Читать книгу Designer Genes - Brian Stableford - Страница 8

THE INVISIBLE WORM

Rick first noticed the sick rose when he went to lift Steven for his morning feed, but he didn’t pay any particular attention to it because his mind was on other things—mainly Steven’s voice. For one so young, Steven had a lusty pair of lungs, and when he exercised them Rick wasted no time in responding. The sound went through him like a knife.

Rick sometimes wondered whether everyone might have some built-in, unique and secret sensory key, which, when turned, would plunge him into a private Hell of unparalleled excruciation. If so, he thought, some horribly unkind whim of chance had surely given Steven the uncanny knack of hitting it spot on.

The silence that fell once he had established the baby in the feeding-nook was a blessed relief, but the relief was—as usual—tinged with guilt. Now, when Rick looked down at the baby, sucking vigorously away at the teat, he was able to feel conventionally loving. It was only when Steven cried.…

He had not expected that having a baby in the house would be so disturbing, so frequently painful. He knew perfectly well how lucky and how privileged the household was—he and his five co-parents had waited nearly ten years to come through the waiting-list after first submitting their application for a license—and he was sure that he loved Steven as much as any co-father could, but he had never imagined that being carer-of-the-week could be so stressful, so exhausting, and so nerve-wracking.

The problem, he supposed, was that he had never been around babies much. Nobody had, these days. Even as a baby you didn’t get to be around babies much, no matter how much effort your co-parents put into the awkward business of arranging playtimes.

Rick did not dare to admit the extent of his confusion and difficulty to his five co-parents—not because they would not understand, but rather because they would insist on understanding, at great and wearisome length. They would schedule a fortnight of evening meetings so that they could all discuss the psychological roots of existential unease and the hazards of bonding failure, and spend hours lamenting the fact that the emotional underside of human nature had been shaped in the long-gone days when it was usual for people to be biologically related to the children they reared. He preferred to suffer their unthinking impatience; one could only take so much five-handed moral support.

It was in order to subvert his vague annoyance with himself that Rick went back to inspect the imperfect rose. He had to make an effort to pull himself together before he could examine it properly. He couldn’t remember which of his co-parents had pressed so hard for pink decor in the nursery, but it certainly hadn’t been him; he didn’t like wallflowers and he thought that pink roses were terminally cute.

The rose didn’t look well at all; its pink petals were extensively mottled with ochreous yellow. Rick was tempted to pluck the flower immediately and hurl it into the cloaca to which all the rest of the nursery’s wastes were consigned. Another would grow to take its place, in time. He reached out to do it, but then he hesitated. He realized belatedly that the sickening of the rose might conceivably be a symptom of something serious. The nursery was supposed to be free of all non-functional biota, even kinds that were harmless to everything except wallflowers.

Rick studied the petals again, more carefully. Then he scanned the neighboring corollas. They too were beginning to show early signs of discoloration.

“Oh pollution,” he murmured. “Why me?” Carer-of-the-week was nominally in charge of the house as well as the baby, but that was usually a sinecure because nothing ever went wrong with the house.

There was a screen set into the rosewood half a meter to the left of the yellowing rose, and Rick punched in the code for the house’s cellular troubleshooting program. He entered the location codes, and watched the screen, hoping fervently that no human action would be necessary in facilitating treatment of the trouble-spot.

But the screen flashed up: ALL CLEAR.

“How can it be all clear, moron?” he asked, out loud. “It’s supposed to be an eternal bloom, immortal unless picked.”

Unfortunately, the cellular troubleshooter was a low-grade system. As artificial intelligences went, it really was a moron. Rick pressed RETRY, but he knew it wouldn’t get him anywhere. The message stubbornly held its centre-screen ground.

Across the room, Steven let go of the teat and began to exercise his lungs again. He was a light but frequent feeder, and he tended to mop up a lot of air when he ate. The feeding-nook was a clever piece of design, but it wasn’t versatile enough to take care of every need.

Rick hurried over to pick Steven up, and hoisted the naked baby high on to his left shoulder. Then he began walking round and round the cradle, rubbing Steven’s back gently and rhythmically. Inevitably, Steven could not be content with a delicate burp. He brought a few milliliters of milk back with the air, and dribbled it down the back of Rick’s shirt. Rick stripped off the shirt and dropped it into the laundry-port, trying hard not to curse the child.

The next item on Steven’s schedule was his morning bath. He was, of course, clean already—the cradle was fully-equipped for waste-disposal—but the co-parents knew from their assiduous studies how vital it was to maintain a child’s water-familiarity. The household soviet had designed the carer’s routines with that in mind. The baby-bath, like the cradle, was an outgrowth of the nursery wallwood, but it normally stood empty for hygiene’s sake. Rick activated the tear-ducts, and stood cuddling Steven while he waited for it to fill up. Steven was no longer wailing, and there was nothing to distract Rick’s attention from the gentle trickle of water.

Because the bath was dark brown, Rick did not immediately observe that anything was amiss. It wasn’t until there were eight or ten centimeters of liquid in the shallow bowl that he realized that the water was discolored. He dipped his hand in and brought out a little of the liquid, cupped in the palm. It was faintly straw-colored, and it had an odd feel.

He knew then that the problem was serious. A sickly wallflower was one thing, but an unidentified substance in the baby-bath was something else: it was a naked threat to the well-being of the household’s most precious member.

The household had no in-living biotechnician. Three of the co-parents worked in construction and deconstruction, and therefore knew something about house-systems, but Don and Nicola were away on-site somewhere in South America and Dieter was strictly a mud-and-sand gantzer who couldn’t tell left-handed wood from right. Not only was there no expert help on hand, but there was no one in the house who could reasonably be interrupted at work in order to commiserate with him. Rosa—who was in Ed and Ents, like Rick himself—was busy tutoring. Chloe was plugged into a robominer way down in the mid-Atlantic trench. Dieter had a DO NOT DISTURB sign posted.

Rick went back to the screen, activated the camera, and called a doctor.

The doctor was a little slow coming on screen, but at least she didn’t put Rick on hold. The ID code on the screen told him that her name was Maura Jauregy. She looked overdue for a rejuve, but Rick found that slightly comforting. Wrinkles—provided that they were subtly understated—still seemed to him to be somehow emblematic of wisdom.

