A Different Flesh (36 page)

Doris opened the door for Tanaka. Howard rose to shake his hand. He had a strong grip, and looked a few years younger in person than in photos—he was, of course, almost exactly the censor's age. His sturdy, middle-aged oriental features somehow went well with the conservative blue velvet jacket and maroon ruffled shirt he wore.

“Good of you to take time from your busy schedule, Dr. Howard.” Tanaka's voice was deep, almost gravelly, his manner straightforward.

“A pleasure.” Howard waved to a chair. “Won't you sit down?”

Tanaka did not. “I was hoping you'd show me around first.”

“Certainly.” Straightforward indeed, Howard thought. “Follow me, then.” He gave Tanaka a quick tour of the DRC laboratories, ending with the bank of screens that monitored the infected sims. The technician, fortunately, had sense enough to keep his mouth shut.

When they were back in Howard's office, Tanaka did at last take a seat. “Most interesting,” he said, steepling his fingers, “especially the sims' quarters. I must say, you treat them well.”

“Certainly we do,” Howard said. “For one example, they eat the same food as our staff buys at the cafeteria we passed through.”

Tanaka gave a wry chuckle. “From what I know of cafeterias, that's not necessarily a recommendation. Still, I see your point. You do well by the sims, as I said already.” He turned serious again. “Of course, you've also given them AIDS.”

“Mr. Tanaka,” Howard said stiffly, “this research program operates under laws passed by the Popular Assembly with funds appropriated by the Senate. Neither censor saw fit to affix his veto to the laws of the appropriation. I assure you, I am conforming to them in every particular.”

“I do not doubt that for a moment, Dr. Howard,” Tanaka said. “What I've come to see is the result of that conformity. After all, though they are not human beings, sims do have their own smaller measure of intelligence, and they did not consent to be experimented on.”

Appalled, Howard burst out, “A sim cannot give informed consent! That's a fundamental principle of law.”

“Not quite what I meant,” Tanaka said. “I doubt they are eager to die, though, of a disease they almost certainly would not have contracted in the normal course of their lives. Many people not usually supportive of the sim justice movement—” He paused to let Howard make some uncomplimentary remark, but the doctor stayed quiet. Shrugging, Tanaka went on, “—still have qualms at their being infected with AIDS.”

Howard had dealt with officials for years, and had no trouble translating what they said into what they meant. Tanaka was talking about votes. The doctor took a moment to make sure his reply informed without antagonizing: “They also have qualms, Mr. Tanaka, about being infected themselves, and two or three million of them have been. Of those, somewhere around a third—maybe more, as time goes by—will actually develop AIDS. And just about all of those will die, very unpleasantly. The people who show no symptoms are just as able to pass it on through sex as the ones who do—more able, because the ones without symptoms feel fine. Sims give me my best chance of fighting AIDS in people. How can I do anything but use them?”

“What would you do if there were no sims?” Tanaka asked after thinking a few seconds himself.

“The best I could,” Howard answered. “Muddle along with shimpanses and a lot of
in vitro
work, I suppose. It wouldn't be the same. I think you've seen that here. A lot more people would die while I—and a lot of other researchers using sims, don't forget—struggled to translate the answers we eventually got into clinical terms. We don't have that problem with sims. Their biochemistry is almost identical to ours.”

Tanaka nodded and rose, showing the meeting was done. He stuck out his hand. “Thank you very much, Dr. Howard. You've been most interesting.”

“Have I? I'm glad. What will you tell Censor Jennings, then?”

Tanaka blinked. “You're very forthright.”

“I'm concerned about my program, sir.”

“Reluctantly, Dr. Howard, I have to say you needn't be. I don't think the Censor will be happy when I tell him that, but you've made your points well. You also might have given me another answer to my question just now, in which case I would have said something different to Censor Jennings.”

Honestly puzzled, Howard asked, “What might I have said?”

“When I asked what you'd do without sims, you might have suggested going on with human defectives.”

The doctor felt his face freeze. “Good day, Mr. Tanaka. Someone, I am certain, will show you out.” He sat down abruptly.

