy. Fortunately, my arm did. I leaned forward and put it around her shoulder for a quick, firm hug. “Maybe we’ll both get less peculiar,” I said, and just then Ildo called from the wheel:

  “Mon? We’re comin’ up on you-ah bay!”

  ###

  The hotel site looked even more beautiful from the water than it had from the land. There was a pale half-moon of beach that reached from one hill on the south to another at the northern end, and a white collar of breaking wavelets all its length. The water was crystal. When Ildo dropped anchor I could follow the line all twenty-odd feet to the rippled sand bottom. The only ugliness was the chain-link fence that marched around the building site itself.

  The bay was not quite perfect. It was rather shallow from point to point, so that wind-surfing hotel guests who ventured more than a hundred yards out might find themselves abruptly in stronger seas. But that was a minor problem. Very few tourists would be able to stay on the boards long enough to go a hundred yards in any direction at all. The ones who might get out where they would be endangered would have the skills to handle it. And there was plenty of marine life for snorkelers and scuba-divers to look at. Ildo showed us places in under the rocky headlands where lobsters could be caught. “Plenty now,” he explained. “Oh, mon, six years ago was bad. No lobster never, but they all come back now.”

  The hotel, I observed, had been intelligently sited. It wasn’t dead center in the arc of the bay, but enough around the curve toward the northern end so that every one of the four hundred private balconies would get plenty of sun: extra work for the air conditioners, but satisfied guests. The buildings were high enough above the water to be safe from any likely storm surf—and anyway, I had already established, storms almost never struck the island from the west. And there was a rocky outcrop on the beach just at the hotel itself. That was where the dock would go, with plenty of water for sport-fishing boats—there were plenty of sailfish, tuna and everything else within half an hour’s sail, Ildo said. The dock could even handle a fair-sized private yacht without serious dredging.

  While I was putting all this in my notebook, Edna had borrowed mask and flippers from Ildo’s adequate supply and was considerately staying out of my way. It wasn’t just politeness. She was obviously enjoying herself.

  I, on the other hand, was itchily nervous. Ildo assured me there was nothing to be nervous about; she was a strong swimmer, there were no sharks or barracuda likely to bother her, she wasn’t so far from the boat that one of us couldn’t have jumped in after her at any time. It didn’t help. I couldn’t focus on the buildings through the finder of the Polaroid for more than a couple of seconds without taking a quick look to make sure she was all right.

  Actually there were other reasons for looking at her. She was at home in the water and looked good in it. Edna was not in the least like Marge—tall where Marge had been tiny, hair much darker than Marge’s maple-syrup head. And of course a good deal younger than Marge had been even when I let her die.

  It struck me as surprising that Edna was the first woman in years I had been able to look at without wishing she were Marge. And even more surprising that I could think of the death of my wife without that quick rush of pain and horror. When Edna noticed that I had put my camera and notebook away she swam back to the boat and let me help her aboard. “God,” she said, grinning, “I needed that.” And then she waved to the northern headland and said, “I just realized that the other side of that hill must be where my old neighbor lives.”

  I said, “I didn’t know you had friends on the island.”

  “Just one, Jerry. Not a friend, exactly. Sort of an honorary uncle. He used to live next door to my parents’ house in Maryland, and we kept in touch—in fact, he’s the one that made me want to come here, in his letters. Val Michaelis.”

  III

  Ildo offered us grilled lobsters for lunch. While he took the skiff and a face mask off to get the raw materials and Edna retreated to the cabin to change, I splashed ashore. He had brought the Esmeralda close in, and I could catch a glimpse of Edna’s face in the porthole as she smiled out at me, but I wasn’t thinking about her. I was thinking about something not attractive at all, called “bacteriological warfare.”

  Actually the kind of warfare we dealt with at the labs wasn’t bacteriological. Bacteria are too easy to kill with broad-spectrum antibiotics. If you want to make a large number of people sick and want them to stay sick long enough to be no further problem, what you want is a virus.

  That was the job Val Michaelis had walked away from.

