Blood Music (8 page)
Edward looked down at his hands. That had been his best shot, he was sure of it. “We could do some experiments, see how they metabolize, differ from other cells. If we could isolate a nutrient they require more of, we could starve them. Maybe even radiation treatments—”
“Hurt them,” Vergil said, turning toward Edward, “hurt me.” He stood in the middle of the Irving room and held out his arms. The robe fell open and revealed Vergil’s legs and torso. Shadow obscured any visible detail. “I’m not sure I want to be rid of them. They’re not doing any harm.”
Edward swallowed back his frustration and tried to control a flush of anger, only making it worse. “How do you know?”
Vergil shook his head and held up one finger. They’re trying to understand what space is. That’s tough for them. They break distances down into concentrations of chemicals. For them, space is a range of taste intensities.”
“Vergil—”
“Listen, think, Edward!” His tone was excited but even. “Something is happening inside me. They talk to each other with proteins and nucleic acids, through the fluids, through membranes. They tailor something—viruses, maybe—to carry long messages or personality traits or biologic. Plasmid-like structures. That makes sense. Those are some of the ways I programmed them. Maybe that’s what your machine calls infection—all the new information in my blood. Chatter. Tastes of other individuals. Peers. Superiors. Subordinates.”
“Vergil, I’m listening, but I—”
“This is my show, Edward. I’m their universe. They’re amazed by the new scale.” He sat down and was quiet again for a time. Edward squatted by his chair and pulled up the sleeve of Vergil’s robe. His arm was criss-crossed with white lines.
“I’m calling an ambulance,” Edward said, reaching for the table phone.
“No!” Vergil cried, sitting up. “I told you, I’m not sick, this is my show. What can they do for me? It would be a farce.”
Then what in hell am I doing here?” Edward asked, becoming angry. “I can’t do anything. I’m one of the cavemen and you came to me—”
“You’re a friend,” Vergil said, fixing his eyes on him. Edward had the unnerving suspicion he was being watched by more than just Vergil. “I wanted you here to keep me company.” He laughed. “But I’m not exactly alone, am I?”
“I have to call Gail,” Edward said, dialing the number.
“Gail, yeah. But don’t tell her anything.”
“Oh, no. Absolutely.”
By dawn, Vergil was walking around the apartment, fingering things, looking out windows, slowly and methodically making himself lunch. “You know, I can actually feel their thoughts,” he said. Edward watched, exhausted and sick with tension, from an armchair in the Irving room. “I mean, their cytoplasm seems to have a will of its own. A kind of subconscious life, counter to the rationality they’ve acquired so recently. They hear the chemical ‘noise’ of molecules fitting and unfitting inside.”
He stood in the middle of the living room, robe fallen open, eyes dosed. He seemed to be taking brief naps. It was possible, Edward thought, that he was undergoing petit mal seizures. Who could predict what havoc the lymphocytes were wreaking in his brain?
Edward called Gail again from the kitchen phone. She was preparing for work. He asked her to phone the hospital and tell them he was too ill to come to work. “Cover up for you? This must be serious. What’s wrong with Vergil? Can’t he change his own diapers?”
Edward didn’t say anything.
“Everything okay?” she asked, after a long pause.
Was it? Decidedly not. “Fine,” he said.
“Culture!” Vergil said loudly, peering around the kitchen divider. Edward said good-by and quickly hung up. “They’re always swimming in a bath of information. Contributing to it. It’s a kind of gestalt thing, whatever. The hierarchy is absolute. They send tailored phages after cells that don’t interact properly. Viruses specified to individuals or groups. No escape. One gets pierced by a virus, the cell blebs outward, it explodes and dissolves. But it’s not just a dictatorship. I think they effectively have more freedom than we do. They vary so differently—I mean, from individual to individual, if there are individuals, they vary in different ways than we do. Does that make sense?”
“No,” Edward said softly, rubbing his temples. “Vergil, you are pushing me dose to the edge. I can’t take this much longer. I don’t understand, I’m not sure I believe—”
“Not even now?”
“Okay, let’s say you’re giving me the right interpretation. Giving it to me straight and the whole thing’s true. Have you bothered to figure out the consequences?”
Vergil regarded him warily. “My mother,” he said.
“What about her?”
“Anyone who cleans a toilet.”
“Please make sense.” Desperation made Edward’s voice almost whiny.
“I’ve never been very good at that” Vergil murmured. “Figuring out where things might lead.”
“Aren’t you afraid?”
