Blood Music (5 page)

Vergil had spent weeks, it seemed, in just such offices as this: pastel earth-colored walls, gray steel desk surmounted by neat stacks of papers and in-out baskets, man or woman politely asking psychologically telling questions. This time it was a woman, zaftig and well-dressed, with a friendly, patient face. Before her on the desk was his employment record and the results of a psych profile test. He had long since learned how to take such tests: When they ask for a sketch, avoid drawing eyes or sharp, wedge-shaped objects; draw items of food or pictures of pretty women; always state one’s goals in sharp, practical terms, but with a touch of overreaching; exhibit imagination, but not wild imagination. She nodded over his papers and looked up at him.

“Your record is remarkable, Mr. Ulam.”

“Vergil, please.”

“Your academic background leaves a bit to be desired, but your work experience could more than make up for that I suppose you know the questions we’ll ask next”

He widened his eyes, all innocence.

“You’re a bit vague about what you could do for us, Vergil. I’d like to hear a little more about how you’d fit in with Codon Research.”

He glanced at his watch surreptitiously, not looking at the hour, but at the date. In a week there would be little or no hope of recovering his amplified Lymphocytes. Really, this I was his last chance.

“I’m fully qualified to perform all kinds of lab work, research or manufacturing. Codon Research has done very well with Pharmaceuticals, and I’m interested in that, but I really believe I can help out with any biochip program you’re developing.”

The personnel manager’s eyes narrowed by the merest millimeter. Bullseye, he thought. Codon Research is going to jump into biochips.

“We aren’t working on biochips, Vergil. Still, your record in pharmaceutical-related work is impressive. You’ve done extensive culturing; looks to me like you’d be almost as valuable to a brewery as to us.” That was a watered-down version of an old joke among vat culturists. Vergil smiled.

“There is a problem, however,” she continued. “Your security rating from one source is very high, but your rating from Genetron, your last employer, is abysmal.”

“I’ve explained about the personality clash—”

“Yes, and we normally don’t pursue these matters. Our company is different from other companies, after all, and if a potential employee’s work record is otherwise good—as yours appears to be—we allow for such clashes. But I sometimes have to work on instinct, Vergil. And something’s not quite right here. You worked in Genetron’s biochip program.”

“Doing adjunct research.”

“Yes. Are you offering us the expertise you acquired at Genetron?” That was code for are you going to spill your former employer’s secrets?

“Yes, and no,” he said. “First of all, I wasn’t at the heart of the biochip program. I wasn’t privy to the hard secrets. I can, however, offer you the results of my own research. So technically, yes, since Genetron had a work-for-hire clause, I’m going to spill some secrets if you hire me. But they’ll be part and parcel of the work I did.” He hoped that shot landed in some middle ground. There was an outright lie in it—he knew virtually everything there was to know about Genetron’s biochips—but there was truth, also, since he felt the whole concept of biochips was obsolete, stillborn.

“Mm hmm.” she flipped back through his papers. “I’m going to be straight with you, Vergil. Maybe straighter than you’ve been with me. You’re a bit wizardry for us, and a loner, but we’d jump at the chance to hire you…if it weren’t for one thing. I’m a friend of Mr. Rothwild at Genetron. A very good friend. And he’s passed on some information to me that would otherwise be confidential. He didn’t name names, and he couldn’t possibly have known I would ever face you over this desk. But he told me someone at Genetron had broken a handful of NIH guidelines and recombined mammalian nuclear DNA. I strongly suspect you’re that individual.” She smiled pleasantly. “Are you?”

No one else had been fired or even let go at Genetron for over a year. He nodded.

“He was quite upset. He said you were brilliant, but that you’d be trouble for any company that employed you. And he said he threatened you with blacklisting. Now I know and he knows that such a threat doesn’t really mean much with today’s labor laws and the potential for litigation. But this time, just by accident, Codon Research knows more about you than we should know. I’m being up front with you, because there shouldn’t be any misunderstanding. I will deny saying any of these things if pressed. My real reason for not hiring you is your psychological profile. Your drawings are spaced too far apart and indicate an unwholesome predilection for self-isolation.” She handed back his records. “Fair enough?”

Vergil nodded. He took his records and stood up. “You don’t even know Rothwild,” he said. “This has happened to me six times.”

