Adultby David Redd |
Part 1 Part 3 appear in this issue. |
| part 2 of 3 |
I woke up amid confused dreams of my homeland being wiped out, me running through ruins prowled by monsters. Quite close to reality in many ways, but Manchester lay twenty metres above pre-warming sea level and hadn’t drowned like central London. So what if the survivors were huddled behind barricades to defend their resources? They had trade, reading and writing, science in places, and even a belief that mankind could keep going.
I couldn’t complain about my treatment so far. I breakfasted on hot bean soup and prayers, all well-meant but not a diet likely to nourish me long-term. I was careful to thank everyone. The little Munchkins from last night grinned farewell as we went down to the gate. Cute kids, but the thought of them learning the ten-for-one game made me shiver.
“Trading can start two hours after sunup,” said Spiro, outside. “That allows time to deploy guards and load lorries in daylight. The old Council organised a morning truce in Year Zero, and the tradition stuck. I’ll take you across with a guide. It’s not anarchy here, you know. They just like to act tough.”
“Well, sure.” Tough was understood everywhere. England was no different these days, except colder. A dull cumulus blanket hung overhead. Me, I preferred Georgia, or even the remains of Kansas. Checking smilodon subfossils for genetic material was a lot more civilised than being traded across subculture zones for a mission Spiro wouldn’t explain yet. Secretive clients were always bad news.
Our guide appeared, the driver from yesterday, accompanied by a white-masked heavy whose rifle was marked REPENT. Better than the USAA’s NO PRISONERS. Or the Anzac DIE, BASTARDS! Outside the gate, Driver Man returned our own guns, whose unmarked barrels betrayed our mercenary nature. He sounded wary of the place he was taking us. “Trouble of sorts, I hear. Kids out planting reckon they seen a gorilla loose. Maybe it’s a Bigfoot? What they got in that zoo over there?”
“I don’t remember any city-centre zoo.”
“You remember the place it started.” Spiro liked needling me. “This outfit Biocom used to be the Uni Centre of Excellence Bio3, hot on metabolic pathways and pharmaceuticals, but it’s had to evolve. The animals came as host bodies for initial biomanufacture. Of course it’s totally private enterprise now.”
“Of course.” Wasn’t everything? The gang bosses, the Council, the Federal Government? The climate had changed all right. And my client was based in the Uni where I’d worked in the old days. That might not be a coincidence. “Let’s go.”
We started walking across no-man’s-land. I thought again, if the deal went sour I’d never make it out alive. Same as every other job, then.
Our destination was an armoured multistorey building so close the lorry could have dropped me there last night had politics allowed. The four of us reached a peeling tarmac road, stopped and raised our arms until two greeters came out, Nepali types in very smart lime-green uniforms carrying long-barrelled pistols marked SUPREMACY. Our Christian escorts got thanked and were waved away; they seemed glad to go. I let the soldiers empty my shoulder holster and frisk me. Nobody was searching Spiro, I noticed. Meanwhile they found my second gun, proving they were good, but I didn’t worry. My third was a wrist-bone implant.
I sensed Spiro loosen up slightly. “Okay, Timmy Boy, straight across to Biocom. You’ll get your answers there.”
“About bloody time.” We walked, and I tried a first question, an easy one to get him talking. “Why Asian guards here, Spiro? It’s like some rich guy’s mansion in Bengaluru.”
“Because Gurkhas are the best in the world and this facility picks only the best. That’s why we picked you, Timmy boy.” Sarcasm yet. Spiro trotted beside me across uneven concrete. “Yes, only the best. That’s why they have Elta Canetti here.”
Elta Canetti? Her name hit me like a Louisiana welcome.
No wonder Spiro hadn’t mentioned any names, not until I was too far in to back out.
My Elta.
Here.
* * *
Years ago in a different age, during the coffee break of an in-house Personal Management seminar, a slim black-haired girl had questioned me about the foetal development of chimpanzees. I had studied the subject only briefly, having become uneasy about vivisection, but with her dark eyes flashing up at me I was happy to explain the differing growth patterns of humans and simians.
I was a very earnest youngster then, like many in the new partnership between university and industry. Later that day, realising that “Elta Canetti, M.Sc., Clinical Trials Scientist” had been picking my brains very expertly, I asked a colleague her background.
“Headhunted from Celltech three months ago. Speciality: optimum cell growth, human. Smart kid.”
The second time I saw this “smart kid” was a week later, in my capacity as an occasional internal referee, when her project director asked me to call across urgently. Inside his lab I found Elta confronting a quality-auditor from Quintiles or some such consultancy. She looked stubborn but attractive, defending her use of mutual-favour deals with colleagues for data beyond the project budget. Unpedigreed results in a QA audit? A bad breach of procedure, but her biochemical overwriting of skin cell genes was good science. Elta was confident enough to have used her own forearm as a test substrate.
Her project director hovered expectantly, so I advised Elta Canetti to follow proper channels in future, kicked out the jobsworth, and finally summarised a PDQ way ahead in my best one-minute manager manner. Nothing drastic; the girl was only researching some improved skin cream. My best touch of all was arranging to meet her after work.
