Authors: James Calder
“Why are they like that?” she demanded.
“I guess the landlord felt safe with a neutral color.”
“No, those people! Why are they against us? What did we ever do to them?”
I sat next to her. “Nothing, Jen. They’ve decided to see the situation in a certain way. They’re fixated on their own goals, and they see others as either helping them or getting in their way. If you don’t help them, you’re their enemy.”
“That’s so unfair.”
“Well, I intend to get in their way a little more.” I looked at my watch. “I’ve got a meeting with Marion at the Brentwood.”
Jenny’s foot wiggled madly. “Great. Leave me here alone. Why didn’t you toss their self-righteous asses on the street?”
“If we were guilty, that would have been a logical thing to do. But we need to stay in the game. Stay on some kind of speaking terms with Harros. Otherwise Dugan’s got free rein.”
“It’s not a game. It’s my life. My reputation.”
“You’re right. It’s not a game.”
“So what am I supposed to do, sit around and wait for those two belly-floppers who ransacked my kitchen to come back?”
“You could come with me to see Marion. Or maybe you need a break from this business. You could go up to your mother’s house in Sacramento. You’d be safe up there.”
Jenny lifted her chin. “I might do that.”
It didn’t sound like a bad idea to me, either. The whole business was wearing on her. I got the feeling she’d prefer that I just drop it, which was not going to happen.
She picked up the remote and switched on the TV, making a point of ignoring me. I said good-bye and took a slow walk to the Scout, wondering if her real peeve didn’t still come down to my continuing failure to move in with her.
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The Brentwood Lodge, halfway between Palo Alto and the city, was a monument to the grand era of ersatz elegant American dining. The entryway and great hearth were built of flagstones laid atop one another. A dark oak counter made a big undulating sweep in front of the bar. A fire roared in the hearth. The bar had a small stage in one corner and plenty of room for dancing to the old tunes, now belted out on Saturday nights by a guy in a velvet jacket with a portable synthesizer. The restaurant served old favorites like beef burgundy and crab à la king. The bow-tied waiters and their shoe-polish hair were monuments in themselves.
I put on a little double take when I came upon Wes and Marion at a table in the bar. Wes was rotating his beer glass in
nervous circles. He pressed forward in his seat as if trying to get some difficult words out. Marion sipped a drink with an umbrella. Her head was erect, her neck and shoulders draped artfully with a checked scarf.
Wes leaned back and stretched his arms with relief. “Bill! What are you doing here?”
“Meeting Jenny. Wow, what a surprise!”
I pulled an imitation leather chair right up to their table. Marion turned a briny eye on me. I sat down anyway. I signalled to the cocktail waitress, ordered a Manhattan, and beamed at Wes and Marion with a whaddya-know smile.
Marion turned away from me and tightened the scarf on her shoulders. “Finish what you were telling me, Wes.”
“Oh… well, never mind,” he stammered. “But I think it can be easily—uh, easily treated.”
He looked at his watch and I looked at mine. Seven-fifteen. Wes’s cell phone chirped. His secretary was punctual. After a few uh-huhs into the phone, he gulped down his beer. “Something’s come up. Sorry, I’ve got to go. Good seeing you, Marion.”
Marion stood to protest. I stood with her. “What is this?” she demanded. “You set me up!”
I blocked her way out. “Stay just a minute, Marion. Let’s talk about Sheila.”
Marion sank slowly into the chair. Her eyes burned holes into Wes’s receding back, then turned on me. “You’re a couple of creeps.”
My face remained innocent and blank. The waitress set a perfect brimming amber cone of Manhattan before me. I lifted it in Marion’s direction and savored a spine-shivering sip. She looked into her own drink, then picked the umbrella out and twirled it. “You still have a copy of the diary, don’t you?”
I was impressed with her ability to shift gears. “I know what’s in it,” I allowed, “and I’m willing to share. But first, I want to know why you ganged up with Fay against Jenny and me.”
Marion gave a naughty-girl tilt of the head. A strand of hair fell across her face. “Don’t take it personally. It was just something I needed to do. George Harros was in a position to shed light.”
I held her eyes. They’d gone opaque again, reflecting neither hostility nor sympathy. She was all about her own agenda. “I’m glad to hear you use the past tense. As you know, there’s a lot more to it than Harros thinks. You know that Dugan is in deep, and he’s got Harros snookered.”
