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- COCOON
- Greg Egan
- "Cocoon" was purchased by Gardner Dozois, and appeared in the May 1994 issue of Asimov's, with an
- illustration by Steve Cavallo; the story went on to appear on the Hugo Final Ballot in 1995, and to win both the
- Ditmar Award and the Asimov's Readers Award. Egan has had a string of powerful stories in Asimov's througho
- the '90s. In fact, it's already a fairly safe bet to predict that Australian writer Greg Egan is going to come to be
- recognized (if indeed he hasn't already been so recognized) as being one of the Big New Names to emerge in SF i
- nineties, and one of the most inventive and intriguing of all the new "hard science" writers. His first novel,
- Quarantine, appeared in 1992, to wide critical ac-claim, and was followed by a second novel in 1994, Permutation
- City, which won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His most recent books are a col-lection of his short fic
- Axiomatic, and a new novel, Distress. Upcoming is another new novel, Di-aspora.
- In the powerful story that follows-one of 1994's most controversial-he unravels a suspenseful and provoca
- mystery that revolves around sexual pol-itics, corporate intrigue, and high-tech eugenics, all set against the
- background of a troubled future Aus-tralia ...
- 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 minut
- and our night shift oper-ator 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 cof-fe
- and trying not to type too loudly.
- By the time I arrived, the local fire service contractors had departed, having certified th
- 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
- a quiet, leafy suburb, mixed residential and high-tech industrial, the lush vegetation of
- cor-porate open spaces blending almost seamlessly into the ad-jacent 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 instrumen
- for scientific and aerospace applications, and no less than twenty-seven biotechnology
- firms-includ-ing Life Enhancement International, the erstwhile sprawling concrete building
- now reduced to a collection of white pow-dery blocks clustered around twisted reinforcem
- rods. The exposed steel glinted in the early light, disconcertingly pris-tine; the building wa
- only three years old. I could understand why the forensic team had ruled out an accident at
- first glance; a few drums of organic solvent could not have done anything remotely like this
- Nothing legally stored in a resi-dential 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
- 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
- bi-ology from Cambridge, and an M.B.A. from an equally rep-utable Japanese virtual
- university. I'd had my knowledge miner extract her details, and photo, from assorted databa
- before I'd left home.
- I approached her and said, "James Glass, Nexus Investi-gations." She frowned at my
- business card, but accepted it, then glanced at the technicians trawling their gas
- chromato-graphs 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 l
- of you with trespass?"
- "If you hire another company, we'll be happy to hand over all the samples and data we'
- collected."
- She nodded distractedly. "I'll hire you, of course. Since four? I'm impressed. You've ev
- arrived before the insur-ance 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
- courage to phone me half an hour ago. Evi-dently a fiber-optic junction box was sabotaged,
- disconnecting the whole area. They're supposed to send in patrols in the event of equipmen
- failure, but apparently they didn't bother."
- I grimaced sympathetically. ' 'What exactly were you peo-ple 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, w
- the head office in Monaco, and research facilities scattered around the world. There's a fin
- 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 wit
- 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 detai
- My notepad signed the agreement electronically on my behalf, and Lansing's did the same, t
- they both chimed happily in unison to let us know that the deal had been concluded.
- Lansing said, ' 'Our main project here was engineering im-proved 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 hor-mones across the placental barrier. The trouble is, all kinds of
- viruses, toxins, pharmaceuticals and illicit drugs can also cross over. The natural barrier c
- didn't evolve to cope with AIDS, fetal alcohol syndrome, cocaine-addicted babies, or the n
- thalidomidelike disaster. We're aiming for a single intra-venous injection of a gene-tailorin
- vector, which would trig-ger 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 wh
- the developing fetus actually needs from the maternal blood. These gene-tailored cells wou
- 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
- com-pany called Life Enhancement would be hatching in leafy Lane Cove. True, even a lay
- could spot a few flaws in the scheme. I'd heard that AIDS most often infected children durin
- birth itself, not pregnancy-but presumably there were other viruses that crossed the placent
- barrier more fre-quently. I had no idea whether or not mothers at risk of giving birth to chil
- 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 terrif
- 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 rou-tine prenatal care.
- Beneficent, and lucrative.
- In any case-whether or not there were biological, eco-nomic, and social factors which
- might keep the technology from being a complete success ... it was hard to imagine any-one
- objecting to the principle of the thing.
- I said, "Were you working with animals?"
- Lansing scowled. "Only early calf embryos, and disem-bodied bovine uteruses on
- tissue-support machines. If it was an animal rights group, they would have been better off
- bomb-ing an abattoir."
- "Mmm." In the past few years, the Sydney chapter of An-imal 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 targe
- there were plenty of laboratories widely known to use whole, live rats and rabbits as if the
- 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 bei
- run; we've already obtained individual patents for all of the essential components-the
- membrane channels, the transporter molecules-so any com-petitor would have to pay us lic
- fees, regardless."
- "What if someone simply wanted to damage you, finan-cially?' '
- "Then they should have bombed one of the factories in-stead. 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 quit
- much as terrorism."
- Lansing agreed, reluctantly. "But then, whoever took ad-vantage 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? Sev-eral religious sects flatly rejected any kind of modification
- human biology ... but the ones who employed violence were far more likely to have bombe
- manufacturer of abortifa-cient drugs than a laboratory dedicated to the task of safe-guardin
- the unborn child.
- Elaine Chang, head of the forensic team, approached us. I introduced her to Lansing. El
- said, "It was a very pro-fessional 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
- compute the timing and placement of the charges." She held up her notepad, and dis-played
- stylized reconstruction of the building, with hypo-thetical explosive charges marked. She h
- 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 explos
- with a trace element sig-nature, which remains in the residue. We've linked the charges use
- here to a batch stolen from a warehouse in Sin-gapore five years ago."
- I added, "Which may not be a great help, though, I'm afraid. After five years on the blac
- market, they could have changed hands a dozen times."
- Elaine returned to her equipment. Lansing was beginning to look a little dazed. I said, "
- like to talk to you again, later-but I am going to need a list of your employees, past and pres
- 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 v
- in Milson's Point."
- Commercial data backup would be all but untouchable, with the records stored in a doz
- or more locations scattered around the world-heavily encrypted, of course. Cell lines soun
- 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. "Th
- insurance company will pay for the rebuilding. In six months' time, we'll be back on our fee
- 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
- died, she wasn't remotely hysterical, but it would have been strange if a setback like this ha
- 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 eve-ning. Working on his costu
- 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, b
- could tell from his ex-pression that he'd caught an involuntary flicker of distaste on my face
- 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 big-gest yet. You could at least co
- 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 point-less 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
- Lesbian Mardi Gras at all. It's a freak show, for people who want to live in a cultural ghett
- 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 mo-ronic 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 medieva
- morality play. The cos-tumes are code, shorthand. Give the great unwashed hetero-sexual
- masses credit for some intelligence; they don't watch the parade and conclude that the avera
- gay man spends all his time in a gold lame 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 Ox-fo
- 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 com-munity, 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
- happens, I don't want to spend my life watching gay and lesbian television channels, using
- and lesbian news sys-tems ... or going to gay and lesbian street parades. It's all so ...
