* * *
And yet there was a boat, coming around Marwick Head from the south, a little fishing tub from Stromness, rolling horribly in the swell. Heading northwest, out to—out to where? There were no more islands out there, not until Iceland anyway, or Greenland, Spitsbergen … where was it going at this time of day, near sunset and the west wind tearing in?
He stared at the trawler for a long time, rapt at the sight, until it was nothing but a black dot near the horizon. Whitecaps covered the sea, and the wind was still rising, gusting really hard. Gulls skated around on the blasts, landing on the cliffs below. The sun was very near the water, sliding off to the north, the boat no more than flotsam: and then he remembered the causeway and the tide.
* * *
He ran down the island and his heart leaped when he saw the concrete walkway washed by white water, surging up from the right. Stuck here, forced to break into the museum or huddle in a corner of the church … but no; the concrete stood clear again. If he ran—
He pounded down the steps and ran over the rough concrete. There were scores of parallel sandstone ridges still exposed to the left, but the right side was submerged already, and as he ran a broken wave rolled up onto the walkway and drenched him to the knees, filling his shoes with seawater and scaring him much more than was reasonable. He ran on cursing.
Onto the rocks and up five steps. At his car he stopped, gasping for breath. He got in the passenger side and took off his boots, socks, and pants. Put on dry pants, socks, and running shoes.
He got back out of the car.
The wind was now a constant gale, ripping over the car and the point and the ocean all around. It was going to be tough to cook dinner on his stove; the car made a poor windbreak, wind rushing under it right at stove level.
He got out the foam pad, and propped it with his boots against the lee side of the car. The pad and the car’s bulk gave him just enough wind shelter to keep the little Bluet’s gas flame alive. He sat on the asphalt behind the stove, watching the flames and the sea. The wind was tremendous, the Bay of Birsay riven by whitecaps, more white than blue. The car rocked on its shock absorbers. The sun had finally slid sideways into the sea, but clearly it was going to be a long blue dusk.
When the water was boiling he poured in a dried Knorr’s soup and stirred it, put it back on the flame for a few more minutes, then killed the flame and ate, spooning split pea soup straight from the steaming pot into his mouth. Soup, bit of cheese, bit of salami, red wine from a tin cup, more soup. It was absurdly satisfying to make a meal in these conditions: the wind was in a fury!
When he was done eating he opened the car door and put away his dinner gear, then got out his windbreaker and rain pants and put them on. He walked around the carpark, and then up and down the low cliffy edges of the point of Buckquoy, watching the North Atlantic get torn by a full force gale. People had done this for thousands of years. The rich twilight blue looked like it would last forever.
Eventually he went to the car and got his notebooks. He returned to the very tip of the point, feeling the wind like slaps on the ear. He sat with his legs hanging over the drop, the ocean on three sides of him, the wind pouring across him, left to right. The horizon was a line where purest blue met bluest black. He kicked his heels against the rock. He could see just well enough to tell which pages in the notebooks had writing on them; he tore these from the wire spirals, and bunched them into balls and threw them away. They flew off to the right and disappeared immediately in the murk and whitecaps. When he had disposed of all the pages he had written on he cleared the long torn shreds of paper out of the wire rings, and tossed them after the rest.
* * *
It was getting cold, and the wind was a constant kinetic assault. He went back to the car and sat in the passenger seat. His notebooks lay on the driver’s seat. The western horizon was a deep blue, now. Must be eleven at least.
After a time he lit the candle and set it on the dash. The car was still rocking in the wind, and the candle flame danced and trembled on its wick. All the black shadows in the car shivered too, synchronized perfectly with the flame.
He picked up a notebook and opened it. There were a few pages left between damp cardboard covers. He found a pen in his daypack. He rested his hand on the page, the pen in position to write, its tip in the quivering shadow of his hand. He wrote, “I believe that man is good. I believe we stand at the dawn of a century that will be more peaceful and prosperous than any in history.” Outside it was dark, and the wind howled.
