Designer Genes: Tales of the Biotech Revolution

by Brian Stableford

  He struggled back to the foot of the stairway, and up it. His eyes were fixed on the mute and useless screen beside the door. His breathing was ragged and his heart was racing.

  He didn’t know how strong the plastic screen might be, but he had seen people hurl objects through offending screens on half a hundred vid-shows, so he knew that it could be done, and that it produced shards with sharp edges.

  He also knew that he had nothing to hit it with but his fist, and that those sharp edges were going to do nasty things to his knuckles, but he wasn’t about to wait around hoping that it wouldn’t be necessary.

  Rick came back to the second step and braced himself again, laying his left palm flat against the unopenable door. He balled his fist up as tight as he could, ignoring the pain in his two damaged fingers, and psyched himself up for the punch, telling himself sternly that he must follow through, hitting with all his might.

  Steven’s howling seemed to grow even louder as Rick focused his attention and let fly.

  His fist rebounded.

  The shock of the reaction sent a wave of pain through his hand into his wrist and all the way up his arm and he howled in agony. He cursed volubly, not bothering with the customary euphemisms. He felt that he was about to burst into tears, although he could not tell whether it was pain or terror that had brought him to that pitch of anguish.

  As soon as the pain began to die down, though, he started thinking again, madly and furiously. He knew that his shoes were too soft, and that there was no way he could contort himself into such a position that he would be able to lash out at the screen with his bare heel. If he was to hit the screen again he would have to use either his fist—the left, this time—or his head.

  Rick had no idea how hard his head was, or how much force he could get into a butt, but he knew that it would give him a terrible headache if the screen didn’t break. He cursed the wonderful resilience of modern materials, and the marvelous ingenuity of modern technics. He inspected the keyboard beneath the screen, wondering if there might be a weak spot anywhere there. He tried inserting his fingernails into all the cracks and crevices, but he was too well-manicured to have much effect. He thumped the keys a few times, not too heavily, just in case the keys might respond to the extra pressure, but nothing happened.

  He conceded that he was going to have to hit the screen again. He tossed up, mentally, between head and hand. Hand won.

  He moved right to the edge of the step, shoving Steven a little closer to the wall. Again he braced himself; again he psyched himself up. Then, perversely, he looked down at the rising tide of filth, which was now only one step down. He could see that if the screen didn’t break this time, he was going to have to pick Steven up and hold him, to keep him out of harm’s way.

  He turned back towards the screen, and stared at it as though it were something utterly loathsome, which had to be destroyed. He felt that his entire nervous system was screaming—resonating with that dreadful note that only Steven could produce, and which only he in all the world could properly appreciate.

  He launched his left fist at the screen, with every last vestige of his strength, howling aloud in fury.

  The screen imploded, bursting into fifty or a hundred shards, some of which peppered his face before falling. Only a handful hit Steven, and none did him any damage.

  Oddly enough—or so it seemed—the successful blow did not hurt Rick’s hand nearly as much as the unsuccessful one had, but the shards did indeed cut him in a dozen different places, and blood began to ooze out everywhere. The biggest, sharpest triangular shard was still stuck to the rim of the casing, but Rick pulled it out easily. Then he began poking at the machinery inside the screen. There were bare wires on display now, and circuit-boards—lots of complicated and vulnerable assemblies. He cut, slashed and scraped with gay abandon…but nothing happened. The machinery was quite dead and disconnected.

  Rick was alarmed to find himself trembling. He bent down swiftly to pick Steven up, snatching him away from the turbid floodwater just before it reached the edge of the trailing shawl. Then he looked around desperately. All the thinner root-filaments were under the surface now, but there was still plenty of bare wood visible—wood that was scratchable and cuttable. But where was he to cut? Where was he to scratch?

  He felt that he could no longer think, no longer plan.

  Steven was still screaming, and his tiny hand grappled with Rick’s ear. The baby sounded truly desperate, as though he had somehow sensed that things were going from bad to worse, and his anxiety fed Rick’s, redoubling it yet again.

