by Brian Craig
“So it should be,” said Yokoi soberly. “But Tanagawa-san fears that GenTech may have lost sight of its true objectives.”
“What objectives does a corp have, apart from making money?” asked he Kid, cynically.
“Dollars are only symbols of true wealth,” said the scientist. “True wealth is property: land, materials, machinery. True wealth is power. For most of human history, it would have made no sense to speak of people owning even the tracts of land on which they lived, but as soon as it became sensible to talk in those terms there was set in train a process whose inevitable end would be the ownership of the entire earth. That process has nearly reached its end, Zero-san. But the end is supposed to be ownership and control, not destruction. Competition between corporations should be a matter of products, not bullets. The corporation which obliterates its markets obliterates itself.”
“And you think GenTech’s directors don’t know that?” The Kid was frankly incredulous.
Yokoi spread his hands, as if to say that the incredibility of it was not his fault. “GenTech’s masters, whoever they may be—and the fact that even our own Directors do not know is itself ominous—seem to be in danger of losing sight of it. GenTech’s business is being conducted in an increasingly aggressive manner, and the manner of its threats and postures is giving us concern. In particular, we are anxious about the arsenal of biotechnological weapons which it appear to be building.”
“Is that what this affair with the disc is all about? You think the disc has information relating to plague warfare? And you’re worried that if you can’t defend yourselves against what GenTech have, they might actually set out to wipe you out—literally?”
Yokoi nodded. “Those are some of our Tanagawa-san’s anxieties,” he conceded.
“Some?” The Kid fought an impulse to laugh. “That isn’t enough?”
“It is only the beginning of our real fears,” said Yokoi regretfully. “Only the beginning.”
4
You’re sitting in a chair in a windowless office, looking into the intimidating eyes of a blond man with ice-blue eyes. The expression on his face is difficult to read, but it might be amused contempt.
“I’m trying to make human beings better than nature makes them,” the blond man is saying. “I’m trying to get one step ahead of the clumsy process of mutation and natural selection. I’m trying to create the next stage in our evolution—Homo superior, as the old science fiction writers used to call it. Do you read science fiction, Carl?”
“Sure,” you say.
“Then maybe you can understand what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to make us better—better able to repair ourselves…more resistant to disease…immortal.”
“But it doesn’t always work, does it, Doc?” you say. “It didn’t work on Bro, did it? It made him into a freak—a poisonous freak.”
(It didn’t work on Snake Eyes either. It just made her into a freak—and she didn’t even gel to be poison, did she?)
For a moment or two Zarathustra’s face blurs, and superimposed upon it you see another: darker, coarser, wild-eyed. The image is fleeting, and is soon gone. Zarathustra raises his thick blond eyebrows, as if astonished to have been displaced from centre-stage, if only for a moment.
“There are casualties,” says Zarathustra evenly. “But the casualties of genetic engineering research can be counted in their hundreds, Carl. The casualties of trial by mutation have to be counted in billions. How many creatures died, do you think, while natural selection was shaping mankind out of the clay of common apes? People die, Carl, and people suffer—but that was the situation I inherited, and I don’t have to take responsibility for it. I’m trying to ameliorate that suffering, and in the end I hope to eliminate the necessity of death itself; in the meantime, I make errors. I add a small measure to the quota of suffering which falls upon the victims of my errors—but anything I inflict on anyone here is trivial compared to what goes on outside these walls.
“You know what the world is like, Carl—you’ve ridden the convoys long enough to know all the kinds of human vermin which swarm about the roads and the towns. Was what I did to Mary anything like as bad as what Satan’s Stormtroopers did to her before you brought her back? And what I did, I did because I was trying to make the world better—what they did, they did because they’re trying to tear the world apart with their vacuous rage. Do you think your brother is in Hell, Carl? Do you honestly think that he has a worse life now than he would have had if he’d still have been on the road? He was a disaster looking for somewhere to happen, and you know it—and you know, too, that if things had been different you’d have been in that disaster with him, at ground zero. Don’t come crying to me about casualties, Carl—but for me, you’d be one.”
