Genocide by universal inaction. The Lord doesn’t help those who are cerebrochemically incapable of helping themselves. Who are too terrified of change to let anyone else anywhere near them. And who just lost their last extraterrestrial champions.
Jackson breathed deeply of the sweet, artificial air, and closed his eyes.
“Jackson.” Vicki said behind him. “Theresa’s calling for you.”
“In a minute.”
To his surprise, he felt Vicki’s arms creep around him from behind. Her cheek rested against his back. His shirt grew wet. He remembered that while he’d been thinking of the dead SuperSleepless as mostly a source of Change syringes, Vicki had had some kind of unexplained personal history with them.
He said, not turning around, “You met Miranda Sharifi.”
“I met her, yes. Twice.”
“What lunatic killed them?”
“Too many candidates to enumerate. The world is full of the disgruntled and the disgusted.”
“Yeah. All kinds of losers who resent the winners.”
“I’m not sure Miranda was ever a winner,” Vicki said. “Not ever. But she and her kind were our one shot at forced radical evolution. Only Sanctuary could have created them, and Sanctuary will never do it again.”
And then Jackson saw it. His hands tightened on the railing. The air suddenly smelled noxious. “Jennifer Sharifi killed them. In retaliation for sending her and her co-conspirators to prison almost thirty years ago.”
“Yes,” Vicki said. “Probably. But the Justice Department will never be able to prove it.”
She let Jackson go and stepped away from him. “It’s up to you, Jackson.”
He turned to face her. “Up to me? What the hell are you talking about?”
“You don’t think Kelvin-Castner is really aiming their research at a cure for the neuropharm, do you? They don’t expect it to filter into the enclaves, because they know it’s some other donkey group that must have made it in the first place. In order to render the Livers no political or physical threat, without the nasty business of actually having to wipe them all out. Unless you hold K-C to your contract, they’ll just roar ahead with the commercial applications and drag their feet on the counterdrug you contracted for.”
“The daily lab records—”
“Have been carefully examined by you, right? Bullshit. You’ve hardly looked at them.”
He was silent, trying to take it in.
“I looked at them,” Vicki said, “for all the good it did me. I’m not trained; to me they’re just rows of charts, gibberish of equations, and models of incomprehensible substances. Jackson, you’re going to have to live on top of Kelvin-Castner if you care about a counteragent. You.”
“Theresa—”
“—is healing. Dirk and Billy and Shockey aren’t. After all”—she raised both hands, palm up, in a humble pleading gesture Jackson had never seen from her and hadn’t thought her capable of—“after all, you’re a doctor, aren’t you?”
“I’m not a medical researcher!”
“You are now,” Vicki said. And then suddenly, shockingly, she smiled. “Welcome to personal evolution.”
There were weeks of reports. Each day the number of primary researchers grew, starting at seventeen and escalating to an incredible two hundred forty-one at ten different sites around the country. Everyone had sent copies of everything to Jackson: every recorded conference, every procedure, every speculation, every version of every electronic model. Variances in absorption rate, bioavailability, protein binding, receptor-subtype mechanisms, efferent nerve equations, Meldrum models, gangloid ionization, ribosome protein synthesis, Cell Cleaner interaction rates—no one person could possibly have processed it all. As he tried, Jackson began to suspect that was the point.
He also began to suspect that some of what he’d been sent was bogus. But he didn’t have the time, the expertise, or the patience to determine exactly what.
Sitting at the terminal in his study, scanning printouts, he realized that the only way to wade through all of this was by using programs written to search for specific patterns, specific lines of research. Or possible research. Or maybe a direction that research could go, perhaps. Such customized programs didn’t exist. And Jackson, no software expert, couldn’t write them. Let alone dip the records he suspected he wasn’t getting from Kelvin-Castner.
“Send for Lizzie,” he told Vicki, wearily.
“Lizzie? She doesn’t know anything about brain-chemistry research.”
“Well, neither do I. Or at least, not enough. Call her and tell her I’ll send a car for her right away. She’s going to have to help me write specialized intent-software. If she can’t do that, she can at least dip K-C’s closed records. God knows she’s good enough at dipping. I don’t want to bring in an outside dipper who might resell the information. At least, not yet.”
Vicki’s eyes gleamed. “All right. And, by way of information, Jones says that Cazie is on her way up to see you.”
Jackson looked up from the toppling piles of printouts all over his antique Aubusson. Vicki’s face was carefully neutral. Once more he could feel her arms around him, warm and solid, beside the terrace railing.
Maybe help from Lizzie wasn’t the only way through.
He said quietly, “Cazie. She’s been here regularly, hasn’t she? To see Theresa.”
“This time she wants to see you.”
“How do you know?”
Vicki smiled sourly. “I know.”
And then Cazie was there, striding into his study as if she owned it, electric blue dress rustling and dark curls swirling, a vivid presence igniting the dim room to a dangerous glow that seemed capable of consuming the nonconsumable plastic printouts. Cazie scowled. “Jack! If I could see you alone…”
Vicki murmured, “Only if you can see past yourself,” and left the room.
Jackson stood, for the fragile advantage of height.
“How are you. Jack?”
“I’m fine.” He waited. This was going to be it, then. It really was. He wondered if Cazie realized.
“And Tessie?”
“She’s progressing right on schedule.”
Cazie’s smile was genuine. “I’m so glad! Our Tessie… remember how we used to think of her as the child we hadn’t yet had? Unearned sentiment, but not totally false.” She moved a step closer to him. He could smell her perfume, like flowers in animal heat.
Jackson said, “Kelvin-Castner isn’t developing the counteragent. And I can prove that you know it.”
It was his only real shot—catch her by surprise, counting on the fact that she didn’t expect duplicity from him, or unsubstantiated accusations, or lies. She trusted him, even though she’d always let him know he couldn’t trust her. He was Jackson: solid, honest, dazzled by her. Easy to fool. Easy to control.
He watched closely. She was good—just a slight widening of the huge gold-green eyes, an involuntary change in the shining pupils. It was enough. Jackson suddenly felt punched in the stomach.
Cazie said evenly, “That’s not true, Jack. You’ve been sent the lab reports every day.”
“They’re faked. All the effort in understanding the permanence factor is going toward its use as a basis for a pleasure drug.”
“You haven’t had time for that kind of analysis. And even if you had, you’re wrong. Come over to K-C and see for yourself. Thurmond will show you—”
“—actual experiments. Yes, I don’t doubt it. A few kept for show. Cazie… how could you? You know what this new neuropharm did to the Livers in Vicki’s camp. What it could do everywhere. No one able to adapt, to modify their daily routines. When the Change syringes are all gone and kids can’t count on the Cell Cleaner to zap every harmful organism they pick up, or on trophoblastic tubules to feed them, nobody will be able to innovate enough to relearn how! Within a generation—”