Organic Future - Sparrowhawk Part 7

With an abrupt wave of one hand, Bernie cut him off. Sweating now, and still scowling, he stalked through the hangar. He didn't know what he was looking for, but there was a faint touch of something strange to the stink in the hangar's air.

In the back, under the small wooden table and close by the dungheap, the dirt floor looked disturbed, as if someone had been digging. He scanned the hangar's walls. There was a shovel, its blade marked by ordinary soil, not the litter one might expect, or wish.

When he moved the table and reached for the shovel, Conal began to back toward the door. "Uh-uh," said Bernie. He raised the gun in his other hand as a reminder of the strength of his position. "Stay here." He whistled, and the Hawk's shadow moved to block the hangar's doorway.

He put the gun away and began to dig. Moments later, he had the answer spread out on the tabletop: two wooden boxes, each one twice the size of a s...o...b..x. Each one was full of small vials. Each vial contained a gelatin capsule that might once have held vitamins. There were no labels, though the capsules were of various colors that might encode some meaning.

Bernie's voice was disgusted. "Hedonic parasites," he said aloud. He bent over the table to sniff the vials. He sensed nothing but the odor of freshly turned earth, and then he realized what the strange scent had been. It was not the smell of contraband, but--in a hangar that normally reeked of litter, jet fuel, and old bird food--that very scent of dirt.

Smugglers, he thought. Coming in at night to bury the goods, or dig them up while money changed hands. Though the quant.i.ties of money could not be great. It was too easy to get the parasite eggs from another addict. Or might this be something new? He held a vial to the light. Through the translucent wall of the gelatin capsule he could see a small round dot that looked more like a seed. He knew about the nettles that had come on the market in just the last few months. Was that what these were? Whatever, the smugglers had been here, and they presumably had let the Chickadee out to give themselves more room in which to work.

The airport manager was huddled against one wall of the hangar, his body folded in upon itself as if he were cold. But he was sweating too, and even more than could be credited to the hangar's saunalike atmosphere. Bernie ignored him as he threw the shovel down and went to the Hawk. There he used the radio to call the dispatcher and request a warrant and a crew. They would search the terminal and the other hangars, collect the evidence, arrest Conal, and stake out the cache in hope of catching the smugglers that night, or the next. The hope was slim, he knew, for surely there was another of the gang watching the hangar now, noting his presence, and warning off the rest. But they would try.

The necessary reports had taken time, but it was still morning when Bernie set his Hawk down in the Neoform parking lot and toggled it to sleep. Hegrinned when he noticed the Gilman family Tortoise not far from the slot he had chosen. He had some information for her, perhaps he could learn something more about gengineering, and maybe...

The Gray Lady at the reception desk kept him waiting just long enough to let him know that everyone called her Miss Carol, that it was an awful shame what happened on the expressway just the other day, and she hoped he, as a policeman, would see to it that it never happened again, and Dr. Gilman was such a nice woman, didn't he think? When Emily showed up on the other side of the turnstile, he could just barely restrain an effusive "Thank you!" until they were out of sight.

"She has that effect on everyone," said Emily. "I've heard Security took a year to find her."

He stopped dead in the hallway and swung to face her. "You mean it's an act?"

"Oh, no!" Her wide mouth parted in a laugh, and he noticed the way the floral print of her dress swayed as if in a breeze and her pens bounced in the pocket on her bosom. She touched his arm to push him into motion again. "Oh, no! They wanted a genuine yenta. I'm told the idea is that she can keep any intruder talking--or listening--until the guards arrive."

"As long as she's on duty."

"Oh, well. There's someone else on the desk, but we lock the doors at night." He supposed the company's armed guards were on more visible patrol then, as well. "There's the lab." She pointed. As they began to slow down for the turn into her lab, a man emerged from a door on the other side of the hall, and a little farther from them. He was slight, short, and brown-skinned, and when he saw them, he scowled viciously. Bernie thought he recognized the man, but he had to grope for the name.

Only when they were in the lab could he say, "What's Chowdhury mad about today?"

"Probably the same thing as yesterday. He holds grudges." She gestured toward a young black man seated before a complicated array of control pads, gla.s.s tubing, and test tubes. "You met Alan. He's putting together an artificial virus for a gene transplant."

"How does that work?" he asked.

"Wild viruses can plug genes into DNA, but they put them anyplace. The ones we use can be designed to insert a 'cargo' gene wherever we wish in a genome. They can also be targeted to any type of cell in an animal's body. We have viruses for plants too."

When he said nothing, she added, "The key is simple. DNA is built as a sequence of simpler chemicals, or nucleotides. And it can bind to matching sequences. Since the virus is also DNA, all we have to do is tailor the appropriate piece of it to match the target area we want, and the virus will do the rest."

Now Bernie looked confused. Alan grinned up at them. "We use them the way mechanics use pliers," he said, ignoring her little lecture. "You shouldn't have scared Chowdhury's Armadon for him."

"You heard, huh?" "We all did, though it didn't help that you were with her at the time."

When Bernie looked puzzled, Emily explained, "There's a certain amount of rivalry between us. He wants those Armadons of his to be the next big product for the company. I want..." She told him about the Bioblimp.

"And the chowderhead hates everyone anyway," said Alan. "His parents were South African."

"Alan!"

He grinned sheepishly. "You know I can't resist."

