Genometry Read online

  “Well, get your hormones adjusted, for chrissake.” He was annoyed, and I couldn’t really blame him. “Let’s get back to the media allocation issue, if you can keep your mind on it. I’ve got another meeting at eleven in Building Two.”

  Inappropriate feeding behavior was not unusual in the company, and corporate etiquette sometimes allowed minor lapses to pass without pursuit. Of course, I could no longer hope that he would support me on moving some money out of the direct-mail budget . . .

  ###

  During the remainder of the meeting, my glance kept drifting through the open door of the conference room, toward a large decorative plant in the hall, one of those oases of generic greenery that dot the corporate landscape. It didn’t look succulent exactly—it obviously wasn’t what I would have preferred to eat if I hadn’t been so hungry—but I wondered if I swung both ways?

  I grabbed a handful of the broad leaves as I left the room and carried them back to my office. With my tongue, I probed a vein in the thickest part of a leaf. It wasn’t so bad. Tasted green. I sucked them dry and tossed the husks in the waste basket.

  I was still omnivorous, at least—female mosquitoes don’t eat plants. So the process wasn’t complete . . .

  I got a cup of coffee, for company, from the kitchenette and sat in my office with the door closed and wondered what was happening. The incident with Harry disturbed me. Was I turning into a mosquito? If so, what the hell kind of good was that supposed to do me? The company didn’t have any use for a whining loner.

  There was a knock at the door, and my boss stuck his head in. I nodded and gestured him into my office. He sat down in the visitor’s chair on the other side of my desk. From the look on his face, I could tell Harry had talked to him already.

  Tom Samson was an older guy, pre-bioengineering. He was well versed in stimulus-response techniques, but had somehow never made it to the top job. I liked him, but then that was what he intended. Without sacrificing authority, he had pitched his appearance, his gestures, the tone of his voice, to the warm end of the spectrum. Even though I knew what he was doing, it worked.

  He looked at me with what appeared to be sympathy, but was actually a practiced sign stimulus, intended to defuse any fight-or-flight response. “Is there something bothering you, Margaret?”

  “Bothering me? I’m hungry, that’s all. I get short-tempered when I’m hungry.”

  Watch it, I thought. He hasn’t referred to the incident; leave it for him to bring up. I made my mind go blank and forced myself to meet his eyes. A shifty gaze is a guilty gaze.

  Tom just looked at me, biding his time, waiting for me to put myself on the spot. My coffee smelt burnt, but I stuck my tongue in it and pretended to drink. “I’m just not human until I’ve had my coffee in the morning.” Sounded phony. Shut up, I thought.

  This was the opening that Tom was waiting for. “That’s what I wanted to speak to you about, Margaret.” He sat there, hunched over in a relaxed way, like a mountain gorilla, unthreatened by natural enemies. “I just talked to Harry Winthrop, and he said you were trying to suck his blood during a meeting on marketing strategy.” He paused for a moment to check my reaction, but the neutral expression was fixed on my face and I said nothing. His face changed to project disappointment. “You know, when we noticed you were developing three distinct body segments, we had great hopes for you. But your actions just don’t reflect the social and organizational development we expected.”

  He paused, and it was my turn to say something in my defense. “Most insects are solitary, you know. Perhaps the company erred in hoping for a termite or an ant. I’m not responsible for that.”

  “Now, Margaret,” he said, his voice simulating genial reprimand. “This isn’t the jungle, you know. When you signed those consent forms, you agreed to let the B-E staff mold you into a more useful corporate organism. But this isn’t nature, this is man reshaping nature. It doesn’t follow the old rules. You can truly be anything you want to be. But you have to cooperate.”

  “I’m doing the best I can,” I said, cooperatively. “I’m putting in eighty hours a week.”

  “Margaret, the quality of your work is not an issue. It’s your interactions with others that you have to work on. You have to learn to work as part of the group. I just cannot permit such backbiting to continue. I’ll have Arthur get you an appointment this afternoon with the B-E counselor.” Arthur was his secretary. He knew everything that happened in the department and mostly kept his mouth shut.