- proprietary. You'd think there was a multinational cor-poration who had the franchise right
- 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 y
- 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 some-thing I was born with? I'm no
- 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 represen-tation rates in movies and TV
- year were close to the true demographics. And if you hardly even notice it anymore when a
- openly gay or lesbian politician gets elected, that's because it's no longer an issue. To mos
- 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 inhab-itants of this planet are now absolutely impartial on the ques-ti
- 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 some-one 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 tha
- "People are still bashed in this city. People are still dis-criminated against."
- ' 'Yeah. And people are also shot dead in peak-hour traffic for playing the wrong music
- their car stereos, or denied jobs because they live in the wrong suburbs. I'm not talking abo
- the perfection of human nature. I just want you to ac-knowledge one tiny victory: leaving ou
- few psychotics, and a few fundamentalist bigots ... most people just don't care."
- Martin said ruefully, "If only that were true!"
- The argument went on for more than an hour-ending in a stalemate, as usual. But then,
- neither one of us had seriously expected to change the other's mind.
- I did catch myself wondering afterward, though, if I really believed all of my own
- optimistic rhetoric. About as signifi-cant as being left or right handed? Certainly, that wa
- the line taken by most Western politicians, academics, essayists, talk show hosts, soap ope
- writers, and mainstream religious leaders ... but the same people had been espousing equal
- high-minded principles of racial equality for decades, and the reality still hadn't entirely ca
- up on that front. I'd suffered very little discrimination, myself-by the time I reached high
- school, tolerance was hip, and I'd witnessed a constant stream of improvements since then
- but how could I ever know precisely how much hidden prejudice remained? By interro-gati
- my own straight friends? By reading the sociologists' latest attitude surveys? People will
- always tell you what they think you want to hear.
- Still, it hardly seemed to matter. Personally, I could get by without the deep and sincere
- approval of every other member of the human race. Martin and I were lucky enough to have
- been born into a time and place where, in almost every tan-gible respect, we were treated a
- equal.
- What more could anyone hope for?
- In bed that night, we made love very slowly, at first just kissing and stroking each other
- bodies for what seemed like hours. Neither of us spoke, and in the stupefying heat I lost all
- sense of belonging to any other time, any other reality. Nothing existed but the two of us; the
- rest of the world, the rest of my life, went spinning away into the darkness.
- The investigation moved slowly. I interviewed every current member of LEI's workforc
- then started on the long list of past employees. I still believed that commercial sabotage wa
- the most likely explanation for such a professional job-but blowing up the opposition is a
- desperate measure; a little civ-ilized espionage usually comes first. I was hoping that some
- who'd worked for LEI might have been approached in the past and offered money for inside
- information-and if I could find just one employee who'd turned down a bribe, they might ha
- learnt something useful from their contact with the presumed rival.
- Although the Lane Cove facility had only been built three years before, LEI had operate
- research division in Sydney for twelve years before that, in North Ryde, not far away. Man
- the ex-employees from that period had moved inter-state or overseas; quite a few had been
- transferred to LEI divisions in other countries. Still, almost no one had changed their perso
- phone numbers, so I had very little trouble tracking them down.
- The exception was a biochemist named Catherine Mendel-sohn; the number listed for h
- the LEI staff records had been canceled. There were seventeen people with the same surnam
- and initials in the national phone directory; none ad-mitted to being Catherine Alice
- Mendelsohn, and none looked at all like the staff photo I had.
- Mendelsohn's address in the Electoral Roll, an apartment in Newtown, matched the LEI
- records-but the same address was in the phone directory (and Electoral Roll) for Stanley G
- a young man who told me that he'd never met Men-delsohn. He'd been leasing the apartmen
- the past eighteen months.
- Credit rating databases gave the same out-of-date address. I couldn't access tax, bankin
- utilities records without a warrant. I had my knowledge miner scan the death notices, but th
- was no match there.
- Mendelsohn had worked for LEI until about a year before the move to Lane Cove. She'd
- been part of a team working on a gene-tailoring system for ameliorating menstrual side-effe
- and although the Sydney division had always spe-cialized in gynecological research, for so
- reason the project was about to be moved to Texas. I checked the industry publications;
- apparently, LEI had been rearranging all of its operations at the time, gathering together
- projects from around the globe into new multi-disciplinary configurations, in ac-cordance w
- the latest fashionable theories of research dy-namics. Mendelsohn had declined the transfer
- and had been retrenched.
- I dug deeper. The staff records showed that Mendelsohn had been questioned by securit
- guards after being found on the North Ryde premises late at night, two days before her
- dismissal. Workaholic biotechnologists aren't uncommon, but starting the day at two in the
- morning shows exceptional ded-ication, especially when the company has just tried to shuf
- you off to Amarillo. Having turned down the transfer, she must have known what was in sto
- Nothing came of the incident, though. And even if Men-delsohn had been planning some
- minor act of sabotage, that hardly established any connection with a bombing four years lat
- She might have been angry enough to leak confidential information to one of LEI's rivals... b
- whoever had bombed the Lane Cove laboratory would have been more in-terested in some
- who'd worked on the fetal barrier project itself-a project which had only come into existen
- year after Mendelsohn had been sacked.
- I pressed on through the list. Interviewing the ex-employees was frustrating; almost all
- them were still working in the biotechnology industry, and they would have been an ideal
- group to poll on the question of who would benefit most from LEI's misfortune-but the
- confidentiality agreement I'd signed meant that I couldn't disclose anything about the re-sear
- in question-not even to people working for LEI's other divisions.
- The one thing which I could discuss drew a blank: if any-one had been offered a bribe,
- weren't talking about it- and no magistrate was going to sign a warrant letting me loose on a
- fishing expedition through a hundred and seventeen peo-ple's financial records.
- Forensic examination of the ruins, and the sabotaged fiber-optic exchange, had yielded
- usual catalogue of minutiae which might eventually turn out to be invaluable-but none of it
- going to conjure up a suspect out of thin air.
- Four days after the bombing-just as I found myself grow-ing desperate for a fresh angle
- the case-I had a call from Janet Lansing.
- The backup samples of the project's gene-tailored cell lines had been destroyed.
- The vault in Milson's Point turned out to be directly under-neath a section of the Harbor
- Bridge-built right into the foundations on the north shore. Lansing hadn't arrived yet, but the
- head of security for the storage company, an elderly man called David Asher, showed me
- around. Inside, the traffic was barely audible, but the vibration coming through the floor fel
- like a constant mild earthquake. The place was cavernous, dry and cool. At least a hundred
- cryogenic freezers were laid out in rows; heavily clad pipes ran between them, replenishin
- their liquid nitrogen.