“I’m Richard Reece,” said Rick, though he knew that the doctor’s screen would already be displaying his name and address. “I think our house has a problem, but the lar keeps flashing an ALL CLEAR signal. The symptoms aren’t extreme—a few wallflowers that look as if they’re sick, and discolored bathwater—but they’re in the nursery, and we can’t take any chances with the baby.”

Dr. Jauregy could see the baby, because Rick was holding him up to the camera, and she nodded to indicate that she understood.

“I’m activating my diagnostic AI now, Mr. Reece,” she said. “Can you lower the drawbridge to let it in?”

Rick punched out the codes that would open the house’s systems to interrogation and investigation by the doctor’s specialist software. He watched her face while she studied a datascreen to the left of camera. She had an old-fashioned professional frown, which was really quite charming.

“Mmm…,” she said, speculatively. Then she looked straight at camera again. “Could you help me out, Mr. Reece? Can you remove a few petals from the affected flower, and a cupful of water from the bath? Place them in two separate sections of the dispenser-unit. No need to activate any analysis-programs; I’ll use my own.”

He did as he had been asked, and then politely placed himself in front of the camera again, so that he and the doctor could look at one another. Her professional frown gradually deepened, until it seemed to Rick to be positively funereal.

“Very odd,” she said, after a while. “Very odd indeed.”

“The nursery systems were only installed a couple of months ago,” said Rick, knowing that his input was probably unnecessary but feeling that he ought to make an effort to help out. “We didn’t have our own womb put in; we collected Steven after delivery. The wood and the wallflowers are dextro-rotatory—they’re supposed to be non-metabolizable by all feral organisms and fully immune to all natural pathogens.”

“Of course, of course,” said Dr. Jauregy, contemplatively. “The trouble is that so much progress has been made recently in dextro-rotatory organics that there’s an awful lot of dr-DNA floating around. It might be something that got into it at the manufacturer’s and lay dormant. On the other hand, it might be something else. Exactly what though.…”

“You don’t know what it is, then?” said Rick, feebly.

“Not yet,” agreed the doctor, obviously choosing her words very carefully. “There’s a slim possibility that the root of the trouble isn’t organic at all. It might be a fault in your electronics, at the silicon/biochip interface. If something in the software were interfering with the nutritional upkeep of your organics, that would account for the fact that your lar won’t recognize that anything’s amiss. You’ve definitely got bugs of some kind rattling around in the walls, but it might not be easy to figure out exactly what they are. Are any members of your household professionally involved in cutting-edge biotech?”

“No,” said Rick. “We’re just ordinary people. No intellectuals here.”

“It’s probably something very minor,” the doctor said. “But it will need investigating. I’ll have to come over.”

“In person?” said Rick, in astonishment. He had never known a doctor to make a house call before—although he supposed, on reflection, that doctors who specialized in the diseases of houses probably had to do it fairly frequently.

“It makes it easier to prod and poke about,” said Dr. Jauregy, “and although it might well be something utterly trivial, it’s got my AI thoroughly confused. I’ll pick up a robocab and be with you in two hours or so. I’ll leave my systems hooked up, if you don’t mind—feel free to call the cabscreen if anything else comes up.”

“No problem,” said Rick.

“I don’t suppose…,” the doctor began, and then paused.

“What?” asked Rick.

“Have any of you any enemies?” she asked, trying to imply by her manner that she naturally assumed that the answer would be “no,” but that she felt obliged to check it out just in case.

“You think someone might be doing this deliberately?” said Rick, utterly horrified by the thought. “You think someone might be trying to poison our house?”

“I doubt it,” she said with a slight sigh, perhaps also doubting her own wisdom in having asked the question. “As I said, it’s probably something utterly trivial. Two hours, then.” And then, having deftly planted the seed of an awful anxiety, she switched off.

* * * *

Chloe was still mentally lost in the ocean-depths, even though her body was peacefully slumped into an armchair in her cubby-hole. Dieter, though he probably wasn’t working at all, still had his systems programd to post DO NOT DISTURB messages in response to all inquiries. As soon as Rosa had finished her tutorial, though, she responded to Rick’s appeal for someone to talk to.

“Of course we don’t have any enemies,” she said, when he’d recounted the whole of his conversation with the doctor. “Who could possibly want to hurt our house—our nursery? It’s probably an innate fault in the system, which is only just beginning to show up. Have you checked the rest of the house?”

“All except the cellar,” said Rick. “But I wouldn’t know what to look for, would I?”

The house’s systems were arranged in the conventional fashion. The inorganic parts of its brain were in the attic-space under the roof; the pump controlling its various circulatory systems was in the cupboard under the stairs. Rick had opened both cubby-holes to look in, but there had been nothing visibly amiss. He hadn’t gone down into the cellar mainly because he didn’t much like the cellar, which was cramped and crowded. All the waste-recycling systems were down there; so were the knotted roots whose growing-points extended deep into the ungantzed substratum on which the foundations were built, scavenging for minerals and water. The lighting down there was minimal; it was the only part of the house that was actually gloomy.

“It has to be the new systems,” said Rosa, as though trying to convince herself. “It’s not right, though—it’s not as if we cut any corners cost-wise. Those nursery-fittings were the best we could afford. It’s not right.”

“It might be because they’re state-of-the-art that all the bugs haven’t been ironed out yet,” Rick suggested. “New technologies always have teething problems—just like babies.”

She didn’t seem to be listening. “You don’t suppose Dieter brought something back on his boots when he came back from Africa, do you?” she said. “He was carer last week, wasn’t he?”

“He was in the middle of the Kalahari desert,” said Rick. “That’s the last place in the world where you might pick up a bug capable of metabolizing dextro-rotatory proteins.”

“He came back on a plane,” she countered, combatively. “Planes these days are full of dr stuff.”

Rick couldn’t help thinking that Rosa wasn’t being as supportive as she might have been, and he felt let down. It was strictly taboo to love one of one’s co-spouses significantly more than the others, lest one be thought guilty of singling, but Rick always felt particularly vulnerable with Rosa. She wasn’t as good-looking as Chloe or Nicola, but there was something about her that always made his heart feel as if it might melt, and he didn’t like it when she was annoyed with him.

For once, he was grateful when Steven began to whimper; having someone to talk to didn’t seem to be helping much.

“I’d better feed him again,” said Rick.

