Blood Music Read online

  The pizza arrived and he looked down on the cheese and condiments and greasy sausage. “You used to like this stuff,” he said under his breath. He picked at the pizza and finished the salad. That seemed to be enough. Leaving most of his meal on the table, he wiped his mouth, smiled at the young girl behind the cash register, and returned to his car.

  Vergil did not look forward to visits with his mother. He needed them, in some uncertain and irritating way, but he did not enjoy them.

  April Ulam lived in a well-maintained century-old two-story house just off First Street. The house was painted forest green and had a Mansard roof. Two little gardens fenced in with wrought iron flanked the steep front steps—one garden for flowers and herbs, the other for vegetables. The porch was screened-in, with a wood-frame screen door mounted on squeaking hinges and reined in by a complaining steel spring. Entrance to the house proper was through a heavy dark oak door with a beveled-glass window and lion-faced knocker.

  None of these commodities were unexpected when attached to an old house in a small California town. But then his mother appeared, svelte and dressed in flowing lavender silks and high-heeled gold shoes, her raven black hair barely touched with at the temples, coming through the oak door and the screen door and stepping into the sunshine. She greeted Vergil with a reserved hug and led him through the parlor, thin cool fingers lightly gripping his hand.

  In the living room, she sat on a gray velvet chaise lounge, her gown flowing lightly over the sides. The living room suited the house, being furnished with items an elderly woman (not his mother) might have gathered over a long and moderately interesting life. Besides the lounge there was a blue flower-print overstuffed couch, a brass round table with Arabic proverbs stamped in concentric circles around abstract geometries, Tiffany-style lamps in three corners and in the fourth, a decayed Chinese Kwan-Yin statue carved from a seven-foot teak log. His father—simply “Frank” in all conversations—had brought the statue back from Taiwan after a merchant marine tour; it had scared three-year-old Vergil half to death.

  Frank had abandoned both of them in Texas when Vergil was ten. They had then moved to California. His mother had not remarried, saying that would cut down on her options. Vergil was not even certain his mother and father had divorced. He remembered his father as dark, sharp-faced, sharp-voiced, not tolerant and not intelligent, with a thundering laugh brought out for display at moments of perverse anxiety. He could not imagine even now his mother and father going to bed together, much less living together eleven years. He had not missed Frank except in a theoretical way—missing a father, the imagined state of having a rather who could talk to him, help him with homework, be a touch wiser when he was having trouble with being a child. He had always missed having that sort of father.

  “So you’re not working,” April said, surveying her son with what passed for mild concern.

  Vergil had not told his mother about his dismissal and didn’t even question how she knew. She had been much sharper than her husband and still could match wits with her son, usually overmatching in practical or worldly matters.

  He nodded. “Five weeks now.”

  “Any prospects?”

  “Not even looking.”

  “You were let go with prejudice,” she said.

  “Almost with extreme prejudice.”

  She smiled; now the verbal fencing could begin. Her son was very clever, very amusing, whatever his other faults. She was not sorry he had no job; that was simply the state of affairs, and he would either sink, or swim. In the past, despite his difficulties, her son had usually stayed on the surface, with much splashing and poor form, but still, on the surface.

  He hadn’t asked for money from her since leaving home ten years ago.

  “So you come to see what your old mother’s up to.”

  “What’s my old mother up to?”

  “Her neck, as usual,” she said “Six suitors in the past month. It’s a pain being old and not looking it, Verge.”

  Vergil chuckled and shook his head, as he knew she expected. “Any prospects?”

  She scoffed. “Never again. No man could replace Frank, thank God.”

  “They fired me because I was doing experiments on my own,” he said. She nodded and asked if he wanted tea or wine or a beer. “A beer,” he said.

  She indicated the kitchen. “Fridge is unlocked.”

  He picked out a Dos Equis and wiped the condensation on his sleeve as he returned to the living room. He sat in a broad-backed armchair and took a long swallow.

  “They didn’t appreciate your brilliance?”

  He shook his head. “Nobody understands me, Mother.”

  She stared off over his shoulder and sighed. “I never did. Do you expect to be employed again soon?”

  “You already asked that.”

  “I thought maybe rephrasing would bring a better answer.”

  “Answer’s the same if you ask in Swahili. I’m sick of working for somebody else.”

  “My unhappy misfit son.”

  “Mother,” Vergil said, faintly irritated.

  “What were you doing?”

