THE SAFETY OF THE HERD
Cringing from the press of bodies, Shotgun City detective Toyas Midtmann missed the beginning of the confrontation. He pushed his elbows against the commuters penning him in to give himself a little room, shutting his eyes against the mass of heads swaying to the tram’s movement. A cop who loathes people shouldn’t be a public servant, he thought. If he were a lion strolling alone across an African steppe where hills rose in the distance, shimmering in the heat, he would be happy. An uneasy murmur brought him back.
He eyed the tram securitycams, three black-lensed bubbles hanging from the roof. A red light blinked in two of them, but the one directly overhead looked dead, which either meant the vid was dead or the light didn’t work. Regardless, the two toughs facing each other a few feet away weren’t paying attention. Toyas squeezed between a couple of business types, trying to get close before things got worse. Everyone leaned away, though, and there wasn’t room to move. Toyas shifted to get his stun prod out of its holster; but a heavyset guy in a gray overcoat trapped his arm against him.
A young tough said to an older man, “Are you pulling blade on me?” A skinart forest fire blazed on the young man’s face and shaved head. Flame images circled his cool, blue eyes. He tapped his dueling knife’s hilt that hung on his chest just below his shoulder, handle down for a quick draw.
The older one, dark-bearded, wearing pale leather, held his knife delicately between thumb and finger, sliding it slowly in and out of its chest sheath. “I’m pulling it.”
“But are you pulling on me?”
Faces surrounded them, mostly Shotgun City domestics heading down canyon for day jobs. They pushed back, creating a four-foot arena. Behind them, the curious stood on their toes, peering over heads for a better look. The tram rocked, and through the windows, building after building whipped by.
The tableau froze, pale-leather holding his blade so an inch gleamed; fire-face resting a finger on the hilt. Toyas yelled, “Break it up! Police!”
Fire-face turned toward him, and the tram lurched. Pale-leather lunged forward, blade beside his ear.
Someone screamed. People pushed together so hard Toyas lost his breath. The tram slid onto the platform and stopped. Doors on one side opened, releasing the commuters. Behind him, other doors opened and new commuters pushed in. Toyas rode the crush out, panning the crowd for the two toughs. Nothing. People riding slideways and escalators. Others milled around soy and drink kiosks, steam rising from heating pans.
He almost tripped over the body ten feet later. Lying on his back, fire-face stared into the sky. Toyas felt for a pulse but knew the boy was dead. A stab wound just left of center bled little. The blade had gone straight to the heart, a rare thrust for a dueling knife, which by law could be no longer than three inches.
The neck was warm and placid. Sweat slick. Toyas guessed the boy died before he left the tram, but the crowd carried him upright to this point before he dropped. Fire images still crawled up his cheeks, licked his ears, flickered across his forehead, the skinart dyes following their programmed display, living on the dead skin. False fire. No heat. A woman brushed against him, her eyes locked forward; he was sure she didn’t see him. “Step wide!” he called. “Crime scene. Step wide!” Still, they came. Crouched over the body, he saw knees and feet. A flattened cup leaked coffee until someone kicked it, and only the stain remained.
Toyas tongued a transmit switch on the back of a tooth and called for clean up. He ordered a tracer on the tram and a download of the securitycam files, but he held little hope they’d show much: backs of heads, fuzzy faces, motion—not enough for court-worthy IDs. Another corpse—fifteen to twenty a day on this tram line alone.
Tiny voices filled his ear: a rolling riot had spread to Idaho Springs, fifteen miles down canyon; there was a hostage situation in Dillon and another in Shotgun City. A dozen All Points Bulletins. Another cop called for a clean up while he waited. The violent recital: situations droned on. He half listened, tuning in to his calls and not the others, but he had nothing to do, leaning over the dead boy.
People stepped over the body. Toyas fended them off the best he could until clean up arrived. The human tide inexorably flowed, a herd on the move.
By the time he got to Bellamy Labs where he was to arrest Reanna Loveday for unauthorized genetic manipulation, it had turned into a suicide standoff.
