The Ophiuchi Hotline

Lilo had not seen Tweed since the day of her awakening. She assumed he had been present at that so her responses would be as they had been before. He was teaching her a lesson, and co

From that day on he seemed to take no further interest in her. She tried to get in to see him, but was brushed off by aides. The Boss was always too busy.

It had been oddly comforting to see herself as very important to Tweed, someone he must have even at the risk of abducting her from the institute. She gradually had to change that picture. When she realized she was going through an established curriculum for clandestine agents—which implied there were others, perhaps hundreds of others, like her—she became depressed. Maybe she was no more important to Tweed than Mari, whose skills he could hire at any labor exchange in Luna.

The more she looked at it, the more it became apparent that she was being put through machinery that had been in place long before the need to abduct her ever arose. The Free Earthers' control of the institute was such that Mari could grow a full-term clone—a six-month undertaking—inside the walls with no fear of detection. In the light of that, Lilo began to wonder if her sprint across vacuum had been necessary. Had it been some sort of test? Free Earthers seemed to like tests; her training, if it had a purpose at all, consisted of an endless series of them, putting her up against environments she would never see, since they were all Earth environments.

It seemed certain that Tweed was not after Lilo personally, but people like her. Looking at it impartially, there were only three things she could see in herself that set her apart from anyone else. She was a scientist, but surely he could hire all the scientists he needed. She was a condemned criminal, but she could not even venture a guess as to why he might value that quality. So it had to be the nature of her researches, the work that had resulted in her arrest.

No one could have been more surprised than Lilo when she had found herself drifting gradually but persistently into proscribed areas. She had had time to reflect on that while in prison, and more time now, during her training, to review again the steps that had made her an Enemy of Humanity. That still amazed her.

Lilo had wanted to be a medico. As early as she could remember she had been good with her hands, and while she was growing up her most cherished toy was her junior surgery kit. She would operate on herself and her friends, always keeping abreast of the latest fashions in face and figure.

But her mother and her teachers knew she was cut out for better things and steered her into a skilled profession. She did not object; she was a reader—all her ancestors had been, all the way back to pre-Invasion times—and devoured any book that was left in her reach. Her teachers knew their business; eventually it seemed that she had always wanted to be a genetic engineer.

She was good at what she did. Her services were in demand with all the big companies, and she worked for several before going into business for herself. Her specialty was foodstuffs, an area that had been neglected for a long time but was then undergoing a new surge of interest.

While most of her colleagues concentrated on hydroponic fad foods—exotic blends of existing flavors that made a splash for a few months and then were forgotten—Lilo took a new look at staples. She refined rather than invented, and it paid off. The production companies knew that with a big advertising budget and promotion they could create a transitory demand for almost anything. In the long run, however, they made their money licensing gene patents for improved beef trees and egg plants.

Lilo concentrated on pork trees. She succeeded in improving the yield and sweetness of the pink i

Her work on pork trees had brought her to realize that there were many base organisms which had long been neglected because of inability to compete with the artificially created strains people now thought of as staple crops. There had been a time when wheat, soybeans, potatoes, corn, and rice had been the major foods of the human race. Now there was no one alive who had ever seen them.

But they existed in the Life Bank, as did virtually every plant and animal that had lived on Old Earth. It dawned on her that the food she had eaten all her life were all created plants, and that all of them were over four hundred years old. It seemed that the age of invention in plant genetics was behind her, that no totally new staple food had been invented since human civilization had established itself in the Eight Worlds. She did not bother wondering why that was; she set about to invent a new staple.

The result was the bananameat tree, and it was an instant and steady success. As its name indicated, she derived it from tropical fruit stock, but the flavor was not derivative of anything. It was something new, and the attempts to describe it as tasting "like chicken" or "like venison" always fell short.

Lilo did not advertise the fact, but the meat that came closest to the taste of bananameat was human flesh. Her first questionable act, done i

Bananameat made her rich. Not fabulously so, but with the time and resources to tempt her back to her first love: the human body.

She remembered the happy days spent tinkering with the external structure of her own body and the bodies of others. While she still saw it as a phase she had been going through—and by now was contemptuous of most cosmetic body changes—it continued to fascinate her.

She thought about the tremendous genetic accidents that had shaped her life, and that shaped the lives of all humans. She was a reader; there were many citizens who were not. The prevailing social explanation for illiteracy was that there were people who were temperamentally unsuited for reading—and indeed there were few callings in a computerized, video-saturated world that required literacy. Lilo accepted that, but had always had a feeling that most people never learned to read because they simply were not smart enough.

This did not make her feel superior. It was an accident, and it offended her. Her intelligence was not of her own doing, but had been predetermined when two gametes blundered into each other in a placentory.

As she chafed under the restraints of the genetic laws, she researched into their origins and was appalled to discover that the five-hundred-year ban on human experimentation had been intended only as a moratorium. It had made a lot of sense at the time, with the human race in a state of flux, facing an uncertain future. But how long is enough? The present scope of humanity represented all the changes that could be rung on a small gene pool of survivors of the Invasion. All the actual genetic diseases and defects had been weeded out early, before the ban on research. The human race was healthy enough, but was it going anywhere?

Her shock increased as she learned about the reproductive aspect of genetics. Lilo was not a geneticist or a breeder. In the same sense that the builder of a machine might know little of the metallurgy that had produced its parts. Lilo was only vaguely aware of the laws of inheritance. Her job was to take something that was already there and bend it to her will with the direct manipulation techniques learned from the Ophiuchi Hotline. Now she delved into the world of recessives and inbreeding. She began to wonder if the human race might be turning into idiots, with no baseline to indicate the change.