“Yes, well, Mr. Ulam, ours is a fledgling industry, barely fifteen years old. Companies still rely on each other when it comes to certain things. Cutthroat out front, and supportive behind the scenes. It’s been interesting talking with you, Mr. Ulam. Good day.”

He blinked in the sunshine outside the white concrete front of Codon Research. So much for recovery, he thought.

The whole experiment would soon fade away to nothing. Perhaps it was just as well.

He drove north through white-gold hills dotted with twisted oaks, past cerulean lakes deep and dear with the past winter’s rains. The summer had been mild so far, and even inland, the temperature hadn’t gone over ninety.

The Volvo hummed over the endless stretch of Highway 5 through fields given over to cotton, then through green nut groves. Vergil cut across 580 along the outskirts of Tracy, his mind almost blank, the driving a panacea against his worries. Forests of pylon-mounted propellers turned in harmony on both sides of the highway, each great swinging arm two thirds as wide as a football field.

He had never felt better in his life, and he was worried. He had not sneezed for two weeks, in the middle of a champion allergy season. The last time he had seen Candice, to tell her he was going to Livermore to visit his mother, she had commented on his skin color, which had changed from pallid to a healthy peach-pink, and his freedom from sniffles.

“You’re looking better each time I see you, Vergil,” she had said, smiling and kissing him. “Come back soon. I’ll miss you. And maybe we’ll find more spice.”

Looking better, feeling better—and no excuse for it. He wasn’t sentimental enough to believe that love cured all, even calling what he felt for Candice love. Was it?

Something else.

He didn’t like thinking about it, so he drove. After ten hours, he felt vaguely disappointed as he turned onto South Vasco Road and motored south. He hung a right on East Avenue and drove into downtown Livermore, a small California burg with old stone and brick buildings, old wooden farmhouses now surrounded by suburbs, shopping centers not unlike those in every other town in California…and just outside of town, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where, among many other researches, nuclear weapons were designed.

He stopped at Guinevere’s Pizza Parlor and forced himself to order a medium garbage pizza and a salad and Coke. As he sat down to wait in the pseudo-medieval dining area, he wondered idly whether the Livermore Labs had any facilities he could use. Who was the more Strangelovian—the weapons folks, or good ol’ Vergil I. Ulam?

The pizza arrived and he looked down on the cheese and condiments and greasy sausage. “You used to like this stuff,” he said under his breath. He picked at the pizza and finished the salad. That seemed to be enough. Leaving most of his meal on the table, he wiped his mouth, smiled at the young girl behind the cash register, and returned to his car.

Vergil did not look forward to visits with his mother. He needed them, in some uncertain and irritating way, but he did not enjoy them.

April Ulam lived in a well-maintained century-old two-story house just off First Street. The house was painted forest green and had a Mansard roof. Two little gardens fenced in with wrought iron flanked the steep front steps—one garden for flowers and herbs, the other for vegetables. The porch was screened-in, with a wood-frame screen door mounted on squeaking hinges and reined in by a complaining steel spring. Entrance to the house proper was through a heavy dark oak door with a beveled-glass window and lion-faced knocker.

None of these commodities were unexpected when attached to an old house in a small California town. But then his mother appeared, svelte and dressed in flowing lavender silks and high-heeled gold shoes, her raven black hair barely touched with at the temples, coming through the oak door and the screen door and stepping into the sunshine. She greeted Vergil with a reserved hug and led him through the parlor, thin cool fingers lightly gripping his hand.

In the living room, she sat on a gray velvet chaise lounge, her gown flowing lightly over the sides. The living room suited the house, being furnished with items an elderly woman (not his mother) might have gathered over a long and moderately interesting life. Besides the lounge there was a blue flower-print overstuffed couch, a brass round table with Arabic proverbs stamped in concentric circles around abstract geometries, Tiffany-style lamps in three corners and in the fourth, a decayed Chinese Kwan-Yin statue carved from a seven-foot teak log. His father—simply “Frank” in all conversations—had brought the statue back from Taiwan after a merchant marine tour; it had scared three-year-old Vergil half to death.