Not much to the building itself. Undistinguished signs marked the slideway platform as private, and the afternoon’s light reflected off the door’s muted silver sheen. People in a steady procession on the slideway moved up and down canyon behind him. Toyas arched back; the sky, a luminous blue ribbon cut by walks and bridges, stretched between the buildings’ tops. Trams scooted overhead on magnetic rails. The population’s weight pressed around him, above him, below him; going its varied ways. It smelled of fish and deodorizers, of dusty, clammy skin that never saw the sun and slept too close together. This is no place for a Masai warrior, he thought. I should be trotting across a grassy plain, spear in hand, my fate’s master. Not that there are any Masai left, or grassy plains for that matter.
He imagined how easy it would be to pull his dueling blade in a crowded tram too and stab and stab and stab, for the room, for the dull hatred. He rubbed his hands together. He still felt the dead boy’s sweat on his fingertips.
The door scanner okayed his warrant, opening to a wide hallway crowded with frightened lab staff. A young man in a medical smock turned to him when he came in the door. Something in his eyes struck Toyas. They darted wildly, and the man trembled. A skinart rose rotated slowly on his cheek, and Toyas thought about the dead tough, fire crawling on his head. “It’ll be fine,” said Toyas. “We do this all the time.”
Sub-detective Clancey waved from the far end, looking small in his new uniform, his police academy chevrons still shiny. “She’s blocked herself into a back office on the other side of her lab with a vial of something poisonous. Nobody knows what it is.” He’d unholstered his stun-prod and slapped it nervously into his hand. “I figured I’d wait until you got here.”
“Her lab’s through there?” A skinny window beside the door revealed another hallway punctuated with doors.
Clancey nodded, then wiped his sleeve across his forehead. “She’s got DNA stuff back there, they say. Maybe some wacky diseases. I don’t know. Something exotic and incurable. Make your skin fall off.”
Toyas shook his head. “Not a contract gene shop like this. Worst she could do is change your rhododendrons.”
A shaky voice behind him said, “Her specialties are genetically-based animal behavior modification and natural vectoring. She finds traits we like from one kind of animal to replace traits we don’t like in another animal.”
Toyas turned.
Another man in a medical smock. Close-set eyes. Fiftyish. Name tag read “Hirhito Blevins.” He extended a hand. “Loveday is working on the pigeon problem for the city. Wonderful mind. Wonderful, but touchy. She has a lab to herself. Over a hundred square feet of space, and she bullied the others out. Hates crowds, she says. Terribly inefficient. Three employees generally work a lab that size. We leave her alone, though. Genius can be eccentric.”
Toyas tried to back away from the man, but the room was too crowded. “Can’t you let these people go home? They’ll just be in the way.”
Blevins shook his head. “They’re hourlies. Automatically docked if they leave the building.”
Toyas rubbed his eyes and held back an urge to yell. Clancey downloaded the situation file and Loveday’s psychiatric and work profiles into Toyas’ palmtop. Intelligence rating off the scale, but mediocre school records. She’d worked continuously for the last four years, moving from one contract to the next—a rarity for most employees—flawless performance numbers. She must be good, Toyas thought. She’d tried killing herself when she was a teenager. Clancey peeked over his shoulder at the display. “See, she’s serious about this.”
Loveday’s portrait came up. An unsmiling, thin-faced blonde in her mid-twenties.
“Any clue what set her off?”
Blevins said, “I was talking, very calmly, and she started raving. Threw a clipboard at me. Totally unprovoked. She’s unbalanced. Always has been, but we need her.”
Toyas guessed the conversation wasn’t that innocent but didn’t say so. The case profile noted that Blevins had turned in the original complaint for unauthorized computer use. Loveday’s user history showed hours of research on human gene patterns, mostly centering on socialization behavior. “This is all outside her specialty, isn’t it?”