“He can’t be hungry already,” Rosa complained. “It’s not time.”

“He didn’t have much last time,” Rick answered, apologetically, “and he burped some of that back again.” He realized even as he spoke that there just might be a sinister implication in what he was saying. “Oh pollution,” he said, softly. “I can’t just put him back in the nook, can I? Not if the nursery’s sick. What can I do, Rosie?”

“Take him to the dining-room,” said Rosa. “The main system can mix baby-milk just as well as the nursery-nook.”

“But it hasn’t got a teat!” Rick protested. “I can’t feed him with a spoon, can I?”

“Get the dispenser to mould one out of soft plastic,” she said. “There must be a program for it somewhere in the library. One that fits on to a bottle. It’s a bit twenty-first century, but it’s bound to work.”

“He won’t like it,” said Rick, mournfully.

“It’s not good for him to get bogged down in a routine of comforts,” said Rosa, sternly. Because she did so much work in primary ed she considered herself the household expert on child-rearing, although she was very particular about not doing more than her fair share of caring. “He needs a bit of innovation and improvisation occasionally—especially at the elementary level.

Steven had by now begun to amplify his whimpers, and was getting set for a full-scale bawl. Rick hurried away with him, hoping that he could find the requisite program, and that the dispenser could deliver the goods in time to save his ears from too much torture.

* * * *

“There have been some developments, I’m afraid,” said the doctor mournfully, when she arrived at the house. “The lab has completed the scan of the rose’s dr-DNA and the extraneous matter in the bathwater. It all looks a bit iffy. I’ve had to call in some help, but you mustn’t worry. We’ve caught the problem early, and it’s just a matter of backtracking to figure out how it started. When the other people arrive, we’re going to have to seal off the nursery for a while and usurp control of the house’s main systems. You’ll have to wind down any work you’re doing, and you might experience some localized control problems, but everything will be all right and with luck we’ll be out of here in a matter of hours. Don’t worry.”

The last piece of advice was difficult to follow, and it became even more difficult when the first of Dr. Jauregy’s “other people” arrived. His name was Ituro Morusaki and his ID declared him to be an officer of the International Bureau of Investigation. “I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about,” he said, breezily. “But we have to take precautions, whenever there’s a possibility that a crime might have been committed.”

“What crime?” asked Rick.

“Any crime,” answered the IBI man, unhelpfully.

“You mean software sabotage, don’t you?” said Rosa, with a keen edge of anxiety in her voice. “You think we’re the victim of a terrorist attack! But why us? What have we ever done to anyone?”

Officer Morusaki put up his hands defensively. “No, no!” he said. “We mustn’t jump to any conclusions. We simply don’t know what we’re dealing with, and it could be anything. Please don’t worry.”

He didn’t hang around to be questioned any further. He disappeared into the nursery, to confer with Dr. Jauregy.

By this time Dieter and Chloe had been alerted to the fact that something was seriously amiss, and they had joined Rick and Rosa in the main common-room.

“Well,” said Chloe, “I’m squeaky clean, greenwise. What did you get up to in Africa, Dieter?”

“Helping to reclaim the Kalahari desert is hardly an eco-crime,” Dieter countered, testily. “The Gaians can’t possibly have anything against me. What are Don and Nicola doing down in Amazonia? That’s the Gaians’ number one area of concern, isn’t it? Maybe they’ve done something to piss off Mother Earth’s Avengers.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Rosa told them both. “They’re only techs, not planners. Gaians don’t send electronic mail-bombs to the likes of us.”

Steven wasn’t at all happy with the bottle that Rick was trying—inexpertly—to force into his mouth. There was something about the teat that he didn’t like, in spite of the fact that he was hungry. His face was red and his eyes were screwed up tight and he was mewling pitifully. It wasn’t a full-blown tantrum yet, but it was going on that way. Rick gritted his teeth and tried to be patient, yet firm.

“Do it gently,” Chloe advised. “You’re upsetting him. We all have to keep calm, for his sake.”

“I heard about some practical joker who used a random-number generator to send copies of a spoiler virus through the net,” said Dieter. “Maybe that’s what happened—maybe our number just got thrown up at random.”

“Don’t be silly,” said Rosa. “This isn’t something that flashes silly messages on our screens—it’s something that’s sabotaging our nursery. What kind of joker would do a thing like that?”

Steven, clearly despairing of half-measures, began to yell. He hadn’t yet begun to strike the secret note, but Rick could tell that the gathering crescendo was heading in that direction

“Oh, come on, Rick!” Dieter complained. “Can’t you at least keep him quiet, so we can think about this. This is important!”

Rick abandoned the bottle and tried to jolly Steven out of the crying fit by bouncing him around a bit. He knew that it wasn’t going to work, but at least it demonstrated to the others that he was trying. Silently, he willed the baby to be quiet, but the power of positive thinking that he was trying to exercise kept getting interrupted by silent pleas and curses.

“Wrap him up,” said Rosa. “He’s not in the nursery now and the ambient temperature’s too low for him—find him something soft and warm and comforting, then try the bottle again.”

The torrent of advice did nothing to soothe Rick’s temper; it only made him more aggrieved. But the one thing he couldn’t do was to hand Steven over to someone else and say, “You take care of the little brat.” That would really call down the wrath of Heaven upon him.

The lar informed them that someone else was at the door, and Rosa went to let in the second of Dr. Jauregy’s expected helpers. His name was Lionel Murgatroyd, and his ID informed them that he was with the Ministry of Defense.

“The Ministry of Defense!” said Dieter, incredulously. “What is this—World War Five?”

“No, no, no,” Mr. Murgatroyd assured them. “It’s nothing to worry about—nothing at all. A routine notification under the rather-be-safe policy. Please don’t let your imagination run away with you. It’s just that where novel DNA is concerned, especially when it seems to be a bit on the nasty side, we have to be extremely careful.”

They didn’t have time to ask Mr. Murgatroyd any more questions, because he was seized by Officer Morusaki and hauled into the nursery.

“We have to seal everything up now,” said Morusaki cheerfully, as he prepared to close the door behind him. “We’re taking control of all the house’s systems except for the fundamental subroutines, so you won’t be able to phone out or call up data from the net. You might experience some slight problems while we’re running tests, but please be patient.”

