by Rebecca Ore
Allison suggested releasing the little wasps away from pollution sources so they could multiply before they reached humankind. Every national and state forest in Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Illinois had some.
The real challenge was still the neuroleptic wasp that could sting to sleep people whose violence was breaking through. Dorcas wanted that wasp to be perfect, not to respond to any common anger.
But Willie asked, “Do people who start wars have anger, or is it just the bastards getting ripped by machines and hallucination bugs who get mad?”
If only Dorcas had a lover, her situation would be perfect. Willie’s experience with the hallie bugs made him an unsatisfactory lover. Dorcas tried, but erections terrified him. She knew Allison still worked on Willie, but emotional cripples made Dorcas uneasy.
Meanwhile, Loba grew two perfect arms. Loba with arms seemed less threatening than Loba without.
Later, the morning after they’d reached Davenport, Loba went out before the others woke. She came back and said, “I’ve rented us barges,” Loba said. Now, she limped. Dorcas wondered if the Brazilian woman could allow herself a truly normal body. “We can see the damage Allison’s bomb did as we head down to Mexico. Then to Brazil and Venezuela. Many black flies in the jungle, if not so many human-sucking mosquitos. You’ll find lots of good genetic material.”
“Are we coming back to the States?” Dorcas asked. She found she missed sex more than she missed Henry or any of her earlier lovers, which surprised her. But now, watching the Mississippi roll between its levees, trees bare, gas and battery recharge stations visible, Dorcas remembered her parents’ faxes from the Mekong. Perhaps they could go to release insects in Asia, then she could look for her parents. Her parents would be pissed if they knew what she was doing, of course, but Dorcas could pretend she was involved in secret war games. Of course, she was, but on what her parents would consider the wrong side.
Of course. She could arrange to meet them in New Orleans.
Loba said, “Hard for you to leave who you were?”
“I wasn’t much, a lab wife.”
“Don’t play tough with me. Why don’t you make an insect to take your mind off the men?”
“Whatever do you mean?”
“Miriam could have cut your heart out over Joe.”
“What kind of yuppizoidal possessive crap is that? Does she own him?”
“Yes, they own each other.”
“But I’m the scientist here.”
“Allison could make you a machine.”
“I don’t miss it that much,” Dorcas said. She was glad she’d arranged a special meeting code with her parents, a personal ad on The American Times net.
Or she could trace them through the American Association of Retired Persons, but that might trip a back-trace.
Loba said, “We’ll meet the barges at Hannibal.”
Willie and Allison plugged into the navigation system, maps and sonar to show where the Mississippi main channel was this week. The barges began drifting. Loba took Dorcas’s arm and led her back to the next vehicle.
Dorcas was surprised to see read helmets and what looked like a newer version of her computer. “I thought all my stuff was on the barges.” Dorcas asked.
“We’ve been acquiring duplicate equipment,” Loba said.
Dorcas wondered how long it would be before they acquired a duplicate gene hacker. “So now, we’re going down the Mississippi.” Various people did this every year, the aquatic equivalent of hiking the Pacific Crest or Appalachian Trails. Dorcas had always wanted to bisect America through its industrial midsection. She wished they could have started at the head of navigation in Minnesota, but this was much more than she’d even expected to have time to do.
At Hannibal, a restored nineteenth-century town laced with monorails and tramlines, Allison and Willie, in very good wigs, toured the Mark Twain sites. Loba met them as though they were strangers. Allison invited Loba and her friend to join them on the barges for dinner.
After dinner, they cast off again. Willie ran the first barge and towed the second. On the Illinois side, red and blue lights flashed on abandoned smokestacks. Dorcas realized this pollution had stopped before her time, but newer pollution continued, chemical factory drains, smokestacks that ran only in rainy weather to disguise their plumes. The river doubled when the Missouri hit it. The barge stopped for each lock. Big steel gates closed around them, water swirled out, then the big steel lock gates, groaned open and dropped them to the next level. Now, the eastern shore showed outlines of windowless buildings processing industrial secrets, backlit by streetlights and rail lines.
The barges passed under a brightly lit bridge. Between it and the next bridge floated a mini-mall, neon under plastic. Attached to the land by gangways, with windows down on the water sides, steel and aluminum hulled fast food joints sold krill, soyaburgers. Behind the floating fast food joints and riverboats-converted-to-casinos, Dorcas saw an old cathedral and an old courthouse, both land-bound buildings losing their dignity to the events on the river.
Beyond the second bridge, the Arch glistened above its flood lights, more fast food barges moored to the river steps. Loba said, “We pick up some food here, why not?”
The two barges pulled up beside a floating Chinese takeout place. Loba ordered kung po chicken, seven orders. The waiter at the window smiled and handed seven bags back to her almost as fast as she’d given the order. Dorcas wondered how badly the steam table or heat lamp damaged the servings.
“Okay, let’s move,” Loba spoke to the bridge. Willie maneuvered both barges back into mainstream. They passed the landing and steps up to the Arch.