Blevins said, “Oh, yes. Completely misplaced effort. Her real gift is natural vectoring for animals. Most genetic manipulation happens under controlled conditions: a livestock breeding facility, for example, or a doctor’s office. But sometimes we want to spread a genetic change where the subjects are difficult to reach, so we have to find a way to introduce and disseminate the mutagen naturally. A parasite or a disease. Something infectious, easily transferred, but not fatal. She was piggybacking a mutagen to a weakened form of avian influenza for the pigeon problem. This investigation into human genetic patterns is not a part of her contract. There are federal laws, and, besides, she stole computer time and lab space. It reflects on my evaluation.”
Toyas gave his stun prod to Clancey, then opened the door into the empty hallway. His palmtop went back into its fanny pack. “Why’d she try to kill herself the first time?”
Clancey scanned his display. “Doesn’t say, but her parents died two months before in a rolling riot.” He read further. “Looks like they got caught at a restaurant. Six others died there too. The report doesn’t implicate them. Might be a connection.”
“Give me an hour.”
The door closed. Toyas walked past open offices toward Loveday’s lab. He turned off his earplug, and the crime litany stopped. His steps clicked loudly in the silence, and he realized for the first time in days, he couldn’t hear a human voice. The police station rang with sounds; human commerce filled the shops and streets; his tiny Shotgun City apartment never completely shut out the slideway’s rumble and the rise and fall of human murmur twenty-four hours a day. Everywhere he went, thousands of people within a mile of him. The entire Denver to Salt Lake City intermountain urban corridor crowded with them. They’d even filled the twin Eisenhower tunnels that used to be a part of the highway system with apartments and shops to create Shotgun City.
He slowed to enjoy the moment. Took a deep breath. Here the air smelled antiseptic, scrubbed clean, slightly chemical, not close and clammy. Not like the tram. He walked in the middle of the hall and thought about extending his arms as wings; they wouldn’t touch either side. In his apartment, he kept a recording of a Greater Flamingo taking off from the shore of lake Samburu—a tremendous bird fighting its way into the air. He could spin around here, his arms out, and not touch anything.
Toyas glanced back; in the window behind him, Clancey and several others peered through. He kept his arms down, but for the first time today he felt relaxed. If the tram hadn’t been so crowded, if it had been like this hallway, the fight might never have happened. The flame-faced boy would still be alive, the fires washing over his lips and sweeping around his eyes. Before the fight started, the people close by had pushed away, but the people farther back had leaned in, not wanting to miss the action. Their heads bobbed between shoulders, craning for a view. A violence hunger. They wanted to see, and the ones close didn’t want to be hurt, but none of them had reached forward to stop the fight. Toyas thought everyone on the tram should have been arrested. Co-conspirators. Accessories to a homicide.
Most of them wore blades. Old folks, children, clergy—it didn’t matter. A knife was a fashion statement. Illegal to use outside the dueling halls, but people had them just the same. Toyas thought about his luck that the tram had pulled into the platform when it did. That close, blood’s smell in the air, a chain reaction could have started. Everyone stabbing everyone else out of . . . what? Fear? Hatred? Hysteria? It didn’t matter. Mass stabbings had happened before. Like a rolling riot. No explanation. Violence breaking out in one spot, spreading to another, leaving destruction and injury before moving on. Sometimes lasting for weeks and traveling for miles, like fire.
Loveday’s lab door wasn’t closed tight. Toyas pushed it open with his foot, letting the room unfold before him as the door swept wide. She wasn’t there. A long table in the middle was clean, a clipboard on the floor the only sign of disarray. On the wall, between open cabinets filled with equipment, several posters hung. All historical scenes. In one, a herd of cows grazed at sunset, their backs golden in the slanted light. Another showed a hundred buffalo, their heads up and alert, as if a wolf had appeared just off the poster’s edge. He touched it, and it crackled under his fingers. Real paper. Very expensive.
“Reanna Loveday?” Toyas called. He thought the partly closed door at the back of the lab must be her office. The light was off. “My name’s Toyas. Shotgun City police, Reanna. I need to talk to you. We don’t want you to hurt yourself. Your friends are concerned about you.”
