The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (88 page)

Every once in a while I reflected wryly that I seemed to have taken on Jane’s penchant for wounded birds. But I didn’t reflect too hard; hospital visiting was a long way from Hollywood management, which in turn was a long way from the nails-tough political world. I didn’t want to look at how far I’d fallen.

Jane, too, seemed to be in wounded-bird mode. Sometimes, not too often, a picture of her would turn up on some fourth-rate “celebrity watch” linksite, the holo supplied by a desperate paparazzo who couldn’t do better. In those shots, she was helping some homeless drunk or paying the bills for a child who owned one ragged dress, or so it was claimed. The holos of Jane with the Barrington twins, on the other hand, turned up regularly on all the news vectors. Frieda Barrington probably saw to that.

In July, Ernie and Sandra quit. “I’m sorry, Mr Tenler, but we’re not comfortable here any more.”

“Not comfortable?” I had just spent twenty thousand dollars remodeling the guest cottage.

“No.” He shifted from one foot to the other. Ernie has a smaller head and butt than a lot of achons, but he’s far from being a proportional, and another job that paid this well for this little work was not going to be easy to find. Not for him, not for Sandra. Where would they go?

“Where will you go?”

“That’s our business.”

It was such a rude answer that I frowned. Something in the frown broke his reserve.

“Look, Mr Tenler, it’s not that we aren’t grateful. You done a lot for us. But lately you’re so . . . We didn’t want the cottage remodeled, and I said as much to you. You keep giving us things we don’t want. And . . . and hanging around a lot. I’m sorry, but it’s a huge pain in the ass.”

And I had just wanted to help!

But now Ernie was wound up. “It’s like you’re trying to control us. I know, I know, you think you’re being a good guy, but we . . . and those calls! They’re creeping out Sandra. It’s best that we go.”

I gave them a generous severance pay-out and hired a Mexican couple, undocumented, who desperately needed jobs. It felt good to help them along. The comlink calls, I started taking myself.

They came once or twice a week. No visual, and the audio came through a voice changer. Routing was via a private, encrypted satellite system, so there was no chance whatsoever of tracing the calls. I thought at first that they might be from Jane, but this emphatically was not her style. Each call was exactly the same:

“Barry Tenler.”

“I’m Barry Tenler.”

Heavy breathing. Finally, “I know how you feel.”

“Feel about what?”

And now the mechanical voice – this isn’t supposed to be possible, but I swear I heard it – hinted at pain. “I just want you to know that someone understands. Someone in the same position.”

“Look, let me help—” And the link ended.

What “position”? Another dwarf? Another unemployed PR-flack-cum-manager? Another parent of a kid with major genetic problems?

Then I had another mystery because the feds showed up. They proved to be just as elusive as my unknown caller.

“We’d like to ask you some questions, Mr Tenler.”

“What about? Do I need my lawyer?”

“No, not at all. These are just general questions, in the public interest. You’d really help us out.”

I blinked. The HPA usually commands “help” rather than requests it, and these were not the erection-jawed types who’d interviewed me after Jane’s and my visit to The Group. These two, a man and a woman, were both short, slightly built, mild in manner, deliberately unthreatening. Why? I was curious. Also bored, so I asked them in. Or maybe it was just to see them both perch un comfortably on my dwarf-sized living room chairs, their knees rising above the cocktail table like cliff faces from a Himalayan valley. “Have you been ill lately, Mr Tenler?”

“Ill? No. I’m fine.” I knew they weren’t referring to chronic pain. Nor to chronic self-pity, either.

“No flu-like symptoms?”

“I did have the flu a few months ago, but nothing since.”

I could sense the two of them not looking at each other.

“What is this about?” I asked. “I think I’d like to know before I answer any more questions.”

“I wish we could accommodate you, sir,” the woman said apologetically. She was maybe five-one, pretty, and when she smiled at me, I felt anger swell in my chest. A cheap tactic if there ever was one. Maybe he’ll talk to a woman on his own level . . . “Just one more question, please. It would really help us out. Since March, has anyone from The Group tried to contact you?”

“No.” If the encrypted calls were from The Group, I didn’t know it, and the feds weren’t going to, either.

“Thank you, Mr Tenler,” she said winningly, and handed me her card. Agent Elaine Brown, Human Protection Agency.