You hear yourself beginning another question (which is odd, in a way, because you don’t remember forming any intention to speak, and you haven’t the slightest idea what it is that you’re going to say).
As it turns out, what you say is: “Where do the mutants fit in, Dr Zarathustra? Why have you interrupted your programmes in order to study the mutants?”
The blond man opens his mouth to reply, but he too seems confused. No words come out immediately, and when they finally do, they’re peculiarly slurred.
“That’s none of your business, Carl,” he says.
“I’ve a right to know,” your voice insists—except that it doesn’t seem to be your voice any more. Does it even sound the same? Nor does Dr Zarathustra seem to be Dr Zarathustra any more—again that other face is briefly superimposed, but then there’s a more general blurring, as though the whole room is slipping out of focus. It lasts longer than last time, but eventually the image firms up again.
“If I knew what I thought,” says the bioscientist, “I’d tell you. But I don’t.
“There’s been some talk about the laws of nature breaking down,” you say—and once again your voice sounds normal, as though they really are your words. “You think there’s something new going on—something more sinister than chemical and radioactive wastes?”
“That would make a lot of people feel better,” says Zarathustra wearily. “If what’s happening to the world is just a symptom of some ongoing catastrophe, we don’t have to take the blame for it. But I don’t know what is meant—or could be meant—by the laws of nature breaking down. If it only means that some of the things we thought we knew for sure aren’t true after all, that’s okay—that I can take aboard. But if you mean all this Millenarian stuff about evil’s empire bidding to take over the world before the messiah comes again, forget it—you know how I feel about that kind of stuff. You shouldn’t watch so much TV, Carl.”
“But what about the mutants,” you hear yourself saying. “What do you think they are?”
Again the blond man slips out of focus, as though a sheet of glass is somehow materializing to shield his face.
“I don’t know, Carl,” he says—though his voice sounds funny, like a bad tape-recording. “I don’t know…I don’t….”
The image snaps back into focus again, and you see that Zarathustra is leaning forward now, his expression far more intense.
“Carl,” he says, with contrived softness “there is no such thing as a tame and loyal rattlesnake—unless it is a very peculiar mutant. I want that snake, Carl. I need it. I want you to bring me that snake, dead or alive but preferably alive. Just get them for me, Mr Pasco: the Kid, the snake, the disc—I want them all, very badly.”
(You shiver suddenly, but it’s not a physical shudder—it’s an internal shiver, a ripple of sensation… as though someone just walked over your grave.)
“Why?” The word comes from nowhere, cracking like a pistol shot. But the question goes unanswered. The image blurs again, as if it’s stubbornly trying to fade out.
(But you don’t want it to fade. You want answers.)
“What’s on the disc, Doc?” says that voice, again—the voice which ought to be yours but isn’t. “Why did the guys upstairs p
anic when they found out it was missing? Why did you try to keep it quiet, so that they wouldn’t ever have to know it was missing? What’s going on, Doc?”
Zarathustra’s face is oddly contorted now, and you can’t quite fathom out what’s happening to it. But the thin lips open, and the answer comes out, grotesquely inflected. (Mocking? Derisive? Sarcastic?)
“You know why, Carl,” says Doc Zarathustra. “You’ve worked it out all by yourself. You know why, don’t you?”
“No,” you say. “No—I don’t know why.”
“Yes you do,” insists the Doc, his face twisted into an evil grin. “You know. Admit it, Carl, you know.”
(Obviously, you don’t want to know. You wish that you didn’t know. Obviously, you don’t want anyone else to know that you know—but it’s too late now, because it’s on tape. You’ve made your own horrorshow, and now you have to star in it. You have to say it. Please, please say it!)
You hear your voice again, and you struggle to catch the word that it’s trying to pronounce..but it’s not easy, because the word isn’t a real word at all, just a syllable…just a meaningless syllable…
“Bro,” you say.