“Blevins isn’t a friend,” said a voice from the dark. A bitter laugh. “He’s an accounting geek. Right now he’s adding up lost productivity.” A shuffling noise. A click of metal on metal. “Toyas? Good, African name. Are you a rat or a snake, Officer Toyas?”
Toyas sat on the table’s edge. He liked the empty room. He liked the posters. There was no reason to rush. Unless someone buzzed his palmtop, he was unreachable for the moment.
“I don’t know. What’s the difference?” he said. She didn’t reply. “Must be nice to have a big place like this to work in.” Blevins was right about the room: it was about ten by ten feet, which made it two feet longer and four feet wider than Toyas’ Shotgun City apartment. “They said you were going to kill yourself.”
Loveday didn’t speak for a while. There was only one way out of the lab, and it was past him, so she wasn’t going anywhere. Toyas stretched his legs.
“I might,” she said. Her voice didn’t sound stressed. Tired, but not stressed. Not like she was poised on the precipice. “Rats kill themselves. Snakes don’t.”
“Any particular reason?”
“Genetics. It’s all in the genes.”
“I didn’t know animals could commit suicide,” said Toyas. She actually sounded pleasant. A little stuffed up perhaps. She sniffed in the darkened office and blew her nose. “Do you want to come out here to tell me about it?”
“I don’t like people. Did they tell you that?”
“Who does?” Toyas got up. Walked around the room. It was amazing. Step after step without running into someone. His knuckles brushed against the wall as he went by.
“Snakes do.”
“Like people?”
“No, each other. You could fill a box with snakes and they wouldn’t know the difference. Some of them spend the winter crammed into a little hole, hundreds of them. There was a story once of a Texas rancher who broke into a snake den while digging a cellar. Ten-foot-thick ball of rattlers snoozing away.”
Toyas wrinkled his brow. The conversation had taken an odd turn. Still, standard procedure in a suicide situation was to keep the victim talking. “Snakes aren’t people, though.”
“My point exactly! At least most of them,” she said, as if she’d won an argument. “But we can’t avoid them! I had a reservation to go camping next month. I’ve held it for four years. Three days and two nights in a real forest. It’s with a group, of course, but you can hike by yourself. There’s a stream and a lake, they say. I’ve seen the brochure. There’s a picture of one person, just one, sitting on a rock at a meadow’s edge.”
Toyas nodded sympathetically. For the last three years he had submitted requests to visit Mt. Kenya Park. He wanted to see Kere Nyaga, the Kikuyu name for Mount Kenya, the Mountain of Brightness.
She sneezed. “Sorry, allergies.” She wiped at her nose. “They canceled my reservation.”
“Why?” Toyas paused in front of a complicated computer display: twisted strands braiding among each other, numbered and lettered notation labeling the strand’s bumps. He scrolled to the display’s top. Human Gene Segment, L14d.
“People won’t come out. Not enough snakes. Too many rats. They closed the park. They’ve closed all of them. There’s no place to go to get away. There are too many people who are rats. We’ve got to get rid of the rats.”
Toyas glanced sharply at the office door. Her voice sounded odd on the last statement, ominous or desperate. He remembered Clancey’s fear that she’d made a disease. It was unlikely—anticipation of just such an event had prompted hundreds of checks in the system—but maybe she’d figured a way around the security. He reached behind him for his palmtop, and pressed the emergency call to bring a squad to isolate the building. This might not be just one detective talking a person out of suicide anymore. Soon, experts by the score would dissect her notes and computer, revealing everything she’d worked on in all the time she’d been here.
“That’s why you wanted to kill yourself? Because you lost a camping reservation?” Keeping his tone calm, he clicked backwards through screen after screen of genetic code, but his fingers quivered on the keys. All beyond him, the cryptic notations giving no clue of her intent. Was this a suicide situation or a threat to public safety? “And what does this have to do with rats?”
