Cobalt 60 was dangerous stuff—but fifty milligrams in a carefully shielded container wasn’t exactly a tactical nuclear weapon. The news systems went berserk, though: ATOMIC TERRORISTS STRIKE HARBOR BRIDGE, et cetera. If LEI’S enemies were activists, with some “moral cause” which they hoped to set before the public, they clearly had the worst PR advisers in the business. Their prospects of gaining the slightest sympathy had vanished, the instant the first news reports had mentioned the word radiation.
My secretarial software issued polite statements of “No comment” on my behalf, but camera crews began hovering outside my front door, so I relented and mouthed a few news-speak sentences for them which meant essentially the same thing. Martin looked on, amused—and then I looked on, astonished, as Janet Lansing’s own doorstop media conference appeared on TV.
“These people are clearly ruthless. Human life, the environment, radioactive contamination … all mean nothing to them.”
“Do you have any idea who might be responsible for this outrage, Dr. Lansing?”
“I can’t disclose that, yet. All I can reveal, right now, is that our research is at the very cutting edge of preventative medicine—and I’m not at all surprised that there are powerful vested interests working against us.”
Powerful vested interests? What was that meant to be code for—if not the rival biotechnology firm whose involvement she kept denying? No doubt she had her eye on the publicity advantages of being the victim of ATOMIC TERRORISTS—but I thought she was wasting her breath. In two or more years’ time, when the product finally hit the market, the story would be long forgotten.
* * *
After some tricky jurisdictional negotiations, Asher finally sent me six months’ worth of files from the vault’s surveillance cameras—all that they kept. The freezer in question had been unused for almost two years; the last authorized tenant was a small IVF clinic which had gone bankrupt. Only about 60 percent of the freezers were currently leased, so it wasn’t particularly surprising that LEI had had a conveniently empty neighbor.
I ran the surveillance files through image-processing software, in the hope that someone might have been caught in the act of opening the unused freezer. The search took almost an hour of supercomputer time—and turned up precisely nothing. A few minutes later, Elaine Chang popped her head into my office to say that she’d finished her analysis of the damage to the freezer walls: the nightly irradiation had been going on for between eight and nine months.
Undeterred, I scanned the files again, this time instructing the software to assemble a gallery of every individual sighted inside the vault.
Sixty-two faces emerged. I put company names to all of them, matching the times of each sighting to Biofile’s records of the use of each client’s electronic key. No obvious inconsistencies showed up; nobody had been seen inside who hadn’t used an authorized key to gain access—and the same people had used the same keys, again and again.
I flicked through the gallery, wondering what to do next. Search for anyone glancing slyly in the direction of the radioactive freezer? The software could have done it—but I wasn’t quite ready for barrel-scraping efforts like that.
I came to a face which looked familiar: a blonde woman in her midthirties, who’d used the key belonging to Federation Centennial Hospital’s Oncology Research Unit, three times. I was certain that I knew her, but I couldn’t recall where I’d seen her before. It didn’t matter; after a few seconds’ searching, I found a clear shot of the name badge pinned to her lab coat. All I had to do was zoom in.
The badge read: C. MENDELSOHN.
There was a knock on my open door. I turned from the screen; Elaine was back, looking pleased with herself.
She said, “We’ve finally found a place who’ll own up to having lost some cobalt 60. What’s more … the activity of our source fits their missing item’s decay curve, exactly.”
“So where was it stolen from?”
“Federation Centennial.”
* * *
I phoned the Oncology Research Unit. Yes, Catherine Mendelsohn worked there—she’d done so for almost four years—but they couldn’t put me through to her; she’d been on sick leave all week. They gave me the same canceled phone number as LEI—but a different address, an apartment in Petersham. The address wasn’t listed in the phone directory; I’d have to go there in person.
A cancer research team would have no reason to want to harm LEI, but a commercial rival—with or without their own key to the vault—could still have paid Mendelsohn to do their work for them. It seemed like a lousy deal to me, whatever they’d offered her—if she was convicted, every last cent would be traced and confiscated—but bitterness over her sacking might have clouded her judgment.
Maybe. Or maybe that was all too glib.
I replayed the shots of Mendelsohn taken by the surveillance cameras. She did nothing unusual, nothing suspicious. She went straight to the ORU’s freezer, put in whatever samples she’d brought, and departed. She didn’t glance slyly in any direction at all.
The fact that she had been inside the vault—on legitimate business—proved nothing. The fact that the cobalt 60 had been stolen from the hospital where she worked could have been pure coincidence.
And anyone had the right to cancel their phone service.
I pictured the steel reinforcement rods of the Lane Cove laboratory, glinting in the sunlight.
On the way out, reluctantly, I took a detour to the basement. I sat at a console while the armaments safe checked my fingerprints, took breath samples and a retinal blood spectrogram, ran some perception-and-judgment response time tests, then quizzed me for five minutes about the case. Once it was satisfied with my reflexes, my motives, and my state of mind, it issued me a nine-millimeter pistol and a shoulder holster.