“Speak up,” says the hideous caricature of Dr Zarathustra, grinning in an appalling manner, as though it were the face of the Devil incarnate. “What did you say?”
“Bro,” you say, again. And then, mercifully, you black out.
You black it all out. You sleep; you die; you refuse to exist.
(But when all else is silenced, you can still hear the soft humming of a machine. You know—you know—that the tape is still running.
In the horrorshow, you can’t even die.)
They were both waiting for the Kid—Yokoi and Tanagawa. At least that meant that there were chairs to sit on, and a table on which to rest his elbows. The Kid could see that they were interested in his response to Preston’s tape, and he felt sick as a pig that he didn’t understand it at all.
He knew, though, that they understood it. How else could they seem so smug?
“One lousy syllable?” he said, in an unreasonably bad-tempered fashion. “You go digging around in the deep recesses of the guy’s mind, and all you come up with is one lousy syllable?”
“It was enough,” said Tanagawa softly. “Given what we already know, it was enough.”
“Do I get an explanation?” asked the Kid.
Tanagawa just smiled—but Dr Yokoi stepped into the breach. “Mr Preston has a younger brother,” he said. “Bro is short for brother—it’s what Preston always called him. The younger brother was unfortunately and accidentally involved in one of Dr Zarathustra’s experiments, which went wrong—it was that experiment which the early part of the remembered dialogue refers to. Zarathustra transformed a girl’s red blood cells, hoping to increase their resistance to disease, but there was an unforeseen side-effect. She became…poisonous. Her bodily secretions are fatal to anyone who come into contact with them, unless they too have similarly-transformed blood cells. Mr Preston’s brother was subsequently infected with the same condition.”
The Kid thought about Snake-Eyes, who had always joked about becoming poisonous, but had never succeeded.
“Plague warfare,” he said bleakly. “GenTech can manufacture an army of poisonous soldiers, capable of wiping out everyone who isn’t like them. That’s what’s on Zarathustra’s disc. That’s why everyone’s so desperate to have it. Anyone who has a copy of the disc has the power to destroy the whole freak in’ world.”
“That information is on the disc,” agreed Tanagawa serenely. “Among many other things, some of which might be equally important.”
“And now the mafia have it too—and Mitsu-Makema. You can all wipe out the outsiders. You can all destroy the world.”
“No one wants to,” said Tanagawa. “No one—except, perhaps, the Temple.”
“The Temple? What the freakin’ hell is the Temple?”
“We are not entirely sure,” said Tanagawa. “We believe that it may be a Millenarian cult; we also believe that it may be very influential within the higher echelons of GenTech. There is a possibility that the Temple may even control GenTech. If that is true, then the Temple may be the first Millenarian cult in history ever to acquire the power to bring about the end of the world. It is a paradox, we know—Millenarianism is supposed to be an expression of powerlessness…a producer of doomed ghost dancers; it is not supposed to involve powerful men in powerful corporations. But we live in a paradoxical world, Mr Zero.”
The Kid thought back to the tape of Preston’s command performance dream. “Even Zarathustra doesn’t want it,” he said. “He really does mean what he says about trying to make things better. He was trying to keep the secret—even from his own bosses…because he’s afraid, too.”
“It was not the real Dr Zarathustra on the tape,” Yokoi reminded him. “It was Carl Preston’s image of him. But it may well be accurate. You may have done the world a service, Zero-san. Once we have the disc in our possession, the particular weapon in question will be much reduced in value. Its worth is halved because we have it too, and halved again because we have the opportunity to devise a defence—a cure for the poisoning.”
“This weapon,” said the Kid, who was smart enough to see all the implications of the phrase. There would be other weapons. If Tanagawa’s paranoid anxiety about secret societies running GenTech had any real basis, this would be a temporary victory.
