The Great Chain of Being and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution Read online

  "How nice,” she said. She still hadn't told me her name, let alone invited me in. “What do you grow there?"

  "Psychotropics. Mostly amanita and muscaria derivatives, some opiates, a few exotic oils and digitalids."

  "Digitalids?” she queried. “Does that include inspirationals and focal intensifiers?” She was definitely an artist.

  "Yes it does,” I said. “Nothing very exotic, though—standard stuff you could buy off the shelf if the law were a little saner and Big Pharma a little less paranoid."

  "Ah,” she said. “You've found some of my alates, haven't you? You're worried about the possibility of transgressive cross-pollination. How far away in your pharm, exactly?"

  "A little less than three kilometers, as the alate flies,” I told her.

  "That far? I had no idea that my little treasures had that sort of range, even with the aid of a favorable wind. The wind mostly blows from the west, carrying escapees out to sea, but the land and sea breezes are brisker in summer, and they alternate with a certain forceful regularity. I can assure you that my alates pose no danger to your poppies and foxgloves. For the moment, I'm only working with roses, lilies and orchids, and I've no intention of broadening my experimental range in the present phase of my campaign."

  "How long is the present phase of your campaign likely to last?” I asked, lending a slight ironic emphasis to the odd phraseology.

  She didn't answer. She didn't shut the door in my face, though. She was obviously intrigued to discover that she had a neighbor within a mere three kilometers. She wanted to know more about me. She knew full well that it would be easier and safer to do that at a distance, but she was apparently the kind of person who preferred operating directly, face-to-face—unlike me.

  "What do you think of my designs, Mr. Anderson?” she asked.

  I didn't suppose that she cared about my critical opinion. She was fishing for information about my politics, and the extent of my biochemical expertise. “It's not a matter of aesthetic admiration, so far as I'm concerned,” I told her. “I'm sure that the natural flowering plants that are busy colonizing the New Everglades are too discriminating to entertain foreign pollen, but the whole point of engineered flowers is to welcome hybridization and facilitate eclectic recombinations. It's hard enough keeping my poppies and foxgloves from unnatural intercourse with one another, without having dozens of varieties of ambitious pollen flying in of their own volition. Would it be possible for you to tighten up your containment procedures? Not so much for my benefit as for your own—it's only a matter of time before other people begin finding your stray produce."

  "I can assure you,” she said, “that the police aren't going to bother me here.” She sounded very confident. She looked me up and down again, as if measuring me for aggressive potential. I had to admit that, from her point of view, I might easily seem dangerous, no matter what kind of subtle defenses her fancy house was fitted with or how many other people would come running in response to a cry of alarm. After a suitable pause, though, she nodded and moved aside, inviting me to come in.

  I hesitated. I wanted to turn and run, assuring myself as I went that I'd done what I came to do, and that there was no need to string it out.

  She frowned, obviously having divined the impulse, and finding it rather unflattering. “I'm Judith Hillinger,” she said, as if that were guaranteed to settle the matter.

  It took a couple of seconds for the reflex to kick in and bring the memory to the surface. The moment of realization must have been clearly legible on my face. “Please come in,” she said, to complete her victory. “Given that we're neighbors, we ought to get to know one another a little better."

  She showed me into a room that the mansion's architect must have envisaged as a “reception room", even though the edifice was located in a place to which invited guests and stray callers would have to make a long and awkward journey. I sat down on a settee, which was upholstered in fancy leather that had never been worn by a cow, and accepted her offer of a glass of iced water.

  "You have the advantage of me now,” she said. “You probably know my entire life-story, up to the point when I was released from jail. Even if you somehow contrived to miss the scandal, you can extract every detail from web archives in a matter of minutes. I know nothing at all about you, though, and if I were to feed your name into a search engine I'd probably find it very difficult to sort out one particular Daniel Anderson from all the rest."

