Genometry Read online

  I saw to my surprise she was weeping. I shouldn’t have been surprised. As I reached forward and put my arms around her, I discovered that I was weeping, too.

  That was the biggest surprise of all. I’d done a lot of weeping in eight years, but never once in the presence of another human being, not even the shrinks I’d gone to see. And when the weeping stopped and the kissing began I found that it didn’t seem wrong at all. It seemed very right, and a long, long time overdue.

  IV

  My remaining business with Dick Kavilan didn’t take long. By the time Edna’s tour group was scheduled to go home, I was ready, too.

  The two of us decided not to wait for the bus to the airport. We went early, by taxi, beating the tours to the check-in desk. By the time the first of them arrived we were already sitting at the tiny bar, sipping farewell piña coladas. Only it was not going to be a farewell, not when I had discovered she lived only a few miles from the house I had kept all these years as home base.

  When the tour buses began to arrive I could not resist preening my forethought a little. ‘That’s going to be a really ugly scene, trying to check in all at once,” I said wisely.

  But really it wasn’t. There were all the ingredients for a bad time, more than three hundred tired tourists trying to get seat assignments from a single airline clerk. But they didn’t jostle. They didn’t snarl, at her or each other. The tiny terminal was steamy with human bodies, but it almost seemed they didn’t even sweat. They were singing and smiling—even Edna’s sister and brother-in-law. They waved up at us, and it looked like their marriage had a good shot at lasting awhile longer, after all.

  A sudden gabble from the line of passengers told us what the little callboard confirmed a moment later. Our airplane had arrived from the States. Edna started to collect her bag, her sack of duty-free rum, her boots and fur-collared coat for the landing at Dulles, her little carry-on with the cigarettes and the book to read on the flight, her last-minute souvenir T-shirt . . .

  “Hold on,” I said. “We’ve got an hour yet. They’ve got to disembark the arrivals and muck out the plane—you didn’t think we’d leave on time, did you?”

  So there was time for another piña colada, and while we were drinking them the newcomers began to straggle off the DC-10. The noise level in the terminal jumped fifteen decibels, and most of it was meal complaints, family arguments and clamor over lost luggage. The departing crowd gazed at their fretful replacements good humoredly.

  And all of a sudden that other unpleasant train of thought bit down hard. There was a healing magic on the island, and the thought of Val Michaelis doing the sort of thing he was trained to do here was more than I could bear. I hadn’t turned Michaelis in because I thought he was a decent man. But damaging these kind, gentle people was indecent.

  I put down my half-finished drink, stood up and dropped a bill on the table. “Edna,” I said, “I just realized there’s something I have to do. I’m afraid I’m going to miss this flight. I’ll call you in Maryland when I get back—I’m sorry.”

  And I really was. Very. But that did not stop me from heading for the phone.

  ###

  The men from the NSA were there the next morning. Evidently they hadn’t waited for a straight-through flight. Maybe they’d chartered one, or caught a light flight to a nearby island.

  But they hadn’t wasted any time.

  They could have thanked me for calling them. I thought. They didn’t. They invited me out to their car for privacy—it was about as much of an “invitation” as a draft notice is, and as difficult to decline—while I answered their questions. Then they pulled out of the hotel lot and drove those thirty-mile-an-hour island roads at sixty. We managed not to hit any of the cows and people along the way. We did, I think, score one hen. The driver didn’t even slow down to look.

  I was not in the least surprised. I didn’t know the driver, but the other man was Joe Mooney. Now he was a full field investigator, but he had been a junior security officer at the labs when Michaelis walked away. He was a mean little man with a high opinion of himself; he had always thought that the rules he enforced on the people he surveilled didn’t have to apply to him. He proved it. He turned around in the front seat, arm across the back, so he could look at me while ostensibly talking to his partner at the wheel: “You know what Michaelis was working on? Some kind of a bug to drive the Russians nuts.”

  “Mooney, watch it!” his partner snapped.

  “Oh, it’s all right. Old Jerry knows all about it, and he’s cleared—or used to be.”