“Terrified,” Vergil said. His grin became maniacal “Exhilarated.” He kneeled beside Edward’s chair. “At first I wanted to control them. But they are more capable than I am. Who am I, a blundering fool, to try to frustrate them? They’re up to something very important”
“What if they kill you?”
Vergil lay on the floor and spread out his arms and legs. “Dead dog,” he said. Edward felt like kicking him. “Look, I don’t want you to think I’m going around you, but yesterday I went to see Michael Bernard. He put me through his private clinic, took a whole range of specimens. Biopsies. You can’t see where he took muscle tissue samples, skin samples, anything. It’s all healed. He said it checks out. And he asked me not to tell anybody.” His expression became dreamy again. “Cities of cells,” he said. “Edward, they push pili-like tubes through the tissues, spread themselves, their information, convert other kinds of cells…”
“Stop it!” Edward shouted. His voice cracked. “What checks out?”
“As Bernard puts it I have ‘severely enlarged’ lymphocytes. The other data isn’t ready yet. I mean, it was only yesterday. So this isn’t our common delusion.”
“What does he plan to do?”
“He’s going to convince Genetron to take me back. Reopen my lab.”
“Is that what you want?”
“It’s not just having the lab open again. Let me show you. Since I stopped the lamp treatments, my skin’s been changing again.” He pulled back the robe where he lay on the floor.
The skin all over Vergil’s body was crisscrossed with white lines. He turned over. Along his back, the lines were starting to form ridges.
“My God,” Edward said.
“I’m not going to be much good anywhere else but the lab,” Vergil said. “I won’t be able to go out in public.”
“You…you can talk to them, tell them to slow down.” He was immediately aware how ridiculous that sounded.
“Yes, indeed I can, but that doesn’t mean they listen.”
“I thought you’re their god.”
“The ones hooked up to my neurons aren’t the big wheels. They’re researchers, or at least serve the same function. They know I’m here, what I am, but that doesn’t mean they’ve convinced the upper levels of the hierarchy.”
“They’re disputing?”
“Something like that” He pulled the robe back on and went to the window, peering through the curtains as if looking for someone. “I don’t have anything left but them. They aren’t afraid. Edward, I’ve never felt so close to anyone or anything before.” Again, the beatific smile. “I’m responsible for them. Mother to them all. You know, until the last few days, I didn’t even have a name for them. A mother should name her offspring, shouldn’t she?”
Edward didn’t answer.
“I looked all around—dictionaries, textbooks, everywhere. Then it just popped into my head. ‘Noocytes.’ From the Greek word for mind, ‘noos.’ Noocytes. Sounds kind of ominous, doesn’t it? I told Bernard. He seemed to think it was a good name—”
Edward raised his arms in exasperation. “You don’t know what they’re going to do! You say they’re like a civilization—”
“A thousand civilizations.”
“Yes, and civilizations have been known to screw up before. Warfare, the environment—” He was grasping at straws, trying to restrain the panic that had been growing since he arrived. He wasn’t competent to handle the enormity of what was happening. And neither was Vergil. Vergil was the last person Edward would have called insightful and wise with regard to large issues.
“But I’m the only one at risk,” Vergil said.
“You don’t know that Jesus, Vergil, look what they’re doing to you!”
“I accept it,” he said stoically.
Edward shook his head, as much as admitting defeat. “Okay. Bernard gets Genetron to reopen the lab, you move in, become a guinea pig. What then?”
“They treat me right. I’m more than just good ol’ Vergil I. Ulam right now. I’m a goddamned galaxy, a super-mother.”
“Super-host, you mean.”
Vergil conceded the point with a shrug.
Edward felt his throat constricting. “I can’t help you,” he said. “I can’t talk to you, convince you, can’t help you. You’re as stubborn as ever.” That sounded almost benign; how could “stubborn” describe an attitude like Vergil’s? He tried to clarify what he meant but could only stammer. “I have to go,” he finally managed to say. “I can’t do you any good here.”
Vergil nodded. “I suppose not. This can’t be easy.”
“No,” Edward said, swallowing. Vergil stepped forward and seemed about to put his hands on Edward’s shoulders. Edward backed away instinctively.
“I’d like at least your understanding,” Vergil said, dropping his arms. “This is the greatest thing I’ve ever done.” His face twisted into a grimace. “I’m not sure how much longer I can face it, face up to it I mean. I don’t know whether they’ll kill me or not. I think not. The strain, Edward.”
Edward backed away toward the door and put his hand on the knob. Vergil’s face, temporarily creased with an agony of worry, returned to beatitude. “Hey,” he said. “Listen. They—”
Edward opened the door and stepped outside, closing it firmly behind him. He quickly walked to the elevator and punched the button for the ground floor.
