Organic Future - Sparrowhawk Part 3

Perhaps, however, he could study that modus operandi. He could find out, even before the feds reported, just how a non-spec chip like the one they had found would have to work. How could a tiny thing like that possibly take over something as huge as an airliner? How could it possibly make the airliner do things so far outside its normal range of behaviors?

He needed a gengineer. Fortunately, he remembered, he knew one. He had met her just the day before. She had even been on the expressway, in the midst of the disaster, and she should therefore have some interest in the case. Now all he had to do was remember her name, and where she worked. Unfortunately, all the papers he had filled out, with all the information he needed, were back in the office.

But...Neoform was the company. That much he recalled. And he knew where that was located. He tipped the Hawk's soaring from its endless circles into a straight-line course. As he flew, he struggled to recall the name. The kid, the kid with the feather, his name had been Andy. Hers...? The Neoform complex grew visible in the distance, and it came to him: Emily.

When he reached the Neoform headquarters, he was surprised to find another departmental Hawk in the parking lot. It had been toggled into dormancy, presumably because of the Buggies that surrounded it. If it had not been shut down, it might not have been able to resist temptation.

He took an empty s.p.a.ce across the aisle, positioning his Hawk so that it faced the other, and put it as well to sleep. Who else was here? Was their business related at all to his own? He supposed he would find out soon enough.

As he walked toward the building entrance, he noticed a Tortoise drinking from the trough before it. Its sh.e.l.l bore splatters of something that had once been liquid. He supposed that most who noticed would have no idea of what the liquid might have been. To him, the splatters said that this was indeed the right place, and Emily--Emily Gilman, that was it--was here.

As he approached the gla.s.s doorway, he thought he recognized the figure standing before the receptionist's barrier. Connie, here? She had said shewould be interviewing witnesses, and the computer would have parceled out the lists. Had it been alphabetic? Or random? His hand hovered over the door handle, and he decided it didn't matter. It was just coincidence that their paths had crossed here and now.

When he entered, the receptionist's eyebrows rose dramatically, as if to say that one cop on the premises was unusual enough, but two? He ignored her.

"Hi, Connie. Mrs. Gilman?"

"She was in a meeting. She's on the way down now."

She had hardly finished speaking when a slim, dark-haired woman rounded the corner. Her dress was tailored both for an appearance of professional competence and for utility--one breast pocket, loaded with pens, had obviously been stiffened to resist sagging; two side pockets, just forward of her hips, supported folded papers.

As Emily approached, her gaze swung back and forth between them. "Yes?"

Connie spoke first: "Dr. Gilman? We're interviewing as many witnesses to yesterday's incident as we can."

"An incident, is it now?" She looked at Bernie, and her eyes widened with recognition.

He couldn't help but blush. "I'm investigating the Sparrow from another angle," he said. "I need some background on how genimals are controlled, and I thought of you."

She smiled at him. "I'll be delighted to help. But I'm afraid I can only oblige one of you today. I've been out of town..."

"You were here first, Connie." He turned back to Emily. "Tomorrow?"

They made the appointment. When they had shaken hands, he gave Connie a mock salute and left.

Bernie's quarters were stark and bare, less from some austerity of design than simply because he had never felt the need for pretty tables, pictures for the walls, or draperies. A bed, a bureau, an easy chair, a worn dinette set, one small bookcase, and a sagging couch had all come with the apartment. His own possessions consisted of the clothes in the closet, the dishes in the kitchen cupboard, a few books, some photos of his favorite genimals, all of them raptors, scattered on a bookcase shelf. And, of course, his bicycle.

Connie had an apartment in the same near-work neighborhood as Bernie, and she too was a single police officer, but that was where the resemblance ended.

The furniture was her own, all of it, polished wood, fabrics whose roughness was meant to suggest hand-weaving, soft cus.h.i.+ons. The floors wore braided rugs. The walls bore art photos printed in metallic inks on gla.s.s.

Now he lay supine on her bed. She sat erect beside him. One of his hands lay on her thigh. One of hers was flat on his bare chest. He circled his index finger in the sweat on her skin. She pretended to coil the same finger in the scant hair between his nipples. He let his eyes wander over her: so slender that she might have seemed anorexic if her muscles weren't so clearly, cleanly drawn beneath the skin, small b.r.e.a.s.t.s like plums, hard and sweet, corded neck, fine-drawn features. She surveyed him as well: as strong as she in the male way that needs less work to maintain the muscles, the early signs of later paunch--she pinched his belly flesh--square hands, blocky features, rugged. If he had gone home when he got off work, he would have fried a couple of hot dogs, or a pork chop, and opened a beer. Connie had stuck lasagna from the freezer in her microwave and opened a bottle of wine. Then she had actually made a salad, and he got a dose of the greens his mother had always told him never to forget to eat.

