“But they’re a convenience, really,” she went on. “We could do without them, if we had to, though it would make the gengineering go much more slowly. By the late 1980s, the early gengineers had already made bacteria that would produce human hormones and other drugs. They had even transplanted growth genes from trout to carp to get larger, faster-growing fish.”
“Is that all?” said Bernie. It was hard to believe the technology had ever been so primitive.
“They were timid,” she said. “Scared. There were groups that sued every time someone proposed doing anything more challenging. Very few dared to speculate about Roachsters or hanky bushes. Or…”
The waiter finally reached their table. “Or potsters?” asked Bernie. They were a hybrid of lobster and potato, with all the flavor of the former and the convenience of the latter. Emily nodded and ordered a glass of white wine and a potster salad. He asked for a beer and a hamburger and fries, made the old way, with potatoes.
When the waiter had left, Emily said, “Potsters were a very early development. I was thinking more of this.” As she reached overhead to finger a dangling vine leaf, she stretched the bodice of her dress across her chest. Bernie felt his attention focus, but so did she, and the arm drew back. “I’ve been here at night,” she said. “The leaves glow brightly enough to provide all the light this place needs. But things like this were only for the tabloids then.”
“I’ll bet they loved them.”
“They would have loved the Sparrow too.”
“That reminds me…” That morning, after he had finished at the airport, when he had gone to the office to write up his reports, he had found on his desk a note from the Air Board’s Alan Praeger, saying that they had finished their analysis of the chip they had found in the Sparrow’s controller. And yes, it was indeed responsible for the liner’s behavior. A timer had activated it on the Sparrow’s approach to the airport, and then a simple program had directed it to the expressway and stimulated its hunger center. “You were,” he said, “quite right.”
Their drinks came, they sipped, and she twisted the stem of her wine glass in her fingers as if uneasy with his compliment. “It was simple,” she said. “It couldn’t have worked in any very different way.”
He laughed and touched her hand. “Enjoy your strokes, Dr. Gilman. We never get enough of them. And then tell me what it took to get gengineering from bigger carp to Tortoises, Sparrows, and Armadons.”
As she then explained it, while they ate and while they walked back to her Neoform laboratory, the simplest part of gengineering was finding and transplanting the genes that gave an organism the ability to make a new substance such as a drug. But that ability was useless for designing new creatures such as Armadons. Patterns of growth, of size and shape, depended much less on individual genes than on large complexes of genes, including genes that controlled just when, in the course of development, various other genes became active. And synergy was crucial. Much of natural evolution, she told him, seemed to be due to changes in these controllers, which then changed the way all the other genes knitted together into a functional whole. The genes of a human and a chimpanzee were 99 percent or more identical; the vast differences between the two species resided in less than one percent of their genomes, in the controlling genes that shaped the interrelationships of all the rest.
“We try,” she said, “to mimic this natural process. We don’t just transplant single genes. We change the way they are controlled, their timing, their interactions. And it’s difficult work. It takes time to build, or rebuild, a genome that really works. And there are always bugs, just as in a computer program.”
“Those wheels,” said Bernie. “On the Armadon.”
They were in the Neoform parking lot now, standing beside his dormant Hawk. “But don’t underestimate Chowdhury. He’s a better gengineer than I am.” She shook her head. “I wouldn’t dare to tackle making those Armadons. But he can do it. He’s good.”
Bernie looked perplexed. “What’s so tricky about a giant armadillo?”
She pointed at the Hawk. “Big is easy, and that’s mostly all we do to make many of our genimals. But he’s also reshaped it to get those wheels, and the internal passenger compartment.”
He shook his head. “It sounds like a Roachster.”
“He likes to remind us that General Bodies had it easy, and he’s right. They had a shell to work with, while an armadillo’s armor is bone buried in its skin.”
He opened the hatch in the Hawk’s pod, stepped up and into his seat, and toggled the creature awake. It stretched, gaping its beak and extending its wings. “Gotta go,” he said.
“Me too.”
