Designer Genes: Tales of the Biotech Revolution Read online

  “Don’t be silly,” said Rosa. “This isn’t something that flashes silly messages on our screens—it’s something that’s sabotaging our nursery. What kind of joker would do a thing like that?”

  Steven, clearly despairing of half-measures, began to yell. He hadn’t yet begun to strike the secret note, but Rick could tell that the gathering crescendo was heading in that direction

  “Oh, come on, Rick!” Dieter complained. “Can’t you at least keep him quiet, so we can think about this. This is important!”

  Rick abandoned the bottle and tried to jolly Steven out of the crying fit by bouncing him around a bit. He knew that it wasn’t going to work, but at least it demonstrated to the others that he was trying. Silently, he willed the baby to be quiet, but the power of positive thinking that he was trying to exercise kept getting interrupted by silent pleas and curses.

  “Wrap him up,” said Rosa. “He’s not in the nursery now and the ambient temperature’s too low for him—find him something soft and warm and comforting, then try the bottle again.”

  The torrent of advice did nothing to soothe Rick’s temper; it only made him more aggrieved. But the one thing he couldn’t do was to hand Steven over to someone else and say, “You take care of the little brat.” That would really call down the wrath of Heaven upon him.

  The lar informed them that someone else was at the door, and Rosa went to let in the second of Dr. Jauregy’s expected helpers. His name was Lionel Murgatroyd, and his ID informed them that he was with the Ministry of Defense.

  “The Ministry of Defense!” said Dieter, incredulously. “What is this—World War Five?”

  “No, no, no,” Mr. Murgatroyd assured them. “It’s nothing to worry about—nothing at all. A routine notification under the rather-be-safe policy. Please don’t let your imagination run away with you. It’s just that where novel DNA is concerned, especially when it seems to be a bit on the nasty side, we have to be extremely careful.”

  They didn’t have time to ask Mr. Murgatroyd any more questions, because he was seized by Officer Morusaki and hauled into the nursery.

  “We have to seal everything up now,” said Morusaki cheerfully, as he prepared to close the door behind him. “We’re taking control of all the house’s systems except for the fundamental subroutines, so you won’t be able to phone out or call up data from the net. You might experience some slight problems while we’re running tests, but please be patient.”

  The nursery door closed behind him, and the four householders exchanged helpless looks. Nobody wanted to start asking accusative questions about who might or might not have got the house a front-line posting in the next Plague War. The thought was too preposterous to entertain.

  Steven was still bawling, despite the fact that Rick—following Rosa’s suggestion—had managed to summon up a warm and soft ultrawoolly shawl. Rick tried unsuccessfully to persuade the baby to accept the makeshift teat, but Steven obviously wanted the nursery nook and wasn’t prepared to accept any second-rate substitutes—not, at least, without making his protest first. Rick had retreated to the corner of the room furthest away from his co-parents in the hope of reducing the nuisance level slightly, but it was a futile gesture.

  “I know one thing,” said Dieter, raising his voice above the din. “Whatever it is and however it got into our systems, this thing is dangerous. It has weapon-potential. They want to tame it before they stop it—that’s why they’re beavering away in there under the protection of a full-scale security shield.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Chloe. “If it’s organic, it must be dextro-rotatory. It can’t hurt anything living—not really living. It can only affect right-handed proteins.”

  “Chloe, darling,” said Dieter, with uncharacteristically bitter sarcasm. “Half the world lives in houses made from dr-wood, and dresses in dr-clothes. There are dr-components in virtually every machine our factories produce. A virus that could eat its way through dr-materials would be the ideal humane weapon. It could wreck a nation’s property without actually killing anyone.”

  “You’re being silly,” said Rosa, shortly. “There aren’t any lr-viruses that destroy all laevo-rotatory materials, even after three billion years of lr-evolution. Why should a universally-destructive dr-virus suddenly turn up out of the blue? And if it did, why on earth would it make its first appearance in our nursery? Rick, can’t you keep the poor little mite quiet for a while.”

