Lightpaths (8 page)

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“I still can’t figure out exactly how those glitches might have arisen in the net coordinator,” Lakshmi said to Lev as they worked to transfer the Möbius Cadúceus skysign into the memory of a photorefractive holographic projector—one of Lev’s most prized stage-pyrotechnic devices. “The keyword mention, though, particularly ‘schizos’, that has to have something to do with Jiro Yamaguchi’s connection to all this.”

“Whatever floats your boat,” Lev said with a shrug, not wanting to get into it. “At least we’ve got all the corrupted code out of my shobots. I’m sure Aleister’s having a great time with it.”

“Looks like the skysign’s all loaded,” Lakshmi said, checking a display screen and turning her hoverchair toward where Lev’s special effect projector would soon be projecting. “Set it free.”

Lev spoke a machine command, sotto voce. The Möbius Cadúceus symbol leapt into the warehouse space before them, giant-sized, a rainbow redesigned by a mad topologist, a Rorschach skyscape.

“Oh yeah,” Lev said, unable to take his eyes from it. Lakshmi remained silent, staring, the beautiful complexity of the thing forming a singularity from which her words could not escape.

“Here again so early, Marissa?” Roger said, joining her in the Cybergene virtuality. “Already at work, too. You spend much more time here and we’re going to start calling you ‘The Girl with the DNA Eyes.’”

Marissa laughed. She was, after all, dealing with DNA, and when she had her virtual wraparounds on, anyone looking at her would see two images of that molecule where her eyes were supposed to be.

“I’d consider that an honorable title,” Marissa said, shagging back her red hair. “You were right about this being a user-friendly toy. Got right into it. I’m dealing with the dynamics of reverse transcriptase and with a well-known location on Human Chromosome One, so there’s a good deal of prepackaged graphics material available on those.”

“What’re you doing with them?” Roger asked in her implants. “I thought you were working on longevity’s link to lowered mortality and delayed senescence in naked mole-rats.”

“I am, but I’ve broadened it beyond just mole-rats,” Marissa said, initiating a graphic sequence. “Here, I’ll show you.” She switched on the large scale display and the two of them moved within it, interacting with the submicroscopic world.

“Let’s move down into The Notch,” she said, causing an area of chromosomal surface to grow into canyon around them. Via feedback, they “felt” their way among the forces acting on the molecular landscape through which they moved.

“There it is,” she continued, “the part of Chromosome One where aging and death are. This is the genescape my viral vector will have to target and modify.”

“What exactly are you trying to do?” Roger asked, sounding genuinely curious.

“Well,” Marissa began, taking a deep breath, wanting to impress Roger and hoping he wouldn’t shoot her idea down from the start, “my research with your mole-rats indicates it should be possible to design viral vectors to speed up the evolutionary pace of the immune system, supercharge its rate of reactivity. At the same time, it should also be possible to use reverse transcriptase’s ability to translate viral RNA into host-cell DNA—as a means by which to vector into the genome the immortalizing capability from teratoma tumors. A non-carcinogenic telomere alteration. These immortalizing vectors can then be targeted at, among other places, Human Chromosome One—particularly at the gene series on that chromosome which programs senescence and allows death to occur.”

Roger was silent a moment. Marissa hoped that merely meant he was thinking carefully about what she’d said.

“You want to take traits from the so-called ‘immortalized cancer cells’ of teratocarcinomas and use them against aging?” he asked.

Marissa nodded mutely. Perhaps he felt her nod, but at any rate he went on.

“Well, I don’t think you can overcome aging and death quite that easily,” he said, “but it would be a step in that direction, certainly. Using engineered viral vectors to transfer the immortalizing trait from teratoma sources into the human genome—that’s quite a novel approach. Potentially dangerous too, though, even if you do beat the cancer factor. If human longevity were to be greatly increased, but without any corresponding decrease in birth rate or the rate of survival to sexual maturity—just think how that would ratchet up the population problem! That’s a consequence you might want to consider carefully.”

Marissa smiled, for in Roger’s voice she could hear that he was indeed impressed—almost despite himself—and was taking her work quite seriously.

“I’m nowhere close to developing the vector yet,” Marissa said. “Don’t worry. I have no intention of unleashing an Immortality Plague upon humanity.”

“I didn’t think so,” Roger said with a laugh. “My own work may be a little closer to fruition, though.”

“Show me,” Marissa said eagerly.

