They rose from their seats and gathered near Chowdhury’s lectern. When Bernie showed them the warrant, Micaela sighed. “It had to come,” she said. She led them to a bench in a shadowed corner of the room. It bore a row of terraria whose contents were only dimly visible. She pressed a switch. An overhead light came on to reveal a churning mass of…Of what? They looked like worms in size and shape, but they were banded in bright colors.
“Coral snakes,” said Micaela. “There’s heroin in the venom. He had me implant the genes. I didn’t know what they were until…”
Sam Dong said, “I knew. He had me make some changes in them, and I looked them up. I didn’t tell her.”
Bernie moved to peer into another terrarium, deliberately ignoring the other man’s attempt to defend his colleague. “Rattlesnakes,” Micaela said. “Amphetamines.” She pointed. “Mambas. Asps. Mescaline and angel dust.” All three technicians looked awkward, pained, embarrassed.
“The classics,” Bernie said. His voice was quiet, depressed. There was no crime in giving a genimal the ability to manufacture drugs, though the law would certainly cover selling those genimals to drug users. And surely the Bioform Regulatory Administration would object to the potential environmental impact. No wonder, he thought, that Chowdhury had sabotaged the Hawk. He must have seen Bernie’s interest in Emily as a blind, his interest in the Armadon as a pretext, his continuing presence as a threat. He must have panicked. And today he hadn’t dared to stay and try to bluff it out.
He opened an incubator, an upright cabinet like a stainless steel kitchen refrigerator. It was filled with bottles of pinkish fluid and trays of small eggs. “Snake eggs,” said Micaela.
He moved to another bench and touched an aquarium. “What’s this?”
Adam Chand answered. “Jellyfish.” He explained how they administered their drug.
Bernie bent to peer more closely. The water smelled of the sea and was full of dime-sized bells, mouths down, colored in faint pastels, trailing translucent fringes. “What’s the drug?”
“We don’t know. He did that one himself.”
“They’re so small,” said Emily. “They can’t give much of a dose.”
“Just babies. He’s kept us busy cloning the snakes. He said we could stop as soon as there were enough to handle the reproduction on their own. Like the jellyfish. They lay eggs. By the thousands.”
“We think…” Sam Dong pointed at the aquarium, hesitation over the words. “We think it’s a production run. As soon as they’re big enough…” He looked away from Bernie.
Bernie stared at the three of them in turn. “Why didn’t you report this?”
As one, they shrugged. “He’s the boss,” said Micaela. “And he’s got a temper.”
Emily touched his arm. “She’s right,” she said. “They were surely scared.”
“I tried to mention it once,” said Chand. “To Dr. Gelarean. He just told me to do what I was told.” He hesitated. “And I like my job.”
Bernie made an exasperated noise and moved toward the window. “And this? Nettles, by God! Did you make these too?”
“They were his,” said Dong. “Just his. The first.”
Bernie shook his head. He had not expected to find all this. A design shop for hedonic genimals and shrubbery. A goddamn drug factory! The root of the new drug trade, and signs that that trade was ready to take off in new directions.
The technicians were dupes, browbeaten, intimidated into keeping quiet about their work. Surely, he told himself, they knew nothing more than they had already told him so freely, probably because all Chowdhury’s threats had clearly lost their power as soon as Bernie had entered the lab with his warrant. They would be interrogated later, just in case. For now, though, could there be any clues in this lab to the destinations of all these snakes and jellyfish and nettles? Florin had to be involved, but had Chowdhury left anything to prove it?
Bernie began his search with the drawers of Chowdhury’s own desk. He found small models of Armadons and other genimals, diagrams, notebooks, spec sheets, including one for the coral snake. One of the notebooks held two sketches, one of a jellyfish, the other of something he recognized as a molecular diagram. When he held it out to Emily, she studied it for a moment, her forehead wrinkled intently, before she said, “Now I remember. Heroin.”
