Asimov's SF, April-May 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “A DNA extract from datura and other herbs was introduced into the growth medium,” she said. “Then the bacteria were induced to take up DNA and chromosomes from the extract, and Ezawa injected the recombinant strain into the cerebellum and temporal lobes of a freshly dead corpse. The bacteria began processing the corpse's genetic complement and eventually the body was revivified."

  “Whoa! Revivified?” I said. “You mean it came back to life?"

  She nodded.

  “How long were these people dead?” I asked.

  “On the average, a little under an hour. The longest was about an hour and a half. The process required a certain amount of time, so the bodies had to be secured quickly."

  “Makes you wonder, doesn't it? Getting the paperwork done for releasing a body generally takes more than an hour."

  “I don't know,” she said.

  “Jesus. Ezawa was basically making zombies. High-tech zombies."

  She started, I presumed, to object, but I headed her off.

  “Don't bullshit me,” I said. “I grew up voodoo. Datura's one of the classic ingredients in the old recipe books. I bet he tried goat's rue, too ... and Angel's trumpet. The man was making zombies."

  She frowned. “What I was going to say was, the term was appropriate for most of the patients. They were weak. Helpless. They rarely survived longer than a day. But there were a few who lived longer. For months, some of them. We called them ‘slow-burners.’ We moved them out to a plantation house in bayou country and brought in a clinical psychologist to assess their new personalities. You see, the patients developed personalities markedly different from the ones they originally had. The psychologist, Doctor Edman, he believed these personalities manifested a kind of wish-fulfillment. His theory was that the process changed a portion of the RNA and made it dominant. ‘The bioform of their deepest wish,’ that's how he put it. The patients manufactured memories. They recalled having different names, different histories. In effect, they were telling us—and themselves—a new life story, one in which they achieved their heart's desire. The amazing thing was, they had abilities commensurate with these stories."

  I could have used some of Pellerin's ability to read people. What she had told me had a ring of authenticity, but if I were to accept it as true, I would have to rearrange my notion of what was possible. I started to speak, but I was on shaky ground and wasn't certain which questions to ask.

  “It's hard to believe,” she said. “But it's the truth.” She let some seconds slip past and then, when I remained mute, as if she were trying to keep the conversation going, she went on: “I disagreed with Edman about a great many things. He demanded that we allow the patients to find their own way. He believed we should let their stories come out naturally. But I thought if we prompted them some, if we reminded them of their original identities ... I don't mean give them every detail, you understand. Just their names and a little background. That would have afforded them a stronger foundation and perhaps we wouldn't have had so many breakdowns among the slow-burners. These people were re-inventing themselves out of whole cloth. They were bound to be unstable. I was hoping Crain would agree with me, but...” She made a contemptuous gesture, then seemed to remember where she was. “Do you want to know anything else?"

  I still was at a loss for words, but I managed to say, “So I'm guessing Pellerin's a slow-burner."

  “Yes. He was born Theodore Rankin. He's forty-three. He believes he's the world's best poker player. And he may well be."

  “What was he before?"

  “A bartender. He was killed during a robbery. I don't know how the corporation got hold of the body."

  “The corporation. I assume they took the project over after it went in the toilet at Tulane."

  “That's right. But there was a gap of ten years or so."

  “Why're they so interested in a poker player?"

  “It's not the poker playing per se that's of interest, it's the patients’ underlying abilities. Their potentials go far beyond the life story they construct for themselves. We don't understand what they can do. None of them lived long enough. But with the advances in microbiology made during the last two decades, Doctor Crain thinks Josey may live for years. He's developing more rapidly than the others, too. That may be a result of improvements in the delivery system. We used a heart pump at Tulane, but now they..."

  “I don't have to know the gearhead stuff.” I mulled over what she had told me. “You were fired from the original project. Why would Darden hire you? Where do you fit in?"