“I had to keep Dugan off my own ass, Bill.”
“Maybe so, but you’ve used us as decoys long enough. Jenny’s about to have a nervous breakdown.” This did bring a flicker of concern. “Let’s just talk. We’re both trying to figure out what killed Sheila, right?”
Marion tilted her head in a qualified yes.
“I count five ways Sheila could have died,” I went on.
“Only five?”
“Feel free to add to the list. One, Jenny had the shellfish antigen in her kitchen. Unless she’s totally mistaken, this isn’t it. Two, Sheila ingested the antigen on her own before or after Jenny’s. This is highly unlikely. She was very careful. Three, someone brought the antigen to the meal in a deliberate attempt to poison her. Four, someone injected the antigen or forced it on her outside of Jenny’s apartment, before or after dinner. She had puncture marks in her arm. And five, the cause of death is something other than the antigen. Factor X. Probably from the lab at LifeScience.”
Amusement played on Marion’s lips. “You’re so charmingly naive about causation. You think we can pin it on one little smoking-gun protein.”
“So you’re saying it’s number five. Factor X.”
“No. Bill, I don’t know what killed her. Honestly, I don’t. I’m trying to make you see that there could be a multiplicity of factors. Cellular interactions so complex we’ll never disentangle them.”
“Don’t pull the scientist stuff on me, Marion. If I need to learn something new, I will.”
“I didn’t mean it that way. I’m saying we really may never unravel it. It’s the nature of the new world we’re creating. We’re rearranging the alphabet of life.”
“Well, isn’t biotech just a more precise way to do what farmers have been doing for millennia? Animal breeding, grain hybrids. They’re pretty much the cornerstone of civilization, right?”
“Sure. But we’re transferring genes between kingdoms now, not just species. For each little step we take, there’s a logical purpose. Put them together, though, and they add up to something bigger than any of us can grasp. People only latch on to the immediate dangers. The Institute of Science and Technology is funding research into mass-produced, high-throughput, high-value cloned chickens for the poultry industry. Animal welfare people worry that the chickens will suffer. Sure, that’s an issue, but it’s miles from the real point. The leap we’re taking is epochal. It’s metaphysical.”
“Metaphysical?”
“On the scale of Prometheus stealing fire from Olympus. In the old days, doctors were like mechanics repairing a vehicle. Now we’re becoming more like co-creators of the vehicle. Look at
the other realms we’ve conquered. Once upon a time, the heavens belonged only to birds and gods. Now we zoom through them drinking cocktails. Then, when we divided the atom, which was thought to be the irreducible unit of the universe, we gave ourselves the button to apocalypse. Over and over, we usurp the powers of nature, or the gods, or whatever name you want to use. The question, of course, is whether we have the
wisdom
of the gods.”
“From what I remember of Greek mythology, the gods had more power than wisdom.”
“You two have
got
to need another drink,” the waitress said from over my right shoulder. The lines around her eyes said she knew more about the whims of the gods than the two of us put together.
“Rum and bitters,” Marion said. “Over, with a twist.”
I tapped my glass for another Manhattan. “How’d you get into biotech anyway, Marion?”
“I started in botany, way back when. Silly thing, I loved flowers, their role in evolution. ‘The weight of a petal has changed the face of the world.’ But I slowly found out that if you really wanted to know
why
a plant survived a drought or resisted a pest, you had to go into the lab.”
“So you switched to molecular biology.”
“I’d thought mo bio was all about yeast colonies and fruit flies. When I saw what it could tell me about petals, I was hooked. Fifty years ago, most people thought proteins were what we now call genes. Now we can manipulate them to assemble our own bestiary.”
“Didn’t someone plug a firefly gene into a rabbit, so that the rabbit glowed in the dark?”
“Mere epiphenomena. We can go much deeper now. We can engineer male fruit flies to spend their whole day doing mating dances with each other in a big conga line. If you alter a gene called
disheveled,
a normally neat mouse turns into a slob. Humans share 80 percent of our genome with fruit flies, 90 percent with mice, and 98 percent with chimps. That means we’ll be able to engineer human behavior, too. Stephen Hawking and others say we have no choice, or we’ll be left behind by our machines.”
