Luminous

by Greg Egan

  I spotted Janet Lansing as I left my car. She was surveying the ruins with an expression of stoicism, but she was hugging herself. Mild shock, probably. She had no other reason to be chilly; it had been stinking hot all night, and the temperature was already climbing. Lansing was Director of the Lane Cove complex: forty-three years old, with a PhD in molecular biology from Cambridge, and an MBA from an equally reputable Japanese virtual university. I’d had my knowledge miner extract her details, and photo, from assorted databases before I’d left home.

  I approached her and said, ‘James Glass, Nexus Investigations.’

  She frowned at my business card, but accepted it, then glanced at the technicians trawling their gas chromatographs and holography equipment around the perimeter of the ruins. ‘They’re yours, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes. They’ve been here since four.’

  She smirked slightly. ‘What happens if I give the job to someone else? And charge the lot of you with trespass?’

  ‘If you hire another company, we’ll be happy to hand over all the samples and data we’ve collected.’

  She nodded distractedly. ‘I’ll hire you, of course. Since four? I’m impressed. You’ve even arrived before the insurance people.’ As it happened, LEI’s ‘insurance people’ owned 49 per cent of Nexus, and would stay out of the way until we were finished, but I didn’t see any reason to mention that. Lansing added sourly, ‘Our so-called security firm only worked up the courage to phone me half an hour ago. Evidently a fibre-optic junction box was sabotaged, disconnecting the whole area. They’re supposed to send in patrols in the event of equipment failure, but apparently they didn’t bother.’

  I grimaced sympathetically. ‘What exactly were you people making here?’

  ‘Making? Nothing. We did no manufacturing; this was pure R & D.’

  In fact, I’d already established that LEI’s factories were all in Thailand and Indonesia, with the head office in Monaco, and research facilities scattered around the world. There’s a fine line, though, between demonstrating that the facts are at your fingertips, and unnerving the client. A total stranger ought to make at least one trivial wrong assumption, ask at least one misguided question. I always do.

  ‘So what were you researching and developing?’

  ‘That’s commercially sensitive information.’

  I took my notepad from my shirt pocket and displayed a standard contract, complete with the usual secrecy provisions. She glanced at it, then had her own computer scrutinise the document. Conversing in modulated infra-red, the machines rapidly negotiated the fine details. My notepad signed the agreement electronically on my behalf, and Lansing’s did the same, then they both chimed happily in unison to let us know that the deal had been concluded.

  Lansing said, ‘Our main project here was engineering improved syncytiotrophoblastic cells.’ I smiled patiently, and she translated for me. ‘Strengthening the barrier between the maternal and foetal blood supplies. Mother and foetus don’t share blood directly, but they exchange nutrients and hormones across the placental barrier. The trouble is, all kinds of viruses, toxins, pharmaceuticals and illicit drugs can also cross over. The natural barrier cells didn’t evolve to cope with HIV, foetal alcohol syndrome, cocaine-addicted babies, or the next thalidomide-like disaster. We’re aiming for a single intravenous injection of a gene-tailoring vector, which would trigger the formation of an extra layer of cells in the appropriate structures within the placenta, specifically designed to shield the foetal blood supply from contaminants in the maternal blood.’

  ‘A thicker barrier?’

  ‘Smarter. More selective. More choosy about what it lets through. We know exactly what the developing foetus actually needs from the maternal blood. These gene-tailored cells would contain specific channels for transporting each of those substances. Nothing else would be allowed through.’

  ‘Very impressive.’ A cocoon around the unborn child, shielding it from all of the poisons of modern society. It sounded like exactly the kind of beneficent technology a company called Life Enhancement would be hatching in leafy Lane Cove. True, even a layman could spot a few flaws in the scheme. I’d heard that HIV most often infected children during birth itself, not pregnancy, but presumably there were other viruses which crossed the placental barrier more frequently. And I had no idea whether or not mothers at risk of giving birth to children stunted by alcohol or addicted to cocaine were likely to rush out en masse and have gene-tailored foetal barriers installed, but I could picture a strong demand from people terrified of food additives, pesticides, and pollutants. In the long term – if the system actually worked, and wasn’t prohibitively expensive – it could even become a part of routine prenatal care.

