Blood Music

CHAPTER TWELVE

Gail found Edward lying on the couch, sleeping fitfully as a chill freak winter breeze whistled outside. She sat down beside him and stroked his arm until his eyes opened.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi to you.” He blinked and looked around. “What time is it?”
“I just got home.”
“Four-thirty. Christ. Have I been asleep?”
“I wasn’t here,” Gail said. “Have you?”
“I’m still tired.”
“So what did Vergil do this time?”
Edward’s face assumed a patent mask of equanimity. He caressed her chin with one finger—“Chin chucking,” she called it, finding it faintly objectionable, as if she were a cat.
“Something’s wrong,” she said. “Are you going to tell me, or just keep acting like everything’s normal?”
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Edward said.
“Oh, Lord,” Gail sighed, standing. “You’re going to divorce me for that Baker woman.” Mrs. Baker weighed three hundred pounds and hadn’t known she was pregnant until her fifth month.
“No,” Edward said listlessly.
“Rapturous relief.” Gail touched his forehead lightly. “You know this kind of introspection drives me crazy.”
“Well, it’s nothing I can talk about, so…” He took her hand in his and patted it.
“That’s disgustingly patronizing,” she said. “I’m going to make some tea. Want some?” He nodded and she went into the kitchen.
Why not just reveal all? he asked himself. An old friend was turning himself into a galaxy.
He cleared away the dining table instead.
That night, unable to sleep, Edward looked down on Gail from his sitting position, pillow against the wall, and tried to determine what he knew was real, and what wasn’t.
I’m a doctor, he told himself. A technical, scientific profession. Supposed to be immune to things like future shock.
Vergil Ulam was turning into a galaxy.
How would it feel to be topped off with a trillion Chinese? He grinned in the dark, and almost cried at the same time. What Vergil had inside him was unimaginably stranger than Chinese. Stranger than anything Edward—or Vergil—could easily understand. Perhaps ever understand.
What kind of psychology or personality would a cell develop—or a cluster of cells, for that matter? He tried to recall all his schooling on cell environments in the human body. Blood, lymph, tissue, interstitial fluid, cerebrospinal fluid…He could not imagine an organism of human complexity in such surroundings not going crazy from boredom. The environment was simple, the demands relatively simple, and fee levels of behavior were suited to cells, not people. On the other hand, stress might be the major factor—the environment was benign to familiar cells, hell on unfamiliar cells.
But he knew what was important, if not necessarily what was real: the bedroom, streetlights and tree shadows on the window curtains, Gail sleeping.
Very important. Gail, in bed, sleeping.
He thought of Vergil sterilizing the dishes of altered E. coli. The bottle of enhanced lymphocytes. Perversely, Krypton came to mind—Superman’s home world, billions of geniuses destroyed in an all-encompassing calamity. Murder? Genocide?
There was no barrier between sleeping and waking. He was watching the window, and city lights glared through as the curtains opened. They could have been living in New York (Irvine nights were never that brightly illuminated) or Chicago; he had lived in Chicago for two years
and the window shattered, soundless, the glass peeling back and falling away. The city crawled in through the window, a great, spiky lighted-up prowler growling in a language he couldn’t understand, made up of auto horns, crowd noises, construction bedlam. He tried to fight it off, but it got to Gail and turned into a shower of stars, sprinkling all over the bed, all over everything in the room.
He jerked awake to the sound of a gust of wind and the windows rattling. Best not to sleep, he decided, and stayed awake until it was time to dress with Gail. As she left for the school, he kissed her deeply, savoring the reality of her human, unviolated lips.
Then he made the long drive to North Torrey Pines Road past the Salk Institute with its spare concrete architecture past the dozens of new and resurrected research centers which made up Enzyme Valley, surrounded by eucalypti and the new hybrid fast-growing conifers whose ancestors had given the road its name.
The black sign with red Times Roman letters sat atop its mound of Korean grass. The buildings beyond followed the fashion of simple planar concrete surfaces, except for the ominous black cube of the defense contracts labs.
At the guardhouse, a thin, wiry man in dark blue stepped out of his cubicle and leaned down to the Volkswagen’s window level. He stared at Edward with an air of aloofness. “Business, sir?”
“I’m here to see Dr. Bernard.”
The guard asked for ID. Edward produced his wallet. The guard took it to his phone in the cubicle and spent some time discussing its contents. He returned it, still aloof, and said, “There ain’t any visitor’s parking. Take space 31 in the employee lot that’s around this curve and on the other side of the front office, west wing. Don’t go anywhere but the front office.”
“Of course not,” Edward said testily. “Around this curve.” He pointed. The guard nodded curtly and returned to the cubicle.
Edward walked down the flagstone path to the front office. Papyrus reeds grew next to concrete ponds filled with gold and silver carp. The glass doors opened at his approach, and he entered. The circular lobby held a single couch and table of technical journals and newspapers.
“May I help you?” the receptionist asked. She was slender, attractive, hair carefully arranged in the current artificial bun that Gail so fervently eschewed.
“Dr. Bernard, please.”
“Dr. Bernard?” She looked puzzled. “We don’t have—”
“Dr. Milligan?”