  Rick interrupted the murmurous stream of soothing noises that he was emitting into Steven’s ear in order to say “No.” Then he added, “Oh, pollution!” as he realized to his discomfort that the ultrawoolly had suffered a sudden attack of stinking stickiness.

  He moved rapidly to the disposal chute, hitting the control-button with his elbow because his hands were over-full with the bottle and the wrapped-up baby. The lid failed to respond to his signal. He jabbed it again, and then again, but nothing happened.

  He turned round to complain but saw that Rosa was now busy giving Dieter an extended, if inexpert, lecture on the elements of dextro-rotatory organic chemistry. Dieter, obviously resentful of being treated as if he were one of her primary ed counseling cases, was busy going red in the face. Rick knew that if he called their attention to what had happened, they would merely point out with some asperity that the chute’s systems must have fallen prey to the side-effects of the probings being carried out by the investigators in the nursery.

  The door to the staircase that led down to the cellar was only a couple of feet away, and Rick kicked the control panel, probably a little bit harder than was necessary. He sighed with relief when it opened, and he went swiftly through it. He glanced back as the door slid shut behind him, but only Chloe was taking any notice, and her expression showed profound relief that the crying baby was being taken away.

  Rick figured that it would probably be possible to dispose of the polluted ultrawoolly into the cellar chute, and that, even if it turned out not to be possible, he could at least abandon the horrid thing, sluice Steven down, and then have another go at persuading him to take the bottle without having to suffer the censorious glares of his co-parents. He took the six steps two at a time, and made his way along the narrow corridor between the massed root-ridges to the portal set in the basal trunk.

  The portal opened readily enough, and he sighed with relief. He had thrown the ultra-woolly in before he realized that all was not well within the chute.

  Instead of falling away through empty space to the reclamation-chamber, the soiled garment landed in a pool of turbid water whose surface was only a couple of centimeters below the opening. Because of the odiferous nature of the stain on the shawl, Rick did not at first notice that the water was also rather noisome, but when he leaned over to take a closer look, the fact became abundantly clear.

  He also noticed that the level of the water was slowly rising. The house was evidently experiencing difficulties in the waterworks.

  Rick’s first supposition was that the three investigators in the nursery must already know about this problem, given that they had taken over all the house’s systems, but then he remembered that the lar had stubbornly insisted that nothing was wrong in the nursery. Perhaps, given Mr. Murgatroyd’s declared allegiance to the philosophy of better-be-safe, they should be told.

  Rick climbed back up to the cellar door, which had closed automatically behind him, and brought his knee up to tap the control panel.

  The door didn’t open.

  Rick cursed. He hung the loudly-squalling Steven over his shoulder, switched the feeding-bottle from his left hand to his right, and tapped the panel again with his fingers.

  The door still failed to respond.

  Rick turned to the screen beside the door and poked the keyboard beneath it. The screen remained dead, as he had expected. The men in the nursery had presumably switched off the circuitry for some arcane purpose of their own.

  He turned around to look back at the waste-chute. The portal was still open, and the wat
er level had now reached its rim. Water began to spill over. While Rick watched, the floating ultrawoolly was carried over the lip of the precipice, and fell soggily to the floor, where it sat lumpenly in a rapidly-spreading pool of discolored liquid.

  “Pollution!” said Rick, with feeling. “Pollution, corrosion and copulating corruption!” The obscenities seemed oddly ineffective, given their incipient literality.

  He knew that there was no point at all in shouting for help. The house was well-designed, and the walls and ceiling were far too efficient at damping out sounds.

  He realized that he was trapped.

  * * * *

  Even though he knew there was no point, Rick yelled for help; there seemed no harm in trying. In the meantime, he struggled to think of something more likely to get results.

  Steven responded to the unexpected competition with a moment’s startled silence, but then began to compete with a will, increasing his own efforts to be heard. Within seconds he began to hit that note. The din was too appalling to be tolerated, and Rick shut up.

