Into the New Millennium: Trailblazing Tales From Analog Science Fiction and Fact, 2000 - 2010 (55 page)

"I know."

The fish break up and swim around more or less randomly. Then they line up again. The J is up front again, but it hovers upside-down, looking sort of like an ‘n'. They spell:

nICE ASS

"Very funny," I say. "You had me going there."

"I didn't do it," he says in a shaky voice. Now he's creeping me out because I can tell he's not joking.

"Then what's going on?"

"Chaos theory, maybe," Gus says. "Did I ever tell you why I made them?"

"No."

"A friend was doing his PhD in some nonsense theory of chaos," he says, and sinks into the futon, his head clasped in his hands. "He was making a computer model of flocking birds, and he wanted to validate it. I told him that shoaling fish would be easier, since they are slower, and the environment is more controlled. You could even film them."

"Hence the video camera in your shop," I say.

"Yeah. Paul, my friend, said, ‘How do you tell one fish apart from the other?' And I said—we've had a few drinks by then—'What if they're labeled with letters?' We drank some more, and kind of laughed about it—if we had fish like that they might start randomly spelling stuff."

"So you stumbled drunkenly to your secret lair and hooked up the generator to the lightning rod," I say.

Gus cringes. "I took some angels and just tweaked the pigment expression. It's pretty easy with fish—all the right genes are mapped; I just had to figure out what segments should express the color to approximate letters. I had some NSF funding anyway, and did the angels as a side project. Paul had defended by then, but I gave him a tank and a few sentences worth of these buggers as a graduation present. He got a kick out of it."

"And you kept some for yourself," I say. "Shame on you—what about the taxpayers' money?"

He grins weakly. "Paul called me two days ago. Said his fish started spelling stuff."

"Like what?" I say, and feel a chill.

"Like the weather," Gus says. "And they got it right."

I laugh, although I'm really creeped out. "Well," I say, "there's probably an explanation."

"Like what?"

"Maybe Paul had a newspaper nearby, or a TV on. They could have seen it and mimicked it."

"I suppose so," Gus says, "but there's more. I think I caught my angels spelling something also."

"What?" I ask.

He shakes his head. "Nothing that made any sense."

I tell him about the messages I've seen. He says he knows nothing about them. I'm dumbfounded, but then I can't recall him being nearby for anything other than ALPHABET ANGELFISH.

Gus is visibly disturbed by the nature of the messages. They resemble his own sense of humor altogether too much.

The phone rings again. "Mom forgot to ask what church you belong to," I say as I pick up the ringing beast. "What?" I growl.

"Jessica?" a pleasant male voice says.

"Yes," I say. "I love my existing long-distance provider and I've already found God."

The guy laughs. "My name's Paul," he says. "I'm a friend of Gus, and he said that I should look for him at this number. Is he there?"

"Sorry," I say. "Yeah, he's here."

Gus holds the receiver with his shoulder, his head tilted. "Really?" he says. "I'll be damned . . . No, nothing like that . . . Jessie's fish are doing it too . . . ‘Jessica' and ‘nice ass'." He gives me a sideways look. "Yeah, very much so. Okay, later." He hangs up.

"We should go to the store," Gus says. "You know, to see what the others have to say. The ones in the hundred-gallon."

I groan. "No. You're staying here, and so am I. I've got lots of beer and a Monty Python DVD."

Gus seems to lighten up. "You've been planning this, haven't you?"

"Damn it, Gus, I haven't had a boyfriend for who knows how long, so now I'm going to enjoy it."

The teenage mutant spelling fish can bloody well read themselves until Monday.

On Monday Gus drops me off at work.

"You want to come up?" I say. And explain, since he looks puzzled, "The guys I work with seem to think I'm making you up just to get out of rejecting them every Friday."

"Okay," Gus says. "Haven't been in a lab for quite a while. What exactly do you do in there?"

"Find cures for cancer," I say. "Except that they seem to be causing more cancer."

Gus laughs. "Gotta love research." He follows through the double doors, into the kingdom of laminated hoods and UV lights, PCR machines and smells of bacterial medium. He breathes in and smiles. Poor thing has been missing all this—it's written clearly on his sweet stubbly face.

I'm late, and the crew is in, drinking coffee and bullshitting.

