"Alex..." She hesitated. "That's kind of an expensive proposition."
"Not for me. I know ways, I have contacts. Really, it's no problem; just slip me a little sample, you know, a frozen scraping off the inside of the cheek, we can get a genome rundown started right away, hit the high points, all the major fault centers. Reasonable rates. You really ought to have him scanned, Jane. His uncle has a disorder."
"We're not very lucky people, are we, Alex?"
"We're alive. That's lucky."
"We're not lucky, Alex. This is not a lucky time. We're alive, and I'm glad we're alive, but we're people of disaster. We'll never truly be happy or safe, never. Never, ever."
"No," he said. He drew a breath. A good, deep breath. "jane. I came here to Austin because I needed to tell you something. I wanted to thank you, Jane. Thank you for saving my life."
"De nada."
"No, Jane, it was a hit. You could have let me be, like I was telling you to do, and those quacks would have killed me in that black-market clinica. But you came after me, and you got me, and you even looked after me. And even though we were close to death, and surrounded by death, and we chased deadly things, we both came out alive. We're survivors, and look, there's another one of us now."
She grabbed his arm. "You want to tell me something, Alejandro? All right. Tell me something that I really want to hear." She tugged him to the side of the baby's crib. "Tell me that's your family, Alex. Tell me you'll help me look after him, like he was family."
"Sure he's family. He's my nephew. I'm proud of him."
"No, not that way. I mean the real way. I mean look after him, Alex, really care about him, like when I'm dead, and Jerry's dead, and this city is smashed, and everyone is sick and dying, and you don't even personally like him very much. But you still care anyway, and you still save him."
"Okay, Janey," Alex said slowly. "That's only fair. It's a bargain."
"No! Not a bargain, not a money thing, I don't want that from you or from anyone. I want a real promise from you, I want you to swear to me so that I'll never doubt you.
He looked at her. Her face was tight and her eyes were clouded, and he realized, with a strange little jolt of surprise, that his sister was truly afraid. Juanita had come to know and understand real fear. She was more afraid for this little bundle in the crib than she had ever been for herself. Or for her friends, or for her husband, or for anyone. She had a hostage to fortune now. That baby's sweaty little monkey hands had gripped her soul.
"All right," he said. He raised his right hand, solemnly. "Juanita Unger Mulcahey, I promise you that I'll look after your son, and all your children. I swear it on our mother's grave. Te lo juro por Ia tumba de nuestra mad re."
"That's good, Alex." She relaxed, a little. "I really believed you when you said it that way."
Voices came from the front of the house. Jerry had come home.
Alex went to meet him in the front room.
"This is a pleasant surprise," Jerry boomed. He and Alex shook hands.
Jerry had lost weight. He'd lost the great heaps of muscle on his shoulders, and his arms and legs were of relatively normal dimensions, and his gut looked like the gut of a family man in his thirties. He'd lost more hair, and the sides of the beard were gone now; he had a professorial Vandyke, and a real haircut. He had a shirt, suit jacket and tie, and a leather valise.
"They must be keeping you busy, Jerry."
"Oh yes. And you?"
"I'm getting into genetics."
"Really. That's interesting, Alex."
"I felt I had to." He looked hard into Jerry's eyes. Maybe he could, for the first time ever, make some kind of human contact there. "You see, Jerry, genetic treatment changed me so profoundly, I felt I just had to comprehend it. And I mean really understand it, not just get my hands on it and hack at it, but genuinely understand the science. It's a difficult field, but I think I'm up to the challenge. If I work at it hard, I can really learn it." He shrugged. "Of course, ~I still have to go through all that equivalency nonsense first."
"Right," Jerry said, clear-eyed and nodding sympathetically, "the academic proprieties." Nothing was wrong, and no one was missing, and there were no ghosts at this banquet, and no deep dark secrets, and for good old brother-in-law Jerry, life was just life.
"Done any storm work lately, Jerry?"
"Of course! The F-6! Extremely well documented. Enough material there for a lifetime."
Jane spoke up. "Nobody believed it would happen, even though he said it would. And now he's trying to explain to them why it stopped."
"That's a real problem," Jerry said, savoring it. "A nexus of problems. Nontrivial."
"The best kind of nexus of problems, I'm sure."
Jerry laughed. Briefly. "It's good to see you in such good spirits, Alex. You and your friend should stay for lunch."
"Tacos," Jane said.
"Good! My favorite." Jerry's eyes glazed. "Just a moment I've got to look after some things first." He vanished into his office.
Music burst out through Jerry's closed office door, the insistent squeaking and rattling of a Thai pop tune. It was loud.
"Does he really like that Thai stuff?" Alex asked Juanita.
Juanita shrugged. "Not really," she said loudly.
"That's just some of my old college music, but Jerry punches up anything on the box when he works... . He plays it to drown out the city noise. To drown out the hum, y'know. So he can think."
The music segued into an elaborate Asian cha-cha. Sylvia made a face.
"Let's go in the backyard and I'll show you my garden. The tacos will keep."
It was quiet in the backyard. It was a lovely spring day. It was sunny and there were honeysuckles and a birdbath.
"Jerry's always like this when they make him do polynomials," Jane apologized.
"Always like what? Jerry has always acted just like that."
"No, not quite like he does now, but... well, you don't know him like I do." She sighed. "The labcoat people have really got him where they want him now. The seminars, the lecture tours, the peer review committees... If he gets tenure and they offer him the chairmanship, we're gonna have some real problems."
"What kind of problems?"
"You don't wanna know. Lemme put it this way- when Mommy gets her claws on some real money again, Mommy's gonna buy Daddy a nice endowed chair where he can sit and think quietly, all by himself." Jane shrugged. "We've been up to Oklahoma City a couple of times to lecture and do media-Jerry's real popular there... . It's really weird up there now, that city was just leveled, and they were all completely broke and tragic and desperate, and so they just... well, they just threw away all the rule books. And now they're doing the weirdest architecture you can imagine! They're rebuilding everything aboveground, out of dirt-cheap nothing, out of paper and software and foam. The new Oklahoma City is just like a giant, smart, wasp's nest. Have you been up there?"
"No! But it sounds really worthwhile," Alex said.
"Yeah. I think so. I think it's the future, frankly. You can tell it's the future, too, 'cause the plumbing hardly works, and it's crowded, and it smells bad. They got the storm problem whipped, though. God help them if they get a fire." She looked at her garden: beans, tomatoes. "I got some special stuff from some Oklahoma agro-engineers during Jerry's last speaking tour. It was kind of a celebrity perk."
Jane was growing two rows of corn in her backyard. Corn, Zea mays, but with the chlorophyll hack. It had taken the human race quite some time to understand chlorophyll, the chemical method by which plants turned light into food, and when the ancient secret finally came out, the secret had turned out to be a really dumb botch. Even after two billion years of practice, plants had an utterly lousy notion of how to turn light into food. Plants were damn near as dumb as rocks, basically, and their lame idea of capturing sunlight was the silliest, most harebrained scheme imaginable.