He closed his eyes while Connie fingered his chest hair. He squeezed her thigh, and he thought that she was good for him. Just what he needed. Maybe...

"Hey, Bernie." She tweaked a hair. "Think you'll ever get close to her?"

She reached downward with her other hand. "Close like this?"

"Huh? Who you talkin' about?" He opened his eyes. She was smiling.

"Mrs. Gilman. That good-lookin' Emily. She was lookin' at you, Bernie."

"Aaahh, you're full of it, Skoglund." She had looked at him, there in the Neoform entrance lobby, just as she had looked at Connie, just as she would look at any vaguely familiar stranger. There had been no sign of any deeper interest, and he thought that surely he could have told.

"No, I mean it. I think you turned her on when you threw up all over her running board. Showed her how sensitive you are, you know?"

He fell himself turning red. Connie had pumped her for everything, hadn't she?

"Oh, my," she said. "I never knew a man could blush like that!" She laughed. Her hand left his chest and touched the side of his face. "From here..." It slid down his neck, over his shoulder, and back to his chest. "To here."

"Come on, Connie!" His voice plaintive, he tried to sit up.

She pushed him back. "Uh-uh. Don't run away. I've always known you were sensitive, Bernie. It's why I like you. Why you're here now."

He glared up at her. "So why push my b.u.t.tons?"

She giggled. "There's only one b.u.t.ton I want to push. The same one she does, I bet. Think it'll work again?"

There was a pause, another giggle, a rustling of sheets as they changed their positions. Then, "Go for it, fella."

Chapter Five.

RALPH CHOWDHURY'S LAB might have seemed strange to another scientist, even to another gengineer. The computer workstations, screens aglow with graphic simulations and columns of figures, were normal enough. So were the scattered aquaria, shelves of reagents, enameled freezers, stainless steel incubators, and LED-illuminated DNA splicers. But Chowdhury's desk, carefully centered before the green-board at the head of the room, looked much more like a schoolmaster's podium than like a researcher's work s.p.a.ce. The desk was a high, slant-topped affair at which he sat on a high stool, his feet wrappedaround the rungs. The other desks and workbenches in his lab were less extreme in their idiosyncrasy, but they too were higher than normal, and Chowdhury expected his aides to use the stools he had provided for them.

It might have seemed even stranger to visitors from Neoform's financial or marketing departments. They too favored more conventional furniture, but they would have found most alarming precisely what no gengineer would blink at: the strange things floating in the aquaria, the particular subjects of the graphic simulations, the dried puffer hanging above Adam Chand's workstation. They promised new products for the company, but they also gave Chowdhury's lab something of the air of an alchemist's workshop. It was only missing a suitable array of alembics and a grimoire or two, though that absence had never struck Chowdhury. His lab was as it was because, quite simply, he had once seen an old photo of a Bombay accounting shop, with rows of bookkeepers perched on stools and leaning over heavy ledgers set on slant-topped lecterns.

He knew perfectly well that modern Indians, like accountants and bookkeepers throughout the world, now used desktop computers, but he had inescapably identified that photo with his ethnic heritage. And as soon as he had earned the right to dictate the design of his own lab, he had exercised that right.

Adam Chand was one of Chowdhury's three technicians. He had found the puffer in an antique shop the summer before, its bleached and empty body inflated like a balloon, but stiff, all spines and p.r.i.c.kles. The storekeeper had told him that they were also called blowfish, that they inflated themselves with air to foil predators, that they had been at times used as lanterns, housing candles, and that in j.a.pan, as fugu, they were considered delicacies, if the chefs were successful in removing the toxic inner organs.

Now, beneath the puffer's dry benison, Chand labored, exploring the puffer's genome. He had long since, in his spare moments, confirmed the dealer's tales through the data bases. Then he had wondered if the fish could be enlarged and its air cavity turned into a compartment for pa.s.sengers, cargo, and engines. Gengineers had tried, he knew, to turn porpoises and whales into bioform submarines, but so far they had failed. If he could be the first to succeed...Once, he had admitted to his boss that at night he dreamed of promotion to a lab of his own. Chowdhury presumed he still did, though he no longer dared to speak of it.

