Slant

by Greg Bear

  (Ironically, it was discovered in 2023 that bacteria are responsible for the production of many viruses, which they use to target opposing bacterial populations or to weaken prey hosts… a kind of microbiological super-warfare that still fascinates students of evolution and transspecies culture.)

  Also in the late twentieth, with the advent of popular computers, dataflow evolvons were unleashed by pasty, sweating young intellectuals as a kind of game, and were called viruses. They were quickly and efficiently countered, though several such outbreaks caused severe economic disruption.

  One prominent computer HACKER*564 or CRACKER*239 was kidnapped from Los Angeles in 2006 and removed to Singapore, where the death penalty was imposed and carried out, after extensive torture…

  15

  Jonathan sits in the autobus, chin in hand, a little darked by the conversation (or lack of such) with Chloe. There are days when he wonders where their marriage is headed, other days when he accepts the changes with a pragmatic air that could almost be called happiness; but tonight, he feels the institution stretching to confine him.

  That, and he hates having to shout at his children. They evoke such primal reactions—love without boundaries, helpless pain at their own pains, and then, whenever he senses Hiram acting beneath his abilities, a flare of fear for his son, fear that he will end up disAffected and useless, a broken and breaking failure. He knows he should lighten up, that Hiram is sharp and capable and will grow out of these awkward doldrums, but the fear remains. Chloe hates his voice when he shouts… But he is the father, and if he does nothing, contributes nothing, what will happen?

  Across the aisle and two seats up, woman in a no-nonsense Alacrity jumper is surrounded by some unseen distant place, telepresenting. She holds her arms out and makes small conversational gestures, silent, though her lips move.

  He looks away. Lack of contact; disembodied presence. He likes none of it. Chloe does not understand, but Jonathan wants more touch, more contact, in his life and work, not less.

  The city lights hanging over the old asphalt side streets leading to St. Mark’s Cathedral reflect in the windows and illuminate the faces of his fellow passengers. Jonathan’s mind flips through the familiar catalog of the highlights of his relationship, with Chloe. Her youthful beauty, her vigorous enthusiasm as they sneak through the rituals of both their families to make love in bathrooms, hallways, in the backs of empty autobuses, in graveyards on summer evenings; their mutual maturation and mutual astonishment that, in fact, they would survive past the age of thirty, despite entanglements with complex intoxicants and all the other pitfalls of their generation; the one hiatus in their life together (that he knows about, he thinks with a sudden sourness), before they were married, when a man (four years older! A veritable ancient of thirty-seven) charmed Chloe into an abortive affair that left her desperate to secure her relationship with Jonathan.

  And then marriage. The arrival of the children; Chloe’s acquiescence in the face of motherhood and contemporary fashion to forego career and concentrate on the infants, each comfortably born ex utero, as the women in even the most conservative families were demanding at the time. Her first flush of maternal instinct treatments, to which she overreacts, turning her into a protective tigress who hardly lets Jonathan touch Penelope; the traumatic adjustments to a second child, all of which they survive, and their marriage survives, and throughout which their interest in each other continues virtually unabated.

  Jonathan adores her; perhaps because of their initial troubles, he thinks Chloe is the most desirable woman on Earth.

  But in the last few years, Chloe has gone internal. Jonathan can’t point to any particular behavior, but to a sum of behaviors and attitudes which can just as easily be described as mellowing or coming of age, finally or the inevitable settling down of the passions, or just as easily, she’s lost interest.

  His reflection stares back at him from the autobus window, a thin face, forehead high, black hair receding nicely, accenting his small narrow nose and deepset black eyes and his lips which, he thinks, are still boyish and do not look at all resolute. He does not think he has changed or aged so drastically that he is no longer attractive, but he feels that way. He often wonders whether transform surgery—mild, of course; his social station and employers would tolerate nothing more—could rekindle Chloe’s interest, or whether they should step into even more experimental territory and encourage each other to take occasionals. Many do, particularly among the class of women who have given up careers.

  The autobus slows and his seat vibrates faintly to let him know this is his stop. He takes his small valise and steps down into the night, blinking at a rush of wind. Thick clouds blow over the tall steeple and the roofs of nearby mansions and multis.

  The nearest tower is three miles south and west, across the 5; he can see it through rifts in the cloud deck from where he stands, its flanks glowing with faint blue lines and red marker sheets like square eyes in the darkness.

  His overcoat blows around his legs as he walks up a concrete ramp to the main entrance. St. Mark’s has not been renovated since the late twentieth and is looking a little dark, a little old, though still dignified and of course traditional; just the place for the Stoics to have their monthly meetings. All terribly dull and advantageous, head to head, and he seldom looks forward to them.

  Chloe seems even more stiff on such evenings perhaps she secretly nurses resentment, imagines herself in the feed, riding the current of business, part of the great river of Corridor commerce… Which is of course a laugh. Jonathan hasn’t been awarded significant advancement in years. The economic squall of 2049 has frozen most lobe-sods, even management, at status re-value ever since.

