Into the New Millennium: Trailblazing Tales From Analog Science Fiction and Fact, 2000 - 2010 (56 page)

I get a sinking feeling as I actually ponder what my mom would do if she hadn't heard from me for two days. God, I hate this, but I'm desperate.

I go home and start calling the hospitals. "We have no Gus Lanley here," they all say, from Philly to New York.

I call his house again. He's not there, so I leave a whimpering message. I stay up most of the night, but the bastard never calls back. I go to sleep at 3 am, by which time the cats have reclaimed half of the bed. I dream of Gus in his car at the bottom of a dark river, with alphabet angels forming a living tombstone over his head:

GUS LANLEY

PATRON SAINT OF LOST ANGELS

AND WAYWARD GENES

Sunday morning I wake up to the ringing phone. Thank you, Lord.

"H'lo?" I say, swallowing the lump in my throat.

"Hi, Jessie," a male voice says. "It's Paul."

"Gus isn't here," I say gloomily.

"I know," Paul says. "He spent the night up here."

Thank God. "What's going on?"

"The boy wonder is at it again," Paul says, sympathetic. "Before he's done, we'll have fish with legs."

I laugh, and start warming up to this Paul guy. "Tell me about it. I told him that the spelling is an emergent property, and he's been incommunicado ever since."

"So that's it," he says. "I told him the exact same thing a while ago. He muttered something about a conspiracy. I've never seen him like this before."

I snivel. "Well, what is he doing up there? Where are you anyway?"

"New Brunswick. He didn't tell you he was coming?"

"No," I say, trying to exhale an Arctic wind through the phone.

"Sorry," Paul says. "I didn't know that. Honestly, he was just coming up to get my fish. I didn't want him to drive after all the scotch he sucked down. He should be home soon."

"I'm confused, Paul," I say, relief settling in. "What do you think is going on? The fish act like they know what they're doing."

"I know," he says, and he pauses. "Now don't freak out, but before Gus took my fish back, they were writing some pretty creepy things."

"Like what?" I say, preparing to freak out anyway.

"They moved from the weather to the news."

Now I'm too busy gasping for air to freak out. "You okay?" he says.

"Yeah," I exhale. "How would the fish know that?"

"I wouldn't say they
know
about anything. I do chaos, you know, and Gus has been mulling that around since this all started."

I think hard. "So it's not genetic. You're saying it's statistical."

"I haven't a clue," he says. "But obviously the chaos theory doesn't explain all this." Paul keeps quiet for a while. "Think about it," he says finally. "How did they start spelling?"

"Gus trained them," I say, and sniff a bit, just at the sound of his name. "They like to mimic, and he just had these index cards with words written on them."

"Mmm. Suppose they started to form their own words."

"Wouldn't those be just gibberish? Don't they have to know English?"

"Not necessarily," Paul says. "Bear with me, I'm just thinking here. There are rules to any language. What if the fish internalized the rules and thus mastered the language?"

"Without understanding it?"

Paul huffs. "Why the hell not? Parrots do."

"But they don't make up their own sentences."

"Touché©."

I think so hard my tears dry up. "And the fish do it as a group."

"Right, they act like a single organism."

"Like a beehive!" I scream, excited. "I think some vertebrates make colonies too."

"Pardon?" Paul says, and I remember that he's handicapped by his lack of biological training.

"You know, sea critters that form sort of a super-organism out of simple ones."

"Sponges?"

"Yeah, but they're invertebrates. I'm thinking of… what are they called?" For the first time in my life, I try to induce a flashback to vertebrate zoology class. "Chordate-something."

"Urochordata," Gus says, walking in. "Tunicates. Sea squirts. Is there any beer left?"

I leave the receiver dangling, and hug wayward Gus, as Paul is saying, "Hello? Are you there?"

Gus grabs the phone. "I'll call you back."

I'm too relieved to see him to be mad, but I scowl nonetheless. "You could've called."

"I know," Gus says. "I'm sorry for being an ass. I should have listened to you. Will you come to the store with me?"

"Sure," I say, surrendering any illusion of independence I might've harbored.

"John," I say into the phone the next morning. "I'm not going to be in today. Terrible night."