GENE WARS
Paul J. McAuley
Born in Oxford, England, in 1955, Paul J. McAuley now makes his home in St. Andrews, Scotland. He is considered to be one of the best of the new British breed of “hard-science” writers, and is a frequent contributor to Interzone, as well as to markets such as Amazing, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, When the Music’s Over, and elsewhere. His first novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars, won the 1988 Philip K. Dick Memorial Award. His most recent books are a new novel, Of the Fall, and a collection of his short work, The King of the Hill and Other Stories. Coming up are an original anthology co-edited with Kim Newman, In Dreams, and a major new novel, Eternal Light. His story “The Temporary King” was in our Fifth Annual Collection.
In the dizzyingly fast-paced little story that follows, jam-packed with enough invention for many another author’s four-book trilogy, he paints a sharp portrait of a new kind of entrepreneur, a self-made man—twenty-first-century style.
1
On Evan’s eighth birthday, his aunt sent him the latest smash-hit biokit, Splicing Your Own Semisentients. The box-lid depicted an alien swamp throbbing with weird, amorphous life; a double helix spiralling out of a test-tube was embossed in one corner. Don’t let your father see that, his mother said, so Evan took it out to the old barn, set up the plastic culture trays and vials of chemicals and retroviruses on a dusty workbench in the shadow of the shrouded combine.
His father found Evan there two days later. The slime mould he’d created, a million amoebae aggregated around a drop of cyclic AMP, had been transformed with a retrovirus and was budding little blue-furred blobs. Evan’s father dumped culture trays and vials in the yard and made Evan pour a litre of industrial-grade bleach over them. More than fear or anger, it was the acrid stench that made Evan cry.
That summer, the leasing company foreclosed on the livestock. The rep who supervised repossession of the supercows drove off in a big car with the test-tube and double-helix logo on its gull-wing door. The next year the wheat failed, blighted by a particularly virulent rust. Evan’s father couldn’t afford the new resistant strain, and the farm went under.
2
Evan lived with his aunt, in the capital. He was fifteen. He had a street bike, a plug-in computer, and a pet microsaur, a cat-sized triceratops in purple funfur. Buying the special porridge which was all the microsaur could eat took half of Evan’s weekly allowance; that was why he let his best friend inject the pet with a bootleg virus to edit out its dietary dependence. It was only a partial success: the triceratops no longer needed its porridge, but it developed epilepsy triggered by sunlight. Evan had to keep it in his wardrobe. When it started shedding fur in great swatches, he abandoned it in a nearby park. Microsaurs were out of fashion, anyway. Dozens could be found wandering the park, nibbling at leaves, grass, discarded scraps of fastfood. Quite soon they disappeared, starved to extinction.
3
The day before Evan graduated, his sponsor firm called to tell him that he wouldn’t be doing research after all. There had been a change of policy: the covert gene wars were going public. When Evan started to protest, the woman said sharply, “You’re better off than many long-term employees. With a degree in molecular genetics you’ll make sergeant at least.”
4
The jungle was a vivid green blanket in which rivers made silvery forked lightnings. Warm wind rushed around Evan as he leaned out the helicopter’s hatch; harness dug into his
shoulders. He was twenty-three, a tech sergeant. It was his second tour of duty.
His goggles flashed icons over the view, tracking the target. Two villages a klick apart, linked by a red dirt road narrow as a capillary that suddenly widened to an artery as the helicopter dove.
Flashes on the ground: Evan hoped the peasants only had Kalashnikovs: last week some gook had downed a copter with an antiquated SAM. Then he was too busy laying the pattern, virus-suspension in a sticky spray that fogged the maize fields.
Afterwards, the pilot, an old-timer, said over the intercom, “Things get tougher every day. We used just to take a leaf, cloning did the rest. You couldn’t even call it theft. And this stuff … I always thought war was bad for business.”
Evan said, “The company owns copyright to the maize genome. Those peasants aren’t licensed to grow it.”
