by Greg Bear
Miller nodded. “Good. Much more efficient than just allowing any old mutation to be expressed and probably destroy an individual or damage a population. Let’s say this adaptive genetic computer, this evolutionary processor, only allows certain kinds of mutations to be used. Individuals store the results of the processor’s work—which would, I assume, be . . .” Miller looked at Kaye for help, waggling his hand.
“Mutations that are grammatical,” she said, “physiological statements that don’t violate any important structural rules in an organism.”
Miller smiled beatifically, then held his knee and began rocking gently back and forth. His large square cranium glinted as it caught the reddish gleam of an overhead light. He was thoroughly enjoying himself.
“Where would the evolutionary information be stored—throughout the genome, holographically, in different parts in different individuals, or just in germ-line cells, or . . . elsewhere?”
“Tags stored in a set-aside section of the genome in each individual,” Kaye said, and then bit her tongue. Miller—and Saul, for that matter—regarded an idea as a kind of food that needed to be thoroughly shared and chewed over before it could be useful. Kaye preferred certainties before she spoke. She searched for an immediate example. “Like heat-shock response in bacteria, or single-generation climate adaptation in fruit flies.”
“But a human set-aside has to be huge. We’re so much more complex than fruit flies,” Miller said. “Have we found it already, but just don’t know what it is?”
Kaye touched Saul’s arm, urging caution. They had a reputation now for riding a certain wave, and even with an old guard scientist like Miller, a gadfly with sufficient accomplishments under his belt for a dozen careers, she felt nervous giving away their most recent thinking. It could get around: Kaye Lang says such and such . . .
“Nobody’s found it yet,” Kaye said.
“Oh?” Miller said, searching her face with a critical gaze. She felt like a deer frozen in headlights.
Miller shrugged. “Maybe not. My guess is, it’s expressed only in germ-line cells. Sex cells. Haploid to haploid. It doesn’t get expressed, it doesn’t start work unless there’s confirmation from other individuals. Pheromones. Eye contact, maybe.”
“We think otherwise,” Kaye said. “We think the set-aside will only carry instructions for the small alterations that lead to a new species. The rest of the details remains encoded in the genome, standard instructions for everything below that level . . . Probably working as well for chimpanzees as for us.”
Miller frowned, stopped rocking. “I have to let that run around in my head for a minute.” He glanced up at the dark ceiling. “Makes sense. Protect the design that you know works, at a minimum. So will these subtle changes carried in the set-aside express as units, do you think,” Miller said, “one change at a time?”
“We don’t know,” Saul said. He folded his napkin beside his plate and thumped it with his hand. “And that’s all we’re going to tell you, Drew.”
Miller smiled broadly. “Jay Niles has been talking with me. He thinks punctuated equilibrium is on a roll, and he thinks it’s a systems problem, a network problem. Selective neural network intelligence at work. I’ve never much trusted talk about neural networks. Just a way of clouding the issue, of not describing what you need to describe.” With complete lack of guile, Miller added, “I think I can help, if you want me to.”
“Thanks, Drew. We might call on you,” Kaye said, “but for right now, we’d like to have our own fun.”
Miller shrugged expressively, tipped his finger to his forehead, and walked back to the other end of the table, where he picked up another breadstick and began another conversation.
On the plane to La Guardia, Saul slumped in his seat. “Drew has no idea, no idea.”
Kaye looked up from the airplane copy of Threads.
“About what?” Kaye asked. “He seemed pretty on track to me.”
“If you or I or anybody in biology was to talk about any kind of intelligence behind evolution . . .”
“Oh,” Kaye said. She gave a delicate shudder. “The old spooky vitalism.”
“When Drew talks about intelligence or mind, he doesn’t mean conscious thought, of course.”
“No?” Kaye said, deliciously tired, full of pasta. She pushed the magazine into the pouch under the tray table and leaned her seat back. “What does he mean?”
“You’ve already thought about ecological networks.”
“Not my most original work,” Kaye said. “And what does it let us predict?”