“No. Not the camping.” The ominous tone dropped away, and now she sounded exhausted, like she was giving up. “An experiment went wrong. I thought I’d solved a problem, but it didn’t work. I couldn’t change a rat. Physician Rat, heal thyself.”
“Blevins said you worked with pigeons.”
She laughed. “Those stupid pigeons. Do you know what the city wanted me to do? Stop pigeon droppings. Millions of dollars over the years cleaning buildings. They contracted me to change pigeon pooping behavior. I think I solved it. Pigeons poop everywhere. Cats are clean about it. A cut here, a splice there, and I’ll have all the pigeons in the world scratching their droppings into the dirt. No, the experiment was with me. My self experiment failed. I’m genetically resistant.”
Toyas transferred everything in her computer onto his palmtop. It only took a few seconds. The experts could look at it later if there was a need. He didn’t see her own palmtop. Probably had it on her. Incriminating evidence might be there.
“Genetically resistant?” he said, mostly to keep her talking while he waited for reinforcements.
She sneezed again. “Yes. Not everyone’s genes are malleable. Some resist mutagens better than others.”
A chair scraped. Her pale hand appeared on the door jamb, and the door swung open. “Are you by yourself?” She stood in the shadows.
He nodded.
After several minutes without moving—he could feel her eyes on him, sizing him up—she said, “I’m agoraphobic. Really bad. You know, panic attacks.” She slid around the door’s edge, keeping her back to the wall. The palmtop picture didn’t flatter her. Even in the lab’s harsh light, her features were softer, younger, color high in her cheeks. “It’s hard to breathe with you here.” There was nothing in her hands—no poison or way to kill herself—nothing frightening about her. She might have a syringe in the lab coat, though, thought Toyas, something that would take just a pressure on the pocket to inject.
The file transfer finished. Toyas moved to the other end of the room. “Have you always been that way?”
She touched a button near the computer, and the double-helix on the screen cleared. “Since I was a kid. The doctors call it trauma induced social anxiety disorder. It got worse after my parents died. Rats in the box.”
“Rats?” He checked his palmtop. The files were all there. Crisis intervention reported they were in the lobby.
She looked directly at him for the first time since she’d come out, her eyes bright, fevered. “Rats attack each other in a box. They’re social, but you can’t overcrowd them. They’ll even bite themselves. Snakes don’t. Herd animals don’t. Pressed together in pens, they’re content. Nothing bothers them. It’s genetic. Mom and Dad died in a restaurant, killed with butter knives and forks. The box was too crowded. The rats got them. So, are you a rat or a snake?”
A bustle in the hallway behind him, and the door shattered inward. Loveday shrieked, leaping for her office door, but a tangle-burst got her. She went down in a tightening confusion of fine mesh that pulled her arms into her sides and bound her legs. Masked intervention operatives poured into the room, fifteen or twenty of them. There was little room to move. Toyas backed against the wall.
“Did she say anything?” someone shouted to him. “Did she make a threat?” Someone else pushed a re-breather into his hands, but he didn’t put it on. Operatives opened drawers, poking gene-scanner proboscises into the depths, the hand-held units sucking air to their tiny, automated analysis chambers. “Nothing here,” said one operative, the re-breathing unit muffling his voice. “Pigeon DNA,” said another. “More pigeon. And cat. I have cat.”
Blevins voice came from the door; Toyas couldn’t see him past the officers. “Those are authorized. We have papers for them!” Blevins followed the officers, showing them clearances for everything they found: dog, cow, octopus, mosquito, several others, but no snake. Toyas shook his head. Why no snake? That’s what she said she’d been doing. There wasn’t rat either.
Loveday kept shrieking wordlessly.
“What are you looking for?” said Toyas, flinching against her voice. “Can I help?” He sidled along the wall toward Loveday. Two officers held her down while a third ran a see-all over her tangle-webbed lab coat.
