He nodded. “If I could have had a month more, and if Bernard had seen it everything would have been just sweet.” He was seldom evasive with his mother. She was virtually unshockable; tough to keep up with, and even tougher to fool.
“And you wouldn’t be here now, visiting your old, feeble mater.”
“Probably not,” Vergil said, shrugging. “Also, there’s a girl. I mean, a woman.”
“If she lets you call her a girl, she isn’t a woman.”
“She’s pretty independent.” He talked for a while about Candice, about her brazen overtures at the beginning and her gradual domesticating. I’m getting used to having her around. I mean, we’re not living together. We’re on a sort of sabbatical right now, to see how things work out. I’m no prize in the domestic department.” April nodded and asked him to get her a beer. He retrieved an unopened Anchor Steam.
“My fingernails aren’t that tough,” she said.
“Oh.” He returned to the kitchen and uncapped it.
“Now. What did you expect a big brain surgeon like Bernard to do for you?”
“He’s not just a brain surgeon. He’s been interested in AI for years now.”
“AI?”
“Artificial intelligence.”
“Oh.” She smiled radiant understanding. “You’re unemployed,” she said, “maybe in love, no prospects. Gladden your parent’s heart some more. What else is going on?”
“I’m experimenting on myself, I think,” he said.
April’s eyes widened. “How?”
“Well, those cells I changed. I had to smuggle them out by injecting them into my body. And I haven’t had access to a lab or doctor’s office since. By now, I’ll never recover them.”
“Recover them?”
“Separate them from the others. There’s billions of them, Mother.”
“If they’re your own cells, why should you worry?”
“Notice anything different?”
She squinted at him. “You’re not so pale, and you’ve changed to contact lenses.”
“I’m not wearing contacts.”
“Then maybe you’ve changed your habits and aren’t reading in the dark any more.” She shook her head. “I never have understood your interest in all this nonsense.”
Vergil stared at her, dumbfounded. “It’s fascinating,” he said. “And if you can’t see how important it is, then—”
“Don’t get snippy about my peculiar blindness. I admit them, but I don’t go out of my way to change them. Not when I see the world in the shape it’s in today, because of people with your intellectual inclinations. Why every day, over at the Lab, they’re coming up with more and more doomsday—”
“Don’t judge most scientists by me, Mother. I’m not exactly typical. I’m a little more…” He couldn’t find the word and grinned. She returned the grin with the slight smile he had never been able to decipher.
“Mad,” she said.
“Unorthodox,” Vergil corrected.
“I don’t understand what you’re getting at, Vergil What kind of cells are these? Just parts of your blood you’ve been working on?”
“They can think, Mother.”
Again, unshockable, she didn’t react in any way he could perceive. “Together—I mean, all of them, or each one?”
“Each one. Though they tended to group together in the last experiments.”
“Are they friendly?”
Vergil looked up at the ceiling in exasperation. “They’re lymphocytes, Mother. They don’t even live in the same world we do. They can’t be friendly or unfriendly in the way we mean the words. Everything’s chemicals for them.”
“If they can think, then they feel something, at least if my life experience is any good. Unless they’re like Frank. Of course, he didn’t think much, so the comparison is not exact.”
“I never had time to find out what they’re like, or whether they can reason as much as…as their potential.”
“What is their potential?”
“Are you sure you’re understanding this?”
“Do I sound like I’m understanding?”
“Yes. That’s why I’m doubtful. I don’t know what their potential is. It’s very large, though.”
“Verge, there’s always been method to your madness. What did you hope to gain by doing this?”
That stopped him. He despaired of ever communicating on that level—the level of achievement and goals— with his mother. She had never understood his need to accomplish. For her, goals were met by not ruffling the neighbors’ feathers too often. “I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Forget it”
“It’s forgotten. Where shall we eat dinner tonight?”
“Let’s eat Moroccan,” Vergil said.
“Belly dancers it is.”
Of all the things he didn’t understand about April, the real topper was his childhood bedroom. Toys, bed and furniture, posters on the wall, his room had been preserved not as he had left it, but as it had been when he was twelve years old. The books he had read had been pulled out of boxes in the attic and lined up on the shelves of the single bookcase that had once sufficed to hold his library. Paperback and book dub science fiction vied with comics and a small, important cluster of science and electronics books.
Movie posters—no doubt very valuable now—showed Robbie the Robot clutching a much amplified Anne Frances and stalking across a jagged planetscape, Christopher Lee snag-snarling with red eyes, Keir Dullea staring in wonder from his spacesuit helmet.
He had taken those posters down at age nineteen, folded them and stashed them in a drawer. April had put them back up after he left for college.
She had even resurrected his checked hunters-and-hounds bedspread. The bed itself was worn and familiar, seducing him back to a childhood he wasn’t sure he had ever had, much less left behind.
He remembered his pre-adolescence as a time of considerable fear and worry. Fear that he was some kind of sex maniac, that he had been responsible for his father’s exit, worry about measuring up in school. And along with the worry, exaltation. The light-headed and peculiar joy he had felt on half-twisting a strip of paper, pasting the ends together and manufacturing his first Mobius strip; his ant farm and Heathkits; his discovery of ten years’ worth of
In the dark, just as he was on the edge of sleep, his back began to crawl. He scratched abstractedly, then sat up in bed with a whispered curse and curled the hem of his pajama top into a tight roll, drawing it up and down, back and forth with both hands to ease the itch.
He reached up to his face. It felt totally unfamiliar, somebody else’s face-bumps and ridges, nose extended, lips protruding. But with his other hand, it felt normal. He rubbed the fingers of both hands together. The sensations weren’t right One hand was far more sensitive than usual, the other almost numb.
Breathing heavily, Vergil stumbled into the upstairs bathroom and switched on a light His chest itched abominably. The spaces between his toes seemed alive with invisible ants. He hadn’t felt so miserable since he had had chicken pox at eleven, a month before his father’s departure. With the unspeculating concentration of misery, Vergil stripped off his pajamas and crawled into the shower, hoping for relief under cold water.
The water spluttered in a weak stream from the old plumbing and rippled across his head and neck, over his shoulders and back, rivulets snaking down his chest and legs. Both hands were exquisitely, painfully sensitive now, and the water seemed to come in needles, warming and then cooling, burning and then freezing. He held his arms out and the air itself felt bumpy.
He stood under the shower for fifteen minutes, sighing with relief as the irritation subsided, rubbing the offending areas of his skin with his wrists and the backs of his hands until they were angry red. His fingers and palms tingled and the tingling diminished to a low, blood-pumping throb of returning normality.
He emerged and toweled off, then stood naked by the bathroom window, feeling the cool breeze and