  “It wasn’t a bug,” I said. “It was a virus. It wouldn’t drive them crazy. It would work on the brain to make them irritable and nasty—a kind of personality change, like some people get after a stroke. And he didn’t just try. He succeeded.”

  “And then he ran.”

  “And then he ran, yes.”

  “Only it didn’t work,” grinned Mooney, “because they couldn’t find a way to spread it. And now what we have to worry about, we have to worry that while he was down here he figured out how to make it work and’s looking for a buyer. Like a Russian buyer.”

  Well, I could have argued all of that. But the only part I answered, as we stopped to unlock the chain-link gate, was the last part. And all I said was, “I don’t think so.”

  Mooney laughed out loud. “You always were a googoo,” he said. “You sure Michaelis didn’t stick you with some of the stuff in reverse?”

  ###

  I hadn’t been able to find the entrance of the wine cellar, but that pair of NSA men had no trouble at all. They realized at once that there had to be a delivery system to the main dining room—I hadn’t thought of that. So that’s where they went, and found a small elevator shaft that went two stories down. There wasn’t any elevator, but there were ropes and Mooney’s partner climbed down while Mooney and I went back to the shopping floor. About two minutes after we got there a painters’ scaffold at the end of the hall went over with a crash, and the NSA man pushed his way out of the door it had concealed. Mooney gave me a contemptuous look. “Fire stairs,” he explained. “They had to be there. There has to be another entrance, too—outside, so they can deliver the wine by truck.”

  He was right again. From the inside it was easy to spot, even though we had only flashlights to see what we were doing. When Mooney pushed it open we got a flood of tropical light coming, and a terrible smell to go with it. For a moment I wondered if the graveyard wind had shifted again, but it was only a pile of garbage—rotted garbage—long-gone lobster shells and sweepings from the mall and trash of all kinds. It wasn’t surprising no one had found the entrance from outside; the stink was discouraging.

  No matter what else I was, I was still a man paid to do a job by his company. So while the NSA team was prodding and peering and taking flash pictures, I was looking at the cellar. It was large enough to handle all the wines a first-class sommelier might want to store; the walls were solid, and the temperature good. With that outside door kept closed, it would be no problem to keep any vintage safely resting here. The Dutchmen shouldn’t have given up so easily, just because they were faced with a lot of lawsuits—but maybe, as Dick Kavilan had said, people were meaner then.

  I blinked when Joe Mooney poked his flashlight in my face. “What are you daydreaming about?” he demanded.

  I pushed his hand away. “Have you seen everything you need?” I asked.

  He looked around. There wasn’t a whole lot to see, really. Along one wall there were large glass tanks—empty, except for a scummy inch or two of liquid at the bottom of some of them, fishy smelling and unappetizing. There were smaller tanks on the floor, and marks on the rubber tile to show where other things had been that now were gone. “He took everything that matters out,” he grumbled. “Son of a bitch! He got clean away.”

  “We’ll find him,” his partner said.

  “Damn right, but what was he doing here? Trying out his stuff on the natives?” Mooney looked at me sear
chingly. “What do you think, Wenright? Have you heard of any cases of epidemic craziness on the island?”

  I shrugged. “I did my part when I called you,” I said. “Now all I want is to go home.”

  But it wasn’t quite true. There was something else I wanted, and that was to know if there was any chance at all that what I was beginning to suspect might be true.

  ###

  The next day I was on the home-bound jet, taking a drink from the stew in the first-class section and still trying to convince myself that what I believed was possible. The people were meaner then. It wasn’t just an offhand remark of Kavilan’s; the hotel manager told me as I was checking out that it was true, yes, a few years ago he had a lot of trouble with help, but lately everybody seemed a lot friendlier. Val Michaelis was a decent man. I’d always believed that, in the face of the indecencies of his work at the labs . . . having left, would he go on performing indecencies?

  Could it be that Michaelis had in fact found a different kind of virus? One that worked on different parts of the brain, for different purposes? That made people happier and more gentle, instead of suspicious, paranoid, and dangerous?

