Collected short fiction.., p.28
Collected Short Fiction of Greg Egan, page 28
And I knew, now, that what Sian had always wanted most in a lover was the alien, the unknowable, the mysterious, the opaque. The whole point, for her, of being with someone else was the sense of confronting otherness. Without it, she believed, you might as well be talking to yourself.
I found that I now shared this view (a change whose precise origins I didn’t much want to think about … but then, I’d always known she had the stronger personality, I should have guessed that something would rub off).
Together, we might as well have been alone, so we had no choice but to part.
Nobody wants to spend eternity alone.
Cocoon
From The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twelfth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois; St. Martin's Press, New York, 1995. First published in Asimov's Science Fiction, May 1994.
· · · · ·
Only a few years into the decade, it’s already a fairly safe bet to predict that Australian writer Greg Egan is going to be recognized (if indeed he hasn’t already been so recognized) as one of the Big New Names to emerge in SF in the nineties. In the last few years, he has become a frequent contributor to 1nterzone and Asimov’s Science Fiction, and has made sales as well as to Pulphouse, Analog, Aurealis, Eidolon, and other publications. Several of his stories have appeared in various “Best of the Year” series, including this one; in fact, he placed two stories in both our Eighth and Ninth Annual Collections—the first author ever to do that back-to-back in consecutive volumes; he has also had stories in our Tenth and Eleventh Annual Collections as well. His first novel, Quarantine, appeared in 1992 to wide critical acclaim, and was followed in 1994 by a second novel, Permutation City. Coming up is a collection of his short fiction, Axiomatic, and another novel, tentatively entitled Distress.
In the powerful story that follows—one of the year’s most controversial—he spins a suspenseful and provocative tale of sexual politics, corporate intrigue, and high-tech eugenics in a troubled future Australia…
* * * * *
The explosion shattered windows hundreds of meters away, but started no fire. Later, I discovered that it had shown up on a seismograph at Macquarie University, fixing the time precisely: 3:52 A.M. Residents woken by the blast phoned emergency services within minutes, and our night shift operator called me just after four, but there was no point rushing to the scene when I’d only be in the way. I sat at the terminal in my study for almost an hour, assembling background data and monitoring the radio traffic on headphones, drinking coffee and trying not to type too loudly.
By the time I arrived, the local fire service contractors had departed, having certified that there was no risk of further explosions, but our forensic people were still poring over the wreckage, the electric hum of their equipment all but drowned out by birdsong. Lane Cove was a quiet, leafy suburb, mixed residential and high-tech industrial, the lush vegetation of corporate open spaces blending almost seamlessly into the adjacent national park that straddled the Lane Cove River. The map of the area on my car terminal had identified suppliers of laboratory reagents and pharmaceuticals, manufacturers of precision instruments for scientific and aerospace applications, and no less than twenty-seven biotechnology firms—including Life Enhancement International, the erstwhile sprawling concrete building now reduced to a collection of white powdery blocks clustered around twisted reinforcement rods. The exposed steel glinted in the early light, disconcertingly pristine; the building was only three years old. I could understand why the forensic team had ruled out an accident at their first glance; a few drums of organic solvent could not have done anything remotely like this. Nothing legally stored in a residential zone could reduce a modern building to rubble in a matter of seconds.
I spotted Janet Lansing as I left my car. She was surveying the ruins with an expression of stoicism, but she was hugging herself. Mild shock, probably. She had no other reason to be chilly; it had been stinking hot all night, and the temperature was already climbing. Lansing was Director of the Lane Cove complex: forty-three years old, with a Ph.D. in molecular biology from Cambridge, and an M.B.A. from an equally reputable Japanese virtual university. I’d had my knowledge miner extract her details, and photo, from assorted databases before I’d left home.
I approached her and said, “James Glass, Nexus Investigations.” She frowned at my business card, but accepted it, then glanced at the technicians trawling their gas chromatographs and holography equipment around the perimeter of the ruins.
“They’re yours, I suppose?”
“Yes. They’ve been here since four.”
She smirked slightly. “What happens if I give the job to someone else? And charge the lot of you with trespass?”
“If you hire another company, we’ll be happy to hand over all the samples and data we’ve collected.”
She nodded distractedly. “I’ll hire you, of course. Since four? I’m impressed. You’ve even arrived before the insurance people.” As it happened, LEI’s “insurance people” owned 49 percent of Nexus, and would stay out of the way until we were finished, but I didn’t see any reason to mention that. Lansing added sourly, “Our so-called security firm only worked up the courage to phone me half an hour ago. Evidently a fiberoptic junction box was sabotaged, disconnecting the whole area. They’re supposed to send in patrols in the event of equipment failure, but apparently they didn’t bother.”
I grimaced sympathetically. “What exactly were you people making here?”
“Making? Nothing. We did no manufacturing; this was pure R & D.”