“I understand your reaction, Dr. Howard. As I said, you passed the test nicely. The idea revolts me quite as much as it does you, I assure you. But I had to know.”

“Good day,” Howard repeated, unmollified. Nodding, Tanaka left. Howard was so filled with fury that he did not care whether he had hurt the DRC politically. He did not think he had; Tanaka plainly felt as he did.

He was also, he realized, furious at himself, and took a long while to figure out why. When he did, he wished he hadn't. If there were no sims, who could say what he might do to take a crack at AIDS? And who could say whether he would be able to look at himself in a mirror afterwards? He was not grateful to Tanaka for showing him a part of himself he would sooner have left unseen.

He got very little work done the rest of the day.

The air waggon pulled slowly to a stop outside Terminus. When it was not moving anymore, a steward opened the door. Ken Dixon got his shoulder bag out from under his seat, worked his way up the aisle. “Thanks for breaking the trail for me,” Melody Porter said from behind him.

“My pleasure,” he said, adding “Oof!” a moment later as another passenger stuck an accidental elbow in his belly. He turned his head back toward Melody. “You'll forgive me if I omit the gallant bow.”

“This once,” she said graciously. He snorted.

“Have a pleasant stay in Terminus,” the steward said as Dixon walked by, and then again to Melody.

They walked out of the air waggon's cooled air and into the furious muggy heat of a Terminus August afternoon. “What's the matter?” Melody asked when Dixon suddenly stopped halfway down the descent ladder. In less polite voices, passengers behind them asked the same thing.

“Sorry. My spectacles just steamed up.” Dixon took them off his nose, peered at them in nearsighted wonder, and stuck them in his hip pocket. Holding tightly to the rail, he went carefully down the rest of the ladder.

Once down on the ground, he was relieved to discover that the fog dissipated as his spectacles reached the same sweltering temperature as their surroundings. He put them back on. When they went inside the cooled station building, he let out a blissful sigh.

Melody echoed him, adding, “Philadelphia summer is bad, but this—”

“—Is worse,” he finished. Walking twenty yards had left him covered with a sweaty film. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.

Through the station building's broad sweep of plate glass, he and Melody watched a human boss supervise the gang of sims that was loading baggage from the air waggon onto carts. He shook his head. “The seventeenth century, alive and well in the twentieth,” he said scornfully.

“Well,” someone with an amused voice said at his elbow, “you sound like the chap I'm looking for. Look like him, too,” the young man added.

He looked the way the Philadelphia committee said he should: a tall man with a good many blacks in his ancestry who wore a thick mustache. “You're Patrick?” Dixon asked, as he had been told to do.

“Sorry, no. Stephen's the name,” the fellow said. They nodded at each other. Amateurs' games, Dixon thought, but good enough—he hoped—for the moment. Later—later was another matter. He put it aside.

“Here comes the luggage.” Melody had been watching the sims tossing bags onto the conveyor belt.

They walked over to it. Stephen nudged Dixon. “Is she really the one who's his great-granddaughter?” he whispered, not wanting her to hear.

“Great-great, yeah.”

“Whoa.” The respect in Stephen's voice and eyes was just this side of awe. Dixon's lingering doubts cleared up. No infiltrator could be that impressed over her ancestry.

He and Melody had boarded the air waggon early; their bags, naturally, were among the last ones out, having been buried beneath everyone else's. “So much for efficiency,” Melody sighed when she had hers. Dixon's finally appeared a couple of minutes after that.

“Come on,” Stephen said. He led them to an omnibus with
PEACHTREE STREET
on the destination placard. It roared off, a little more than half full, about ten minutes later. It was, Dixon discovered thankfully, cooled.

Stephen rose from his seat at a stop on Peachtree Street, in the midst of a neighborhood with many more apartment blocks than private houses. Dixon thought himself ready for the blast of heat that would greet him when he got off the omnibus, and was almost right.

