by N Lee Wood
I swatted at the most persistent of the flies hovering around my face. For some reason, the flies ignored Halton. He said nothing, just nodding as if he understood, and finished the rest of his lunch.
“When I was a kid”—I felt compelled to explain something to him—“there was a big fuss about a genetically altered petunia this research group of university botanists wanted to release in the wild. It had an artificial gene spliced into it, not something that was going to give it any edge in competing with wild petunias. They wanted to use this spliced-in gene as a kind of bookmark they could track to see what would happen over multiple generations under various natural conditions.” I remembered the term from my college biology. “Genetic drift.”
“Petunias.” The corners of Halton’s lips quirked up, amused.
“Yeah. Petunias. This whole huge organization of people-environmentalists, Greens, nutcases, whatever— marched on the university, demanding they destroy all the altered petunia plants. At some point things got heated, a brick got thrown through the greenhouse glass, a botanist shoved somebody—who knows what all really caused it? But people got seriously hurt and the greenhouses were burnt down, fields torched.” I shrugged. “There were a lot of people suing each other, laws got passed, some of them pretty laughable, some of them just plain stupid and mean. A company allowed to make poison gas for weapons couldn’t get permission to grow vats of tailored bacteria to produce cheap insulin.”
“All over petunias?”
It sounded pretty silly to me, too. “It wasn’t just about flowers; genetic engineering wasn’t as sophisticated then,” I said defensively. “Facts and rumors got mixed up. Some people claimed that Legionnaires’ disease and the AIDS virus were secret biological weapons the Government released, probably accidentally.”
“Do you believe that?”
“No.” Or not much, at least. “But it scared people, and they ended up arguing so loudly about petunias that nobody noticed when Government agencies like CDI started buying up patents on genes and clonal techniques, including every known strand of human DNA.”
The National Institutes of Health in Bethesda had gobbled up every patent on any gene linked to the human brain even before the turn of the century. Defying the EEC cries of foul play, the Recombinant Advisory Committee, a Government review board conveniently controlled by the NIH, had allowed a few select biotechnological companies eager to win FDA patent approvals ahead of their competitors to corner the market on fabricant technology before fabricants were even a gleam in some mad scientist’s eye. The Europeans found themselves shut out from even basic access to biological data. American pharmaceutical and gene-therapy companies suddenly found their CEO’s weren’t researchers or physicians anymore, but Government-controlled sycophants with some interesting ideas of their own.
“But by then it was too late. Nobody had any idea the kind of things they could create.”
I flushed, realizing I’d inadvertently insulted Halton. Again. He was listening stoically.
“Things like viral pesticides,” I said, covering up quickly. “Some of the precautions were necessary. You don’t go releasing modified viruses into the atmosphere as pesticides to kill one species of bug if you don’t know for certain they won’t hurt other species or mutate into something that might be toxic to people.”
Halton stared at me. “I’m not a virus, Kay Bee,” he said quietly. “And I’m not a petunia.”
“No,” I agreed. “You’re much scarier than that. When it was still illegal for American doctors to use aborted fetal tissue to cure diseases, only the CDI could have developed fabricants. They had the money and legal immunity that allowed them to play around with human genes.”
His chin came up a fraction, I thought. “CDI didn’t break any laws. I’m not a virus, but I’m not human, either. My chromosomes were not stolen from human beings; every strand of my DNA is legally patented and designed. Not one gene has been taken from any natural source.” His voice held a note of pride I found oddly touching.
I knew the argument. The details of CDI’s fabricant technology were a closely held secret, but this much was common knowledge: Fabricants didn’t have parents. They were individually crafted organisms, and therefore legally biomachines. The only organism the law considered human was that “conceived of man, born of woman.” It didn’t matter if it was a test-tube baby or a fetus altered with genetic surgery. What counted was that its origin was one human egg fertilized by one human sperm. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’d better have a set of genetic blueprints to prove its parents were ducks. Otherwise, it wasn’t legally a duck.