We became close. Or did we?
Physically Elta was everything I could have wished, but emotionally I was never sure. This was a girl on whom romantic scene-setting was utterly wasted, just as well, since like most males I was into sex, not romance. Elta would spend the night at my flat without hesitation, but she would rather discuss scientific news than watch a DVD, and her diet might consist of Big Macs grabbed on the way over. Only the nights without Elta at squash and weight-training reminded me that I wanted real activities in the real world, not quiet nights in. Somehow I hadn’t grown up to be Harrison Ford. (But after I quit Uni I bought a proper Tilley hat, just for the Indy look. And on my initial contract, in Bas-Congo, the first technical equipment I acquired was an old Stechkin 9mm machine pistol.)
Looking back, my attempt at a comfortable University career didn’t impress Elta because I didn’t really believe in it myself. I introduced her to my loving middle-class family in their safe little suburb, and that didn’t impress her either. (Note: when the islands north of Mauritius vanished under me, I only got halfway back to England before that safe suburb imploded. I heard screams and gunshots on Dad’s mobile, and then everything was dead. My family, my town, my whole past. But that was long after I’d split from Elta.)
As for her origins I could learn nothing, other than hints about “the back streets of Naples” which sounded as made-up as her name. Eventually she admitted to having had a social life before me, mainly some Mediterranean scientist called Spyros Achilleos. Mostly, however, Elta preferred shop talk about cell growth and the like. She was still picking my brains.
“Hey Tim, I found your original report from Yerkes today.”
“The one comparing chimpanzees with humans for pharmaceutical test purposes? Where I listed the 98% genetic similarities between us?”
“Uh-huh. I’m more interested in the differences you found. A normal human never grows full body hair. A human infant takes a year to acquire a developed larynx, or a developed way of walking.” And so on. This dialogue seemed to recur regularly. With us, our scientific conversation was a kind of foreplay.
I would say, “Elta, one possibility is that people are neotenous apes, grown in size but retaining juvenile features. Our baby fat, our brain/body weight ratio more appropriate to a foetus, our face being relatively shortened, our physical development retarded by ape standards...” I would list more evidence, then finish with “But that’s too simplistic. Anyway, it’s not relevant to our work here.”
“Not relevant? Oh, Tim! Anything which affects ageing and growth is relevant!”
Maybe I should have agreed with her.
She never actually moved in with me. For a couple of semesters we slept in either my flat or hers, whichever we happened to be in.
It changed in hours, minutes. Her new Kortisone Kosmetika took off. Elta had been seeing someone in Marketing, I discovered, someone so helpful over her big launch. The Kosmetika line conquered the world, and Elta never had quality audit problems again.
By then I was gone.
Memory tells me that I dumped her, but reason says that she must have dumped me.
* * *
On a grey Manchester morning, in the chilly end of summer before Scandinavian snows would descend, I walked across uneven concrete. All outlying buildings had been demolished. Rectangular beds of grass and clover were grazed by tethered sheep, perhaps experimental animals, or perhaps bait for ferals. But some changes were for the better: starlings and wagtails were back, dark handfuls of feathers pecking at the ground as we went past.
A watchful Gurkha led us forward, then came Spiro, then me eyeing the tall steel-shuttered Bio building for possible gun emplacements, and finally the other Gurkha covering me. Had I really been jetted halfway across the world just to work for Elta Canetti? After so many years she must be highly placed somewhere. In today’s climate, jump-jets and reliable guns came expensive, and my work might be good but the possible returns from palaeogenetics didn’t add up to the cost of acquiring me.
This must be personal. Elta wanted me, not my skills.
But that didn’t make sense either. She could have located me at any time in the past three decades, through Spiro or some other Mr Fix-it. Why drag me in now?
I heard traffic noises. A skull-and-crossbones fuel tanker chugged past, spooking nervous pigeons into clattering flight. I could imagine what efforts the Christians made to keep their generators supplied: shakedowns, threats, dickering, checking purity, always reassessing whether the game was worthwhile. Probably the Biocom outfit operated in similar fashion with its own products, albeit in the more lordly manner of ancient knights in their castles trading or warring with other knights rather than with peasants. I shook my head, still wondering what I was getting into. Then a section of bullet-chipped armourglass before us swung inward, and I saw people.
The girl, flanked by more Gurkhas, was Elta.
She hadn’t changed in over quarter of a century. Still slim, dark-haired, in white shirt and black trousers so simple and clean that her appearance shone with status. Still young. I knew instantly that she was still using Kortisone Kosmetica or its latest equivalent. For me, the stubble and outdoor bloom on my face would show her I hadn’t invested in any pharma lately.
Elta saluted our escort in friendly fashion and said “Thank you” as to equals. Spiro got a nod. To me she said only, “Hello, Tim. Let’s go up and talk.”
Talk? What do you say to each other after so long, when you and everything about you and around you has changed? Except that Elta hadn’t changed. She didn’t look any different at all, and that was weird. With great restraint I asked, “Anything I should know?”
“Lots. Stay close to Smiling Spiro. He’s your passport.”
