Night insects whirled around the computer display. Michelle batted them away and got busy mapping. The photo was digital and Michelle could enlarge it.
To her surprise, she discovered that the woman had green eyes. Black women with green irises—or irises of orange or chartreuse or chrome steel—were not unusual in her own time, but she knew that in Terzian’s time they were rare. That would make the search much easier.
“Michelle …” The voice came just as Michelle sent her new search spiders into the ether. A shiver ran up her spine.
“Michelle …” The voice came again.
It was Darton.
Michelle’s heart gave a sickening lurch. She closed her console and put it back in the mesh bag, then crossed the rope bridge between the ironwood tree and the banyan. Her knees were weak, and the swaying bridge seemed to take a couple of unexpected pitches. She stepped out onto the banyan’s sturdy overhanging limb and gazed out at the water.
“Michelle …” To the southwest, in the channel between the mermaid’s island and another, she could see a pale light bobbing, the light of a small boat.
“Michelle, where are you?”
The voice died away in the silence and surf. Michelle remembered the spike in her hand, the long, agonized trek up the slope above Jellyfish Lake. Darton pale, panting for breath, dying in her arms.
The lake was one of the wonders of the world, but the steep path over the ridge that fenced the lake from the ocean was challenging even for those who were not dying. When Michelle and Darton—at that time, apes—came up from their boat that afternoon, they didn’t climb the steep path, but swung hand-over-hand through the trees overhead, through the hardwood and guava trees, and avoided the poison trees with their bleeding, allergenic black sap. Even though their trip was less exhausting than if they’d gone over the land route, the two were ready for the cool water by the time they arrived at the lake.
Tens of thousands of years in the past, the water level was higher, and when it receded, the lake was cut off from the Pacific, and with it the Mastigias sp. jellyfish, which soon exhausted the supply of small fish that were its food. As the human race did later, the jellies gave up hunting and gathering in exchange for agriculture, and permitted themselves to be farmed by colonies of algae that provided the sugars they needed for life. At night, they’d descend to the bottom of the lake, where they fertilized their algae crops in the anoxic, sulfurous waters; at dawn, the jellies rose to the surface, and during the day, they crossed the lake, following the course of the sun, and allowed the sun’s rays to supply the energy necessary for making their daily ration of food.
When Darton and Michelle arrived, there were ten million jellyfish in the lake, from fingertip-sized to jellies the size of a dinner plate, all in one warm throbbing golden-brown mass in the center of the water. The two swam easily on the surface with their long siamang arms, laughing and calling to one another as the jellyfish in their millions caressed them with the most featherlike of touches. The lake was the temperature of their own blood, and it was like a soupy bath, the jellyfish so thick that Michelle felt she could almost walk on the surface. The warm touch wasn’t erotic, exactly, but it was sensual in the way that an erotic touch was sensual, a light brush over the skin by the pad of a teasing finger.
Trapped in a lake for thousands of years without suitable prey, the jellyfish had lost most of their ability to sting. Only a small percentage of people were sensitive enough to the toxin to receive a rash or feel a modest burning.
A very few people, though, were more sensitive than that.
Darton and Michelle left at dusk, and, by that time Darton was already gasping for breath. He said he’d overexerted himself, that all he needed was to get back to their base for a snack, but as he swung through the trees on the way up the ridge, he lost his hold on a Palauan apple tree and crashed through a thicket of limbs to sprawl, amid a hail of fruit, on the sharp algae-covered limestone of the ridge.
Michelle swung down from the trees, her heart pounding. Darton was nearly colorless and struggling to breathe. They had no way of calling for help unless Michelle took their boat to Koror or to their base camp on another island. She tried to help Darton walk, taking one of his long arms over her shoulder, supporting him up the steep island trail. He collapsed, finally, at the foot of a poison tree, and Michelle bent over him to shield him from the drops of venomous sap until he died.
Her back aflame with the poison sap, she’d whispered her parting words into Darton’s ear. She never knew if he heard.
The coroner said it was a million-to-one chance that Darton had been so deathly allergic, and tried to comfort her with the thought that there was nothing she could have done. Torbiong, who had made the arrangements for Darton and Michelle to come in the first place, had been consoling, had offered to let Michelle stay with his family. Michelle had surprised him by asking permission to move her base camp to another island, and to continue her work alone.
She also had herself transformed into a mermaid, and subsequently, a romantic local legend.
And now Darton was back, bobbing in a boat in the nearby channel and calling her name, shouting into a bullhorn.
“Michelle, I love you.” The words floated clear into the night air. Michelle’s mouth was dry. Her fingers formed the sign
There was a silence, and then Michelle heard the engine start on Darton’s boat. He motored past her position, within five hundred meters or so, and continued on to the northern point of the island.
“Michelle …” Again his voice floated out onto the breeze. It was clear that he didn’t know where she was. She was going to have to be careful about showing lights.
Michelle waited while Darton called out a half-dozen more times, and then he started his engine and moved on. She wondered if he would search all three hundred islands in the Rock Island group.
No, she knew he was more organized than that.
She’d have to decide what to do when he finally found her.