“That’s true, Halton,” I said softly. “You’re not a virus, and you’re not a human. What you are is a lethal military weapon. That’s what you were designed to be.” The impassive expression returned, Halton’s eyes unflinching. “We humans are good at developing new weapons. We have the power to completely alter our environment, change ourselves, without necessarily having complete control over what we’re capable of doing.” I smiled lopsidedly at him. “Your average man in the street is afraid fabricants are really a sort of Hitlerian übermenchen, the start of a brave new world which will sooner or later begin culling out the imperfect human riffraff.” I thought briefly of the occasional insults and animosity I had endured in school, the blind, jingoistic hatred toward Arabs, fanned by periodic acts of terrorism and war. “Including me.”
“Then why do people build things that frighten them?”
“Because we can,” I said. “That’s part of what it means to be human. It makes no sense, I’ll admit. We’ve built weapons with the power to completely vaporize the planet, slaughter every living thing, turn the Earth into a lifeless stone. Just because we can. Pretty fucking useless, when you think about it.”
He had finished his lunch, and leaned back on his rock. Filtered sunlight through the acacia leaves caught highlights in his dark hair, and speckled his tanned, smooth skin. I found myself dejectedly admiring the way his shoulders pressed against his shirt. Pushing away the flutter in my stomach, I tried to think of something else. He took a deep breath, a sad, patient sound.
“So you’re still afraid I really am Frankenstein’s monster, after all?” he asked. I thought I heard a slight edge of sarcasm in his tone. A damned good-looking Frankenstein’s monster. I didn’t say it. “Do you honestly believe fabricants are going to suddenly wake up one day, realize their superiority over all you flawed human tinkerers, and rise up in revolt to destroy their own creators?”
“You don’t seem to have any psychological impediment to killing people,” I pointed out.
“For which I would have assumed you’d have reason to be grateful.” I wasn’t sure how to take that. Sometimes Halton seemed absurdly naive, then could turn around with biting keenness. “But if you’re worried I might have some ideas about mutiny, my designers have already taken care of that. I am psychologically inhibited from killing for my own purposes.”
He smiled, that strange plastic smile. “You’re right. I’m a weapon, but only a weapon. I am not a killer.” He seemed to be reassured by that, his confidence in the ability of his makers, if not in their intentions, unshakable.
I shuddered. How utterly convenient. Guns don’t kill people, I remember my card-carrying NRA stepdad saying, refusing to register his hunting rifles racked like art on the living-room wall and calling it civil disobedience. He had slept with a loaded .45 under his pillow, and bought my mom a shiny new .38 of her very own for her birthday, just the right size to fit into her purse. Every other weekend he took us to the rifle range for target practice; no gang of teenaged drug thugs was going to take his family down like weak-kneed liberal wimps. People kill people. People have always seemed to enjoy dreaming up new ways to kill a lot of other people.
“Well,” I said, “that’s one way to keep your conscience clean.”
I got up and bought some more “apple juice” from our genial host. He refilled our chipped glasses
with his homemade hootch from a fruit jar kept in the antiquated refrigerator, condensation running down its sides. I brought them back, set one down in front of Halton and turned my back to him. We drank in silence. I watched the kids playing with a scabrous mutt in the smelly mountain of trash piled behind the improvised kitchen, and let my thoughts wander off on their own.
Bad idea.
God knows what Halton was thinking. But I was reminiscing of a time before anyone knew about fabricants, not so long ago, when we didn’t need help in killing each other. My senses did a sudden detour, a sickening lurch into a past reality I’d thought I’d managed to suppress. I hadn’t had those waking nightmares in years. The breeze shifted, and for a heart-stopping moment I didn’t smell the sickly sweet odor of rotting garbage, but the thick stench of blood and burnt flesh and scorched explosives. A kid turned, laughing, his mouth open. I saw the silent scream in a baby’s withered corpse.
My skin turned clammy, and I was sweating.