  Inside the cloakroom, he hands his overcoat to a church daughter, graying and round-faced and smiling, and strolls with hands in pockets into the nave. The tall stained glass windows glow with phosphorescence painted on the outer surfaces, a cool night-ocean light that is strangely soothing. Jonathan walks down the aisle toward the center, a large gray granite baptismal font on a stone pedestal.

  The arms of the transept lead off into gloom, empty of conversing Stoics, who gather at the center, in the aisles and near the font. He sees a few he knows, some fresh-faced recruits a decade younger than he, and then the gray pate of Marcus Reilly, his sponsor.

  Marcus seldom has much to say to Jonathan these days; his interests are not in Jonathan’s line of work, which is nutritional design and supply. Marcus—Jonathan tries to remember—is increasing his already impressive holdings in cold ore extraction in Utah and squeezing a few last tons of paydirt out of Green Idaho.

  But Marcus spots him in the aisle, holds up his hand, smiles brightly. He’s going to end this present conversation gracefully, his gestures say, and join Jonathan in a few moments.

  Jonathan stands with hands folded. Marcus is one of the few men of his acquaintance who can make him sweat, and also make him wait with hands folded.

  “Jonathan! How are you?” Marcus asks expansively, creeping between the pews and holding out his hand. They shake and Jonathan accepts the upward curled fingers with the opposite of his own downward curl. Marcus tugs on the join vigorously, smiling. “How’s Chloe? The children?”

  “All well. And Beate?”

  “Can-TANK-erous. Can’t stand to have me around the house anymore. She spends all her time driving chemical futures and screwing up the market. But she’s having fun. And you, dear Jonathan—still frozen?”

  Jonathan nods ruefully. Marcus knows something important about everybody.

  “No prospects for a thaw?”

  “Not so far. Managers can’t write their own ticket any more.

  “Don’t I know it. To tell the truth, Beate’s the force in our credit balance any more. She drives more weather into our account… good weather, I mean. Calm seas. Makes her too independent, I think. Doesn’t need me any more. But that’s changing. Can we talk after?”

  “Sure.” Jonathan says. There is alwa
ys, in meetings between sponsor and client, an air of informality and equality, belied by the stains under his arm. Marcus could remove Jonathan from any position in the Corridor in a few minutes, with a few simple stabs on his pad… Patria potestas.

  But Marcus has of course never done that. Perhaps it is Jonathan’s own insecurity that even makes him think of the possibility. When something is not right at home, all the universe tilts.

  But then, what is it that is not right at home?

  “Grand!” Marcus says. “Do you know anything about this fellow, Torino?”

  “No, sir,” Jonathan says.

  “I hear it was Luke’s idea to bring him in. Shake all of us up with some stimulating big-picture stuff.”

  “Sounds interesting,” Jonathan says. Chao Luke, tall and monkish in his formal black Stoic’s robe, is arranging a podium near the central font. A small, elfish-looking man in slacks and a sweater, very nineties, stands beside Chao, calmly ineffectual. This must be Torino. And the lecture—He pulls up the note on his pad calendar—is about Autopoiesis and the Grand Scheme. He looks around the transept and nave. A number of men are setting up equipment near the walls: banks of small projectors that will play out over the crowd, reflective screens to catch large displays. Like most presentations before the Stoics, the tech will be distinctly early twentieth—no plugs, no fibe hooks between pads, all in the spirit of community, not dataflow immersion.

  Chao takes the podium and asks the Stoics to sit. The men and women arrange themselves in the pews before the podium and the font as Chao smiles out over them. “We’ll bring the February meeting of the Stoics, Seattle chapter, to order now.”

  Jonathan sits on the hard wood. Churches seem not to believe in comfort, the perpetual strain of hardroot American asceticism which he does not actually oppose, but which still leaves him buttsore by the end of these meetings.

  He glances at Torino as the notes are read and motions proposed, seconded, and voted upon. The speaker stares up at the dome. His face is childlike, head small, hair dark and tousled. Torino. Torino.

  Jonathan wonders if this is the same man who has become a minor celebrity in scientific circles for his work in bacterial communities. Jonathan does not have time to follow all these threads through the fibes, but he watches Torino with more interest. What is it like to be famous—even a little famous? To have people want to listen to your words, to sit respectfully and await your wisdom?

  Again the suspicion of his own weakness and inferiority, like the little bite of a spider tangled in his underwear. Jonathan wishes Chloe would have shown him more warmth this evening, helped him face up to Marcus with self-assurance.

  Now it is Torino’s turn to speak. Chao introduces him—his full name is Jerome Torino—and steps aside. The small man grips the sides of the podium with both hands, and the pickup adjusts to his stature like a metal snake. He clears his throat.

  “It’s cold and windy out there. Not good weather for public speaking.”

  Jonathan smiles politely, as do most of the Stoics around him. Weak intro. He does not feel positively toward this famous person who dresses so informally.

  “Tonight I hope to pull aside some curtains and dispel a few misconceptions that haunt our culture, our philosophy, our politics,” Torino says. His small hands swing wide, as if embracing the audience, the church. His eyes are bright and close together. With a beard he could be a little monkey, Jonathan thinks.