Frank had abandoned both of them in Texas when Vergil was ten. They had then moved to California. His mother had not remarried, saying that would cut down on her options. Vergil was not even certain his mother and father had divorced. He remembered his father as dark, sharp-faced, sharp-voiced, not tolerant and not intelligent, with a thundering laugh brought out for display at moments of perverse anxiety. He could not imagine even now his mother and father going to bed together, much less living together eleven years. He had not missed Frank except in a theoretical way—missing a father, the imagined state of having a rather who could talk to him, help him with homework, be a touch wiser when he was having trouble with being a child. He had always missed having that sort of father.

“So you’re not working,” April said, surveying her son with what passed for mild concern.

Vergil had not told his mother about his dismissal and didn’t even question how she knew. She had been much sharper than her husband and still could match wits with her son, usually overmatching in practical or worldly matters.

He nodded. “Five weeks now.”

“Any prospects?”

“Not even looking.”

“You were let go with prejudice,” she said.

“Almost with extreme prejudice.”

She smiled; now the verbal fencing could begin. Her son was very clever, very amusing, whatever his other faults. She was not sorry he had no job; that was simply the state of affairs, and he would either sink, or swim. In the past, despite his difficulties, her son had usually stayed on the surface, with much splashing and poor form, but still, on the surface.

He hadn’t asked for money from her since leaving home ten years ago.

“So you come to see what your old mother’s up to.”

“What’s my old mother up to?”

“Her neck, as usual,” she said “Six suitors in the past month. It’s a pain being old and not looking it, Verge.”

Vergil chuckled and shook his head, as he knew she expected. “Any prospects?”

She scoffed. “Never again. No man could replace Frank, thank God.”

“They fired me because I was doing experiments on my own,” he said. She nodded and asked if he wanted tea or wine or a beer. “A beer,” he said.

She indicated the kitchen. “Fridge is unlocked.”

He picked out a Dos Equis and wiped the condensation on his sleeve as he returned to the living room. He sat in a broad-backed armchair and took a long swallow.

“They didn’t appreciate your brilliance?”

He shook his head. “Nobody understands me, Mother.”

She stared off over his shoulder and sighed. “I never did. Do you expect to be employed again soon?”

“You already asked that.”

“I thought maybe rephrasing would bring a better answer.”

“Answer’s the same if you ask in Swahili. I’m sick of working for somebody else.”

“My unhappy misfit son.”

“Mother,” Vergil said, faintly irritated.

“What were you doing?”

He gave her a brief outline, of which she understood little but the most salient points. “You were setting up a deal behind their backs, then.”

He nodded. “If I could have had a month more, and if Bernard had seen it everything would have been just sweet.” He was seldom evasive with his mother. She was virtually unshockable; tough to keep up with, and even tougher to fool.

“And you wouldn’t be here now, visiting your old, feeble mater.”

“Probably not,” Vergil said, shrugging. “Also, there’s a girl. I mean, a woman.”

“If she lets you call her a girl, she isn’t a woman.”

“She’s pretty independent.” He talked for a while about Candice, about her brazen overtures at the beginning and her gradual domesticating. I’m getting used to having her around. I mean, we’re not living together. We’re on a sort of sabbatical right now, to see how things work out. I’m no prize in the domestic department.” April nodded and asked him to get her a beer. He retrieved an unopened Anchor Steam.

“My fingernails aren’t that tough,” she said.

“Oh.” He returned to the kitchen and uncapped it.

“Now. What did you expect a big brain surgeon like Bernard to do for you?”

“He’s not just a brain surgeon. He’s been interested in AI for years now.”

“AI?”

“Artificial intelligence.”

“Oh.” She smiled radiant understanding. “You’re unemployed,” she said, “maybe in love, no prospects. Gladden your parent’s heart some more. What else is going on?”

“I’m experimenting on myself, I think,” he said.

April’s eyes widened. “How?”

“Well, those cells I changed. I had to smuggle them out by injecting them into my body. And I haven’t had access to a lab or doctor’s office since. By now, I’ll never recover them.”

“Recover them?”

“Separate them from the others. There’s billions of them, Mother.”

“If they’re your own cells, why should you worry?”

“Notice anything different?”

She squinted at him. “You’re not so pale, and you’ve changed to contact lenses.”

“I’m not wearing contacts.”

“Then maybe you’ve changed your habits and aren’t reading in the dark any more.” She shook her head. “I never have understood your interest in all this nonsense.”

