by Rebecca Ore
Even through the mantis charms, I realized the implications of that. Keep them drode heads happy, drugged with bug juice and good vibrations. “Where were they first seen?”
“New York and Long Island.”
“Any evidence of gene branding?”
“You know about that?”
“We Illichers give each other good educations.”
“Brands tampered with, probably from the Rockefeller University people who helixed the street tree silk moths. Or stolen from them.”
I leaned back in bed with the mantis still on my hand. “Someone gave it the pheromones, the sounds, and the better lungs.”
“Yes. And it eats kibble that’s been showing up in ghetto shops.”
“Well, why bother about it. Owners couldn’t have invented a better insect.”
“The tranquilizer tends to make people less anxious. But about 20 percent of drode heads started trying to make their own plans. All of them have had mantises for over three months. Plus, we want this person who tampers with insect genes under control. Insects are very volatile without help, evolving resistances. Now, if a human is unnaturally tampering with insects… come on, you’re an ecologist. You should hate the implications.”
“You’re right. I should hate it.” But I couldn’t. It was Jergen all over again, me feeling three-quarters dead, hating the life I’d been leading, then a door opens and love is on the other side.
“I’ll send in mantis kibble with your next meal.”
THREE
INSECTS SPIRALLING
OUT OF MANHATTAN
Now we use our enemies to save us, Dorcas thought as she manipulated her waldo glove. First she’d insert the DNA fragment of redesigned insect lung into a retrovirus. Insects deserve better than book lungs and spiracles. She could admit to herself that perhaps she was just playing with insects. We toy with mantises and they play back to us.
One of Dorcas’s enemies once told her that a non-publishing scientist was an oxymoron. When she told him that she wanted to use science to make neater insects, he said, “You’re an engineer, maybe an artist, not a scientist. The world doesn’t need neater insects. And we can’t afford to give a lab to a bioenhanced redhead who wants to play.”
The viruses were solid crystals floating in front of her eyes, chemically shattered and rebuilt. Dorcas dissolved them and they swirled away, a solution to be oozed into wasp eggs. On the right hand side of the display was a window into the lab that Dorcas checked with periodic nervousness.
Her latest superior and lover, Henry Itaka, Ph.D, M.D., A.Ph.D. (that new degree of academic inflation), rebuilt people. Dorcas, feeling rebuilt people weren’t ecologically appropriate, rebuilt insects. The Federal Laboratory Administration hadn’t granted them permits to work on either problem. FLA wanted all recombinant projects registered, controlled, and industrially applicable.
(The Rockefeller University security files told the first investigator that the woman in Lab 43, Dorcas Rae, was an adult only child, a Ph.D., and a long time lover of various married men able to offer her postdoctoral fellowships.)
She rarely used technicians in her lab, but if she needed them would get her lovers technicians to do the work. She ordered drode heads for computer connections about half the time, but knew her way around a keyboard, most virtual reality systems, and a couple of programming languages, unusual skills these days.
“You’d make better money in gene-tech,” one of her lovers told her. “You don’t have the hots for shoving your papers and ideas in other people’s faces.”
“But…” Dorcas couldn’t explain that the gene industry monitored its people’s time too closely. She preferred being innovative with genetic material too much.
Dorcas lived on what academics call soft money—postdocs, study grants—but never got tenure track positions. She was the junior author of seven papers, the senior author of one, published online in a discussion group chaired by a former lover. Only another woman could take her seriously.
(The first security officer to check her file was male. He didn’t copy her file onto his disc, but called up the next file just as Dorcas began changing the cell membranes on the wasp eggs to make them more receptive to the retroviruses.)
Whether working with retroviruses or with chromosomal pieces, Dorcas used electroporation to make the insertions easier. She’d fit tomorrow’s eggs with chromosomal pieces. Fewer would take, but they’d be more likely to affect the final product. Every day, she ran off lots of a queen wasp ovary full before doing the tasks Henry assigned her.
