And then the world would have to be started all over again, for both of them. He knew the medical community in the States would welcome him. So would others…and this time he would have to be more careful than he had been here. It was not as if there were not cruel, venal, and evil people in the United States, just as well as here; people who would see, in the delicate and intelligent little machines he had created, a weapon instead of a tool. He would have to work with Martin, and with Martin’s friends at Net Force and elsewhere in the intelligence and scientific communities, to find ways to control his creations so that they could not be modified for deadly purposes.
He sighed, alone there in the darkness, and knew that it would be an uphill fight, if indeed this purpose could be achieved at all. There was no putting the genic back in the bottle, as the old story had it. It was out, now — out walking around the world in his son’s body. Soon enough it would be in the lab, being studied by other scientists. And after that…
Armin felt around him in the darkness for the plastic bottle of springwater, took a swig, sealed it, and put it aside again. At least he had left no working prototypes here. What hurt him most now was the price he suspected that some of the people who had been working with him must be paying. But there comes a time when one must, however reluctantly, weigh lives in one’s hand — one’s own life, as well as those of others — and decide whether sparing two lives, or five or ten, here and now, is worth losing thousands, perhaps millions, later on. For Armin was not so naive as to think his invention would stay inside his country’s borders if he completed it and turned it over to the government. Cluj desperately needed hard currency. He would sell the microps to anyone who would pay him. Terrorists, intelligence organizations, criminals, common murderers, other countries with better intentions would all pay well for them. And chaos would ensue. Soon the negative uses would proliferate, outnumbering the positive ones. No one would know whether anything they ate or drank was normal food, or something that could take them apart from the inside — either slowly, molecule by molecule, or very quickly indeed.
Armin’s only consolation was that he had managed to destroy all the locally held records about the section of coding which told the microps how to “breed,” how to reproduce themselves from raw materials, protein chains and mineral ions, inside their host. He had destroyed not only the code, before he left, but all his notes, and as many of his associates’ notes as possible. Not all of them had been accessible…but he had made sure that it would take a long, long while before anyone remaining behind here would be able to retro-engineer the microps from the bits and pieces which were all that remained when he left the laboratory for the last time the other night, having that afternoon sent his son off, ostensibly to visit the vampire’s castle.
Half his work was done. Now all that remained was to get himself to safety as well. The quiet people who had slowly let him know that they would help him were now busy out there — he would hear from them soon. Most of his time he now spent listening to the little radio on its earphone, amusing himself by judging the tenor of the search for him by the increasing or decreasing shrillness of the announcements about him during the “crime bulletins.” The rest of the time, he spent thinking about new microps designs, taking refuge in the sweet orderliness of the molecular-level world, where structure and symmetry reigned….
…And about his son. Safe, thank God, he thought; safe….
In the darkness he closed his eyes.
The darkness sang to him, and Laurent streaked out through it, laughing. Maj had been right about the Arbalest. It needed very little expertise in handling, in this mode — a normal joystick was enough. “Right now you’re going to be flying it for pleasure, not mastery,” she had said, having handed him the icon. “So there’s no harm in letting the game module ‘read your mind’ a little. But don’t overdo it. And I wouldn’t go in the main game, if I were you. The Archon’s people are still drifting around there trying to make trouble, some of them…and if you get my fighter shot up, we’re going to have words.”
But she had also shown him how to return instantly from the Cluster Rangers game to her own simming space…and Laurent had not been able to resist. Maj’s re-created space, though full of stars and matching the Cluster Rangers space closely in terms of astrography and physical laws — this being important for the high-G work — still did not have that subtle, sublime look-and-feel that the original had. He craved the sound of the stars singing, and he was going to have just a little of it, on his own, before coming back to mundane life again.
Listen to me, he thought as he flew up and over the curve of Dolorosa, into that spectacular view. “Mundane,” I am calling her life, after only, what? A day and a half of it? Two days. And a life that any of the other kids at school would kill for — I don’t care how high up in the government their parents are. Look at me! I’m becoming jaded. Decadent.
He laughed for sheer pleasure as the great arm of the Galaxy spread itself out before him, the sound of it shimmering silvery against the ship’s skin, tingling all through him. This is what virtually should be like, Laurent thought, tumbling the Arbalest in its yaw axis so that it turned to face the view of the great heart of the Seraphim Cluster, all those burning jewels spilled out across the night, flaring and fading, flaring and fading again. You would never have thought the stars could have so many colors, he thought. He knew the stellar types, but the prosaic letters and numbers did not even hint at this wild treasury of shades and brilliances, set dazzling in the darkness.
It is enough to turn me into an astronomer, Laurent thought. And a big shiver went through him, hot and cold at once, and then another one, so that he was surprised for a moment, and checked the ship’s controls to see if something was wrong with the suit conditioning system, or the cockpit’s own environmental controls. But all the lights were green, so that Laurent laughed again, at himself this time. He tumbled the ship once more to get one last look at that huge arm of the Galaxy, lying draped over a third of the sky, like a blazing banner spread out on some impossible wind—
“Niko?”
Uh-oh, he thought, and tumbled the ship one more time, getting a fix on Maj’s hangar and heading for it. “Coming—”
It was Maj’s mother, outside the virtual space. It amused Laurent that her family all seemed to leave the option open to talk to each other from inside or outside their various virtualities, no matter what they were doing. “Do you eat lamb, honey?”
“Lamb? Yes!”
“Oh, good,” she said, invisible but amused. “An enthusiast. Garlic?”
“We all have to eat garlic,” Laurent said. “It is required. It keeps the Transylvanians away.”
“Mmm, no comment,” Maj’s mother said. “If I didn’t know better, I would have believed you about the cows, too. Are you going to be in there much longer?”
“I am coming out now,” Laurent said. He was landing the Arbalest in Maj’s hangar even as he spoke — which was just as well, since the light over one of the hangar’s pedestrian doors started flashing, indicating that someone wanted to come in.