  I knew how slight and short-lived any advantage I might possess would prove. If she wanted to find out everything there was to know about me, she could do it—except, of course, for the one thing that nobody knew. I didn't even have the momentary advantage of still being familiar with the lurid details of her case, All I remembered for sure was that she was sufficiently well-connected to have got away with a slap on the wrist for the kinds of flagrantly illegal but essentially unhazardous plant engineering she'd been doing a decade or so ago, and that she had inherited so much money from her late father that the maximum fine would hardly have made a dent in her fortune. Instead, she'd elected to go to trial, and had turned the courtroom into a media circus, making impassioned speeches in defense of the freedom of creativity, and the urgent necessity of humankind becoming the true masters of evolution.

  I'd thought that what she'd done was foolish and counterproductive even at the time, when I too had still been enthusiastic to invent, innovate and become a master of mental evolution. She'd posed as a hero, but she was really just a nuisance, making it harder rather than easier for those of us who were content to work patiently in the shadows.

  "There's nothing about me to interest someone like you,” I told her, not knowing whether to hope that it was true. “I'm just a pharmer, trying to make a dishonest living in peace."

  "Which implies, I presume, that you haven't got a criminal record—yet."

  "No. Are you going to turn me in? I suppose that a simple phone call from you would be enough to bring police copters scurrying from Hull to Hollyn, no matter how much they have on their plate."

  "Don't be ridiculous,” she said. “I'm in hiding, just as you are—and for me, as you'll understand, that's a little more difficult. The police won't bother me, as I said, but that doesn't mean that you couldn't cause trouble for me. If you were to tip off a certain section of the media...."

  "I wouldn't,” I said. “As you say, it's as much in my interest as yours to be discreet—which is why I'm here, to warn you about the alate problem. I just want us to be good neighbors. As far as I'm concerned, you have as much right to be here as I have, and to do exactly as you please—but I need to protect my investment. My margins are a trifle thin right now; the market's oversupplied, and the dealers I work with have troubles of their own."

  "Perhaps you ought to be developing new products,” she said.

  "I've tried that,” I admitted, trying to keep the bitterness out of my voice. “Research in psychotropics is difficult and dangerous; testing new products is the sort of thing that can seriously damage your thought-processes. Adventures of your sort carry far less hazard, and the results are much easier to evaluate. I presume that you don't have to worry overmuch about regulating your turnover and protecting your profit margins."

  "You're right, I suppose,” she said, insouciantly. “Given your apparently-straitened circumstances, I dare say that it would be difficult for you to relocate—and why should you, given that you were here first? You're right; the best thing is for us to make the effort to be good neighbors. If my alates’ range extends to several kilometers, I'll have to make more effort to contain them. It'll be a nuisance, but it's not impractical. I originally intended to surround the compound with high fences—nothing obtrusive, just spidersilk mesh sustained by discreet poles—but I let it slide when I discovered how difficult it is to make them storm-proof. I'll just have to steel myself to the necessity of making frequent repairs. Maybe I can get away with shielding the southern and eastern sides, so that any fliers that go a-wandering will be lost at sea. Will you give me a little grace, so that I can experiment with potential solutions until we find one that suits us both?"

  "That's fine,” I assured her—and it was, indeed, a better deal than I had any right to hope for, given that she probably had enough money to force me out or crush me like a bug, if that had been the way her instinct worked. “Thanks—I appreciate it. If there's anything I can offer by way of trade..."

  "Of course there is,” she said. “It will be handy, now I come to think about it, to have a local supplier. I'll pay you the retail price, and I'll trust you not to poison me."

  The last comment was probably more of a threat than an expression of confidence, but she said it so lightly that I didn't take offence.

  "Are you living here alone?” I asked.

  "Oh no,” she said. “I don't pay anyone to answer the door, because I didn't expect to have any uninvited visitors, but I'm not alone. I have three technical assistants, a cook-housekeeper and a boatman. The cook and the boatman are out fishing at present. Do you live alone, Mr. Anderson?"