  I was neither biologist nor brain anatomist to guess if that could be true. But I had the evidence of my eyes. Something had changed the isle from mean, litigious, grasping—from the normal state of the rest of the world—to what I had seen around me. It had even worked on me. It was not just Edna Buckner’s sweet self, sweet though she was, that had let me discharge eight years of guilt and horror in one night. And right here on this plane, the grinning tour groups in the back and even the older, more sedate first-class passengers around me testified that something had happened to them . . .

  Not all the first-class passengers.

  Just across the aisle from me one couple was busy berating the stewardess. They didn’t like their appetizer.

  “Langouste salad, you call it?” snapped the man. “I call it poison. Didn’t you ever hear of allergy? Jesus, we’ve been spending the whole week trying to keep them from pushing those damned lobsters on us everywhere we went . . .”

  Lobsters.

  Lobsters were neither mammal nor insects. And the particular strains of Retroviridae that wouldn’t reproduce in either, I remember, had done just fine in crustaceans.

  Like lobsters.

  V

  The NSA team caught up with me again six months later, in my office. I was just getting ready to leave, to pick Edna up for the drive down to Chesapeake Bay, where the company was considering the acquisition of an elderly and declining hotel. I told them I was in a hurry.

  “This is official business,” Mooney’s partner growled, but Mooney shook his head.

  “We won’t keep you long, Wenright. Michaelis has been reported in the States. Have you heard anything from him?”

  “Where in the States?”

  “None of your business,” he snapped, and then shrugged. “Maryland.”

  I said, “That would be pretty foolish of him, wouldn’t it?” He didn’t respond, just looked at me. “No,” I said, “I haven’t heard anything at all.”

  He obviously had not expected anything more. He gave me a routinely nasty look, the whatever-it-is-you’re-up-to-you-won’t-get-away-with-it kind, and stood up to go. His partner gave me the routinely unpleasant warning: “We’ll be watching you,” he said.

  I laughed. “I’m sure you will. And don’t you think Michaelis will figure that out, too?”

  That night I told Edna about the interview, though I wasn’t supposed to. I didn’t care about that, having already told her so much that I wasn’t supposed to about Michaelis’s work and my suspicions. There were a lot of laws that said I should have kept my mouth shut, and I had broken all of them.

  She nibbled at her salad, nodding. We were dining in the hotel’s open-air restaurant; it was late spring, and nearly as warm as it had been back on the island. “I hope he gets away,” she said.

  “I hope more than that. I hope he lives and prospers with his work.”

  She giggled. “Johnny Happyseed,” she said.

  I shook my head slightly, because the maître d’ was approaching and I didn’t want him to hear. He was a plump young man with visions of a career at the Plaza, and he knew what I was there for. He was desperately anxious to make my report favorable. The hotel itself was fine. It was the top management that was incompetent, and if we bought it out there would be changes—as he knew. Whether he would be one of the changes I didn’t yet know.

  So when he asked, “Is everything satisfactory, Mr. Wenright?” he was asking about more than the meal. I hadn’t been there long enough to have made up my mind—and certainly wouldn’t have told him if I had. I only smiled, and he pressed on: “This is really a delightful old hotel, Mr. Wenright, with all sorts of marvelous historical associations. And it’s been kept up very well, as you’ll see. Of course, some improvements are always in order—but we get a first-class clientele, especially in the softshell crab season. Congressmen. Senators. Diplomats. Every year we get a series of seminars with Pentagon people—”

  Edna dropped her fork.

  I didn’t, but I was glad to have him distracted by the necessity of clapping his hands so that a busboy could rush up at once with a fresh one. Then I said, “Tell me, isn’t it true that the crabbing has been very poor lately? Some sort of disease among the shellfish?”

  “Yes, that’s true, Mr. Wenright,” he admitted, but added eagerly, “I’m sure they’ll come back.”

  I said, “I absolutely guarantee it.” He left chuckling, and wondering if he’d missed the point of the joke.

  I looked at Edna. She looked at me. We both nodded.

  But all either of us said, after quite a while, was Edna’s, “I wonder what kind of seafood they eat in Moscow?”

