Филип Керр - The Second Angel

‘You could give me those figures,’ he suggested. ‘For the new multicursal route design.’

‘I meant...’

‘I know what you meant, Dixy,’ Dallas said gently.

It was his own fault. An indefatigable interest in sex was part of his own mind’s conception of the perfect woman. That Dixy didn’t look more like his wife had as much to do with Aria as it had to do with Dallas. Knowing her husband’s propensity for the abuse of his Motion Parallax program — in this regard, Dallas was in no way atypical — Aria had insisted that her husband should try to visualize someone very different from her for the original DTR recording. She had no wish for the director or any of Dallas’s other colleagues to find her image in such a subservient and occasionally pornographic role. So it was with Aria’s encouragement and complicity that Dixy most resembled an actress from one of the two-dimensional moving picture disc recordings of the early twenty-first century that Dallas collected as a hobby.

Careful of her feelings function, he added, ‘Perhaps later you could show me that trick you learned. The one with the cigar. But right now, I really need those calculations for the MR [30] Multicursal route. Also known as a labyrinth, although strictly speaking, labyrinths can also be unicursal routes. The MR suggests a series of choices between paths. The UR contains only a single path, twisting and turning, but entailing no dead ends or choices between paths. shape — the ones based on Fresnel integrals. And of course the component specifications.’

‘Sure,’ smiled Dixy, for despite her feelings function’s semblance of sensitivity, it was impossible to offend her in any lasting way. ‘Would you like me to display the differential equations on paper, or on the faux fenêtre?’

‘Sur la fenêtre,’ said Dallas.

His undersea view was now replaced by rows of figures. Overnight Dixy had produced a number of equations it would have taken a whole team of engineers months to do manually. Designing Rational Environments within the budgetary and time constraints imposed by Terotechnology clients would not have been possible without an assistant like Dixy. This was the nineteenth blood bank he had designed in as many months — each more sophisticated than the last. But working for a larger client like this one — the Deutsche Siedlungs Blutbank, an Earth-station facility — with a generous budget, meant that Dallas could indulge himself a little with a favorite touch, adding a multicursal route to all the other security management systems he had devised to protect the deep-frozen deposits of Deutsche Siedlungs’ autologous donors. Including an MR was his opportunity to be creative, to do something artistic and imaginative, to surpass himself, for every route he created offered a more bewildering range of choices than the last. It was one of the things for which Dallas was famous and was why many of the clients — keen to outstrip their competitors in the modernity and complexity of their security management systems — came to Terotechnology in the first place.

The MR Dallas was currently working on included a curving corridor where the floor gradually, almost imperceptibly, became the wall, to increase the sense of disorientation experienced by a potential interloper. For despite these Byzantine security precautions, criminals still tried to rob these facilities, even the ones in space, although so far, none had ever succeeded.

‘To set up an optimal corner,’ Dixy was explaining, ‘we require a curve whose curvature increases in a linear way, with arc length. Differential geometry shows us the following equations, which we can immediately solve algebraically.’

Dallas nodded thoughtfully. ‘Is it possible to show me that curve as a parametric plot?’

‘Of course.’ Dixy’s symbolic solutions gave way to a picture of a graph that was more spiral than curve. Dallas realized that it was a spiral he could very easily incorporate within the route’s overall design. And where better to locate the living conditions and essential nutrient supplies for a transgenic [31] During the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, genetic engineers labored to produce scarce medicines from transgenic animal bioreactors, or TABs. This involved the injection of human DNA into the embryos of dairy animals such as sheep, goats, and cows. Mammary tissue from genetically engineered livestock contained cells that produced a therapeutic human protein that flowed through the animal’s secretory channels along with other components in the animal’s milk. What was not known at the time was how human genes in certain genetic manipidations are also able to produce foreign protein in a way that alters surrounding tissue. This was how mutating human/animal genes were able to enter the food chain. Neither was it properly understood how genetically engineered proteins actually functioned in people. After the first TABs were engineered, a whole generation was to pass before these two fundamental misunderstandings were perceived to have resulted in hundreds of human/animal genetic birth defects — transgenic creatures that were half animal and half human. Also known as genetors. — the highly aggressive life-form that Terotech employed as custodians in all their Earth-based Rational Environments.

‘That’s good, Dixy,’ said Dallas. ‘That’s very good indeed. You’ve done well. You can go ahead and incorporate that spiral in the overall design.’

Dixy shot Dallas a flawless smile, delighted to have given her master some satisfaction. Folding her arms across her breasts she walked up and down the floor in front of his desk, tossing her mane of blonde hair from one shoulder to the other, like an excited horse. Dallas became aware of the scent of perfume in the air, puffed through his office air-conditioning by the Motion Parallax reality support sensor.

Dallas breathed deeply through his nose, aware that Dixy’s was no ordinary perfume, but one containing the tiny quantities of the drug that he needed to treat his own genetic predisposition to prostate cancer. The disease had killed Dallas’s own grandfather. Hence, his treatment, based on the modern medical assumption that preventing cancer was the only infallible way of treating it. A predisposition to arthritis and brittle bones on the part of his wife was similarly treated using other prophylactic vomeronasal [32] The vomeronasal organ, or VNO, consists of a tiny pair of dents on either side of the nasal septum. For centuries this organ was thought to have no important function. Today, 90 percent of all prophylactic medicines are administered in this way. drugs. The pity was that Caro’s condition could not be so easily relieved.

There were times in his baby daughter’s life when Dallas despaired of an accurate diagnosis, let alone a cure. That was the trouble with being RES Class One and an autologous donor within Crossover Healthcare: It was very easy to gain the impression of an omnipotent medical system. But just because you weren’t afflicted with P2, like the other 80 percent of the population, didn’t mean that you were going to live forever. There were still plenty of other illnesses to which even someone who was RES Class One could fall victim. Not to mention all the violent crime there was these days. Most of it blood-related. There was even a name for it in the news media: vamping. Hardly a day passed in which New York Today did not carry a story describing how some hapless victim had been murdered and drained of blood, like a lamb slaughtered in an abattoir according to strict religious rules — vamped, the newspapers said — by one of the bestial and sanguinary creatures who made up that wretched section of society known as bad bloods, or the living dead. This sensational modern phenomenon was no ancient superstition, and owed more to the story of Elizabeth Bathory, the so-called Countess Dracula, than it did to the eponymous count. Bathory was a seventeenth-century Hungarian aristocrat who murdered some three hundred girls in order to bathe her aging body in their supposedly rejuvenating blood. For does not the Bible say that the blood is the life? [33] ‘Only be sure that thou eat not the blood: for the blood is the life, and thou mayest not eat the life with the flesh.’ Deuteronomy 12:23. Cf. Deuteronomy 12:16, Genesis 9:4, and Leviticus 17:11.