In fact, I’d already established that LEI’s factories were all in Thailand and Indonesia, with the head office in Monaco, and research facilities scattered around the world. There’s a fine line, though, between demonstrating that the facts are at your fingertips, and unnerving the client. A total stranger ought to make at least one trivial wrong assumption, ask at least one misguided question. I always do.
“So what were you researching and developing?”
“That’s commercially sensitive information.”
I took my notepad from my shirt pocket and displayed a standard contract, complete with the usual secrecy provisions. She glanced at it, then had her own computer scrutinize the document. Conversing in modulated infrared, the machines rapidly negotiated the fine details. My notepad signed the agreement electronically on my behalf, and Lansing’s did the same, then they both chimed happily in unison to let us know that the deal had been concluded.
Lansing said, “Our main project here was engineering improved syncytiotrophoblastic cells.” I smiled patiently, and she translated for me. “Strengthening the barrier between the maternal and fetal blood supplies. Mother and fetus don’t share blood directly, but they exchange nutrients and hormones across the placental barrier. The trouble is, all kinds of viruses, toxins, pharmaceuticals and illicit drugs can also cross over. The natural barrier cells didn’t evolve to cope with AIDS, fetal alcohol syndrome, cocaine-addicted babies, or the next thalidomidelike disaster. We’re aiming for a single intravenous injection of a gene-tailoring vector, which would trigger the formation of an extra layer of cells in the appropriate structures within the placenta, specifically designed to shield the fetal blood supply from contaminants in the maternal blood.”
“A thicker barrier?”
“Smarter. More selective. More choosy about what it lets through. We know exactly what the developing fetus actually needs from the maternal blood. These gene-tailored cells would contain specific channels for transporting each of those substances. Nothing else would be allowed through.”
“Very impressive.” A cocoon around the unborn child, shielding it from all of the poisons of modern society. It sounded exactly like the kind of beneficent technology a company called Life Enhancement would be hatching in leafy Lane Cove. True, even a layman could spot a few flaws in the scheme. I’d heard that AIDS most often infected children during birth itself, not pregnancy—but presumably there were other viruses that crossed the placental barrier more frequently. I had no idea whether or not mothers at risk of giving birth to children stunted by alcohol or addicted to cocaine were likely to rush out en masse and have gene-tailored fetal barriers installed—but I could picture a strong demand from people terrified of food additives, pesticides, and pollutants. In the long term—if the system actually worked, and wasn’t prohibitively expensive—it could even become a part of routine prenatal care.
Beneficent, and lucrative.
In any case—whether or not there were biological, economic, and social factors which might keep the technology from being a complete success … it was hard to imagine anyone objecting to the principle of the thing.
I said, “Were you working with animals?”
Lansing scowled. “Only early calf embryos, and disembodied bovine uteruses on tissue-support machines. If it was an animal rights group, they would have been better off bombing an abattoir.”
“Mmm.” In the past few years, the Sydney chapter of Animal Equality—the only group known to use such extreme methods—had concentrated on primate research facilities. They might have changed their focus, or been misinformed, but LEI still seemed like an odd target; there were plenty of laboratories widely known to use whole, live rats and rabbits as if they were disposable test tubes—many of them quite close by. “What about competitors?”
“No one else is pursuing this kind of product line, so far as I know. There’s no race being run; we’ve already obtained individual patents for all of the essential components—the membrane channels, the transporter molecules—so any competitor would have to pay us license fees, regardless.”
“What if someone simply wanted to damage you, financially?”
“Then they should have bombed one of the factories instead. Cutting off our cash flow would have been the best way to hurt us; this laboratory wasn’t earning a cent.”
“Your share price will still take a dive, won’t it? Nothing makes investors nervous quite so much as terrorism.”
Lansing agreed, reluctantly. “But then, whoever took advantage of that and launched a takeover bid would suffer the same taint, themselves. I don’t deny that commercial sabotage takes place in this industry, now and then … but not on a level as crude as this. Genetic engineering is a subtle business. Bombs are for fanatics.”
Perhaps. But who would be fanatically opposed to the idea of shielding human embryos from viruses and poisons? Several religious sects flatly rejected any kind of modification to human biology … but the ones who employed violence were far more likely to have bombed a manufacturer of abortifacient drugs than a laboratory dedicated to the task of safeguarding the unborn child.
Elaine Chang, head of the forensic team, approached us. I introduced her to Lansing. Elaine said, “It was a very professional job. If you’d hired demolition experts, they wouldn’t have done a single thing differently. But then, they probably would have used identical software to compute the timing and placement of the charges.” She held up her notepad, and displayed a stylized reconstruction of the building, with hypothetical explosive charges marked. She hit a button and the simulation crumbled into something very like the actual mess behind us.
She continued, “Most reputable manufacturers these days imprint every batch of explosives with a trace element signature, which remains in the residue. We’ve linked the charges used here to a batch stolen from a warehouse in Singapore five years ago.”
I added, “Which may not be a great help, though, I’m afraid. After five years on the black market, they could have changed hands a dozen times.”
Elaine returned to her equipment. Lansing was beginning to look a little dazed. I said, “I’d like to talk to you again, later—but I am going to need a list of your employees, past and present, as soon as possible.”