He stood in the empty lobby for a few minutes, trying to control his erratic breathing. He glanced at his watch: nine in the morning.
Who would Vergil listen to?
Vergil had gone to Bernard; perhaps Bernard was now the pivot on which the whole situation turned. Vergil made it seem as if Bernard were not only convinced, but very interested. People of Bernard’s stature didn’t coax the Vergil Ulams of the world along unless they felt it was to their advantage. As Edward pushed through the double glass doors, he decided to play a hunch.
Vergil lay in the middle of the living room, arms and legs cruciform, and laughed. Then he sobered and asked himself what impression he had made on Edward, or on Bernard for that matter. Not important, he decided. Nothing was important but what was going on inside, the interior universe.
“I’ve always been a big fellow,” Vergil murmured.
Everything
—Yes, I am everything now.
Explain
—What? I mean, explain what?
Simplicities
—Yes, I Imagine if s tough waking up. Well, you deserve the difficulties. Damn very old DNA finally waking up.
SPOKEN with other
—What?
WORDS communicate with *share* body structure *external* is this like *wholeness WITHIN* *totality* is EXTERNAL alike
—I’m not understanding, you’re not clear.
Silence inside for how long? Difficult to tell the passage of time, hours and days in minutes and seconds. The noocytes had screwed up his brain clock. And what else?
YOU *interface* *stand BETWEEN* EXTERNAL and INTERNAL. Are they alike.
—Inside and outside? Oh, no.
Are OUTSIDE *share body structure* alike
—You mean Edward, don’t you? Yes indeed…share body structure alike.
EDWARD and other structure INTERNAL similar/same
—Oh yes, he’s quite the same except for you. Only—yes, and is she better now? She wasn’t well last night.
No answer to that question.
Query
—He doesn’t have you. Nobody does. Is she all right? We’re the only ones. I made you. Nobody else but us has you.
A deep and profound silence.
Edward drove to the La Jolla Museum of Modem Art and walked across the concrete to a pay phone near a bronze drinking fountain. Fog drifted in from the ocean, obscuring the cream-plastered Spanish lines of the Church of St. James by the Sea and beading on the leaves of the trees. He inserted his credit card into the phone and asked information for the number of Genetron, Inc. The mechanical voice replied swiftly and he dialed through.
“Please page Dr. Michael Bernard,” he told the receptionist.
“Who’s calling, please?”
“This is his answering service. We have an emergency call and his beeper doesn’t seem to be working.”
A few anxious minutes later, Bernard came on the line. “Who the hell is this?” he asked quietly. “I don’t have an answering service.”
“My name is Edward Milligan. I’m a friend of Vergil Ulam’s. I think we have some problems to discuss.”
There was a long silence on the other end. “You’re at Mount Freedom, aren’t you, Dr. Milligan?”
“Yes.”
“Staying down here?”
“Not really.”
“I can’t see you today. Would tomorrow morning be acceptable?”
Edward thought of driving up and back, of time lost and of Gail, worrying. It all seemed trivial. “Yes,” he said.
“Nine o’clock, at Genetron. 60895 North Torrey Pines Road.”
“Fine.”
Edward walked back to his car in the morning grayness. As he opened the door and slid into the seat, he had a sudden thought. Candice hadn’t come home last night.
She had been in the apartment that morning.
Vergil had been lying about her, he was sure of that much. So what role was she playing?
And where was she?
Gail found Edward lying on the couch, sleeping fitfully as a chill freak winter breeze whistled outside. She sat down beside him and stroked his arm until his eyes opened.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi to you.” He blinked and looked around. “What time is it?”
“I just got home.”
“Four-thirty. Christ. Have I been asleep?”
“I wasn’t here,” Gail said. “Have you?”
“I’m still tired.”
“So what did Vergil do this time?”
Edward’s face assumed a patent mask of equanimity. He caressed her chin with one finger—“Chin chucking,” she called it, finding it faintly objectionable, as if she were a cat.
“Something’s wrong,” she said. “Are you going to tell me, or just keep acting like everything’s normal?”
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Edward said.
“Oh, Lord,” Gail sighed, standing. “You’re going to divorce me for that Baker woman.” Mrs. Baker weighed three hundred pounds and hadn’t known she was pregnant until her fifth month.
“No,” Edward said listlessly.
“Rapturous relief.” Gail touched his forehead lightly. “You know this kind of introspection drives me crazy.”
“Well, it’s nothing I can talk about, so…” He took her hand in his and patted it.
“That’s disgustingly patronizing,” she said. “I’m going to make some tea. Want some?” He nodded and she went into the kitchen.