  “I’d be a social insect if I could manage it,” I muttered as Tom left my office. “But I’ve never known what to say to people in bars.”

  ###

  For lunch I met Greg and our friend David Detlor at a health-food restaurant that advertises fifty different kinds of fruit nectar. We’d never eaten there before, but Greg knew he’d love the place. It was already a favorite of David’s, and he still has all his teeth, so I figured it would be okay with me.

  David was there when I arrived, but not Greg. David works for the company too, in a different department. He, however, has proved remarkably resistant to corporate blandishment. Not only has he never undertaken B-E, he hasn’t even bought a three-piece suit. Today he was wearing chewed-up blue jeans and a flashy Hawaiian shirt of a type that was cool about ten years ago.

  “Your boss lets you dress like that?” I asked.

  “We have this agreement. I don’t tell her she has to give me a job, and she doesn’t tell me what to wear.”

  David’s perspective on life is very different from mine. And I don’t think it’s just that he’s in R&D and I’m in Advertising—it’s more basic than that. Where he sees the world as a bunch of really neat but optional puzzles put there for his enjoyment, I see it as . . . well, as a series of SATs.

  “So what’s new with you guys?” he asked, while we stood around wailing for a table.

  “Greg’s turning into a goddamn butterfly. He went out last week and bought a dozen Italian silk sweaters. It’s not a corporate look.”

  “He’s not a corporate guy, Margaret.”

  “Then why is he having all this B-E done if he’s not even going to use it?”

  “He’s dressing up a little. He just wants to look nice. Like Michael Jackson, you know?”

  I couldn’t tell whether David was kidding me or not. Then he started telling me about his music, this barbershop quartet that he sings in. They were going to dress in black leather for the next competition and sing Shel Silverstein’s “Come to Me, My Masochistic Baby.”

  “It’ll knock them on their tails,” he said gleefully. “We’ve already got a great arrangement.”

  “Do you think it will win, David?” It seemed too weird to please the judges in that sort of a show.

  “Who cares?” said David. He didn’t look worried.

  Just then Greg showed up. He was wearing a cobalt blue silk sweater with a copper green design on it. Italian. He was also wearing a pair of dangly earrings shaped like bright blue airplanes. We were shown to a table near a display of carved vegetables.

  “This is great,” said David. “Everybody wants to sit near the vegetables. It’s where you sit to be seen in this place.” He nodded to Greg. “I think it’s your sweater.”

  “It’s the butterfly in my personality,” said Greg. “Headwaiters never used to do stuff like this for me. I always got the table next to the espresso machine.”

  If Greg was going to go on about the perks that come with being a butterfly, I was going to change the subject.

  “David, how come you still haven’t signed up for B-E?” I asked. “The company pays half the cost, and they don’t ask questions.”

  David screwed up his mouth, raised his hands to his face, and made small, twitching, insect gestures, as if grooming his nose and eyes. “I’m doing okay the way I am.”

  Greg chuckled at this, but I was serious. “You’ll get ahead faster with a little adjustment. Plus you’re showing a good attitude, you know, if you do it.
”

  “I’m getting ahead faster than I want to right now—it looks like I won’t be able to take the three months off that I wanted this summer.”

  “Three months?” I was astonished. “Aren’t you afraid you won’t have a job to come back to?”

  “I could live with that,” said David calmly, opening his menu.

  The waiter took our orders. We sat for a moment in a companionable silence, the self-congratulation that follows ordering high-fiber foodstuffs. Then I told them the story of my encounter with Harry Winthrop.

  “There’s something wrong with me,” I said. “Why suck his blood? What good is that supposed to do me?”

  “Well,” said David, “you chose this schedule of treatments. Where did you want it to go?”