  I had walked away from the same place not long after him, and likely for very similar reasons—I didn’t like what was happening there. But there was a difference. I’m an orderly perso
n. I had put in for my twenty-year retirement and left with the consent, if not the blessing, of the establishment. Val Michaelis simply left. When he didn’t return to the labs from vacation, his assistant went looking for him at his house. When the house turned up empty, others had begun to look. But by then Michaelis had had three weeks to get lost in. The search was pretty thorough, but he was never found. After a few years, no doubt, the steam had gone out of it, as new lines of research outmoded most of what he had been working on. That was a nasty enough business. I wasn’t a need-to-knower and all I ever knew of it was an occasional slip. That was more than I wanted, though. Now and then I would spend an hour or two in the public library to make sure I’d got the words right, and try to figure how to put them together, and I think I had at least the right general idea. There are these things called oncoviruses, a whole family of them. One kind seems to cause leukemia. A couple of others don’t seem to bother anybody but mice. But another kind, what they called “type D,” likes monkeys, apes and human beings; and that was what Michaelis was working on. At first I thought he was trying to produce a weapon that would cause cancer and that didn’t seem sensible—cancers take too long to develop to be much help on a battlefield. Then I caught another phrase: “substantia nigra.” The library told me that that was a small, dark mass of cells way inside the brain. The substantia nigra’s A9 cells control the physical things you learn to do automatically, like touch-typing or riding a bike; and near them are the Al0 cells, which do something to control emotions. None of that helped me much, either, until I heard one more word:

  Schizophrenia.

  I left the library that day convinced that I was helping people develop a virus that would turn normal people into psychotics.

  Later on—long after Val had gone AWOL and I’d gone my own way—some of the work was declassified, and the open literature confirmed part, and corrected part. There was still a pretty big question of whether I understood all I was reading, but it seemed that what the oncovirus D might do was to mess up some dopamine cells in and around the substantia nigra, producing a condition that was not psychotic exactly, but angry, tense, irresponsible—the sort of thing you hear about in kids that have burned their brains out with amphetamines. And the virus wouldn’t reproduce in any mammals but primates. They couldn’t infect any insects at all. Without rats or mice or mosquitoes or lice to carry it, how do you spread that kind of disease? True, they could have looked for a vector among, say, the monotremes or the marsupials—but how are you going to introduce a herd of sick platypuses into the Kremlin?

  Later on, I am sure, they found meaner and easier bugs; but that was the one Michaelis and I had run away from. And nobody had seen Val Michaelis again—until I did, from Dick Kavilan’s Saab.

  Of course, Michaelis had more reason to quit than I did, and far more reason to hide. I only made up the payrolls and audited the bills. He did the molecular biology that turned laboratory cultures into killers.

  ###

  The lobsters were delicious, split and broiled over a driftwood fire. Ildo had brought salad greens and beer from Port, and plates to eat it all on. China plates, not paper, and that was decent of him—he wasn’t going to litter the beauty of the beach. While we were picking the last of the meat out of the shells Edna was watching me. I was doing my best to do justice to the lunch, but I don’t suppose I was succeeding. Strange sensation. I wasn’t unhappy. I wasn’t unaware of the taste of the lobster, or the pleasure of Edna’s company, or the charm of the beach. I was very nearly happy, in a sort of basic, background way, but there were nastinesses just outside that gentle sphere of happiness, and they were nagging at me. I had felt like that before, time and again, in fact; most often when Marge and I were planning what to do with my retirement, and it all seemed rosy except for the constant sting of knowing the job I would have to finish first. The job was part of it now, or Val Michaelis was, and so was the way Marge died, and the two of them were spoiling what should have been perfection. Edna didn’t miss what was going on, she simply diagnosed it wrong. “I guess I shouldn’t have dumped my troubles on you, Jerry,” she said, as Ildo picked up the plates and buried the ashes of the fire.

  “Oh, no,” I said. “No, it’s not that—I’m glad you told me.” I was, though I couldn’t have said why, exactly; it was not a habit of mine to want that kind of intimacy from another person, because I didn’t want to offer them any of mine. I said, “It’s Val Michaelis.”

  She nodded. “He’s in some kind of trouble? I thought it was strange that he’d bury himself here.”

  “Some kind,” I agreed. “Or was. Maybe it’s all over now.” And then I made my decision. “I’d like to go see him.”

  “Oh,” said Edna, “I don’t know if he’s still on the island.”