Why not just reveal all? he asked himself. An old friend was turning himself into a galaxy.
He cleared away the dining table instead.
That night, unable to sleep, Edward looked down on Gail from his sitting position, pillow against the wall, and tried to determine what he knew was real, and what wasn’t.
I’m a doctor, he told himself. A technical, scientific profession. Supposed to be immune to things like future shock.
Vergil Ulam was turning into a galaxy.
How would it feel to be topped off with a trillion Chinese? He grinned in the dark, and almost cried at the same time. What Vergil had inside him was unimaginably stranger than Chinese. Stranger than anything Edward—or Vergil—could easily understand. Perhaps ever understand.
What kind of psychology or personality would a cell develop—or a cluster of cells, for that matter? He tried to recall all his schooling on cell environments in the human body. Blood, lymph, tissue, interstitial fluid, cerebrospinal fluid…He could not imagine an organism of human complexity in such surroundings not going crazy from boredom. The environment was simple, the demands relatively simple, and fee levels of behavior were suited to cells, not people. On the other hand, stress might be the major factor—the environment was benign to familiar cells, hell on unfamiliar cells.
But he knew what was important, if not necessarily what was real: the bedroom, streetlights and tree shadows on the window curtains, Gail sleeping.
Very important. Gail, in bed, sleeping.
He thought of Vergil sterilizing the dishes of altered E. coli. The bottle of enhanced lymphocytes. Perversely, Krypton came to mind—Superman’s home world, billions of geniuses destroyed in an all-encompassing calamity. Murder? Genocide?
There was no barrier between sleeping and waking. He was watching the window, and city lights glared through as the curtains opened. They could have been living in New York (Irvine nights were never that brightly illuminated) or Chicago; he had lived in Chicago for two years
and the window shattered, soundless, the glass peeling back and falling away. The city crawled in through the window, a great, spiky lighted-up prowler growling in a language he couldn’t understand, made up of auto horns, crowd noises, construction bedlam. He tried to fight it off, but it got to Gail and turned into a shower of stars, sprinkling all over the bed, all over everything in the room.
He jerked awake to the sound of a gust of wind and the windows rattling. Best not to sleep, he decided, and stayed awake until it was time to dress with Gail. As she left for the school, he kissed her deeply, savoring the reality of her human, unviolated lips.
Then he made the long drive to North Torrey Pines Road past the Salk Institute with its spare concrete architecture past the dozens of new and resurrected research centers which made up Enzyme Valley, surrounded by eucalypti and the new hybrid fast-growing conifers whose ancestors had given the road its name.
The black sign with red Times Roman letters sat atop its mound of Korean grass. The buildings beyond followed the fashion of simple planar concrete surfaces, except for the ominous black cube of the defense contracts labs.
At the guardhouse, a thin, wiry man in dark blue stepped out of his cubicle and leaned down to the Volkswagen’s window level. He stared at Edward with an air of aloofness. “Business, sir?”
“I’m here to see Dr. Bernard.”
The guard asked for ID. Edward produced his wallet. The guard took it to his phone in the cubicle and spent some time discussing its contents. He returned it, still aloof, and said, “There ain’t any visitor’s parking. Take space 31 in the employee lot that’s around this curve and on the other side of the front office, west wing. Don’t go anywhere but the front office.”
“Of course not,” Edward said testily. “Around this curve.” He pointed. The guard nodded curtly and returned to the cubicle.
Edward walked down the flagstone path to the front office. Papyrus reeds grew next to concrete ponds filled with gold and silver carp. The glass doors opened at his approach, and he entered. The circular lobby held a single couch and table of technical journals and newspapers.
“May I help you?” the receptionist asked. She was slender, attractive, hair carefully arranged in the current artificial bun that Gail so fervently eschewed.
“Dr. Bernard, please.”
“Dr. Bernard?” She looked puzzled. “We don’t have—”
“Dr. Milligan?”
Edward turned to see Bernard entering the automatic doors. Thank you, Janet,” he said to the receptionist. She returned to her switchboard to route calls. “Please come with me, Dr. Milligan. We’ll have a conference room all to our selves.” He led Edward through the rear door and down the concrete path flanking the west wing’s ground floor.
Bernard wore a dapper gray suit that matched his graying hair; his profile was sharp and handsome. He closely resembled Leonard Bernstein; it was easy to see why the press had accorded nun so much coverage. He was a pioneer—and photogenic, besides. “We keep very tight security here. It’s the court decisions of the last ten years, you know. They’ve been absolutely insane. Losing patent rights because of simply mentioning work being done at a scientific conference. That sort of thing. What else can we expect when the judges are so ignorant of what’s really happening?” The question seemed rhetorical. Edward nodded politely and obeyed Bernard’s hand gesture to climb a flight of steel stairs to the second floor.