He kept an eye on her, appreciating the lines of her body, as she began walking toward the building entrance. He watched her stop and turn when the Hawk’s hatch slammed shut. But then he had to look away, to pay attention to his controls. He snatched only a glimpse as the Hawk set its wings, fired its engines, and leaped into the air, and he was delighted to see that she was still there, one hand shading her eyes, the other holding her fluttering skirt against her thigh. He wished he could remember what ancient movie had first shown him that sight.
* * *
Chapter Ten
ON SATURDAY, BERNIE Fischer and Connie Skoglund went to the Roachster races.
For Bernie, it began when Connie stopped him in the hall on Friday afternoon to say, “You look depressed. What happened?”
He told her about finding the boxes of capsules, which had indeed turned out to contain nettle seeds. “We set up a stakeout at the airport, but it was a bust. Someone passed the word.”
She made a sympathetic face. “Sounds like you need a break. I won big last weekend. C’mon and share the luck.”
“I don’t bet,” he said. He really didn’t bet and she knew it, for always before he had refused her invitations to the track, but he often played the game of deliberate balkiness. At the same time, his mind was dwelling on another woman.
“So come anyway. You’ll have fun. And you need it.”
The Roachster races were not just for Roachsters. There were events for Buggies of all kinds, including Hoppers, Beetles, and even Tortoises. The paved, oval track had been built nearly a century before for the gasoline-burning stock cars and dragsters that now made the stands tremble with their bellowing roars only on nostalgic special occasions. Most weekends were now much quieter affairs, though the crowds made as much noise as ever. Some things never changed.
Bernie thought that racing Tortoises looked just plain silly, as did the Hoppers and Beetles. He favored the Roachsters, though he had never been able to decide which version he preferred. The wheeled Roachsters, with their stubby legs pushing on the wheel tops, made him think of wheelchairs built for paraplegic galley slaves. Legged Roachsters were derived from the spiny lobster of the Caribbean instead of the North Atlantic table lobster. They were so long-limbed that Bernie wondered how they could possibly run. In repose, their limbs jutted like the masts and yards of some prickly sailing ship. In action, they flailed the ground to every side like a berserk bundle of knitting needles.
He was not the only one to note the similarity, or to realize why “stilters” were rare on the highways. He didn’t bet, but Connie did, and she was shouting, “What do you think of ‘Tatter’s Hope’? or ‘Orkney Nightmare’?”
“What about ‘Kentucky Whizzer’? or ‘Derby Dervish’?” he countered, speaking as loudly as she to be heard above the crowd. They were wheelers, and though they would not compete in the same races as the stilters, he knew she would bet on them as well. He had heard enough talk of her coups and setbacks to know.
Connie disappeared to place her bets. “Waste of money,” he said and stayed to hold their seats. When the vendor passed nearby, he bought beer for both of them. He handed her hers when she returned and said, “It’s a hot day. They should do well.” The gengineers had made their arthropod-based designs more or less warm-blooded, with metabolisms that would fu
nction even in a temperate winter, but they remained true enough to their ancestors to work best in hot weather. They were useless in more northern winters, and Bernie sometimes wondered why the gengineers had bothered, except to prove what they could do and demonstrate their power over the square-cube law.
She glanced sidelong at him, most of her attention on the track, where the first race’s stilters were taking their positions. She leaned closer; he bent to put his ear near her mouth. “How about you? Made a move on that Emily yet?”
The starter’s gun banged in the distance as he shook his head. She squeezed his knee with her free hand and leaned forward to watch the race.
The crowd roared as the stilters began to move. The start was slow, much slower than for wheelers or other Buggies, for the track was so narrow that the stilters had to set their flailing legs among their neighbors’ limbs to move at all. They managed it, however, and somehow without tangling, and as first one and then another broke from the pack’s leading edge, the pace picked up.
He was left to wonder whether he had imagined a sense of satisfaction, even of possessiveness, in that squeeze. Connie had egged him on with Emily, but she had also invited him into her own bed. And this trip to the races had been her idea.
