ViraVax (8 page)

Chapter 13

With Marte Chang’s employment came her “eyes only” access to certain spurs on the ViraVax networks. A few of these spurs led to the webs, the outside world. If Shirley Good were to be believed, an entire satellite went to orbit for the exclusive benefit of ViraVax, and Marte Chang was lonely enough to take full advantage of it. Since she could not explore the beaches and bistros of Costa Brava, she threw herself into the geography of the web, the ViraVax files and her dreams.

The one person to whom she felt connected was Mariposa, on the Agency’s burst line. Her social life on site was Shirley Good, known in her New Age days as “Phoenix Rising” before her conversion by the Children of Eden, God’s Gardeners. Of the hundreds of people living at ViraVax, fewer than a dozen were normal females. For ViraVax, Shirley was extremely normal.

Shirley Good had been the records clerk for ViraVax since the opening of the Jaguar Mountains facility nearly twenty years ago. Marte guessed her age at forty-five, about the same as Casey’s. Shirley was taller than Marte, who was taller than Casey, and her hair was a shock of red wool mushrooming to her shoulders. The top of her head was shaved clean to about three fingers above her ears. A rose tattoo curled over her right ear, its stem and buds trailing down the back of her neck.

Shirley bit her fingernails down to ragged nubs, which she’d tried to dress up with a little clear polish. Even that, for a Gardener, would require a serious meditation on vanity. Shirley’s hands, like her face, reflected the death-like pallor of someone who had been out of the sun’s light for a very long time.

Marte suffered a sudden, frightening vision of herself trapped, as Shirley had been trapped, by the heady magnitude of their projects and their isolation. Sunspot production was ahead of schedule, and Marte Chang wasn’t the least bit sorry.

“Some people call Dr. Casey ‘the Mountain,’” Shirley explained. “Since he won’t come to anybody, everybody has to come to him.”

Something’s happening between those two,
Marte thought.

The lift of Shirley’s jaw at the end telegraphed her pride. Marte found herself rooting for them, for whatever scrap of a relationship they salvaged out of their severity and their work. Marte had never sustained a sexual relationship beyond a weekend. No man had ever excited her as much as her work.

Marte Chang had been summoned with her idea, and ViraVax converted that idea to reality. Marte’s was a new twist on solar technology, a viral process that would make her extremely rich.

Being rich isn’t much good if I can’t get out to spend it,
she thought.

From the moment her chopper touched down on the lift pad, Marte counted the thousands of moments to go in her contract. She was a viral engineer, not a spy. Marte was beginning to think she wouldn’t make it.

It’s been the most productive month of my life,
she reminded herself.

She still felt a chill in her belly, a chill that told her over and over, “Get out. Get out now.” But Casey provided the only way out, and she was bound to her contract, which stated that failure to fulfill meant she would forfeit her profit share of any of her patents or developments. She told herself she was just being a baby.

Besides,
she thought,
living in the U.S. isn’t pretty either, these days.

Thanks to the dedication of the ViraVax staff, Marte had full setup for production completed in less than two weeks. Her first installation of her Sunspots would empower ViraVax itself within a month, and they could anticipate freedom from the hydroelectric system by Easter. Marte would go ahead and let them believe that she wanted ViraVax to handle commercial production.

Marte had underestimated the enthusiasm of the missionaries and the Innocents alike. ViraVax had leased the rights already, and in two more months some Costa Bravan corporation would start commercial production.

Marte had tailored, then colonized, a very prolific, very sturdy virus. The excellent organic growth medium provided by Dajaj Mishwe had trebled her experimental outputs. Once she had initiated her changes, the rest was growth and production, a lot of time for research, and snooping.

Marte coaxed the protein shell of the virus to take on silicon, at first, then certain metallic structures. Marte directed her mutation into a suitable architecture of capillaries and tubules, then killed and fixed the viral colony in position.

This task proved simple, since she grew the colony within a durable, nontoxic medium that hardened into interlocking amber hexagons. The annual solar yield of electricity from one acre of Sunspots had a projected worth on the U.S. market of a half million dollars.