The pilot said admiringly, “Man, you’re a real company guy. I bet you don’t even know what country this is.”
Evan thought about that. He said, “Since when were countries important?”
5
Rice fields spread across the floodplain, dense as a handstitched quilt. In every paddy, peasants bent over their own reflections, planting seedlings for the winter crop.
In the centre of the UNESCO delegation, the Minister for Agriculture stood under a black umbrella held by an aide. He was explaining that his country was starving to death after a record rice crop.
Evan was at the back of the little crowd, bareheaded in warm drizzle. He wore a smart onepiece suit, yellow overshoes. He was twenty-eight, had spent two years infiltrating UNESCO for his company.
The minister was saying, “We have to buy seed genespliced for pesticide resistance to compete with our neighbours, but my people can’t afford to buy the rice they grow. It must all be exported to service our debt. Our children are starving in the midst of plenty.”
Evan stifled a yawn. Later, at a reception in some crumbling embassy, he managed to get the minister on his own. The man was drunk, unaccustomed to hard liquor. Evan told him he was very moved by what he had seen.
“Look in our cities,” the minister said, slurring his words. “Every day a thousand more refugees pour in from the countryside. There is kwashiorkor, beri-beri.”
Evan popped a canape into his mouth. One of his company’s new lines, it squirmed with delicious lasciviousness before he swallowed it. “I may be able to help you,” he said. “The people I represent have a new yeast that completely fulfills dietary requirements and will grow on a simple medium.”
“How simple?” As Evan explained, the minister, no longer as drunk as he had seemed, steered him onto the terrace. The minister said, “You understand this must be confidential. Under UNESCO rules…”
“There are ways around that. We have lease arrangements with five countries that have … trade imbalances similar to your own. We lease the genome as a loss-leader, to support governments who look favourably on our other products…”
6
The gene pirate was showing Evan his editing facility when the slow poison finally hit him. They were aboard an ancient ICBM submarine grounded somewhere off the Philippines. Missile tubes had been converted into fermenters. The bridge was crammed with the latest manipulation technology, virtual reality gear which let the wearer directly control molecule-sized cutting robots as they travelled along DNA helices.
“It’s not facilities I need,” the pirate told Evan, “it’s distribution.”
“No problem,” Evan said. The pirate’s security had been pathetically easy to penetrate. He’d tried to infect Evan with a zombie virus, but Evan’s gene-spliced designer immune system had easily dealt with it. Slow poison was so much more subtle: by the time it could be detected it was too late. Evan was thirty-two. He was posing as a Swiss grey-market broker.
“This is where I keep my old stuff,” the pirate said, rapping a stainless-steel cryogenic vat. “Stuff from before I went big time. A free luciferase gene complex, for instance. Remember when the Brazilian rainforest started to glow? That was me.” He dashed sweat from his forehead, frowned at the room’s complicated thermostat. Grossly fat and completely hairless, he wore nothing but Bermuda shorts and shower sandals. He’d been targeted because he was about to break the big time with a novel HIV cure. The company was still making a lot of money from its own cure: they made sure AIDS had never been completely eradicated in third-world countries.
Evan said, “I remember the Brazilian government was overthrown—the population took it as a bad omen.”
“Hey, what can I say? I was only a kid. Transforming the gene was easy, only difficulty was finding a vector. Old stuff. Somatic mutation really is going to be the next big thing, believe me. Why breed new strains when you can rework a genome cell by cell?” He rapped the thermostat. His hands were shaking. “Hey, is it hot in here, or what?”
“That’s the first symptom,” Evan said. He stepped out of the way as the gene pirate crashed to the decking. “And that’s the second.”
The company had taken the precaution of buying the pirate’s security chief: Evan had plenty of time to fix the fermenters. By the time he was ashore, they would have boiled dry. On impulse, against orders, he took a microgram sample of the HIV cure with him.