Later events only kept him wondering. For dinner, they bought takeout ribs near one of the city’s parks and found a grassy niche beside a pond. There, Connie kicked off her shoes, stuck the toes of one foot up his pants leg, and said, “Go ahead, Bernie. Make a pass. I’ll bet you score.”
He had called himself a predator, but not of that kind. He was not a skirt flipper. But why not go along with Connie, just to see what happened? “Maybe I will,” he said. He pointed at her with a rib bone, a scrap of meat dangling from one end. Connie had very little surplus flesh, and he didn’t dare to touch her with his sauce-coated fingers. “She’s bigger there.”
The toes withdrew. Connie stuck out her tongue and turned her back on him. She was much leaner than Emily; Bernie could count the knobs of her vertebrae, though now he pointed somewhat lower.
“And there.”
She turned back. “I’ll bet it’s all flab. She doesn’t work out.”
“She’s got a sit-down job. What do you expect?”
“She’d be a marshmallow in bed. All soft and…”
He grinned deliberately.
“…and weak!”
His grin grew broader, but only for a moment. He stopped teasing her when she began to turn red. She was proud of her strength. He knew it, he enjoyed it, and she knew he enjoyed it. But there was an insecurity to her pride that left her vulnerable. He was beginning to doubt that she really meant it when she urged him to pursue Emily Gilman. He was beginning, in fact, to sense a cattiness, a jealousy of whatever time he spent with the attractive gengineer, even of what might in the future come of all her urging him in that direction.
He watched her flush fade away, watched her turn to face him once more, watched the toes creep back up his leg. How jealous was she? he wondered. How jealous could she get? Might she be the one who had sicced the Assassin bird on Emily? But where would she have gotten it?
He dismissed his suspicion. He recognized that she was by her behavior staking a definite claim upon him, and that if she were ever to get nasty in any competition over a man, she might get very nasty indeed. But he thought that she would be more direct, more explicitly confrontational. She was a traditionalist. She would look for a woman-to-woman, hair-pulling, knock-down scream-fest.
Suppressing his sudden urge either to laugh aloud or speak, he took her hand and carefully, thoroughly licked every trace of the rib sauce from her fingers. She did the same for him, her eyes sparkling at him above her busy lips. When they were done, they walked the city’s streets hand in hand, window-shopping, debating the attractions of bars and movies while knowing that only one end to the day would suit them equally.
He liked her. He did. He even told himself that if he ever chose to marry, another cop, one much like Connie, Connie herself, would be ideal, for she would understand the life, and the risks. She might, unlike his mother, even be able to survive his loss. He winced within as he realized that he had not considered the possibility that the loss might go the other way, especially if he married another cop. Could he survive such a loss? He did not know.
He said nothing. He told himself that he had long since sworn himself to a single life, one without hostages, and besides, there was Emily. She had more status in his mind than Connie; she was a gengineer, a shaper, not a mere guardian, of society. She also probably had more money than either of them. Maybe he would make that pass Connie kept urging on him.
Bernie had flown over the suburb of Greenacres before. Now he was on foot, circling the neighborhood where that girl, Jasmine, had been so brutally murdered. Lieutenant Alexander had braced him that morning, saying, “You’ve been spending too much time on the Sparrow case. Let the feds have it. I want you to go over the ground again on that rape. Search the neighborhood. Look for witnesses. Look for anything unusual! Check the garbage!”
Garbage searches had been routine for decades, ever since the Supreme Court decided they were not an invasion of privacy. But the criminal they wanted had been smart, or lucky: There had been a pickup in this neighborhood even before the body had been found. There would be another early tomorrow morning, Tuesday. There would be nothing now. Nor would he find witnesses this way, unless he was very lucky.