The nursery door closed behind him, and the four householders exchanged helpless looks. Nobody wanted to start asking accusative questions about who might or might not have got the house a front-line posting in the next Plague War. The thought was too preposterous to entertain.

Steven was still bawling, despite the fact that Rick—following Rosa’s suggestion—had managed to summon up a warm and soft ultrawoolly shawl. Rick tried unsuccessfully to persuade the baby to accept the makeshift teat, but Steven obviously wanted the nursery nook and wasn’t prepared to accept any second-rate substitutes—not, at least, without making his protest first. Rick had retreated to the corner of the room furthest away from his co-parents in the hope of reducing the nuisance level slightly, but it was a futile gesture.

“I know one thing,” said Dieter, raising his voice above the din. “Whatever it is and however it got into our systems, this thing is dangerous. It has weapon-potential. They want to tame it before they stop it—that’s why they’re beavering away in there under the protection of a full-scale security shield.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Chloe. “If it’s organic, it must be dextro-rotatory. It can’t hurt anything living—not really living. It can only affect right-handed proteins.”

“Chloe, darling,” said Dieter, with uncharacteristically bitter sarcasm. “Half the world lives in houses made from dr-wood, and dresses in dr-clothes. There are dr-components in virtually every machine our factories produce. A virus that could eat its way through dr-materials would be the ideal humane weapon. It could wreck a nation’s property without actually killing anyone.”

“You’re being silly,” said Rosa, shortly. “There aren’t any lr-viruses that destroy all laevo-rotatory materials, even after three billion years of lr-evolution. Why should a universally-destructive dr-virus suddenly turn up out of the blue? And if it did, why on earth would it make its first appearance in our nursery? Rick, can’t you keep the poor little mite quiet for a while.”

Rick interrupted the murmurous stream of soothing noises that he was emitting into Steven’s ear in order to say “No.” Then he added, “Oh, pollution!” as he realized to his discomfort that the ultrawoolly had suffered a sudden attack of stinking stickiness.

He moved rapidly to the disposal chute, hitting the control-button with his elbow because his hands were over-full with the bottle and the wrapped-up baby. The lid failed to respond to his signal. He jabbed it again, and then again, but nothing happened.

He turned round to complain but saw that Rosa was now busy giving Dieter an extended, if inexpert, lecture on the elements of dextro-rotatory organic chemistry. Dieter, obviously resentful of being treated as if he were one of her primary ed counseling cases, was busy going red in the face. Rick knew that if he called their attention to what had happened, they would merely point out with some asperity that the chute’s systems must have fallen prey to the side-effects of the probings being carried out by the investigators in the nursery.

The door to the staircase that led down to the cellar was only a couple of feet away, and Rick kicked the control panel, probably a little bit harder than was necessary. He sighed with relief when it opened, and he went swiftly through it. He glanced back as the door slid shut behind him, but only Chloe was taking any notice, and her expression showed profound relief that the crying baby was being taken away.

Rick figured that it would probably be possible to dispose of the polluted ultrawoolly into the cellar chute, and that, even if it turned out not to be possible, he could at least abandon the horrid thing, sluice Steven down, and then have another go at persuading him to take the bottle without having to suffer the censorious glares of his co-parents. He took the six steps two at a time, and made his way along the narrow corridor between the massed root-ridges to the portal set in the basal trunk.

The portal opened readily enough, and he sighed with relief. He had thrown the ultra-woolly in before he realized that all was not well within the chute.

Instead of falling away through empty space to the reclamation-chamber, the soiled garment landed in a pool of turbid water whose surface was only a couple of centimeters below the opening. Because of the odiferous nature of the stain on the shawl, Rick did not at first notice that the water was also rather noisome, but when he leaned over to take a closer look, the fact became abundantly clear.

He also noticed that the level of the water was slowly rising. The house was evidently experiencing difficulties in the waterworks.

Rick’s first supposition was that the three investigators in the nursery must already know about this problem, given that they had taken over all the house’s systems, but then he remembered that the lar had stubbornly insisted that nothing was wrong in the nursery. Perhaps, given Mr. Murgatroyd’s declared allegiance to the philosophy of better-be-safe, they should be told.

Rick climbed back up to the cellar door, which had closed automatically behind him, and brought his knee up to tap the control panel.

The door didn’t open.

Rick cursed. He hung the loudly-squalling Steven over his shoulder, switched the feeding-bottle from his left hand to his right, and tapped the panel again with his fingers.

The door still failed to respond.

Rick turned to the screen beside the door and poked the keyboard beneath it. The screen remained dead, as he had expected. The men in the nursery had presumably switched off the circuitry for some arcane purpose of their own.

He turned around to look back at the waste-chute. The portal was still open, and the water level had now reached its rim. Water began to spill over. While Rick watched, the floating ultrawoolly was carried over the lip of the precipice, and fell soggily to the floor, where it sat lumpenly in a rapidly-spreading pool of discolored liquid.

“Pollution!” said Rick, with feeling. “Pollution, corrosion and copulating corruption!” The obscenities seemed oddly ineffective, given their incipient literality.

He knew that there was no point at all in shouting for help. The house was well-designed, and the walls and ceiling were far too efficient at damping out sounds.

He realized that he was trapped.

* * * *

Even though he knew there was no point, Rick yelled for help; there seemed no harm in trying. In the meantime, he struggled to think of something more likely to get results.

Steven responded to the unexpected competition with a moment’s startled silence, but then began to compete with a will, increasing his own efforts to be heard. Within seconds he began to hit that note. The din was too appalling to be tolerated, and Rick shut up.

Steven didn’t. Rick gritted his teeth and tried to shut out the sound, but the screams went deep into the core of his brain.

Rick went to the top of the cellar steps and kicked the door, very hard. Nothing happened, and he kicked it again, even harder. Then, holding Steven carefully at arm’s length, he rammed it with his shoulder.

The door absorbed the brutal mistreatment with dignified ease, swallowing the sound of the impacts. The blows had discharged a little of Rick’s frustration, but he wasn’t sufficiently masochistic to keep going until he did himself an injury.

“Shut up, you little bastard,” he said to Steven, with asperity. He had never before dared speak aloud to the baby in such hostile terms, but he felt that he might as well take what meager advantage he could of the fact that no one could hear him. He didn’t mean it, of course—not really.