  “Why not?”

  “He said he was leaving. He’s been planning to for some time—he only stayed on to see us. What’s this, Friday? The last time I saw him was Tuesday, and he was packing up then. He may be gone.”

  And he was. When Ildo deposited us at the Keytown dock and the taxi took us to the apartments where Michaelis had lived, the door of his place was unlocked. The rented furniture was there, but the closets were empty, and so were the bureau drawers, and of an occupant the only sign remaining was an envelope addressed to Edna:

  I thought I’d better leave while Gerald was still wrestling with his conscience. If you see him, thank him for the use of his space—and I hope we’ll meet again in a couple of years.

  Edna looked up at me in puzzlement. “Do you know what that part about your space means?”

  I gave the note back to her and watched her fold it up and put it in her bag. I thought of asking her to burn it, but that would just make it more important to her. I wanted her to forget it. I said, “No,” which was somewhat true. I didn’t know. And I surely didn’t want to guess.

  ###

  By the time we were back on the boat I was able to be cheerful again, at least on the surface. When we docked at our own hotel Edna went on ahead to change, while I sent Ildo happily off with a big tip. He was, Edna had said, a pretty sweet man. He was not alone in that; nearly everyone I’d met on the island was as kindly as the island claimed, and it hurt me to think of Val Michaelis going on with his work in this gentle place.

  We had agreed to meet for a drink before dinner—we had taken it for granted that we were going to have dinner together—and when I came to Edna’s room to pick her up she invited me in. “The Starlight Casino is pretty noisy, Jerry, and I’ve got this perfectly beautiful balcony to use up. Can you drink gin and tonic?”

  “My very favorite,” I said. That wasn’t true. I didn’t much like the taste of quinine water, or of gin, either, but sitting on a warm sunset balcony with Edna was a lot more attractive than listening to rockabilly music in the bar.

  But I wasn’t good company. Seeing Edna off by herself in the bay had set off one set of memories, Val Michaelis’s note had triggered another. I didn’t welcome either train of thought, because they were intruders; I was feeling almost happy, almost at peace—and those two old pains kept coming in to remind me of misery and fear. I did my best. Edna had set out glasses, bottles, a bucket of ice, a plate of things to nibble on, and the descending sun was perfect. “This is really nice. Marge,” I said, accepting a refill of my glass . . . and only heard myself when I saw the look on her face.

  “I mean Edna,” I said.

  She touched my hand when she gave the glass back to me. “I think that’s a compliment, Jerry,” she said sweetly.

  I thought that over. “I guess it is,” I said. “You know, I’ve never done that before. Called someone else by my wife’s name, I mean. Of course, I haven’t often been in the sort of situation where—” I stopped there, because it didn’t seem right to define what I thought the present “situation” was.

  She started to speak, hesitated, took a tiny sip of her drink, started again, stopped and finally laughed—at herself, I realized. “Jerry,” sh
e said, “you can tell me to mind my own business if you want to, because I know I ought to. But you told me your wife died eight years ago. Are you saying you’ve never had a private drink with a woman since then?”

  “Well, no—it has happened now and then,” I said, and then added honestly, “but not very often. You see—”

  I stopped and swallowed. The expression on her face was changing, the smile softening. She reached out to touch my hand.

  And then I found myself telling her the whole thing.

  Not the whole whole thing. I did not tell her what the surfboard looked like, with the ragged half-moon gap in the side, and I didn’t tell her what Marge’s body had looked like—what was left of it—when at last they found it near the shore, eight days later. But I told her the rest. Turning in my retirement papers. The trip to California to see her folks. The boat. The surfboard. Marge paddling around in the swell, just before the breaker, while I watched from the boat. “I went down below for just a minute,” I said, “and when I came back on deck she was gone. I could still see the surfboard, but she wasn’t there. I hadn’t heard a thing, although she must have—”

  “Oh, Jerry,” said Edna.

  “It has to do with water temperatures,” I explained, “and with the increase in the seal population. The great white sharks didn’t used to come up that far north along the coast, but the water’s a little warmer, and there are more seals. That’s what they live on. Seals and other things. And from a shark’s view underwater, you see a person lying on a surfboard, with his arms and legs paddling over the side, looks a lot like a seal . . .”