“I’m sure they do. But it’s still the wrong message: it makes exotic what ought to be mundane. Okay, people have the right to dress up any way they like and march down Oxford Street … but it means absolutely nothing to me.”
“I’m not asking you to join in—”
“Very wise.”
“—but if one hundred thousand straights can turn up, to show their support for the gay community, why can’t you?”
I said wearily, “Because every time I hear the word community, I know I’m being manipulated. If there is such a thing as the gay community, I’m certainly not a part of it. As it happens, I don’t want to spend my life watching gay and lesbian television channels, using gay and lesbian news systems … or going to gay and lesbian street parades. It’s all so … proprietary. You’d think there was a multinational corporation who had the franchise rights on homosexuality. And if you don’t market the product their way, you’re some kind of second-class, inferior, bootleg, unauthorized queer.”
Martin cracked up. When he finally stopped laughing, he said, “Go on. I’m waiting for you to get to the part where you say you’re no more proud of being gay than you are of having brown eyes, or black hair, or a birthmark behind your left knee.”
I protested, “That’s true. Why should I be ‘proud’ of something I was born with? I’m not proud, or ashamed. I just accept it. And I don’t have to join a parade to prove that.”
“So you’d rather we all stayed invisible?”
“Invisible! You’re the one who told me that the representation rates in movies and TV last year were close to the true demographics. And if you hardly even notice it anymore when an openly gay or lesbian politician gets elected, that’s because it’s no longer an issue. To most people, now, it’s about as significant as … being left or right handed.”
Martin seemed to find this suggestion surreal. “Are you trying to tell me that it’s now a non-subject? That the inhabitants of this planet are now absolutely impartial on the question of sexual preference? Your faith is touching—but…” He mimed incredulity.
I said, “We’re equal before the law with any heterosexual couple, aren’t we? And when was the last time you told someone you were gay and they so much as blinked? And yes, I know, there are dozens of countries where it’s still illegal—along with joining the wrong political parties, or the wrong religions. Parades in Oxford Street aren’t going to change that.”
“People are still bashed in this city. People are still discriminated against.”
“Yeah. And people are also shot dead in peak-hour traffic for playing the wrong music on their car stereos, or denied jobs because they live in the wrong suburbs. I’m not talking about the perfection of human nature. I just want you to acknowledge one tiny victory: leaving out a few psychotics, and a few fundamentalist bigots … most people just don’t care. ”
Martin said ruefully, “If only that were true!”
The argument went on for more than an hour—ending in a stalemate, as usual. But then, neither one of us had seriously expected to change the other’s mind.
I did catch myself wondering afterward, though, if I really believed all of my own optimistic rhetoric. About as significant as being left or right handed? Certainly, that was the line taken by most Western politicians, academics, essayists, talk show hosts, soap opera writers, and mainstream religious leaders … but the same people had been espousing equally high-minded principles of racial equality for decades, and the reality still hadn’t entirely caught up on that front. I’d suffered very little discrimination, myself—by the time I reached high school, tolerance was hip, and I’d witnessed a constant stream of improvements since then … but how could I ever know precisely how much hidden prejudice remained? By interrogating my own straight friends? By reading the sociologists’ latest attitude surveys? People will always tell you what they think you want to hear.
Still, it hardly seemed to matter. Personally, I could get by without the deep and sincere approval of every other member of the human race. Martin and I were lucky enough to have been born into a time and place where, in almost every tangible respect, we were treated as equal.
What more could anyone hope for?
In bed that night, we made love very slowly, at first just kissing and stroking each other’s bodies for what seemed like hours. Neither of us spoke, and in the stupefying heat I lost all sense of belonging to any other time, any other reality. Nothing existed but the two of us; the rest of the world, the rest of my life, went spinning away into the darkness.