Chowdhury's other two technicians were busy too. Micaela Potonegra, at another terminal, was working on production schedules for the Armadons. Zhang Dong--everyone but Chowdhury called him Sam--was using the DNA splicer to make certain changes Chowdhury had ordered in several genes taken from a coral snake. Chowdhury, not having told him what genes he was working on, had watched expressionlessly as Dong consulted the genebanks and learned that they controlled venom production. He had not tried to learn what effects his changes would have.

The door to the lab slammed. Chowdhury had returned from the meeting at which Emily Gilman had presented the results of her Was.h.i.+ngton trip and then had ridiculed his Armadons. His technicians stared at him. He stared back. His mouth was a line, his eyes hidden behind his spectacles, his arms stiff at his sides. Chand was the only one who dared to speak: "Dr. Chowdhury? There's an interesting gene complex in these puffers..."

He turned toward Chand. He spoke quietly: "Those verdammt puffers are none of our business, Dr. Chand. Work on them on your own time. And now..."

Suddenly he screamed, "Out!"

The three were used to being banished. Without a word, Chand and Potonegra closed down their terminals. Dong touched a b.u.t.ton, and the splicer spat out aca.s.sette containing the material he had been working on and the reagents he had been using. He would take it to the alternate lab they had set up in the prototype barn. There they could continue their work.

The banishments were frequent. Chowdhury rarely pa.s.sed a day without a temper tantrum and an "Out!" Sometimes the moment came after a meeting of the company's researchers, as it had today. Sometimes it came after a phone call.

Sometimes it seemed to come out of the blue, or swim up out of his first morning cup of tea, or rumble out of his bowels. Sometimes he called his people back in just an hour. Sometimes he let them work in the barn all day.

The barn was isolated from Neoform's main building and other workers, and it could be noisy, for many genimals, like their unmodified ancestors, had voices and used them. Yet, in some ways, the technicians preferred the place.

Despite the noise, and sometimes the stink, it was peaceful. It was also comfortable, for the barn lab's desks and benches were all of standard height, unlike the furniture Chowdhury preferred, and the seats were padded swivel chairs.

Now Chowdhury hunched on his high stool, facing his high podium, and stared at nothing. His phone occupied a shelf beneath his desktop. His computer terminal rested on a table, flat-topped but of a height to match his desk, to his right. To his left, another table bore a salt.w.a.ter aquarium.

"Dillo Dillies!" His head twitched, and a vagrant sunbeam glanced off the flat planes of his spectacles to put a cursor on the wall. His Armadons would outdo those Roachsters! He knew it! They were warm-blooded, after all, and he would prove to the world what an immense advantage that could be as soon as he got an Armadon and a Roachster head-to-head on the track. Armadons would need more food for fuel, but that should be no problem. Roachsters had been the first bioform vehicles, designed to eat hay, gra.s.s clippings, household garbage, whatever was available. The waste disposal genimals had not at the time been widespread. Now there were airliners with prodigious appet.i.tes, and the gengineers had taken seriously an old adage of the environmental scientists--"A waste is simply a resource that is out of place." They had redefined waste disposal as fuel production, and there was no shortage.

The company was wasting its money on Emily Gilman's Bioblimps. He turned to stare at his aquarium. It had been handy having a source of jellyfish on the premises. But there was no need for new cargo vehicles, and no money in them.

They refused to see the truth. They even ridiculed him. And now the police were here. Here!

His phone rang. He picked it up, listened, and was glad that he had thrown his technicians out. He could feel the beads of sweat upon his brow, knew that he was cringing, shrinking upon his stool.

He said, "I know what I owe them. I know what I promised. And part of the package is ready now. The rest is almost ready." There was a pause while he listened. Then he hung up and dropped his forehead into his hands, his fingers gripping his scalp. Years before, he had taken a vacation in Las Vegas. He had gambled. He had won. And when he had come home, there had been an invitation to a local club, a back room in a restaurant in an ordinary middle-cla.s.s neighborhood. He had gambled again. And he had lost. They had offered him credit. And he had lost that.

And then...