* * *
Mendelsohn’s apartment block was a concrete box from the 1960s, front doors opening onto long shared balconies, no security at all. I arrived just after seven, to the smell of cooking and the sound of game show applause, wafting from a hundred open windows. The concrete still shimmered with the day’s heat; three flights of stairs left me coated in sweat. Mendelsohn’s apartment was silent, but the lights were on.
She answered the door. I introduced myself, and showed her my ID. She seemed nervous, but not surprised.
She said, “I still find it galling to have to deal with people like you.”
“People like—?”
“I was opposed to privatizing the police force. I helped organize some of the marches.”
She would have been fourteen years old at the time—a precocious political activist.
She let me in, begrudgingly. The living room was modestly furnished, with a terminal on a desk in one corner.
I said, “I’m investigating the bombing of Life Enhancement International. You used to work for them, up until about four years ago. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell me why you left?”
She repeated what I knew about the transfer of her project to the Amarillo division. She answered every question directly, looking me straight in the eye; she still appeared nervous, but she seemed to be trying to read some vital piece of information from my demeanor. Wondering if I’d traced the cobalt?
“What were you doing on the North Ryde premises at two in the morning, two days before you were sacked?”
She said, “I wanted to find out what LEI was planning for the new building. I wanted to know why they didn’t want me to stick around.”
“Your job was moved to Texas.”
She laughed drily. “The work wasn’t that specialized. I could have swapped jobs with someone who wanted to travel to the States. It would have been the perfect solution—and there would have been plenty of people more than happy to trade places with me. But no, that wasn’t allowed.”
“So … did you find the answer?”
“Not that night. But later, yes.”
I said carefully, “So y
ou knew what LEI was doing in Lane Cove?”
“Yes.”
“How did you discover that?”
“I kept an ear to the ground. Nobody who’d stayed on would have told me directly, but word leaked out, eventually. About a year ago.”
“Three years after you’d left? Why were you still interested? Did you think there was a market for the information?”
She said, “Put your notepad in the bathroom sink and run the tap on it.”
I hesitated, then complied. When I returned to the living room, she had her face in her hands. She looked up at me grimly.
“Why was I still interested? Because I wanted to know why every project with any lesbian or gay team members was being transferred out of the division. I wanted to know if that was pure coincidence. Or not.”
I felt a sudden chill in the pit of my stomach. I said, “If you had some problem with discrimination, there are avenues you could have—”
Mendelsohn shook her head impatiently. “LEI was never discriminatory. They didn’t sack anyone who was willing to move—and they always transferred the entire team; there was nothing so crude as picking out individuals by sexual preference. And they had a rationalization for everything: projects were being re-grouped between divisions to facilitate ‘synergistic cross-pollination.’ And if that sounds like pretentious bullshit, it was—but it was plausible pretentious bullshit. Other corporations have adopted far more ridiculous schemes, in perfect sincerity.”
“But if it wasn’t a matter of discrimination … why should LEI want to force people out of one particular division—?”
I think I’d finally guessed the answer, even as I said those words—but I needed to hear her spell it out, before I could really believe it.
Mendelsohn must have been practicing her version for non-biochemists; she had it down pat. “When people are subject to stress—physical or emotional—the levels of certain substances in the bloodstream increase. Cortisol and adrenaline, mainly. Adrenaline has a rapid, short-term effect on the nervous system. Cortisol works on a much longer time frame, modulating all kinds of bodily processes, adapting them for hard times: injury, fatigue, whatever. If the stress is prolonged, someone’s cortisol can be elevated for days, or weeks, or months.
“High enough levels of cortisol, in the bloodstream of a pregnant woman, can cross the placental barrier and interact with the hormonal system of the developing fetus. There are parts of the brain where embryonic development is switched into one of two possible pathways, by hormones released by the fetal testes or ovaries. The parts of the brain which control body image, and the parts which control sexual preference. Female embryos usually develop a brain wired with a self-image of a female body, and the strongest potential for sexual attraction toward males. Male embryos, vice versa. And it’s the sex hormones in the fetal bloodstream which let the growing neurons know the gender of the embryo, and which wiring pattern to adopt.
“Cortisol can interfere with this process. The precise interactions are complex, but the ultimate effect depends on the timing; different parts of the brain are switched into gender-specific versions at different stages of development. So stress at different times during pregnancy leads to different patterns of sexual preference and body image in the child: homosexual, bisexual, transsexual.
“Obviously, a lot depends on the mother’s biochemistry. Pregnancy itself is stressful—but everyone responds to that differently. The first sign that cortisol might have an effect came in studies in the 1980s, on the children of German women who’d been pregnant during the most intense bombing raids of World War II—when the stress was so great that the effect showed through despite individual differences. In the nineties, researchers thought they’d found a gene which determined male homosexuality … but it was always maternally inherited—and it turned out to be influencing the mother’s stress response, rather than acting directly on the child.