  Verret toyed with the bottle cap. “I helped a patient escape. I couldn't go along with what they were doing to him anymore. He developed some astonishing abilities while he was on the run. I'm the only person who's dealt with someone that advanced."

  “What sort of abilities we talking about?"

  “Perceptual, for the most part. Changes in visual capacity and such."

  She said this off-handedly, but I doubted she was being straight with me. I decided not to push it, and I asked what they had been doing at Harrah's.

  “At Tulane we kept the patients confined,” she said. “But Crain thought Josey would develop more rapidly if we exposed him to an unstructured environment under controlled conditions.” She gave a rueful laugh. “Turns out we didn't have much control."

  “How much does Pellerin know?"

  “He knows he was brought back to life. But he doesn't know about the new personality ... though he suspects something's wrong there. It's up to me to determine when he's ready to hear the truth. Things go better if we tell them than if we let them piece it together on their own."

  “I still don't understand your function. What exactly is it you do?"

  “Patients need to bond with someone in order to create a complex personality. They have to be controlled, carefully manipulated. We were trained to instill that bond, to draw out their capabilities."

  She folded her arms, compressed her lips. I had the thought that, though none of what she had told me was comedy club material, talking about her role in things distressed her more than the rest.

  “If the other therapists are as good-looking as you,” I said, “I bet that instilling thing goes pretty easily."

  That seemed to distress her further.

  “Come on, cher,” I said. “You going to be just fine. Y'all can be a significant asset for Billy, and that works to your advantage."

  She leaned forward, putting a hand on my knee; the touch surprised me. “Mister Lamb,” she said, and I said, without intending to, “Jack. You can call me Jack."

  “I want to be able to count on you, Jack. Can I count on you?"

  “I told you I don't have any control over the situation."

  “But can you be a friend? That's all I'm asking. Can we count on you to be a friend?"

  Those big brown eyes were doing a job on me, but I resisted them. “I haven't ever been much good as a friend. It's a character flaw, I'm afraid."

  “I don't believe that.” She sat back, adjusting her T-shirt so it fit more snugly. “You can call me Jo."

  * * * *

  I contacted Billy Pitch, though not during prime time, fearing I might interrupt The Surreal Life or Wife Swap, and I told him what I had learned, omitting any mention of the “remarkable powers” that might soon be Pellerin's, stressing instead his developing visual capacity. I wasn't sure why I did this—perhaps because I thought that Billy, already powerful, needed no further inducement to use his strength intemperately. He professed amazement at what I had to say, then slipped into business mode.

  “I got an idea, but it needs to simmer, so I'm going to stash you away for a while,” he said. “Get everybody ready to travel tonight."

  “By ‘everybody,'” I said, “you don't mean me, right? I got deals cooking. I have to..."

  “I'll handle them for you."

  “Billy, some of what I got going requires the personal touch."

  “Are you suggesting I can't handle whatever piddly b
usiness it is you got?"

  “No, that's not it. But there's..."

  “You're not going to thwart me in this, are you, Jack?"

  “No,” I said helplessly.

  “Good! Call my secretary and tell her what needs doing. I'll see it gets done."

  That night we were flown by private jet to an airstrip in South Florida, and then transported by cigarette boat to Billy's estate in the Keys. Absent from our party was Dr. Crain. I never got to know the man. Each time I walked him to the john or gave him food, he railed at me, saying that I didn't know who I was dealing with, I didn't understand what was involved, causing such a ruckus that I found it easier to keep him bound and gagged in a separate room. I warned him that he was doing himself no good acting this way, yet all he did was tell me again I didn't know who I was dealing with and threaten me with corporate reprisals. When it was time to leave, I started to untie him, but Huey dropped a hand onto my shoulder and said, “Billy say to let him be."

  “He's a doctor,” I said. “He's the only one knows what's going on. What if Pellerin gets sick or something?"

  “Billy say let him be."