- Asher was understandably morose, but cooperative. Cellu-loid movie film had been
- archived here, he explained, before everything went digital; the present owners specialized
- bi-ological materials. There were no guards physically assigned to the vault, but the
- surveillance cameras and alarm systems looked impressive, and the structure itself must ha
- been close to impregnable.
- Lansing had phoned the storage company, Biofile, on the morning of the bombing. Ashe
- confirmed that he'd sent someone down from their North Sydney office to check the freezer
- question. Nothing was missing-but he'd promised to boost security measures immediately.
- Because the freezers were supposedly tamper-proof, and individually locked, cli-ents were
- normally allowed access to the vault at their con-venience, monitored by the surveillance
- cameras, but otherwise unsupervised. Asher had promised Lansing that, henceforth, nobody
- would enter the building without a mem-ber of his staff to accompany them-and he claimed
- no-body had been inside since the day of the bombing, anyway.
- When two LEI technicians had arrived that morning to carry out an inventory, they'd fou
- the expected number of culture flasks, all with the correct bar code labels, all tightly sealed
- the appearance of their contents was subtly wrong. The translucent frozen colloid was more
- opalescent than cloudy; an untrained eye might never have noticed the difference, but
- apparently it spoke volumes to the cognoscenti.
- The technicians had taken a number of the flasks away for analysis; LEI were working o
- of temporary premises, a sub-leased corner of a paint manufacturer's quality control lab.
- Lansing had promised me preliminary test results by the time we met.
- Lansing arrived, and unlocked the freezer. With gloved hands, she lifted a flask out of th
- swirling mist and held it up for me to inspect.
- She said, "We've only thawed three samples, but they all look the same. The cells have
- been torn apart."
- "How?" The flask was covered with such heavy conden-sation that I couldn't have said
- was empty or full, let alone cloudy or opalescent.
- "It looks like radiation damage."
- My skin crawled. I peered into the depths of the freezer; all I could make out were the t
- of rows of identical flasks-but if one of them had been spiked with a radioiso-tope...
- Lansing scowled. "Relax." She tapped a small electronic badge pinned to her lab coat,
- a dull gray face like a solar cell: a radiation dosimeter. "This would be screaming if we w
- being exposed to anything significant. Whatever the source of the radiation was, it's no long
- in here-and it hasn't left the walls glowing. Your future offspring are safe."
- I let that pass. "You think all the samples will turn out to be ruined? You won't be able
- salvage anything?"
- Lansing was stoical as ever. ' 'It looks that way. There are some elaborate techniques w
- could use, to try to repair the DNA-but it will probably be easier to synthesize fresh DNA f
- scratch, and re-introduce it into unmodified bovine pla-cental cell lines. We still have all th
- sequence data; that's what matters in the end."
- I pondered the freezer's locking system, the surveillance cameras. ' 'Are you sure that th
- source was inside the freezer? Or could the damage have been done without actually break
- in-right through the walls?"
- She thought it over. "Maybe. There's not much metal in these things; they're mostly plas
- foam. But I'm not a ra-diation physicist; your forensic people will probably be able to give
- a better idea of what happened, once they've checked out the freezer itself. If there's damag
- the poly-mers in the foam, it might be possible to use that to recon-struct the geometry of th
- radiation field."
- A forensic team was on its way. I said, "How would they have done it? Walked casuall
- by, and just-?"
- "Hardly. A source which could do this in one quick hit would have been unmanageable
- far more likely to have been a matter of weeks, or months, of low-level exposure."
- "So they must have smuggled some kind of device into
- their own freezer, and aimed it at yours? But then... we'll be able to trace the effects rig
- back to the source, won't we? So how could they have hoped to get away with it?''
- Lansing said, "It's even simpler than that. We're talking about a modest amount of a
- gamma-emitting isotope, not some billion-dollar particle-beam weapon. The effective rang
- would be a couple of meters, at most. If it was done from the outside, you've just narrowed
- down your suspect list to two." She thumped the freezer's left neighbor in the aisle, then did
- same to the one on the right-and said, "Aha."
- "What?"
- She thumped them both again. The second one sounded hollow. I said, "No liquid nitrog
- It's not in use?"
- Lansing nodded. She reached for the handle.
- Asher said, "I don't think-"
- The freezer was unlocked, the lid swung open easily. Lan-sing's badge started beeping-
- worse, there was some-thing in there, with batteries and wires....
- I don't know what kept me from knocking her to the floor-but Lansing, untroubled, lifted
- lid all the way. She said mildly, "Don't panic; this dose rate's nothing. Threshold of
- detectable."
- The thing inside looked superficially like a home-made bomb-but the batteries and time
- chip I'd glimpsed were wired to a heavy-duty solenoid, which was part of an elabo-rate shu
- mechanism on one side of a large, metallic gray box.
- Lansing said, ' 'Cannibalized medical source, probably. You know these things have tur
- up in garbage dumps?" She unpinned her badge and waved it near the box; the pitch of the
- alarm increased, but only slightly. ' 'Shielding seems to be intact."
- I said, as calmly as possible, ' 'These people have access to high explosives. You don't
- have any idea what the fuck might be in there, or what it's wired up to do. This is the point
- where we walk out, quietly, and leave it to the bomb-disposal robots."
- She seemed about to protest, but then she nodded contritely. The three of us went up ont
- the street, and Asher called the local terrorist services contractor. I suddenly realized that
- they'd have to divert all traffic from the bridge. The Lane Cove bombing had received some
- perfunctory media cover-age-but this would lead the evening news.
- I took Lansing aside. "They've destroyed your laboratory. They've wiped out your cell
- lines. Your data may be almost impossible to locate and corrupt-so the next logical target i
- you and your employees. Nexus doesn't provide protective services, but I can recommend a
- good firm."
- I gave her the phone number; she accepted it with appro-priate solemnity. "So you final
- believe me? These people aren't commercial saboteurs. They're dangerous fanatics."
- I was growing impatient with her vague references to "fa-natics."
- "Who exactly do you have in mind?"
- She said darkly, ' 'We're tampering with certain ... natural processes. You can draw yo
- own conclusions, can't you?"
- There was no logic to that at all. God's Image would prob-ably want to force all pregna
- women with HIV infections, or drug habits, to use the cocoon; they wouldn't try to bomb the
- technology out of existence. Gaia's Soldiers were more concerned with genetically enginee
- crops and bacteria than trivial modifications to insignificant species like humans-and they
- wouldn't have used radioisotopes if the fate of the planet depended on it. Lansing was
- beginning to sound thoroughly paranoid-although in the circumstances, I couldn't really blam
- her.
- I said, "I'm not drawing any conclusions. I'm just advising you to take some sensible
- precautions, because we have no way of knowing how far this might escalate. But... Biofile
- must lease freezer space to every one of your competitors. A commercial rival would have
- found it a thousand times easier than any hypothetical sect member to get into the vault to pl
- that thing."