  Beneficent, and lucrative.

  In any case, whether or not there were biological, economic and social factors which might keep the technology from being a complete success, it was hard to imagine anyone objecting to the principle of the thing.

  I said, ‘Were you working with animals?’

  Lansing scowled. ‘Only early calf embryos, and disembodied bovine uteruses on tissue-support machines. If it was an animal-rights group, they would have been better off bombing an abattoir.’

  ‘Mmm.’ In the past few years, the Sydney chapter of Animal Equality – the only group known to use such extreme methods – had concentrated on primate research facilities. They might have changed their focus, or been misinformed, but LEI still seemed like an odd target; there were still plenty of laboratories widely known to use whole live rats and rabbits as if they were disposable test tubes – many of them quite close by. ‘What about competitors?’

  ‘No one else is pursuing this kind of product line, so far as I know. There’s no race being run; we’ve already obtained individual patents for all of the essential components – the membrane channels, the transporter molecules – so any competitor would have to pay us licence fees, regardless.’

  ‘What if someone simply wanted to damage you financially?’

  ‘Then they should have bombed one of the factories instead. Cutting off our cash flow would have been the best way to hurt us; this laboratory wasn’t earning a cent.’

  ‘Your share price will still take a dive, won’t it? Nothing makes investors nervous quite so much as terrorism.’

  Lansing agreed, reluctantly. ‘But then, whoever took advantage of that and launched a takeover bid would suffer the same taint themselves. I don’t deny that commercial sabotage takes place in this industry now and then, but not on a level as crude as this. Genetic engineering is a subtle business. Bombs are for fanatics.’

  Perhaps. But who would be fanatically opposed to the idea of shielding human embryos from viruses and poisons? Several religious sects flatly rejected any kind of modification to human biology, but the ones who employed violence were far more likely to have bombed a manufacturer of abortifacient drugs than a laboratory dedicated to the task of safeguarding the unborn child.

  Elaine Chang, head of the forensic team, approached us. I introduced her to Lansing. Elaine said, ‘It was a very professional job. If you’d hired demolition experts, they wouldn’t have done a single thing differently. But then, they probably would have used identical software to compute the timing and placement of the charges.’ She held up her notepad, and displayed a stylised reconstruction of the building, with hypothetical explosive charges marked. She hit a button and the simulation crumbled into something very like the actual mess behind us.

  She continued, ‘Most reputable manufacturers these days imprint every batch of explosives with a trace element signature, which remains in the residue. We’ve linked the charges used here to a batch stolen from a warehouse in Singapore five years ago.’

  I added, ‘Which may not be a great help though, I’m afraid. After five years on the black market, they could have changed hands a dozen times.’

  Elaine returned to her equipment. Lansing was beginning to look a little dazed. I said, ‘I’d like to talk to you again, later,
but I am going to need a list of your employees, past and present, as soon as possible.’

  She nodded, and hit a few keys on her notepad, transferring the list to mine. She said, ‘Nothing’s been lost, really. We had off-site backup for all of our data, administrative and scientific. And we have frozen samples of most of the cell lines we were working on, in a vault in Milson’s Point.’

  Commercial data backup would be all but untouchable, with the records stored in a dozen or more locations scattered around the world – heavily encrypted, of course. Cell lines sounded more vulnerable. I said, ‘You’d better let the vault’s operators know what’s happened.’

  ‘I’ve already done that; I phoned them on my way here.’ She gazed at the wreckage. ‘The insurance company will pay for the rebuilding. In six months’ time, we’ll be back on our feet. So whoever did this was wasting their time. The work will go on.’

  I said, ‘Who would want to stop it in the first place?’

  Lancing’s faint smirk appeared again, and I very nearly asked her what she found so amusing. But people often act incongruously in the face of disasters, large or small; nobody had died, she wasn’t remotely hysterical, but it would have been strange if a setback like this hadn’t knocked her slightly out of kilter.

