Distraction

“Hmmm. I know a lot of technicians. I don’t know many tech-nicians who are multimillionaires, like you are.”

“Oh, well, that … Yes, I’m well-to-do, but compared to what my father made in his heyday, or the Senator’s fortune … I do have money, but I wouldn’t call that serious money. I know people with serious money, and I’m just not in their league.” Oscar hefted a long green tube from the packing case, examined its crooks and angles mournfully, and set it back down. “The wind’s picking up … I don’t have the heart for this anymore. I think I’ll walk back to the dome. Maybe somebody’s still up in the dorm. We’ll play some poker.”

“I have a car,” she said.

“Really. ”

“You get a car, when you’re on the Collaboratory board. So I drove here. I can give you a ride back to the lab.”

“That would be lovely. Just let me stow the gear and shut down the system.” He took off his hard hat and kneepads. He shed his padded construction jacket, and stood there hatless in a long-sleeved shirt; the cold wind ripped into the damp at his armpits. When he was done, he set the alarms and they left the site together.

He stopped at the sidewalk… “Wait a moment.”

“What is it?”

“We seem to be chatting along pretty well here. But your car may be bugged.”

She brushed her windblown hair back, skeptically. “Why would anyone bug me?”

“Because it’s so cheap and easy. So tell me something just now, before we get into your car. Tell me something very frankly. Do you know about my personal background problem?”

“Your background? I know that your father was a movie star…”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought that matter up. Really, I’m being completely impossible tonight. It was really good of you to visit the site tonight, but I’ve gotten off on the wrong foot here. I shouldn’t bother you with any of this. You’re on the board of direc-tors, and I’m a federal official… Listen, if our personal circum-stances were different… And if either of us really had time for our personal problems…”

She stood there shivering. She was tall and thin and no longer used to real weather; she had worked hard in the dark and cold, and she was freezing. The night wind rose harshly and tore at his sleeves. He felt strangely drawn to her now. She was too tall, she was too thin, she had bad clothes, an odd face, and poor posture, she was eight years older than he was. They had nothing in common as people, any rela-tionship they might establish was clearly doomed from the outset. Re-lating to her was like coaxing some rare animal on the other side of a woven-wire fence. Maybe that was why he felt such a compelling urge to touch her. “Doctor, I appreciate your company tonight, but I think you’d better go on ahead in your car now. We’ll be in touch later about the board meetings. I still have a lot to learn.”

“I hope you don’t expect me to just drive off alone after that. Now I have to know. Get in the car.”

She opened the door and they jammed themselves together. It was a meager little car, a Collaboratory car, and naturally it had no heater. Their chilling breath began to smear the windows.

“I really don’t think you want to know about this. It’s a rather strange story. It’s bad. Worse than you expect.”

She adjusted her woolen hat, and blew on her bare fingers. “They never put heaters in these things. Because you’re never sup-posed to drive them outside the dome. It’ll warm up in a minute. Why don’t you just tell me whatever you think you can tell me. Then I’ll decide if I want to know more.”

“All right.” He hesitated. “Well, to begin with, I’m an adopted child. Logan Valparaiso was not my biological father.”

“No?”

“No, he didn’t adopt me until I was almost three. You see, at the time, Logan was working on an international thriller movie about evil adoption farms. Adoption mills. They were a big scandal during that period. The full scale of the hormone pesticide disasters was becoming common knowledge. There were major male-infertility problems. So, the adoption market really boomed. Infertility clinics too, obviously. The demand-pull was suddenly huge, so a lot of unsavory people, quacks, exploiters, health-fad people, they all rushed in to exploit it…”

“I can remember that time.”

“Suddenly there was a lot of offshore baby-farming, embryo-farming. People were taking extreme measures. It made a pretty good topic for an action film. So, my dad cast himself as a vigilante law-and-order guerrilla. He played the role of a two-fisted Chicano abortion-clinic bomber, who gets turned by the feds, and becomes a secret-agent embryo-farm demolisher…”

Whenever he told this story, he could hear his voice shift into a hateful, high-pitched whine. And it was happening now, even as the car’s windows began to steam. He was sliding helplessly from his stan-dard fast-talk into something much more extreme, a kind of chronic gabbling jabber. He would really have to watch that. He was watching it, he was watching it as well as he could, but he just couldn’t help himself “I don’t mean to go on and on about the movie, but I did have to watch that film about four hundred times as a kid… Plus all the rushes and the outtakes… Anyway, Logan was Method acting deep into the role, and he and wife number three had a solid relationship at the time, as Logan’s marriages went, that is. So he decided that as a kind of combination personal-growth move and film-related publicity stunt, he was going to adopt a real victim child from a real embryo mill.”

She listened silently.

“Well, that kid was me. My original egg cell was product sold on the infertility black market, and it ended up in a Colombian embryo mill. It was a mafia operation, so they were buying or stealing human eggs, fertilizing them, and offering them at a black-market rate for implantation. But there were quality problems. With resultant health problems for the female buyers. Not to mention the lawsuits and eth-ics hassles if somebody ratted them out. So the crooks started develop-ing the product inside hired wombs, for a somewhat more standard, post-birth adoption … But that business plan didn’t work out ei-ther. The rent-a-womb thing was just too slow a process, and they had too many local women involved who might rat them out, or shake them down, or get upset about surrendering the product after term. So then they decided they would try to grow the embryos to term in vitro. They got a bunch of support vats together, but they weren’t very good at it, because by this point, they’d already lost most of their working capital. Still, they got their hands on enough mammal-cloning data to give the artificial-womb thing a serious try with hu-man beings. So I was never actually born, per se.”

“I see.” She straightened in her seat, placed her hands on the steering wheel, and drew a breath. “Please do go on, this is truly enormously interesting.”

“Well, they were trying to sell me and their other products, but the overhead was just too high, and their failure rate was huge, and worse yet the market crashed when it turned out there was a cheaper medical workaround for sperm damage. Once they had the testicular syndrome fixed, it kicked the bottom right out of the baby market. So I was less than a year old when somebody ratted them out to the world health people, and then the blue-helmet brigade busted in from Europe and shut the whole place down. They confiscated all of us. I ended up in Denmark. Those are my earliest memories, this little orphanage in Denmark… An orphanage and health clinic.”

He had forced himself to tell this story many times, far more times than he had ever wanted to tell it to anyone. He had a prepared spiel of sorts, but he had never fully steeled himself to the dread it caused him to talk about it, the paralyzing stage fright. “Most of the product just didn’t make it. They’d really screwed with us trying to get us tank-worthy. I had a full genetic scan done in Copenhagen, and it turned out that they’d simply lopped off most of the introns from the zygote DNA. See, they somehow figured that if they could prune away some junk DNA from the human genome, then the product would be hardier in the tank and would run more efficiently… Their lab guys were all med-school dropouts, or downsizees from bankrupt HMOs. Also, they spent a lot of time high on synthetic cocaine, which was always the standard collateral industry with South American genetic black-marketeering…”