  “I’ll have the help of some… what used to be called media. Everything is media nowadays, so that word is out of use, like saying ‘heat’ at the heart of the sun. Because of your charter, I’ve been challenged to avoid the more sophisticated effects I’ve been known to use to get my points across.” He clears his throat again.

  Jonathan prepares to be bored. He shifts in his seat. The woman beside him, am discreet eighteen inches to his left, glances at him. He feels like a little boy cautioned to keep still.

  “We’ll begin with words, words only. Imagine you’re in a library and walking through stacks of books. Let’s say you’re in the Library of Congress, walking in a pressure suit through the helium-filled chambers, between miles of shelves, just staring at the millions upon billions of publications, periodicals, books, cubes…”

  Jonathan hopes for a little visual interest soon. His mind goes back to Chloe. I feel so weak without her support. Why can’t she support me strongly, give me her //UNDIVIDED ATTENTION!// no, not that, but at least leave me feeling she really values me.

  “Every single one of those books begins, of course, with an act of sex. Are you offended by the old sexual words? Then use the euphemisms. Men and women, getting together—”

  Christ, is everything sex? Jonathan squirms again, and the woman looks at him with lingering distaste from the lecture’s opening bluntness added to irritation that Jonathan is behaving like a little boy. But of course he is not; he is imagining that she looks at him that way.

  He focuses on Torino. Yes, so it all begins in bed.

  “—and exchanging ideas.”

  The meeting laughs with some relief. Torino smiles at them.

  “Sex is often confused with reproduction. But bacteria engage in sex for the sheer desperate necessary joy of it—sex is their visit to the community library, the communal cookbook. They wriggle themselves through seas of recipes, little circular bits of DNA called plasmids. When they absorb a plasmid they don’t necessarily reproduce, but they still swap genetic material, and that’s what bacteriologists call sex. Unlike us, however, bacterial sex—this kind of swap—can even occur between totally different kinds, what we once regarded as different species. But there are no true species in bacteria. We know now that bacteria are not grouped into species, as such, but evanescent communities we call microgens, or even more currently, ecobacters.

  “The plasmids contain helpful hints on how to survive, how to make this or that new defense against an antibiotic, how to rise up as a community against tailored phages flooding in to eradicate.

  “In the very beginning, for bacteria, this was sex. This was how sex began, as a visit to the great extended library. I call this data sex. No bacterium can exist for long without touching base with its colleagues, its peers. So how do we differ from the bacteria?

  “Not much. You come to this group, you exchange greetings, arrange meetings, sometimes you exchange recipes. Sometimes we—and here I don’t mean the members of this club, necessarily—get together, conjugate, to exchange genetic material, either in a pleasant social jest or joust with biology, or sometimes, in earnest, because it’s really time to reproduce.

  “Since the days of the bacteria, there are few higher organisms who reproduce without conjugal sex. This may be because we are far fewer than the bacteria, who can afford to make many millions of mistakes, and consequently we are especially protective about the kinds of information that enter our bodies. We have to check out our potential partners, see if we really want to refer to their genetic library in creating our offspring—judging them by their appearance and actions, and initiating in evolution the entire peacock panoply of ritual and display.

  “In the Library of Congress, every single book, every item, began with an act of reproductive sex, allowing the author to get born and eventually to write a book. That book now acts as kind of plasmid, reaching into your mind to alter your memory, which is the con-template—my word: the template, through cognition, of behavior. The medium of course is language. Sex is language, and language is sex, whatever form it takes. Changes in anatomy and behavior are the ultimate results—and sometimes, coincidentally, reproduction.”

  Jonathan wonders what in hell Chao was thinking, bringing this man in to talk to the Stoics. Usually the talks are about economics, politics, activism in the Corridor communities—rarely, about science or international affairs. This is much too abstruse.

  “So let’s begin where sex began, with the bacteria. How do bacteria remember? Their behavior is fairly basic, individually.”

&nb
sp; The transept fills with a writhing torrent of bacteria, just above their heads. Jonathan does not expect this and jumps, as does the woman on his left. They smile sheepishly at each other. He tries to remember her name—Henrietta, Rhetta, something like that. She’s involved in economic design. Jonathan congratulates himself for having such a quick memory.

  The torrent of bacteria, blue and green, settles into a gentle flow. Individuals touch, push thin tubes across to others, congregate, release plasmids and a variety of molecules that alert each other to the environmental conditions experienced by “Pickets,” so the display marks them; like soldiers foraging. These molecules, Torino explains, are the precursors to the neural transmitters within the human brain…

  “Bacteria have no home, no rest, and their individual existence is fleeting. But they invest in a kind of communal memory—not just the genetic pool of a species, but the overall acquired knowledge of the community. Not unlike our human communities. The result is rapid adaptation throughout the community to threats—and magnanimously, as if bacteria recognize the importance of the overall ecosystem—the clues and recipes spread to other types and other microgens.

  “Only in the past half-century have we studied these microgens, and determined all the ways they share experience. They are not that different from humans, at least as far as the mathematics of networking is concerned. From the very bottom, to the very top, webbing or networking—autopoiesis—the behavior of self-organizing systems—shares many common characteristics. So—