Greg Egan - Quarantine

I head for the reception desk, but there's no need.

'Mr Stavrianos?'

Dr Cheng — the Deputy Medical Director, whom I spoke with briefly on the phone — is already waiting in the lobby, an unusual courtesy, which, politely, deprives me of any chance to poke my unsupervised head around corners. No white coats here; her dress bears an intricate, Escher-like design of interlocking flowers and birds. She guides me through a staff only door and a tight maze of corridors to her office. We sit in padded armchairs, away from her spartan desk.

"Thank you for seeing me at such short notice.'

'Not at all. We're more than happy to cooperate; we're as anxious to find Laura as anyone. But I must say I have no idea what her sister is hoping to achieve by suing us. It's not going to help Laura, is it?'

I make a sympathetic but non-committal noise. Perhaps the sister, or her law firm, is my client — but if so, why all the pointless secrecy? Even if I hadn't barged in here and announced myself to the opposition — and I received no instructions not to — the Hilgemann's lawyers would have taken it for granted that she'd hire an investigator, sooner or later. They would have hired their own, long ago.

'Tell me what you think happened to Laura.'

Dr Cheng frowns. 'I'm sure of one thing: she can't have escaped by herself. Laura couldn't even turn a door handle. Someone took her. Now, we don't run a prison here, but we do take security very seriously. Only a highly skilled, highly resourced professional could have removed her — but on whose behalf, and to what end, I can't imagine. It's getting a bit late for ransom demands, and in any case, her sister isn't well off.'

'Could they have taken the wrong person? Maybe they intended to kidnap another patient — someone whose relatives could raise a worthwhile ransom — and only realized their mistake when it was too late to do anything about it.'

'I suppose that's possible.'

'Any obvious targets? Any patients with particularly wealthy — ' I really can't — '

'No, of course not. Forgive me.' From the look on her face, I'd say she has several candidates in mind — and the last thing in the world she wants is for me to approach their families. I take it you've stepped up security?'

'I'm afraid I can't discuss that either.'

'No. Tell me about Laura, then. Why was she born brain-damaged? What was the cause?'

'We can't be sure.'

'No, but you must have some idea. What are the possibilities? Rubella? Syphilis? AIDS? Maternal drug abuse? Side-effects from a pharmaceutical, or a pesticide, or a food additive…?'

She shakes her head dismissively. 'Almost certainly none of those. Her mother went through standard prenatal health care; she had no major illness, and she wasn't using drugs. And a chemical teratogen or mutagen doesn't really fit in with Laura's condition. Laura has no malformation, no biochemical imbalance, no defective proteins, no histological abnormalities — '

'Then why is she massively retarded?'

'It looks as if certain crucial pathways in the brain, certain systems of neural connections which should have formed at a very early age, failed to appear in Laura's case — and their absence made subsequent normal development impossible. The question is why those early pathways didn't form. As I've said, we can't be sure — but I suspect it was a complex genetic effect, something quite subtle involving the interaction of a number of separate genes, in utero.'

'Couldn't you tell, though, if it was genetic? Couldn't you test her DNA?'

'She has no recognized, catalogued genetic defects, if that's what you mean — which only proves that there are genes crucial to brain development yet to be located.'

'Any family history of the same thing?'

'No, but if several genes are involved, that's not necessarily surprising — the chance of a relative sharing the condition could be quite small.' She frowns. 'I'm sorry, but how is any of this going to help you find her?'

'Well, if a pharmaceutical or a consumer product were the cause, the manufacturers might be safeguarding their interests. It's a long time after the event, I know, but maybe some obscure birth-defects research team is on the verge of publishing the claim that wonder drug X, the miracle antidepressant of the thirties, makes one foetus per hundred thousand turn out like Laura. You must have heard about Holistic Health Products, in the States; six hundred people suffered kidney failure from taking their "energy supplement", so they hired a dozen hit men to start wiping out the victims, faking accidental deaths. Corpses attract much smaller damages verdicts. Okay, kidnapping doesn't seem to make much sense, but who knows? Maybe they needed to study Laura, to extract some kind of information that might eventually help them in court.'

'It all sounds rather paranoid to me.' I shrug. Occupational hazard.'

She laughs. 'Yours, or mine? Anyway, I've told you, I think the cause was inherited.'

'But you can't be positive.'

'No.'

I ask the usual questions about the staff: anyone hired or fired in the last few months, anyone known to have debts or problems, anyone with a grudge? The cops would have been through all of this, but after four weeks of brooding on the disappearance, some trivial matter, not worth mentioning at first, may have come to assume greater significance.

No such luck.

'Can I see her room?'

'Certainly.'

The corridors we pass through have cameras mounted on the ceiling, at ten-metre intervals; I'd guess that any approach to Laura's room is covered by at least seven. Seven data chameleons, though, would not have been beyond the budget of a serious kidnapper; each pinhead-sized robot would have tapped into one camera's signal, memorized the sequence of bits for a single frame while the corridor was empty, then spat it out repeatedly, replacing the real image. There may have been faint patches of high-frequency noise when the fake data was switched in and out — but not enough to leave tell-tale imperfections on a noise-tolerant digital recording. Short of subjecting every last metre of optical fibre to electron microscopy, hunting for the tiny scars where the chameleons intervened, it's impossible to know whether or not such tampering ever took place.

The door — remotely locked and unlocked — would have been just as easy to interfere with.

The room itself is small and sparsely furnished. One wall is painted with a cheerful, glossy mural of flowers and birds; not something I'd care to wake up to, personally, but I can hardly judge how Laura would have felt. There's a single large window by the bed, set solidly into the wall, with no pretence that it was ever designed to be opened. The pane is high-impact plastic; even a bullet wouldn't shatter it, but with the right equipment it could be cut and resealed, leaving no visible seam. I draw my pocket camera and take a snapshot of the window in the polarized light of a laser flash, then I process the image into a false-colour stress map, but the contours are smooth and orderly, betraying no flaws.

The truth is, there's nothing I can do here that the police forensic team would not have done first, and better. The carpet would have been holographed for footprint impressions, then vacuumed for fibres and biological detritus; the bed sheets taken away for analysis; the ground outside the window scoured for microscopic clues. But at least I have the room itself fixed in my mind now; a solid backdrop for any speculations about the night's events.

Dr Cheng escorts me back to the lobby.

'Can I ask you something that has nothing to do with Laura?'

'What?'

'Do you have many patients here with Bubble Fever?' She laughs and shakes her head. 'Not one. Bubble Fever has gone right out of fashion.'