Edward turned to see Bernard entering the automatic doors. Thank you, Janet,” he said to the receptionist. She returned to her switchboard to route calls. “Please come with me, Dr. Milligan. We’ll have a conference room all to our selves.” He led Edward through the rear door and down the concrete path flanking the west wing’s ground floor.
Bernard wore a dapper gray suit that matched his graying hair; his profile was sharp and handsome. He closely resembled Leonard Bernstein; it was easy to see why the press had accorded nun so much coverage. He was a pioneer—and photogenic, besides. “We keep very tight security here. It’s the court decisions of the last ten years, you know. They’ve been absolutely insane. Losing patent rights because of simply mentioning work being done at a scientific conference. That sort of thing. What else can we expect when the judges are so ignorant of what’s really happening?” The question seemed rhetorical. Edward nodded politely and obeyed Bernard’s hand gesture to climb a flight of steel stairs to the second floor.
“You’ve seen Vergil recently?” Bernard asked as he unlocked room 245.
“Yesterday.”
Bernard entered ahead of him and turned on the lights. The room was barely ten feet square, furnished with a round table and four chairs and a blackboard on one wall Bernard dosed the door. “Sit, please.” Edward pulled out a chair and Bernard sat opposite him, putting his elbows on the table. “Ulam is brilliant. And I won’t hesitate to say, courageous.”
“He’s my friend. I’m very worried about him.”
Bernard held up one finger. “Courageous—and a bloody damned fool. What’s happening to him should never have been allowed. He may have done it under duress, but that’s no excuse. Still, what’s done is done, you know everything, I take it.”
“I know the basics,” Edward said. “I’m still not clear on how he did it.”
“Nor are we, Dr. Milligan. That’s one of the reasons we’re offering him a lab again. And a home, while we sort this out.”
“He shouldn’t be in public,” Edward said.
“No, indeed. We’re constructing an isolation lab right now. But we’re a private company and our resources are limited.”
“This should be reported to the NIH and the FDA.”
Bernard sighed. “Yes. Well, we’d stand to lose everything if word leaked out right now. I’m not talking about business decisions—we’d stand to lose the whole biochips industry. The public outcry could be horrendous.”
“Vergil is very sick. Physically mentally. He may die.”
“Somehow, I don’t think he’ll die,” Bernard said. “But we’re getting away from the focus.”
“What is the focus?” Edward asked angrily. “I assume you’re working hand-in-glove with Genetron now—you certainly talk like you are. What does Genetron stand to gain?”
Bernard leaned back in his chair. “I can think of a large number of uses for small, super-dense computer elements with a biological base. Can’t you? Genetron has already made breakthroughs, but Vergil’s work is something else again.”
“What do you envision?”
Bernard’s smile was sunny and certifiably false. “I’m not really at liberty to say. It’ll be revolutionary. We’ll have to study him in lab conditions. Animal experiments have to be conducted. We’ll have to start from scratch, of course. Vergil’s…um…colonies can’t be transferred. They’re based on his own cells. We have to develop organisms that won’t trigger immune responses in other animals.”
“Like an infection?” Edward asked.
“I suppose there are similarities.” But Vergil is not infected or ill in the normal uses of the words.”
“My tests indicate he is,” Edward said.
“I don’t think the usual diagnostics are appropriate, do you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Listen,” Bernard said, leaning forward. “I’d like you to come and work with us once Vergil’s settled in. Your expertise might be useful to us.”
Edward almost flinched at the openness of the offer. “How will you benefit from all this?” he asked. “I mean you, personally.”
“Edward, I have always been at the forefront of my profession. I see no reason why I shouldn’t be helping here. With my knowledge of brain and nerve functions, and the research I’ve been conducting in artificial intelligence and neurophysiology—”
“You could help Genetron hold off a government investigation,” Edward said.
“That’s being very blunt Too blunt, and unfair.” For a moment, Edward sensed uncertainty and even a touch of anxiety in Bernard.
“Maybe I am,” Edward said. “And maybe that’s not the worst thing that can happen.”
“I don’t get you,” Bernard said.
“Bad dreams, Mr. Bernard.”
Bernard’s eyes narrowed and his brows lowered. Here was an uncharacteristic expression, not suitable for covers on Time, Mega or Rolling Stone: a puzzled and angry scowl. “Our time is too valuable to be wasted. I’ve made the offer in good faith.”
“Of course,” Edward said. “And of course, I’d like to visit the lab when Vergil’s settled in. If I’m still welcome, bluntness and all.”
“Of course,” Bernard echoed, but his thoughts were almost nakedly apparent: Edward would never be playing on his team. They rose together and Bernard held out his hand. His palm was damp; he was as nervous as Edward.
“I assume you want this all in strict confidence,” Edward said.
“I’m not sure we can require it of you. You’re not under contract.”
“No,” Edward said.
Bernard regarded him for a long moment, then nodded. I’ll escort you out.”
“There’s one more thing,” Edward said. “Do you know anything about a woman named Candice?”
“Vergil mentioned he had a girlfriend by that name.”
“Had, or has?”
“Yes, I see what you mean,” Bernard said. “She could be a security problem.”
“No, that’s not what I mean,” Edward said emphatically. “Not at all what I mean.”