"This is Gus," I say, and go to my bench. He can fend for himself in the butt-sniffing ritual.

"Hi, Gus," John says, his scalp wrinkled. "John Dorsey. How about that game last night?"

"Haven't seen it," Gus says. "Can't stand the Phillies. Hope they lost."

"Careful there," Steve says. "That's who we root for in our neck of the woods. What's your team?"

"Yankees," Gus says. "I cheered for them during the Red Sox game. In Boston. In an Irish pub."

I am vaguely aware of some sort of rivalry between New York and Boston in baseball terms, but the respectful silence that follows indicates that it is more serious than I thought.

"Wow," John says. I suppose Gus has proven his masculinity. "What were you doing in Boston?"

"Grad school," Gus says. "Wasn't that a nightmare."

John and Steve nod and mutter that oh God, was it though.

"Where at?" Steve asks. "I went to Boston U."

"MIT," Gus answers. "Probably before your time."

"What in?" John says.

"Genetics."

John perks up. "Human genome?"

"No," Gus says modestly. "Sommers' group."

Apparently, it actually means something, for John and Steve look at Gus as if he just confessed to being the seraph who hands God his pipe and slippers in the morning.

"I didn't think Sommers took grad students," John says.

"Not many, no. There was just me and Diane Thrench—she changed advisors halfway through. I don't blame her; Jim is a misogynist."

The fact that he refers to fearsome Sommers by first name sends the guys gawking.

"You wouldn't happen to be," John says, "the G.S. Lanley of Lanley and Sommers 1998?"

"That's me," Gus says. "Which one did you read—the frog or the fish?"

"I read all of them," John says. "It is really amazing what you did with vertebrate development regulation."

"Thanks," Gus says. "Sommers' boys were all working with frogs, and I started the fish project. You know the frog DNA—nothing but repeats."

All of them sigh, appalled at the scandalous state of frog genes. I try not to giggle.

"Darn it," John says. "You have to give us a seminar, or something. Are you at U Penn?"

"I taught there for a bit," Gus says slowly, staring at a cluttered lab table. "It was a paper mill, so I quit."

"Where are you now?" John says, and smirks in my direction. "And don't say at a pet store."

Gus smiles. "I am, actually. I'd been breeding fish and frogs and herps for so long I figured I might as well turn it into a job. Which beckons." He turns to me. "I'll see you tonight?"

"Yeah," I say, and give him a kiss as a mark of ownership. It would be gauche to urinate all over him in public.

Later that day the phone rings, and John picks up. "Cancer lab," he says cheerfully. "Oh, hi, Gus." This is weird. Gus never calls me at work. "Yeah, I'd love to chat, Gus." John seems to like saying ‘Gus' as much as I do. "Sure, whenever you want—heh, I thought it wouldn't be easy to quit. Of course we have a sequencer. Primers? Well, we do bacterial stuff, so I don't know about eukaryotes. If you can design them, I'll order them. No, don't worry about it, blanket accounts. What? Radioactive or fluorescent? Yeah, we have them. Stop by this afternoon and we can look at the primers. Don't mention it, Gus." He hangs up.

"Well?" I say.

John stares at me blankly. "Oh. Gus wanted to do a quickie analysis of one of his fish."

I think I know which one. I'm surprised to hear that he's willing to sacrifice them though. "You don't mind?" I say.

John gives me a condescending look. "Jess, that's
the
Lanley. If he kept at it, he would've had a Nobel Prize by now." He wags his finger at me. "You better be good to him."

Great. If Gus and I ever have a fight, I know not to ask John for sympathy. Around here, Gus walks on water. I'm a little jealous too, hearing how excited Gus was over all those toys. I'm not sure I can compete with an open account in a state-of-the-art lab.

The next morning, Gus drives his own 1987 Volvo station wagon to the lab, and immediately takes over like he owns the place. I am bossed around as it is, and the last thing I need is my own boyfriend saying things like, "Jessie, is there any Tris buffer left? I want to run some gels, and would you mind taking the dye out of the fridge for me?" in front of everybody.

John shadows him, and even Steve gets into a worshipful mood—he runs out and gets him a coffee. Humph. The rest of the week is no better: Gus is entrenched here, being brilliant, and only goes to his store for a couple of hours. I spend more time there than he does, just feeding the pets.

