Across the Spectrum (25 page)

I listened to every word in horrified fascination. I needed
to be out there doing something to stop people from killing the oceans, killing
the
planet
, not writing biology
papers. We’d gone beyond breaking the oceans. Now we were murdering them.

And no one seemed to care but me.

Smoke in the air from burning off the crude, closed beaches,
volunteer weekends on clean up duty—I had my own stretch of the Chesapeake Bay
that I patrolled every Saturday morning trying to catch a glimpse of Dad’s
ship—and a diet devoid of seafood; we were tired of it all. What hurt most were
the daily lists of mass kills: birds, fish, and the occasional whale. Those
broke my heart more than any of the other inconveniences.

Someday I was going to find a way to save those creatures.

“Oh, my god, that crazy Czech did it. He really did it,” Mom
gasped.

“What crazy Czech?” I asked.

“UNOMA’s been monitoring Rudi Czerna,” she said, nearly
bouncing in place, eyes still glued to the computer—no longer the news. This
looked like a private UNOMA site. “He’s engineered bacteria that will eat oil
pollution. UNOMA announced the first visible clearing of the mid-Atlantic.
We’re seeing an end to this disaster.”

My gaze landed on my AP biology bibliography highlighted on
my screen. “Um . . . Mom?” Something sounded fishy about this
wonderful news. I didn’t want to crush the hope in my heart that we could end
this. That Daddy could come home.

“What, honey?” she replied, distracted.

“Bacteria need food for mitosis.” I tapped the flash drive
with my AP biology report. “The more they eat the more often they split. Pretty
soon there’s going to be a ton more of them and they’ll run out of oil in the
ocean to eat.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Hope. If they ever run out of spilled
oil, there’s old pollution they can eat.”

“And when they run out of that?” What-ifs spun in my brain.
I got into trouble in school over that, thinking too fast and far ahead of my
teachers.

“I suppose they can move on to the dead zones that collect
plastic dumped in the ocean. Plastic is processed oil after all. By the time
you graduate from college our oceans will be clean again. We can take
endangered species out of aquariums and zoos, thaw frozen embryos and put them
back in the wild.”

That seemed too far-fetched even for me. Might as well ask
for help from aliens.

But Daddy might get to come home.

“What happens to the bacteria when they run out of pollution
and trash?”

“One step at a time, sweetie,” Mom said, finally looking at
me. “One step at a time.”

I worried my bottom lip with my teeth, aping my Mom. Our
chins trembled in unison, neither of us admitting how much we feared that the
solution might be more dangerous than the problem.

Suddenly my twelfth birthday didn’t seem so important.

But I still wanted my cake.

∞

Fast forward six years. Another birthday. A different
cake. Mom scrolled through the news while I fixed cereal. Mom now spent more
time in the field. I could take care of myself when neither she nor Dad was
around. Often I didn’t know where in the world she’d gone. On my beach patrols,
scooping up globs of oil and taking oil-drenched birds to sanctuaries (how
could they call it volunteer work when graduation required a thousand hours of
cleanup duty?) I noticed a little difference in the intensity of pollution and
damage. But more just kept coming.

I think I cried myself to sleep every Saturday night after
my patrols, even if I’d had a spectacular date—rare enough when all the boys I
liked had as much or more homework and independent projects as I did. My few
dates were usually a productive session in the lab at school.

Today Mom was home for my birthday and she made a cake, of
sorts.

Dad still captained a skimmer ship in the Bay, patrolling
for leaks from gypsy (i.e. illegal) wells. My attention was on the chemistry
text on my netbook. If I aced the second period semifinals, I could cinch early
placement at University of Virginia in pre-med.

I’d given up showing my worry when either or both my parents
were gone, or my short-lived relief when one or both came home. It was a big,
ugly, dangerous world out there and most sensible people stayed close to home.

Once I graduated and became a legal adult, maybe I could
make a difference. Find out what was really going on in the wider world.

At home our world had closed in upon itself. Only government
agents, like Mom, got to travel. Somebody who claimed more smarts than me said
if we all conserved oil, drastically, then the need for more drilling and the
leaky, half-assed gypsy wells would no longer be profitable.