Vergil stared at her, dumbfounded. “It’s fascinating,” he said. “And if you can’t see how important it is, then—”

“Don’t get snippy about my peculiar blindness. I admit them, but I don’t go out of my way to change them. Not when I see the world in the shape it’s in today, because of people with your intellectual inclinations. Why every day, over at the Lab, they’re coming up with more and more doomsday—”

“Don’t judge most scientists by me, Mother. I’m not exactly typical. I’m a little more…” He couldn’t find the word and grinned. She returned the grin with the slight smile he had never been able to decipher.

“Mad,” she said.

“Unorthodox,” Vergil corrected.

“I don’t understand what you’re getting at, Vergil What kind of cells are these? Just parts of your blood you’ve been working on?”

“They can think, Mother.”

Again, unshockable, she didn’t react in any way he could perceive. “Together—I mean, all of them, or each one?”

“Each one. Though they tended to group together in the last experiments.”

“Are they friendly?”

Vergil looked up at the ceiling in exasperation. “They’re lymphocytes, Mother. They don’t even live in the same world we do. They can’t be friendly or unfriendly in the way we mean the words. Everything’s chemicals for them.”

“If they can think, then they feel something, at least if my life experience is any good. Unless they’re like Frank. Of course, he didn’t think much, so the comparison is not exact.”

“I never had time to find out what they’re like, or whether they can reason as much as…as their potential.”

“What is their potential?”

“Are you sure you’re understanding this?”

“Do I sound like I’m understanding?”

“Yes. That’s why I’m doubtful. I don’t know what their potential is. It’s very large, though.”

“Verge, there’s always been method to your madness. What did you hope to gain by doing this?”

That stopped him. He despaired of ever communicating on that level—the level of achievement and goals—with his mother. She had never understood his need to accomplish. For her, goals were met by not ruffling the neighbors’ feathers too often. “I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Forget it”

“It’s forgotten. Where shall we eat dinner tonight?”

“Let’s eat Moroccan,” Vergil said.

“Belly dancers it is.”

Of all the things he didn’t understand about April, the real topper was his childhood bedroom. Toys, bed and furniture, posters on the wall, his room had been preserved not as he had left it, but as it had been when he was twelve years old. The books he had read had been pulled out of boxes in the attic and lined up on the shelves of the single bookcase that had once sufficed to hold his library. Paperback and book dub science fiction vied with comics and a small, important cluster of science and electronics books.

Movie posters—no doubt very valuable now—showed Robbie the Robot clutching a much amplified Anne Frances and stalking across a jagged planetscape, Christopher Lee snag-snarling with red eyes, Keir Dullea staring in wonder from his spacesuit helmet.

He had taken those posters down at age nineteen, folded them and stashed them in a drawer. April had put them back up after he left for college.

She had even resurrected his checked hunters-and-hounds bedspread. The bed itself was worn and familiar, seducing him back to a childhood he wasn’t sure he had ever had, much less left behind.

He remembered his pre-adolescence as a time of considerable fear and worry. Fear that he was some kind of sex maniac, that he had been responsible for his father’s exit, worry about measuring up in school. And along with the worry, exaltation. The light-headed and peculiar joy he had felt on half-twisting a strip of paper, pasting the ends together and manufacturing his first Möbius strip; his ant farm and Heathkits; his discovery of ten years’ worth of Scientific Americans in a trash can in the alley behind the house.

In the dark, just as he was on the edge of sleep, his back began to crawl. He scratched abstractedly, then sat up in bed with a whispered curse and curled the hem of his pajama top into a tight roll, drawing it up and down, back and forth with both hands to ease the itch.

He reached up to his face. It felt totally unfamiliar, somebody else’s face-bumps and ridges, nose extended, lips protruding. But with his other hand, it felt normal. He rubbed the fingers of both hands together. The sensations weren’t right One hand was far more sensitive than usual, the other almost numb.

Breathing heavily, Vergil stumbled into the upstairs bathroom and switched on a light His chest itched abominably. The spaces between his toes seemed alive with invisible ants. He hadn’t felt so miserable since he had had chicken pox at eleven, a month before his father’s departure. With the unspeculating concentration of misery, Vergil stripped off his pajamas and crawled into the shower, hoping for relief under cold water.