“An environmentally destructive hobby.”
“Not at all. We give ornamental fish-exporting nations a reason to leave forest strips around rivers.”
“Fish collecting is a by-product of the logging industry. Fish started coming from the Rio Xingu only after the logging crews arrived. The environment is raped when the fish come out of it.”
“Thomas, the man who arrested me said that we don’t see the world outside the United States as real. I don’t think you see the world outside your head as real.”
“Too many humans to get concerned over one. And you’re being hysterical. I’m asking you to leave. Now.”
Sarafina knew that the Director of Environmental Education had more clout than she did, not because he helped the private sector, but because he was some industrialist’s son. “The man who arrested me did show me your fax,” she said as she stood up.
“He must have been suspicious of your earlier border crossings and faked a fax from me. The Gabonese have been manipulating the French and the World Bank for decades. Why not manipulate us, too? You are leaving now, aren’t you?”
Sarafina nodded, and took the elevator back down to her fish. For the rest of the day, she picked eggs off the spawning mops, rinsed them in clean water, and put them in petri dishes to incubate at room temperature. Finally calm, she pulled out a meal cake saved from her last hideous field trip and ate the stale thing, then washed the taste away with reverse osmosis water, totally demineralized. She needed another field R/O unit before she went back to Africa. She’d go to Zaire this time, find someone who could tell her about the Gabonese lieutenant. The men who’d escorted her to the plane hadn’t approved of the lieutenant. He’d taken advantage of a situation. If she’d only have protested then. Oh well, she hadn’t, too much shock.
Before Sarafina could get her visa, the research institute transferred her to the L-4 biohazard unit. She lost her vacation time. Others had unraveled the secrets of the DNA she’d been working on. Her supervisor, who’d left her to her work for years, said, “We need someone who knows how to handle bio material precisely. You know the drill.”
Congress approved biohazard projects without knowing precisely how the material was shuffled between labs to justify the grants. Sarafina knew that vast collections of Hantavirus Giles County and Gardiner’s Island, Ebola Reston and Ebola Zaire, and various strains of AIDS and staphylococcus, moved in secure bottle trucks between the remaining universities and the new research institutes to justify these grants. Turning the bacteria and viruses loose would harm the private sector, so keeping them contained and studied helped it. Sarafina saw it as a larger-scale and twisted version of the extortion the lieutenant had practiced on her.
“I know the drill,” Sarafina said. Nobody could be nuts enough to turn loose those lethal protein crystals, those tiny fungi kin.
“We’ll need you to move your fish, since you won’t be using this lab anymore. We’ll give you the tank stands if you don’t have stands at your apartment.”
“I can’t control the temperature where I live,” Sarafina said. She had one room in a technicians’ building.
“We need the space.”
Thomas was taking her space. Human overpopulation had robbed her of a Ph.D., was paving her fish’s water shed, and was now pushing her arked species out of the two closets where she’d kept them. She couldn’t both go to Africa on her vacations and rent a larger apartment.
“Give me a few days.”
Her supervisor nodded. Sarafina locked herself in the warmer closet and cried for her fish, for her lost Ph.D. She wondered, I have so little. How can they take away what little I have and put me in a L-4 unit?
She called friends in the American Killie Association and found homes in Oregon, Washington State, and Colorado for the cold-water variants, then shipped them using her savings money, days out of her postponed vacation. The warmth-tolerant fish she squeezed into her apartment.
I doubt I could have collected any more without permits in any case. I’m probably on the list offish smugglers. Or, if the lieutenant’s treatment of her had overly embarrassed the suited men who’d escorted her onto the plane, maybe she wasn’t on the list. No, she couldn’t trust that. She had to live as though she was on the bio-smugglers list.
Years before, when Sarafina had been in graduate school, a house painter who wrote poetry between gigs told her that scientists would end up as marginal as artists. “No, we can always make bombs,” Sarafina had told that cynical older woman.
Why should we train Ph.D.’s the economy can’t absorb? Isn’t tenure just another form of welfare?
Going into the L-4 lab was like living through the horrors of Africa without the pleasures, isolated not by language but by the suits, the air hoses, the monkeys howling in their cages. Each virus had its own genome project—short viral genetic material unraveled, sometimes rebuilt, injected into tissue cultures or live animals to see if the gene tweak affected the virulence.
As research jobs went, L-4 lab work was secure. Sarafina found the daily protocol in her box each morning. She never went into the unit alone. After showers, gloves, suits, helmets, sweat and claustrophobia, Sarafina found herself reduced to a mammal in a transport bag, her partner reduced to eyes and a voice. Each day unwound in distorted reverse: showering in the suit, then stripping off the helmet and suit, take another shower, take off the gloves, take another shower. Air blowers dried her. After she got home, Sarafina felt as though she’d disembarked from a long airplane ride: dehydrated, tired from holding her body in fixed positions. In a plane, she could move her arms freely at least. But in the L-4 lab, each movement had to be considered. Sharps, partners, monkeys, proprioceptors in the muscles at the body’s rim the brain’s constant focus.
And the monkeys, unless they were too sick, threw shit at her. On injection days, Sarafina found she had additional partners. She never knew from one day to the next precisely which L-4 lab she’d be in, what she’d be doing. Security.
At night, Sarafina fed her fish, changed the water, pipetted out dead eggs, fed brine shrimp. She called the people who’d taken her surplus populations, found that few people were quite as obsessed with Aphyosemion ogoense as she was.
Thomas was responsible for exterminating the lines other aquarists lost.
Confront the problem directly, Sarafina decided. She’d apply for a Gabonese fish collecting permit, do it legally this time. If she was on a fish smuggling list, they’d turn her down. Or they’d turn her down because they didn’t want eco-tourists checking out the logging damage. But still, she wanted to go back to Gabon, collect where she’d collected in the past, before the lieutenant.
The officials at the embassy told her that, as an amateur, she’d need to book with a fish collection group tour. Her fish would be exported under the expedition’s license.
Both the British Killie Association and the German killie club publications advertised tours into Gabon. On-line in the killie area, Sarafina learned that the expedition firm, run by German and American Greens, watched its charges quite carefully.
But Sarafina couldn’t afford the trip this year. So she spent her vacation working with the ogoense variations she did have: tying new spawning mops around cork floats, sterilizing egg containers, selecting new broodstock, rebuilding her air-compressor, boiling peat moss.
The L-4 lab was twice as terrible when she came back. Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta sent the institute samples of hantavirus Gardiner’s Island and cages of grey squirrels. Hantaviruses had been a surprise back in the 1990s, when they killed over thirty people in the West, one boy on Gardiner’s Island off Long Island, and half-killed an Australian hiker who’d picked up the virus somewhere along the Appalachian Trail between Springer Mountain, Georgia, and Chambersberg, Pennsylvania, where he showed up with damaged lungs and kidneys. Trip of a lifetime, doing the whole Appalachian Traiclass="underline" not this year, sucker, but you will make medical history. CDC personnel in moonsuits trapped deer mice and astonished late-season hikers during the winter, but failed that year to isolate the particular virus. Of approximately two hundred biologists who’d worked for years with small rodents, only one turned up positive for hantavirus.