  Rick held the triangular shard high in the air, with one point outwards, desperate to find some target to aim at. Carelessly, he leapt down into the foul-smelling fluid. His feet were on the floor but he was waist deep. He held Steven over one shoulder, and reached out to hack at the root-bundles near the steadily-climbing surface.

  The jagged edge made a scratch, but did not cut deeply. Rick ran it back and forth as fast as he could, trying to make the cut deeper. Steven yelled in his ear, and the sound was so frightfully loud and urgent that it filled his head and brought forth tears of frustration in astonishing profusion.

  He chopped and sawed and cursed for three full minutes before he suddenly realized that the surface of the flood had not swallowed up the spot he was attacking, and was no nearer to doing so than when he had started.

  The flow had stopped, and the water-level had stabilized.

  Rick was astonished by the wave of relief that flooded over him—a sudden realization that they might not be going to die. He did not realize how convinced he had been that he was doomed until the fear was suddenly swept away.

  He threw the blunted plastic shard away, and took hold of Steven in both hands, pulling the baby around to cradle him against his chest.

  “It’s all right, son!” he said, as his tears of frustration became tears of amazement. “We’re going to be all right!”

  Steven’s wild yelling abated, as though the message had got through. By slow degrees, as Rick hugged the baby to him, rocking gently from side to side, silence fell. The water level did not begin to fall, but it did not begin to rise again either. There was stability; there was peace.

  Steven was no longer crying and Rick was no longer weeping.

  Rick stood where he was, not moving an inch, for several minutes more. Steven put his face into the hollow of Rick’s shoulder, and went to sleep, quite oblivious to the fact that the hand with that Rick was supporting his tiny bald head was still leaking blood from a dozen ragged cuts.

  Then the door above them slid suddenly aside, and Rosa’s voice, utterly aghast, said: “Corruption and corrosion, Rick! What are you doing to that poor child!”

  * * * *

  Dr. Jauregy wasn’t licensed to practice medicine on humans but she cleaned up his cuts and bandaged his hand. She had sufficient sense and sensibility not to start telling him what a fool he’d been, and he was glad of that. He’d heard enough from Rosa, Dieter, and Chloe about what he ought to have known (that he wasn’t really in danger), ought to have thought (that the sensible thing to do was wait), and ought to have done (nothing).

  At first he had been astounded by their attitude, deeply wounded by their accusative tones. It had taken him some little while to realize that they had not the least understanding of what he had been through. He had done his best to point out that hindsight gave them calculative advantages that he had sadly lacked, but they had refused to listen, and even seemed intent on blaming him for the fact that the cellar was flooded, simply because he had been down there when it happened.

  Rick was still seething with frustration and annoyance. He found it quite appalling that no one seemed to have the least idea of what he had been through, but he now realized how absurd his appearance and his conduct must have seemed to anyone who had not shared his experience. He dared not try to explain how terrified he had been, because he knew that it would only make him seem ridiculous. It was bad enough to ha
ve panicked, when—a things had turned out—panic had been quite unnecessary, but trying to explain how and why he had panicked, and attempting to justify his panicking, could now only make things worse.

  Now that hindsight had delivered its verdict—that he had not drowned, and therefore had never been in real danger of drowning—all that he had suffered had been for nothing.

  It was all horribly unfair, but there was nothing he could say or do to defend himself.

  Mr. Murgatroyd was the only one who thought of offering any kind of apology, and even that was far from satisfactory. “Altogether unforeseen,” he assured them, peering solemnly at Chloe, as though she and not Rick had been the one who had been hurt. “That’s the trouble with unprecedented situations, I’m afraid. New bugs, new symptoms. Sorry we couldn’t cope any better.”

  “Do that mean you now know what it is?” asked Rick, sourly. “Or is it still a big mystery?”