Loba and Dorcas stood by the side railing looking at the city levees and the buildings glowing behind them. Dorcas asked, “Can we as a species sustain that, those flood walls, that energy consumption? But when it goes, something marvelous goes. I couldn’t have made the insects to defend the planet without that civilization.”
Loba said, “But without that civilization, the planet wouldn’t have needed your insects. We’re the defective by-catch of that civilization’s chase for the perfect.”
“You and the others. We’re funded by industrial accident settlements, aren’t we?”
“You, too. The planet speaks through you, whether you understand the message or not.”
Dorcas knew the Gaia hypothesis in any incarnation. “Never grant purpose to the universe. Or a planet. Things just happen.”
Loba said, “I suppose. Ah, St. Louis, you wanted to be Chicago, you wanted to be New York.”
Dorcas said, “I applied for a job at Washington University once.”
“What happened?”
“They didn’t hire me. Said I hadn’t published enough senior author papers.”
Loba said, “I’ve never understood this American mania for training people the system can’t absorb.”
St. Louis extended lights and bridges for miles, reflections dancing on the surface, then the barges floated off over darker water.
When they stopped at Memphis, a mantis boarded them. It was as large as anything from Dorcas’s lab-spawned generation, but not quite as chemically charming. Willie said, “We have a mascot.”
Dorcas asked, “Why did they lose the pheromone tranquilizer?”
“Probably it attracted things perfectly capable of loving what they ate,” Loba said.
Dorcas said, “But birds don’t have senses of smell.” Then she realized the mantises were big enough to feed a cat, help feed a coyote. “Yeah, they’d be vulnerable when they molted. I should have had the chemicals shut down then.”
Willie took the mantis up on his hand. He said, “But it’s still nice. I don’t need the tranquilizers now.”
Dorcas said, “But you’re still phobic of erections and small bugs.”
Willie turned slightly toward Allison, then shrugged.
Dorcas spent the rest of the time working again, submerging herself in science, wondering what she could do wi
th jungle insect genomes. She could give them torpor and hibernation, perhaps finding pesticide resistance superior to even Manhattan cockroaches. The desert and high Mexican mountains had always been the barrier between the rainforest insects and the civilization that created small tropics in concrete and steel, stacked higher than rainforests, heated and cooled to match Pliocene savannas. Dorcas would help these insects over the barriers.
Memphis crawled with agents of all descriptions. Loba limped off the lead barge to begin to deal with them. She came back and opened her hand in Dorcas’s face. On her hand was a vial four inches long and an inch and a half in diameter. Inside the vial was a grub. “Yours?”
Dorcas looked closely at the grub. “I never worked with beetles. What does it do?”
“It aborts women. It tastes quite good.”
“Steam engine time for insects,” Dorcas said. She felt miffed that she wasn’t the only one, but then this other hacker meant that she was not the Fed’s only target. “Do you plan to locate this person, too?”
“There was a bombing in Davis, a letter bomb mailed to a DNA researcher who had a guard to open his mail, but the guard was a Federal agent who neglected to open this letter. None of our friends knew anything about the researcher until after the bombing.”
Dorcas said, “What would they do if they caught me?”
“They’d offer you life if you let them do the full brain scan, what they did to Allison. Then they might send you back to us. We can’t take you back if you disappear for more than a few hours. They’d want you to make mantises that never helped anyone rediscover ambition.”
Dorcas asked, “Would you come hunting for me?”
“No.”
Dorcas enjoyed her new life, but if it ever became tedious, she could just leave. She took the vial off Loba’s hand. “You say women eat these? What if they’re not pregnant?”
“I’ve heard the worm gives pleasure.”
Dorcas opened the vial and ate part of the grub to see what it tasted like. She needed to eat it all. In twenty minutes, she was slumped against the superstructure, a female wringing her womb empty in wrong-way orgasms. The air touched her over and over, most knowing and intimate air. Loba passed her several times, looking down, then going on about her business. Loba came back and said, “Are you through now?”
Her uterus twitched back on its ligaments. Dorcas looked up and said, “It will work quite nicely to cut back human numbers.”
Loba said, “Trucks are coming to off-load us.”
Dorcas stumbled to her feet. She was astonished to find that she was fully dressed.
Loba said, “Remind me not to try that.”
Dorcas realized the insect orgasm was scary, now that it was over. “An aphrodisiac that really works.” Only a man would want to design an insect that left women so out of control. “You’d push a man out. Rupture his dick.”
“And what it would do for childbirth,” Dorcas said.
Loba said, “The worm doesn’t have that reputation on the streets. I wondered if it would bring men to orgasm. Perha is Willie could try it.”
Later that afternoon, Dorcas found a dockside kiosk that accessed The American Times. She asked Loba, “Can I see something on American Times? You can see me from the street.”
“Ill come in with you. What are you looking for?” Dorcas didn’t answer, but hypertexted to the want-ads from the last two months.
Ruthie, we’ve found the papers on your Rottweiler, Black Brock. Her parents were looking for her. Dorcas picked up a message pad and stylus.
Loba grabbed her hand and said, “What?”
“My parents are looking for me. Can’t I tell them I’m okay. We’ve got a code. Daddy was always ready for complete social chaos.”
“No.”