“If maternal cortisol, and other stress hormones, were kept from reaching the fetus … then the gender of the brain would always match the gender of the body in every respect. All of the present variation would be wiped out.”
I was shaken, but I don’t think I let it show. Everything she said rang true; I didn’t doubt a word of it. I’d always known that sexual preference was decided before birth. I’d known that I was gay, myself, by the age of seven. I’d never sought out the elaborate biological details, though—because I’d never believed that the tedious mechanics of the process could ever matter to me. What turned my blood to ice was not finally learning the neuroembryology of desire. The shock was discovering that LEI planned to reach into the womb and take control of it.
I pressed on with the questioning in a kind of trance, putting my own feelings into suspended animation.
I said, “LEI’s barrier is for filtering out viruses and toxins. You’re talking about a natural substance which has been present for millions of years—”
“LEI’s barrier will keep out everything they deem non-essential. The fetus doesn’t need maternal cortisol in order to survive. If LEI doesn’t explicitly include transporters for it, it won’t get through. And I’ll give you one guess what their plans are.”
I said, “You’re being paranoid. You think LEI would invest millions of dollars just to take part in a conspiracy to rid the world of homosexuals?”
Mendelsohn looked at me pityingly. “It’s not a conspiracy. It’s a marketing opportunity. LEI doesn’t give a shit about the sexual politics. They could put in cortisol transporters, and sell the barrier as an antiviral, anti-drug, anti-pollution screen. Or, they could leave them out, and sell it as all of that—plus a means of guaranteeing a heterosexual child. Which do you think would earn the most money?”
That question hit a nerve; I said angrily, “And you had so little faith in people’s choice that you bombed the laboratory so that no one would ever have the chance to decide?”
Mendelsohn’s expression turned stony. “I did not bomb LEI. Or irradiate their freezer.”
“No? We’ve traced the cobalt 60 to Federation Centennial.”
She looked stunned for a moment, then she said, “Congratulations. Six thousand other people work there, you know. I’m obviously not the only one of them who’d discovered what LEI is up to.”
“You’re the only one with access to the Biofile vault. What do you expect me to believe? That having learnt about this project, you were going to do absolutely nothing about it?”
“Of course not! And I still plan to publicize what they’re doing. Let people know what it will mean. Try to get the issue debated before the product appears in a blaze of misinformation.”
“You said you’ve known about the work for a year.”
“Yes—and I’ve spent most of that time trying to verify all the facts, before opening my big mouth. Nothing would have been stupider than going public with half-baked rumors. I’ve only told about a dozen people so far, but we were going to launch a big publicity campaign to coincide with this year’s Mardi Gras. Although now, with the bombing, everything’s a thousand times more complicated.” She spread her hands in a gesture of helplessness. “But we still have to do what we can, to try to keep the worst from happening.”
“The worst?”
“Separatism. Paranoia. Homosexuality redefined as pathological. Lesbians and sympathetic straight women looking for their own technological means to guarantee the survival of the culture … while the religious far-right try to prosecute them for poisoning their babies … with a substance God’s been happily ‘poisoning’ babies with for the last few thousand years! Sexual tourists traveling from wealthy countries where the technology is in use, to poorer countries where it isn’t.”
I was sickened by the vision she was painting—but I pushed on. “These dozen friends of yours—?”
Mendelsohn said dispassionately, “Go fuck yourself. I’ve got nothing more to say to you. I’ve told you the truth. I’m not a criminal. And I think you’d better leave.”
&n
bsp; I went to the bathroom and collected my notepad. In the doorway, I said, “If you’re not a criminal, why are you so hard to track down?”
Wordlessly, contemptuously, she lifted her shirt and showed me the bruises below her rib cage—fading, but still an ugly sight. Whoever it was who’d beaten her—an ex-lover?—I could hardly blame her for doing everything she could to avoid a repeat performance.
On the stairs, I hit the REPLAY button on my notepad. The software computed the frequency spectrum for the noise of the running water, subtracted it out of the recording, and then amplified and cleaned up what remained. Every word of our conversation came through crystal clear.
From my car, I phoned a surveillance firm and arranged to have Mendelsohn kept under twenty-four-hour observation.
Halfway home, I stopped in a side street, and sat behind the wheel for ten minutes, unable to think, unable to move.
* * *
In bed that night, I asked Martin, “You’re left-handed. How would you feel if no one was ever born left-handed again?”
“It wouldn’t bother me in the least. Why?”
“You wouldn’t think of it as a kind of … genocide?”
“Hardly. What’s this all about?”
“Nothing. Forget it.”
“You’re shaking.”
“I’m cold.”
“You don’t feel cold to me.”
As we made love—tenderly, then savagely—I thought: This is our language, this is our dialect. Wars have been fought over less. And if this language ever dies out, a people will have vanished from the face of the Earth.
I knew I had to drop the case. If Mendelsohn was guilty, someone else could prove it. To go on working for LEI would destroy me.
The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994 Page 54