“Maybe nothing,” Saul said. “But it orders my thinking in useful ways. Nodes or neurons in a network leading to neural net patterns, feeding back to the nodes the results of any network activity, leading to increased efficiencies for every node and for the network in particular.”
“That’s certainly clear enough,” Kaye said, making a sour face.
Saul wagged his head from side to side, acknowledging her criticism. “You’re smarter than I’ll ever be, Kaye Lang,” Saul said. She watched him closely, and saw only what she admired in Saul. The ideas had taken hold of him; he was not interested in attribution, merely in seeing a new truth. Her eyes misted, and she remembered with an almost painful intensity the emotions Saul had aroused in their first year together. Goading her, encouraging her, driving her nuts until she spoke clearly and understood the full arc of an idea, a hypothesis. “Make it clear, Kaye. That’s what you’re good at.”
“Well . . .” Kaye frowned. “That’s the way the human brain works, or a species, or an ecosystem, for that matter. And it’s also the most basic definition of thought. Neurons exchange lots of signals. The signals can add or subtract from each other, neutralize or cooperate to reach a decision. They follow the basic actions of all nature: cooperation and competition: symbiosis, parasitism, predation. Nerve cells are nodes in the brain, and genes are nodes in the genome, competing and cooperating to be reproduced in the next generation. Individuals are nodes in a species, and species are nodes in an ecosystem.”
Saul scratched his cheek and looked at her proudly.
Kaye waggled her finger in warning. “The Creationists will pop out of the woodwork and crow that we’re finally talking about God.”
“We all have our burdens.” Saul sighed.
“Miller talked about SHEVA closing the feedback loop for individual organisms—that is, individual human beings. That would make SHEVA a neurotransmitter of sorts,” Kaye said, mulling this over.
Saul pushed closer to her, his hands working to describe volumes of ideas. “Let’s get specific. Humans cooperate for advantage, forming a society. They communicate sexually, chemically, but also socially—through speech, writing, culture. Molecules and memes. We know that scent molecules, pheromones, affect behavior; females in groups come into estrus together. Men avoid chairs where other men have sat; women are attracted to those same chairs. We’re just refining the kinds of signals that can be sent, what kind of messages, and what can carry the message. Now we suspect that our bodies exchange endogenous virus, just as bacteria do. Is it really all that startling?”
Kaye had not told Saul about her conversation with Judith. She did not want to take the edge off their fun just yet, especially with so little actually known, but it would have to happen soon. She sat up. “What if SHEVA has multiple purposes,” she suggested. “Could it also have bad side effects?”
“Everything in nature can go wrong,” Saul said.
“What if it actually has gone wrong? What if it’s been expressed in error, has completely lost its original purpose and just makes us sick?”
“Not impossible,” Saul said in a way that suggested polite lack of interest. His mind was still on evolution. “I really think we should work this over in the next week and put together another paper. We have the material almost ready—we could cover all the speculative bases, bring in some of the folks in Cold Spring Harbor and Santa Barbara . . . Maybe even Miller. You just don�
�t turn down an offer from someone like Drew. We should talk to Jay Niles, too. Get a real firm base laid down. Shall we go ahead, put our money on the table, tackle evolution?”
In truth, this possibility scared Kaye. It seemed very dangerous, and she wanted to give Judith more time to learn what SHEVA could do. More to the point, it had no connection with their core business of finding new antibiotics.
“I’m too tired to think,” Kaye said. “Ask me tomorrow.”
Saul sighed happily. “So many puzzles, so little time.”
Kaye had not seen Saul so energetic and content in years. He tapped his fingers in rapid rhythm on the armrest and hummed softly to himself.
16
Innsbruck, Austria
Sam, Mitch’s father, found him in the hospital lobby, his single bag packed and his leg wrapped in a cumbersome cast. The surgery had gone well, the pins had been removed two days before, his leg was healing on schedule. He was being discharged.
Sam helped Mitch out to the parking lot, carrying the bag for him. They pushed the seat all the way back on the passenger side of the rented Opel. Mitch fitted his leg in awkwardly, with some discomfort, and Sam drove him through the light midmorning traffic. His father’s eyes darted to every corner, nervous.
