“It’s not prattle, Bowman, it’s science,” Sheida said. “But logic seems to have left you behind. You want to make people ‘work,’ but at work that has never, historically, enhanced reproduction, work that has, in fact, tended to detract from it. I have to ask: can all of this work be done by those who have chosen to Change?”
“The program may necessitate some adjustments to the Change… fad,” Paul said with a distasteful expression.
“Oh, ho!” Cantor said. “Now we come to it! You want me to be a nice little humanoform and work in a… what’s the word, a place where things were made?”
“Factory,” Sheida supplied.
“You want me to be a nice little humanoform ‘working’ in a factory instead of what I choose to be!” He stood up, kicked back the chair and transformed. Suddenly, in the place of the large, hirsute “man,” a four-meter-high grizzly bear reared.
“I doooo’ ’hin’ soooo,” the grizzly growled. He leaned forward and rested on the table, his long claws gouging the natural wood of the tabletop, as his head transformed back to human. “I’m not giving up my form for you, Paul Bowman! Nor am I going to force any of the Changed!”
Ishtar caught Sheida’s eye and threw a Whisper into her ear. “Makes me glad he’s not a dragon.”
“I think we’re done here,” Ungphakorn said. “The Finn isssn’t going to ssside with you, if he even bothersss to find out what the dissscusssion wasss about. The Demon might, but only for the chaosss that would ensssue. Ssso you need ssseven to implement.”
“Nine,” Sheida said. “Revocation of the Change rules will require nine; they were implemented with eight votes. Actually, one of them was implemented with a unanimous vote of Council so you’ll have to get one of the Hacks to agree to override that one.”
“Which was?” Ishtar asked.
“ ‘No revocation of Change under conditions in which the Changed would be placed in mortal peril.’ So you’d have to recover all the mer-people, delphinos, whalers and all the rest before you could change them back. And the logistics of changing back all the mer and delphinos, alone, boggles the mind; it requires human intervention because of the risk factors. And then there would be the genetic flaws that would creep in during the process. Just what we need: more wild gene faults.”
“Not to mention make sssure no one wasss flying when you took away their ability,” Ungphakorn added dryly. “You don’t have enough votesss to implement, Bowman, even with the Demon. Give it up.”
“Never,” Paul said, getting to his feet. “The future of humanity is in our hands, and you are throwing it away. For fantasies of a race of maternal females arising from nowhere and…” he stopped and just gestured wordlessly at the quetzacoatl.
“I do believe that you’re looking for the word ‘abomination,’ ” Ishtar said lightly. “Aren’t you?”
“Yes!” Chansa snapped, his patience apparently gone. “Abominations! Dragons and unicorns and your precious mer-people! These are not humans! They are filth, nothing but degenerate FILTH!”
“Oh, my,” Ishtar said. “I do believe that we’ve annoyed our good Chansa. And let me ask you, boy, do your natural genetics indicate that you should be three meters tall and two hundred kilos?”
“That is beside the point,” the council member growled. “At least I am human.”
“Yes, well, I think that about sssettlesss that,” Ungphakorn said. “Thanksss for clearing up that little point. Time for a voiccce vote. I motion that the dissscusssion of waysss to forccce people to ‘work’ ssso that they begin breeding fassster and dissscusssionsss of forsss-able end to the ‘abominable’ Changed be permanently tabled.”
“We haven’t heard from a few of the council members,” Sheida pointed out. “Minjie? Tetzacola? You’ve been unusually silent.”
“That’s because we’re with Paul.” The answerer was Said Dracovich, but she gestured at the rest. “We six think that the best action to take is to enforce some restrictions. To… put pressure on the human race again so it can be strong. Expose it to the fire for a while to temper the steel.”
“Oh, deary, deary, deary,” Ishtar said. “First we’re abominations and now we’re simple knife blades to be tinkered with.”
“All of us do not consider the Changed to be abominations,” Celine said. “I have assisted too many Changes to consider it abomination. But Change is resource intensive and support of the Changed is more so; just look at Cantor for example. Such resource overuse redirects it from important projects.”
She paused and smiled ingratiatingly at Ishtar. “I will add, though, that Change among the leadership would, of course, be fully acceptable. So no one in this room has anything to fear from this program.”
“Riiigh’,” Cantor growled skeptically. He had shifted back to full bear form when Chansa started talking. “So no’ ’ere we’re being bribe’. I secon’!”
“All in favor?” Ishtar asked.
“A’,” Cantor said.
“Aye,” Sheida.
“Aye,” Aikawa said. “ ‘The true abomination is intolerance.’ ”
“Aye,” Ungphakorn.
“Aye,” Ishtar finished. “That’s it. You need nine votes to override all the protocols in place to prevent your ‘program,’ Paul. So until three of us die, you’re shit out of luck.”
“We’ll see,” Bowman said. “The necessity for this will become clear. I promise you.”
“Not as long as I’ve got eyes to see,” Sheida answered.
CHAPTER TWO
Over the desk a three dimensional hologram of a double helix broke apart, incorporated new DNA, broke down into sections, simulated protein linkage, then recombined only to start over again.
Daneh Ghorbani watched the simulation with a distant expression. The Doctor of Genetic Repair was fine skinned like her sister, with the same titian hair. Unlike her sister she wore it long, and a good geneticist would be able to tell that her eyes probably were not naturally cornflower blue. However, like her sister, she had very little in the way of “enhancements” and the ones that she did have were all nongenetic. She had enough problems fixing other people’s lives without screwing up her own code.
The hologram was not running at the actual speed of the program; it was just a graphic representation of a process that was going on much faster than the eye could see. Computations and comparisons were going on across the Net, looking for a combination of genes that would eliminate a particular problem in the current patient’s code.
The result of that problem was sitting on a chair across from her, twitching and watching her earnestly. Herzer Herrick had been born with a genetic condition with symptoms similar to Parkinson’s disease. It had gone undetected in standard genetic scans and only started to manifest itself when he was five years old as hidden retrogenes broke loose and began randomly encoding. In the last ten years it had progressed to the point that he was losing vision because of inability to control his eyes, had occasional epileptic fits and had to be transported most of the time. The prognosis was that if his condition continued to be untreated, and up until now it had been untreatable, he would shuttle off this mortal coil before his twentieth birthday. Or about four hundred and seventy-five years before he should.