“I don’t know. Got a call from Bibi, who heard it from Aunt Sammy, who found him. When I went round, I walked into a cop convention. They figured out soon enough it wasna me what did it.” You ken where this is going. “Don’t worry, I didn’t breathe your name. I had to cough to working on the side for Tariq, but I figure what he gave me isn’t majorly incriminating, and anyway, it’s a murder investigation. They won’t be blabbing to Mr. Webber.”
The Gnome turns an even whiter shade of fish-belly pink than is his wont. “I’ll thank you for doing that much.” He raises his glass and drinks deeply. “Do you know how Tariq died?”
“No.” The ignorance burns your throat. “They wouldn’t tell me anything, except that—except—” You can’t bring yourself to finish it.
He leans forward. “Tell me about Colonel Datka’s man.”
Adam is treating the shrapnel of your life like some kind of puzzle game, you realize, just like Inspector Butthurt. The momentary flash and sizzle of resentment nearly throws what’s left of your beer in his face. But what stills your hand is knowing that he’s trying to help, in his slightly askew borderline aspie way. Help: You need it. So you tell him.
“He scared the shit out of me—even though he was polite. Eyes like a detective, you know? Only with a drum of unset concrete instead of handcuffs if you fucked him off.”
“I do believe fear reveals your hitherto-unplumbed poetic depths.” The Gnome is scrutinizing you like he’s got you under a microscope. “What did he want?”
“A padded envelope from the office safe. And a bag of bread mix.” You shiver. “He opened the envelope—there was a baggie in it, with a passport. Other papers. And he gave me a suitcase to take home. It’s got a combination lock. Said he may need to stay with me for a couple of days from tomorrow.” You shudder again. Those eyes.
“Well, you’re in it now,” the Gnome observes calmly.
“In what?”
“That remains to be seen.” He leans forward. “But I’ve got a fair idea it means the end game is in train. Listen, can you lay your hands on five grand? Put it on credit if you have to, but you won’t be able to pay it back for a month.”
“What has that got—”
“It’s time to cash out.”
“Eh?” You think fast. There’s the two grand you staked Uncle Hassan a couple of years ago, back before everything caught up with you—he’s probably good for at least one. Maybe more. You’ve still got your credit card, but in these deflationary times, you can only draw five hundred in cash against it. You could pawn some of Bibi’s jewellery to cover the rest, but she’s bound to notice, and she’ll want to know what you’re doing with the money. And hurrying right behind the hamster wheel spin of your financial calculations is your native suspicion of anyone asking you to cough up cash on the barrel for something too good to be true. “Why now, Adam? What’s the sudden hurry?”
“The sudden hurry, dear boy, is that your employers didn’t go out looking to hire honorary consuls at not-inconsiderable cost on a whim; they obviously had a purpose in mind, and with a purpose goes a plan, and with a plan goes a time-table. I’ve been waiting for a sign that they were getting ready to go to the end game, and the arrival of your colonel’s man means things are about to get too hot for you to stay in the bathtub—you’ll be wanting out while the water’s still clean enough that the Polis aren’t taking an interest. So it’s time to cash out.”
“And how precisely am I going to do that?”
Adam bares his teeth at you. “You’re going to do as I tell you and short a particular national bank’s bonds. Trust me, you’ll make a killing…”
There is no solace to be had in getting stinking drunk with the Gnome. So you take your less usual route home, up the hill and through the graveyard in search of a casual shag.
There is a younger man up there, short-haired and heavily accented: a small-town incomer, escaping from the usual, but with his feet under him enough to know the places to haunt. You make brief small-talk before he leads you round the back of an overgrown crypt, then it’s hard up against the lichen-encrusted stone, tongues grappling hungrily and his hand down your trousers, squeezing your cock. He tastes of stale roll-ups and sweat, and when you go down on him, he washes away the memory of the day’s horror with furtive joy.
After he sucks you off in turn, you stumble away in disarray, drained and feeling curiously vacant. You’re late, and you feel like a complete fraud. Some family man you are, with the touch of another’s lips on your bell-end. But at least Bibi isn’t there to stare at you in silent irritation or chide you for drinking again.
When you get home, it’s quiet and empty. Your wife is off auntsitting and has taken the kids to run errands or something. There’s an uneaten portion of rice sitting in her fancy rice-cooker, and she’s left some daal in the karai, to go cold for you in silent reproach. You fumble through the kitchen drawers until you find what you’re looking for—a pair of plastic chopsticks (Bibi likes a Cantonese take-away once in a while)—then climb the stairs with heavy tread, pull down the attic hatch, and ascend, wondering what you’re going to find.
Adam’s slid a dagger of curiosity between the slats of your misery and paranoia. Investment opportunities aside, it’s time to find out what the little fuck’s playing with.
Your den is suffocatingly over-warm from the summer evening sun, and you feel ill at ease, as if your personal space is under siege. The stranger’s suitcase squats in the corner like an enemy garrison, a forbidding reminder of ill-advised treaties. Tariq’s old pad sprawls out from behind the fridge. You stretch the metaphor until you see the fallen tombstone of a forgotten soldier and shiver despite the heat. The brewing bucket lies where you left it, under the beam of early-evening sunlight sluicing through the Velux: There’s a yeasty smell in the air like rising bread dough, and the wee airlock thingy sticking up from the lid burps an alien curse as you stare at it.
It’s a fab of sorts, the Gnome told you. A new kind of fab, or a really old one, depending on your perspective. Transmutation, liquid bread, water of life, al-kuhl. Not like the desktop fabs Tariq and his mates are using to run off air-guns and sex toys these days.
This is about using yeast cells as a platform for synthetic biology. As the Gnome explained it to you at great length—there will be an exam later, Anwar—in normal cells there’s DNA, which is transcribed into RNA, which in turn is used as a punched-card template by protein-manufacturing machines called ribosomes. Each three words of DNA data—codons—correspond to a single amino acid out of a palette of twenty-one; the ribosomes read the codons, grab amino acids bound to carrier molecules out of the soupy intracellular medium, and glue them together to form new proteins or enzymes.
But in these cells there’s a whole new biology. It uses four codons to represent a much wider range of amino acids, many of which are entirely artificial. Some of them code for the protein components of the molecular assembly line that replaces the boring Nature 1.0 ribosomes in the mechanosystem; others code for enzymes that synthesize the exotic new amino acids the synthetic biochemistry runs on. There’s bootstrap code written for old-style ribosomes to get the new system up and running: That’s what the health-food supplement switched on. Once it’s running, the yeast cells are redundant, just a convenient platform for servicing the nanosystem.
Not that this is about shiny Star Trek nanites. Oh no, we’re not that advanced. Nanotechnology is the shiny new magic dessert topping /floor wax/pixie dust of tomorrow, and always will be. This stuff is just synthetic biochemistry, with some funky new tools for handling buckytubes and exotic amino acids. Nothing strange about it at all, except that it’s bubbling away in the bucket in the corner of your den and it smells like money, which is always enough to secure your exclusive attention.