* * *
The investigation moved slowly. I interviewed every current member of LEI’s workforce, then started on the long list of past employees. I still believed that commercial sabotage was the most likely explanation for such a professional job—but blowing up the opposition is a desperate measure; a little civilized espionage usually comes first. I was hoping that someone who’d worked for LEI might have been approached in the past and offered money for inside information—and if I could find just one employee who’d turned down a bribe, they might have learnt something useful from their contact with the presumed rival.
Although the Lane Cove facility had only been built three years before, LEI had operated a research division in Sydney for twelve years before that, in North Ryde, not far away. Many of the ex-employees from that period had moved interstate or overseas; quite a few had been transferred to LEI divisions in other countries. Still, almost no one had changed their personal phone numbers, so I had very little trouble tracking them down.
The exception was a biochemist named Catherine Mendelsohn; the number listed for her in the LEI staff records had been canceled. There were seventeen people with the same surname and initials in the national phone directory; none admitted to being Catherine Alice Mendelsohn, and none looked at all like the staff photo I had.
Mendelsohn’s address in the Electoral Roll, an apartment in Newtown, matched the LEI records—but the same address was in the phone directory (and Electoral Roll) for Stanley Goh, a young man who told me that he’d never met Mendelsohn. He’d been leasing the apartment for the past eighteen months.
Credit rating databases gave the same out-of-date address. I couldn’t access tax, banking, or utilities records without a warrant. I had my knowledge miner scan the death notices, but there was no match there.
Mendelsohn had worked for LEI until about a year before the move to Lane Cove. She’d been part of a team working on a gene-tailoring system for ameliorating menstrual side-effects, and although the Sydney division had always specialized in gynecological research, for some reason the project was about to be moved to Texas. I checked the industry publications; apparently, LEI had been rearranging all of its operations at the time, gathering together projects from around the globe into new multidisciplinary configurations, in accordance with the latest fashionable theories of research dynamics. Mendelsohn had declined the transfer, and had been retrenched.
I dug deeper. The staff records showed that Mendelsohn had been questioned by security guards after being found on the North Ryde premises late at night, two days before her dismissal. Workaholic biotechnologists aren’t uncommon, but starting the day at two in the morning shows exceptional dedication, especially when the company has just tried to shuffle you off to Amarillo. Having turned down the transfer, she must have known what was in store.
Nothing came of the incident, though. And even if Mendelsohn had been planning some minor act of sabotage, that hardly established any connection with a bombing four years later. She might have been angry enough to leak confidential information to one of LEI’s rivals … but whoever had bombed the Lane Cove laboratory would have been more interested in someone who’d worked on the fetal barrier project itself—a project which had only come into existence a year after Mendelsohn had been sacked.
I pressed on through the list. Interviewing the ex-employees was frustrating; almost all of them were still working in the biotechnology industry, and they wo
uld have been an ideal group to poll on the question of who would benefit most from LEI’s misfortune—but the confidentiality agreement I’d signed meant that I couldn’t disclose anything about the research in question—not even to people working for LEI’s other divisions.
The one thing which I could discuss drew a blank: if anyone had been offered a bribe, they weren’t talking about it—and no magistrate was going to sign a warrant letting me loose on a fishing expedition through a hundred and seventeen people’s financial records.
Forensic examination of the ruins, and the sabotaged fiber-optic exchange, had yielded the usual catalogue of minutiae which might eventually turn out to be invaluable—but none of it was going to conjure up a suspect out of thin air.
Four days after the bombing—just as I found myself growing desperate for a fresh angle on the case—I had a call from Janet Lansing.
The backup samples of the project’s gene-tailored cell lines had been destroyed.
* * *
The vault in Milson’s Point turned out to be directly underneath a section of the Harbor Bridge—built right into the foundations on the north shore. Lansing hadn’t arrived yet, but the head of security for the storage company, an elderly man called David Asher, showed me around. Inside, the traffic was barely audible, but the vibration coming through the floor felt like a constant mild earthquake. The place was cavernous, dry and cool. At least a hundred cryogenic freezers were laid out in rows; heavily clad pipes ran between them, replenishing their liquid nitrogen.