While a thousand questions chased each other’s tails through his mind, Terzian opened the Nike bag and withdrew the small hard plastic case inside, something like a box for fishing tackle. He popped the locks on the case and opened the lid, and he saw glass vials resting in slots cut into dark grey foam. In them was a liquid with a faint golden cast.
“The papiloma,” Stephanie said.
Terzian dropped the lid on the case as he cast a guilty look over his shoulder, not wanting anyone to see him with this stuff. If he were arrested under suspicion of being a drug dealer, the wads of cash and the pistol certainly wouldn’t help.
“What do you do with the stuff once you get to where you’re going?”
“Brush it on the skin. With exposure to solar energy, it replicates as needed.”
“Has it been tested?”
“On people? No. Works fine on rhesus monkeys, though.”
He tapped his wedding ring on the arm of his seat. “Can it be … caught? I mean, it’s a virus, can it go from one person to another?”
“Through skin-to-skin contact.”
“I’d say that’s a yes. Can mothers pass it on to their children?”
“Adrian didn’t think it would cross the placental barrier, but he didn’t get a chance to test it. If mothers want to infect their children, they’ll probably have to do it deliberately.” She shrugged. “Whatever the case, my guess is that mothers won’t mind green babies, as long as they’re green healthy babies.” She looked down at the little vials in their secure coffins of foam. “We can infect tens of thousands of people with this amount,” she said. “And we can make more very easily.”
If mothers want to infect their children … Terzian closed the lid of the plastic case and snapped the locks. “You’re out of your mind,” he said.
Stephanie cocked her head and peered at him, looking as if she’d anticipated his objections and was humoring him. “How so?”
<
br /> “Where do I start?” Terzian zipped up the bag, then tossed it in Stephanie’s lap, pleased to see her defensive reflexes leap in response. “You’re planning on unleashing an untested transgenic virus on Africa—on Africa of all places, a continent that doesn’t exactly have a happy history with pandemics: And it’s a virus that’s cooked up by a bunch of illegal pharmacists in a non-country with a murderous secret police, facts that don’t give me much confidence that this is going to be anything but a disaster.”
Stephanie tapped two fingers on her chin as if she were wishing there were a cigarette between them. “I can put your mind to rest on the last issue. The animal study worked. Adrian had a family of bright green rhesus in his lab, till the project was canceled and the rhesus were, ah, liquidated.”
“So if the project’s so terrific, why’d the company pull the plug?”
“Money.” Her lips twisted in anger. “Starving people can’t afford to pay for the treatments, so they’d have to practically give the stuff away. Plus they’d get reams of endless bad publicity, which is exactly what outlaw biotech companies in outlaw countries don’t want. There are millions of people who go ballistic at the very thought of a genetically engineered vegetable—you can imagine how people who can’t abide the idea of a transgenic bell pepper would freak at the thought of infecting people with an engineered virus. The company decided it wasn’t worth the risk. They closed the project down.”
Stephanie looked at the bag in her hands. “But Adrian had been in the camps himself, you see. A displaced person, a refugee from the civil war in Moldova. And he couldn’t stand the thought that there was a way to end hunger sitting in his refrigerator in the lab, and that nothing was being done with it. And so …” Her hands outlined the case inside the Nike bag. “He called me. He took some vacation time and booked himself into the Henri IV, on the Place Dauphine. And I guess he must have been careless, because …”
Tears starred in her eyes, and she fell silent. Terzian, strong in the knowledge that he’d shared quite enough of her troubles by now, stared out the window, at the green landscape that was beginning to take on the brilliant colors of Provence. The Hautes-Alpes floated blue and white-capped in the distant East, and nearby were orchards of almonds and olives with shimmering leaves, and hillsides covered with rows of orderly vines. The Rhone ran silver under the westering sun.
“I’m not going to be your bagman,” he said. “I’m not going to contaminate the world with your freaky biotech.”
“Then they’ll catch you and you’ll die,” Stephanie said. “And it will be for nothing.”
“My experience of death,” said Terzian, “is that it’s always for nothing.”
She snorted then, angry. “My experience of death,” she mocked, “is that it’s too often for profit. I want to make mass murder an unprofitable venture. I want to crash the market in starvation by giving away life.” She gave another snort, amused this time. “It’s the ultimate anti-capitalist gesture.”
Terzian didn’t rise to that. Gestures, he thought, were just that. Gestures didn’t change the fundamentals. If some jefe couldn’t starve his people to death, he’d just use bullets, or deadly genetic technology he bought from outlaw Transnistrian corporations.
The landscape, all blazing green, raced past at over two hundred kilometers per hour. An attendant came by and sold them each a cup of coffee and a sandwich.
“You should use my phone to call your wife,” Stephanie said as she peeled the cellophane from her sandwich. “Let her know that your travel plans have changed.”
Apparently she’d noticed Terzian’s wedding ring.
“My wife is dead,” Terzian said.
She looked at him in surprise. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Brain cancer,” he said.
Though it was more complicated than that. Claire had first complained of back pain, and there had been an operation, and the tumor removed from her spine. There had been a couple of weeks of mad joy and relief, and then it had been revealed that the cancer had spread to the brain and that it was inoperable. Chemotherapy had failed. She died six weeks after her first visit to the doctor.