“Once again, what is this about?”

“Please contact us if anything occurs to you, or if you’re contacted by The Group,” the male agent said. “There’s been chatter among our informants.”

I knew better than to ask what kind of chatter; he’d probably said too much anyway. After they left, I stared at Elaine Brown’s card, wondering what the hell that had all been about.

Two weeks later, I found out. The whole world found out, but I was first.

Another post-midnight phone call, and this time I was not in the mood for it. I’d spent the day at the hospital. Martin, my mah-jongg playing cancer patient, died at 4.43 p.m. The only other person there was his elderly mother, who then fell apart. I had done for her what I could, which wasn’t much, arriving home late at night. Three whisky-and-sodas hadn’t dulled my sense that the world made no sense. The bedside clock said 2.14 a.m. I snarled at the screen, “What?”

“Barry Tenler.” It wasn’t a question. The screen stayed dark.

“Look, I’m not in the mood for games tonight, so you can just—” Then it hit me that the voice was not mechanical, not masked. A woman’s voice, and somewhere I’d heard it before.

“Listen to me, this is a matter of life-and-death for someone you love. Get Jane Snow away to someplace safe and hidden, and do it now. Tonight.”

“What the – who are you?”

“It doesn’t matter who I am. Get her away tonight.”

“Why? What’s going to – no, don’t hang up! You’re—”

Where had I heard that voice?

“Just go. Goodbye.”

I had it. “You’re the woman from The Group. In the warehouse basement. To date, three thousand two hundred fourteen. The only sentence I’d heard her utter, and not even a whole sentence. A fragment.

Silence.

“And,” I said, as it all came together in my sleep-deprived brain, “you’re the woman who’s been making those masked calls to me.” I know how you feel. . . . I just want you to know that someone understands. Someone in the same position. “You loved Ishmael.”

“They murdered him!” A second later she’d regained control of herself. That a woman like this lost control at all was a measure of her pain. Grief can drive even the toughest person to acts of insanity. Maybe especially the toughest person. She said, “I underestimated you.”

I didn’t say People usually do, because now fear had my chest gripped tight. She was credible, at least to me. “How is Jane in danger? Please tell me.”

A long pause, and then she said, “Why the fuck not? But know one thing, Barry Tenler. You will never find me, and neither will The Group. And tomorrow morning it will all be public anyway. Tell me, have you ever heard of oxytorin?”

“No.”

“Did you get ill a few days after your little visit in March to that warehouse?”

The fear gripped harder. “Flu-like symp—”

“It wasn’t flu. Tell me, have you noticed yourself engaged in unusual behaviors lately? Has Jane? Has anyone else with whom you’ve exchanged bodily fluids, especially saliva?”

I hadn’t exchanged bodily fluids, including saliva, with anyone. But all at once I remembered the pre-meeting searches in the warehouse. A man had checked me over, including opening my mouth and moving aside my tongue. His hands had felt unpleasantly slimy.

I was having trouble breathing. “What . . . what is oxytorin?”

“Nothing that will kill you. The Group is made up of idealists, remember? Idealists who murder anyone who wanders two inches off the reservation.” She laughed, a horrible sound. “I know he was dumb and vain, but I loved him. Sneer at that if you will, only you won’t, will you? Not you. You’re just as enslaved by another beautiful moron. And you can’t help it any more than I could, can you?”

“Please . . . what is oxytorin?”

Her tone lost its anguished cynicism. Relaying factual information steadied her.

“It’s a neuropeptide, a close relative to oxytocin, secreted in the brain and the pituitary gland. Like oxytocin, it has effects on social behavior. Specifically, it promotes nurturing behavior. If you give it to virgin female rats, within forty-eight hours they’re building nests and trying to nurse any baby rats you hand to them. If you remove it from mother rats’ brains, they ignore their babies and let them die. The same with monkeys. It—”

Nurturing behavior. Bringing Ernie and Sandra orange juice and remodeling their cottage. Visiting hospital patients whom I met by accident. Jane, childless, spending hours and hours with the Barrington twins.

“ – has been synthesized synthetically for a long time, but the synthetic version has to be injected directly into the brain. That’s not practical when you want to permanently influence a large fraction of the population, so instead—”

“You bastards.” It came out a whisper, strangled by rage.