Asher was understandably morose, but cooperative. Celluloid movie film had been archived here, he explained, before everything went digital; the present owners specialized in biological materials. There were no guards physically assigned to the vault, but the surveillance cameras and alarm systems looked impressive, and the structure itself must have been close to impregnable.
Lansing had phoned the storage company, Biofile, on the morning of the bombing. Asher confirmed that he’d sent someone down from their North Sydney office to check the freezer in question. Nothing was missing—but he’d promised to boost security measures immediately. Because the freezers were supposedly tamper-proof, and individually locked, clients were normally allowed access to the vault at their convenience, monitored by the surveillance cameras, but otherwise unsupervised. Asher had promised Lansing that, henceforth, nobody would enter the building without a member of his staff to accompany them—and he claimed that nobody had been inside since the day of the bombing, anyway.
When two LEI technicians had arrived that morning to carry out an inventory, they’d found the expected number of culture flasks, all with the correct bar code labels, all tightly sealed—but the appearance of their contents was subtly wrong. The translucent frozen colloid was more opalescent than cloudy; an untrained eye might never have noticed the difference, but apparently it spoke volumes to the cognoscenti.
The technicians had taken a number of the flasks away for analysis; LEI were working out of temporary premises, a sub-leased corner of a paint manufacturer’s quality control lab. Lansing had promised me preliminary test results by the time we met.
Lansing arrived, and unlocked the freezer. With gloved hands, she lifted a flask out of the swirling mist and held it up for me to inspect.
She said, “We’ve only thawed three samples, but they all look the same. The cells have been torn apart.”
“How?” The flask was covered with such heavy condensation that I couldn’t have said if it was empty or full, let alone cloudy or opalescent. “It looks like radiation damage.”
My skin crawled. I peered into the depths of the freezer; all I could make out were the tops of rows of identical flasks—but if one of them had been spiked with a radioisotope …
Lansing scowled. “Relax.” She tapped a small electronic badge pinned to her lab coat, with a dull gray face like a solar cell: a radiation dosimeter. “This would be screaming if we were being exposed to anything significant. Whatever the source of the radiation was, it’s no longer in here—and it hasn’t left the walls glowing. Your future offspring are safe.”
I let that pass. “You think all the samples will turn out to be ruined? You won’t be able to salvage anything?”
Lansing was stoical as ever. “It looks that way. There are some elaborate techniques we could use, to try to repair the DNA—but it will probably be easier to synthesize fresh DNA from scratch, and re-introduce it into unmodified bovine placental cell lines. We still have all the sequence data; that’s what matters in the end.”
I pondered the freezer’s locking system, the surveillance cameras. “Are you sure that the source was inside the freezer? Or could the damage have been done without actually breaking in—right through the walls?”
She thought it over. “Maybe. There’s not much metal in these things; they’re mostly plastic foam. But I’m not a radiation physicist; your forensic people will probably be able to give you a better idea of what happened, once they’ve checked out the freezer itself. If there’s damage to the polymers in the foam, it might be possible to use that to reconstruct the geometry of the radiation field.”
A forensic team was on its way. I said, “How would they have done it? Walked casually by, and just—?”
“Hardly. A source which could do this in one quick hit would have been unmanageable. It’s far more likely to have been a matter of weeks, or months, of low-level exposure.”
“So they must have smuggled some kind of device into their own freezer, and aimed it at yours? But then … we’ll be able to trace the effects right back to the source, won’t we? So how could they have hoped to get away with it?”
Lansing said, “It’s even simpler than that. We’re talking about a modest amount of a gamma-emitting isotope, not some billion-dollar particle-beam weapon. The effective range would be a couple of meters, at most. If it was done from the outside, you’ve just narrowed down your suspect list to two.” She thumped the freezer’s left neighbor in the aisle, then did the same to the one on the right—and said, “Aha.”