“Do you have any other family?” Stephanie said.
“My parents are dead, too.” Auto accident, aneurysm. He didn’t mention Claire’s uncle Geoff and his partner Luis, who had died of HIV within eight months of each other and left Claire the Victorian house on Esplanade in New Orleans. The house that, a few weeks ago, he had sold for six hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and the furnishings for a further ninety-five thousand, and Uncle Geoff’s collection of equestrian art for a further forty-one thousand.
He was disinclined to mention that he had quite a lot of money, enough to float around Europe for years.
Telling Stephanie that might only encourage her.
There was a long silence. Terzian broke it. “I’ve read spy novels,” he said. “And I know that we shouldn’t go to the place we’ve bought tickets for. We shouldn’t go anywhere near Nice.”
She considered this, then said, “We’ll get off at Avignon.”
They stayed in Provence for nearly two weeks, staying always in unrated hotels, those that didn’t even rise to a single star from the Ministry of Tourism, or in gîtes ruraux, farmhouses with rooms for rent. Stephanie spent much of her energy trying to call colleagues in Africa on her cell phone and achieved only sporadic success, a frustration that left her in a near-permanent fury. It was never clear just who she was trying to call, or how she thought they were going to get the papiloma off her hands. Terzian wondered how many people were involved in this conspiracy of hers.
They attended some local fêtes, though it was always a struggle to convince Stephanie it was safe to appear in a crowd. She made a point of disguising herself in big hats and shades and ended up looking like a cartoon spy. Terzian tramped rural lanes or fields or village streets, lost some pounds despite the splendid fresh local cuisine, and gained a suntan. He made a stab at writing several papers on his laptop, and spent time researching them in internet cafés.
He kept thinking he would have enjoyed this trip, if only Claire had been with him.
“What is it you do, exactly?” Stephanie asked him once, as he wrote. “I know you teach at university, but …”
“I don’t teach anymore,” Terzian said. “I didn’t get my post-doc renewed. The department and I didn’t exactly get along.”
“Why not?”
Terzian turned away from the stale, stalled ideas on his display. “I’m too interdisciplinary. There’s a place on the academic spectrum where history and politics and philosophy come together—it’s called ‘political theory’ usually—but I throw in economics and a layman’s understanding of science as well, and it confuses everybody but me. That’s why my MA is in American Studies—nobody in my philosophy or political science department had the nerve to deal with me, and nobody knows what American Studies actually are, so I was able to hide out there. And my doctorate is in philosophy, but only because I found one rogue professor emeritus who was willing to chair my committee.
“The problem is that if you’re hired by a philosophy department, you’re supposed to teach Plato or Hume or whoever, and they don’t want you confusing everybody by adding Maynard Keynes and Leo Szilard. And if you teach history, you’re supposed to confine yourself to acceptable stories about the past and not toss in ideas about perceptual mechanics and Kant’s ideas of the noumenon, and of course you court crucifixion from the laity if you mention Foucault or Nietzsche.”
Amusement touched Stephanie’s lips. “So where do you find a job?”
“France?” he ventured, and they laughed. “In France, ‘thinker’ is a job description. It’s not necessary to have a degree, it’s just something you do.” He shrugged. “And if that fails, there’s always Burger King.”
She seemed amused. “Sounds like burgers are in your future.”
“Oh, it’s not as bad as all that. If I can generate enough intere
sting, sexy, highly original papers, I might attract attention and a job, in that order.”
“And have you done that?”
Terzian looked at his display and sighed. “So far, no.”
Stephanie narrowed her eyes and she considered him. “You’re not a conventional person. You don’t think inside the box, as they say.”
“As they say,” Terzian repeated.
“Then you should have no objections to radical solutions to world hunger. Particularly ones that don’t cost a penny to white liberals throughout the world.”
“Hah,” Terzian said. “Who says I’m a liberal? I’m an economist.”
So Stephanie told him terrible things about Africa. Another famine was brewing across the southern part of the continent. Mozambique was plagued with flood and drought, a startling combination. The Horn of Africa was worse. According to her friends, Santa Croce had a food shipment stuck in Mogadishu and before letting it pass, the local warlord wanted to renegotiate his bribe. In the meantime, people were starving, dying of malnutrition, infection, and dysentery in camps in the dry highlands of Bale and Sidamo. Their own government in Addis Ababa was worse than the Somali warlord, at this stage permitting no aid at all, bribes or no bribes.
And as for the southern Sudan, it didn’t bear thinking about.
“What’s your solution to this?” she demanded of Terzian. “Or do you have one?”
“Test this stuff, this papiloma,” he said, “show me that it works, and I’m with you. But there are too many plagues in Africa as it is.”
“Confine the papiloma to labs while thousands die? Hand it to governments who can suppress it because of pressure from religious loons and hysterical NGOs? You call that an answer?” And Stephanie went back to working her phone while Terzian walked off in anger for another stalk down country lanes.
The Year's Best SF 21 # 2003 Page 43