“ – The Group went with a compound that switches on the genes that create oxytorin receptors. You don’t have more oxytorin, you just have more receptors for it, so more of it is actually affecting your brain. Although susceptibility to the genemod will vary among people – like, say, susceptibility to cholera depends on blood type. The delivery vector is a retrovirus, capable of penetrating the blood-brain barrier, but which first colonizes mouth and nose secretions. The—”

“You used us. Me and Jane. You—”

“—desired end here is a kinder, gentler populace. Isn’t that what we all want?”

The combination of cynicism and idealism in her words stunned me, because I knew it was absolutely genuine. Again, a whisper: “You can’t.”

“We did. And if the motherfucking leadership had ever taken it themselves, before they decided Harold was a liability—” She was sobbing. I didn’t care.

My throat opened up. I screamed, “You can’t just fuck around with people’s genes without their consent!”

The sobbing stopped. She said coldly, “Why not? You did.”

She knew. They knew. About Ethan.

“I’m telling you this because tomorrow morning The Group is putting the story on the Link. You and your ageing Aphrodite are carriers, and when the press gets hold of that, you’ll be inundated, if not lynched. Especially since The Group is saying that Jane Snow cooperated, that this is part of her Hollywood liberal-left politics. Plenty will believe it. And even if they don’t, sensationalism always works best when pegged to a few identifiable people. You should know that.”

“Why are you telling—”

“You don’t listen, do you? I already told you why. You’re just as fucked as I am. We’re alike, you and I, and neither of us ever stood a fucking chance of getting who we wanted. Damn them to hell, all of them . . . It always comes down to bodies, Munchkin, and yours has been damned twice. So get yourself and her out of town. Now.” The link broke.

I stood staring at nothing for a full minute, for a lifetime. I wasn’t even aware of the body she had just mocked. Only my mind raced.

Bodily fluids. Blood, semen, saliva. Jane wiping snot from the noses of the Barrington twins, kissing them, kissing half of the Hollywood press corps in their touch-touch social rituals. And . . . sleeping with someone? I never asked her. And undoubtedly we weren’t the only two that had been infected; that wouldn’t be widespread enough. We were just the two that were going to be publicly named.

The weakness of The Group’s expensive, individually created genemods for Arlen’s Syndrome had always been the very small number of empathic kids it could create. When Jane had pointed this out, Ishmael had gone into his grandiose “ripple” analogy, which explained nothing. But somewhere above Ishmael were people far more knowledgeable, more committed, more dangerous. People with a plan, a revolution for society. The Group had been waging war with the genomes of children as bullets. Now they had moved up to soma-gene engineering, as saturation bombing.

Anger is a great heartener. I dressed quickly, put a few things in a bag, and went down to the car. The kind of encryption that my caller had used was not available to me, and so the comlink was too big a risk. The pedal extenders that Ernie had used in the Lexus, and which Carlos didn’t need, were still in the trunk. I installed them and drove to Jane’s. I have e-codes to the gate and the house. Within an hour I was at her bedroom door.

What if she wasn’t alone?

Deep breath. I went in. “Jane? Don’t scream, it’s Barry.”

“What—”

“It’s Barry. I’m turning on the light.”

She sat up in bed, wild-eyed, and she wasn’t alone. The Barrington twins curled up on the other side of the huge bed, lost in the heavy sleep of childhood, their hair in tangles and drool on their pillows. “What the fuck—”

All at once my legs gave way. I grasped the edge of the mattress, lowered myself to the floor, and so once again had to look up at her. “Listen, Janie, this is life-and-death. We have to leave here. Now. No, don’t say anything – just listen to me for once!”

Something in my voice, or my ridiculous position, got through to her. She didn’t say a word as I told her everything that I’d been told. Her feathery light hair drifted in some air current from the open window, and above the modest blue pajamas she wore for this grandmotherly sleepover, her neck and face turned mottled red, and then dead white. When I finished, I heaved myself to my feet.

“Pack a bag. Five minutes.”

And then she spoke. “I can’t leave the twins.”

I stared at her.

“I can’t, Barry. Frieda and John are in Europe, so the kids are staying with me this week, and anyway won’t they be in danger, too? I must have infected them by now . . . saliva . . .”