He shuddered. The snakes were bad enough. “I hope no one ever dumps one in the ocean. Can you imagine a day at the beach then?”
Micaela Potonegra scooched before a workbench at the other end of the room and pulled from beneath it a cage. It held four baby Armadons the size of kittens. As the light struck them, they began to dash frantically and noisily about. “Armadillos,” she said. “They always have identical quadruplets.”
He had heard of that peculiarity. Now he crossed the room to watch the small genimals, their bodies still unmarked by doors and windows, whizzing on their wheels around the confines of their cage. They had little room and kept banging into each other.
“Aren’t they supposed to have tails?” asked Emily.
“Our first ones did, but we decided they just got in the way. We took the gene out.”
Bernie felt sorry for the genimals, but they had nothing to do with the case. Leaving the technicians and Emily to watch the Armadons, he returned to the lectern and opened his briefcase. Within it was a rack of disks. He selected one and plugged it into Chowdhury’s terminal. It carried a sophisticated ferret program that could check every file Chowdhury had ever recorded on the machine’s hard disk, as long as he had not later overwritten it, for whatever he wished. Passwords did not matter, for computers were required by law to allow police overrides. They also had to keep internal records of uploads to networks and mainframes so that official ferrets could pursue files into all available hiding places.
Chowdhury’s stool was much too high for Bernie’s comfort. He stood at the keyboard while he gave the program every keyword he could think of—drugs, heroin, nettle, cocaine, angel dust, mescaline, asp, coral snake, rattlesnake, mamba, jellyfish, hedonic, illegal, illicit, Emily, Gilman, sabotage, Sparrow, Mack, Hawk, PROM, chip, Assassin…He paused, and then he added Jasmine, Greenacres, rape, mutilation, pumpkin, murder. Finally, he turned the ferret loose.
Emily reached past his shoulder to point at the screen. “Why those?”
“I told you about that case,” he said. “Her name was Jasmine. We found her body in an empty pumpkin house in Greenacres.” He paused to watch the messages the ferret was throwing onto the screen as it searched, listing clean files, saying, “Nothing…Nothing…Nothing…” Occasionally, it would pause to display a file name accompanied by a suspect line of text. Each time it was an internal memo that mentioned Emily as a fellow Neoform employee. Innocuous stuff, so confirmed by Emily. If he thought the file important, he could easily tell the ferret to copy it onto its own disk for later study. But he simply pressed the keyboard’s spacebar, and the ferret resumed its search.
“And Chowdhury lives in that neighborhood,” Bernie added.
“He’s not the only one,” said Emily.
“There’s Gelarean,” he admitted.
“And a VP or two.”
The computer beeped. The ferret’s mission was accomplished. It had found nothing.
“He must keep his notes on paper, or in his head,” said Bernie. His voice sounded disappointed.
“Or in the computer in the barn,” said Emily.
Sam Dong shook his head. “They’re linked. Your ferret would have found anything there. But…” He paused. “He does keep a number of loose disks with him.”
Bernie grunted. So that was what had been in the case Chowdhury had carried as he fled the lab. “Perfect security. He leaves no trace in the company’s files, no hacker can get into them, we can’t get into them. Does he always play things so close to his vest?”
Both Emily and Sam nodded. “He likes to pull the curtain aside all at once,” said the latter.
“The fait accompli,” adde
d Emily. “I’m sure nobody knows of these snakes and jellyfish.”
Adam nodded, saying, “He insisted we keep them quiet.”
“I’ll bet that’s not what he has in mind this time,” said Bernie. The company would not, he was sure, find genimals that injected illegal drugs very compatible with its public image. Nor would it run the risk of an undercover product line. That could backfire much too easily. No, Chowdhury must be developing his little wonders on the side. The nettles had already entered the underworld trade. The snakes, he thought, had not. Not yet. Not quite. And there would be no surprise announcements, no sudden unveilings.