He was perversely glad that the phone call had come from that particularcaller. He knew the man, and though he had asked Chowdhury to do things of which he had never dreamed, and though he had uttered words that promised that Chowdhury would do far more hateful deeds, deeds he could never conceive of dreaming...He sighed. It would be still worse to be owned by some outsider.

He knew why he had fallen into the trap. He had been born in this country.

But his parents had been South African "coloureds." His father had been a hybrid of Boer and African, his mother a sari-wearing descendant of Indian merchants. Both had been physicians and well off compared to other members of their undercla.s.s. But they had belonged to an undercla.s.s, and he had been weaned on the bitter tales of how neither had ever been allowed into such precincts of privilege and wealth as the local casinos. He had seized his opportunity with the eagerness of the culturally deprived.

And then--the man before him had had the well-fed beefiness of the Boers who had tyrannized his parents. He sat at a broad desk, polished until his inverted reflection doubled the stares aimed Chowdhury's way. One hand rested on a stack of yellow slips, the credit markers that measured Chowdhury's foolishness. The other held a small gla.s.s vial. A pair of bodyguards flanked the door behind Chowdhury. A safe stood open in the paneled wall to the left.

"We have let you get much too far into us, Dr. Chowdhury."

He stared at the large diamond that held the other's black tie flat against his s.h.i.+rtfront.

"You don't seem to have wondered why." A sigh. "They never do. But now it's time to pay."

"I can't."

"You can. You even have a choice of methods." The other held up the vial and shook it to make the tiny capsule within it rattle. The gla.s.s sparkled in the light. "One way is to take this pill."

Chowdhury shrank within. He had heard. He knew. The Biological Revolution had put an end to drug smuggling, but not to addiction. Someone, early on, had fitted tapeworms and other parasites with the genes for heroin, cannabinol, cocaine, mescaline, and other substances. There were even parasites for alcoholics. The parasites' eggs could be washed from an addict's wastes and given to anyone who wished infection; some addicts carried a dozen different parasites, and their brains were a chemical stew unmatched since the drug-happy days of the 1960s.

For the first time in history, addicts never had to come down, or worry about how to pay for their next hit. Overdoses were inevitable, for as the parasites grew, they secreted more and more of their drugs, but the addicts never thought of the death awaiting them.

Nor did they think of how their convenience had hurt the drug trade. The man before Chowdhury had. "Take this," he said. "And you will be a very happy man."

It would cost him his job, his career, his very wish to do the gengineering he loved. "And a dead one," whispered Chowdhury. He could not take his eyes off the vial.

The other shrugged. "Eventually. Or..."

Did Chowdhury sense a possible reprieve? He looked up, from the vial to the diamond again, to the soft chin, the unblinking eyes. Another sigh. "These hedonic parasites cost us a very profitable line of business. But they do have a drawback--once one is infected, one is never again free of the drug, even if one should wish to be so. We have wondered whether it would be possible to gengineer an animal, or a plant, that would administer a drug only on command?"

"A snake? A nettle?"

The other's smile showed teeth but did not touch his eyes. "Ah, you understand. And as soon as you bring us something along those lines, something marketable, you understand, we'll tear these up." He held the credit markers up. One of the bodyguards stepped past Chowdhury to take them, and the vial, and return them to the safe.

"Shall we say--cocaine? Until then, I'm afraid, we can't allow you to gamble any more of our money."

The cocaine nettle had been easy. Nettle leaves and stalks are covered with tiny, sharp-tipped, hollow hairs. Normally the hairs are filled with venom; when a person brushes against the plant, the hair tips break off and the hairs inject their venom into the skin; the result is an intense itching, burning sensation. All he had had to do was change the venom genes so that the hairs were filled with a strong cocaine solution.

He had known what he was doing. He had known that he was developing a new way, a new variation, really, on an old way for people to kill themselves. He had done it anyway, telling himself that it was inevitable. New technology first went to major uses, such as Roachsters, Sparrows, and Armadons, even Bioblimps. Soon thereafter, even before it spread widely in legitimate industry, it began to affect crime, and the underworld use of the technology might even find its way to influencing the legitimate. Prohibition, he thought, had spurred automotive technology because liquor smugglers and moons.h.i.+ners had devised ways to enhance the speed and power of their vehicles.

Later, those same techniques had appeared in Detroit, and when Prohibition ended, racing had strengthened to provide a new impetus to the technology.

He had delivered the cocaine nettle within a month, and he had done so proudly, if warily. Now its scions grew in pots all across the country, while those with the money to buy them, and their guests...