He looked down at the floor, which was now covered by a thin scum of something horrible. The scum was slowly being elevated by the water on which it floated. He watched it for a minute or so, watching the meniscus climb the knobbly walls of the root-complex. He estimated that the level was now rising by about a centimeter per minute, and noted that the flow seemed to be increasing. His feet were less than a meter above the surface, and he knew that he wasn’t much more than a meter-and-a-half tall. His mental arithmetic could do the simple averaging well enough, but he didn’t know how to figure in the possible effects of the accelerating flow.

“Shut up!” he said to Steven, in a low but fierce tone. “This is serious. If we aren’t out of here soon.…”

At a centimeter a minute, he knew, they would have four hours. Four hours, looked at dispassionately, was a long time, but Rick already knew that it was the highest possible figure. The faster the rate of flow was increasing, the quicker that four hours would become three, and then two…and all the while, it was also being eroded by actual elapsed time. Rick looked about him at the cellar, whose narrow passages and dim lighting had always made him feel slightly claustrophobic. His mental arithmetic wasn’t up to calculating the actual cubic capacity of the room, but the looming root-processes and the thick central trunk of the house had never seemed more massive.

Steven also seemed utterly convinced that something was badly wrong. He was certainly yelling as if he believed that his life was in danger.

“Please shut up,” complained Rick, changing tactics. “For Gaia’s sake, let me think!”

After all, he told himself, he was bound to be missed. Chloe, Rosa, and Dieter might already have noticed that he was gone, and might have begun to get worried…except, of course, that they couldn’t know that the cellar was being flooded. They would undoubtedly discover as soon as they tried it that the door was stuck, and they would undoubtedly figure out that it was a side-effect of whatever Dr. Jauregy’s troubleshooting crew was doing, but they wouldn’t necessarily feel any sense of urgency about getting him out. In fact, they might be profoundly glad that they no longer had to listen to Steven’s crying, and in no hurry at all to expose themselves to it again. They might be sitting upstairs right now, joking about his bad luck and his parental incompetence.

It was, he decided, definitely time to get worried.

Rick sat down on the top step, biting his lip anxiously, and began to rock Steven in his arms. Steven continued to cry, but not quite so loudly. The crying seemed slightly less appalling now—indeed, it suddenly seemed to be entirely appropriate, given the situation. It was no longer so excruciating.

“Okay son,” said Rick, looking down into the baby’s screwed-up eyes and making every possible effort to be civil, “we’ve got to think about this logically. The odds are that we’ll be out of here long before that tide of filth is up to the soles of my sneakers, but just in case…just in case, mind you…we ought to figure out some way of attracting attention to our predicament. The three wise men might have got the house’s nerve-net into a terrible tangle, but they can’t have anaesthetized it entirely. We have to wake it up. It’s fighting sabotage with sabotage, but it’s the only way.” He was trying to sound calm, for his own sake rather than for Steven’s, but he couldn’t fool himself. He was scared—really scared.

For a moment he consoled himself with the inspiration that the house’s central supply-tank and reclamation unit couldn’t possibly contain enough water to fill the cellar completely, but no sooner had the elation of this thought buoyed him up than he noticed a distinct whiff of sterilizing fluid in the air.

“Oh pollution!” he said, as his heart skipped a beat. “It’s the water from the pool, too…we really are in trouble.”

Steven just went on bawling, but Rick took that as an indication of agreement. He stood up and descended to the third step, then turned around to lay the baby down on the top one. He wiped his fingers on his shirt, and looked around for something that he could use to hurt the house—not much, but just enough to make sure that the act would not go unnoticed.

Unfortunately, the tool cabinet that was set in the wall beside the staircase wouldn’t open, and all the tools that might have sufficed to pry it open were inside. His anxiety grew, and the nausea induced by the vilely mixed odors of the dirty water made it feel even worse.

“Corruption,” he said, unsteadily. It wasn’t so much the thought that he was going to have to use his bare hands to attack the root-processes as the thought that he was going to have to stand calf-deep in the rising tide of filthy water while he did it. He knew that he would have to snap one of the slimmer rootlets, and the thinnest ones were all close to ground-level.

He looked down at Steven, who was lying on his back like a stranded beetle, kicking his legs and screaming as if he were about to burst.

“All right,” he said. “I’m going.”

He stepped down into the murky water, feeling it ooze unpleasantly into his soft-soled shoes. Two squelching strides took him to what looked like a suitably fragile bundle of root-fibers, and he managed to get his forefinger around a single filament that was no thicker than Steven’s smallest digit.

He pulled at it. Then he heaved upwards with all his strength, bracing himself with his feet. He fully expected the rootlet to break, but his expectation was not based in experience—he had never before had any occasion to try the experiment. The root was far tougher than it looked, and more elastic. It stretched a little, but it didn’t snap.

Rick didn’t bother to swear. He simply forced a second finger around the rootlet, and gathered all his strength, making sure that he would exert the maximum leverage of which he was capable.

He heaved.

The pain in his fingers was indescribable, but he did not relax until he was convinced that it would take less force to tear them off than it would to snap the rootlet. He extracted the two digits with difficulty, and nursed them tenderly while he looked down, furiously, at the stubborn filament. While he watched, there was a sudden surge in the flow of turbid water, and a wave swamped the rootlet.

He realized that he was knee-deep, and that the flow was fast becoming a flood. Four hours had been a hopelessly optimistic estimate even at the time. Now, though he did not pause to measure and calculate, he figured that he had less than forty minutes.

We’re going to drown! he thought, wildly. We’re really going to drown!

Rick was fifty-three years old; nine-tenths of his life still lay before him. Steven was less than six months old…but in spite of the fact that he really did love the child, Rick could not help thinking that his own tragedy was the greater. Steven had hardly begun to be aware of the world, and had no sense whatsoever of the magnitude of his possible loss. To Steven, the present situation was no worse than being offered a bottle with an unfamiliar teat, but to Rick.…

Rick had never been in mortal danger before. He had never felt that he was in mortal danger before. The fact that he was in his own home, and that the only baby he was likely to be licensed to look after for at least two hundred years was with him, depending on him, made the feeling ten times worse than it could have been had he been somewhere out in the wild and still-slightly-dangerous world.

He looked around desperately, cursing the strength and economy of modern design and the careful tidiness of his co-parents. There was not a single object lying around loose, and everything built into the house’s systems was built to last, resistant to any and all attempts at vandalism. He couldn’t see anything that might be used as a lever or a club.

