and handed it to him as he limped out of the refresher and started to dress. Drum grumbled all the way out the door.
‘We’ll keep your portion of the bouillabaisse warm,’ he called.
The once-spacious Bio Labs were now shrunken and crowded. Drum walked through rooms of endless clutter: sagging storage cartons, heaps of broken instruments, and derelict mecks – obsolete and irreparable as the Hive lost the skills of salvage.
‘Hello,’ he called.
‘Back here,’ answered a female voice.
Wandee, the unpolarized, was bent over her bubbling tanks. Drum limped up and watched over her shoulder. She moved her optic probe through the scummy green waters and threw images up on a screen – amorphous blobs.
‘Algae?’ he ventured.
‘No.’ She smiled. ‘A flagellate – only it has no flagella. My Gene Spinner finally identified the flagellar condons and built this creature’s DNA without it.’
‘Synthetic genes – marvellous!’
‘Not really,’ said Wandee, straightening up and wiping her hands. ‘We had a living flagellate to learn from. We’ve been mapping DNA of fresh-water diatoms and algae in an attempt to rebuild marine biota. If we could re-establish the ocean food chain, it would greatly improve the Hive’s standard of living.’
Drum nodded, forgetting the ache in his toe. ‘How close are you? Have you put anything back into salt water?’
She waved towards her workboard – a paste-up of gene charts and photomicrographs. ‘We did find the eye spot – and now the flagella. I have one synthetic creature that will live in seawater, but it must return to fresh water to reproduce.’
Drum’s eyes glowed with excitement. ‘No more TS!’
‘Not just yet.’ Wandee frowned thoughtfully. ‘Spinner has offered numerous “what ifs” and “random associations” – all good theories – but I’d need more personnel and floor space to follow them up. We’re just time-sharing now. I try a couple of likely maps each week, but I know I’m just scratching the surface. There are millions of possible DNA sequences. It would be simple if I had one marine protozoan to map and decode. The big problem is the membrane pumps in the cell wall. Evolution has prepared the freshwater creatures to like their hypotonic environment, and getting them to go back to the sea will take an entirely different set of cell wall genes. That is why we stress classification of sewer biota in the sump region – where waters are a little salty. If you could bring us just one marine—’
Drum’s toe twinged. ‘Here is a bug I found in my boot. Can you tell what it is?’
‘Not marine, I’m sure. Looks like one of the aquatic insects – nymph stage. Let me spread out the parts on Spinner’s stage.’ A genus appeared on the screen immediately,, then several species flickered on and off until Wandee shuffled the parts around. One species printed out.
‘It bit me.’
‘Not serious,’ she said. ‘It has horny mandibles – no barbed mouth parts or poisons.’
‘But my toe really hurts, and it’s all swollen up . . .’
She noticed his limp for the first time. ‘Probably infected. You’ve been on calorie-basic too long. Take off your shoe and come over here. I have a salvaged Medimeck. We can get a quick screen.’
The White Meck lacked most of the expensive appendages, but its basic chassis circuits remained. Coarse splices linked it to Spinner’s What-If-Circuit and Random-Association-Circuit (WIC/RIC) and a brace of memory bins hung high on the wall. Its clouded optic scanned the swollen toe, while the lambda needle sampled a drop of his blood and a drop of the pink serum that exuded from the wound. Spinner’s printout rattled and produced a lengthy report. Wandee studied it and handed it to Drum with a nod: ‘Infection; sewer flora.’
The symbols meant nothing to him.
‘You must have been bitten early in your shift. Exposing the wound to sewage was the worst thing you could have done. Those
‘We’ll keep your portion of the bouillabaisse warm,’ he called.
The once-spacious Bio Labs were now shrunken and crowded. Drum walked through rooms of endless clutter: sagging storage cartons, heaps of broken instruments, and derelict mecks – obsolete and irreparable as the Hive lost the skills of salvage.
‘Hello,’ he called.
‘Back here,’ answered a female voice.
Wandee, the unpolarized, was bent over her bubbling tanks. Drum limped up and watched over her shoulder. She moved her optic probe through the scummy green waters and threw images up on a screen – amorphous blobs.
‘Algae?’ he ventured.
‘No.’ She smiled. ‘A flagellate – only it has no flagella. My Gene Spinner finally identified the flagellar condons and built this creature’s DNA without it.’
‘Synthetic genes – marvellous!’
‘Not really,’ said Wandee, straightening up and wiping her hands. ‘We had a living flagellate to learn from. We’ve been mapping DNA of fresh-water diatoms and algae in an attempt to rebuild marine biota. If we could re-establish the ocean food chain, it would greatly improve the Hive’s standard of living.’
Drum nodded, forgetting the ache in his toe. ‘How close are you? Have you put anything back into salt water?’
She waved towards her workboard – a paste-up of gene charts and photomicrographs. ‘We did find the eye spot – and now the flagella. I have one synthetic creature that will live in seawater, but it must return to fresh water to reproduce.’
Drum’s eyes glowed with excitement. ‘No more TS!’
‘Not just yet.’ Wandee frowned thoughtfully. ‘Spinner has offered numerous “what ifs” and “random associations” – all good theories – but I’d need more personnel and floor space to follow them up. We’re just time-sharing now. I try a couple of likely maps each week, but I know I’m just scratching the surface. There are millions of possible DNA sequences. It would be simple if I had one marine protozoan to map and decode. The big problem is the membrane pumps in the cell wall. Evolution has prepared the freshwater creatures to like their hypotonic environment, and getting them to go back to the sea will take an entirely different set of cell wall genes. That is why we stress classification of sewer biota in the sump region – where waters are a little salty. If you could bring us just one marine—’
Drum’s toe twinged. ‘Here is a bug I found in my boot. Can you tell what it is?’
‘Not marine, I’m sure. Looks like one of the aquatic insects – nymph stage. Let me spread out the parts on Spinner’s stage.’ A genus appeared on the screen immediately,, then several species flickered on and off until Wandee shuffled the parts around. One species printed out.
‘It bit me.’
‘Not serious,’ she said. ‘It has horny mandibles – no barbed mouth parts or poisons.’
‘But my toe really hurts, and it’s all swollen up . . .’
She noticed his limp for the first time. ‘Probably infected. You’ve been on calorie-basic too long. Take off your shoe and come over here. I have a salvaged Medimeck. We can get a quick screen.’
The White Meck lacked most of the expensive appendages, but its basic chassis circuits remained. Coarse splices linked it to Spinner’s What-If-Circuit and Random-Association-Circuit (WIC/RIC) and a brace of memory bins hung high on the wall. Its clouded optic scanned the swollen toe, while the lambda needle sampled a drop of his blood and a drop of the pink serum that exuded from the wound. Spinner’s printout rattled and produced a lengthy report. Wandee studied it and handed it to Drum with a nod: ‘Infection; sewer flora.’
The symbols meant nothing to him.
‘You must have been bitten early in your shift. Exposing the wound to sewage was the worst thing you could have done. Those
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