- A gray armor-plated van screeched to a halt in front of us; the back door swung up, ram
- slid down, and a squat, multi-limbed robot on treads descended. I raised a hand in greeting
- the robot did the same; the operator was a friend of mine.
- Lansing said, "You may be right. But then, there's nothing to stop a terrorist from having
- day job in biotechnology, is there?"
- The device turned out not to be booby-trapped at all-just rigged to spray LEI's precious
- cells with gamma rays for six hours, starting at midnight, every night. Even in the unlikely e
- that someone had come into the vault in the early hours and wedged themselves into the nar
- gap between the freezers, the dose they received would not have been much; as Lansing had
- suggested, it was the cumulative effect over months which had done the damage. The
- radioisotope in the box was cobalt 60, almost certainly a decomissioned medical
- source-grown too weak for its original use, but still too hot to be discarded-stolen from a
- "cooling off" site. No such theft had been reported, but Elaine Chang's assistants were phon
- around the hospitals, trying to persuade them to re-inventory their concrete bunkers.
- Cobalt 60 was dangerous stuff-but fifty milligrams in a carefully shielded container wa
- exactly a tactical nuclear weapon. The news systems went berserk, though: ATOMIC
- TERRORISTS STRIKE HARBOR BRIDGE, et cetera. If LEI's enemies were activists, wit
- some "moral cause" which they hoped to set before the public, they clearly had the worst P
- advisers in the business. Their prospects of gain-ing the slightest sympathy had vanished, th
- instant the first news reports had mentioned the word radiation.
- My secretarial software issued polite statements of "No comment" on my behalf, but
- camera crews began hovering outside my front door, so I relented and mouthed a few
- news-speak sentences for them which meant essentially the same thing. Martin looked on,
- amused-and then I looked on, astonished, as Janet Lansing's own doorstop media conferenc
- appeared on TV.
- "These people are clearly ruthless. Human life, the envi-ronment, radioactive
- contamination ... all mean nothing to them."
- ' 'Do you have any idea who might be responsible for this outrage, Dr. Lansing?"
- "I can't disclose that, yet. All I can reveal, right now, is that our research is at the very
- cutting edge of preventative medicine-and I'm not at all surprised that there are powerful
- vested interests working against us."
- Powerful vested interests? What was that meant to be code for-if not the rival
- biotechnology firm whose involvement she kept denying? No doubt she had her eye on the
- publicity advantages of being the victim of ATOMIC TERRORISTS- but I thought she was
- wasting her breath. In two or more years' time, when the product finally hit the market, the s
- would be long forgotten.
- After some tricky jurisdictional negotiations, Asher finally sent me six months' worth of
- files from the vault's surveil-lance cameras-all that they kept. The freezer in question had b
- unused for almost two years; the last authorized tenant was a small IVF clinic which had go
- bankrupt. Only about 60 percent of the freezers were currently leased, so it wasn't particula
- surprising that LEI had had a conveniently empty neighbor.
- I ran the surveillance files through image-processing soft-ware, in the hope that someon
- might have been caught in the act of opening the unused freezer. The search took almost an h
- of supercomputer time-and turned up precisely nothing. A few minutes later, Elaine Chang
- popped her head into my office to say that she'd finished her analysis of the damage to the
- freezer walls: the nightly irradiation had been going on for between eight and nine months.
- Undeterred, I scanned the files again, this time instructing the software to assemble a
- gallery of every individual sighted inside the vault.
- Sixty-two faces emerged. I put company names to all of them, matching the times of eac
- sighting to Biofile's records of the use of each client's electronic key. No obvious
- incon-sistencies showed up; nobody had been seen inside who hadn't used an authorized ke
- gain access-and the same people had used the same keys, again and again.
- I flicked through the gallery, wondering what to do next. Search for anyone glancing s
- in the direction of the ra-dioactive freezer? The software could have done it-but I wasn't
- quite ready for barrel-scraping efforts like that.
- I came to a face which looked familiar: a blonde woman in her mid-thirties, who'd used
- key belonging to Federa-tion Centennial Hospital's Oncology Research Unit, three times. I
- certain that I knew her, but I couldn't recall where I'd seen her before. It didn't matter; after
- few sec-onds' searching, I found a clear shot of the name badge pinned to her lab coat. All
- had to do was zoom in.
- The badge read: C. MENDELSOHN.
- There was a knock on my open door. I turned from the screen; Elaine was back, looking
- pleased with herself.
- She said, "We've finally found a place who'll own up to having lost some cobalt 60. W
- more... the activity of our source fits their missing item's decay curve, exactly."
- "So where was it stolen from?"
- "Federation Centennial."
- I phoned the Oncology Research Unit. Yes, Catherine Men-delsohn worked there-she'd
- done so for almost four years- but they couldn't put me through to her; she'd been on sick le
- all week. They gave me the same canceled phone num-ber as LEI-but a different address, a
- apartment in Peter-sham. The address wasn't listed in the phone directory; I'd have to go the
- in person.
- A cancer research team would have no reason to want to harm LEI, but a commercial
- rival-with or without their own key to the vault-could still have paid Mendelsohn to do the
- work for them. It seemed like a lousy deal to me, whatever they'd offered her-if she was
- convicted, every last cent would be traced and confiscated-but bitterness over her sacking
- might have clouded her judgment.
- Maybe. Or maybe that was all too glib.
- I replayed the shots of Mendelsohn taken by the surveil-lance cameras. She did nothing
- unusual, nothing suspicious. She went straight to the ORU's freezer, put in whatever sam-pl
- she'd brought, and departed. She didn't glance slyly in any direction at all.
- The fact that she had been inside the vault-on legitimate business-proved nothing. The f
- that the cobalt 60 had been stolen from the hospital where she worked could have been pur
- coincidence.
- And anyone had the right to cancel their phone service.
- I pictured the steel reinforcement rods of the Lane Cove laboratory, glinting in the sunli
- On the way out, reluctantly, I took a detour to the basement. I sat at a console while the
- armaments safe checked my fin-gerprints, took breath samples and a retinal blood
- spectro-gram, ran some perception-and-judgment response time tests, then quizzed me for f
- minutes about the case. Once it was satisfied with my reflexes, my motives, and my state of
- mind, it issued me a nine-millimeter pistol and a shoulder holster.
- Mendelsohn's apartment block was a concrete box from the 1960s, front doors opening
- onto long shared balconies, no security at all. I arrived just after seven, to the smell of cook
- and the sound of game show applause, wafting from a hundred open windows. The concrete
- still shimmered with the day's heat; three flights of stairs left me coated in sweat.
- Men-delsohn's apartment was silent, but the lights were on.
- She answered the door. I introduced myself, and showed her my ID. She seemed nervou
- but not surprised.
- She said, ' 'I still find it galling to have to deal with people like you."