Marte thanked the fates that she did not have to face Dajaj Mishwe once during the entire process. His preparation of her various media was brilliant, however twisted his mind, and she posted him a formal thank-you note on the lab’s interior net. She thought that it was the Christian thing to do, though she was growing more disenchanted daily with the Christians around her.

She had witnessed several further incidents of sexual contact between the young male missionaries and the young female Innocents. She reported these incidents to Casey, in three cases documenting a positive ID of both parties. Via memo, Casey thanked her for her concern and reassured her that punishment would follow.

She never saw any of the perpetrators or their victims again, and presumed them transferred to another sector.

They’ll just keep it up wherever they go,
she thought.
They’ll just keep getting moved around.

She was vulnerable now, this she knew. She would have to be strong to keep from turning to someone for security, protection. Even Casey could look attractive if she were scared enough; that was something Mariposa had warned her about. Mariposa, who was so good with computers, seemed to know so much about confinement.

Marte saw very little of Casey during her first month, but the signs of his approval began appearing in her bank account within a week. Casey was strange, and strict, but his profit-sharing system and bonuses were generous beyond her imagination. All researchers received a monthly stipend from ViraVax, but anything that turned a profit for Casey turned a profit for the principals involved as well. A ten percent tithe was automatically deducted as a donation to the Children of Eden, per a clause in her original contract.

Marte realized that it was likely she would never want for money again, no matter how things turned out with the Agency. Now that her financial worries were gone, she was discovering her real wants.

She wanted what was forbidden.

“What
do
you want, girl?” Shirley asked her over lunch.

They sat at a table in one of the facility’s teahouses, under some well-cultivated vines. Beside them, a fractal splashed electronic water over real rocks.

“I want walks in the jungle,” Marte said, “sun on the beach, a lover who can’t spell ‘acetylcholine.’ “

“Futures on your Sunspots swept the market today,” Shirley told her. “The
Star
says, ‘For the first time, scientists guarantee liberation from the oil barons.’ You’re hot property, baby. Just hang on. Stay here awhile, till the flash fades, then go out there and buy your beach, snag you a man.”

Shirley repeated Casey’s scenario for her: the energy giants would try to block production, they would be squelched by the Agency, then they would scramble to get aboard.

This very smooth choreography made Marte realize that these partners had danced together before. The Agency’s name rolled off Casey’s lips all too easily for her comfort.

All of this buzzed through her mind as she shared a huge salad with Shirley Good.

“Y’know what I did before this?” Shirley asked.

“What?”

“Phone sex,” Shirley whispered. Then she giggled. “It paid okay, and I didn’t ever have to let them touch me.”

Marte was stunned, then amused. She couldn’t suppress either blush or giggle.

“But why . . . ?”

“That’s what everybody asks.” Shirley bit off a chunk of celery and crunched it unselfconsciously. “I’m agoraphobic. I’ve always looked for jobs that I could do indoors. Preferably at home, on the webs. That’s why this job is perfect. I get all the outside world I need via nets, webs and sats.”

“But, Shirley, what about. . . you know, meeting someone. . . .”

“Falling in love? Having babies? Honey, I got raped at thirteen by the baddest man in town, and that was enough of that for me. These hands might be ugly, but they suit me just fine.”

Marte felt her traitor skin blush again, and Shirley patted her shoulder.

“Don’t feel bad, honey. I’m happy as can be in this job. This is the perfect place for me. You’ll see, it might grow on you, too.”

Marte Chang loved her work, too, but she was not in love with this place or its people. She was young enough at twenty-six to love bright lights and company, uncomplicated male company. The Children of Eden had put her through school, but she liked a drink now and then and she considered their observance of the Sabbath to be an obsession and an obstruction to responsible science.

Shutting down the entire lab for thirty-six hours a week is a major pain,
she thought.

Casey went so far as to require the on-duty security squad to walk the perimeter every Saturday. He would not allow them to work inside his compound. Marte wondered what they were supposed to do if they found anything suspicious.