Bernie wanted very badly to talk to Chowdhury, and he thought he knew where to find him. He would check the barn, just in case the man was saying goodbye to his Armadons. But he did not expect to find him there.
He would be at home. Packing.
* * *
Chapter Twenty
THE WINDOWS WERE curtained by strings of wooden beads. A faint odor of curry permeated the air. Wood-block prints of strange, multi-armed deities adorned the walls. Old photographs of a crowded shantytown sat, framed in lacquered bamboo, on a bookcase shelf.
The beads were a tropical affectation, and he knew it. The prints had come from a secondhand shop in San Francisco, in his student days. The curry, like sin, was something that followed the children of Mother India wherever they might wander, unto the seventh generation. The photographs were of his ancestral home, the coloured ghetto in which his parents had once lived and worked. He had never seen it. He never would.
He sat in a padded armchair, his back to the apartment door, positioned so he could see both the prints upon the wall and the photos on the shelf. The chair was an emblem of the land in which he had been born and still lived, but hardly of the land he felt was most truly his. It was a typical American device, a recliner, designed to foster and reward relaxation, a luxury unknown to billions.
His thoughts stuttered. Those billions, many of them, most, had hammocks, didn’t they? And hammocks were more comfortable, more relaxing, more portable, cheaper. But they were not luxury, not unless they were made—or sold!—in America of brightly dyed cord, or of canvas and slung from metal frames. Then they might not even be cheaper.
He was not comfortable. He refused to recline in his sumptuous throne. He was not relaxed. He sat erect, clutching the chair arms, staring at the walls, the beads, the prints, the photos. The case full of disks was on the dining-room table. He should, he knew, destroy them before the police got here. Those disks held evidence enough to damn him and all his bosses many times over. But…It was already far too late for his own salvation. His bosses had forced him to damnation. If he were caught, he would quite happily see them join him in prison. He would feel special glee because they were white, even, really…
Should he flee? The police were not here yet. He had time. He could pack a bag and call a taxi and run to the airport and catch a jet to…Where? Argentina? Brazil? Paris? Tokyo? God forbid, Johannesburg?
He shuddered. His hands did their best to shred the upholstery covering the arms of his chair. He could not move. The phone call from Gelarean had galvanized him into fleeing the lab for home. But the motive to run was now exhausted.
A lighted aquarium occupied the bookshelf below the photos of his parents’ home. It was a saltwater aquarium, and it held a jellyfish, just one, a large one, the size of two fists, full-grown, the very first of his drug-secreting genimals. He stared at it. He was a success. He was. He could make genes, genes of all kinds, stand up and dance at his command. His bosses applauded his skills. His Armadons would within a year or so begin to displace the Buggies that now dominated the highways. His nettles were already spread wide across the land.
Then why was he cowering here? Why was he about to be arrested and jailed and convicted and sentenced to spend the rest of his life among thugs no better or worse than the South African thugs whom his family had already fled?
He should not have sabotaged the Hawk. He had gone too far with that.
But that cop, that Fischer, Bernie Fischer, had been too close. Nick Gilman had told him so at Gelarean’s party. They had a suspect for the Sparrow and the Assassin bird, and they were on the verge of an arrest. And then that Bernie had continued to hang around the building. He had pretended his interest was in Emily, but Chowdhury knew—yes! he knew!—that Fischer had been watching him, him. He had overheard the cop bragging to Emily about how close he was! And he had known that if the cops ever got him, he would have no more chances to kill Emily.
No more chances to free his Armadons of competition from her and her verdammt Bioblimps. No, that wasn’t true. Killing her hadn’t even been his own idea in the first place. If he had accepted the idea, it had been mostly to get rid of her and her snide reminders of details he had forgotten. He knew the Bioblimps were here to stay. The company had the patent, and the orders, and it would see to that.
Something else was truer: If the cops got him, he would have no more chances to obey his masters, to free himself of debt and slavery, to grow rich and famous, to avenge his parents in the pages of history.