“Nothing in the pockets. She’s clean.” The officer searching her looked up at Toyas. “If she’s made a pathogen, she needs a way to distribute it. Powder, pills, liquid spray—it could be anywhere. We’ve got a squad doing her apartment too.”
Another officer ground his knee into Loveday’s back, squeezing her screams thin. Toyas grabbed his collar and pulled him off. “She’s not going anywhere,” said Toyas. “No need to hurt her.” Only the man’s eyes were visible above his re-breather, dark and enigmatic. Toyas suspected the man liked what he had been doing. Loveday stopped screaming.
They ripped posters off the walls, scanned behind them; emptied cabinets, broke jars, poured out chemicals, cut open notebook covers, all efficiently. In fifteen minutes they’d taken the lab apart and found no deadly viruses or evidence that she’d worked on one.
An officer came out of her office, a melted palmtop in his hand. “She torched it,” he said. “We may never know what was on this.” He dropped it into a plastic bag for later analysis.
Toyas stayed close to Loveday, keeping his hand on her arm. “She just wanted to go to a park,” he said under his breath. Knees and feet passed around him. He fended them off so no one stepped on her. It reminded him of the dead boy from the tram. No reason for all these people to be here, thought Toyas. They’re scaring her, and it made his skin creep. Too much jostling.
Finally the officers stood around Loveday, discussing whether they should take her to the patrol house for questioning or to a hospital for observation. She breathed through her mouth. “Officer Toyas,” she whispered. “I need to blow my nose.” Stuffed up, her arms tight to her side, she sounded pathetic. Toyas found a tissue in his fannypack and held it for her. She blew noisily against his hand. When they picked her up, still horizontal, facing the floor, she rose until her red-rimmed eyes were level with his. “Thanks,” she said, and sneezed in his face.
When the squad left, Toyas looked around the room. The litter had been swept up, but broken glass in a fine dust sparkled at the lab table’s end. They’d taken the computer and her notes. A poster dangled from one corner on the wall. He pressed it back up. Sheep on a hillside, covering it so tightly he could see no grass, just backs and heads. In the middle, a single tree rose above them, its greenery a sharp contrast to the sheep’s white and black.
Toyas couldn’t sleep that night. The slideway’s constant rumble bothered him. He could feel crowds passing past his doorway. He tried staring at his prints on the wall: a brightly lit view of Mt. Kilimanjaro, a sunrise on the Indian Ocean at the Kenyan coast, a lone giraffe. But it didn’t help. After he turned down the light, he imagined his neighbor’s breathing to his left and right. The weight from neighbors above seemed to bow the roof. Sometimes he heard them in bed, their apartment no larger than his own, moving rhythmically.
When he finally dozed, he dreamt of crawling in a tunnel, deep underground, moist dirt falling on his neck, slipping under his hands. After a dozen turns, the tunnel grew tighter until he squirmed on his belly. Then, the ceiling rose away. His fingers hooked over an earthen edge. A dim light glowed in the huge room below him, and it was filled. Thousands of naked people, intertwined, moving slowly in sleep—a giant people ball. The closest parted, as if they knew he was there, to give him a space in the mass. He slithered from the hole, put his hands on legs and arms, pulled himself in. No one woke, but they moved aside, let him burrow deeply in their phosphorescence. He pushed his knee against a shoulder, levered himself between two backs, their ribs and backbones sliding over him, swimming in people, and then he reached the middle. He rested. Everything tight and cozy, warm and friendly, until he heard a vibration, a quiet rattle rising in the mass. The leg above his head grew cool. Pressing against his side, a thigh thinned, became slick and scaled. Air buzzed, and pressure rose. He struggled to breathe. A fanged face pressed against his head, black marble eye unblinking. It slid by. All snakes, everywhere. No people. He gasped. Lungs ached. Arms trapped. No breath.
He flailed in the darkness, throwing his blanket aside. One hand slapped against the wall, and his neighbor rapped back a muffled curse. Toyas lay gasping, his throat coated and his nose stuffed up. By bed light he found tissue, but blowing didn’t clear his nasal passages. A couple pillows propped beneath his head stopped the worst of the draining, and when the antihistamine and decongestant began to work, he fell asleep again, this time without dreams.
