“You are morally wrong, all of you. The whole purpose of this so-called scientific Forum is to protect drug company profits at the expense of the sick and dying. You are moral Fascists, using the strength of government to harm those already weak and powerless, in order to keep them powerless and so keep yourselves in power. And I except none of you from these charges, not even the scientists, who conspire with profit and power and so deliver science to them.
“With the Cell Cleaner, Huevos Verdes offers you life. Even though you do not deserve to live. But Huevos Verdes does not distinguish between the deserving and the undeserving when it offers a product. You do, every time your regulations stifle genetic or nanotech research, every time that lost research deprives someone of life. You are killers, all of you. Political and economic mercenaries, no better at judging true science than the jungle animals whose morality you emulate. Nonetheless, Huevos Verdes Corporation offers you the Cell Cleaner, and I will prove to you here its essential safety, even though I’m not sure any of you has the capacity to understand the science I will explain.”
And Miranda Sharifi sat down.
The panel looked stunned, as well they might. More interestingly, Leisha Camden also looked stunned. Evidently this was not what she’d expected to hear her protegee say. She whispered frantically into Miranda’s ear.
“I have never heard such unprofessional bullshit!” Martin Davis Exford, Nobel laureate in molecular physics, on his feet behind the panelists’ table. His powerful voice outshouted everyone else. Maroon veins pulsed below the surface of his neck.
“I deeply resent, Ms. Sharifi, your perversion of this Forum. We’re here to determine scientific fact, not indulge in ad hominem attacks!”
A journalist in fashionable yellow stripes yelled from the front row of the press box, “Ms. Sharifi — are you trying to lose this case?”
Slowly I turned my head in his direction.
“Hey, Miranda, look this way!” a Liver-channel reporter, his robocam floating beside him. “Smile pretty!”
“Order, please! Order!” Moderator Yongers, her glasses gone, banging her metal water pitcher since she had no gavel because of course this wasn’t really a court.
“Smile, Miranda!”
“—an outrage to professional discourse and—”
“Please sit down,” said several seats, “others may have trouble seeing over you. Please sit—”
“I will have order in this Forum!”
But the pandemonium grew. A man broke from the public section and charged down the inclined aisle toward the Forum floor.
I had a clear view of his face. It twisted with the terrible rigidity of hate, a rigidity that no amount of reason can relax and that takes years to calcify. Miranda Sharifi’s insults today hadn’t created that face. The man ran toward her, pulling something from his jacket. Seventeen robocams and three security ’bots zoomed toward him.
He hit the invisible Y-energy shield in front of the participants’
tables, and spread-eagled against it with an audible crack of skull or other bone. Dazed, the man slid down the shield exactly as down a brick wall. A security ’bot dragged him away.
“—restore order to these proceedings now—”
“A smile, Miranda! Just one smile!”
“—unwarranted assumption of moral superiority, and contempt for United States law, when in reality—”
“—and it looks, newsgrid viewers, as if the fracas were deliberately created by Miranda Sharifi for hidden Huevos Verdes motives about which we can only—”
Miranda Sharifi never moved.
Eventually Moderator Yongers, having no real choice, recessed for lunch.
I pushed my way to the front of the chaotic Forum chamber, trying to shadow Miranda Sharifi, which was of course impossible. The Y-shield stood between us, and spectacularly built bodyguards muscled her and Leisha Camden out a rear door. I caught sight of them again on the roof, having knocked over four people to get there. They climbed into an aircar. Several other cars followed in close pursuit, but I was convinced it wasn’t going to do any of them — reporters, GSEA, FBI, rogue geneticists, whoever — any good. They weren’t going to learn any more than I had.
What had I learned?
The journalist in yellow stripes was right. Miranda Sharifi’s performance had just ensured that Case 1892-A was dead. She had insulted not only the intellectual and technical competence of eight scientists, but their characters as well. I had cursorily researched three of those scientists, the Nobel laureates, and I knew they were not venial sellouts but people of integrity. Miranda must know that, too. So — why?
Maybe, despite any research she’d done, she genuinely believed all Sleepers were corrupt. Her grandmother, a brilliant woman, had believed it. But somehow I didn’t think Miranda did.
Maybe she believed the five non-laureate scientists, mediocrities with good political connections, would inevitably outvote the impartial laureates. But if so, why alienate her three potential allies? And why agree to seating the five mediocrities in the first place? All panelists had been agreed upon by both sides.
No. Miranda Sharifi wanted to lose this case. She wanted a decision against the Cell Cleaner.
But maybe I was being too anthropomorphic. Miranda Sharifi was, after all, completely different from me. Her mental processes were different, which included her motives. Maybe she’d alienated the panel to … what? To make it harder to obtain official approval for the patent. Maybe she only valued victory if it was hard won. Maybe making everything as difficult as possible was part of some Sleepless Code of Honor, built upon the fact that things came so easily to them. How the fuck would I know?
All this ratiocination translated itself into self-disgust. Despite the heat, it was a gorgeous day in Washington, one of those clear-blue-sky-and-golden-light afternoons that seem to have blown in from some more favored city. I walked along the mall, attracting attention: the crazy donkey dressed like a gone-native Liver. Drug dealers and lovers and gravboarding teenagers left me alone, which was just as well. I was having one of those brief, sharp self-questionings that leave you both enervated and embarrassed afterwards. What was I doing skulking around in these silly plastic clothes, trying to manufacture some difficult personal meaning-fulness out of following around people who were clearly my superiors?
For the Sleepless were my superiors, and in more than intelligence. In discipline, in sheer sweep of vision. In the enviable certainty that accompanies purpose, even if I didn’t know what that purpose was, whereas all I had was an aimless, drifting alarm about where my country was headed. An alarm set off by a semi-sentient pink dog hurling over a terrace railing. When I thought of that now, it sounded silly.
I couldn’t even define where I thought my country ought to head. I could only impede, not propel, and I wasn’t even sure what I was impeding. It was sure as hell more than Case 1892-A.
I didn’t know what the Sleepless were trying to do. Nobody knew. So what made me so damn sure I should be stopping them from doing it?
On the other hand, nothing I had done so far, or seemed likely to do in the near future, had had the slightest effect on Miranda Sharifi’s plans. I had not reported on her to the GSEA, not kept her under constant surveillance, not even reached a coherent conclusion about her in the private and unsought-after recesses of my mind. I was completely irrelevant. So there was nothing for me to regret, nothing to agonize over doing or not doing, nothing to change. Zero, whatever you multiply or divide it by, is still zero. Somehow this failed to cheer me up.