Greg Bear: Blood Music

In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

Welcome to the SF Gateway.

Each hour, a myriad of trillions of little live things—microbes, bacteria, the peasants of nature—are born and die, not counting for much except in the bulk of their numbers and the accumulation of their tiny lives. They do not perceive deeply, nor do they suffer. A hundred trillion, dying, would not begin to have the same importance as a single human death.

Within the ranks of magnitude of all creatures, small as microbes or great as humans, there is an equality of “elan,” just as the branches of a tall tree, gathered together, equal the bulk of the limbs below, and all the limbs equal the bulk of the trunk.

We believe this as firmly as the kings of France believed in their hierarchy. Which of our generations will come to disagree?

The rectangular slate-black sign stood on a low mound of bright green and clumpy Korean grass, surrounded by irises and sided by a dark, cement-bedded brook filled with koi. Carved into the street side of the sign was the name GENETRON in Times Roman letters of insignia red, and beneath the name the motto, “Where Small Things Make Big Changes.”

The Genetron labs and business offices were housed in a U-shaped, bare concrete Bauhaus structure surrounding a rectangular garden court. The main complex had two levels with open-air walkways. Beyond the courtyard and just behind an artificial hummock of earth, not yet filled in with new greenery, was a four-story black glass-sided cube fenced with electrified razor-wire.

These were the two sides of Genetron; the open labs, where biochip research was conducted, and the defense contracts building, where military applications were investigated.

Security was strict even in the open labs. All employees wore laser-printed badges and non-employee access to the labs was carefully monitored. The management of Genetron—five Stanford graduates who had founded the company just three years out of school—realized that industrial espionage was even more likely than an intelligence breach in the black cube. Yet the outward atmosphere was serene, and every attempt was made to soft-pedal the security measures.

A tall, stoop-shouldered man with unruly black hair untangled himself from the interior of a red Volvo sports car and sneezed twice before crossing the employee parking lot. The grasses were tuning up for an early summer orgy of irritation. He casually greeted Walter, the middle-aged and whippet-wiry guard. Walter just as casually confirmed his badge by running it through the laser reader. “Not much sleep last night, Mr. Ulam?” Walter asked.

Vergil pursed his lips and shook his head. “Parties, Walter.” His eyes were red and his nose was swollen from constant rubbing with the handkerchief that now resided abused and submissive, in his pocket.

“How working men like you can party on a weeknight, I don’t know.”

The ladies demand it, Walter,” Vergil said, passing through. Walter grinned and nodded, though he sincerely doubted Vergil was getting much action, parties or no. Unless standards had severely declined since Walter’s day, nobody with a week’s growth of patchy beard was getting much action.

Ulam was not the most prepossessing figure at Genetron. He stood six feet two inches on very large flat feet. He was twenty-five pounds overweight and at thirty-two years of age, his back hurt him, he had high blood pressure, and he could never shave close enough to eliminate an Emmett Kelly shadow.

His voice seemed designed not to win friends—harsh, slightly grating, tending toward loudness. Two decades in California had smoothed his Texas accent, but when he became excited or angry, the Panhandle asserted itself with an almost painful edge.

His sole distinction was an exquisite pair of emerald green eyes, wide and expressive, defended by a luxurious set of lashes. The eyes were more decorative than functional, however; they were covered by a large pair of black-framed glasses. Vergil was near-sighted.

He ascended the stairs two and three steps at a time, long powerful legs making the concrete and steel steps resound. On the second floor, he walked along the open corridor to the Advanced Biochip Division’s joint equipment room, known as the share lab. His mornings usually began with a check on specimens in one of the five ultra-centrifuges. His most recent batch had been rotating for sixty hours at 200,000 G’s and was now ready for analysis.

For such a large man, Vergil had surprisingly delicate and sensitive hands. He removed an expensive black titanium rotor from the ultracentrifuge and slid shut the steel vacuum seal. Placing the rotor on a workbench, one by one he removed and squinted at the five squat plastic tubes suspended in slings beneath its mushroom-like cap. Several well-defined beige layers had formed in each tube.

Vergil’s heavy black eyebrows arched and drew together behind the thick rims of his glasses. He smiled, revealing teeth spotted brown from a childhood of drinking naturally fluoridated water.

He was about to suction off the buffer solution and the unwanted layers when the lab phone beeped. He placed the tube in a rack and picked up the receiver. “Share lab, Ulam here.”

“Vergil, this is Rita. I saw you come in, but you weren’t in your lab.”

“Home away from home, Rita. What’s up?”

“You asked me—told me—to let you know if a certain gentleman arrived. I think he’s here, Vergil.”

“Michael Bernard?” Vergil asked, his voice rising.

“I think it’s him. But Vergil—”

I’ll be right down.”

“Vergil—”

He hung up and dithered for a moment over the tubes, then left them where they were.