  I tried to call Billy, but was met with a series of rebuffs from men as constricted by the literal limits of their orders as Huey. Their basic message was, “Billy can't be disturbed.” Crain's eyes were wide, fixed on me; his nostrils flared above the gag when he tried to speak. I made to remove it, but Huey once again stayed my hand.

  “Let him talk,” I said. “He might..."

  “What he going to say, Jack?” Huey's glum, wicked face gazed down at me. “You know there ain't nothing to say?"

  He steered me into the corridor, closed the door behind us and leaned against it. “Get a move on,” he said. “Ain't nothing you can do, so you might as well not think about it."

  Yet I did think about it as I descended the stair and walked along the corridor and out into the drizzly New Orleans night. I thought about Crain waiting in that stuffy little room, about whether or not he knew what was coming, and I thought that if I didn't change the way things were headed, I might soon be enduring a similar wait myself.

  * * * *

  Some weeks later, I watched a videotape that captured Jo's interaction with one of the short-lived zombies whose passage from death to life and back again she had overseen at Tulane. By then, I had become thoroughly acquainted with Pellerin and the zombie on the tape didn't interest me nearly as much as Jo's performance. She tempted and teased his story out of him with the gestures and movements of a sexier-than-average ballerina, exaggerated so as to make an impression on the man's dim vision, and I came to realize that all of her movements possessed an element of this same controlled grace. Whether she was doing this by design, I had no clue; by that time I had tumbled to the fact that she was a woman who hid much from herself, and I doubted that she would be able to shed light on the matter.

  Over the space of a month, Pellerin grew from a man whom I had mistaken for dead money into a formidable presence. He was stronger, more vital in every way, and he began to generate what I can only describe as a certain magnetism—I felt the back of my neck prickle whenever he came near, though the effect diminished over the days and weeks that followed. And then there were his eyes. On the same day I interrogated Jo, I was escorting him to the john when he said, “Hey, check this out, Small Time!” He snatched off his sunglasses and brought his eyes close to mine. I was about to make a sarcastic remark, when I noticed a green flickering in his irises.

  “What the fuck!” I said.

  Pellerin grinned. “Looks like a little ol’ storm back in there, doesn't it?"

  I asked him what it was and he told me the flickers, etched in an electric green, signaled the bacteria impinging on the optic nerve.

  “They're bioluminescent,” he said. “Weird, huh? Jocundra says it's going to get worse before it gets better. People are going to think I'm the goddamn Green Lantern."

  Though he had changed considerably since that day, his attitudes toward almost everyone around him remained consistently negative—he was blunt, condescending, an arrogant smart-ass. Yet toward Jo, his basic stance did change. He grew less submissive and often would challenge her authority. She adapted by becoming more compliant, but I could see that she wasn't happy, that his contentiousness was getting to her. She still was able to control him by means of subtle and not-so-subtle manipulation, but how long that control would last was a matter for conjecture.

  The island where we were kept was Billy's private preserve. It was shaped roughly like a T, having two thin strips of land extending out in opposite directions from the west end. Billy's compound took up most of the available space. Within a high white brick wall topped by razor wire were a pool, outbuildings (including a gym and eight bungalows), a helicopter pad, and a sprawling Florida-style ranch house that might have been designed by an architect with a Lego fetish—wings diverged off the central structure and off each other at angles such as a child might employ, and I guessed that from the air it must resemble half a crossword puzzle. There were flat screen TVs in every room, even the johns, and all the rooms were decorated in a fashion that I labeled haute mafia. The dining room table was fashioned from a fourteenth century monastery door lifted from some European ruin. The rugs were a motley assortment of modern and antique. Some of the windows were stained glass relics, while others were jalousies; but since heavy drapes were drawn across them, whatever effect had been intended was lost. Every room was home to a variety of antiquities: Egyptian statuary, Greek amphorae, Venetian glassware, German tapestries, and so on. In my bathroom, the toilet was carved from a single block of marble, and mounted on the wall facing it, a section of a Persian bas-relief, was yet another flat screen. It was as if someone with the sensibility of a magpie had looted the world's museums in order to furnish the place, and yet the decor was so uniformly haphazard, I had the impression that Billy was making an anti-fashion statement, sneering at the concept of taste. Elvis would have approved. In fact, had he seen the entirety of Billy's house, he would have returned home to Graceland and redecorated.