Without further delay Roger quickly logged them out of Marissa’s Cybergene graphics sequence and into his own. They moved along another chromosome, watched and felt it grow into canyonland around them, then stopped along a particular length of it. Roger quickly overlay the site with all pertinent chemical information concerning it.

“What’s here?” Marissa asked.

“A gene that gives rise to important receptor molecules in the vomeronasal nerve,” Roger said proudly, “maybe even in the brain itself, of the naked mole-rat. I’ve always believed that behavioral and physical controls are inadequate to account for the level of reproductive suppression in the mole-rat. There must be a chemical component, a pheromone. The receptor molecules this gene leads to are exactly what the mole-rat pheromones would have to bind to. Using gene machines like this one, I’m generating thousands of hypotheticals, ‘scenario-compounds,’ and testing them. Speeded-up mutation, as it were. With the receptor cloned or even just simulated, we can test those compounds quickly to select the appropriate active ones. Mutation and selection: all we basically need for directed artificial evolution.”

Now it was Marissa’s turn to be impressed. They clicked out of the virtuality and exited the CAMD facility for the main lab, busily exchanging insights into each other’s work. They were still thus caught up when they walked into the lab.

“Good morning, Roger. Hello, Marissa.”

They looked up to see Atsuko Cortland standing in the doorway of Roger’s lab office.

“Hello, Mother,” he said with a grimace. “What brings you to my lab?”

“Nothing in particular,” Atsuko said, fingering absently the end of a thin braid that floated amidst the rest of her flowing hair like a rope in a waterfall. “I heard you had returned from Earth. Not that you’d tell me yourself, of course.” She paused as if awaiting some response. Roger only clicked off the terminal he’d just turned on and stared at her. “I also heard your funding hunt didn’t go so well.”

“‘Hearing things’ is a sign of deteriorating mental health,” Roger said, standing abruptly and walking stiffly past his mother. “You should really have that checked into, Mother.”

“Ah, that’s more like the Roger I know!” Atsuko Cortland said, walking out of the office, following Roger into the center of the lab. Her gaze lighted on squirming naked mole rats in their glass-walled colony. “You’re still working with these little grotesques, hm? Whatever do you see in them?”

Roger began to talk about self-regulating populations and feedback loops and the only mammal with insectoid eusocial organization—

“No, no. I’ve heard all that. What is it, really? You’ve been obsessed with them for years. It’s even less healthy than my ‘hearing things’.”

Roger said nothing, merely fiddled with genome map graphics and pretended not to have heard.

“Oh, very well,” Atsuko sighed. “Then at least you can tell me what direction your research is going to take, can’t you? Now that you’ve lost most of your funding?”

“I haven’t lost most of my funding,” Cortland said in exasperation, turning to monitor the output of an automatic nucleic acid synthesizer that hummed and clicked in an alcove of the lab. “I just didn’t get the new funding I wanted. We’re restructuring our researches.”

“How?”

Roger summarized the gene/receptor molecule/pheromone binding scenario he’d just given Marissa.

“Seems like an awful lot of work,” his mother remarked with a shrug when he was done, “just to find out what turns on or turns off some obscure endangered sand rats.”

“It would be—if that were where I intended to stop,” Roger said quickly, pride creeping into his voice once more. “But I don’t. I have a strong suspicion that the pheromone active in mole rats will be a strong structural analog of one active in humans too.”

“Oh, I see what you’re getting at!” his mother said, turning her gaze from the rat burrow. “You’re going into the perfume business, just like your father did before he branched out.”

Roger glanced down at the floor of the lab.

“I hadn’t thought of it in exactly those terms, but yes, I guess you could say that.”

“A word to the wise then, dear. Making sweet smells is a dirty business. Your mole-rat pheromone—where do you think it comes from?”

Marissa sensed that Roger already knew where she was headed but was going to answer anyway.

“Urine, scent secretions on the skin, fecal matter—”

“See?”

Roger shook his head in frustration.

“So? Ambergris is whale puke. Civet is cat stink—”

“My point precisely. A dirty business. Good luck, but try to keep your nose clean. So to speak.” With a burst of her shattering windchime laughter she breezed toward the exit door of the lab. “Good-bye,” she called as she left. “See you later, Marissa.”

Beside her, Roger stood cracking his knuckles nervously, until he realized he was doing so. Then he stopped. Somehow, Marissa felt sorry for both of them, wondering what it was that could ever have driven mother and son into such an antagonistic relationship.

