As she watched pensively, he shook his head irritably, gave an umpf and snapped off the screen.
“Done?”
“Yes, with nothing to show for it.” He drummed fingers on the desktop.
“What were you looking for?”
“Some contaminant I thought I saw. It was… no, nothing. Forget it.”
“You’re worried about something.”
He leaned back, let his face relax. “No… well, no more than usual.”
“We’re going to be. on First Watch together,” she ventured. “Plenty of time to work on our own research then.”
He nodded. “I’m looking forward to it. Sixteen months of peace and quiet carving ice and tending corpsicles.”
“Another few weeks, we’ll start slotting people.”
He nodded, distracted. Then he said abruptly, “I’m a poor host. Something from the bar?”
“You have alcohol ration left?”
“In this lab? I can make anything I want. I have my own beer, if you’d care to risk it.”
“Of course.” She felt a need to break through, to reach him. His face was complex, a slate time had written all over, the mouth and eyes at battle with each other. His eyes seemed to peer at something far away—a problem coming slowly into focus, perhaps—unrelenting intellect. His lips betrayed this concentration, though. They twisted into an ironic curve, yet were full and sensuous, with a hint of passion and power. The cool mind that ruled the eyes did not know of this lower, submerged force. The contradiction warred across his face, complex with stubble, pale here and mottled there, a shiny brow with a curve that caught a reflected yellow beam from the New England sunset. He popped caps from two long-necked brown bottles with relish, suddenly seeming like a balding and wiry tradesman.
Virginia bit her lip as they both sat. Now that she had braved the first moments and taken the step she had considered a hundred times, she found she couldn’t take her eyes off him.
“You’re here because of our conversation the other day, aren’t you?” he said. Suddenly his expression was gentler, opening outward from his self-immersion. His eyes met hers.
“Ah, well, yes.” She might as well attribute it to that.
“What was it your mother had?”
“I… Lupus.”
“Ah yes.” A brief pain flickered in his eyes. He leaned back in his webchair, put hands behind his neck, stretched in the light gravity of the wheel. “I remember those years. That one, we got a clean solution. No side effects—as you so clearly demonstrate. Um. You ever see a really bad case?”
“No. I read—”
“Not the same thing. Under the ’scope the cells aren’t tight little cylinders, y’know—they’re misshapen, meshugenuh, tortured things. The patient’s connective tissue clogs. Swollen joints. Repeated infections. Liver damage, early death. There’d been good detectors to warn parents if a baby had it, sure, but nobody cracked the real problem—the genetic fix-up—until we did. Sorry—until Simon Percell did.”
“You can take a lot of credit.”
He laughed. “My career in the last couple of decades, my dear, has depended on my not taking credit.”
“With us Percells… it’s different.”
He smiled wearily. And warily? she wondered. “You are, Virginia, an expression of how different a map is from the territory.”
She frowned.
“Sorry, I’m being opaque. Habit of mine. We charted all the DNA nucleotides long ago. Knew where everything was—a great map. Only we didn’t know what it meant.”
“My genes don’t carry the lupus—you knew how to do that. And the usual Percell enhancements are effective.”
“Obviously.” A grin.
She felt herself blushing at the compliment, rummaged for something to say. “We have all kinds of advantages…”
“True…” He was still pensive, reflecting on times she could not know. Yet, those days would not die, as long as there were Percells. And that legacy lived in every corridor of this expedition.
He sighed “But not true enough. Sure, we got the hemoglobin disorders, Huntington’s disease, all the easy targets. Just lop off a few molecules. Trimming. Pruning. Change the cryptogram and—presto.”
“I read that there are over two million people who owe you that.”
“Been dipping into the forbidden Percell underground newspapers?” he said with mock seriousness. “Yes, that’s right—you’re from Hawaii. Plenty of pro-Percell sentiment there still, eh? Who passed on your security clearance?”
“I’m so good, they had to let me come,” she said with a proud smirk.
“Bravo!” He applauded. “Bravo, indeed. And you are good—I looked in your file, back when Captain Cruz had me on the recruiting committee.”
“Really?” She was suddenly serious. “What… what’s in there? Did they—”
He waved a hand. “Nothing about your subversive ideas. Not a jot.”
Her eyes widened, her mouth formed a shocked O—and then she saw he was kidding. “Ah… oh.”
“They don’t care if you think Percells are just as good as—what’s the slang? yes—as good as Orthos are, you know.” His voice dropped. “Since they’re all so damned sure you’re not.”
She saw suddenly that she had been right—his pose before others was a mask. “They… do think that, don’t they?”
“I’m afraid so. Many of them, anyway.”
“Even though they let some of us go on this expedition.”
“Let…” he began, then shook his head. “They had their reasons.”
“But…
“Virginia, has it never occurred to you that getting bright, hardworking, potentially troublemaking Percells out of their hair might be a very attractive idea?”
“Of course.” She frowned.
“And isn’t some side of you glad to be rid of all that krenk… that Earthside bullshit?”
She had to admit he was right. When the Edmund had lifted free of Earth orbit, she had felt…released. “Well…ins some ways.”
“Such as?” He sat forward, apparently genuinely interested. The slanting burnt orange of the Massachusetts sunset struck his bald patch, yet he did not seem old, only wise and kind and quietly powerful.
“Well… my father, he thought I was special. That our family was unique, a kind of historic experiment.”
“Ah. A common mode.”
“I… I hated it.”
“Feeling special?”
“Being… different.”
“You’re not, really.”
“Tell them.”
“Your parents should’ve shielded you from that.”
“They… Listen. When I was eleven, I was the only girl in my class without nylons. So I went to the local Woolworth’s and bought a pair. I had no idea how to hold them up—I got the old kind, by mistake.”
“Your mother…”
“She died when I was ten.”
“Lupus.”
She nodded.
“So you were a tomboy. Surfing, basking in Hawaiian splendor.”
“Yes. It was beautiful, but… Well, my father raised me. I remember one day when I was playing catch in a T-shirt with the boys, I heard some giggles over my bouncing breasts. This was on Maui, where nobody’s especially reluctant to talk about such things. So I went back to Woolworth’s. The saleslady had to explain about bras—I didn’t even know what the sizes meant! Then, in seventh grade, I started wearing skirts instead of jeans, because the other girls were. A boy looked at my hairy legs and said, ‘I’m gonna get you a razor for Christmas:’ I could have died! The next day, I borrowed my father’s razor and cut my left shin so badly I still have the scar.”