I didn’t believe it for a minute.

“Mom, may I have a piece of cake if I come home for lunch?”
I asked as I crunched through plain shredded wheat with soy milk (we saved the
goat milk from our neighborhood herd for cheeses). No fresh berries this time
of year. Six weeks from now, for my graduation breakfast, I might find a few
strawberries in the back yard—if the goats and the chickens didn’t eat them
first.

Since gasoline rationing, we didn’t import produce from
California anymore. We depended more and more upon what we could grow in our
own yards or neighborhood communes. Having eggs to make a cake meant I traded
my breakfast scrambled eggs for cereal. Gone was the bleached white flour and
processed sugar for
my
cake. Mom made
do with rough-milled flour, eggs from our backyard chickens who weren’t laying
well right now, raisins from our own grape arbor, and local honey for a dense
and chewy slab. Good, but different. I’d given up hope of ever having my cake
again.

“The ocean has been clean for a year, you’d think we’d get a
relaxation of petroleum rationing. Your father could come home. Instead, the
government just announced new restrictions,” Mom whined.

“He promised to come home for my graduation.” I didn’t like
the whine in my voice any more than in hers.

“The press conference says that the resources saved in this
new round of restrictions will go back into scientific research,” she mumbled.
I pretended I didn’t hear several curses that followed under her breath.

“Will they restore SETI and the space program?” That kind of
research might be useful. Maybe we could drill Europa for clean water or get
help from aliens. We weren’t helping ourselves much.

“Doubtful.”

“I read a paper last night that suggested we should start
mining asteroids for new fuel sources.”

“Wishful thinking,” Mom grunted.

Humans had closed in on themselves into small communities,
keeping all facilities within walking distance. We no longer looked to the
skies for answers or inspiration.

“The p-rats are the best thing that happened to us,” I told
her snootily to hide my true disdain of the polluters who were the source of
the problem. But they were corporations contributing to the health of our
economy so they couldn’t be to blame. “We’re healthier, walking and eating
fresh food grown without petroleum-based fertilizer and preservatives. Obesity
is almost obsolete. Type-two diabetes has fallen below epidemic levels. Air
pollution has reduced 63.8%.” I read the data off my Modern Problems research
paper due tomorrow.

I saved my extra credit term paper to a data crystal. Part
of the p-rats was a reduction of plastic. DVDs and flash drives had fallen
before the mighty crystal grown in factories from easily mined minerals. In
fact the oil-laden sand we hauled off the beaches made a splendid silica base
for crystals.

“Rudi Czerna just announced a new bacteria to eat the old
one that has mutated to eating plankton,” Mom nearly shouted. Then her face
fell.

“And what happens when
that
bacteria runs out of food?” I asked the question I knew hovered on her lips. I
had a few ideas gleaned from bits and pieces of Mom’s reports I’d stolen looks
at and phone conversations I’d eavesdropped on. She knew I knew more than I was
supposed to. She didn’t go out of her way to hide supposedly secret UNOMA stuff
from me.

For six years I’d studied bio-chem in and outside of class.
I had a twenty terabyte crystal the size of my thumb with all of my notes and
scientific articles. The thing had cost three months’ allowance. I wore it on a
neck chain with a wire basket for the crystal. All the girls wore their
crystals as status symbol jewelry. My big one held more than school work. I
recorded my own research and ideas for a better tomorrow on it.

“I’m beginning to wonder if St. Rudi offers any real hope,”
Mom said quietly. Then she looked up, her expression brightening. “Here’s your
birthday present a little early.” She held out a data crystal almost the size
of her palm. It rested in its own gold mesh cage.

“What’s that, Mom?”

“Hope. Keep it safe; even if you can’t open it with your
current computers, you will be able to when the time comes.”

I didn’t know if she used my name or if she defined the
crystal. Maybe both. That made me think long and hard. But I had to say
something.

“Gosh, it looks like an alien artifact!”

“Never say that in public,” she warned. “Never, if you value
your life and mine, let anyone know you have this, or where it came from.”