“Kay Bee?” Halton had moved as noiselessly as a ghost, standing with his hand on my shoulder. I started, realized I was panting, my heart racing.
“I’m all right, it’s okay, just leave me alone…” I blurted rapidly, trying to brush him and my fears away. The welcome surge of anger focused my awareness, blotted out the waking dreams. It was true. I was stuck in Nok Kuzlat. But it was now, not then. Kids played with their dog in a rubbish heap. No booby-trapped mines exploded under their feet. The scrawny cat, a flash of orange fur, streaked across a field of broken bricks and weeds. No spotting missile would spear down from the sky to blow it to pieces, no invisible sniper’s bullets would rip it to shreds.
No child’s huge eyes staring at me over the barrel of a gun, small, dirty hands holding it up before… Just staring… Before…
I pushed the memory down. Hard.
I hated Nok Kuzlat then, I hated it now. I hated this entire part of the world and everyone in it with the kind of guilty self-loathing only the displaced can feel. I despised the mindless violence and relentless misery, while still bristling at the West’s chauvinistic attitude of superiority.
Most of all I hated my parents for being Arabs.
My father was born in the Gaza Strip, and my mother in Kuwait City, neither of them citizens of the countries of their birth. They met and married while working as wage-slaves for some despotic Saudi company and emigrated to America the first chance they got. They lived in what they initially considered luxury, but what was then regarded in the States as poverty-level subsistence. I had been born in Denver, Colorado, and that made me 100% American under United States law. I could even run for President when I grew up.
I don’t remember my real father; he died when I was four. My mother promptly threw away her veil and married a half-Irish, half-Italian, all-American cowboy who thought the sun rose and set just for her. Religion was never a problem in our family; Mom never gave up being a Muslim, not entirely. There was no mosque in our small town. I went to a Presbyterian church with my stepdad on major Christian holidays while Mom did her praying in private. God was an abstract that had no particular meaning for me.
My life was not much different from that of any other average American kid. My mother dressed like the other ladies at the local PTA, wore makeup and had her hair done at the neighborhood beauty salon, and worked at our local Sears in the purchasing department. My stepfather was a state contractor who built government offices. He drove an ordinary car to work with its “Buy American” bumper sticker, drank beer with his buddies on Saturdays down in the game room he’d built in the basement, football or basketball or the World Series blaring from the latest model television set. We weren’t rich, but at least my stepdad had steady work and we never really lacked for anything important. I ran around the malls with the few friends I had, grew up on a steady diet of Burger King and Pizza Hut, rode rental horses at the stable, mooned over cute boys and magazine photos of pubescent movie stars, snuck cigarettes with my buddies in the girls’ toilet in school. An all-American childhood.
When I was about nine years old, I remember a U.S. Congressman from Georgia or Louisiana, some Southern state, testifying at one of these Congressional panels televised every so often to justify taxpayers’ money being wasted on finding out where taxpayers’ money was being wasted. The latest “peace initiative” had gone exactly nowhere. While everyone was busy arguing over the old question of Israel’s occupied territories, the perpetual sticky wicket in negotiating any peace agreement, Israel kept building up its military arms capability and expanding Jewish settlements on the West Bank and Gaza and the Golan Heights as fast as they could drag prefab trailer homes into them. Then some Islamic terrorist group had set off a bomb in New York’s World Trade Center, killing people who probably didn’t have too much interest in the cause they had died for, and not furthering favorable American public opinion at all.
The Congressman, an ex-White Citizens Councilman who reveled in controversy guaranteed to get him good news coverage, stood outside the Capitol surrounded by a pack of journalists, thumbs tucked in his belt as he likened the Middle East to a large pack of vicious dogs penned up together, all fighting over a single bone while Israel, an ill-tempered alley cat, sat on the fence and watched them. Every once in a while one dog would jump at the cat, snarling and snapping, and the cat would leisurely swipe at the dog’s nose with sharp claws, sending it ass-over-teakettle yipping in pain.