  Beyond the wall was jungly growth that hid the house completely. The beach was a crescent of tawny sand fringed by palms and hibiscus shrubs and Spanish bayonet, protected by an underwater fence. A bunker-like guard house stood at the foot of the concrete pier to which the cigarette boat was moored, and a multicultural force (Cuban, white, African-American) patrolled within and without the walls. The guards, along with gardeners and maids, were housed in the bungalows, but they entered the house frequently to check on us. If we stepped outside they would dog us, their weapons shouldered, keeping a distance, alert to our every movement. It was easier to find privacy inside the house. Relative privacy, at any rate. Knowing Billy, I was certain that the rooms were bugged, and I had given up on the idea that I could keep anything from him. Whenever Pellerin and Jo were closeted in their rooms, I would walk along corridors populated by suits of armor and ninja costumes fitted to basketwork men and gilt French chairs that, with their curved legs and positioned between such martial figures, looked poised for an attack. I would poke into rooms, examine their collection of objets d'art, uniformly mismatched, yet priceless. Sometimes I would wonder if I dared slip one or two small items into my pocket, but most of my thoughts were less concerned with gain than with my forlorn prospects for survival.

  Occasionally in the course of these forays, I would encounter a maid, but never anyone else, and thus I was surprised one afternoon when, upon entering a room in the northernmost wing with a four-poster bed and a fortune in gee-gaws littering the tables and bureaus, I saw Jo standing by the entrance to a walk-in closet, inspecting the dresses within. She gave a start when I spoke her name, then offered a wan smile and said, “Hello."

  “What are you doing here?” I said.

  “Browsing.” She touched the bodice of a green silk dress. “These clothes must have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. They're all designer originals."

  �
�No, I meant aren't you supposed to be with Pellerin."

  “I need breaks from Josey,” she said. “His intensity gets to me after awhile. And he's getting more independent, he wants time to himself. So...” She shrugged. “I like to come here and look at the clothes."

  She stepped into the closet and I moved into the room so I could keep her in view.

  “He must bring a lot of women here,” she said. “He's got every imaginable size."

  “It's hard for me to think of Billy as a sexual being."

  “Why's that?"

  “You'd have to know him. I've never seen him with a woman on his arm, but I suppose he has his moments."

  She went deeper into the closet, toyed with the hem of a dress that bore a pattern like a moth's wing, all soft grays and greens, a touch of brown.

  I perched on the edge of the bed. “Why don't you try it on?"

  “Do you think he'd mind?” she asked.

  “Go for it."

  She hesitated, then said, “I'll just be a second,” and closed the closet door.

  The idea that she was getting naked behind the door inspired a salacious thought or two—I was already more than a little smitten. When she came out, she was barefoot. She did a pirouette and struck a fashion magazine pose. I was dumbstruck. The dress was nearly diaphanous, made of some feathery stuff that clung to her hips and flat stomach and breasts, the flared skirt reaching to mid-thigh.

  “You like?” she asked. “It's a little short on me."

  “I didn't notice."

  She laughed delightedly and went for another spin. “I could never afford this. Not that I care all that much about clothes. But if I had a couple of million, I'd probably indulge."

  Shortly thereafter she went back inside the closet, re-emerging wearing her jeans and a nondescript top. It seemed that she had exchanged personalities as well as clothes, for she was once again somber and downcast. “I've got to get back,” she said.

  “So soon?"

  She stopped by the door. “I come here most days about this time,” she said. “A little earlier, actually.” Then, after a pause, she added, “It's nice having someone to wear clothes for."