“What?”
She thumped them both again. The second one sounded hollow. I said, “No liquid nitrogen? It’s not in use?”
Lansing nodded. She reached for the handle.
Asher said, “I don’t think—”
The freezer was unlocked, the lid swung open easily. Lansing’s badge started beeping—and, worse, there was something in there, with batteries and wires.…
I don’t know what kept me from knocking her to the floor—but Lansing, untroubled, lifted the lid all the way. She said mildly, “Don’t panic; this dose rate’s nothing. Threshold of detectable.”
The thing inside looked superficially like a home-made bomb—but the batteries and timer chip I’d glimpsed were wired to a heavy-duty solenoid, which was part of an elaborate shutter mechanism on one side of a large, metallic gray box.
Lansing said, “Cannibalized medical source, probably. You know these things have turned up in garbage dumps?” She unpinned her badge and waved it near the box; the pitch of the alarm increased, but only slightly. “Shielding seems to be intact.”
I said, as calmly as possible, “These people have access to high explosives. You don’t have any idea what the fuck might be in there, or what it’s wired up to do. This is the point where we walk out, quietly, and leave it to the bomb-disposal robots.”
She seemed about to protest, but then she nodded contritely. The three of us went up onto the street, and Asher called the local terrorist services contractor. I suddenly realized that they’d have to divert all traffic from the bridge. The Lane Cove bombing had received some perfunctory media coverage—but this would lead the evening news.
I took Lansing aside. “They’ve destroyed your laboratory. They’ve wiped out your cell lines. Your data may be almost impossible to locate and corrupt—so the next logical target is you and your employees. Nexus doesn’t provide protective services, but I can recommend a good firm.”
I g
ave her the phone number; she accepted it with appropriate solemnity. “So you finally believe me? These people aren’t commercial saboteurs. They’re dangerous fanatics.”
I was growing impatient with her vague references to “fanatics.” “Who exactly do you have in mind?”
She said darkly, “We’re tampering with certain … natural processes. You can draw your own conclusions, can’t you?”
There was no logic to that at all. God’s Image would probably want to force all pregnant women with HIV infections, or drug habits, to use the cocoon; they wouldn’t try to bomb the technology out of existence. Gaia’s Soldiers were more concerned with genetically engineered crops and bacteria than trivial modifications to insignificant species like humans—and they wouldn’t have used radioisotopes if the fate of the planet depended on it. Lansing was beginning to sound thoroughly paranoid—although in the circumstances, I couldn’t really blame her.
I said, “I’m not drawing any conclusions. I’m just advising you to take some sensible precautions, because we have no way of knowing how far this might escalate. But … Biofile must lease freezer space to every one of your competitors. A commercial rival would have found it a thousand times easier than any hypothetical sect member to get into the vault to plant that thing.”
A gray armor-plated van screeched to a halt in front of us; the back door swung up, ramps slid down, and a squat, multi-limbed robot on treads descended. I raised a hand in greeting and the robot did the same; the operator was a friend of mine.
Lansing said, “You may be right. But then, there’s nothing to stop a terrorist from having a day job in biotechnology, is there?”
* * *
The device turned out not to be booby-trapped at all—just rigged to spray LEI’s precious cells with gamma rays for six hours, starting at midnight, every night. Even in the unlikely event that someone had come into the vault in the early hours and wedged themselves into the narrow gap between the freezers, the dose they received would not have been much; as Lansing had suggested, it was the cumulative effect over months which had done the damage. The radioisotope in the box was cobalt 60, almost certainly a decomissioned medical source—grown too weak for its original use, but still too hot to be discarded—stolen from a “cooling off” site. No such theft had been reported, but Elaine Chang’s assistants were phoning around the hospitals, trying to persuade them to re-inventory their concrete bunkers.
The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994 Page 53