“Okay.” Um . . . something was up. Something
weird. From the stubborn lift of Mom’s chin, and the cold glint in her eye I
knew she wouldn’t say anything more. This was something she’d made sure I
didn’t know about until now.

I took the crystal and strung it on my golden neck chain.
Thought better of it and tucked it into the special pouch on my netbook case
for crystals. It hid quite happily beneath three smaller ones.

But I wanted to wear it. No one else in my class had
anything as big or bright or uniquely faceted.

Three hours later, after I aced the chem test, some friends
and I loaded onto a bio-diesel bus for a field trip to the UNOMA offices in
Norfolk. The crazy Czech was in town for a conference at Navy Fleet
Headquarters—which now included the skimmer ships. He’d agreed to speak to a
select group of students. I had more than a few questions for him.

Rudi Czerna made his appearance twenty minutes late. I
fidgeted and found metaphors for his tardiness in the timing of his work. He
never released it until almost too late. A miracle in the making.

Was that his way of making people love him as the savior of
humankind when all he did was cause new problems?

When he finally made an entrance, flanked by seven Secret
Service agents—why did he need those?—we could barely see his short, square
form behind all the black-suited male hunks.

Guess who got most of my attention. Not the little man with
a nervous tic in his cheek.

He talked of generalities in engineering bacteria. Most of
us knew how to do that sophomore year. He kept looking around nervously.

“Sir, what about the ethics of science?” I asked as he
closed his state-of-the-art netpad. I stood so he could not ignore me. One
hundred bored teenagers heard me. I knew that by the sudden silence that
followed my words.

“Vhat you mean?” he asked in his fake-sounding thick accent.
His eyes riveted on the crystals on my necklace. Seeking something like the big
one hiding in my case? Or maybe just my meager cleavage.

“I mean, you created a life form with a finite food supply.
Did you just expect them to all die of starvation when our use for them ran
out?”

“Is bacteria. Not true life. We kill bacteria every time we
wash hands.”

“But your artificial bacteria didn’t die. They didn’t resort
to cannibalism. They mutated and started eating plankton, and now our entire
oceanic ecosystem is threatened.”

“That’s classified information, Miss,” one of the
black-suited hunks said sternly.

“No, it’s not. It was on all the news channels three weeks
ago,” the young man next to me shouted.

“I fix with new bacteria,” St. Rudy said with a dismissive
gesture.

“And so we have an endless round of solutions becoming as
big a problem as the mess they were supposed to solve.” I parroted my mother on
this one.

That got me a round of nods and whispered comments from my
fellow students. We’d discussed it endlessly, and quietly, over lunch every
time a popular blog or indie news site disappeared from the internet. We knew
enough to keep our opinions under the governmental radar.

“By time we need fix, I fix. No time to do more. Never
enough time . . . to understand.” Then he dismissed the group by
turning his back on us.

“Which means we have to ricochet from disaster to disaster
because
you
can’t think far enough
ahead to build an end-scape into your work?” I asked as loudly as I could
before he and his protectors could escape.

His eyes widened and his florid face paled in panic. Four
agents gathered in a tighter circle and literally pushed him out the door.

Three agents jumped off the stage and made their way toward
me. “We’re just curious kids,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. Ten of my
friends sided with me.

The agents backed off. “We’re watching you,” one muttered. I
couldn’t tell which one. They all looked alike and stood shoulder to shoulder.

I sank into a depressed silence on the ride home.

I fingered the bulge of the data crystal in its pouch.
Memory of Mom’s intensity sent warning tingles up my back.

That’s when I noted the big black SUV following our bus.
Only official government types could afford that much fuel for their vehicles.
Every time I turned to look at it, it dropped back behind a dozen little electric
cars.

Once home I didn’t bother looking for a slice of birthday
cake while I searched the news sites for rumors and background on Rudi Czerna,
PhD. I found precious little. His personal website waxed poetic about his
credentials from a European university I’d never heard of, nor could I find a
website for it. Then nothing beyond his early employment with a European
conglomerate. A patent for a gene-splitting technique that made genetic
engineering easier filed with the Russian government and the US patent office.
I used that method in middle school biology classes two years before his
patent.