  She said, ‘You tell me. That’s your job, isn’t it?’

  * * *

  Martin was in the living room when I arrived home that evening. Working on his costume for the Mardi Gras. I couldn’t imagine what it would look like when it was completed, but there were definitely feathers involved. Blue feathers. I did my best to appear composed, but I could tell from his expression that he’d caught an involuntary flicker of distaste on my face as he looked up. We kissed anyway, and said nothing about it.

  Over dinner, though, he couldn’t help himself.

  ‘Fortieth anniversary this year, James. Sure to be the biggest yet. You could at least come and watch.’ His eyes glinted; he enjoyed needling me. We’d had this argument five years running, and it was close to becoming a ritual as pointless as the parade itself.

  I said flatly, ‘Why would I want to watch ten thousand drag queens ride down Oxford Street, blowing kisses to the tourists?’

  ‘Don’t exaggerate. There’ll only be a thousand men in drag, at most.’

  ‘Yeah, the rest will be in sequined jockstraps.’

  ‘If you actually came and watched, you’d discover that most people’s imaginations have progressed far beyond that.’

  I shook my head, bemused. ‘If people’s imaginations had progressed, there’d be no Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras at all. It’s a freak show, for people who want to live in a cultural ghetto. Forty years ago, it might have been … provocative. Maybe it did some good, back then. But now? What’s the point? There are no laws left to change, no politics left to address. This kind of thing just recycles the same moronic stereotypes, year after year.’

  Martin said smoothly, ‘It’s a public reassertion of the right to diverse sexuality. Just because it’s no longer a protest march as well as a celebration doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant. And complaining about stereotypes is like … complaining about the characters in a medieval morality play. The costumes are code, shorthand. Give the great unwashed heterosexual masses credit for some intelligence; they don’t watch the parade and conclude that the average gay man spends all his time in a gold lamé tutu. People aren’t that literal-minded. They all learnt semiotics in kindergarten, they know how to decode the message.’

  ‘I’m sure they do. But it’s still the wrong message: it makes exotic what ought to be mundane. OK, people have the right to dress up any way they like and march down Oxford Street … but it means absolutely nothing to me.’

  ‘I’m not asking you to join in—’

  ‘Very wise.’

  ‘—but if one hundred thousand straights can turn up, to show their support for the gay community, why can’t you?’

  I said wearily, ‘Because every time I hear the word community, I know I’m being manipulated. If there is such a thing as the gay community, I’m certainly not a part of it. As it happens, I don’t want to spend my life watching gay and lesbian television channels, using gay and lesbian news systems … or going to gay and lesbian street parades. It’s all so … proprietary. You’d think there was a multinational corporation who had the franchise rights on homosexuality. And if you don’t market the product their way, you’re some kind of second-class, inferior, bootleg, unauthorised queer.’

  Martin cracked up. When he finally stopped laughing, he said, ‘Go on. I’m waiting for you to get to the part where you say you’re no more proud of being gay than you are of having brown eyes, or black hair, or a birthmark behind your left knee.’

  I protested, ‘That’s true. Why should I be ‘‘proud’’ of something I was born with? I’m not proud, or ashamed. I just accept it. And I don’t have to join a parade to prove that.’

  ‘So you’d rather we all stayed invisible?’

  ‘Invisible! You’re the one who told me that the representation rates in movies and TV last year were close to the true demographics. And if you hardly even notice it any more when an openly gay or lesbian politician gets elected, that’s because it’s no longer an issue. To most people, now, it’s about as significant as … being left- or right-handed.’

  Martin seemed to find this suggestion surreal. ‘Are you trying to tell me that it’s now a non-subject? That the inhabitants of this planet are now absolutely impartial on the question of sexual preference? Your faith is touching, but …’ He mimed incredulity.