Certainly he would be my passport out at the end. We followed her into a lift, the troops staying behind. I risked one brief exchange with Spiro as we ascended.
“You said this job was temporary and I’d be back in days. Still true?”
“As far as I know.”
Unsatisfactory, but honest. Elta flashed annoyance at me.
“You’re on very short-term loan, Tim. We’ll fly you back to Kansas afterwards.”
I didn’t reply. Years ago she’d been living with me and also seeing that guy in Marketing; I couldn’t remember his name and probably she couldn’t either. History could teach us a lot.
She took us to a bright spacious office, right out of the Hollywood Dream Factory idea of executive style, clean and carpeted in white and black squares, with old-fashioned pine desks and keyboards in front of a wallscreen. Only a rack of sharpshooter rifles by the window spoiled the décor. They bore no wording, just rows of little skulls. Elta indicated a kitchenette unit. “Help yourselves to tea. Nothing stronger here, Tim. We have rules.”
The whole world had rules. Pity they changed so often.
Spiro went to the urn and cups to play butler. His crumpled travel gear made him look out of place, like a movie frontiersman on a chrome starship set. Probably I didn’t fit too well either.
“Elta, I guess you know my brilliant career since the world fell apart. How’re you doing?”
“Sit down, Tim. I think we can co-operate. You won’t let our old relationship affect the job now, I hope.”
Strange feelings burned and fought each other inside me, but she was right. Our past was gone.
“If the job’s genetics, fine. Tell me about it. Are you the boss?”
“I’m what they used to call a line manager.” She explained that Biocom was run by someone called Pietro who held court in a top-floor penthouse. “I just work here, Tim, but I should warn you that Pietro and I have a special relationship. Do you have a problem with that?”
“No.” My old life was dead along with my old world. I’d grown up. I would pretend to accept her “I just work here” line and do whatever she wanted, then get out fast on the next jump-jet. “So tell me the deal.”
“I hardly know where to start, Tim. You’ve been away too long.”
She looked young and innocent, but that was as false as her claim of indecision. She was my age, and everything she said would have been prepared and calculated down to the last syllable. I took a cup of straight tea from Spiro (our usual workplaces didn’t run to luxury imports like sugar or milk) and I let Elta say what she had decided to say.
First, like one desert traveller updating another, she reviewed the history of England. “Flooded; frozen; shot to pieces.” (That summed up the ten-metre-plus rise in sea level; the loss of thermohaline circulation letting in the arctic winters; and the resulting refugee wars, race wars, religious wars, food wars, fuel wars and just plain wars.)
After the epidemics Manchester had devolved into small self-sufficient tribes, each ruled by its top gun. In some communities hi-tech manufacturing and even cutting-edge research went on; people traded multifunction satellite phones the same way that Neolithic cavemen had traded hand-axes. Impressively, Elta had stayed throughout at Bio3 as it became Biocom.
“We survived by becoming the world leader in our field.” They — she — had peddled opiates, viagras and beauty treatments. Biocom had seen off all predators because the warrior guards were world leaders too and had a 50% stake in the business to defend. (That 50% bankrolled their supremacist agenda in the post-chaos East.) Elta, in the unique niche environment of Biocom, continued her R&D almost undisturbed. I thought, but didn’t say, that having a “special relationship” with the boss must help.
“Really, Tim, you’ll find our organisation very similar to the old Uni commercial partnerships.”
Elta sounded sincere; she must have rehearsed that line for hours. I felt cynical and suspicious, weary of evasions.
“What do you want me for?”
She said, “My current project needs a second opinion. That means finding someone with a wide background knowledge of the human genome and genetic changes. You’re the ideal candidate.”
I shook my head.
“Why me? I don’t do medicine. Fossils, buried stuff, food plants. That’s my line.”
“You’ve done palaeogenetics on people, I understand.”
She knew about the racial purity work. Pity. I didn’t like to be reminded of that, even though it had paid well.
“You’re not into ethnic cleansing, Elta? Not with this place stuffed full of Gurung and Limbu or whoever?”
“Nothing racist,” she said definitively, and Spiro chipped in with, “Never.” At last, something genuine.
“Talk technical,” I said, and Elta began another prepared speech. This was one I could believe.
Pietro wanted bio-enhancement. That meant strength, improved perceptions and reflexes, and anti-ageing treatments. The whole package for himself and the Gurkhas. Especially the Gurkhas. Elta had developed pills for delivering enzymes or amino acid sequences directly to the DNA in a client’s cells. Once absorbed, the biotech could upgrade a man’s genetic activity for life. Her treatment would improve muscle development, nerve signalling speeds, resistance to stress, defences against disease... in short, every strength a fighting man could wish for.
She pointed to a wall picture of a tanned bare-chested hero. He had broad shoulders, huge clenched fists, a jutting determined chin, a high forehead and blazing eyes. Super-warrior. A man who would not age as ordinary men did, she said. Her goal. Already she was most of the way there. I wondered if my Gurkha escorts had been older than they looked. Elta certainly was.
No way was she just a line manager.
Copyright © 2007 by David Redd