- "People like-?"
- "I was opposed to privatizing the police force. I helped organize some of the marches."
- She would have been fourteen years old at the time-a precocious political activist.
- She let me in, begrudgingly. The living room was modestly furnished, with a terminal o
- desk in one corner.
- I said, "I'm investigating the bombing of Life Enhance-ment International. You used to w
- for them, up until about four years ago. Is that correct?"
- "Yes."
- "Can you tell me why you left?"
- She repeated what I knew about the transfer of her project to the Amarillo division. She
- answered every question directly, looking me straight in the eye; she still appeared nervous
- but she seemed to be trying to read some vital piece of information from my demeanor.
- Wondering if I'd traced the cobalt?
- "What were you doing on the North Ryde premises at two in the morning, two days befo
- you were sacked?''
- She said, "I wanted to find out what LEI was planning for the new building. I wanted to
- know why they didn't want me to stick around."
- "Your job was moved to Texas."
- She laughed drily. "The work wasn't that specialized. I could have swapped jobs with
- someone who wanted to travel to the States. It would have been the perfect solution-and the
- would have been plenty of people more than happy to trade places with me. But no, that wa
- allowed."
- "So ... did you find the answer?"
- "Not that night. But later, yes."
- I said carefully, ' 'So you knew what LEI was doing in Lane Cove?"
- "Yes."
- "How did you discover that?"
- "I kept an ear to the ground. Nobody who'd stayed on would have told me directly, but
- word leaked out, eventually. About a year ago."
- "Three years after you'd left? Why were you still inter-ested? Did you think there was
- market for the information?''
- She said, "Put your notepad in the bathroom sink and run the tap on it."
- I hesitated, then complied. When I returned to the living room, she had her face in her
- hands. She looked up at me grimly.
- "Why was I still interested? Because I wanted to know why every project with any les
- or gay team members was be-ing transferred out of the division. I wanted to know if that w
- pure coincidence. Or not."
- I felt a sudden chill in the pit of my stomach. I said, "If you had some problem with
- discrimination, there are avenues you could have-"
- Mendelsohn shook her head impatiently. "LEI was never discriminatory. They didn't sa
- anyone who was willing to move-and they always transferred the entire team; there was
- nothing so crude as picking out individuals by sexual pref-erence. And they had a
- rationalization for everything: projects were being re-grouped between divisions to facilita
- 'syner-gistic cross-pollination.' And if that sounds like pretentious bullshit, it was-but it wa
- plausible pretentious bullshit. Other corporations have adopted far more ridiculous scheme
- perfect sincerity."
- "But if it wasn't a matter of discrimination ... why should LEI want to force people out o
- one particular division-?"
- I think I'd finally guessed the answer, even as I said those words-but I needed to hear he
- spell it out, before I could really believe it.
- Mendelsohn must have been practicing her version for non-biochemists; she had it dow
- pat. "When people are subject to stress-physical or emotional-the levels of certain sub-stan
- in the bloodstream increase. Cortisol and adrenaline, mainly. Adrenaline has a rapid,
- short-term effect on the ner-vous system. Cortisol works on a much longer time frame,
- modulating all kinds of bodily processes, adapting them for hard times: injury, fatigue,
- whatever. If the stress is pro-longed, someone's cortisol can be elevated for days, or weeks
- months.
- "High enough levels of cortisol, in the bloodstream of a pregnant woman, can cross the
- placental barrier and interact with the hormonal system of the developing fetus. There are p
- of the brain where embryonic development is switched into one of two possible pathways,
- hormones released by the fetal testes or ovaries. The parts of the brain which control body
- image, and the parts which control sexual preference. Female embryos usually develop a b
- wired with a self-image of a female body, and the strongest potential for sexual attraction
- toward males. Male embryos, vice versa. And it's the sex hormones in the fetal bloodstream
- which let the grow-ing neurons know the gender of the embryo, and which wiring pattern to
- adopt.
- "Cortisol can interfere with this process. The precise in-teractions are complex, but the
- ultimate effect depends on the timing; different parts of the brain are switched into
- gender-specific versions at different stages of development. So stress at different times dur
- pregnancy leads to different patterns of sexual preference and body image in the child:
- homosexual, bisexual, transsexual.
- "Obviously, a lot depends on the mother's biochemistry. Pregnancy itself is stressful-bu
- everyone responds to that differently. The first sign that cortisol might have an effect came
- studies in the 1980s, on the children of German women who'd been pregnant during the mos
- intense bombing raids of World War II-when the stress was so great that the effect showed
- through despite individual differences. In the nineties, researchers thought they'd found a ge
- which de-termined male homosexuality ... but it was always maternally inherited-and it turn
- out to be influencing the mother's stress response, rather than acting directly on the child.
- "If maternal cortisol, and other stress hormones, were kept from reaching the fetus ... th
- the gender of the brain would always match the gender of the body in every respect. All of
- present variation would be wiped out."
- I was shaken, but I don't think I let it show. Everything she said rang true; I didn't doubt
- word of it. I'd always known that sexual preference was decided before birth. I'd known tha
- was gay, myself, by the age of seven. I'd never sought out the elaborate biological details,
- though-because I'd never believed that the tedious mechanics of the process could ever mat
- to me. What turned my blood to ice was not finally learning the neuroembryology of desire
- The shock was discovering that LEI planned to reach into the womb and take control of it.
- I pressed on with the questioning in a kind of trance, put-ting my own feelings into
- suspended animation.
- I said, "LEI's barrier is for filtering out viruses and toxins. You're talking about a natur
- substance which has been pres-ent for millions of years-''
- "LEI's barrier will keep out everything they deem non-essential. The fetus doesn't need
- maternal cortisol in order to survive. If LEI doesn't explicitly include transporters for it, it
- won't get through. And I'll give you one guess what their plans are."
- I said, "You're being paranoid. You think LEI would in-vest millions of dollars just to t
- part in a conspiracy to rid the world of homosexuals?"
- Mendelsohn looked at me pityingly. "It's not a conspiracy. It's a marketing opportunity
- LEI doesn't give a shit about the sexual politics. They could put in cortisol transporters, and
- sell the barrier as an anti-viral, anti-drug, anti-pollution screen. Or, they could leave them o
- and sell it as all of that-plus a means of guaranteeing a heterosexual child. Which do you th
- would earn the most money?"
- That question hit a nerve; I said angrily, "And you had so little faith in people's choice t
- you bombed the laboratory so that no one would ever have the chance to decide?"
- Mendelsohn's expression turned stony. "I did not bomb LEI. Or irradiate their freezer."
- "No? We've traced the cobalt 60 to Federation Centen-nial."
- She looked stunned for a moment, then she said, "Con-gratulations. Six thousand other
- people work there, you know. I'm obviously not the only one of them who'd discovered wh
- LEI is up to."
- "You're the only one with access to the Biofile vault. What do you expect me to believe
- That having learnt about this project, you were going to do absolutely nothing about it?"