Dorcas worried that she was simply creating mosaics with genes that wouldn’t bear enough promoter sequences to find expression. If the new genetic material would make a lunged wasp, perhaps that wasp’s progeny wouldn’t breed true. All transgenes are heterozygotes. Expression is a crap shoot.
Rolling gene dice. A thousand zygote tries to get something that grew up to express the effect Dorcas hoped her transgene would carry.
Dorcas had a strange compassion for the zygotes who failed. She’d been the only survivor of a hundred zygote tries by her parents, their pick of the litter, the best expression of their DNA. They’d turned down rebuilding, not because it was illegal with people—they could have afforded the bribes—but they wanted Dorcas to be their real daughter. And her dad wanted his daughter to be beautiful. Smart was incidental.
After the eggs received the lung DNA, Dorcas ordered the computer to bring in this morning’s wasp and lowered the magnification, switching the microscope to ordinary light. A miniature conveyer brought in a queen wasp from a strain already rebuilt with neuroleptic venom and cockroach immunity to insecticides.
We’ll be studying war no more, no more, Dorcas hummed.
In Dorcas’s field of vision, a needle the size of a broomstick probed between the chitin plates of a wasp the size of a small airplane. Dorcas called for yet lower magnification, moved the needle between two abdominal plates, squeezed the redesigned egg cells into the wasp’s ovaries. Then she dosed the wasp’s own eggs with the enhanced retrovirus, a “just in case” move. Still blind to outside reality, she pulled her hands out of the waldo gloves and flexed them, high so they wouldn’t touch anything on the table. She wore eye cups that would have looked like swim goggles except for the cables feeding from the microscope to the black domes over her eyes.
Dorcas Rae, once a tall skinny kid in transparent braces and red hair, now the heavy side of willowy, still without tenure, an academic gypsy, loved her Klein-bottle logic of using science to attack the ecological bottleneck that human science and technology created.
Lunch time. Dorcas pulled microscope feed lines out of her goggles and the goggles away from her face. After stretching, she put on her UV hat. Before she put the wasp in a vial and the vial in her pocket. Dorcas hit her fooler loop for the lab cameras. What would they do to me if they caught me stealing DNA sequences? Dorcas wondered, Order me to make war bugs? Sell me to industry as a gene hacker drode head? Daddy would protect me, unless he felt I was embarrassing him. She swallowed chelate pills for the pollutant of the week. The fooler loop edited out the few seconds that Docus needed to conceal her insect, but went back to real time with the pills.
Rockefeller University, during the decade when it was really dangerous to be a DNA tweaker, built tunnels into Manhattan subway stations so researchers could come and go without Luddite attacks. Dorcas locked her lab. checked out of Tunnel Five, and rode the walkway across to Lexington Avenue. Blinking, she rose into the sun and walked to Central Park.
Now,for a really big wasp to sting soldiers to sleep. Maybe, this wasp would find a male. Maybe the retrovirus would infect other wasps. Maybe the gene wouldn’t be expressed in wasps. The wasp crawled to the edge of the vial. Dorcas looked around to see if anyone was watching. The type of wasp she was rechanging had been designed originally as a house pet, building colored paper nests in room comers, eating mosquitos. The pet company found strains of wild wasps so gentle the people whose
houses they’d colonized hadn’t thought it worth the insectide to kill them. Then they hired a team that included Dorcas to make the wasps gentler yet, resistant to environmental toxins, and capable of using dyed paper pulp to build their nests. A year later, some drug dealer’s gene hacker modified the venom. The drug wasps would sting if their humans forced them.
Tweak the reflexes, the vision, the cascade times for neurotransmitters, and a woman who wanted could make a mean wasp. But this was one of the gentle wasps.
The queen wasp circled Dorcas, buzzing nervously, tilting her abdomen forward. Why am I being abandoned in the park? But Dorcas knew the wasp lacked enough neurons to think that. The wasp drifted away from Dorcas, circled a pretzel cart, then flew skyward.
