Outcasts (13 page)

“Are you hungry?”

“No.” That was easier than trying to explain why
she was, but could not eat. He accepted it without question or surprise, and
still seemed to wait for her orders. She realized that she could stay and he
would never dare complain — perhaps not wish to — nor dare tell
anyone she was here. If he had been one of the plastic people she might have
used him, but he was not, and she could not: full circle.

His hands moved in his lap, nervous.

“What’s wrong?” She was careful to say it
gently.

As an apology, he said, “Miz, I have to work.”

“You don’t need my permission,” she said,
trying to keep her tone from sounding like a reprimand.

He got up, stood uncertainly in the center of his room,
wanting to speak, not knowing the right words. “Maybe later you’ll
be hungry.” He fled.

She unwrapped herself from the blanket and massaged her
knees. She wandered uneasily around the room, feeling trapped and alien.

One station on the trid bounced down all news. She came on
at the quarter hour. The hope that they had only traced her to this world
evaporated as she listened to the bulletin: the broadcast was
satellite-transmitted; unless they had known, they would not have said she was
in Highport and risked missing her in another city. They kept saying she was
crazy, in the politest possible terms. They could never say that the malignancy
was not in her mind but in her body. No one got cancer anymore. People who
related their birth dates to the skies of old Earth did not even call themselves
Moon children if they were born under the Crab. All the normals had been
clean-gened, to strip even the potential for cancer from their chromosomes.
Only a few of them, and now Lais, knew that the potential had been put back
into the Institute Fellows, as punishment and control.

They used even this announcement to remind the people how
important the Fellows were, how many advances they had made, how many benefits
they had provided. Before, Lais had never known that that sort of constant
persuasion was necessary. Perhaps, in fact, it wasn’t. Perhaps they only
thought it was, so they continued it, afraid to stop the constant
reinforcement, probing, breaking old scars.

She turned off the trid. There was a small alcove of a
bathroom off the old man’s quarters; there was no pool, only a shower.
She stripped and took off the dark wig. If there had been a blower she would
have washed her clothes, but there were only a couple of worn towels. She
turned on the shower and slumped under it with water running through her
bright, colorless, startling hair, over her shoulders and breasts and back. Her
bones were etched out at ribs and hips, and her muscles made a clear chart of
anatomy. Her knees were black and purple; she bruised very easily now.

She left before the old man returned. Trying to thank him
would embarrass him and force him to search for words he did not possess. If
she waited she might lose her courage and stay; if she waited she might
convince herself that she did not need to run again to defy the Institute. If
she waited they might trace her to him. It would not matter to them nor help
their search if they questioned him, but it would confuse and hurt him. She
felt strangely protective toward him, perhaps as he had felt toward her, as if
people responded to helplessness in ways that had nothing to do with their
capacity to think.

Outside it was dark again — could be still dark, for
all the sun Lais had seen. But the sleet had stopped and it was a midnight-blue
morning, cold and clear, and even the city’s sky-glow could not dim the
stars. People strolled alone or in groups on the softly lit mall, or sat on the
bronze or stone flanks of the sculptures of prehistoric beasts. Lais stayed in
shadows and at edges. No frozen-young faces blanched on seeing her; no one
sidled toward the nearest cmu booth to call the security agents. Many of the
people, by their clothes and languages, were transients who had no reason to be
interested in local news.

The haranguers were back after the rain: preachers for
bizarre religions, recruiters for little outwoods colonies, proponents of
strange social ideals. Lais could ignore them all, except the ones who preached
against her. She could feel the age about them: they remembered. Only a few
kept that much hate, enough to stand on walls and cry that the freaks were a
danger and a curse. Lais crept by them on the opposite side of the path, as if
they could know what she was just by looking. Their voices followed her.