- "Of course not! And I still plan to publicize what they're doing. Let people know what i
- will mean. Try to get the issue debated before the product appears in a blaze of
- misinfor-mation."
- "You said you've known about the work for a year."
- "Yes-and I've spent most of that time trying to verify all the facts, before opening my big
- mouth. Nothing would have been stupider than going public with half-baked rumors. I've on
- told about a dozen people so far, but we were going to launch a big publicity campaign to
- coincide with this year's Mardi Gras. Although now, with the bombing, everything's a thous
- times more complicated." She spread her hands in a gesture of helplessness. "But we still h
- to do what we can, to try to keep the worst from happening."
- "The worst?"
- "Separatism. Paranoia. Homosexuality redefined as path-ological. Lesbians and
- sympathetic straight women looking for their own technological means to guarantee the
- survival of the culture ... while the religious far-right try to prosecute them for poisoning th
- babies ... with a substance God's been happily 'poisoning' babies with for the last few thou
- years! Sexual tourists traveling from wealthy countries where the technology is in use, to
- poorer countries where it isn't."
- I was sickened by the vision she was painting-but I pushed on. "These dozen friends of
- yours-?"
- Mendelsohn said dispassionately, "Go fuck yourself. I've got nothing more to say to you
- I've told you the truth. I'm not a criminal. And I think you'd better leave."
- I went to the bathroom and collected my notepad. In the doorway, I said, "If you're not a
- criminal, why are you so hard to track down?"
- Wordlessly, contemptuously, she lifted her shirt and showed me the bruises below her
- cage-fading, but still an ugly sight. Whoever it was who'd beaten her-an ex-lover?-I could
- hardly blame her for doing everything she could to avoid a repeat performance.
- On the stairs, I hit the REPLAY button on my notepad. The software computed the
- frequency spectrum for the noise of the running water, subtracted it out of the recording, and
- then amplified and cleaned up what remained. Every word of our conversation came throug
- crystal clear.
- From my car, I phoned a surveillance firm and arranged to have Mendelsohn kept under
- twenty-four-hour observation.
- Halfway home, I stopped in a side street, and sat behind the wheel for ten minutes, unab
- to think, unable to move.
- In bed that night, I asked Martin, "You're left-handed. How would you feel if no one wa
- ever born left-handed again?''
- "It wouldn't bother me in the least. Why?"
- "You wouldn't think of it as a kind of... genocide?"
- "Hardly. What's this all about?"
- "Nothing. Forget it."
- "You're shaking."
- "I'm cold."
- "You don't feel cold to me."
- As we made love-tenderly, then savagely-I thought: This is our language, this is our
- dialect. Wars have been fought over less. And if this language ever dies out, a people wi
- have vanished from the face of the Earth.
- I knew I had to drop the case. If Mendelsohn was guilty, someone else could prove it. T
- go on working for LEI would destroy me.
- Afterward, though ... that seemed like sentimental bullshit. I belonged to no tribe. Every
- human being possessed their own sexuality-and when they died, it died with them. If no one
- was ever born gay again, it made no difference to me.
- And if I dropped the case because I was gay, I'd be aban-doning everything I'd ever
- believed about my own equality, my own identity ... not to mention giving LEI the chance to
- announce: Yes, of course we hired an investigator without regard to sexual preference-bu
- apparently, that was a mis-take.
- Staring up into the darkness, I said, ' 'Every time I hear the word community, I reach for
- revolver."
- There was no response; Martin was fast asleep. I wanted to wake him, I wanted to argu
- all through, there and then- but I'd signed an agreement, I couldn't tell him a thing.
- So I watched him sleep, and tried to convince myself that when the truth came out, he'd
- understand.
- I phoned Janet Lansing, brought her up to date on Mendel-sohn-and said coldly, "Why w
- you so coy? 'Fanatics'? 'Powerful vested interests'? Are there some words you have troub
- pronouncing?"
- She'd clearly prepared herself for this moment. "I didn't want to plant my own ideas in y
- head. Later on, that might have been seen as prejudicial."
- "Seen as prejudicial by whomV It was a rhetorical ques-tion: the media, of course. By
- keeping silent on the issue, she'd minimized the risk of being seen to have launched a
- witch-hunt. Telling me to go look for homosexual terrorists might have put LEI in a very
- unsympathetic light... whereas my finding Mendelsohn-for other reasons entirely, despite m
- ignorance-would come across as proof that the investi-gation had been conducted without a
- preconceptions.
- I said, "You had your suspicions, and you should have disclosed them. At the very least
- you should have told me what the barrier was for."
- "The barrier," she said, "is for protection against viruses and toxins. But anything we do
- the body has side effects. It's not my role to judge whether or not those side effects are
- acceptable; the regulatory authorities will insist that we pub-licize all of the consequences
- using the product-and then the decision will be up to consumers."
- Very neat: the government would twist their arm, "forcing them" to disclose their major
- selling point!
- "And what does your market research tell you?"
- "That's strictly confidential."
- I very nearly asked her: When exactly did you find out that I was gay? After you'd hir
- me-or before ? On the morning of the bombing, while I'd been assembling a dossier on Jane
- Lansing ... had she been assembling dossiers on all of the people who might have bid for th
- investigation? And had she found the ultimate PR advantage, the ultimate seal of im-partiali
- just too tempting to resist?
- I didn't ask. I still wanted to believe that it made no dif-ference: she'd hired me, and I'd
- solve the crime like any other, and nothing else would matter.
- I went to the bunker where the cobalt had been stored, at the edge of Federation
- Centennial's grounds. The trapdoor was solid, but the lock was a joke, and there was no ala
- system at all; any smart twelve-year-old could have broken in. Crates full of all kinds of
- (low-level, shortlived) radioactive waste were stacked up to the ceiling, blocking most of t
- light from the single bulb; it was no wonder that the theft hadn't been detected sooner. There
- were even cobwebs-but no mutant spiders, so far as I could see.
- After five minutes poking around, listening to my borrowed dosimetry badge adding up
- exposure, I was glad to get out... whether or not the average chest X-ray would have done t
- times more damage. Hadn't Mendelsohn realized that: how irrational people were about
- radiation, how much harm it would do her cause once the cobalt was discovered? Or had
- own-fully informed-knowledge of the minimal risks distorted her perception?
- The surveillance teams sent me reports daily. It was an expensive service, but LEI was
- paying. Mendelsohn met her friends openly-telling them all about the night I'd ques-tioned h
- warning them in outraged tones that they were almost certainly being watched. They discus
- the fetal bar-rier, the options for-legitimate-opposition, the problems the bombing had caus
- them. I couldn't tell if the whole thing was being staged for my benefit, or if Mendelsohn w
- deliberately contacting only those friends who genuinely be-lieved that she hadn't been
- involved.