  "Yes,” I said, shortly.

  "That must be rather lonely,” she said. “Perhaps you might come to dinner some time—but I'd really rather that you didn't drop in uninvited, if you don't mind. I'll give you a number to call, and you must give me yours. Would you like to see my laboratory?"

  The last sentence came as a complete surprise, given that its immediate predecessors had implied that I was being brushed off now that our business was settled. She was an artist, though, and I was a pharmer who'd confessed to having done original work in the past. She had some reason to expect that I'd be capable of understanding her lab-work and appreciating its results. I also figured that she probably wanted to satisfy my curiosity, so
I wouldn't have quite so much incentive to come back again.

  "Yes,” I said. “I would."

  * * * *

  The lab was impressive, as it had every right to be, given the money that had obviously been lavished on it. Judith Hillinger's three technical assistants were equally impressive, at least to look at. Not one of them looked a day over twenty-one, although I guessed that they'd all had help in that regard. All three were female, though, so their expensive looks were presumably going to waste, unless the absent cook-housekeeper and boatman were both male and similarly cosmetically enhanced. I felt very old and very ugly, and I wasn't at all reassured by the politely disdainful way the three women looked at me as they were introduced, one by one.

  I made suitably complimentary murmurs in confrontation with the genomic analysis kits, the chromosomal maps and the batteries of restriction enzymes, although the only thing that really impressed me was the sophistication of the proteonomic analyses. I made a similar show of being impressed by the seed nurseries and the hydroponics. I didn't have to make any effort at all, though, when we finally went into the greenhouses, whose contents simply took my breath away.

  As Judith Hillinger had told me, she was working with roses, lilies and orchids—all long-time favorites of floral engineers. The blooms themselves didn't look particularly beautiful and unusual, by the standards that had been established half a century ago, and the symphony of their nectar was also expectable—but it wasn't the shape, color and scent of the blooms that stunned me with amazement.

  I'd already seen the alates, of course, perched in twos and threes on the rail of my verandah, or fluttering in mid-air in tiny flocks of six or seven—but those were escapees a long way from home. In the greenhouses, the air was filled with them, not merely in their thousands but in their hundreds of thousands. It was their riotous colors, and the play of light on their wings, that struck me with extreme aesthetic force.

  As Judith Hillinger moved among them, the alates settled on her body in their hundreds, and she adjusted her movements so as not to risk crushing them. I did likewise, and as we passed through the greenhouses we both seemed to be moving in slow motion, having undergone a metamorphosis into something far richer and stranger than anything merely human.

  She had to put a hand over her mouth to shield it from invasion in order to speak, but she had a speech to make and she wasn't about to be inhibited.

  "This is the way it should have been, Mr. Anderson,” she said. “This is the path that evolution should have taken. This is one of the reasons why we must become masters of evolution as swiftly as possible—to correct the errors of natural selection. We'll have to start with the harmless ones, of course, in order to establish the principle—but pretty little ventures of this kind will only be the beginning."

  This prompt allowed me to remember a little bit more about the content of the ostentatious speeches that Judith Hillinger had made in court when she'd tried to make herself a martyr for the creationist cause. She'd compared the work of natural selection to that of early computer programmers, who had been far more interested in finding a way to get the job done than in writing elegant code. As computing power and computer networks had grown at an explosive rate, all kinds of hasty improvisations had been built into source-codes, their initial weaknesses compensated by an ever-increasing mess of ungainly patches—which kept the whole thing working, after a fashion, but whose sheer mass and complexity prevented anyone from ever going back to basics and redesigning the code more efficiently and elegantly. By the same token, she'd argued, the ecosphere had blithely preserved anything that worked, however inelegantly, and had built up whole ecosystems by adding patches as they were thrown up by mutation—resulting in a vast ungainly complex that no one with any aesthetic intelligence would ever have designed, but which couldn't be comprehensively overhauled.