She nodded, and hit a few keys on her notepad, transferring the list to mine. She said, “Nothing’s been lost, really. We had off-site backup for all of our data, administrative and scientific. And we have frozen samples of most of the cell lines we were working on, in a vault in Milson’s Point.”
Commercial data backup would be all but untouchable, with the records stored in a dozen or more locations scattered around the world—heavily encrypted, of course. Cell lines sounded more vulnerable. I said, “You’d better let the vault’s operators know what’s happened.”
“I’ve already done that; I phoned them on my way here.” She gazed at the wreckage. “The insurance company will pay for the rebuilding. In six months’ time, we’ll be back on our feet. So whoever did this was wasting their time. The work will go on.”
I said, “Who would want to stop it in the first place?”
Lansing’s faint smirk appeared again, and I very nearly asked her what she found so amusing. But people often act incongruously in the face of disasters, large or small; nobody had died, she wasn’t remotely hysterical, but it would have been strange if a setback like this hadn’t knocked her slightly out of kilter.
She said, “You tell me. That’s your job, isn’t it?”
· · · · ·
Martin was in the living room when I arrived home that evening. Working on his costume for the Mardi Gras. I couldn’t imagine what it would look like when it was completed, but there were definitely feathers involved. Blue feathers. I did my best to appear composed, but I could tell from his expression that he’d caught an involuntary flicker of distaste on my face as he looked up. We kissed anyway, and said nothing about it.
Over dinner, though, he couldn’t help himself.
“Fortieth anniversary this year, James. Sure to be the biggest yet. You could at least come and watch.” His eyes glinted; he enjoyed needling me. We’d had this argument five years running, and it was close to becoming a ritual as pointless as the parade itself.
I said flatly, “Why would I want to watch ten thousand drag queens ride down Oxford Street, blowing kisses to the tourists?”
“Don’t exaggerate. There’ll only be a thousand men in drag, at most.”
“Yeah, the rest will be in sequined jockstraps.”
“If you actually came and watched, you’d discover that most people’s imaginations have progressed far beyond that.”
I shook my head, bemused. “If people’s imaginations had progressed, there’d be no Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras at all. It’s a freak show, for people who want to live in a cultural ghetto. Forty years ago, it might have been … provocative. Maybe it did some good, back then. But now? What’s the point? There are no laws left to change, there’s no politics left to address. This kind of thing just recycles the same moronic stereotypes, year after year.”
Martin said smoothly, “It’s a public reassertion of the right to diverse sexuality. Just because it’s no longer a protest march as well as a celebration doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant. And complaining about stereotypes is like … complaining about the characters in a medieval morality play. The costumes are code, shorthand. Give the great unwashed heterosexual masses credit for some intelligence; they don’t watch the parade and conclude that the average gay man spends all his time in a gold lamé tutu. People aren’t that literal-minded. They all learnt semiotics in kindergarten, they know how to decode the message.”
“I’m sure they do. But it’s still the wrong message: it makes exotic what ought to be mundane. Okay, people have the right to dress up any way they like and march down Oxford Street … but it means absolutely nothing to me.”
“I’m not asking you to join in—”
“Very wise.”
“—but if one hundred thousand straights can turn up, to show their support for the gay community, why can’t you?”
I said wearily, “Because every time I hear the word community, I know I’m being manipulated. If there is such a thing as the gay community, I’m certainly not a part of it. As it happens, I don’t want to spend my life watching gay and lesbian television channels, using gay and lesbian news systems … or going to gay and lesbian street parades. It’s all so … proprietary. You’d think there was a multinational corporation who had the franchise rights on homosexuality. And if you don’t market the product their way, you’re some kind of second-class, inferior, bootleg, unauthorized queer.”
Martin cracked up. When he finally stopped laughing, he said, “Go on. I’m waiting for you to get to the part where you say you’re no more proud of being gay than you are of having brown eyes, or black hair, or a birthmark behind your left knee.”
I protested, “That’s true. Why should I be ‘proud’ of something I was born with? I’m not proud, or ashamed. I just accept it. And I don’t have to join a parade to prove that.”
“So you’d rather we all stayed invisible?”
“Invisible! You’re the one who told me that the representation rates in movies and TV last year were close to the true demographics. And if you hardly even notice it anymore when an openly gay or lesbian politician gets elected, that’s because it’s no longer an issue. To most people, now, it’s about as significant as … being left or right handed.”
Martin seemed to find this suggestion surreal. “Are you trying to tell me that it’s now a non-subject? That the inhabitants of this planet are now absolutely impartial on the question of sexual preference? Your faith is touching—but…” He mimed incredulity.
I said, “We’re equal before the law with any heterosexual couple, aren’t we? And when was the last time you told someone you were gay and they so much as blinked? And yes, I know, there are dozens of countries where it’s still illegal—along with joining the wrong political parties, or the wrong religions. Parades in Oxford Street aren’t going to change that.”