- I spent most of my time checking the histories of the people she met. I could find no
- evidence of past violence or sabotage by any of them-let alone experience with high
- explosives. But then, I hadn't seriously expected to be led straight to the bomber.
- All I had was circumstantial evidence. All I could do was gather detail after detail, and
- hope that the mountain of facts I was assembling would eventually reach a critical mass-or
- Mendelsohn would slip up, cracking under the pressure.
- Weeks passed, and Mendelsohn continued to brazen it out. She even had pamphlets prin
- ready to distribute at the Mardi Gras-condemning the bombing as loudly as they con-demne
- LEI for its secrecy.
- The nights grew hotter. My temper frayed. I don't know what Martin thought was happen
- to me, but I had no idea how we were going to survive the impending revelations. I couldn'
- begin to face up to the magnitude of the backlash there'd be once ATOMIC TERRORISTS m
- GAY BABY-POISONERS in the daily murdochs-and it would make no difference whether
- was Mendelsohn's arrest which broke the news to the public, or her media conference blow
- the whistle on LEI and proclaiming her own innocence; either way, the investigation would
- become a circus. I tried not to think about any of it; it was too late to do anything differently
- drop the case, to tell Martin the truth. So I worked on my tunnel vision.
- Elaine scoured the radioactive waste bunker for evidence, but weeks of analysis came u
- blank. I quizzed the Biofile guards, who (supposedly) would have been watching the whole
- thing on their monitors when the cobalt was planted, but nobody could recall a client with a
- unusually large and oddly shaped item, wandering casually into the wrong aisle.
- I finally obtained the warrants I needed to scrutinize Men-delsohn's entire electronic
- history since birth. She'd been ar-rested exactly once, twenty years before, for kicking an-
- unprivatized-policeman in the shin, during a protest he'd probably, privately, applauded. Th
- charges had been dropped. She'd had a court order in force for the last eighteen months,
- restraining a former lover from coming within a kil-ometer of her home. (The woman was a
- musician with a band called Tetanus Switchblade; she had two convictions for as-sault.) T
- was no evidence of undeclared income, or un-usual expenditure. No phone calls to or from
- known or suspected dealers in arms or explosives, or their known or suspected associates.
- everything could have been done with pay phones and cash, if she'd organized it carefully.
- Mendelsohn wasn't going to put a foot wrong while I was watching. However careful s
- been, though, she could not have carried out the bombing alone. What I needed was some-o
- venal, nervous, or conscience-stricken enough to turn in-formant. I put out word on the usua
- channels: I'd be willing to pay, I'd be willing to bargain.
- Six weeks after the bombing, I received an anonymous message by datamail:
- Be at the Mardi Gras. No wires, no weapons. I'll find you.
- 29:17:5:31:23:11
- I played with the numbers for more than an hour, trying to make sense of them, before I
- finally showed them to Elaine.
- She said, "Be careful, James."
- "Why?"
- ' 'These are the ratios of the six trace elements we found in the residue from the explosi
- Martin spent the day of the Mardi Gras with friends who'd also be in the parade. I sat in
- air-conditioned office and tuned in to a TV channel which showed the final preparations,
- interspersed with talking heads describing the history of the event. In forty years, the Gay a
- Lesbian Mardi Gras had been transformed from a series of ugly confrontations with police
- local authorities, into a money-spinning spectacle advertised in tourist brochures around th
- world. It was blessed by every level of government, led by politicians and business
- identities-and the police, like most professions, now had their own float.
- Martin was no transvestite (or muscle-bound leather-fetishist, or any other walking clic
- dressing up in a flam-boyant costume, one night a year, was as false, as artificial, for him a
- would have been for most heterosexual men. But I think I understood why he did it. He felt
- guilty that he could "pass for straight" in the clothes he usually wore, with the speech and
- manner and bearing which came naturally to him. He'd never concealed his sexuality from
- anyone-but it wasn't instantly apparent to total strangers. For him, taking part in the Mardi G
- was a gesture of solidarity with those gay men who were visible, obvious, all year round-a
- who'd borne the brunt of intolerance because of it.
- As dusk fell, spectators began to gather along the route. Helicopters from every news
- service appeared overhead, turn-ing their cameras on each other to prove to their viewers t
- this was An Event. Mounted crowd-control personnel-in something very much like the old
- uniform that had van-ished when I was a child-parked their horses by the fast-food stands, a
- stood around fortifying themselves for the long night ahead.
- I didn't see how the bomber could seriously expect to find me once I was mingling with
- hundred thousand other peo-ple-so after leaving the Nexus building, I drove my car around
- block slowly, three times, just in case.
- By the time I'd made my way to a vantage point, I'd missed the start of the parade; the fi
- thing I saw was a long line of people wearing giant plastic heads bearing the features of
- famous and infamous queers. (Apparently the word was back in fashion again, officially
- declared non-perjorative once more, after several years out of favor.) It was all so Disney
- could have gagged-and yes, there was even Bernadette, the world's first lesbian cartoon mo
- I only recognized three of the humans portrayed-Patrick White, looking haggard and suitabl
- bemused, Joe Orton, leering sardonically, and J. Ed-gar Hoover, with a Mephistophelian
- sneer. Everyone wore their names on sashes, though, for what that was worth. A young man
- beside me asked his girlfriend, "Who the hell was Walt Whitman?"
- She shook her head. "No idea. Alan Turing?"
- "Search me."
- They photographed both of them, anyway.
- I wanted to yell at the marchers: So what? Some queers were famous. Some famous
- people were queer. What a sur-prise! Do you think that means you own them?
- I kept silent, of course-while everyone around me cheered and clapped. I wondered ho
- close the bomber was, how long he or she would leave me sweating. Panopticon-the
- sur-veillance contractors-were still following Mendelsohn and all of her known associates
- most of whom were somewhere along the route of the parade, handing out their pamphlets.
- None of them appeared to have followed me, though. The bomber was almost certainly
- someone outside the network of friends we'd uncovered.
- An anti-viral, anti-drug, anti-pollution barrier, alone-or a means of guaranteeing a
- heterosexual child. Which do you think would earn the most money? Surrounded by cheer
- spectators-half of them mixed-sex couples with children in tow-it was almost possible to la
- off Mendelsohn's fears. Who, here, would admit that they'd buy a version of the co-coon wh
- would help wipe out the source of their enter-tainment? But applauding the freak show didn
- mean wanting your own flesh and blood to join it.
- An hour after the parade had started, I decided to move out of the densest part of the cro
- If the bomber couldn't reach me through the crush of people, there wasn't much point be-ing
- here. A hundred or so leather-clad women on-noise-enhanced-electric motorbikes went rid
- past in a crucifix formation, behind a banner which read DYKES ON BIKES FOR JESUS.
- recalled the small group of fundamentalists I'd passed earlier, their backs to the parade rou
- lest they turn into pillars of salt, holding up candles and praying for rain.