The cocktails arrived. We touched glasses. I took a long sip and said, “We’ve got the power to engineer ourselves into obsolescence.”
Marion swallowed some rum. “Accelerated evolution into cyborgs or transgenic superhumans,” she said. “The ones left behind will be curiosities. Like Ishi, the last Yahi Indian.”
“But people later realized he had a lot of knowledge we’ve lost. I wonder if the preterite humans will be valued and consulted for their appreciation of, say, a Tarkovsky film.”
“If they’re lucky. They may have no survival value. The direction we’re going, survival will be measured by efficiency and shareholder value. We’ll still have entertainment, but it will come in the form of adrenaline jolts. Religion will be packaged as pharmacologically managed inner peace.”
“They’re both guaranteed box office. But I’m not so sure it’s going to happen, Marion. I mean, look around.” A silver-haired man in a crimson cravat was playing liar’s dice with the bartender. Two women with their white hair done up in cochlear curls were chatting over martinis. “The dot-commers used to flock to this place. Now it’s retro’d back to the days before retro. You never know when the future’s going to go bust.”
“Markets may rise and fall, but the underlying technology takes root. The Internet certainly has. The groundwork is being laid in bioengineering right now. Real estate in the genome is being staked out the same way it was on the Web.”
I let some more of the Manhattan warm my throat. “Okay, so biotech is where it’s happening, and you want to influence its direction. What exactly do you do at LifeScience?”
“I’m in the agri department. Bioremediation. Engineering crops that help the environment instead of depleting it. For example, a guy in Davis has a tomato that can grow in salty soils and alleviate soil salinity at the same time. That’s potentially revolutionary.”
“What about MC124?”
“Another department altogether. I don’t know a whole lot about it, to tell you the truth.”
“How about helping me find out, then? Let’s say some mysterious combination of microbes from the lab killed Sheila. Okay, maybe we can’t get all the details, but at least we can find out where it came from.”
Marion tapped the side of her glass. Her nails were short and unlacquered. The right thumb had been chewed. “Sheila’s death is kind of beside the point. I’m sorry for it, but she is, after all, dead. The question is, can we make it count for something?”
I regarded Marion’s pale Nordic face. She was Dutch, Wes had said. At this particular moment she seemed bloodless as a stone. Maybe she was already part of the future. “Don’t you think her family deserves to know what killed her? Don’t you think Sheila herself deserves it? She was on to something at LifeScience.”
“She was
into
something, Bill. She may have stolen some company secrets, or sold inside information, I’m not sure. I’d let
it go, if I were you. Whatever you find will only muddy her name. Is that what you want?”
“What is it that
you
want, Marion?”
She shook the ice in her glass. “Something bigger, Bill. Something necessary. It’s not personal to Sheila or you or Jenny.”
“And you expect me to let you see the diary based on this?”
“What were you talking about so intensely with Sheila that night at Jenny’s?”
“Nothing sinister, Marion. Just life. Allergies. Genetics. Not her work, but general stuff. That’s all.”
Marion folded her arms and regarded me. “Well, I could be wrong. Maybe I should trust you. I just don’t know.”
I folded my arms back at her. “Why am I even talking to you?”
“You tell me. You’re not the only one with the diary.”
“Yeah. There’s Dugan.” This got a good wince from her. She leaned forward. I went ahead and told her about the interrogation this afternoon. Actually, I wasn’t certain that Dugan had read the journal, but I was willing to bet Harros would let him. “It’s them or us,” I said. “Who are you going to let take control?”
She frowned. “I’m sorry, Bill. It’s just too risky for me to tell you more.”
“I know that Frederick McKinnon is feuding with Dugan. I know that he’s planning to start human trials soon. I know that MC124 will be very big for LifeScience if it pans out.” The idea was to make her feel that she’d be adding only a small scrap of information to a large pile.
“Good for you.” Marion loosened the scarf and re-draped it on her shoulders. I could see the down on her arms. She looked more human now. Her voice was softer. “You’ll understand one day.”
I ate my second cherry, red dye and all, and signalled the waitress for the check. Marion opened her wallet, but I stopped her. “So where’s Jenny?” she asked.
I wasn’t quite fast enough. “Um—”