Steven howled and kicked on the top step. Again he struck that horrible, hellish note.

Don’t panic! Rick told himself, knowing that it was already too late; he was in no condition to take such advice.

It had to be something dead, Rick instructed himself, trying against the odds to be reasonable. The problem with the rootlet was that it was part of the living structure of the house, as was everything wooden—even the stairs. On the other hand, all the house’s inorganics were buried deep inside the living tissues, except.…

He struggled back to the foot of the stairway, and up it. His eyes were fixed on the mute and useless screen beside the door. His breathing was ragged and his heart was racing.

He didn’t know how strong the plastic screen might be, but he had seen people hurl objects through offending screens on half a hundred vid-shows, so he knew that it could be done, and that it produced shards with sharp edges.

He also knew that he had nothing to hit it with but his fist, and that those sharp edges were going to do nasty things to his knuckles, but he wasn’t about to wait around hoping that it wouldn’t be necessary.

Rick came back to the second step and braced himself again, laying his left palm flat against the unopenable door. He balled his fist up as tight as he could, ignoring the pain in his two damaged fingers, and psyched himself up for the punch, telling himself sternly that he must follow through, hitting with all his might.

Steven’s howling seemed to grow even louder as Rick focused his attention and let fly.

His fist rebounded.

The shock of the reaction sent a wave of pain through his hand into his wrist and all the way up his arm and he howled in agony. He cursed volubly, not bothering with the customary euphemisms. He felt that he was about to burst into tears, although he could not tell whether it was pain or terror that had brought him to that pitch of anguish.

As soon as the pain began to die down, though, he started thinking again, madly and furiously. He knew that his shoes were too soft, and that there was no way he could contort himself into such a position that he would be able to lash out at the screen with his bare heel. If he was to hit the screen again he would have to use either his fist—the left, this time—or his head.

Rick had no idea how hard his head was, or how much force he could get into a butt, but he knew that it would give him a terrible headache if the screen didn’t break. He cursed the wonderful resilience of modern materials, and the marvelous ingenuity of modern technics. He inspected the keyboard beneath the screen, wondering if there might be a weak spot anywhere there. He tried inserting his fingernails into all the cracks and crevices, but he was too well-manicured to have much effect. He thumped the keys a few times, not too heavily, just in case the keys might respond to the extra pressure, but nothing happened.

He conceded that he was going to have to hit the screen again. He tossed up, mentally, between head and hand. Hand won.

He moved right to the edge of the step, shoving Steven a little closer to the wall. Again he braced himself; again he psyched himself up. Then, perversely, he looked down at the rising tide of filth, which was now only one step down. He could see that if the screen didn’t break this time, he was going to have to pick Steven up and hold him, to keep him out of harm’s way.

He turned back towards the screen, and stared at it as though it were something utterly loathsome, which had to be destroyed. He felt that his entire nervous system was screaming—resonating with that dreadful note that only Steven could produce, and which only he in all the world could properly appreciate.

He launched his left fist at the screen, with every last vestige of his strength, howling aloud in fury.

The screen imploded, bursting into fifty or a hundred shards, some of which peppered his face before falling. Only a handful hit Steven, and none did him any damage.

Oddly enough—or so it seemed—the successful blow did not hurt Rick’s hand nearly as much as the unsuccessful one had, but the shards did indeed cut him in a dozen different places, and blood began to ooze out everywhere. The biggest, sharpest triangular shard was still stuck to the rim of the casing, but Rick pulled it out easily. Then he began poking at the machinery inside the screen. There were bare wires on display now, and circuit-boards—lots of complicated and vulnerable assemblies. He cut, slashed and scraped with gay abandon…but nothing happened. The machinery was quite dead and disconnected.

Rick was alarmed to find himself trembling. He bent down swiftly to pick Steven up, snatching him away from the turbid floodwater just before it reached the edge of the trailing shawl. Then he looked around desperately. All the thinner root-filaments were under the surface now, but there was still plenty of bare wood visible—wood that was scratchable and cuttable. But where was he to cut? Where was he to scratch?

He felt that he could no longer think, no longer plan.

Steven was still screaming, and his tiny hand grappled with Rick’s ear. The baby sounded truly desperate, as though he had somehow sensed that things were going from bad to worse, and his anxiety fed Rick’s, redoubling it yet again.

Rick held the triangular shard high in the air, with one point outwards, desperate to find some target to aim at. Carelessly, he leapt down into the foul-smelling fluid. His feet were on the floor but he was waist deep. He held Steven over one shoulder, and reached out to hack at the root-bundles near the steadily-climbing surface.

The jagged edge made a scratch, but did not cut deeply. Rick ran it back and forth as fast as he could, trying to make the cut deeper. Steven yelled in his ear, and the sound was so frightfully loud and urgent that it filled his head and brought forth tears of frustration in astonishing profusion.

He chopped and sawed and cursed for three full minutes before he suddenly realized that the surface of the flood had not swallowed up the spot he was attacking, and was no nearer to doing so than when he had started.

The flow had stopped, and the water-level had stabilized.

Rick was astonished by the wave of relief that flooded over him—a sudden realization that they might not be going to die. He did not realize how convinced he had been that he was doomed until the fear was suddenly swept away.

He threw the blunted plastic shard away, and took hold of Steven in both hands, pulling the baby around to cradle him against his chest.

“It’s all right, son!” he said, as his tears of frustration became tears of amazement. “We’re going to be all right!”

Steven’s wild yelling abated, as though the message had got through. By slow degrees, as Rick hugged the baby to him, rocking gently from side to side, silence fell. The water level did not begin to fall, but it did not begin to rise again either. There was stability; there was peace.

Steven was no longer crying and Rick was no longer weeping.

Rick stood where he was, not moving an inch, for several minutes more. Steven put his face into the hollow of Rick’s shoulder, and went to sleep, quite oblivious to the fact that the hand with that Rick was supporting his tiny bald head was still leaking blood from a dozen ragged cuts.

Then the door above them slid suddenly aside, and Rosa’s voice, utterly aghast, said: “Corruption and corrosion, Rick! What are you doing to that poor child!”