  "When flowering plants first evolved,” I said, to demonstrate to her that I was no fool, in spite of my exceedingly plain appearance, “the gymnosperms they were replacing set a very low standard of competition, in terms of their methods of pollination. The new forms didn't need to be very clever—just clever enough. It happened to be the evolutionary era in which the insects were undergoing their first major adaptive radiation, and insect pollination was good enough to do the trick. It would have been so much more elegant—albeit considerably more energy-expensive—for the angiosperms to invent pollen that could fly rather than rely on insects to serve as vectors, but the quick fix took hold. Once it had taken hold, the angiosperms and the insects became the major selective forces shaping one another's consequent evolution, so the whole ecosystem grew more and more elaborate, accumulating all manner of improvisatory patches—and the mutual success story was so spectacular that the prospect of going back to square one and finding a more elegant solution to the pollination problem vanished into the mists of possibility. Until now. You're not just trying to make prettier flowers for the home and garden, are you, Ms. Hillinger? You're trying to lay the groundwork for a whole new phase of plant evolution. So why start with roses, lilies and orchids?"

  "I may be rich, Mr. Anderson,” she said, “but I'm not super-rich. I need marketable products and healthy profits to finance further investment. This is just the beginning, as I said—and I'm not just talking about building a commercial empire."

  "You're even more determined to get the law changed now than you were before you went to jail,” I said, glad to be able to demonstrate that I was keeping up with her. “This is phase two of the great crusade, whose furtherance will be seriously expensive. It's not just a matter of buying more kit, hiring more techs and passing a few more brown envelopes to the Hull Police. Changing the law requires a war for hearts and minds, involving powerful advertising campaigns and relentless lobbying. Well, I wish you luck, Ms. Hillinger, I really do."

  "Thank you, Mr. Anderson. I might be able to use a man like you, you know—and I could certainly use your pharm as a second experimental base. I think we could put together a very attractive package for you, which would put an end to your financial difficulties for some time to come, if you didn't want to stay on in a managerial capacity."

  "I'm sorry, Ms. Hillinger, but that's out of the question,” I said. “If I wanted to work for someone else, I'd never have quit Big Pharma."

  "I'm not Big Pharma,” Judith Hillinger stated, as if I'd just delivered a mortal insult. “I'm the absolute opposite. I'm starting out small, but I intend to become one of the leaders of the Revolution."

  "If I weren't a confirmed loner, I wouldn't be holed up in the remoter regions of the Holderness,” I told her. “I really do wish you the best of luck—but I'm just a pharmer, not a revolutionary. I don't want to be a part of your grand plan."

  "You could get your looks fixed,” she said, as if that were her idea of an offer that no one could refuse.

  "I'm sure I could,” I said, “but I think I'd rather wait for ugly to come back into fashion. I'm grateful, but the answer's still no. Can we just be good neighbors?"

  She flashed me a smile that might have been intended to remind me exactly what I was turning down. “Of course we can,” she said. “I'm sure that we shall."

  * * * *

  When I got home, I found that I'd had visitors. I say “visitors” because they didn't seem to have been burglars, exactly, and they didn't seem to have been vandals, exactly. They'd messed things more than up a little, and they'd stolen some trivia, but they hadn't smashed anything up so badly that it would be difficult to make repairs, and they hadn't taken anything that I couldn't do without. Whatever their primary motive had been, it hadn't been robbery or destruction.

  It occurred to me almost immediately, of course, that there might have been another reason why Judith Hillinger had invited me to look over her laboratory and her specimen-houses rather than letting me go home once we'd made an agreement. She had kept me there for a good two and a half hours after I'd told her where I lived and exactly how far away it was. I hadn't seen her make any phone calls, but I hadn't had my eyes on her all the time while I was being introduced to her three lovely assistants and shown around the labs. If the cook-housekeeper and the boatman had been fishing in the marsh rather than the open sea, there had been plenty of time for them to locate my pharm, take a good look around, and leave me abundant evidence that they'd been there.