"Okay," John says. "Is Gus coming?"

"No!" I say in something worse than my usual pre-coffee grumble, and hang up.

Gus gives me an admiring look.

We spend Monday the same way we spent Sunday—watching the fish. Gus set up Paul's tank so that it faces the hundred-gallon. The fish in both tanks are active, rolling out sentences like a ticker tape. A net lies handy, for transfer of fish from one tank to the other. The camcorder is recording, and I feel like an explorer. "They're reinforcing each other's behavior," I say, and feel like Jane Goodall. Gus appears less thrilled. He's sitting on the floor, with a notepad on his bent knees, doodling and talking to himself. "No," he says. "This is just insane. I changed one gene—one gene—but what about the epistasis?"

"What?" I say.

He scowls. "Epistasis. Interactions of the genes… there are thousands of them. Perhaps by changing just one I changed the way it interacts with everything else."

"Oh. Hey, check this out," I say. "I think they're talking to each other!"

He lifts his head and watches the fish in his tank spell "REDUCTIONISM SUCKS".

Paul's fish reply, "NO TO DISSECTION".

"Great," Gus says bitterly. "They're making fun of me."

"They are right," I say. "The emergent properties cannot be studied by looking at their elements—like you can't understand time by taking a watch apart."

"I know, I know," he mumbles. "This is why we're looking at the whole damn school. And what did we learn? The more of them you put together, the smarter they get. Whoopee, what a surprise there."

"They seem to know what you're doing," I say. "And notice that they started with weather reports. They progressed from mimicking chaos—well, telling about it—to an ordered system." I turn towards the tank. "Hey, fish, do you understand what I'm saying?"

The fish consider, and just as Gus says, "You're out of your freaking mind, Jessie," both tanks flash in stereo: "OUT OF F WORD MIND".

"Jesus," I say. "They know what you're thinking!"

Gus groans and clasps his head in his hands. I'm surprised at how poorly he's taking it. You'd think a scientist would be excited to have created a brand new mind-reading form of life, but Gus only gets frustrated because he can't explain it away. It's not genetics, so he doesn't even know where to begin.

"Relax," I say. "We still don't really know how electrical impulses in the mind become words. No one says you have to know everything!"

He grumbles and doesn't deal. He doesn't deal well at all, and spends most of the day sitting on the floor with his head in his hands, refusing to look at the fish. And I can't leave them alone—these are the most entertaining things I have ever seen. They start doing an Abbot and Costello routine, and I crack up.

"How can you be so calm about it?" Gus explodes suddenly, looking at me like it's my fault.

I let it go for the moment. "Why not? Try to look at them as your personal I-Ching."

He snorts and shakes his head. "I don't know. I really screwed up, and I have no idea of how to make it right." He bolts to his feet and runs to the closet where he keeps all the nets, spare tubing, and other trappings. "Sod it," I hear him say.

"SOS," Gus's fish flash.

"SAVE OUR SOULS," Paul's fish clarify.

"Why?" I look around. "What's wrong?"

I find out when Gus reappears, holding a plastic gallon bottle. The cap is off, and I recognize the stench that makes my eyes water.

"What the hell are you doing?" I scream, blinking away the acrid tears.

"Stand back," Gus says. "I should've done this long ago." He raises the bottle and the fish fan out, panicking, spelling out the tag:

DANGER

FORMALIN

ACCIDENTAL INHALATION

MAY BE FATAL

I yank at the bottle. Gus is still holding onto it, but at least it's not anywhere near the fish. "Gus, you've lost your mind. It's not their fault."

He looks defeated. "I know. I don't want to, but if I start over…"

"Oh, honey," I say, and let go of the bottle.

Big mistake. Gus is still pulling on the handle and once I release the bottle, it goes flying and splashing into Gus's face. He inhales a lungful, gasps, and goes down.

It is late September, and finally starting to feel like fall. Light drizzle is tapping pleasantly on the window, and Buttons the cat pounces on me. Without Gus around, his cats have finally taken to me. I grab her and put her in the car. She's due for an annual checkup, and I'm going to stop by the vet on the way back. With no one to mind the store, I have to go daily and take care of the animals, but I never open shop. I decide against letting Buttons explore the shop on her own. She sees the fish and lizards, and puts on that "what, cute innocent me sink fangs into pretty little fish?" face. The fish are agitated, so I put her back in the car.