* * * *

Dr. Jauregy wasn’t licensed to practice medicine on humans but she cleaned up his cuts and bandaged his hand. She had sufficient sense and sensibility not to start telling him what a fool he’d been, and he was glad of that. He’d heard enough from Rosa, Dieter, and Chloe about what he ought to have known (that he wasn’t really in danger), ought to have thought (that the sensible thing to do was wait), and ought to have done (nothing).

At first he had been astounded by their attitude, deeply wounded by their accusative tones. It had taken him some little while to realize that they had not the least understanding of what he had been through. He had done his best to point out that hindsight gave them calculative advantages that he had sadly lacked, but they had refused to listen, and even seemed intent on blaming him for the fact that the cellar was flooded, simply because he had been down there when it happened.

Rick was still seething with frustration and annoyance. He found it quite appalling that no one seemed to have the least idea of what he had been through, but he now realized how absurd his appearance and his conduct must have seemed to anyone who had not shared his experience. He dared not try to explain how terrified he had been, because he knew that it would only make him seem ridiculous. It was bad enough to have panicked, when—a things had turned out—panic had been quite unnecessary, but trying to explain how and why he had panicked, and attempting to justify his panicking, could now only make things worse.

Now that hindsight had delivered its verdict—that he had not drowned, and therefore had never been in real danger of drowning—all that he had suffered had been for nothing.

It was all horribly unfair, but there was nothing he could say or do to defend himself.

Mr. Murgatroyd was the only one who thought of offering any kind of apology, and even that was far from satisfactory. “Altogether unforeseen,” he assured them, peering solemnly at Chloe, as though she and not Rick had been the one who had been hurt. “That’s the trouble with unprecedented situations, I’m afraid. New bugs, new symptoms. Sorry we couldn’t cope any better.”

“Do that mean you now know what it is?” asked Rick, sourly. “Or is it still a big mystery?”

Mr. Murgatroyd opened his mouth to reply, but paused because Officer Morusaki had just re-emerged from the cellar. “It’s okay,” said the IBI man. “The water level’s going down. The house can take care of it all—give it six hours and the pool will be full again. The wood will mop up all the pollutants and redirect them all back to the reclamation tank. The rootlets are fine—he didn’t do any real damage there. You’ll need a new screen, of course, and a new set of circuit-boards—by the time they’re installed, it will all be as good as new.”

Rick felt the pressure of disapproving stares, but was determined not to feel guilty. “What about the nursery?” he said to the man from the Ministry.

“We’ve identified the culprit,” said Murgatroyd, cheerfully. “As we said, there’s nothing to worry about—nothing at all. Within forty-eight hours, everything will be back to normal.”

“In the meantime,” Dr. Jauregy put in, “just as a precaution, don’t use the nursery systems—the main system is perfectly safe.”

Morusaki nodded in agreement, smiling as he did so. There was something extraordinarily infuriating about the way they all looked. It wasn’t just that they were carefully refusing to say exactly what it was they had found—each of them seemed to be possessed by a glow of private pleasure, which suggested that they were extremely pleased about their discovery. Rick glanced at Rosa, who was reluctantly holding the baby, and at Dieter; he could see that they were aware of it too.

“I think we’re entitled to an explanation,” he said, testily, to the doctor. “Don’t you?”

Dr. Jauregy looked at Officer Morusaki, who looked at Mr. Murgatroyd, who looked dubious.

“If we really were the target of some new Gaian terror-weapon,” said Rick, combatively, “I think we should be told—even if it wasn’t aimed specifically at us.”

“It’s nothing like that,” said Mr. Murgatroyd, swiftly. “I told you—my being called in was purely a matter of routine. It’s nothing like that at all—but we’re living in such interesting times, you see. The defense of the realm has become something of a nightmare, with so many viruses around, organic and inorganic. We have to be very careful. Plague wars aren’t like the old heavy metal wars, you know; nobody bothers to declare them, and the weapons are very difficult to spot.”

“But this isn’t a new plague war, is it?” said Rosa, flatly.

“No,” Mr. Murgatroyd confirmed, evidently quite glad about the fact. “It isn’t. It’s something very different. Not war, not terrorism…more like creation, really. The birth of a new kind of nature. Heaven only knows what the Gaians will make of it.”

“Are you sure…?” Morusaki began, but Murgatroyd silenced him with a gesture.

“It won’t hurt to explain,” he said, although he let loose a slight sigh, which signified that he would probably rather not have been asked to do so. “You see, there have already been a number of reports of newly-evolved dr-DNA viruses. Perhaps newly-devolved dr-DNA viruses would be a better way of putting it, because we think they emerge by the mutation of chromosomal fragments displaced from the nuclei of dr-cells. There have also been suggestions that one or two of our very own laevo-rotatory nuisance-organisms are taking aboard dextro-rotatory biochemical apparatus so as to become facultative hybrids. A whole new phase of evolution is starting up…our artificial biotechnologies are beginning to spawn their own mutational progeny. I think that’s very exciting, don’t you?”

“But the whole point of making artifacts from dr-DNA is that they’re immune to disease and decay,” objected Rosa, stubbornly. “If they’ve started giving birth to their own diseases, that’s terrible.”

“I said it had to have weapon potential,” said Dieter, in a tone of profound satisfaction. “What you’re saying is that our house—our house—has accidentally spawned a mutant virus that’s capable of messing up half the world’s property. That’s why you’re so smug, isn’t it? The next Plague War might not have begun today, but you think you’ve just got one step ahead in the arms race, don’t you?”

“Of course not,” said Mr. Murgatroyd. “What we’ve found is certainly a dr-virus, and it certainly seems to have arisen by spontaneous mutation, but it’s not the doomsday weapon. Seen from one point of view, it’s just the first of many minor nuisances that will soon be cropping up here, there, and everywhere. There’s so much dextro-rotatory structural material around nowadays that it was only a matter of time before new bugs evolved to feed on it. It’s been a wide-open ecological niche just begging to be colonized.”

“The Gaians aren’t going to like it,” said Rick, vindictively trying to puncture Mr. Murgatroyd’s good-humor. “It adds a whole new dimension of meaning to the idea of technology running wild.”

“On the contrary,” said Dr. Jauregy, who had now finished attending to his battle-scars. “They’ll probably see it as Mother Nature hitting back, defying us in our quest for perfect order. Your brand-new dr-virus might become a hero of the Counter-Revolution…or do I mean the Counter-Evolution.” She grinned at her joke, though it seemed feeble enough to Rick, and nobody else laughed.

