"And we found a new bit, as Mr. Unger has said," Dr. Kindscher said, radiating satisfaction. "Very unusual. Very!"
"What is it?"
"It's a novel type of mucopolysaccharidosis on chromosome 7-Q-22."
"Could I have that in English?"
"Sorry, Alex, the original lab report is in French."
"I meant give me the upshot, Doctor," Alex croaked. "Give me the executive report."
"Well, since your birth, this genetic defect that you suffer from has been periodically blocking proper cellular function in your lungs, proper expression of fluids. A very rare syndrome. Only four other known cases in the world. One in Switzerland-we were quite lucky in that eventuality, I think-and two in California. Yours is the first known in Texas."
Alex looked at the doctor. Then at his father. Then at the doctor again. It was no joke this time. There wasn't any of the usual hedging and mumbo jumbo~ and alternate prognoses. They really thought they had it this time. They did. They had it. This time they actually had the truth.
"Why?" he croaked.
"Mutagenic damage to the egg cell," Dr. Kindscher said. "It's a very rare syndrome, but all five of them diagnosed so far have -involved maternal exposure to an industrial solvent, a very particular industrial solvent no longer in use.
"Chip assembly,"-his father said. "Your mother used to do chip assembly in a border factory, long before you were born."
"What? That's it, that's all there was to it?"
"She was young," his father said sadly. "We lived on the border, and I had just begun the start-up, and your mother and I, we didn't have much money."
"So that's it, eh? My mother was exposed to a mutagen in a maquiladora plant. And all this time I've really been sick."
"Yes, Alex." Dr. Kindscher nodded. He seemed deeply moved.
"I ~
"And the best news of all is, there's a treatment."
"I might have known."
"Illegal in the U.S.," his father said. "And far too advanced for any border clinica. But this time it sticks, son. This time they really have the root of it."
"We have a clinic contacted already, and they're ready to take you, Alex. Genetic repair. Legal in Egypt, Lebanon, and Cyprus."
"Oh..." Alex groaned. "Not Egypt, I hope."
"No, Cyprus," his father said.
"Good, I heard there's a bad staph strain in Egypt." Alex stood up and walked, painfully, to the doctor's side. "You're really sure about it, this time?"
"As sure as I've ever been in my career! Intron scans don't lie, Alex. You can depend on this one. The flaw is written in your genes, obvious to any trained technician, and now that we've spotted the exact position right down to the branch of the chromosome, any lab can verify that for you. I've already verified it twice!" He beamed. "We've beaten this thing at last, Alex. We're going to cure you!"
"Thanks a lot," Alex said. "You son of a bitch." He hit Dr. Kindscher in the face.
The doctor staggered and fell. He scrambled up, amazed, holding his cheek, then turned and fled the office.
"That's going to cost me," Alex's f~ther observed.
"Sorry," Alex said. He leaned onto the table, shaking. "Really sorry."
"It's all right," his father said, "a son of a bitch like that pest, you can't hit him just once."
Alex began weeping.
"I want to do this for you, Alejandro. Because now I know, it was never your fault, my boy. You were damaged goods right out of the box."
Alex wiped his tears away. "Same old papd," he croaked.
"I don't know if things will change when you are no longer a mutant," his father declared, nobly, "but maybe you will. Who knows? I'm your father, my boy, I feel I owe you that chance at life." He frowned. "But no more foolishness this time! None of these scandals like that shameful business in Nuevo Laredo! Alejandro, those people have lawyers on me! You are going to Cyprus, and you're going right away, and you're going to stay there. No talking, no phone calls, no charge cards, and you do just as you're told! And no more nonsense from you, and especially none from your damn fool of a sister."
"All right," Alex said. He sat in the chair, half collapsing. "You win. I give up. Call the ambulance." He began giggling.
"Don't laugh, Alex. Gene replacement therapy-they tell me it really hurts."
"It always hurts," Alex said, laughing. "It all hurts. Everything hurts. For as long as you can still feel it."
EPILOGUE
Austin, Texas, had once been called the "City of the Violet Crown," back when the city had been small enough to fit within its bowl of hills. That bowl of hills was alleged to serve as protection from local tornadoes. Of course the Violet Crown no longer did that, if in fact it ever had, and even the oldest central section of Austin had been ravaged by an F-2 within the past five years.
The spike had tracked right through the city's oldest northern suburb, an ancient residential district just north of The University of Texas. The area was now part of The University's privately managed, and privately policed, urban demesne. There was not much overt sign left of the spike damage, except for some ancient and now spectacularly crippled trees. Big old pecans mostly; some dead and replaced by saplings, but many of them maimed and left upright.
To Alex's eye, the damage track was easy to spot. You'd be driving under an even canopy of flourishing, pampered, C02-glutted streetside giants, and then there would be this tortured Goyaesque mutant breaking out all up and down with scrawny little green sapling limbs, maybe one original crooked branch left as a kind of beckoning finger. He pointed this out to his companion.
"We never have tornadoes in Boston," she said.
His sister was living in a little crackerbox place. A little brown-and-white shack that looked a hundred years old, if it was a day. Back in the early 2020s, when the practice had been in vogue, somebody had sprayed the outside of the entire building with a weatherproof lacquer. The white housepaint beneath the lacquer looked unnaturally clean and sprightly.
When Alex stepped up to the concrete porch, he could see that the housepaint trapped beneath the lacquer had given up the ghost and shattered into tens of millions of tiny paint flakes no bigger than fine dust. It didn't matter. The dust wasn't going anywhere. That lacquer was there for the ages.
JANE LOOKED THROUGH the security glass at her door and saw a short, plump young blond man in a suit and tie. And a very odd-looking woman. A tiny, witchy-looking boho student type, in a slashed silk dress and striped stockings and red ankle-tied sandals. Half her face-ear, cheeks, temple-was disfigured by a huge purple tattoo.
They didn't look armed, though. And not very dangerous. Anyway, there was rarely much civil trouble around The University. Because The University had massive heaps of data and attention, and even some money, and more importantly, it had a large paramilitary phalanx of armed, disciplined, and enthusiastically violent students.
Jane opened the door. "Hello?"
"Janey?"
"Yeah?"
"It's me."
Jane stared at him. "Christ! Alex."
"This is Sylvia," Alex said. "Sylvia Muybridge. She's traveling with me. Sylvia, this is my sister, Jane Unger."
"How do you do," Jane said. "Actually, I go by Jane Mulcahey these days. It's simpler, and besides, it's legal." She held up her hand with the gold ring.
"Yes," Alex said, pained, "I knew you had a married name, but I thought you still networked professionally as Jane Unger."