  I said, ‘We’re equal before the law with any heterosexual couple, aren’t we? And when was the last time you told someone you were gay and they so much as blinked? And yes, I know, there are dozens of countries where it’s still illegal – along with joining the wrong political parties, or the wrong religions. Parades in Oxford Street aren’t going to change that.’

  ‘People are still bashed in this city. People are still discriminated against.’

  ‘Yeah. And people are also shot dead in peak-hour traffic for playing the wrong music on their car stereos, or denied jobs because they live in the wrong suburbs. I’m not talking about the perfection of human nature. I just want you to acknowledge one tiny victory: leaving out a few psychotics, and a few fundamentalist bigots, most people just don’t care.’

  Martin said ruefully, ‘If only that were true.’

  The argument went on for more than an hour – ending in a stalemate, as usual. But then, neither of us had seriously expected to change the other’s mind.

  I did catch myself wondering afterwards, though, if I really believed all of my own optimistic rhetoric. About as significant as being left- or right-handed? Certainly, that was the line taken by most Western politicians, academics, essayists, talk-show hosts, soap-opera writers, and mainstream religious leaders, but the same people had been espousing equally high-minded principles of racial equality for decades, and the reality still hadn’t entirely caught up on that front. I’d suffered very little discrimination, myself – by the time I reached high school, tolerance was hip, and I’d witnessed a constant stream of improvements since then … but how could I ever know precisely how much hidden prejudice remained? By interrogating my own straight friends? By reading the sociologists’ latest attitude surveys? People will always tell you what they think you want to hear.

  Still, it hardly seemed to matter. Personally, I could get by without the deep and sincere approval of every other member of the human race. Martin and I were lucky enough to have been born into a time and place where, in almost every tangible respect, we were treated as equal.

  What more could anyone hope for?

  In bed that night, we made love very slowly, at first just kissing and stroking each other’s bodies for what seemed like hours. Neither of us spoke, and in the stupefying heat I lost all sense of belonging to any other time, any other reality. Nothing existed but the two of us; the rest of the world, the rest of my
life, went spinning away into the darkness.

  * * *

  The investigation moved slowly. I interviewed every current member of LEI’s workforce, then started on the long list of past employees. I still believed that commercial sabotage was the most likely explanation for such a professional job, but blowing up the opposition is a desperate measure; a little civilised espionage usually comes first. I was hoping that someone who’d worked for LEI might have been approached in the past and offered money for inside information – and if I could find just one employee who’d turned down a bribe, they might have learnt something useful from their contact with the presumed rival.

  Although the Lane Cove facility had been built only three years before, LEI had operated a research division in Sydney for twelve years before that, in North Ryde, not far away. Many of the ex-employees from that period had moved interstate or overseas; quite a few had been transferred to LEI divisions in other countries. Still, almost no one had changed their personal phone numbers, so I had very little trouble tracking them down.

  The exception was a biochemist named Catherine Mendelsohn; the number listed for her in the LEI staff records had been cancelled. There were seventeen people with the same surname and initials in the national phone directory; none admitted to being Catherine Alice Mendelsohn, and none looked at all like the staff photo I had.

  Mendelsohn’s address in the Electoral Roll, an apartment in Newtown, matched the LEI records, but the same address was in the phone directory (and Electoral Roll) for Stanley Goh, a young man who told me that he’d never met Mendelsohn. He’d been leasing the apartment for the past eighteen months.

  Credit-rating databases gave the same out-of-date address. I couldn’t access tax, banking, or utilities records without a warrant. I had my knowledge miner scan the death notices, but there was no match there.

  Mendelsohn had worked for LEI until about a year before the move to Lane Cove. She’d been part of a team working on a gene-tailoring system for ameliorating menstrual side-effects, and although the Sydney division had always specialised in gynaecological research, for some reason the project was about to be moved to Texas. I checked the industry publications; apparently, LEI had been rearranging all of its operations at the time, gathering together projects from around the globe into new multi-disciplinary configurations, in accordance with the latest fashionable theories of research dynamics. Mendelsohn had declined the transfer, and had been retrenched.