“Hey,” said Dieter. “Is there anything in this for us? I mean, this is our house—we ought to have patent rights, or something!”

“I’m afraid not,” said Officer Morusaki, smoothly. “There can be no patent rights in a spontaneous product of mutation unless the mutagenic process is deliberately induced.”

“What about rights of discovery, then?” said Dieter. “We discovered it, didn’t we?”

I was the one who discovered it, thought Rick. There’s no “we” about it.

“You observed a sick rose,” said Mr. Murgatroyd. “You could hardly be said to have discovered the invisible worm that sickened it. That honor, I fear, belongs to Dr. Jauregy, Officer Morusaki, and myself. But if it makes you feel any better, there is no way in which any of us can profit personally from the discovery, because we are all here in our official capacities. Your house will share with our names the credit of a dozen footnotes in scientific journals and reference books, but none of us will make a penny.”

“Except for me,” Dr. Jauregy said, with polite regret. “I’m afraid I’ll still have to bill you for the consultation and the treatment—and for the replacement of the screen downstairs, if you want me to see to that too.”

Dieter’s resentful stare switched from Mr. Murgatroyd to Rick, who simply looked away, pointedly refusing any comment.

“You mustn’t be distressed,” said Murgatroyd, amiably. “It really is best to look at it my way. This is a significant moment in the history of life on earth—the beginning of a new evolutionary sequence—and it began in your nursery.

“It’s a kind of miracle, in a way: a happy gift of providence. Who knows what dextro-rotatory DNA might eventually produce, in the fullness of time, now that it has taken its first small step towards independence from the shaping hand of man? Let’s try to rise above mere matters of commerce, and fix our minds on that. Your nursery had a bad turn, and your cellar got flooded…but that wasn’t what really happened here today. What really happened is that something new revealed itself to the world…something really new, and alive.”

Rick was still mad at everyone, and his hands still hurt like hell, but he suddenly saw what Murgatroyd was getting at, and he saw that Murgatroyd was right. At the molecular level, something significant had happened…something far more important than a cut hand, or a fit of panic that might or might not have been too stupid for words.

A miracle. A happy gift of providence.

“Where is it now?” he asked, soberly. “If you’re going to cure the house, how are you going to preserve the virus?”

Mr. Murgatroyd opened his case, and took out a plastic bag—probably one of several that he had in there. The sealed bag contained a single rose plucked from the nursery wall. As yet, it didn’t look sick.

They all stared at it for a few seconds: all seven of them.

Then Mr. Murgatroyd put the rose back in his case, fastened it up, and headed for the door. It opened for him with what seemed to Rick to be craven servility. The doctor and the IBI man followed.

* * * *

When they had gone, Rosa came over to Rick, and dumped Steven into his lap.

“Well,” she said. “That’s that. I’ve got a counseling session in five minutes.”

“Oh corruption,” said Chloe. “I should have been hooked into that robominer twenty minutes ago.”

Dieter had already disappeared, as though by magic.

Rick didn’t feel too bad about being left alone. They had not even begun to understand what he had gone through, and that devalued the reassurance of their presence. Although he still felt in need of someone to listen, someone to sympathize, he knew that none of them could fulfill that role.

Steven opened his eyes, met Rick’s eyes momentarily, and began to wail.

Rick looked down at the child, and his heart sank. Forty-eight hours, he thought, remembering what the visitors had said. It would be forty-eight hours before the nursery nook was safe for normal use. Until then.…

He got up and went into the kitchen, to salvage the bottle and the teat. It was a bit twenty-first century, but he figured that with luck it ought to work, now that Steven was hungry enough.

It did. After spitting it out once, Steven compromised and started sucking. Silence fell.

Rick stroked the baby’s head with the hand that the doctor had dressed and sealed with syntho-flesh. It felt very odd.

“We really were in trouble down there, you know,” said Rick, levelly. “Not that anybody gives a damn one way or the other, now it’s all come out okay. I was trying to save our lives, because I had every reason to think they needed saving.”

Steven didn’t even spare him a glance, but that didn’t matter.

“You understand, don’t you?” Rick continued. “You were there, and you were yelling even louder than I was. You knew what we were going through. You know what I did, and why. It’s our secret, kid—just yours and mine. We understand.”

He had started saying it simply in order to have something to say, but as he spoke the words aloud he realized that they were true—or, at any rate, nearly true.

He had not been alone in the cellar; he had not panicked entirely on his own behalf. He had been scared for Steven too. He had been right to be scared for Steven, to panic for Steven, to go to the limit…for Steven. Whatever his co-parents thought of him, he’d done what he had to do, and he didn’t have to apologize to anyone.

Steven spat out the teat, and gathered himself for a whimper, which would inevitably turn to a whine, which would turn to a.…

Rick stood up, and took the baby and the bottle into the nursery, hoping that the sight of familiar surroundings would help to set Steven’s mind at rest. A dozen roses had been picked and taken away, but there were hundreds left; not one of them looked sick.

“Look,” Rick murmured into the baby’s ear. “Look at all the beautiful roses. Everything’s okay.”

He tried to push the teat back into the baby’s mouth, but Steven resisted. The baby was crying now—building up yet again towards that frightful note.

“At the end of the day,” Rick went on, stubbornly, “Murgatroyd was right, wasn’t he? We just have to stop thinking about it as a disaster, and start thinking about it as a beginning, don’t we? A miracle happened here today, and you and I were here to see it. We should be grateful for that. We are grateful for that, aren’t we?”

Again, he had said it just to have something to say, but again he realized that it was true. As Steven began to yell, and the pitch of his yelling cut through to the very heart of him, Rick suddenly realized that it would not and could not affect him the way it did unless there was some special bond between them, some indefinable but unique harmony. If one only looked at it sensibly it was not, after all, some malevolent worm gnawing at his soul, but an affirmation of the fact that they meant something to one another…that they had an understanding.

Rick pressed the makeshift teat into the baby’s mouth, gently but insistently fighting the baby’s refusal to make it welcome.

“Take your time, son,” said Rick, soothingly. “Take your time. There’s no hurry at all. We have all the time in the world, if we need it…all the time in the world.”

And he looked around, at all the beautiful roses—all the bright pink roses, which, with tender loving care and a little luck, would live for centuries.