“Do you think the Feds would have approached them?”
“Of course. Your parents could trade you to the Feds, get a nanotech rejuvenation and start a whole new family.”
“They are nanotech rejuvenated already,” Dorcas said. “Would it please them to know you’re an outlaw gene hacker? They’re not going to do you any favors.”
Surrogate momma Loba spank and humiliate, too. “I’m their gourmet child,” Dorcas said. “Their bonsai family.”
“For a woman with a Ph.D., you are being stupid.”
“Okay, I won’t let them know I’m okay. They’ll worry about me.”
“I’m sure,” Loba said.
Dorcas asked Willie to put the prearranged code on the net. Loba perhaps knew and decided to let Dorcas, her star gene hacker, have a little leeway.
Willie and Allison stayed behind in Memphis.
FIFTEEN
FURTHER INDICATIONS
Of THE ECOSPHERE
Mike came to my dreams with his shot head. He told me how I’d be better off if I had married him. “Do something for Willie,” he said before he faded and the tone of the dream changed from nightmare to just REM sleep. I tried to sleep with Willie while we were somewhere in Tennessee, camping out with flasks of insect larvae eating through our culture material.
He was eager enough until he got an erection, then he immediately went soft and rolled off me. He lay trembling beside me. “You remind me of hallie bugs,” he said.
“Thanks a lot,” I said.
“I always wanted a woman, but I thought I didn’t have money enough for a whore.”
“Always found a way not to,” I said, juices curdling inside me.
“I could have fucked to death,” he said. I looked more closely. He was crying.
“Oh, Willie,” I said. I sat up.
“I thought I was… I had fucking down pat once.”
I wondered if I could coax Willie into trusting his dick again. “Is cuddling safe?”
“I could grow a tit, like we did in the machine, do something for you. The virtual you loved that a lot.”
The virtual me, the flesh me, the face I controlled—which was real? “Willie, when does the fear hit?”
“I thought I wanted a woman. I thought I wanted to come up with a plan. I’m doomed now. We’re going to get gunned down eventually. Dorcas thinks she can change her mind and live, but ain’t no way now, even for her.”
I knew he avoided the larvae flasks. How could he take working for insects if he was so afraid of anything that reminded him of hallie bugs?
“Willie, let me try to help you.” I wondered if he’d mind being pitied as much as I did. No, I wasn’t pitying him, I was being compassionate.
“I thought they’d fix me,” he said. “But they just muffled the fear.”
“Did the mantis help?” Laurel brought us the egg case Willie’s mantis had laid in New York before she died, but Dorcas told us it wouldn’t hatch for months.
“If we could take out all those memories,” Willie said. “In both of us.”
I felt strange. We could edit all his memories, at least the major connections between sexual arousal and terror. But we’d have to trust nanotech machines to cut and nip in the brain. My memories would have to stay to remind me how nasty life was.
I felt bewildered by my feelings toward Willie—irritation, compassion, and a strong desire to be the woman who fixed him.
In Memphis, Loba brought Dorcas a beetle grub which laid her down on the deck in orgasms. Willie couldn’t look. I found him staring off the stern, his hands over the rail twitching.
“Is it that bad?”
“It’s the same damn thing, isn’t it? A hallie bug.”
“We can ask when she’s done.”
“Why did I get involved with you people?”
“I’m glad you’re saying that to me, Willie. You ought to be careful around the others.”
“They abandoned you once. You trust them now?”
“I’m happier than I’ve ever been,” I said. Miriam told me to look at my hands when I had nightmares, get control of the dream, realize all the dream characters came from my own brain. I was the Mike with the bloody hole exposing our brai
ns.
Monsters invaded the planet, but I made them good guys even though the boss monster tried very hard to shift them back to the bad mode. My child self found Loba in a dream, then Willie. We attacked a terrifying cola bottle and threw it down between stair railings.
Kearney, taller than life, burst through my door with two little short men on either side of him.
Rape. I woke up laughing, the symbolism was so obvious.
Willie sat beside me, asking, “Allison, are you all right?”
“I just had a symbolic nightmare about rape. Willie, I want us both to be all right. After your body learns it won’t damage itself with orgasms anymore, perhaps you’ll be okay. Let’s try the worm, a tiny bit.”
“I can’t believe you want to do this to me.”
“Willie, I want you to be whole.” I wanted to really help someone else. People had always done to me. Hurt or helped, I’d always felt powerless. Not even the guns really helped.
“Bug of the bugs that bit me.”
At lunch the third day, after Willie went into town alone, with one of Loba’s friends discreetly following him, we all discussed it.
“Memphis has isolation tanks for rent,” Miriam said. “That would eliminate any possible friction.”
Joe said, “It would be permanent if he hurt himself this time.”
When Willie came back, I said, “Willie, please let us try to reverse the conditioning. You were only hurt with hallie bugs once, weren’t you?”
“I’ve adjusted to being fucked up,” he said. “Besides…”
“Are you a coward?” I asked. “We’ll suspend you in salt brine. You can’t possibly hurt yourself.”
“God, I’m with you people,” Willie said. “You want to experiment on me?”