  CHAFF

  Greg Egan

  Looking back at the century that’s just ended, it’s obvious that Australian writer Greg Egan was one of the big new names to emerge in SF in the nineties, and is probably one of the most significant talents to enter the field in the last several decades. Already one of the most widely known of all Australian genre writers, Egan may well be the best new “hard-science” writer to enter the field since Greg Bear, and is still growing in range, power, and sophistication. In the last few years, he has become a frequent contributor to Interzone and Asimov’s Science Fiction, and has made sales as well to Pulphouse, Analog, Aurealis, Eidolon, and elsewhere; many of his stories have also appeared in various “Best of the Year” series, and he was on the Hugo Final Ballot in 1995 for his story “Cocoon,” which won the Ditmar Award and the Asimov’s Readers Award. His first novel, Quarantine, appeared in 1992; his second novel, Permutation City, won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1994. He won the Hugo Award in 1999 for his novella “Oceanic.” His other books include the novels Distress and Diaspora, and three collections of his short fiction: Axiomatic, Luminous, and Our Lady of Chernobyl. His most recent book is a major new novel, Teranesia.

  Here he takes us to the steaming jungles of South America for an unsettling and hard-edged story that explores some of the same sort of territory as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—but then throws away the map and takes us into a whole new uncharted territory, into a world completely reshaped by radical bioscience, a world full of both promise and menace, for a glimpse of what may be the future of humanity . . .

  ###

  El Nido de Ladrones—the Nest of Thieves—occupies a roughly elliptical region, 50,000 square kilometers in the western Amazon Lowlands, straddling the border between Colombia and Peru. It’s difficult to say exactly where the natural rain forest ends and the engineered species of El Nido take over, but the total biomass of the system must be close to a trillion tonnes. A trillion tonnes of structural material, osmotic pumps, solar energy collectors, cellular chemical factories. and biological computing and communications resources. All under the control of its designers.

  The old maps and databases are obsolete; b
y manipulating the hydrology and soil chemistry, and influencing patterns of rainfall and erosion, the vegetation has reshaped the terrain completely, shifting the course of the Putumayo River, drowning old roads in swampland, raising secret causeways through the jungle. This biogenic geography remains in a state of flux, so that even the eye-witness accounts of the rare defectors from El Nido soon lose their currency. Satellite images are meaningless; at every frequency, the forest canopy conceals, or deliberately falsifies, the spectral signature of whatever lies beneath.

  Chemical toxins and defoliants are useless; the plants and their symbiotic bacteria can analyze most poisons, and reprogram their metabolisms to render them harmless—or transform them into food—faster than our agricultural warfare expert systems can invent new molecules. Biological weapons are seduced, subverted, domesticated; most of the genes from the last lethal plant virus we introduced were found three months later, incorporated into a benign vector for El Nido’s elaborate communications network. The assassin had turned into a messenger boy. Any attempt to burn the vegetation is rapidly smothered by carbon dioxide—or more sophisticated fire retardants, if a self-oxidizing fuel is employed. Once we even pumped in a few tonnes of nutrient laced with powerful radioisotopes—locked up in compounds chemically indistinguishable from their natural counterparts. We tracked the results with gamma-ray imaging: El Nido separated out the isotope-laden molecules—probably on the basis of their diffusion rates across organic membranes—sequestered and diluted them, and then pumped them right back out again.

  So when I heard that a Peruvian-born biochemist named Guillermo Largo had departed from Bethesda, Maryland, with some highly classified genetic tools—the fruits of his own research, but very much the property of his employers—and vanished into El Nido, I thought: At last, an excuse for the Big One. The Company had been advocating thermonuclear rehabilitation of El Nido for almost a decade. The Security Council would have rubber-stamped it. The governments with nominal authority over the region would have been delighted. Hundreds of El Nido’s inhabitants were suspected of violating U.S. law—and President Golino was aching for a chance to prove that she could play hard ball south of the border, whatever language she spoke in the privacy of her own home. She could have gone on prime time afterwards and told the nation that they should be proud of Operation Back to Nature, and that the 30,000 displaced farmers who’d taken refuge in El Nido from Colombia’s undeclared civil war—and who had now been liberated forever from the oppression of Marxist terrorists and drug barons—would have saluted her courage and resolve.