  Mr. Murgatroyd opened his mouth to reply, but paused because Officer Morusaki had just re-emerged from the cellar. “It’s okay,” said the IBI man. “The water level’s going down. The house can take care of it all—give it six hours and the pool will be full again. The wood will mop up all the pollutants and redirect them all back to the reclamation tank. The rootlets are fine—he didn’t do any real damage there. You’ll need a new screen, of course, and a new set of circuit-boards—by the time they’re installed, it will all be as good as new.”

  Rick felt the pressure of disapproving stares, but was determined not to feel guilty. “What about the nursery?” he said to the man from the Ministry.

  “We’ve identified the culprit,” said Murgatroyd, cheerfully. “As we said, there’s nothing to worry about—nothing at all. Within forty-eight hours, everything will be back to normal.”

  “In the meantime,” Dr. Jauregy put in, “just as a precaution, don’t use the nursery systems—the main system is perfectly safe.”

  Morusaki nodded in agreement, smiling as he did so. There was something extraordinarily infuriating about the way they all looked. It wasn’t just that they were carefully refusing to say exactly what it was they had found—each of them seemed to be possessed by a glow of private pleasure, which suggested that they were extremely pleased about their discovery. Rick glanced at Rosa, who was reluctantly holding the baby, and at Dieter; he could see that they were aware of it too.

  “I think we’re entitled to an explanation,” he said, testily, to the doctor. “Don’t you?”

  Dr. Jauregy looked at Officer Morusaki, who looked at Mr. Murgatroyd, who looked dubious.

  “If we really were the target of some new Gaian terror-weapon,” said Rick, combatively, “I think we should be told—even if it wasn’t aimed specifically at us.”

  “It’s nothing like that,” said Mr. Murgatroyd, swiftly. “I told you—my being called in was purely a matter of routine. It’s nothing like that at all—but we’re living in such interesting times, you see. The defense of the realm has become something of a nightmare, with so many viruses around, organic and inorganic. We have to be very careful. Plague wars aren’t like the old heavy metal wars, you know; nobody bothers to declare them, and the weapons are very difficult to spot.”

  “But this isn’t a new plague war, is it?” said Rosa, flatly.

  “No,” Mr. Murgatroyd confirmed, evidently quite glad about the fact. “It isn’t. It’s something very different. Not war, not terrorism…more like creation, really. The birth of a new kind of nature. Heaven only knows what the Gaians will make of it.”

  “Are you sure…?” Morusaki began, but Murgatroyd silenced him with a gesture.

  “It won’t hurt to explain,” he said, although he let loose a slight sigh, which signified that he would probably rather not have been asked to do so. “You see, there have already been a number of reports of newly-evolved dr-DNA viruses. Perhaps newly-devolved dr-DNA viruses would be a better way of putting it, because we think they emerge by the mutation of chromosomal fragments displaced from the nuclei of dr-cells. There have also been suggestions that one or two of our very own laevo-rotatory nuisance-organisms are taking aboard dextro-rotatory biochemical apparatus so as to become facultative hybrids. A whole new phase of evolution is starting up…our artificial biotechnologies are beginning to spawn their own mutational progeny. I think that’s very exciting, don’t you?”

  “But the whole point of making artifacts from dr-DNA is that they’re immune to disease and decay,” objected Rosa, stubbornly. “If they’ve started giving birth to their own diseases, that’s terrible.”

  “I said it had to have weapon potential,” said Dieter, in a tone of profound satisfaction. “What you’re saying is that our house—our house—has accidentally spawned a mutant virus that’s capable of messing up half the world’s property. That’s why you’re so smug, isn’t it? The next Plague War might not have begun today, but you think you’ve just got one step ahead in the arms race, don’t you?”

  “Of course not,” said Mr. Murgatroyd. “What we’ve found is certainly a dr-virus, and it certainly seems to have arisen by spontaneous mutation, but it’s not the doomsday weapon. Seen from one point of view, it’s just the first of many minor nuisances that will soon be cropping up here, there, and everywhere. There’s so much dextro-rotatory structural material around nowadays that it was only a matter of time before new bugs evolved to feed on it. It’s been a wide-open ecological niche just begging to be colonized.”

