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"Weeble is fine. He's some pig."
The visitors began their climb. Halfway up the tank's curving wall, Kemp Kingseed's familiar, Shelob, scuttled from her lair in the black pipe of a giant smokestack. She was a spider as big as a walrus. The ghastly arachnid reeked of vinegar.
"It's those big corny spider-legs," said Malvern, hiding his visceral fear in a thin shroud of scientific objectivity. "You'd think old Kingseed had never heard of the cube-square law!"
"Huh?" grunted Fearon, clinging to a sticky cable.
"Look, the proportions go all wrong if you blow them up a thousand times life-size. For one thing, insects breathe through spiracles! Insects don't have lungs. An insect as big as a walrus couldn't even breathe!"
"Arachnids aren't insects, Malvern."
"It's just a big robot with some cheap spider chitin grown on it. That's the only explanation that makes rational sense."
The unspeakable monster retreated to her lair, and the climbers moved thankfully on.
Kemp Kingseed's lab was a giant hornet's nest. The big papery office had been grown inside a giant empty fuel tank. Kingseed had always resented the skyrocketing publication costs in academic research. So he had cut to the chase, and built his entire laboratory out of mulched back issues of Cell and Nature Genomics.
Kingseed had enormous lamp-goggle eyeglasses, tufts of snowy hair on his skull, and impressive white bristles in his withered ears. The ancient Internet mogul still wore his time-honored Versace labcoat, over baggy green ripstop pants and rotting Chuck Taylor hightops.
"Africa," he told them, after examining their swiped goodies.
"'Africa?'"
"I never thought I'd see those sequences again." Kingseed removed his swimmy lenses to dab at his moist red eyes with a swatch of lab paper. "Those were our heroic days. The world's most advanced technicians, fighting for the planet's environmental survival! Of course we completely failed, and the planet's ecosystem totally collapsed. But at least we didn't suck up to politicians."
Kingseed looked at them sharply. "Lousy, fake-rebel pimps like that Ribo Zombie, turned into big phony pop stars. Why, in my generation, we were the real, authentic transgressive-dissident pop stars! Napster … Freenet … GNU/Linux … Man, that was the stuff!"
Kingseed beat vaguely at the air with his wrinkled fist. "Well, when the Greenhouse started really cooking us, we had to invent the Immunosance. We had no choice at that point, because it was the only way to survive. But every hideous thing we did to save the planet was totally UN-approved! Big swarms of rich-guy NGOs were backing us, straight out of the WTO and the Davos Forum. We even had security clearances. It was all for the public good!"
Malvern and Fearon exchanged wary glances.
Kingseed scowled at them. "Malvern, how much weasel flesh do you have in your personal genetic makeup?"
"Practically none, Dr. Kingseed!" Malvern demurred. "Just a few plasmids in my epidermal expression."
"Well, see, that's the vital difference between your decadent times and my heroic age. Back in my day, people were incredibly anxious and fussy about genetic contamination. They expected people and animals to have clean, unpolluted, fully natural genelines. But then, of course, the Greenhouse Effect destroyed the natural ecosystem. Only the thoroughly u
"Oh, we're with the story," Fearon assured him. "We're totally with it heart-ofdarkness- wise."
"'Ha!" barked Kingseed. "You pampered punks got no idea what genuine chaos looks like! It was incredibly awful! Guerrilla armies of African mercenaries grabbed all our state-of-the-art lab equipment. They were looting … burning … and once the narco-terror crowd moved in from the Golden Triangle, it got mondo bizarre!"
Malvern shrugged. "So how tough can it be? You just get on a plane and go look." He looked at Fearon. "You get on planes, don't you, Fearon?"
"Sure. Cars, sleds, waterskis, you bet I get on planes."
Kingseed raised a chiding finger. "We were desperate to save all those endangered species, so we just started packing them into anything that looked like it would survive the climate disruption. Elephant DNA spliced into cacti, rhino sequences tucked into fungi … and hey, we were the good guys. You should have seen what the ruthless terrorists were up to."
Malvern picked a fragment from his molars, examined it thoughtfully, and ate it. "Look Dr. Kingseed, all this ancient history's really edifying, but I still don't get it with the swollen, exploding brain part."
"That's also what Ribo Zombie wanted to know."
Fearon stiffened. "Ribo Zombie came here? What did you tell him?"
"I told that sorry punk nothing! Not one word did he get out of me! He's been sniffing around my crib, but I chased him back to his media coverage and his high- priced market consultants."
Malvern offered a smacking epidermal high-five. "Kemp, you are one uptaking guru! You're the Miami swamp yoda, dad!"
"I kinda like you two kids, so let me cluetrain you in. Ever seen NATO military chimp-brain? If you know how to tuck globs of digitally altered chimp brain into your own glial cells—and I'm not saying that's painless—then you can radically jazz your own cortex. Just swell your head up like a mushroom puffball." Kingseed gazed at them soberly. "It runs on DNA storage, that's the secret. Really, really long strands of DNA. We're talking like infinite Turing-tape strands of gattaca."
"Kemp," said Fearon kindly, "why don't you come along with us to Africa? You spend too much time in this toxic old factory with that big smelly spider. It'll do you good to get some fresh jungle air. Besides, we clearly require a wise native guide, given this situation."
"Are you two clowns really claiming that you wa
"Oh sure, Ghana, Guinea, whatever. We'll just nick over to the Dark Continent duty- free and check it out for the weekend. Come on, Kemp, we're scabs! We got cameras, we got credit cards! It's a cakewalk!"
Kingseed knotted his snowy eyebrows. "Every sane human being fled out of Africa decades ago. It's the dark side of the Immunosance. Even the Red Cross ran off screaming."
" 'Red Cross,' " said Malvern to Fearon. The two of them were unable to restrain their hearty laughter. " 'Red Cross.' "What ineffectual lame-os! Man, that's rich."
"Okay, sure, have it your own way," Kingseed muttered. "I'll just go sherlock my oldest dead-media and scare up some tech-specs." He retreated to his vespine i
Fearon patiently sank into a classic corrugated Gehry chair. Malvern raided Kingseed's tiny bachelor kitchen, appropriating a platter of honey-guarana snack cubes. "What a cool pad this rich geezer's got!" Malvern said, munching. "I am digging how the natural light piped in through fiber-optic cha
"This place is a stinking dump. Sure, he's rich, but that just means he'll overcharge us."
Malvern sternly cleared his throat. "Let's get something straight, partner. I haven't posted a scab acquisition since late last year! And you're in no better shape, with married life putting such a crimp in your scabbing. If we expect to pull down big- time decals and sponsorships, we've just got to beat Ribo Zombie to a major find. And this one is definitely ours by right."
After a moment, Fearon nodded in grim commitment. It was impossible to duck a straight-out scab challenge like this one—not if he expected to face himself in the mirror.