The head of Neoform's legal department had thrown a party for the company's upper-level staff. He had gone, and in the man's apartment he had seen his creation. A large nettle sat atop the baby grand piano, a second as a centerpiece amid the buffet, a third on the wet bar. The man had called it something new, something expensive, something marvelous, Neoform should have come up with it, see, just pet it, and feel great!

Someone had tried it, and then another. Someone else had said, "That feels like cocaine!" and tried to explain how millions once had snorted white powder through narrow tubes, rolled dollar bills, rolled...Governments had been powerless as drug money fueled a criminal empire that stretched from South America around the world. But then the parasites had killed almost all the market. There were very few left who preferred their c.o.ke the old-fas.h.i.+oned way. Fortunately, she had once dated one of them.

"Let's try a leaf!" She had plucked one, rolled it, inserted it into her nose, and gasped. Her current boyfriend had made a hit when he suggested that the leaves might be applied elsewhere to good effect, and it had not been long before the lawyer's three plants were reduced to stumps. Chowdhury had had torea.s.sure him that they would quickly regrow from their roots, though he had not confessed his role in the plant's creation.

But his markers had not been destroyed. Someone else had called. A new master who would hold them as a club, while doling out money enough to buy a new Roachster, and talk of fame and wealth, if only he would produce a hedonic pet or two. They wanted genimals, this time. Something cute, perhaps.

Something that only he, gengineer par excellence, could possibly create.

He looked at his aquarium again. In it floated a small jellyfish. If it were wild, its tentacles would be studded with cnidoblasts. Some cnidoblasts, when touched, would expel minute threads to entangle prey. Others would expel sticky tubes. Still others would discharge barbed needles loaded with paralyzing toxin. His jellyfish had only the third type of cnidoblast. Its needles he had smoothed of barbs and filled with heroin. If he petted it...

He didn't think his masters from the underworld--did anyone still call it the Mafia? the Cosa Nostra?--would like the jellyfish. He would show it to them, but he expected they would prefer his tiny asp, its venom sacs loaded with drugs, the snake just of a size to coil around a lady's throat and, on command, bite her pretty earlobe. Soon he would have a rattlesnake, a coral snake, a mamba. Drugs to be worn. Drugs as fas.h.i.+on. Perhaps he would try a bee, or a spider.

If only his masters were Indian, or half Indian, like himself. Whites reminded him of the verdammt Boers, while blacks...

Ah! The stories he had grown up on! His parents, young then, shoulder to shoulder with all the oppressed blacks and coloureds, resisting the Boers, giving them the Cape Town necklaces of flaming rubber tires, expelling them, those that survived, from the country. And then, with help from America, Europe, Russia, China, everywhere, rebuilding the nation's shattered economy.

His parents had not been there to see success. Through all of Africa, the merchants derived from India, China, and Southeast Asia were hated only a little less than the whites. And with the whites gone, the blacks had turned on their allies. The Chowdhurys had been among the few to escape the pogroms.

He had chosen his technicians carefully. None were white. None were kaffirs, schwartzers. One, Chand, was of Indian ancestry. Potonegra was from Guatemala. Dong was Chinese. They were safe. He could work with them, unlike Emily Gilman, or her technician, Alan Bryant, the black.

He became aware of a thread of music. One of his technicians--there, where Potonegra had been sitting--had left her radio on when she had obeyed his banishment order. He rose from his stool to turn it off. He preferred silence.

When he returned to his desk, he activated the computer terminal. He called up the appropriate data base, and he found that Emily had been quite right. Armadillos did indeed jump straight upward when startled, and on highways that reflex did indeed lead to many deaths.

He had his own copy of the armadillo genome, with every gene labeled. He called it up, found the genes that specified the neural circuits behind the reflex. Then he checked the Armadon genome. He shook his head when he found the same genes there. It must have the same circuitry, the same reflex. A quick simulation confirmed that an Armadon did not have the strength to jump, but, yes, it could tear its own wheels off. Just what the customer would want in an emergency. He chuckled.

With the simulator, he explored the effects of modifying or deletingvarious genes and bits of circuitry. One change left the Armadon unable to move its legs at all. Another limited its speed. Still another...Finally, he found the change that removed only the startle reflex. He would have Micaela implement it immediately. Then they could grow another prototype, and he would have his fame and fortune without the underworld.