  “According to the catalog,” I said, “the No. 2 Insect Option is supposed to make me into a successful competitor for a middle-management niche, with triggerable responses that can be useful in gaining entry to upper hierarchical levels. Unquote.” Of course, that was just ad talk—I didn’t really expect it to do all that. “That’s what I want. I want to be in charge. I want to be the boss.”

  “Maybe you should go back to BioEngineering and try again,” said Greg. “Sometimes the hormones don’t do what you expect. Look at my tongue, for instance.” He unfurled it gently and rolled it back into his mouth. “Though I’m sort of getting to like it.” He sucked at his drink, making disgusting slurping sounds. He didn’t need a straw.

  “Don’t bother with it, Margaret,” said David firmly, taking a cup of rosehip tea from the waiter. “Bioengineering is a waste of time and money and millions of years of evolution. If human beings were intended to be managers, we’d have evolved pin-striped body covering.”

  “That’s cleverly put,” I said, “but it’s dead wrong.”

  The waiter brought our lunches, and we stopped talking as he put them in front of us. It seemed like the anticipatory silence of three very hungry people, but was in fact the polite silence of three people who have been brought up not to argue in front of disinterested bystanders. As soon as he left, we resumed the discussion.

  “I mean it,” David said. “The dubious survival benefits of management aside, bioengineering is a waste of effort. Harry Winthrop, for instance, doesn’t need B-E at all. Here he is, fresh out of business school, audibly buzzing with lust for a high-level management position. Basically he’s just marking time until a presidency opens up somewhere. And what gives him the edge over you is his youth and inexperience, not some specialized primate adaptation.”

  “Well,” I said with some asperity, “he’s not constrained by a knowledge of what’s failed in the past, that’s for sure. But saying that doesn’t solve my problem, David. Harry’s signed up. I’ve signed up. The changes are under way and I don’t have any choice.”

  I squeezed a huge glob of honey into my tea from a plastic bottle shaped like a teddy bear. I took a sip of the tea; it was minty and very sweet. “And now I’m turning into the wrong kind of insect. It’s ruined my ability to deal with Product Marketing.”

  “Oh, give it a rest!” said Greg suddenly. “This is so boring. I don’t want to hear any more about corporate hugger-mugger. Let’s talk about something that’s fun.”

  I had had enough of Greg’s lepidopterate lack of concentration. “Something that’s fun? I’ve invested all my time and most of my genetic material in this job. This is all the goddamn fun there is.”

  The honeyed tea made me feel hot. My stomach itched—I wondered if I was having an allergic reaction. I scratched, and not discreetly. My hand came out from under my shirt full of little waxy scales. What the hell was going on under there? I tasted one of the scales; it was wax all right. Worker bee changes? I couldn’t help myself—I stuffed the wax into my mouth.

  David was busying himself with his alfalfa sprouts, but Greg looked disgusted. “That’s gross, Margaret,” he said. He made a face, sticking his tongue part way out. Talk about gross. “Can’t you wait until after lunch?”

  I was doing what came naturally, and did not dignify his statement with a response. There was a side dish of bee pollen on the table. I took a spoonful and mixed it with the wax, chewing noisily. I’d had a rough morning, and bickering with Greg wasn’t making the day more pleasant.

  Besides, neither he nor David has any real respect for my position in the company. Greg doesn’t take my job seriously at all. And David simply does what he wants to do, regardless of whether it makes any money, for himself or anyone else. He was giving me a back-to-nature lecture, and it was far too late for that.

  This whole lunch was a waste of time. I was tired of listening to them, and felt an intense urge to get back to work. A couple of quick stings distracted them both: I had the advantage of surprise. I ate some more honey and quickly waxed them over. They were soon hibernating side by side in two large octagonal cells.

  I looked around the restaurant. People were rather nervously pretending not to have noticed. I called the waiter over and handed him my credit card. He signaled to several bus boys, who brought a covered cart and took Greg and David away. “They’ll eat themselves out of that by Thursday afternoon,” I told him. “Store them on their sides in a warm, dry place, away from direct heat.” I left a large tip.