He had perched his Hawk on the lawn of the house where the crime had happened. Now his path brought him around the block to see it before him, the Hawk stropping its beak on the tree trunk to which he had tethered it. The house was a small, six-room pumpkin that had been grown on the lot that spring. Once it had reached the proper size, it had been cut from its stem, levered onto a concrete foundation, and allowed to dry. Then workers had cut holes, sprayed the shell with sealants and preservatives, and installed doors, windows, insulation, interior walls, plumbing, and appliances. It had been empty when the rapist had broken in with his victim. The owners had planned to move in later in the month. Now there was a “For Sale” sign on the lawn. Bernie was not surprised.
There were three other pumpkin houses on the block, with curtains in the windows and children’s toys in the yard. Across the street, a beanstalk twined around a concrete pillar that supported a Swiss chalet. A gengineered baobab tree swelled grotesquely to contain a two-story duplex. A flowering vine dangled giant seed cases equipped as apartments above a shallow pool in which flickered Japanese koi, colorful carp.
The lawns around the apartment vine and the baobab duplex were entirely a lush and normal green. The one around the beanstalk was divided into two zones, an outer one of normal green and an inner of green with a tinge of pink, like new oak leaves. A stray dog lay sprawled just within the line that separated the two zones.
This was cannibal grass. Once the householder had sprayed it with an “ID acceptor” pheromone, the whole family and its pets lay on the grass long enough for it to “learn” their odors. Reprogramming it required simultaneous exposure to both the pheromone and one or more of the original family members. Lacking that, whenever strange people or animals stepped onto the tinted grass nearest the house, its sharp blades would penetrate shoes, clothes, and skin, inject a paralytic agent, and sip away the victim’s blood. Death would not come for at least a day; the resident family therefore could, if it wished, rescue wandering neighborhood children, birds, and dogs. They could also deliver would-be burglars, peeping toms, and other undesirables to the police with neither hazard nor objection. The drawback was that temporary guests had to stay outside the protected zone; it was thus not practical for apartment complexes and public buildings. Nor was its sale legal, for the Bioform Regulatory Administration feared—probably justly—the consequences if it ever escaped into the woods and fields. The seed, like that for the cocaine nettles, was contraband.
Greenacres held more conventional structures as well, but the “genurb” w
as a very good example of the new architecture. It was also not a cheap neighborhood. From the air, most of the dwellings vanished in the greenery of ample lawns and plantings, providing a landscape in which only the scattered orange dots of pumpkin houses and a few ordinary roofs stood out. The overall impression was of a carefully tended garden. Bernie thought that impression quite suitable for a place where so many of the houses were gengineered garden plants, though he supposed it wouldn’t last. Future developments would be more crowded. In this one, the lots might someday be subdivided, and the greenery might grow unkempt, while the masonry pillars that flanked some of the driveways would become covered with graffiti. It had happened to older neighborhoods of hand-built houses. In time it would be the turn of the grown houses. In time, the neighborhood might decay as far as any neighborhood could, into the human wilderness of an urban or suburban slum.
As the detective in charge of the case, he had a key to the house. He used it, and once inside the door, he sniffed. The slaughterhouse odor of blood, feces, and urine was now almost undetectable, canceled by vigorous applications of soap and bleach, its remnants covered by perfumed sprays. He stepped into the living room and stood with the broad bay window at his back, letting the morning sunlight illuminate the scene. There were still traces of bloodstains on the hardwood floor and plaster walls. There were even a few spatters on the dome-curved ceiling. He could also make out remnants of the chalk lines that had marked out the body and its parts. He shook his head sadly. The “For Sale” sign would, he was sure, be fruitless until the owners applied new paint and installed a carpet. The new house’s brief but unfortunate history was far too visible.
He settled against the windowsill and withdrew a packet of photos from a pocket of his uniform shirt. The Scene of the Crime—he could not help but add the capitals—as it had first been seen. Close-ups of the dismembered body, forlorn, pathetic. A single footprint on the floor, stamped in blood. It was small, as if made by a woman, but still too large for the victim, as if she could have walked. Or as if the killer had played puppet with her dying body. It had worn a man’s shoe, though, and it was clearly his. But definitely small. Was he a boy, not a man? Or…?
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