  “The Gaians aren’t going to like it,” said Rick, vindictively trying to puncture Mr. Murgatroyd’s good-humor. “It adds a whole new dimension of meaning to the idea of technology running wild.”

  “On the contrary,” said Dr. Jauregy, who had now finished attending to his battle-scars. “They’ll probably see it as Mother Nature hitting back, defying us in our quest for perfect order. Your brand-new dr-virus might become a hero of the Counter-Revolution…or do I mean the Counter-Evolution.” She grinned at her joke, though it seemed feeble enough to Rick, and nobody else laughed.

  “Hey,” said Dieter. “Is there anything in this for us? I mean, this is our house—we ought to have patent rights, or something!”

  “I’m afraid not,” said Officer Morusaki, smoothly. “There can be no patent rights in a spontaneous product of mutation unless the mutagenic process is deliberately induced.”

  “What about rights of discovery, then?” said Dieter. “We discovered it, didn’t we?”

  I was the one who discovered it, thought Rick. There’s no “we” about it.

  “You observed a sick rose,” said Mr. Murgatroyd. “You could hardly be said to have discovered the invisible worm that sickened it. That honor, I fear, belongs to Dr. Jauregy, Officer Morusaki, and myself. But if it makes you feel any better, there is no way in which any of us can profit personally from the discovery, because we are all here in our official capacities. Your house will share with our names the credit of a dozen footnotes in scientific journals and reference books, but none of us will make a penny.”

  “Except for me,” Dr. Jauregy said, with polite regret. “I’m afraid I’ll still have to bill you for the consultation and the treatment—and for the replacement of the screen downstairs, if you want me to see to that too.”

  Dieter’s resentful stare switched from Mr. Murgatroyd to Rick, who simply looked away, pointedly refusing any comment.

  “You mustn’t be distressed,” said Murgatroyd, amiably. “It really is best to look at it my way. This is a significant moment in the history of life on earth—the beginning of a new evolutionary sequence—and it began in your nursery.

  “It’s a kind of miracle, in a way: a happy gift of providence. Who knows what dextro-rotatory DNA might eventually produce, in the fullness of time, now that it has taken its first small step towards independence from the shaping hand of man? Let’s try to rise above mere matters of commerce, and fix our minds on that. Your nursery had a bad turn, and your cellar got flooded…but that wasn’t what really happened here to
day. What really happened is that something new revealed itself to the world…something really new, and alive.”

  Rick was still mad at everyone, and his hands still hurt like hell, but he suddenly saw what Murgatroyd was getting at, and he saw that Murgatroyd was right. At the molecular level, something significant had happened…something far more important than a cut hand, or a fit of panic that might or might not have been too stupid for words.

  A miracle. A happy gift of providence.

  “Where is it now?” he asked, soberly. “If you’re going to cure the house, how are you going to preserve the virus?”

  Mr. Murgatroyd opened his case, and took out a plastic bag—probably one of several that he had in there. The sealed bag contained a single rose plucked from the nursery wall. As yet, it didn’t look sick.

  They all stared at it for a few seconds: all seven of them.

  Then Mr. Murgatroyd put the rose back in his case, fastened it up, and headed for the door. It opened for him with what seemed to Rick to be craven servility. The doctor and the IBI man followed.

  * * * *

  When they had gone, Rosa came over to Rick, and dumped Steven into his lap.

  “Well,” she said. “That’s that. I’ve got a counseling session in five minutes.”

  “Oh corruption,” said Chloe. “I should have been hooked into that robominer twenty minutes ago.”

  Dieter had already disappeared, as though by magic.

  Rick didn’t feel too bad about being left alone. They had not even begun to understand what he had gone through, and that devalued the reassurance of their presence. Although he still felt in need of someone to listen, someone to sympathize, he knew that none of them could fulfill that role.

  Steven opened his eyes, met Rick’s eyes momentarily, and began to wail.

  Rick looked down at the child, and his heart sank. Forty-eight hours, he thought, remembering what the visitors had said. It would be forty-eight hours before the nursery nook was safe for normal use. Until then.…