Marion sank slowly into the chair. Her eyes burned holes into Wes’s receding back, then turned on me. “You’re a couple of creeps.”
My face remained innocent and blank. The waitress set a perfect brimming amber cone of Manhattan before me. I lifted it in Marion’s direction and savored a spine-shivering sip. She looked into her own drink, then picked the umbrella out and twirled it. “You still have a copy of the diary, don’t you?”
I was impressed with her ability to shift gears. “I know what’s in it,” I allowed, “and I’m willing to share. But first, I want to know why you ganged up with Fay against Jenny and me.”
Marion gave a naughty-girl tilt of the head. A strand of hair fell across her face. “Don’t take it personally. It was just something I needed to do. George Harros was in a position to shed light.”
I held her eyes. They’d gone opaque again, reflecting neither hostility nor sympathy. She was all about her own agenda. “I’m glad to hear you use the past tense. As you know, there’s a lot more to it than Harros thinks. You know that Dugan is in deep, and he’s got Harros snookered.”
“I had to keep Dugan off my own ass, Bill.”
“Maybe so, but you’ve used us as decoys long enough. Jenny’s about to have a nervous breakdown.” This did bring a flicker of concern. “Let’s just talk. We’re both trying to figure out what killed Sheila, right?”
Marion tilted her head in a qualified yes.
“I count five ways Sheila could have died,” I went on.
“Only five?”
“Feel free to add to the list. One, Jenny had the shellfish antigen in her kitchen. Unless she’s totally mistaken, this isn’t it. Two, Sheila ingested the antigen on her own before or after Jenny’s. This is highly unlikely. She was very careful. Three, someone brought the antigen to the meal in a deliberate attempt to poison her. Four, someone injected the antigen or forced it on her outside of Jenny’s apartment, before or after dinner. She had puncture marks in her arm. And five, the cause of death is something other than the antigen. Factor X. Probably from the lab at LifeScience.”
Amusement played on Marion’s lips. “You’re so charmingly naive about causation. You think we can pin it on one little smoking-gun protein.”
“So you’re saying it’s number five. Factor X.”
“No. Bill, I don’t know what killed her. Honestly, I don’t. I’m trying to make you see that there could be a multiplicity of factors. Cellular interactions so complex we’ll never disentangle them.”
“Don’t pull the scientist stuff on me, Marion. If I need to learn something new, I will.”
“I didn’t mean it that way. I’m saying we really may never unravel it. It’s the nature of the new world we’re creating. We’re rearranging the alphabet of life.”
“Well, isn’t biotech just a more precise way to do what farmers have been doing for millennia? Animal breeding, grain hybrids. They’re pretty much the cornerstone of civilization, right?”
“Sure. But we’re transferring genes between kingdoms now, not just species. For each little step we take, there’s a logical purpose. Put them together, though, and they add up to something bigger than any of us can grasp. People only latch on to the immediate dangers. The Institute of Science and Technology is funding research into mass-produced, high-throughput, high-value cloned chickens for the poultry industry. Animal welfare people worry that the chickens will suffer. Sure, that’s an issue, but it’s miles from the real point. The leap we’re taking is epochal. It’s metaphysical.”
“Metaphysical?”
“On the scale of Prometheus stealing fire from Olympus. In the old days, doctors were like mechanics repairing a vehicle. Now we’re becoming more like co-creators of the vehicle. Look at the other realms we’ve conquered. Once upon a time, the heavens belonged only to birds and gods. Now we zoom through them drinking cocktails. Then, when we divided the atom, which was thought to be the irreducible unit of the universe, we gave ourselves the button to apocalypse. Over and over, we usurp the powers of nature, or the gods, or whatever name you want to use. The question, of course, is whether we have the wisdom of the gods.”
“From what I remember of Greek mythology, the gods had more power than wisdom.”
“You two have got to need another drink,” the waitress said from over my right shoulder. The lines around her eyes said she knew more about the whims of the gods than the two of us put together.
“Rum and bitters,” Marion said. “Over, with a twist.”
I tapped my glass for another Manhattan. “How’d you get into biotech anyway, Marion?”
“I started in botany, way back when. Silly thing, I loved flowers, their role in evolution. ‘The weight of a petal has changed the face of the world.’ But I slowly found out that if you really wanted to know why a plant survived a drought or resisted a pest, you had to go into the lab.”
“So you switched to molecular biology.”
“I’d thought mo bio was all about yeast colonies and fruit flies. When I saw what it could tell me about petals, I was hooked. Fifty years ago, most people thought proteins were what we now call genes. Now we can manipulate them to assemble our own bestiary.”
“Didn’t someone plug a firefly gene into a rabbit, so that the rabbit glowed in the dark?”
“Mere epiphenomena. We can go much deeper now. We can engineer male fruit flies to spend their whole day doing mating dances with each other in a big conga line. If you alter a gene called disheveled, a normally neat mouse turns into a slob. Humans share 80 percent of our genome with fruit flies, 90 percent with mice, and 98 percent with chimps. That means we’ll be able to engineer human behavior, too. Stephen Hawking and others say we have no choice, or we’ll be left behind by our machines.”
The cocktails arrived. We touched glasses. I took a long sip and said, “We’ve got the power to engineer ourselves into obsolescence.”
Marion swallowed some rum. “Accelerated evolution into cyborgs or transgenic superhumans,” she said. “The ones left behind will be curiosities. Like Ishi, the last Yahi Indian.”
“But people later realized he had a lot of knowledge we’ve lost. I wonder if the preterite humans will be valued and consulted for their appreciation of, say, a Tarkovsky film.”
“If they’re lucky. They may have no survival value. The direction we’re going, survival will be measured by efficiency and shareholder value. We’ll still have entertainment, but it will come in the form of adrenaline jolts. Religion will be packaged as pharmacologically managed inner peace.”
“They’re both guaranteed box office. But I’m not so sure it’s going to happen, Marion. I mean, look around.” A silver-haired man in a crimson cravat was playing liar’s dice with the bartender. Two women with their white hair done up in cochlear curls were chatting over martinis. “The dot-commers used to flock to this place. Now it’s retro’d back to the days before retro. You never know when the future’s going to go bust.”
“Markets may rise and fall, but the underlying technology takes root. The Internet certainly has. The groundwork is being laid in bioengineering right now. Real estate in the genome is being staked out the same way it was on the Web.”
I let some more of the Manhattan warm my throat. “Okay, so biotech is where it’s happening, and you want to influence its direction. What exactly do you do at LifeScience?”
“I’m in the agri department. Bioremediation. Engineering crops that help the environment instead of depleting it. For example, a guy in Davis has a tomato that can grow in salty soils and alleviate soil salinity at the same time. That’s potentially revolutionary.”
“What about MC124?”