- I made my way to one of the food stalls, and bought a cold hot dog and a warm orange
- juice, trying to ignore the smell of horse turds. The place seemed to attract law enforcemen
- types; J. Edgar Hoover himself came wandering by while I was eating, looking like a
- malevolent Humpty Dumpty.
- As he passed me, he said, "Twenty-nine. Seventeen. Five."
- I finished my hot dog and followed him.
- He stopped in a deserted side street, behind a supermarket parking lot. As I caught up w
- him, he took out a magnetic scanner.
- I said, "No wires, no weapons." He waved the device over me. I was telling the truth. "
- you talk through that thing?"
- "Yes." The giant head bobbed strangely; I couldn't see any eye holes, but he clearly was
- blind.
- "Okay. Where did the explosives come from? We know they started off in Singapore, b
- who was your supplier here?"
- Hoover laughed, deep and muffled. "I'm not going to tell you that. I'd be dead in a week
- "So what do you want to tell me?"
- "That I only did the grunt work. Mendelsohn organized everything."
- ' 'No shit. But what have you got that will prove it? Phone calls? Financial transactions
- He just laughed again. I was beginning to wonder how many people in the parade woul
- know who'd played J. Edgar Hoover; even if he clammed up now, it was possible that I'd b
- able to track him down later.
- That was when I turned and saw six more, identical, Hoov-ers coming around the corne
- They were all carrying baseball bats.
- I started to move. Hoover One drew a pistol and aimed it at my face. He said, "Kneel d
- slowly, with your hands behind your head."
- I did it. He kept the gun on me, and I kept my eyes on the trigger, but I heard the others
- arrive, and close into a half-circle behind me.
- Hoover One said, "Don't you know what happens to trai-tors? Don't you know what's go
- to happen to you?"
- I shook my head slowly. I didn't know what I could say to appease him, so I spoke the tr
- "How can I be a traitor? What is there to betray? Dykes on Bikes for Jesus? The Wil-liam S
- Burroughs Dancers?"
- Someone behind me swung their bat into the small of my back. Not as hard as they migh
- have; I lurched forward, but I kept my balance.
- Hoover One said, "Don't you know any history, Mr. Pig? Mr. Polizei? The Nazis put us
- their death camps. The Rea-ganites tried to have us all die of AIDS. And here you are now,
- Mr. Pig, working for the fuckers who want to wipe us off the face of the planet. That sound
- like betrayal to me.""
- I knelt there, staring at the gun, unable to speak. I couldn't dredge up the words to justify
- myself. The truth was too dif-ficult, too gray, too confusing. My teeth started chattering. Na
- AIDS. Genocide. Maybe he was right. Maybe I de-served to die.
- I felt tears on my cheeks. Hoover One laughed. "Boo hoo, Mr. Pig." Someone swung th
- bat onto my shoulders. I fell forward on my face, too afraid to move my hands to break the
- I tried to get up, but a boot came down on the back of my neck.
- Hoover One bent down and put the gun to my skull. He whispered, "Will you close the
- case? Lose the evidence on Catherine? You know, your boyfriend frequents some dan-gero
- places; he needs all the friends he can get."
- I lifted my face high enough above the asphalt to reply. "Yes."
- "Well done, Mr. Pig."
- That was when I heard the helicopter.
- I blinked the gravel out of my eyes and saw the ground, far brighter than it should have
- been; there was a spotlight trained on us. I waited for the sound of a bullhorn. Nothing
- happened. I waited for my assailants to flee. Hoover One took his foot off my neck.
- And then they all laid into me with their baseball bats.
- I should have curled up and protected my head, but curi-osity got the better of me; I turn
- and stole a glimpse of the chopper. It was a news crew, of course, refusing to do any-thing
- unethical like spoil a good story just when it was getting telegenic. That much made perfect
- sense.
- But the goon squad made no sense at all. Why were they sticking around, now that th
- cameras were running? Just for the pleasure of beating me for a few seconds longer!
- Nobody was that stupid, that oblivious to PR.
- I coughed up two teeth and hid my face again. They wanted it all to be broadcast. They
- wanted the headlines, the backlash, the outrage. ATOMIC TERRORISTS!
- BABY-POISONERS! BRUTAL THUGS!
- They wanted to demonize the enemy they were pretending to be.
- The Hoovers finally dropped their bats and started running. I lay on the ground drooling
- blood, too weak to lift my head to see what had driven them away.
- A while later, I heard hoofbeats. Someone dropped to the ground beside me and checke
- my pulse.
- I said, "I'm not in pain. I'm happy. I'm delirious."
- Then I passed out.
- On his second visit, Martin brought Catherine Mendelsohn to the hospital with him. The
- showed me a recording of LEI's media conference, the day after the Mardi Gras-two hours
- before Mendelsohn's was scheduled to take place.
- Janet Lansing said, ' 'In the light of recent events, we have no choice but to go public. W
- would have preferred to keep this technology under wraps for commercial reasons, but
- in-nocent lives are at stake. And when people turn on their own kind-"
- I burst the stitches in my lips laughing.
- LEI had bombed their own laboratory. They'd irradiated their own cells. And they'd ho
- that I'd cover up for Men-delsohn, once the evidence led me to her, out of sympathy with he
- cause. Later, with a tip-off to an investigative re-porter or two, the cover-up would have be
- revealed.
- The perfect climate for their product launch.
- Since I'd continued with the investigation, though, they'd had to make the best of it: send
- in the Hoovers, claiming to be linked to Mendelsohn, to punish me for my diligence.
- Mendelsohn said, "Everything LEI leaked about me-the cobalt, my key to the vault-was
- already spelt out in the pamphlets I'd printed, but that doesn't seem to cut much ice with the
- murdochs. I'm the Harbor Bridge Gamma Ray Ter-rorist now."
- "You'll never be charged."
- "Of course not. So I'll never be found innocent, either."
- I said, ' 'When I'm out of here, I'm going after them.'' They wanted impartiality? An
- investigation untainted by prejudice? They'd get exactly what they paid for, this time. M
- the tunnel vision.
- Martin said softly, "Who's going to employ you to do that?"
- I smiled, painfully. "LEI's insurance company."
- When they'd left, I dozed off.
- I woke suddenly, from a dream of suffocation.
- Even if I proved that the whole thing had been a marketing exercise by LEI-even if half
- their directors were thrown in prison, even if the company itself was liquidated-the
- tech-nology would still be owned by someone.
- And one way or another, in the end, it would be sold.
- That's what I'd missed, in my fanatical neutrality: you can't sell a cure without a disease
- even if I was right to be neutral-even if there was no difference to fight for, no dif-ference t
- betray, no difference to preserve-the best way to sell the cocoon would always be to inven
- one. And even if it would be no tragedy at all if there was nothing left but heterosexuality in
- century's time, the only path which could lead there would be one of lies, and wounding, an
- vilifica-tion.
- Would people buy that, or not?
- I was suddenly very much afraid that they would.
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