  Steven didn’t. Rick gritted his teeth and tried to shut out the sound, but the screams went deep into the core of his brain.

  Rick went to the top of the cellar steps and kicked the door, very hard. Nothing happened, and he kicked it again, even harder. Then, holding Steven carefully at arm’s length, he rammed it with his shoulder.

  The door absorbed the brutal mistreatment with dignified ease, swallowing the sound of the impacts. The blows had discharged a little of Rick’s frustration, but he wasn’t sufficiently masochistic to keep going until he did himself an injury.

  “Shut up, you little bastard,” he said to Steven, with asperity. He had never before dared speak aloud to the baby in such hostile terms, but he felt that he might as well take what meager advantage he could of the fact that no one could hear him. He didn’t mean it, of course—not really.

  He looked down at the floor, which was now covered by a thin scum of something horrible. The scum was slowly being elevated by the water on which it floated. He watched it for a minute or so, watching the meniscus climb the knobbly walls of the root-complex. He estimated that the level was now rising by about a centimeter per minute, and noted that the flow seemed to be increasing. His feet were less than a meter above the surface, and he knew that he wasn’t much more than a meter-and-a-half tall. His mental arithmetic could do the simple averaging well enough, but he didn’t know how to figure in the possible effects of the accelerating flow.

  “Shut up!” he said to Steven, in a low but fierce tone. “This is serious. If we aren’t out of here soon.…”

  At a centimeter a minute, he knew, they would have four hours. Four hours, looked at dispassionately, was a long time, but Rick already knew that it was the highest possible figure. The faster the rate of flow was increasing, the quicker that four hours would become three, and then two…and all the while, it was also being eroded by actual elapsed time. Rick looked about him at the cellar, whose narrow passages and dim lighting had always made him feel slightly claustrophobic. His mental arithmetic wasn’t up to calculating the actual cubic capacity of the room, but the looming root-processes and the thick central trunk of the house had never seemed more massive.

  Steven also seemed utterly convinced that something was badly wrong. He was certainly yelling as if he believed that his life was in danger.

  “Please shut up,” complained Rick, changing tactics. “For Gaia’s sake, let me think!”

  After all, he told himself, he was bound to be missed. Chloe, Rosa, and Dieter might already have noticed that he was gone, and might have begun to get worried…except, of course, that they couldn’t know that the cellar was being flooded. They would undoubtedly discover as soon as they tried it that the door was stuck, and they would undoubtedly figure out that it was a side-effect of whatever Dr. Jauregy’s troubleshooting crew was doing, but they wouldn’t necessarily feel any sense of urgency about getting him out. In fact, they might be profoundly glad that they no longer had to listen to Steven’s crying, and in no hurry at all to expose themselves to it again. They might be sitting upstairs right now, joking about his bad luck and his parental incompetence.

  It was, he decided, definitely time to get worried.

  Rick sat down on the top step, biting his lip anxiously, and began to rock Steven in his arms. Steven continued to cry, but not quite so loudly. The crying seemed slightly less appalling now—indeed, it suddenly seemed to be entirely appropriate, given the situation. It was no longer so excruciating.

  “Okay son,” said Rick, looking down into the baby’s screwed-up eyes and making every possible effort to be civil, “we’ve got to think about this logically. The odds are that we’ll be out of here long before that tide of filth is up to the soles of my sneakers, but just in case…just in case, mind you…we ought to figure out some way of attracting attention to our predicament. The three wise men might have got the house’s nerve-net into a terrible tangle, but they can’t have anaesthetized it entirely. We have to wake it up. It’s fighting sabotage with sabotage, but it’s the only way.” He was trying to sound calm, for his own sake rather than for Steven’s, but he couldn’t fool himself. He was scared—really scared.

