“I just stopped by to say hello to Toby if he happened to be between jobs.”
Manuel’s face, too worn with care for his forty years, had a naturally friendly aspect. Even in this Halloween light, his smile was still engaging, reassuring. As far as I could see, the only luminosity in his eyes was the reflected light from the studio window. Of course, that reflection might mask the same transient flickers of animal eyeshine that I’d seen in Lewis Stevenson.
Orson was reassured enough to ease out of his crouch. But he remained wary.
Manuel exhibited none of Stevenson’s simmering rage or electric energy. As always, his voice was soft and almost musical. “You never did come around to the station after you called.”
I considered my answer and decided to go with the truth. “Yes, I did.”
“So when you phoned me, you were already close,” he guessed.
“Right around the corner. Who’s the bald guy with the earring?”
Manuel mulled over his answer and followed my lead with some truth of his own. “His name’s Carl Scorso.”
“But who is he?”
“A total dirtbag. How far are you going to carry this?”
“Nowhere.”
He was silent, disbelieving.
“It started out a crusade,” I admitted. “But I know when I’m beaten.”
“That sure would be a new Chris Snow.”
“Even if I could contact an outside authority or the media, I don’t understand the situation well enough to convince them of anything.”
“And you have no proof.”
“Nothing substantive. Anyway, I don’t think I’d be allowed to make that contact. If I could get someone to come investigate, I don’t think I or any of my friends would be alive to greet them when they got here.”
Manuel didn’t reply, but his silence was all the answer I needed.
He might still be a baseball fan. He might still like country music, Abbott and Costello. He still understood as much as I did about limitations and still felt the hand of fate as I did. He might even still like me — but he was no longer my friend. If he wouldn’t be sufficiently treacherous to pull the trigger on me himself, he would watch as someone else did.
Sadness pooled in my heart, a greasy despondency that I’d never felt before, akin to nausea. “The entire police department has been co-opted, hasn’t it?”
His smile had faded. He looked tired.
When I saw weariness in him rather than anger, I knew that he was going to tell me more than he should. Riven by guilt, he would not be able to keep all his secrets.
I already suspected that I knew one of the revelations he would make about my mother. I was so loath to hear it that I almost walked away. Almost.
“Yes,” he said. “The entire department.”
“Even you.”
“Oh,
“Are you infected by whatever bug came out of Wyvern?”
“‘Infection’ isn’t quite the word.”
“But close enough.”
“Everyone else in the department has it. But not me. Not that I know. Not yet.”
“So maybe they had no choice. You did.”
“I decided to cooperate because there might be a lot more good that comes from this than bad.”
“From the end of the world?”
“They’re working to undo what’s happened.”
“Working out there at Wyvern, underground somewhere?”
“There and other places, yeah. And if they find a way to combat it…then wonderful things could come from this.”
As he spoke, his gaze moved from me to the studio window.
“Toby,” I said.
Manuel’s eyes shifted to me again.
I said, “This thing, this plague, whatever it is — you’re hoping that if they can bring it under control, they’ll be able to use it to help Toby somehow.”
“You have a selfish interest here, too, Chris.”
From the barn roof, an owl asked its single question of identity five times in quick succession, as if suspicious of everyone in Moonlight Bay.
I took a deep breath and said, “That’s the only reason my mother would work on biological research for military purposes. The only reason. Because there was a very good chance that something would come of it that might cure my XP.”
“And something may still come of it.”
“It was a weapons project?”
“Don’t blame her, Chris. Only a weapons project would have tens of billions of dollars behind it. She’d never have had a chance to do this work for the right reasons. It was just too expensive.”
This was no doubt true. Nothing but a weapons project would have the bottomless resources needed to fund the complex research that my mother’s most profound concepts necessitated.
Wisteria Jane (Milbury) Snow was a theoretical geneticist. This means that she did the heavy thinking while other scientists did the heavy lifting. She didn’t spend much of her time in laboratories or even working in the virtual lab of a computer. Her lab was her mind, and it was extravagantly equipped. She theorized, and with guidance from her, others sought to prove her theories.
I have said that she was brilliant but perhaps not that she was extraordinarily brilliant. Which she was. She could have chosen any university affiliation in the world. They all sought her.
My father loved Ashdon, but he would have followed her where she wished to go. He would have thrived in any academic environment.
She restricted herself to Ashdon because of me. Most of the truly great universities are in either major or midsize cities, where I’d be no more limited by day than I am in Moonlight Bay, but where I’d have no hope of a rich life by night. Cities are bright even after sunset. And the few dark precincts of a city are not places where a young boy on a bicycle could safely go adventuring between dusk and dawn.
She made less of her life in order to make more of mine. She confined herself to a small town, willing to leave her full potential unrealized, to give me a chance at realizing mine.
Tests to determine genetic damage in a fetus were rudimentary when I was born. If the analytic tools had been sufficiently advanced for my XP to have been detected in the weeks following my conception, perhaps she would have chosen not to bring me into the world.
How I love the world in all its beauty and strangeness.
Because of me, however, the world will grow ever stranger in the years to come — and perhaps less beautiful.
If not for me, she would have refused to put her mind to work for the project at Wyvern, would never have led them on new roads of inquiry. And we would not have followed one of those roads to the precipice on which we now stand.
As Orson moved to make room for him, Manuel came to the window. He stared in at his son, and with his face more brightly lit, I could see not a wild light in his eyes but only overwhelming love.
“Enhancing the intelligence of animals,” I said. “How would that have military applications?”
“For one thing, what better spy than a dog as smart as a human being, sent behind enemy lines? An impenetrable disguise. And they don’t check dogs’ passports. What better scout on a battlefield?”
Maybe you engineer an exceptionally powerful dog that’s smart but also savagely vicious when it needs to be. You have a new kind of soldier: a biologically designed killing machine with the capacity for strategizing.
“I thought intelligence depended on brain size.”
He shrugged. “I’m just a cop.”