Drained, she stopped and entered one of the frequent cmu
booths. The door closed over the sounds. She needed to rest. The money she had
scrounged and smoothed could buy no ticket now past the watchers in the port.
She used it instead to open lines to the city’s computers, and they
returned to her the power of machines. Their lure was too great, measured
against the delay. The problem lay so clear in her mind that the programs
needing to be run sprang out full-grown. She did a minute’s worth of
exploration and put a block on the lines so she could not be cut off as soon as
her money ran out. It should hold long enough. Into the wells she inserted the
data cubes she had carried around for two months. Working submerged her;
reality dissolved.

Later, while waiting for more important output, Lais almost
idly probed for vulnerability in the city programs, seeking to construct for
herself a self-erasing escape route. The safeguards were intricate, but hidden
flaws leaped out at Lais and the defenses fell, laying the manager programs
open to her abilities. It was hardly more difficult than blocking the lines. At
that moment she could have put glitches in the city’s services and
untraceable bugs in its programs. She could see a thousand ways to cause
disruption for mere annoyance; she could detour garbage service and destroy
commercial records and mismatch mail codes and reroute the traffic, and there
were a thousand times a thousand ways to disrupt things destructively, to turn
a community of a million people into the ruined inhabitants of a chaotic war
zone. Entropy was all on her side. Yet when the city was stretched out
vulnerable before her, the momentary eagerness to destroy left her. The fact
that she could have done it seemed to be enough. Taking vengeance on the
plastic people would have been senseless, and very much like experimenting with
mice or rabbits or lower primates, small furry stupid beasts that accept the
pain and degradation with frightened resignation in their wide deep eyes, not
knowing
why
. The emotional isolation that might have allowed her to
tamper with the city was shattered in her own experience and existence as a
laboratory animal, knowing, but not really understanding why.

She slammed at the terminal to close down the holes she had
made in the city’s defenses, and touched it more gently to complete her
work. She used an hour of computer time in less than an hour of real time.

The results came chuckling out: first one, then a second
world ecosystem map in fluorescent colors, shading through the spectrum from
violet for concrete through blue and green and yellow for high to low certainty
to orange and red for theoretical projections. The control map was mostly blue,
very little red: it looked good. Its data had been nothing but a sample of
ordinary dirt, analyzed down to its isotopes, from the grounds of the outpost,
where Lais had been working when she got sick. The map showed the smooth flow
of natural evolution, spotted here and there with the quick jumps and twists
and bare spots and rootless branches of alien human occupation. Its accuracy
was extraordinary. Lais had not thought herself still capable of elation, but
she was smiling involuntarily, and for a few moments she forgot about pain and
exhaustion.

The second map had less blue and more red, but it seemed
unified and logical. Its data had been a bit of a drone sample from an
unexplored world, and it showed that the programs were very likely doing what
they were supposed to do: deduce the structure and relationships of a world’s
living things.

Lais’ past research had produced results that could
hardly be understood, much less used, by normals. It would be extended and
built on by her own kind, eventually, not in her lifetime, or perhaps not even
in the lifetime that should have belonged to her. This time she had set out to
discover the limits of theory applied to minimal data, and the applications
were not only obvious but of great potential benefit. When the hounds tracked
her, they would find her last programs, and they would be used. Lais shrugged.
If she had wanted to be vindictive, she would have tried not to finish, but her
mind and her curiosity and her need for knowledge were not things she could
flick on and off at will, to produce results like handsful of cookies.

The screen blinked. Her time had run out long since, and the
computer was beginning to cut out the obstructions she had put in its billing
mechanism. But they held for the moment, and the computer began obediently to
print out the data blocks after the map and the programs. She reached to turn
it off, then drew her hand back.

Among crystal structures and mass spectrum plots a DNA
sequence zipped by, almost unnoticed, almost unnoticeable, but it caught her
attention. She thought it was from the drone sample. She brought it back and
put it on the screen. The city computers had all the wrong library programs,
and who bothered to translate DNA into RNA anymore anyway? She picked a place
that looked right and did it by memory; for Lais it was like typing. AUG,
adenine, uracil, guanine. Start: methionine. Life is the same all over. The
computer built a chain of amino acids like a string of popbeads. 2D valiantly
masqueraded as 3D. Lais threw in entropy and let the chain fold up. When it was
done she doubled and redoubled it and added a copy of its DNA. The screen
flickered again; the openings she had made in the computer’s safeguards
were beginning to close, and alarms would be sounding.

