“No,” Jackson said. “My team will use the comfortable facilities, but I’m coming inside. To the labs.”
Thurmond’s face turned grave. “Jackson, that’s not advisable. Particularly with your sister so sick and susceptible to infection. She’s not Changed, is she? Cazie told me. Although the neuropharm isn’t transmissible in its current form, there’s no guarantee that a version might not mutate, or even be deliberately created, that is transmissible by direct contact.”
“I’m coming in,” Jackson said. “It’s in my contract.”
“Then I can’t stop you,” Rogers said, and from the lack of hesitation Jackson knew that this had been discussed before he even arrived. If he insists, legally we have to admit him, someone had decided: Castner or K-C counsel or even judicial-probability software. “But of course you’ll have to go through decontamination procedures, and quarantine before you can leave again. If you’ll both follow the holo, I’ll conduct you each to the appropriate corridor for—”
The holo froze.
At the same moment, Winterton’s comlink shrilled. “Code One call, Mr. Winterton. Repeat, Code One call…”
Winterton said, “Go ahead. By cable, please.” Only then did Jackson notice the thin, insulated wire running discreetly from the collar of Winterton’s coat to his left ear. His law firm’s Code One calls must come in heavily encrypted. But once the remote in his pocket had unscrambled them, the data was vulnerable to field interception. Unless it traveled to his brain not in any radiated form but by old-fashioned insulated cable. Sometimes, Jackson reflected coldly, the old-fashioned method was the best. Such as visually inspecting K-C’s experiments for himself.
Evan Winterton’s long aristocratic face suddenly trembled. The deepset eyes widened, then closed. Jackson understood that he was looking at an extreme emotional reaction. Thurmond Rogers’s frozen holo abruptly vanished.
“What is it?” Jackson said. “What’s happened?”
Winterton took a moment to answer. His voice sounded scraped. “Someone has blown up Sanctuary.”
“Sanctuary?”
“Nuclear. From the outside, missile trajectory originating in Africa. The President has declared a national alert.” Winterton stood up, took a pointless step forward, and began flicking rapidly through his remote, still listening to the ear implant. Jackson tried to take it in. Sanctuary gone. And La Solana as well. All the Sleepless, or pretty close to it… but only Theresa and Vicki and he knew that. The rest of the world thought Miranda Sharifi was safe at Selene Base.
“Who…?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Winterton said, and Jackson saw that to him, it didn’t. Cisneros, Linville, Winterton and Adkins must have many clients who dealt, directly or indirectly, with Sanctuary. Jennifer Sharifi’s tangle of corporations, lobbyists, investors, holding companies, and data-atoll activities would of course need a legion of lawyers, both Sleepless and, as blinds, Sleepers. Every financial institution in the world would react to the massacre at Sanctuary. The legal implications would take decades to unravel.
The Livers didn’t have decades. Not if the neuropharm spread.
“I’m sorry, Jackson, I have to leave,” Winterton said. “Urgent business at my firm.”
“I’ve retained you!” Jackson said. “You’re obligated to stay until we—”
“I’m sorry, but I am not,” Winterton said. “As yet we have nothing in writing. If it weren’t for the overriding need at my firm… but surely you see that this changes everything. Sanctuary is destroyed.”
Not even Evan Matthew Winterton, Jackson noted as the lawyer left, could keep the note of awe from his voice.
Jackson stared into the atrium pool, with its clouded white water. The silver fish darted and leaped ceaselessly. Their metabolism must be genetically accelerated, to keep up that activity level. He wondered what they ate.
Sanctuary is destroyed. This changes everything. And, in Vicki’s voice, It’s up to you, Jackson.
He didn’t want it to be up to him. He was one individual, not particularly effective in the world, and his professional training had only underscored his belief that no one individual made much difference. Science argued against it. Evolution was never interested in the individual, only in the survival of the species. Brain chemistry shaped the individual’s choice of actions, no matter how much that person might believe in free will. Even the great scientific discoveries, if they had not been made by the men and women who made them, would eventually have been discovered by somebody else. When the slow accretion of tiny bits of knowledge reached critical mass, then you got steamships, or relativity, or Y-energy. The individual wasn’t really important for radical change. Perhaps a Miranda Sharifi was the exception—but Miranda Sharifi had not been human. And there were no more like Miranda Sharifi left.
And Jackson didn’t want this. He wanted to live quietly with Theresa, and to be able to love Cazie again, and to practice medicine, conventional medicine, the kind he’d been trained for before these Sleepless started remaking the world. As it happened, he couldn’t have any of those things, but they were nonetheless what he wanted.
Or did he?
If he had wanted to practice conventional medicine, he could have joined Doctors for Human Aid, left his comfortable enclave, and practiced among the Liver children dying for want of medical care. If he had really wanted Cazie back, he wouldn’t have opposed her on TenTech’s role in adapting the neuropharm delivery targets. If he had wanted to live quietly with Theresa, why wasn’t he there now, doing that, in their apartment overlooking the carefully guarded Eden of Central Park?
Welcome to personal evolution.
He stood. The silver fish continued to cavort frantically in their white pool. Probably their genemod metabolism didn’t permit them to stop.
“Building,” Jackson said, “tell security I’m ready to begin decontamination for the sealed biohazard labs.”
A remote holo of Cazie appeared at his elbow. Jackson had just emerged from Decon, dressed in a disposable suit of Kelvin-Castner green. The suit wasn’t in any way protective. Maybe K-C wasn’t concerned about what might infect him as much as they were about what he might have carried in with him. Or maybe he would have to go through yet more Decon before he inspected the biohazard labs supposedly re-creating the inhibition neuropharm. If there were any such labs.
Cazie’s holo—projected from inside Kelvin-Castner, or outside?—said, “Hello, Jackson. Despite everything, it’s good to see you again in actual flesh.”
Her manner was perfect. Not seductive—she must sense he’d moved beyond that susceptibility. Not cold, not accusing, not ingratiating, not falsely friendly. Cazie spoke gravely, quietly, with just a shade of regret that things could not be different, a shade of respect for Jackson’s right to do what he was doing. Perfect.
“Hello, Cazie.” Astonishingly, he felt for her a sudden stab of pity. Because he felt nothing else. “Shall we get started?”
“Yes. There’s a lot to show you, and someone will be here soon to do that. But while you were in Decon, a complication arrived.”
“ ‘Arrived’?”
“Your friend Victoria Turner. With that Liver girl, the mother of the juvenile tissue samples. Ms. Turner is demanding to be admitted wherever you are. Demanding it somewhat vociferously, I might add.”