Marte had studied everything she could find related to Joshua Casey. She had accepted his invitation with hopes that ViraVax meant a step towards her own lab near some great university in some great city. She had arrived in Costa Brava by private carrier with an overnight bag and the clothes on her back, expecting to install the prototype of her system and get an occasional weekend on the beach—anything to get out of the snake pit that the United States had become. She got her chance and instant isolation at the same time.

Shirley taught her everything about coordinating incoming data files from the eleven satellite clinics that fronted for Casey’s research—nursing homes, a couple of VA hospitals, prisons, a trauma victim center, a school for the retarded and one fully active Central American army. The school for the retarded had been a clandestine clinic under Casey’s direction for two decades.

“They vaccinate the retarded students into becoming universal donors,” Shirley explained. “When transplanted, their organs will never be rejected.”

“You mean, it’s an organ farm?”

Shirley’s blue eyes widened. “Oh, no,” she said, “it’s not like
that.
It’s just to demonstrate that this vaccine is extremely versatile and it doesn’t harm humans. Did you think we went in there and
harvested
those organs?”

“Oh, no,” Marte reassured her. “No, of course not. I’m just. . . unaccustomed to the idea of experimenting on human beings.”

“It’s not like that,” Shirley insisted, “really, it’s not. For one, they’re kind of like vegetables themselves, you know? And they’re none of them Christian souls. . . .”

“But they’re
humans,
Shirley. . . .”

“Well,” Shirley said, sitting up straighter, “you’ve been here long enough to see what we’re doing. You’ve never seen
us
doing anything to people, have you?”

“No, but. . . ”

“But what?”

Marte thought of the two dozen bunkers and outbuildings that made up the Level One compound. Of that two dozen, she had toured the four that made up the ViraVax labs and administrative sector, and one half of Level Five.

What’s in those other levels,
she wondered,
tractors?

Marte laughed a little, nervous laugh. “Nothing. I guess I’m getting claustrophobic here. It’s like living in a submarine, or on an Antarctic research station, except outside it’s so beautiful.”

“Working out helps,” Shirley chuckled. Her hand went to her chest when she laughed, as though her small breasts would get out of control. “I use the gym a lot. Sometimes I’m the only one in there and it really helps me work off some of this stress. The missionaries like it, and they’re on two-year contracts, too.”

“Yeah,” Marte said, “but it’s always the same people I work with, eat with, breathe filtered air with. I’d give a month’s pay right now for a weekend on one of those sunny beaches right over there.”

She pointed to what she thought was west, towards the legendary Costa Bravan beaches that were only fifty klicks away.

“There are ‘field trips,’ as Dr. Casey calls them, for the occasional contractor, like you.”

“Right. Same bunch of people, with our security escorts, no contact with anyone from the outside. . . .”

Shirley frowned, put a nail to her mouth and then pulled it away.

“Use the gym,” she suggested. “Use the pool, use the counselor. That’s what it’s all here for. Pretend you’re on a drug treatment program and the outside is your drug. You simply have to do without it. You knew that when you signed on.”

“I’m sorry,” Marte said. “I didn’t realize that talking about it would get you depressed, too. You’re right. The opportunity I have here with my work is unequaled in the world. I should be thankful for that.”

“And to be at the heart of the Children of Eden,” Shirley said. “Don’t forget that.”

“That’s right,” Marte said.

She gathered some artificial enthusiasm for Shirley’s benefit, and smiled. “It’s a privilege to be on the ground floor of a new order.”

“That’s a good one, Marte.”

“What do you mean?”

“The ground floor of the Garden of Eden. . . .”

Shirley laughed, and it was an obvious attempt to put Marte at ease.

“My subconscious is quicker than my conscious,” she said.

“You don’t have to be a hermit, either,” Shirley said. “Come to the gym in the morning, after readings.”

Marte smiled, glad that someone here had feelings for something more than work. “Deal.”

“At one time, there weren’t
any
women here,” Shirley offered. “Not even Innocents. You would think that would be an advantage for a single girl, but not this place.”