* * * * * * *

Atsuko Cortland knew she hadn’t been at her best with Roger. She had really intended to console, not to taunt, but the moment they saw each other, that expression on his face—as if he blamed her for everything that had ever gone less than perfectly in his life! It was maddening!

It wasn’t as if she didn’t have enough to worry about already—what with the illegal trideos and space junk satellites souring the relations between the colony and Earth. She just really didn’t need Roger giving her further cause for alarm right now.

She needed some time to herself to think. Some time when she could be someone other than the respected and recognized Atsuko Cortland, someone anonymous and seemingly new to life up here, someone through whose eyes she could look without having to pass everything through the distorting filter of Atsuko Cortland’s reputation.

Following her own private admonition that she should be knowledgeable about all the workings of the space colony first-hand, she decided to try the Prince-and-the-Pauper routine just this once, to see if people were really understanding the sort of new world they were trying to build up here. Donning dark glasses and a sun-hat, she decided to take some time off right now and visit the agricultural production toroids, outside the main sphere.

The trip by bulletcart up to zero gravity was uneventful (even if she did always find zero-gee somewhat disconcerting), but the view back into the great sphere was stunning, as usual.

“For the world is hollow—”
Atsuko thought as she tried to take in that view, remembering an old line from somewhere,
“—and I have touched the sky.”

Turning, she entered a ridge cart that shot her along either transparent or mirrored tubing (depending on her location), eventually disgorging her into one of the donut-shaped tori which, stacked in twelve levels on each side of the sphere, constituted the space habitat’s zones of primary agricultural production.

The plaza area she stepped into reminded Atsuko of nothing so much as the great glass and steel conservatories of the earthbound botanical gardens she had visited as a child. The same green, humid, living smell permeated the air. The “conservatories” here, however, stretched and curved away in arcs the greenhouse men of previous centuries could hardly have imagined, and outside their walls lay not just some inclement Northern winter but the cold airlessness of space itself.

“May I help you?” offered a thin woman of indeterminate age and dishwater blonde hair, speaking in Slavically-accented English. The slightly incongruous name of Lex was printed on the ID space of her dull-orange uniform coveralls.

“Er, yes,” Atsuko began, slightly startled and trying to ground herself for the “role” she was supposed to play. “I’m recently arrived from Earth and trying to learn more about the space habitat. Do you provide tours of this area?”

“Nothing formal, no. But everyone who works out here is required to be familiar with the way the agricultural tori function—so I can show you around, if you’d like.”

Atsuko brightened.

“Could you do that? I wouldn’t want to take you away from anything important—”

“Don’t worry,” said the woman Lex, setting aside a coil of thin irrigation tubing. “I can have someone look after my station for a while.”

“Are you sure it’s not too much trouble?”

“No trouble at all,” she said, unclipping a small hand-phone from her belt and speaking a few words into it before turning back to Atsuko. “Most everything here in food production is automated anyway.”

They walked from the plaza down a path toward where an electrical harvesting machine hummed and slashed through what looked like a wheat field. Atsuko introduced herself as Karen Ohnuki.

“Alexandra Petrunkevitch,” said the young woman, shaking her proffered hand. “Lex or Lexi to my friends.”

“How do you like working here, Lexi?” Atsuko asked as they took a meandering path among a polycultured field of myriad plantings.

“About as much as everybody else, I guess. It’s not my only job, you know. All permanent residents are required to do at least two months’ agricultural production work out of the yearly cycle. Mostly machine tending and crop monitoring, but there’s some H and K work too.”

“H and K?”

“Hands and knees,” Lex said, unfolding her hands and showing Atsuko the day’s dirt and calluses. “I’m on a day-a-week plan in ag, though some people take their ag work all in a lump. By trade I’m a software engineer, so this is very much a change of pace. Hard work, sweaty work, sometimes dirty work—though not bad work, overall.”

They walked beside the edge of an apple orchard interplanted with stands of various perennial grains.

“Young apple trees,” Lexi said, noting Atsuko’s gaze, “but producing already, see? And these Rome trees were seedlings less than three years ago.”

“That’s fast, I take it?”

“Very,” Lex said with an enthusiastic nod. “There are some real advantages to farming in space.” She reached down and picked up a handful of dark, slightly damp-looking soil. “All our ground is shot up from the moon via mass driver, so it’s quite sterile. What we add to that moon dirt to make it soil is a completely controlled process. No pest species here, no harmful microorganisms.”

Lexi walked over to the trees and picked a pair of ripe red apples for the two of them and brought them back.