7
“The territory between piracy and legitimacy is a minefield,” the assassin told Evan. “It’s also where paradigm shifts are most likely to occur, and that’s where I come in. My company likes stability. Another year and you’d have gone public, and most likely the share issue would have made you a billionaire—a minor player, but still a player. Those cats, no one else has them. The genome was supposed to have been wiped out back in the twenties. Very astute, quitting the grey medical market and going for luxury goods.” She frowned. “Why am I talking so much?”
“For the same reason you’re not going to kill me,” Evan said.
“It seems such a silly thing to want to do,” the assassin admitted.
Evan smiled. He’d long ago decoded the two-stage virus the gene-pirate had used on him: one a Trojan horse which kept his T lymphocytes busy while the other rewrote loyalty genes companies implanted in their employees. Once again it had proven its worth. He said, “I need someone like you in my organization. And since you spent so long getting close enough to seduce me, perhaps you’d do me the honour of becoming my wife. I’ll need one.”
“You don’t mind being married to a killer?”
“Oh, that. I used to be one myself.”
8
Evan saw the market crash coming. Gene wars had winnowed basic foodcrops to soybeans, rice and, dole yeast: tailored ever-mutating diseases had reduced cereals and many other cash crops to nucleotide sequences stored in computer vaults. Three global biotechnology companies held patents on the calorific input of ninety-eight percent of humanity, but they had lost control of the technology. Pressures of the war economy had simplified it to the point where anyone could directly manipulate her own genome, and hence her own body form.
Evan had made a fortune in the fashion industry, selling templates and microscopic self-replicating robots which edited DNA. But he guessed that sooner or later someone would come up with a direct-photosynthesis system, and his stock-market expert systems were programmed to correlate research in the field. He and his wife sold controlling interest in their company three months before the first green people appeared.
9
“I remember when you knew what a human being was,” Evan said sadly. “I suppose I’m old-fashioned, but there it is.”
From her cradle, inside a mist of spray, his wife said, “Is that why you never went green? I always thought it was a fashion statement.”
“Old habits die hard.” The truth was, he liked his body the way it was. These days, going green involved somatic mutation which grew a metre-high black cowl to absorb sufficient light energy. Most people lived in the tropics, swarms of black-caped anarchists. Work was no longer a necessity, but an indulgence. Evan adde
d, “I’m going to miss you.”
“Let’s face it,” his wife said, “we never were in love. But I’ll miss you, too.” With a flick of her powerful tail she launched her streamlined body into the sea.
10
Black-cowled post-humans, gliding slowly in the sun, aggregating and reag-gregating like amoebae. Dolphinoids, tentacles sheathed under fins, rocking in tanks of cloudy water. Ambulatory starfish; tumbling bushes of spikes; snakes with a single arm, a single leg; flocks of tiny birds, brilliant as emeralds, each flock a single entity.
People, grown strange, infected with myriads of microscopic machines which re-engraved their body form at will.
Evan lived in a secluded estate. He was revered as a founding father of the posthuman revolution. A purple funfur microsaur followed him everywhere. It was recording him because he had elected to die.
“I don’t regret anything,” Evan said, “except perhaps not following my wife when she changed. I saw it coming, you know. All this. Once the technology became simple enough, cheap enough, the companies lost control. Like television or computers, but I suppose you don’t remember those.” He sighed. He had the vague feeling he’d said all this before. He’d had no new thoughts for a century, except the desire to put an end to thought.
The microsaur said, “In a way, I suppose I am a computer. Will you see the colonial delegation now?”
“Later.” Evan hobbled to a bench and slowly sat down. In the last couple of months he had developed mild arthritis, liver spots on the backs of his hands: death finally expressing parts of his genome that had been suppressed for so long. Hot sunlight fell through the velvet streamers of the tree things; Evan dozed, woke to find a group of starfish watching him. They had blue, human eyes, one at the tip of each muscular arm.
“They wish to honour you by taking your genome to Mars,” the little purple triceratops said.
Evan sighed. “I just want peace. To rest. To die.”
The Year's Best SF 09 # 1991 Page 50