  ###

  I walked back to the office, feeling a bit ashamed of myself. A couple days of hibernation weren’t going to make Greg or David more sympathetic to my problems. And they’d be real mad when they got out.

  I didn’t use to do things like that. I used to be more patient, didn’t I? More appreciative of the diverse spectrum of human possibility. More interested in sex and television.

  This job was not doing much for me as a warm, personable human being. At the very least, it was turning me into an unpleasant lunch companion. Whatever had made me think I wanted to get into management anyway?

  The money, maybe.

  But that wasn’t all. It was the challenge, the chance to do something new, to control the total effort instead of just doing part of a project . . .

  The money too, though. There were other ways to get money. Maybe I should just kick the supports out from under the damn job and start over again.

  I saw myself sauntering into Tom’s office, twirling his visitor’s chair around and falling into it. The words “I quit” would force their way out, almost against my will. His face would show surprise—feigned, of course. By then I’d have to go through with it. Maybe I’d put my feet up on his desk. And then—

  But was it possible to just quit, to go back to being the person I used to be? No, I wouldn’t be able to do it. I’d never be a management virgin again.

  I walked up to the employee entrance at the rear of the building. A suction device next to the door sniffed at me, recognized my scent, and clicked the door open. Inside, a group of new employees, trainees, were clustered near the door, while a personnel officer introduced them to the lock and let it familiarize itself with their pheromones.

  On the way down the hall, I passed Tom’s office. The door was open. He was at his desk, bowed over some papers, and looked up as I went by.

  “Ah, Margaret,” he said. “Just the person I want to talk to. Come in for a minute, would you.” He moved a large file folder onto the papers in front of him on his desk, and folded his hands on top of them. “So glad you were passing by.” He nodded toward a large, comfortable chair. “Sit down.

  “We’re going to be doing a bit of restructuring in the department,” he began, “and I’ll need your input, so I want to fill you in now on what will be happening.”

  I was immediately suspicious. Whenever Tom said, “I’ll need your input,” he meant everything was decided already.

  “We’ll be reorganizing the whole division, of course,” he continued, drawing little boxes on a blank piece of paper. He’d mentioned this at the department meeting last week.

  “Now, your group subdivides functionally into two separate areas, wouldn’t you say?”


  “Well—”

  “Yes,” he said thoughtfully, nodding his head as though in agreement. “That would be the way to do it.” He added a few lines and a few more boxes. From what I could see, it meant that Harry would do all the interesting stuff and I’d sweep up afterwards.

  “Looks to me as if you’ve cut the balls out of my area and put them over into Harry Winthrop’s,” I said.

  “Ah, but your area is still very important, my dear. That’s why I don’t have you actually reporting to Harry.” He gave me a smile like a lie.

  He had put me in a tidy little bind. After all, he was my boss. If he was going to take most of my area away from me, as it seemed he was, there wasn’t much I could do to stop him. And I would be better off if we both pretended that I hadn’t experienced any loss of status. That way I kept my title and my salary.

  “Oh, I see,” I said. “Right.”

  It dawned on me that this whole thing had been decided already, and that Harry Winthrop probably knew all about it. He’d probably even wangled a raise out of it. Tom had called me in here to make it look casual, to make it look as though I had something to say about it. I’d been set up.

  This made me mad. There was no question of quitting now. I’d stick around and fight. My eyes blurred, unfocused, refocused again. Compound eyes! The promise of the small comb in my hand was fulfilled! I felt a deep chemical understanding of the ecological system I was now a part of. I knew where I fit in. And I knew what I was going to do. It was inevitable now, hardwired in at the DNA level.

  The strength of this conviction triggered another change in the chitin, and for the first time I could actually feel the rearrangement of my mouth and nose, a numb tickling like inhaling seltzer water. The stiletto receded and mandibles jutted forth, rather like Katharine Hepburn. Form and function achieved an orgasmic synchronicity. As my jaw pushed forward, mantislike, it also opened and I pounced on Tom and bit his head off.