Then he remembered a couple of other things. He remembered that whoever had been feeding the questions into Preston’s dream hadn’t only asked about why GenTech’s bosses were so annoyed about the leak—he had also asked about the mutants. He had asked about the mutants first. And the Kid remembered that Dr Yokoi had said that fears about the possibility of plague war were only the beginning of Mitsu-Makema’s anxieties.
The Kid was getting used to making convoluted deductions. “You think that GenTech might be making the mutants themselves, don’t you?” he said, jumping boldly to the conclusion. “You think it might be part of some plan; but if it is, Preston sure as hell knows nothing about it.”
“The possibility that the mutants are being deliberately created was not one we felt able to discount,” Tanagawa replied, obviously choosing his words very carefully.
“Why would anyone do that?” asked the Kid exasperatedly
“You heard what Dr Zarathustra said about his own objectives, Zero-san,” Yokoi put in. “His objective is to control the genes which determine what we are—to conquer change itself. He has produced monsters.”
It wasn’t really an answer, but the Kid stirred uneasily in his seat as he thought of something else. “You aren’t going to hurt Lady Venom, are you?” he said, sharply.
“No, Zero-san,” said Yokoi reassuringly. “We are not.”
“Where is she? You woke up Pasco and Preston because it wasn’t safe for them to stay asleep any longer—how come it’s safe for the Lady?”
“It is safe,” said Yokoi. “Reptiles are more resilient than human beings in many respects. They are metabolically-capable of hibernation or estivation for months on end. There is, if you will permit it, one more experiment with the sensurround booths which we would like to try.”
“What experiment?”
“We would like you to undertake another interactive sitting—and we would like to complicate the interaction by running two computers in parallel. One of them will be linked to your brain, the other to Lady Venom’s.”
Kid Zero looked at Tanagawa briefly, then turned back to face Dr Yokoi again. “Why?” he asked.
“We would like to observe your processes of communication, if such a thing is possible. There is no reason to think that there is any risk involved—you have monitored the tapes which we made of Ray Pasco and Carl Preston, and you have some idea of the capabilities and limitations of the machine.”
The Kid furrowed his brow, but he knew that he would have to go along with it. He had become curious himself, and it was an i
nteresting idea—but he knew that it didn’t interest his hosts for the same reasons that it interested him. “What do you think the mutants are, Dr Yokoi?” he asked. “Why do you think they’re so important?”
Yokoi and Tanagawa exchanged a glance. Then Yokoi said: “I honestly do not know, Zero-san. It is not my field, and I have been asked to investigate the matter now only because of the fortunate coincidence of your being brought here, and because there is a slim possibility that my machines could be useful.”
The glance had told the Kid what he needed to know, and he switched his gaze to Tanagawa without hesitation. “What do you think, Mr Tanagawa? You seem to be the guesser-in-chief around here?”
Tanagawa smiled. “A man must have imagination, Mr Zero, or he is nothing. I, too, could say honestly that I do not know, but it would not be entirely fair to do so. I am not a scientist, whose work is to establish the truth of matters; I am a director of a multinational corporation, whose duty it is to deal in anxiety on the one hand, and hope on the other. I hope that the mutants are exactly what they seem, Mr Zero; but I am anxious that they may be something sinister—something dangerous.”
“How sinister? How dangerous?”
“If you care to use your own imagination, Mr Zero,” said Tanagawa evenly, “you might make up fantasies of your own. But I will offer you one, for your patient consideration.
“The universe may be full of life, Mr Zero; the earth may only be one arena of evolution among many. We have come to a threshold in our own affairs which may—if we can overcome our present difficulties—allow us to cross the wilderness of space which isolates our world, and carry earthly life to other planets. But we have recently crossed another technological threshold, which may have given advance warning of this impending expansion to other interested parties. The electromagnetic leakage of our radio broadcasts has been travelling outwards in all directions for some seventy years now—which means that the presence on earth of a technologically-sophisticated race might be known to every other technologically-sophisticated species within seventy light-years.