After Dorcas lost sight of her wasp, she walked a bit in Central Park. Slum children gathering silk climbed the trees of heaven looking for cocoons. They stared at Dorcas, suspecting her to be armed, wrapped in Kevlar. One girl looked about ready to be harvested herself, to have her head shaved, dole electrodes put in, turned into a scanning device or a medium-grade data processor. Dorcas herself hadn’t redesigned the wild silk moths that spun in the leaves like Bombyx mori caterpillars. The work inspired her, though. What more could insects give us?
The moth’s such a useful insect to have around poor people and weed trees, Dorcas thought. The children surrounded her, but stayed back. I’m an irritant in a vacuole in the body politic, but a necessary irritant. She bought a hot dog in a whole wheat bun from a street vendor, then walked back along 63rd Street.
Some poor dole brain lying down with electrodes scanned her security tapes. Dorcas wondered how alert a dole brain would be to the tiny flicker of a fooler loop. How much could a dole person care?
The day was one of those brilliant Manhattan summer days, not too hot, the air so clear Dorcas saw every detail on the old copper roofs. She passed a pet store that sold stick insects, captive-bred endangered centipedides, butterfly eggs and captive breeding kits.
We’re bringing in the fragile ones, so fashionable to be part of the ark movement. Why not make species that can stand up to us? Dorcas herself arked rare fish and one land snail, exchanged juveniles with other arkists, kept pedigrees. Belonia hasselotti, Betta macrostomata, antabantoids who evolved to live in low oxygen waters, whose eutrophic waters were drained or filled with hybrid tilapia. She’d asked one of her fellow arkists, “Would descendants of these fish find a natural world to return to? They’re evolving now to do well on flake food.”
Her friend argued that humans owed the natural world and saving the species mattered, even if they had to be arked across deep space to virgin planets.
Dorcas said. “But funds for space have been cut. Too many people,” She also almost said that what we needed was a world where humans had to struggle again, not with each other as now, but with the rest of creation.
With that thought, Dorcas knew she could empower the natural world if she just kept her mouth shut.
The arked endangered species needed teeth, venom, brains.
Dorcas chose insects. She’d already released giant mantises that soothed humans. The dole brains loved them.
She passed under a street light where a group of hornets kept warm through the winter. They moved out of the great paper football when she stopped, looking at her as she looked up at them, She pulled the tip end of her hot dog out of the bun and laid it at the base of the lamp.
The hornets moved their antennae, then one dropped down to the hotdog, then another, and another. Dorcas watched for a minute, then continued toward the University. She went underground at Third Avenue and checked back in.
“Your boss is back,” the guard said. “He wondered why you were fooling around with an outside lunch.”
“It’s a pretty day,” Dorcas said. She went back to her office, hung up her coat, took another chelate pill for whatever might have been in the hotdog, and looked for Henry, suddenly feeling anxious. She remembered the hate-filled stare of the adolescent girl, wondered if a dole brain would willfully look for flickers in security tapes.
When Henry put his hand on her shoulder, Dorcas jumped.
She said, “What a weird world we live in.”
Henry was part Japanese genetically, whatever that meant, considering that Japan had proved to be a genetic mix of Polynesian, Korean, and Ainu, plus small fractions of Caucasian and African material. His grandfather refused to admit that children he sired on his blue-eyed American wife could be anything other than Japanese. Henry’s father married another American woman, as blonde as he could find. Henry came out blue-eyed, a hint of epicanthic folds around them, blonde, and tall. Dorcas, who’d been gangly until she hit her sophomore year, preferred lovers who thought her youth more than made up for her figure. But she was getting older and the lovers younger.
“Why didn’t you wait until I got back before having lunch?” he said. She knew he’d been getting a high-security contract. Normally, everyone just interfaced, but high-security types never trusted computer security.
“The planes are always late,” Dorcas replied. She felt the blend of lust, envy, and intellectual excitement that marked her attachment to her various mates. But she couldn’t tell him what she’d been up to. This, she realized as she took Henry’s hand in her, probably was just as well. Henry wanted to bounce his ideas off her.