Inside, the angels are pretty chaotic. A few of them are writing, and I take a look because there are two rows repeating, which I've never seen before.

WAS IT A

WAS IT A

Then a C with the jitters finally swims into formation, but it still doesn't make sense.

WAS IT A

WAS IT A C

"No, it's BS," I answer. Finally the top line files down back to front as it joins the second.

WAS IT A CAT I SAW

Okay, yeah, it was a cat. I'm tempted to let Buttons have her way with the damn things.

I make the rounds and check back in on the angels before leaving. "JESSICA COME HERE," they say.

"I'm here," I say, amazed that they know my name. They break up and then reform the same message. "I'm here already!"

Over the next days JESSICA COME HERE becomes something of a refrain for them. No matter how I come and go, or sit patiently, they still ask for me. Then one morning I'm feeding the animals at home. My angels are dutifully spelling JESSICA, and it hits me.

I don't even call the lab. Instead I tie up my hair, bag the JESSICA fish and bring them to the shop. The other angels are very excited as I pour JESSICA in with them. I half expect them to spell out some kind of thanks, but instead they form another pattern I've never seen.

It's a message from Gus.

My tires machine-gun gravel into the curb as I speed from the parking lot to the main building of Kessler Hospital. I'm a regular, and the nurse on duty only nods to me, and goes back to her paperwork. I trip down the long hall and push the last door on the left.

To my great relief Gus is sitting up, and is finally off the ventilator. He wasn't much for conversation before that, not to mention making out between tokes of O2. They should sell respirator masks as oral contraceptives.

"How's the store?" he asks. His eyebrows leap in sudden horror. "You didn't sell anything, did you?"

"No," I say, out of breath myself. "I just clean the cages and feed the snakes and things." I look at him sitting there, breathing, thinking. Gus keeps quiet, studying the pattern on his sheets as if he's seeing them for the first time in his life. The neat stripes are distorted by random wrinkles and folds. "You know," he finally says, "I've been wanting to ask you something, but I wanted to get this mask off first."

I laugh. "The cats are already consolidated," I say.

He makes a puzzled look and is about to speak, but I press a finger to his lips. "Before you propose marriage, I'd like you to promise that you'll never set your foot in any labs again. They are bad for you."

He pulls my hand away with encouraging strength. "Devil. How'd you guess?"

"Remember what I told you about your personal I-Ching?"

"More like Scrabble from Hell," he groans. "What exactly did they say?"

I grab a pen and some medical form from the table, turn the paper over, and draw:

JESSICA

O       N

I        GUS

N       E

     COLONY

Harry Turtledove

Spring in Rome. Mild, mostly sunny days. Pretty women's smiles, as bright as the Sun. Plants putting forth new leaves—a green almost painfully beautiful. A torrent of birdsong. Music in the air along with the birdsong. Monuments of mellowed marble, some close to 2,000 years old.

What heart could know such marvels without rejoicing?

Galileo Galilei's heart had no trouble at all.

With all that heart, Galileo wished he were back in Florence, where he belonged. Was the Sun less brilliant there? Were the pretty women's smiles? Did the birds not sing there? Had they no musicians, no monuments? Of course not!

Had they no Holy Inquisition in Florence? They did—they did indeed. But Pope Urban VIII was not convinced it had done all it should concerning Galileo. And so the astronomer had been summoned to Rome for interrogation, like any common criminal.

Muttering to himself, Galileo shook his head. Summoned like a criminal? Yes. Like a common criminal? No. The Inquisition didn't bother with common criminals. He wished with all his heart that it hadn't bothered with him.

When the summons came, he pleaded age. Was he not sixty-eight? Travel truly wasn't easy for him any more. He'd pleaded ill health. He was not a well man; who approaching his threescore and ten was what he had been earlier in life? Three learned Florentine physicians attested to his infirmities. There was plague in Florence. He would have had to spend time in quarantine before being suffered to enter the Papal States.