The next morning after he stepped outside his apartment door, he keyed for an update on Loveday. The palmtop showed they’d checked her in for observation. A couple screens later he found the hospital had put her in a private room. She’ll like that, he thought. Other than disrupting the peace, no indictments had been issued. A blinking icon at the screen’s bottom indicated “Under Investigation.” Another one said, “Possible Biohazard.” He clicked the unit closed, waited for an opening, then stepped on the slideway. Before he reached the Shotgun City limit sign and the end of the city’s long tunnel, he’d sneezed half a dozen times. “Sorry,” he said each time to annoyed commuters. “Allergies.” The decongestants kept his breathing clear, but his nose itched and he had a sore throat. Not bad, but it hurt to swallow.
He checked in so that headquarters would transmit his cases, a short list this morning, only three homicides. On the tram ride, he mulled over the dream, and as an afterthought checked on the stabbing from yesterday. As he’d feared, the securitycams didn’t show enough to advance an investigation. No blood on flame-face’s knife. No witnesses who could help. No specific similarities to other stabbings to indicate a pattern. Probably random, Toyas thought, one act of violence by a man who had never done such a thing before and probably never would again, not that finding the killer would help the dead boy anyway.
The tram missed the first Dillon platform. The rolling riot was too close. Police shut off the platforms, rerouted slideway traffic and shut down bridges and elevators through the district in an attempt to choke the fighting off. As the tram slid past the platform, Toyas saw yelling people standing on the edge, trying to get out. Rats and snakes, Loveday had called them. With no room to move, rats turned on each other. The box was too small. She’d asked him which one was he. That must mean I could be either, he thought. Not everyone hates the crowding. He sneezed again. Couldn’t even get his hand up over his mouth in the tram’s tight quarters. A lady in front of him flinched and wiped at the back of her neck.
The second Dillon platform passed, and the third. An angry mumble rose in the tram. People missing their stops would either have to walk up canyon to get to work, or they wouldn’t be able to get there at all. Most employees were hourlies. They were paid only for time on the job, regardless of the excuse. Somebody pushed someone else, and for a few seconds shouting filled the tram. Toyas held his palmtop tight. With the right combination of commands, he could have the car flooded with sleepy-gas. He wondered how long ago it had been since he’d been gas-proofed, and if it would still keep him conscious. The yelling subsided, though, and he relaxed, swallowing in relief. It hurt.
His all-call squeaked in his ear, and headquarters queried him on his position. “Emergency override,” the earphone said. “Debark at Silverthorne #4.” He shrugged and worked his hand up to his face so he could wipe his nose. The tram followed a long curve in its track, making everyone lean. A man next to Toyas stumbled a little and caught Toyas’ sleeve to keep his balance. “Pardon,” he said.
“It’s O.K.” Except for his sneezing, Toyas didn’t feel bad this morning. Not like yesterday when he might have thrown an elbow to keep the stranger off him. It’s not their fault, thought Toyas. They’re missing work.
He couldn’t see a window. Somehow he’d ended up in the middle, but he knew the upper canyon complexes were passing by. In a minute, they’d be at Silverthorne and he could find out what the emergency was. In the meantime, he let the tram’s gentle motion lull him. People pressed against him, moving with the sway. Very soothing.
Then, Toyas saw him, the pale-leather tough from yesterday. His hand rested on his dueling blade, a line of gleaming metal showing it was part way out of its sheath, and Pale-leather scowled around him, his dark beard disarrayed, his expression filled with hate. Toyas tongued a transmission and subvocalized a report. It took a few seconds to clear his stun-prod from its holster. He didn’t want to be caught unprepared this time.