“This is nothing compared to Vienna,” Mitch said.
“Yes, well, I don’t know how they treat foreigners. Not as bad as they do in Mexico, I guess,” Sam said. Mitch’s father had wiry brown hair and a heavily freckled, broad Irish face that looked as if it might smile easily enough. But Sam seldom smiled, and there was a steely edge in his gray eyes that Mitch had never learned to fathom.
Mitch had rented a one-bedroom flat on the outskirts of Innsbruck, but had not been there since the accident. Sam lit up a cigarette and smoked it quickly as they walked up the concrete stairwell to the second floor.
“You handle that leg pretty well,” Sam said.
“I don’t have much choice,” Mitch said. Sam helped him negotiate a corner and stabilize himself on the crutches. Mitch found his keys and opened the door. The small, low-ceilinged flat had bare concrete walls and hadn’t been heated for weeks. Mitch squeezed into the bathroom and realized he would have to take his craps from a certain angled altitude; the cast didn’t fit between the toilet and the wall.
“I’ll have to learn to aim,” he told his father as he came out. This made his father grin.
“Get a bigger bathroom next time. Spare-looking place, but clean,” Sam commented. He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Your mother and I assume you’re coming home. We’d like you to.”
“I probably will, for a while,” Mitch said. “I’m a bit of a whipped puppy, Dad.”
“Bullshit,” Sam murmured. “Nothing’s ever whipped you.”
Mitch regarded his father with a flat expression, then swiveled around on the crutches and looked at the goldfish Tilde had given him months before. She had provided a little glass bowl and a tin of food and had set it on the counter in the small kitchen. He had cared for it even after the relationship was over.
The fish had died and was now a little raft of mold floating on the surface of the half-filled bowl. Lines marked the levels of scum as the water evaporated. It was pretty gruesome.
“Shit,” Mitch said. He had completely forgotten about the fish.
“What was it?” Sam asked, peering at the bowl.
“The last of a relationship that almost killed me,” Mitch said.
“Pretty dramatic,” Sam said.
“Pretty anticlimactic,” Mitch corrected. “Maybe it should have been a shark.” He offered his father a Carlsberg from the tiny refrigerator beside the kitchen sink. Sam took the beer and swallowed about a third as he walked around the living room.
“You got any unfinished business here?” Sam asked.
“I don’t know,” Mitch said, carrying his suitcase into the ridiculously small bedroom with bare concrete walls and a single ceiling light fixture of clear ribbed glass. He tossed it on the sleeping mat, squidgied his way around on the crutches, returned to the living room. “They want me to help them find the mummies.”
“Then let them fly you back here,” Sam said. “We’re going home.”
Mitch thought to check the answering machine. The little message counter had gone to its maximum, thirty.
“It’s time to come home and get your strength back,” Sam said.
That sounded pretty good, actually. Go back home at age thirty-seven and just stay there, let Mom cook and Dad teach him how to tie flies or whatever Sam was into now, visit with their friends, become a little kid again, not responsible for anything very important.
Mitch felt sick to his stomach. He pressed the rewind button on the answering machine tape. As it whirred back onto its spool, the phone chimed and Mitch answered.
“Excuse me,” a tenor male voice said in English. “Is this Mitch Rafelson?”
“The very one,” Mitch said.
“I just tell you this, then good-bye. Maybe you recognize my voice, but . . . no matter. They have found your bodies in the cave. The University of Innsbruck people. Without your help, I assume. They do not tell anybody yet, I don’t know why. I am not joking and this is no prank, Herr Rafelson.”
There was a distinct click and the line went dead.
“Who was it?” Sam asked.
Mitch sniffed and tried to relax his jaw. “Fuckers,” he said. “They’re just messing with me. I’m famous, Dad. A famous crackpot chucklehead.”
“Bullshit,” Sam said again, his face sharp with disgust and anger. Mitch stared at his father with a mix of love and shame; this was Sam at his most involved, his most protective.