Bernie admitted to himself that the epithet seemed inevitable. He knew just enough history to feel that Alan's description made sense, though he could not, at the moment, spell out that sense. He shrugged, smiled, waved a hand, and followed Emily to her office corner. "What's that gadget?" he asked, glancing over his shoulder.

"A DNA splicer," she said. "Have you found out something about that bird already?"

He shook his head, let his gaze drop to her ankles, and scratched one temple. "Not really. Though we know it's a government genimal, and the beak was poisoned."

"That stain!"

He nodded, watching her face, the wide eyes, the parted lips that let the words escape so quietly, almost in a whisper. "It stabbed the Chickadee." She nodded. "This deep." He showed her with his fingers. "And that was enough to kill it. I had the call even before I made it back to the office." He told her what else he had found in the hangar.

"Then Nick was right. It must have been in the way, and..."

"They were letting it out."

She stood up and said, "Coffee?" The coffee maker was on the windowsill.

She had to step behind him to reach it, and as she did so, her belly brushed the back of his head. Was it deliberate? He let his head lean into her, and she said nothing. But when she had poured the two cups and handed him his, she retraced her path without touching him.

Shrugging mentally, he said, "The a.s.sa.s.sin bird--you saw the band on its ankle? That carries the bird's serial number. Unfortunately, the number wasn't readable. Whoever sicced the bird on you defaced it."

She sipped her coffee. "Why didn't they just take the band off?"

He shook his head. "They tried. But the band is fiber-reinforced metal."

He meant, she knew, the same material that was used to strengthen the skeletons of jets and other genimals against the consequences of the square-cube law. "All they could do was gouge a few of the digits badly enough to make them unreadable."

He then began to explain how an a.s.sa.s.sin worked: Its handler showed it two photos, one of the intended victim, one of some landmark near which that person could be found, and released it not far from the landmark. The bird would then locate the landmark and lie in wait until the target appeared.

Often, as in this case, the beak would be poisoned, although the beak alonewas quite sufficient if the bird hit a vital spot.

She let him get about halfway into his explanation before she stopped him with a chopping gesture of one hand. "I know," she said. "I looked them up this morning, when I got here. Neoform designed them for some government agency--I don't know which--years ago, when I was still in school. We still breed them, though that's a different operation from this." She pointed her chin toward the rest of her lab. Her expression said that she didn't like the idea of clandestine a.s.sa.s.sinations, whether directed at her or not.

He hadn't known, he told himself, that Neoform was responsible for the a.s.sa.s.sins. That bit of information hadn't been in the data base he had been able to tap that morning once he had established his "need to know" as a law-enforcement officer. He supposed that she had been able to consult company files more easily.

But all he said was: "I'm getting hungry. Lunch?"

When lunchtime came to the police department, its clerks, administrators, and officers streamed steadily from the building's main entrance, slowing only when too many people tried to get through the door at once. At Neoform, Bernie therefore thought the rush of employees through the halls toward the main entrance entirely normal, at least until the traffic flow slowed and halted not far from the turnstile.

Emily had just introduced him to one of her coworkers, Frank Janifer. When everyone stopped, he asked the man what was going on.

"Miss Carol," he said. "The dragon at the gate making sure that everyone signs out properly."

"Security," said Emily. "They tried electronic cards once, until the day a summer intern showed up with six of them. She said she was supposed to put them all through the scanner. Their owners were in a rush."

Yet the technology of signing out was not obsolete. Electronic cards may not have worked, but no one had felt that meant a return to pen and paper was necessary. As each person came to the turnstile, they bent and worked an electronic wand over a plastic-coated surface connected by a cable to the company's main computer. Their signature was instantly compared with a template in memory, and the machine kept the essential records of who came in and went out, and when. The process took no one long. Soon Bernie and Emily were outside and walking toward a nearby restaurant. "I don't know much about gengineering," he said.

Emily sidestepped as a girl, perhaps ten years old, sped past them on a bicycle. "It began almost a century ago," she said. "Biologists first learned how to snip genes apart in the 1970s. The key was chemicals--protein enzymes--that cut DNA only at certain points. Very quickly then, they learned how to add genes taken from one organism to the genome of another. They used everything from microscopic shotgun pellets--coated with DNA copies of genes--to viruses, which would carry a gene into a cell and plug it into the cell's DNA."

The restaurant featured a broad flagstoned patio overshadowed by a trellis supporting a heavy growth of vines. Most of the patio's tables were occupied, but they found a small one for themselves. Menus were already on it. When it was obvious that the waiter would be a while in getting to them, Bernie said, "And now you use those artificial viruses."

"Like the one you saw Alan a.s.sembling." She took a moment then to scan theheadlines on a newspaper spread across a chair at the next table. They concerned a demonstration against bioforms in another city; the demonstrators had built a bonfire and roasted a litterbug. Done with that, she glanced at the menu and raised a hand to attract the waiter's attention. He nodded distractedly, as if to say, "Soon! Soon!"

"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 gla.s.s 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 gla.s.s 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 othergenes 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 interrelations.h.i.+ps 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 pa.s.senger 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 sh.e.l.l 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 SAt.u.r.dAY, 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 pa.s.sed 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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 p.r.i.c.kly sailing s.h.i.+p. 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 pa.s.sed 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 function 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, muchslower 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 take-out ribs near one of the city's parks and found a gra.s.sy 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 pa.s.s. 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 sc.r.a.p 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.