  For a moment he consoled himself with the inspiration that the house’s central supply-tank and reclamation unit couldn’t possibly contain enough water to fill the cellar completely, but no sooner had the elation of this thought buoyed him up than he noticed a distinct whiff of sterilizing fluid in the air.

  “Oh pollution!” he said, as his heart skipped a beat. “It’s the water from the pool, too…we really are in trouble.”

  Steven just went on bawling, but Rick took that as an indication of agreement. He stood up and descended to the third step, then turned around to lay the baby down on the top one. He wiped his fingers on his shirt, and looked around for something that he could use to hurt the house—not much, but just enough to make sure that the act would not go unnoticed.

  Unfortunately, the tool cabinet that was set in the wall beside the staircase wouldn’t open, and all the tools that might have sufficed to pry it open were inside. His anxiety grew, and the nausea induced by the vilely mixed odors of the dirty water made it feel even worse.

  “Corruption,” he said, unsteadily. It wasn’t so much the thought that he was going to have to use his bare hands to attack the root-processes as the thought that he was going to have to stand calf-deep in the rising tide of filthy water while he did it. He knew that he would have to snap one of the slimmer rootlets, and the thinnest ones were all close to ground-level.

  He looked down at Steven, who was lying on his back like a stranded beetle, kicking his legs and screaming as if he were about to burst.

  “All right,” he said. “I’m going.”

  He stepped down into the murky water, feeling it ooze unpleasantly into his soft-soled shoes. Two squelching strides took him to what looked like a suitably fragile bundle of root-fibers, and he managed to get his forefinger around a single filament that was no thicker than Steven’s smallest digit.

  He pulled at it. Then he heaved upwards with all his strength, bracing himself with his feet. He fully expected the rootlet to break, but his expectation was not based in experience—he had never before had any occasion to try the experiment. The root was far tougher than it looked, and more elastic. It stretched a little, but it didn’t snap.

  Rick didn’t bother to swear. He simply forced a second finger around the rootlet, and gathered all his strength, making sure that he would exert the maximum leverage of which he was capable.

  He heaved.

  The pain in his fingers was indescribable, but he did not relax until he was convinced that it would take less force to tear them off than it would to snap the rootlet. He extracted the two digits with difficulty, and nursed them tenderly while he looked down, furiously, at the stubborn filament. While he watched, there was a sudden surge in the flow of turbid water, and a wave swamped the rootlet.


  He realized that he was knee-deep, and that the flow was fast becoming a flood. Four hours had been a hopelessly optimistic estimate even at the time. Now, though he did not pause to measure and calculate, he figured that he had less than forty minutes.

  We’re going to drown! he thought, wildly. We’re really going to drown!

  Rick was fifty-three years old; nine-tenths of his life still lay before him. Steven was less than six months old…but in spite of the fact that he really did love the child, Rick could not help thinking that his own tragedy was the greater. Steven had hardly begun to be aware of the world, and had no sense whatsoever of the magnitude of his possible loss. To Steven, the present situation was no worse than being offered a bottle with an unfamiliar teat, but to Rick.…

  Rick had never been in mortal danger before. He had never felt that he was in mortal danger before. The fact that he was in his own home, and that the only baby he was likely to be licensed to look after for at least two hundred years was with him, depending on him, made the feeling ten times worse than it could have been had he been somewhere out in the wild and still-slightly-dangerous world.

  He looked around desperately, cursing the strength and economy of modern design and the careful tidiness of his co-parents. There was not a single object lying around loose, and everything built into the house’s systems was built to last, resistant to any and all attempts at vandalism. He couldn’t see anything that might be used as a lever or a club.

  Steven howled and kicked on the top step. Again he struck that horrible, hellish note.

  Don’t panic! Rick told himself, knowing that it was already too late; he was in no condition to take such advice.

  It had to be something dead, Rick instructed himself, trying against the odds to be reasonable. The problem with the rootlet was that it was part of the living structure of the house, as was everything wooden—even the stairs. On the other hand, all the house’s inorganics were buried deep inside the living tissues, except.…