“You’ve seen Vergil recently?” Bernard asked as he unlocked room 245.
“Yesterday.”
Bernard entered ahead of him and turned on the lights. The room was barely ten feet square, furnished with a round table and four chairs and a blackboard on one wall Bernard dosed the door. “Sit, please.” Edward pulled out a chair and Bernard sat opposite him, putting his elbows on the table. “Ulam is brilliant. And I won’t hesitate to say, courageous.”
“He’s my friend. I’m very worried about him.”
Bernard held up one finger. “Courageous—and a bloody damned fool. What’s happening to him should never have been allowed. He may have done it under duress, but that’s no excuse. Still, what’s done is done, you know everything, I take it.”
“I know the basics,” Edward said. “I’m still not clear on how he did it.”
“Nor are we, Dr. Milligan. That’s one of the reasons we’re offering him a lab again. And a home, while we sort this out.”
“He shouldn’t be in public,” Edward said.
“No, indeed. We’re constructing an isolation lab right now. But we’re a private company and our resources are limited.”
“This should be reported to the NIH and the FDA.”
Bernard sighed. “Yes. Well, we’d stand to lose everything if word leaked out right now. I’m not talking about business decisions—we’d stand to lose the whole biochips industry. The public outcry could be horrendous.”
“Vergil is very sick. Physically mentally. He may die.”
“Somehow, I don’t think he’ll die,” Bernard said. “But we’re getting away from the focus.”
“What is the focus?” Edward asked angrily. “I assume you’re working hand-in-glove with Genetron now—you certainly talk like you are. What does Genetron stand to gain?”
Bernard leaned back in his chair. “I can think of a large number of uses for small, super-dense computer elements with a biological base. Can’t you? Genetron has already made breakthroughs, but Vergil’s work is something else again.”
“What do you envision?”
Bernard’s smile was sunny and certifiably false. “I’m not really at liberty to say. It’ll be revolutionary. We’ll have to study him in lab conditions. Animal experiments have to be conducted. We’ll have to start from scratch, of course. Vergil’s…um…colonies can’t be transferred. They’re based on his own cells. We have to develop organisms that won’t trigger immune responses in other animals.”
“Like an infection?” Edward asked.
“I suppose there are similarities.” But Vergil is not infected or ill in the normal uses of the words.”
“My tests indicate he is,” Edward said.
“I don’t think the usual diagnostics are appropriate, do you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Listen,” Bernard said, leaning forward. “I’d like you to come and work with us once Vergil’s settled in. Your expertise might be useful to us.”
Edward almost flinched at the openness of the offer. “How will you benefit from all this?” he asked. “I mean you, personally.”
“Edward, I have always been at the forefront of my profession. I see no reason why I shouldn’t be helping here. With my knowledge of brain and nerve functions, and the research I’ve been conducting in artificial intelligence and neurophysiology—”
“You could help Genetron hold off a government investigation,” Edward said.
“That’s being very blunt Too blunt, and unfair.” For a moment, Edward sensed uncertainty and even a touch of anxiety in Bernard.
“Maybe I am,” Edward said. “And maybe that’s not the worst thing that can happen.”
“I don’t get you,” Bernard said.
“Bad dreams, Mr. Bernard.”
Bernard’s eyes narrowed and his brows lowered. Here was an uncharacteristic expression, not suitable for covers on Time, Mega or Rolling Stone: a puzzled and angry scowl. “Our time is too valuable to be wasted. I’ve made the offer in good faith.”
“Of course,” Edward said. “And of course, I’d like to visit the lab when Vergil’s settled in. If I’m still welcome, bluntness and all.”
“Of course,” Bernard echoed, but his thoughts were almost nakedly apparent: Edward would never be playing on his team. They rose together and Bernard held out his hand. His palm was damp; he was as nervous as Edward.
“I assume you want this all in strict confidence,” Edward said.
“I’m not sure we can require it of you. You’re not under contract.”
“No,” Edward said.
Bernard regarded him for a long moment, then nodded. I’ll escort you out.”
“There’s one more thing,” Edward said. “Do you know anything about a woman named Candice?”
“Vergil mentioned he had a girlfriend by that name.”
“Had, or has?”
“Yes, I see what you mean,” Bernard said. “She could be a security problem.”
“No, that’s not what I mean,” Edward said emphatically. “Not at all what I mean.”