“Let’s get out of this rat hole,” Sam said in disgust.
17
Long Island, New York
Kaye made Saul breakfast just after sunrise. He seemed subdued, sitting at the knotty pine table in the kitchen, slowly sipping a cup of black coffee. He had had three cups already, not a good sign. In a good mood—Good Saul—he never drank more than a cup a day. If he starts smoking again . . .
Kaye delivered his scrambled eggs and toast and sat beside him. He leaned over, ignoring her, and ate slowly, deliberately, sipping coffee between each bite. As he finished, he made a sour face and pushed the plate back.
“Bad eggs?” Kaye asked quietly.
Saul gave her a long look and shook his head. He was moving slower, also not a good sign. “I called Bristol-Myers Squibb yesterday,” he said. “They haven’t cut a deal with Lado and Eliava, and apparently they don’t expect to. There’s something political going on in Georgia.”
“Maybe that’s good news?”
Saul shook his head and turned his chair toward the French doors and the gray morning outside. “I also called a friend of mine at Merck. He says there’s something cooking with Eliava, but he doesn’t know what it is. Lado Jakeli flew to the United States and met with them.”
Kaye stopped herself in the middle of a sigh, let it out slowly, inaudibly. Walking on eggshells again . . . The body knew, her body knew. Saul was suffering again, worse even than he appeared. She had been through this at least five times. Any hour now he would find a pack of cigarettes, inhale the hot acrid nicotine to straighten out some of his brain chemistry, even though he hated smoking, hated tobacco.
“So . . . we’re out,” she said.
“I don’t know yet,” Saul said. He squinted at a brief ray of sun. “You didn’t tell me about the grave.”
Kaye’s face flushed like a girl’s. “No,” she said stiffly. “I didn’t.”
“And it didn’t make the newspapers.”
“No.”
Saul pushed his chair back and grabbed the edge of the table, then half-stood and performed a series of angled push-ups, eyes focused on the table top. When he finished, having done thirty, he sat down again and wiped his face with the folded paper towel he was using as a napkin.
“Christ, I’m sorry, Kaye,” he said, his voice rough. “
Do you know how that makes me feel?”
“What?”
“Having my wife experience something like that.”
“You knew about my taking criminal medicine at SUNY.”
“It makes me feel funny, even so,” Saul said.
“You want to protect me,” Kaye said, and put her hand over his, rubbing his fingers. He withdrew his hand slowly.
“Against everything,” Saul said, sweeping the hand over the table, taking in the world. “Against cruelty and failure. Stupidity.” His speech accelerated. “It is political. We’re suspect. We’re associated with the United Nations. Lado can’t go with us.”
“It didn’t seem to be that way, the politics, in Georgia,” Kaye said.
“What, you went with the UN team and you didn’t worry it could hurt us?”
“Of course I worried!”
“Right.” Saul nodded, then waggled his head back and forth, as if to relieve tension in his neck. “I’ll make some more calls. Try and learn where Lado is taking his meetings. He apparently has no plans to visit us.”
“Then we go ahead with the people at Evergreen,” Kaye said. “They have a lot of the expertise, and some of their lab work is—”
“Not enough. We’ll be competing with Eliava and whoever they go with. They’ll get the patents and make it to the market first. They’ll grab the capital.” Saul rubbed his chin. “We have two banks and a couple of partners and . . . lots of people who were expecting this to come through for us, Kaye.”
Kaye stood, her hands trembling. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but that grave—they were people, Saul. Someone needed help finding out how they died.” She knew she sounded defensive, and that confused her. “I was there. I made myself useful.”
“Would you have gone if they hadn’t ordered you to?” Saul asked.
“They did not order me,” Kaye said. “Not in so many words.”
“Would you have gone if it hadn’t been official?”
“Of course not,” Kaye said.
Saul reached out his hand and she held it again. He gripped her fingers with almost painful firmness, then his eyes grew heavy-lidded. He let go, stood, poured himself another cup of coffee.