But they were white. They all were white. The cops, his masters, even Emily. They were the persecutors of his people and of his family. They were no better than the blacks, and they would be sure to see that he got all the blame.
Yes, he had made the cocaine nettle and the drug genimals. He looked again toward the aquarium on the bookshelf. He grunted and levered himself out of the armchair. He crossed the room, moving as cautiously as an old man, feeling that fragile, as if abused by years of illness. He unplugged the cord that powered the aquarium’s light and water pump, removed the apparatus, and dropped it on the floor. He ignored the puddle that drained from the pump’s tubing.
For a moment he simply stared into the water, at the jellyfish, his jellyfish. Its drug-laden tentacles were translucent white, almost invisible in the tank’s small portion of the sea. The bell, tinged with pink and blue, pulsed gently, slowly, moving water in and out of its internal chamber. In the sea, that pulsing would be used for propulsion; now it simply aided respiration.
He turned away and paced, his hands clutching jerkily at each other, around the dining table. He paused at the window, pushed aside the curtain of beads, and stared at the street below, so green, so empty. That, he thought, would not last long.
He turned, stared toward the aquarium, took a pace, and looked down at his box of disks. He took off his glasses, another affectation, pure window glass in the wire frames, and threw them to the table. They clattered as he took the final step to wrap his arms around the tank. He grunted again, lifted it free, and staggered back to his armchair. It was heavy. He sat, lurching, water sloshing over his lap and the upholstery. He positioned the tank as comfortably as he could and stared once more into its depths. He ignored the water spill, though his nostrils flared at the smell of salt. The cops would arrive soon, and after that it would not matter.
He had never had anything to do with the Sparrow, though he knew who had. But yes, he had sent the Assassin bird. Yes, he had put chips in the Mack, the Tortoise, and the Hawk. But someone else, his master, had given him the chips. He had given him his orders too, for all but the Hawk. He had had to ask for that chip.
Could he have discharged his gambling debts some other way? Could he have refused to plant the chips? Could he have stopped with the nettle? Or the Assassin? Or the Mack? Had he succumbed, surrendered, obeyed, too easily? Even too eagerly?
He remembered his mother. His Mama. For as long as he could remember, she had been confined to her wheelchair, unable to walk, dependent on his Papa and himself for the simplest things. The Boers had broken her legs. They had raided a small, unlicensed clinic where his parents had been treating blacks. Blacks injured in the demonstrations that before much longer had turned into open warfare. The Boers’ days had been numbered, and they had known it.
The kaffirs had broken her back. She hadn’t been black eno
ugh. And she had been treating others who shared that handicap in the newly all-black, dead-black People’s Republic of South Africa.
They had it coming. They all had it coming.
He was not sorry.
He was terrified.
But he was not sorry.
They had it coming.
And now the cops were after him. They had figured out who had put the chip in the Hawk. They knew who had done everything. And they were coming for him.
That was what the call from Gelarean had been all about. The cop, Bernie Fischer, had been in Gelarean’s office. He had a warrant, and he had said he wanted him, him, Ralph Chowdhury. And he had just left. He was on his way to the lab.
Had Gelarean seemed to wish to keep him chatting on the phone? It did not matter. He had hung up. He had made excuses to his verdammt technicians. He had run.
And Fischer had been in the hall. With Emily. He had ducked and twisted and lost his lab coat and, gasping, ran. For some reason, they had not pursued him. But they would. The Hawk would land on his street and they would climb the stairs to his apartment and they would knock. And…
Fischer had been hanging around all that time, just waiting for him to slip. And he had. He had. He had. They had a warrant, and they were on the way, and…
He stared at the aquarium on his lap.
He wished the jellyfish had eyes. Then it might look back at him. Maybe it would recognize him as its creator. It might even be grateful. Would it raise a tentacle then? Offer him its cnidoblasts, full of bliss? Offer him escape?
But there were no eyes, only spots of pigment around the edges of the bell, light-sensitive but inadequate to the task of forming images.
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