“The collegium is over there,” Stephen said, pointing west; Dixon could see a couple of tall buildings over the tops of the apartments. “In this neighborhood, no one will pay any attention to you; everybody will figure you're just a couple of new students here for the start of fall term.”

“Good,” Melody said briskly. She turned around, trying to orient herself. “Where's the DRC from here? That way?”

Stephen gave her a respectful glance. “Yes, northwest of here, maybe three or four miles.”

“Good,” she said again. “We'll be staying with you, I gather, until we get down to business?”

“That's right. People float in and out of my cube all the time; the landlord's used to it. As long as he gets paid on the first of every month and nobody screams too loud, he doesn't care. Half the cubes in his block are like that.” Stephen started walking down the street. “Come on. It's this way.”

Following, Dixon asked, “How alert are they likely to be at the DRC?”

“Not very, I hope. Since the word came down from Philadelphia that this was going to happen, Terminus hasn't heard much from us about justice for sims. We've been quiet, just letting everybody relax and think we've forgotten what we're for.”

“Outstanding,” Dixon said. “If they were alert, either this wouldn't work at all or a lot of people might end up hurt on account of us, which wouldn't do the cause any good.”

“No, Stephen agreed. “But we have made the two connections we'll need most: one in the calc department, the other in food services.”

“The calc department I can see, but why food services?”

Stephen told him why. He grinned. Melody laughed out loud.

Stephen turned off the street, led them into an apartment block and up three flights of stairs. By the time they got to the fourth floor, Dixon was sweating for reasons that had nothing to do with Terminus's climate. “My arms'll be as long as a shimpanse's if I have to carry these bags one more flight,” he complained.

“You don't. We're here.” Stephen had his key out and opened the door to his cube. “Here, this will help.” He turned on the cooler. Nodding gratefully, Dixon set down his bags and shut the door behind him and Melody.

The cube was not big; the luggage Dixon had dropped and the two bedrolls on the floor effectively swallowed the living room. A table covered with what looked like floor plans was shoved into one corner. Melody made a beeline for that. Dixon was content just to stand and rest for a minute.

Stephen handed him a glass of iced coffee. He gulped it down fast enough to make his sinuses hurt. “Thanks,” he said, squeezing his eyes shut to try to make the pain go away.

“No problem.” Stephen's eyes traveled to the bedrolls. He lowered his voice a little. “I don't know what kind of arrangement the two of you have, but I'm not here all the time.”

Dixon looked at Melody, who was engrossed in architectural drawings. “I don't quite know either,” he said, also quietly. “I was sort of hoping this trip would let me find out.”

“Like that, eh? All right. Like I said, I'll be gone a lot. I expect you'll have the chance to learn.”

“Chance to learn what?” Melody looked up from the floor plans, beckoned. “Come over here, the two of you. Stephen, just how much support can we count on from your people here? If we can put folks in a couple of places at the same time, we may actually bring this off. If I read this right, we can get in and out
here
pretty fast.”

They bent over the plans together.

The night guard's footsteps echoed down the quiet hallway. Except for him, it was empty. He was sleepy and bored. He turned a corner. Gray light from the bank of monitors lit the corridor ahead. The night technician was leaning back in his swivel chair, reading a paperback. He looked bored too.

“Hello, Edward,” the guard said. “Slow here tonight.”

“Isn't it, though, Lloyd?” The technician put the book down on his thigh, open, so he could keep his place. “Place is like a morgue when the calcs go haywire—everybody packs it in and goes home early.”

Lloyd nodded, not quite happily. “Getting so no one can think anymore without the damn gadgets to help 'em.” He glanced at the screens. “That's something sims don't have to worry about.”

“Just swive and sleep and eat,” Edward agreed. “It could be worse.” Then, because he was a fair-minded man, he added, “A lot of times it is—especially when the new drugs go thumbs-down.”

“AIDS.” Like everyone else at the DRC, the guard made it a swear word. “How's he doing?”

Having been free of symptoms for eight months now on HIVI, Matt was a being to conjure with in these halls. Everyone worried over him. The technician perfectly understood Lloyd's concern. “He's fine, just worn out from the females again.”