  He gave her a brief outline, of which she understood little but the most salient points. “You were setting up a deal behind their backs, then.”

  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 Möbius strip; his ant farm and Heathkits; his discovery of ten years’ worth of Scientific Americans in a trash can in the alley behind the house.

  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 listening to crickets. “God damn,” he said slowly and expressively. He turned and looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. His chest was splotchy and red from scratching and rubbing. He rotated and peered over his shoulder at his back.

  From shoulder to shoulder, and criss-crossing down his spine, faint pale lines just beneath the surface of his skin drew a crazy and unwelcome road-map. As he watched, the lines slowly faded until he wondered whether they had been there at all.

  Heart pounding heavily in his chest, Vergil sat on the lid of the toilet and stared at his feet, chin in both hands. Now he was really scared.

  He laughed deep in the back of his throat

  “Put the little suckers to work, him?” he asked himself in a whisper.

  “Vergil, are you all right?” his mother asked from the other side of the bathroom door.

  “I’m fine,” he said. Better and better, every day.

  “I will never understand men, as long as I live and breathe,” his mother said, pouring herself another cup of thick black coffee. “Always tinkering, always getting into trouble.”

  “I’m not in trouble, Mother.” He didn’t sound convinced, even to himself.

  “No?”

  He shrugged. “I’m healthy, I can go for a few more months without work—and something’s bound to turn up.”

  “You’re not even looking.”

  That was true enough. “I’m getting over a depression.” And that was an outright lie.

  “Bull,” April said. “You’ve never been depressed in your life. You don’t even know what it means. You should be a woman for a few years and just see for yourself.”

  The morning sun illuminated the filmy curtains covering the kitchen window and filled the kitchen with subdued, cheerful warmth. “Sometimes you act like I’m a brick wall,” Vergil said.

  “Sometimes you are. Hell, Verge, you’re my son. I gave you life—I think we can X out Frank’s contribution—and I watched you grow older for twenty-two years steady. You never did grow up, and you never did get a full deck of sensibilities. You’re a brilliant boy, but you’re just not complete.”

  “And you,” he said, grimacing, “are a deep well of support and understanding.”

  “Don’t rile the old woman, Verge. I understand and sympathize as much as you deserve. You’re in real trouble, aren’t you? This experiment.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t keep harping on that. I’m the scientist, and I’m the only one affected, and so far—” He closed his mouth with an audible snap and crossed his arms. It was all quite insane. The lymphocytes he had injected were beyond any doubt dead or decrepit by now. They had been altered in test-tube conditions, had probably acquired a whole new
set of his to compatibility antigens, and had been attacked and devoured by their unaltered fellows weeks ago. Any other supposition was simply not supported by reason. Last night had simply been a complex allergic reaction. Why he and his mother, of all people, should be discussing the possibility—

  “Verge?”

  “It’s been nice, April, but I think it’s time for me to leave.”

  “How long do you have?”

  He stood and stared at her, shocked. “I’m not dying, Mother.”

  “All his life, my son has been working for his supreme moment. Sounds to me like it’s come, Verge.”

  “That’s crazier than horseshit.”

  “I’ll throw what you’ve told me right back at you, Son. I’m not a genius, but I’m not a brick wall, either. You tell me you’ve made intelligent germs, and I’ll tell you right now…Anyone who’s ever sanitized a toilet or cleaned a diaper pail would cringe at the idea of germs that think. What happens when they fight back, Verge? Tell your old mother that.”

  There was no answer. He wasn’t sure there was even a viable subject in their discussion; nothing made sense. But he could feel his stomach tensing.

  He had performed this ritual before, getting into trouble and then coming to his mother, uneasy and uncertain, not sure precisely what sort of trouble he was in. With uncanny regularity, she had seemed to jump onto a higher plane of reasoning and identify his problems, laying them out for him so they became unavoidable. This was not a service that made him love her any more, but it did make her invaluable to him.

  He stood and reached down to pat her hand, she turned it and gripped his hand in hers. “You’re going now,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “How long do we have, Vergil?”

  “What?” He couldn’t understand it, but his eyes suddenly filled with tears and he began to tremble.

  “Come back to me, if you can,” she said.

  Terrified, he grabbed his suitcase-packed the night before-and ran down the steps to the Volvo, throwing open the trunk and tossing it in. He rounded the car and caught his knee on the rear bumper. Pain surged, then dropped off rapidly. He climbed into the bucket seat and started the engine.