The tram slid toward Silverthorne station. Pale-leather glared at the crowd, his hand tight on the dueling blade, obviously within an instant of pulling it out. Toyas brought the stun-prod up, next to his chest. If the man drew the blade, Toyas figured he could just reach him over the intervening heads. They held the pose until the tram slowed down for the platform. Pale-leather closed his eyes for a moment, as if in relief, and Toyas felt suddenly inside the man’s head. It was the closing of the eyes that did it. It wasn’t people the man hated, but the pressure against him, the constant touching. He didn’t want to hurt anyone, but he would. A rat in the box, ready to bite, his rodent-like instincts playing themselves through, nearly beyond his control, and Toyas knew that was him too, yesterday, an inch from stabbing out himself.
Doors opened, and a line of policeman waited on the platform, standing steady against the stream flowing from the car. Toyas maneuvered himself behind Pale-leather, letting the traffic carry him out. He reached to snag the man’s shoulder when something grabbed him on both sides.
They spun him around, a policeman on each arm. Toyas barely saw the helmet coming before it was over his head.
“He’s escaping!” yelled Toyas, and struggled to get an arm free. They held too tightly though, and through the helmet’s glass, Toyas glimpsed Pale-leather stepping onto a slideway. The other officers formed a barricade around them that diverted foot traffic. Blevins’ face floated into view as he sealed the helmet at Toyas’ neck. A circulation fan kicked on, sending a sweet tasting wash of bottled air across his forehead. The policemen didn’t say anything as they half-carried Toyas to a cruiser and pushed him into the holding tank. Blevins and an officer followed.
Blevins said, “Did Loveday cough on you? Did you touch her hands or face? How close did you get?” The officer ran a gene-scanner over Toyas’ clothes. On the officer’s shoulders were biotech chevrons and captain’s bars. Toyas had never met a captain before. He searched for something to say.
“Oh, man,” the captain said. “He’s loaded.”
Blevins paled. “It’s not our fault. We admit no liability. Her actions were not sanctioned by the lab. Pure pirate stuff.”
“What’s going on?” said Toyas. His head wobbled, and he wondered blearily if the air in the helmet was doped.
Blevins ignored him. “If your people could have salvaged her palmtop sooner, none of this would have happened. Remember, we reported her. We deserve a medal.”
The captain leaned back. A lurch indicated the cruiser had taken off. Where? Toyas wondered, sure now he was drugged.
“Shut up, Blevins,” said the captain tiredly. “The courts will decide what to do with your company. In the meantime, how can we stop this?”
Blevins licked his lips. Toyas watched the man’s lips part in slow motion, his tongue moving at quarter speed. Funny, Toyas thought, that their speech sounds fine, but they’ve slowed down so much.
“She tied the mutagen to a cold virus. That’s her specialty, natural vectoring. Maybe we can quarantine the area, contain it all.”
The captain kept his eyes closed, defeated. “We’ve ordered it already.”
Toyas formed his words carefully. “Was it snake genes? She said something about snakes. Am I going to die?” The question felt academic, and he almost giggled.
Blevins looked at him. “No, not snakes. Why would you say that? It was a part of cow genetics. We don’t know what part yet. We don’t know what she wanted to do, but it’s a human mutagen. She was immune.”
Toyas’ head dipped and circled. He was sure they could see it, although they didn’t seem to notice. The world felt buttery and soft. He didn’t even mind being transported to an unknown destination. In the background, the cruiser’s hum sounded like bees, African bees, and he thought about Kenya, the great, wind-swept plains, and the long extinct animals. But not a lion. He pictured zebras instead, a congregation of them, heads down at the water hole. Toyas wished he were there, shoulder to shoulder in the population, at peace, taking water. He could almost feel them around him. The dust they kicked up a comforting layer on his back. The safety of the herd.
A tendril of fear eddied in him for a second. His lips parted heavily; he could barely shape the words. “They won’t lock me up, will they?” He saw himself thrown in an empty hospital room. A viral contagion ward. No one to lean against. No one to reach out and touch.
Toyas held onto consciousness long enough to say, “Don’t let them put me in . . . isolation.”