The U.S. Government had allowed this to continue as long as our “national interests”—which translated meant “cheap oil”—were not threatened. But periodically one dog would get too big and mean, and start savaging a smaller mutt, and that interfered with America’s interests. Then Uncle Sam would be forced to wade into the pack with a big stick to beat the crap out of the meanest dog, and stand there yelling, “Down, boys! Down!” The rest of the pack would slink around his legs, glaring at each other, and the smaller mutts would take surreptitious bites out of their fallen companion. The cat would hiss in the corner, a couple of mutts would cough up one or two pale hostages, Uncle Sam would announce A Lasting Peace in the Middle East, shake a scolding finger at the cat, and wade out again. Then the pack would fall on each other, and the fighting resumed, with the occasional snarl at the cat sitting on the fence, licking its paws and sniggering at them all.
It was a hopeless situation, the Congressman was saying in his affable country-boy drawl. Sure them Israelis don’t play fair, but whaddya expect from Christ-killing Jewboys? Still, they were a democratic government and most of ’em were at least white. But them Moo-slim ragheads are stuck in the fourteenth century, violent, treacherous, and ungrateful, impossible to do respectable business with and fundamentally incapable of ever evolving into civilized human beings. Now that they’re bringing their heinous terrorist activities to our hallowed American soil, we gottah keep our military capacity up, our money to ourselves, and our borders firmly locked against them Third World hordes clammering to overwhelm us and dilute our democratic American Way of Life. Our only hope, our Good (Christian) God willing, is that the fence never breaks.
At the age of nine, news was something shown between cartoons and sitcoms, and it meant nothing to me then. But my mother had burst into tears, scaring me. My dad—my stepdad—didn’t know what to do. He put his arms around her and said lamely, “He didn’t mean everybody, Fadela.” She promptly slugged him, screaming hysterical curses at him in Arabic he couldn’t understand, and stomped out the door to disappear for three days.
That’s the first time I ever felt like anything other than a normal American kid. The Congressman had meant me. I was an Arab, wasn’t I? I was the kind of rabid dim-witted cur the Congressman felt so contemptuous of, a dirty, lazy heir of that untamable primitive Bedouin race which over the past century had murdered, terrorized, looted, raped and plundered, bombed airliners, blew up office buildings, destroyed oil wells, damaged their own environment, massacred thousands of innocent people. We were utterly despised and utterly desp
icable.
My family lived in a small town near Denver. I was short and dark, but obviously not Latino, and some of the kids in my school thought I was American Indian, a notion I started doing nothing to disabuse. Indians were fashionable then, a noble, innocent and historically persecuted people whom whites treated with an inherited guilty conscience. I dropped the name Kahlili, and started calling myself Kay Bee, insisting that my parents do the same. I refused to speak Arabic with my mother any longer. I wouldn’t answer her if she spoke to me in anything other than English. I regret that for two reasons: one, because my Arabic is now shitty; and two, because it hurt my mother needlessly. If she had been humiliated by some porky Southern-fried bigot, it only deepened her shame to see her own daughter frantic to deny her heritage.
Later on, when my mother died, I had a brief surge of remorse, actively announcing my Arabishness to anyone who’d listen, parroting various causes with little understanding of any of them. It didn’t last long. I bored the piss out of the few friends who could stand to listen to me for any length of time, and quickly discovered after a brief escapade with a real Arab renegade that I had little in common with his philosophy, his fanaticism, or his passionate hatred of everything Occidental.
My stepdad had adored my mother but merely tolerated me, which I genuinely didn’t mind. I’d catch him staring at me once in a while, totally baffled how someone as lovely as my mother could have given birth to such an unattractive child. But he did his best to love me, in his own way. He was fair, kind, good-natured, and we got along okay. After Mom died, he sent me to a boarding school to finish out the last years of high school. I loved it, thought it was heaven; all the horses I could have ever wished for. He calls once in a while, and we still dutifully exchange Christmas cards every year, although I haven’t seen him in almost twenty years.
