We unpacked, laughing, pitched up on the beach of the New World. We put on coats and fell into the bracing air. Snow was falling thickly. A carpet gathered around the cabin clearing and up the stony hillside. The thought passed through us: head back now, while still possible. But all we spoke out loud was, "Let's try this way."
There were so many stars that the sky seemed black gaps pasted over a silver source. The same lights as hung over the city, invisible. Todd looked up and quoted, " 'The stars get their brightness from the surrounding dark.' Dante, but who's keeping track?"
We walked in silence, in one another's footholes in the drifts. I felt, in the constriction in my chest, the intractable riddle facing the first species saddled with language: why are some things alive and others not? Snow, rock, star, lichen, rabbit scat, pine. It was the easiest, most blanketing protection in the world to imagine that everything partook of the same animation.
"Let's have it," Todd wheedled Ressler after we'd walked half a mile in chill awe. "You're the life scientist. Tell us what's happening here."
"I was never a life scientist, to my misfortune." His breath came out in white, frozen puffs against the snowy air. All our patient field work was about to come to fruition. "I was always, at best, a theorist. But before I was a theorist, I was a child. And every child knows… shh! Look. There. Just past that birch."
Ressler didn't even need to point. Against the black of the woods, a pair of eyes, reflecting dim analogy of starlight, observed us from a distance, measuring our every move, theorizing. We froze, matching it, watching for watching, not even whispering a guess as to what it was.
alive(X) if grows(X) and reproduces(X,Y) and member(Y,class(X)) and not (equals(Y,X)) and
A long, deliberate draw of observation, and the eyes blinked off. The creature vanished, freeing us to turn and retrace our path through the drifted snow. I knew it now: the world, even in the pitch of winter, metabolizing all around us. Every ledge of it, trampled by a permutation on the first principle, each straining for a crack at the Krebs cycle, a slice of the solar grant money. "Hubert's Infinite Hotel," Ressler described it. "Perpetually booked up, but always ready for more occupants, even an infinity of them." The place was penny-wedged, crammed, charged with doppelgängers, protean variants on the originaclass="underline" radial, ruddy, furred, barked, scaled, segmented, flecked, flat, lipped, stippled. Who knows how? The place was beyond counting, outside the sum of the inventory. And we, as of this weekend, were but a particular part.
As day broke, we returned to the cabin, spread ourselves in the existing beds, and slept. I had joined the night shift. I woke to soft talking in the room downstairs. Dr. Ressler was tutoring Todd, laying out the rudiments of the new, biological alchemy. It was afternoon, already dark. On the windowpane, thick flakes had been collecting for hours. I put my hand to the cold glass, leaving a negative ghost when I drew away. I hoped for the worst the elements could do, hoped harder than I've hoped since I was a girl.
I came downstairs. The men had a semblance of warm meal waiting. Flush with eating and drinking, we piled close together on the couch, in front of a fine fire. I thought: This could last forever, long evenings, passing around murder mysteries, losing weeks without glancing at the papers. A place where progress was obscene, unwanted. Todd could putter perpetually at his dissertation, I over some project in Maritime wool, Ressler fiddling with the smoky spruce logs.
Franker roused us to attack the bellows organ. He took the right pedal, Ressler the left. They each took a line in the upper staff, and I, on account of six years of piano lessons as a child, was expected to handle both tenor and bass while simultaneously pulling stops. Conquering the skittish entrances and squashing some unscored tritones, we flew along well. We pumped out Lobe den Herren and Nun danket alle Gott. After a while, we even grew bold enough to let the inner lines out and improvise on the cantus firmus, Todd laying on a counterpoint from "Mood Indigo." But human, we grew tired of hymns. Todd was the first to break off, pace back to the fire. Warming himself, with his back to Ressler, he asked, "How about it, then? Let's hear it for those man-made bacteria."
Ressler sighed with exasperated pleasure. "Ice-minus Pseudomonas." He returned to the couch, wrapping himself in a discarded quilt. "Not man-made. Man-manipulated. The process is neither so formidable nor so erotic as you think."
I wandered to the dining room. "Who's up for a little jigsaw?" Neither man responded. "How 'bout a big jigsaw?" Flat. "Think your friend would mind if I worked on this thing?"
"Of course not," Todd smirked. "Just so long as you take out any pieces you put in before we leave." I pottered away at Mr. Cuyp's cows, an ear posted to the conversation I avoided.
"How erotic is it?" Todd took the rocker opposite Ressler.
"The lab technician identifies, by a lot of boring scutwork, that particular restriction enzyme with the ability to clip out from the bacterial DNA the sequence that directs the synthesis of a given protein. In the case of Pseudomonas, the deleted protein acts as a seed for ice-crystal formation. No gene, no protein. No protein, no crystal seed. No seed, no ice at that temperature. We aren't bestowing any new characteristics on the microbe; we're depriving it of one."
"Like clipping a Scotty's tail?"
"Only this snip is inherited."
"And this sort of deletion — can it happen in nature?"
"It is nature. Only infinitely quicker."
"So where's the danger?"
Ressler shrugged. "Where's the danger in a mongoose?"
"But a mongoose is a separate species. Ice-minus bacteria are just a protein away."
"And you are just proteins away from either." It thrilled to hear the man, the edge of alertness in his voice, discernible only in outline until then. "Yes, the Frankenstein fear is overblown. Transgenesis is not about creating life from scratch. It's about juggling existing genes — existing formulas for protein manufacture. Deleting, adding, moving the factory parts from one organism to the other. You're right: the whole genetic engineering revolution is only a quantitative extension of the ancient art of livestock breeding. Even interspecies gene transfer has a viral precedent. Only human snipping is a billion times faster, more facile."
"Moving around existing traits? That's all we're talking?"
Ressler smiled. "All," he said ironically. "For the time being."
Todd was high-strung. He spoke rapidly. "That just proves my point, then."
"No." Ressler shook his head painfully. "That proves my point. Genetic engineering is not one single thing, but an assortment of various techniques and projects, all with different risks. By far the largest is ecological imbalance. Unpredictable, irreversible environmental mayhem that used to take selective breeders a lifetime to produce can now be knocked off in a dozen weeks."
"Mayhem?" Todd sounded personally wounded. "Are we that stupid? I'd think that any science capable of reaching down into the cell with a syringe a few molecules thick, of doping out the genetic commands and figuring out just where to cut and paste, should be able to predict the effect a simple rearrangement will have once it's in place. The hard part's doing it. Figuring out what you've done ought to be trivial."
"One would think so. But remember our simulation, back at the office. We wrote the piece. We knew what every line of the code did. We knew what effect a change to a given parameter would have locally. But the only way of determining the overall outcome was to run the code." He learned forward under his quilt. "It surprised us. And that program was only a hundred instructions long. The human genome, in twelve-point Roman, is several thousand printed pages. The linked biosphere___"