“Well, come to my office. I’ll send down to the canteen, then we can talk.”
When they got to his office, he grabbed her, one hand on her buttocks, the other in her hair. “Missed you. Missed your stimulating conversation.” He lifted Dorcas’s hair and looked at it again, as if he’d never been convinced that the color was real. The color was real enough even though the number of hair follicles had been augmented and Dorcas’s freckles demelanized. A true red-haired beauty was a rare thing, Dorcas’s daddy had told her when she knew she’d failed, but her mother had been a good enough provider to have paid for the skin and hair job.
“Women always cheat,” her mother had told Dorcas as the pre-op sedatives had begun to work. The red would grow from the roots, from more follicles than Dorcas had been born with.
Now Dorcas told Henry again, “You know my hair’s real.”
“Yes, the hair is so various in tint, but couldn’t your family afford nanoteched follicles? You’re always changing in my mind. Each time I come back, I realize I’d forgotten what you really look like,” Henry said.
Dorcas suspected he was telling her she needed to lose weight. She said, “Did any of your friends know about any job openings?”
“We got a renewal of our grant, plus a new project. You’ll be able to stay on here.”
“Where I know the equipment and the genome library, good,” Dorcas said. She wondered if she’d spend so much time deepening the ecology with wasp queens and preying mantises if she had her own lab. And how long would this last with Henry? He seemed now to find her convenient, not an object of desire.
“We’re getting a domestic containment contract, so if FBI people ask your neighbors…” He didn’t finish but backed her against a tank in his private ark for endangered Appalachian salamanders and kissed her mouth.
Dorcas opened her mouth and thought, Maybe this isn’t a good time to hack the security system. She sucked Henry’s tongue clean of airplane lunch residues, then pulled back to ask, “Domestic containment?”
“Something against eco-terrorists. Something to monitor the drode heads. Based on military bio agents. They told me we’ve got some unlicensed insects showing up. Right up your alley,” Henry said, his hand sliding up her leg.
“What about my own lab?”
“Money’s tight, but…”
“What about tenure?”
“You know Rockefeller only grants tenure to lab heads. You need to think like a consultant, lean, mean, and able to switch loyalties for a dollar.”
“I thought you were going to ask your friends about a tenure track job for me.”
“Oh, Dorcas, wha
t are you, a science slut? Fucking me for job leads? You need to finish that paper on the work you’ve been doing with wasps.”
“Henry, that’s not fair.”
“The other Ph.D.’s from your program should be the ones to give you job leads.”
“They hate me because I was beautiful for a decade.”
“You could… you still are beautiful.”
Dorcas hated the stereotype of the sexless woman scientist, hated faculty wives’ jealousy, the prigs in her program who quipped that she took her comps on her back. Both as an undergraduate and in grad school, she only fucked people after they’d graded or evaluated her. She never fucked her advisor or any of the guys on her dissertation committee. Dorcas asked Henry, “How is your wife, by the way?”
“She’s forgotten every bit of work she did on the human genome project. Some women don’t age well.”
“I need to get out more, walking. Would the FBI think that was too eccentric?”
“Not for a woman scientist,” Henry said. He smiled, Dorcas was sure, at the prospect of her losing weight. Dorcas tried bulimia when she was a teenager, but her braces turned out to be wired to inform on her if she threw up on them. Her family doctor put a shock choker around her throat to make sure she didn’t try tickling her throat again. “You’re too thin already,” both the orthodontist and doctor told her.
Dorcas had a decade and then some as a beauty. Now she’d welcome anorexia, but she was too sane. “Henry, help me,” she said, lips at his ear level. She always expected consideration from her men, even after the passion faded.
“I know a great personal trainer,” he said. “We could split the cost.”
Dorcas wondered if her wasp queen found a mate in Central Park. “I’d love that.” She pulled back to look at him.
A hint of anxiety flicked across Henry’s face. Dorcas remembered that three out of five of her married lovers dropped her within a year of displaying that facial tic.