The pieces on the screen began the process of
self-aggregation, and when they were done she had a luminous green
reproduction, a couple of million times real size, of something that existed on
the borders of life. It was a virus, that was obvious. She could not stay and
translate the whole genome and look for equivalents for the enzymes it would
need. She did not have to. It felt, to all her experience, and memory, and
intuition, like a tumor virus. She glanced at the printout again, and realized
with slow shock, free-fall sensation, that this was from the control data.

There were any number of explanations. Someone could have
been using the virus as a carrier in genetic surgery, replacing its dangerous
parts with genes that it could insert into a chromosome. They did not grow
freaks at that outpost, but they might have made the virus stocks that the
freaks were infected with when they were no more than one-cell zygotes. Someone
could have been careless with their sterile technique, especially if they had
not been told what the virus was used for and how dangerous it was.

The looming green virus particle, as absurd and obscene that
size as the magnified head of a fly, dimmed. The computer was almost through
the block. Lais had been in the company of machines so long that they seemed to
have as much personality as people; this one muttered and grumbled at her for
stealing its time. It lumbered to stop her, a hippopotamus playing crocodile.

Lais had dug the virus up outside in the dirt, free, by
chance, and there was a lot of it. If it were infectious — and it seemed
complete — it could be infecting people at and around the outpost, not
very many, but some, integrating itself into their chromosomes, eradicating the
effects of clean-gening. It might wait ten or fifteen or fifty years, or
forever, but when injury or radiation or carcinogen induced it out, it would
begin to kill. It would be too late to cure people of it then, just as it was
for Lais; the old, crippling methods, surgery, radiation, might work for a few,
but if the disease were similar to hers, fast-growing, metastasizing, nothing
would be much use.

The light on the screen began to go out. She moved quickly
and stored the map programs, the maps, the drone data.

She hesitated. In a moment it would be too late. She felt
the vengeful animals of memories trying to hold her back. She jabbed with anger
at the keyboard, and sent the control data into storage with the rest as the
last bright lines faded from the screen.

The data was there, for them to notice and fear, or ignore
and pay the price. She would give them that much warning. The normals might
find a way to clean-gene people after they were grown; they might even set
Fellows to work on the problem, and let them share the benefits. Lais wondered
at her own naivete, that after everything a small part of her still hoped her
people might finally be forgiven.

She left it all behind, even the data cubes, and went back out
onto the mall.

o0o

A hovercar whirred a few streets back; sharp beams from its
searchlights touched the edges and corners of buildings. She walked faster,
then ran painfully past firmly shut doors to a piece of sculpture that doubled
as a sitting-park. She crawled into the deepest and most enclosed alcove she
could reach. Outside she could hear the security car intruding on the
pedestrian mall. The sucks passed without suspecting her presence, not
recognizing the sculpture as a children’s toy, a place to hide and climb
and play, a place for transients to sleep in good weather, a place that,
tonight, was Lais’ alone.

There was a tiny window by her shoulder that cut through a
meter of stone to the outside. Moonlight polished a square of the wall that
narrowed, crept upward, and vanished as the moon set.

Lais put her head on her knees and focused all her attention
on herself, tracing lines of fatigue through her muscles to extrapolate her
reserves of stamina, probing at the wells of pain in her body and in her bones.
She had become almost accustomed to betrayal by the physical part of herself,
but she was still used to relying on her mind. The slight tilt from a fine edge
of alertness was too recent for her to accept. Now, forcing herself to be aware
of everything she was, she was frightened by the changes to the edge of panic.
She closed her eyes and fought it down, wrestling with a feeling like a great
gray slug in her stomach and a small brown millipede in her throat. Both of
them retreated, temporarily. Tears tickled her cheeks, touched her lips with
salt; she scrubbed them away on her rough sleeve.