Rumors spread that
the
Lanley is working in the lab, and by Wednesday the curious start filing in. Most of them never heard of Gus, but take John's word for his celebrity status. Female interns and grad students are the worst—they ogle over Gus's shoulder as he is doing something as mundane as pouring a gel, and look like they're lining up for him to autograph their boobs. In the bathroom I find a whole herd of them, putting on makeup and talking.

"He's cute," Stephie from oncogenes is saying. "And single."

"Did he tell you that?" I say.

She shakes her head. "No ring, silly." Argh. Stephie gives me a condescending smile. "What do you care? You don't date."

Back in the lab, the freshened Stephie tries to engage Gus in a deep conversation about the loss of heterozygosity or some other such nonsense. Gus, bless him, is absorbed with pipetting his samples into the gel.

"Why don't you have the tech pipette the samples?" Stephie says, nodding at me.

Gus smiles in my direction. "I better not, or I'll hear about it when we get home. Isn't that so, my wild honey?"

Ah, vindication. "That's right," I say, trying not to gloat. "It's your turn to do the dishes," I add.

Stephie's jaw falls into her cleavage. I hope she bites herself.

Gus is quiet and contemplative as he drives me home.

"Gus," I say. "Did you find anything about the fish?"

"No," he says. "Their genes seem to be exactly the way I left them. Maybe if I amplify more fragments . . . There've got to be more palindromes for the restriction analysis. I'll just have to order more endonucleases."

"I don't think it's the genes," I say. "Really, Gus—you're wasting your time, and the shop will be out of business by the time you snap out of it."

"Oh?" he says. "Since when are you an expert?"

Wham. "I'm not an expert," I say, indignant. "But if your cats could talk they'd tell you that obviously the fish are acting that way only in a school, not as individual organisms. The spelling thing is kind of an emergent property."

Gus frowns. "You don't like me being in your lab, is that it?"

"No," I say. "I love you being in the lab—I love you anywhere. I just think you're going in the wrong direction."

"Well, somehow I screwed up, and I have to go back to make sense of it."

I narrow my eyes. "You just love being in the lab again, don't you?"

"Not necessarily."

"I'll take that as a yes," I say. "Gus, please—stay in the shop tomorrow. Relax. Watch the fish. Harass the customers. I'll take a day off, and we can clean all the tanks. Please."

I watch his face, and my plea seems to be working—the angry fold between his eyebrows relaxes, and he even smiles a bit. "No," he says, scowling again. "You take a day off if you want—if you can let me work without breathing down my neck."

"Who was breathing down your neck? Me, or Stephie?"

"You know," he says with a snort, "I didn't like you putting me on the spot like that in front of everybody."

I can't believe this. "Oh really?" I say. "I seem to recall you defending me at the time."

"Of course, but I'd rather not have had to."

I'm at the point of no return. "So you'd rather they think you are available? Is that it?"

He shakes his head. "That's not what I said. It's just that I was trying to work."

"Gus, you're being a jerk," I say. "Drop me off at my place, and call if you decide to come to your senses."

"Fine," he says. He doesn't say another word until he stops in front of my apartment building. "Bye," he says, and takes off with unnecessary screeching.

I mope around the house for the entire Saturday without so much as speaking with Gus. The cats come and go and purr sympathetically, and the alphabet fish do drills. JESSICA, they recite at first. Then nICE ASS, though their heart isn't in it; they hardly stay in formation. Poor J is having trouble hovering upside-down. They look more like ICE ASS most of the time. As if in apology they do a new one, SEA SIC with J finally sitting it out altogether. I change their water, and they perk up a bit.

I feel guilty. Up to now, Gus and I have seen each other every day for months. I feel like calling him, crying into the phone and screaming that I love him. And it's not the other girls either: it's that damn lab. It's worse than baseball or NASCAR or the WWF or I don't know what. It's late afternoon, and I drive by the lab, but Gus's Volvo isn't there. I'll be damned if I'm going to go looking for him.

Okay, so I'll be damned. I drive by his place.

He's not there. I take it out on my car, and speed to PETS. He's not there either. It's closed. I let myself in with my key and tend to the animals. In the back of my mind I'm seeing car pile-ups on the freeway and dismembered bodies. I'm thinking James Dean. It just isn't like Gus to disappear for two days without a word.