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QUARANTINE

Greg Egan

The right of Greg Egan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

This edition published in Great Britain in 1999 by Millennium An imprint of Victor Gollancz Orion House, 5 Upper St

Martin's Lane, London WC2H 9EA

To receive information on the Millennium list, e-mail us at: smy@orionbooks.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 1 85798 590 7

Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic

PART ONE

Only the most paranoid clients phone me in my sleep.

Of course, nobody wants a sensitive call electronically decoded and flashed up on the screen of an ordinary

videophone; even if the room isn't bugged, radio-frequency spillage from the unscrambled signal can be picked up a

block away. Most people, though, are content with the usual solution: a neural modification enabling the brain to

perform the decoding itself, passing the results directly to the visual and auditory centres. The mod I use,

CypherClerk (NeuroComm, $5,999), also provides a virtual larynx option, for complete two-way security.

However. Even the brain leaks faint electric and magnetic fields. A superconducting detector planted on the scalp, no

bigger than a flake of dandruff, can eavesdrop on the neural data flow involved in an act of ersatz perception, and

translate it almost instantaneously into the corresponding images and sounds.

Hence The Night Switchboard (Axon, $17,999). The nano-machines which carry out this modification can take up to six

weeks to map the user's idiosyncratic schemata -the rules by which meanings are encoded in neural connections - but

once that's done, the intermediary language of the senses can be bypassed completely. What the caller wants you to

know, you know, without any need to hallucinate a talking head spelling it out, and the electromagnetic signature at

skull level is, for all practical purposes, inscrutable. The only catch is, in the conscious state, most people find it

disorienting - and at worst traumatic - to have information crystallizing in their heads without the conventional

preliminaries. So, you have to be asleep to take the call.

No dreams; I simply wake, knowing:

Laura Andrews is thirty-two years old, one hundred

and fifty-six centimetres tall, and weighs forty-five kilograms. Short, straight brown hair; pale blue eyes; a long, thin

nose. Anglo-Irish features and deep black skin; like most Australians, born with insufficient UV protection, she's been

retrofitted with genes for boosted melanin production and a thicker epidermis.

Laura Andrews has severe congenital brain damage; she can walk and eat, clumsily, but she can't communicate in any

fashion, and the experts say that she understands the world little better than a six-month-old child. Since the age of

five, she's been an in-patient at the local Hilgemann Institute.

Four weeks ago, when an orderly unlocked her room to serve breakfast, she was gone. After a search of the building

and grounds, the police were called in. They repeated and extended the search, and conducted a doorknock of the

surrounding area, to no avail. Laura's room bore no signs of forced entry, and recordings from security cameras proved

unenlightening. The police interviewed the staff at length, but nobody broke down and owned up to spiriting the

woman away.

Four weeks later, nothing. No sightings. No corpse. No ransom demands. The police have not officially abandoned the

case - merely deprioritized it, pending further developments.

Further developments are not anticipated.

My task is to find Laura Andrews and return her safely to the Hilgemann - or locate her remains, if she's dead -and to

gather sufficient evidence to ensure that those responsible for her abduction can be prosecuted.

My anonymous client presumes that Laura was kidnapped, but declines to suggest a motive. Right now, my

judgement is suspended. I'm in no state to hold an opinion on the matter; I have a head full of received knowledge,

coloured by my client's perspective, possibly even tainted with lies.

I open my eyes, then drag myself out of bed and over to the terminal in the corner of the room; I make it a policy never

to deal with financial matters in my head. A few

keystrokes confirm that my account has been provisionally credited with a satisfactory down payment; accepting the

deposit will signal to the client that I've taken the case. I pause for a moment to think back over the details of the

assignment, trying to reassure myself that I really do understand it - there's always a hint of dream-logic to these calls,

a faint but implacable suspicion that by morning none of what I've learnt will even make sense -then I authorize the

transaction.

It's a hot night. I step out on to the balcony and look down towards the river. Even at three in the morning, the water is

crowded with pleasure craft of every size, from luminescent sailboards, softly glowing orange or lime green, to

twelve-metre yachts, crisscrossed with spotlight beams brighter than daylight. The three main bridges are thick with

cyclists and pedestrians. To the east, giant holograms of cards, dice and champagne glasses strobe and pirouette

above the casino. Doesn't anyone sleep any more?

I glance up at the empty black sky, and find myself, inexplicably, entranced. There's no moon tonight, no clouds, no

planets, and the featureless darkness refuses to sustain any comforting illusion of scale; I might be staring at infinity,

or the backs of my own eyelids. A wave of nausea passes through me, a contradictory mixture of claustrophobia and a

dizzying sense of The Bubble's inhuman dimensions. I shudder-a single, violent twitch-then the feeling is gone.

A mod-generated hallucination of my dead wife Karen, standing on the balcony beside me, slips an arm around my

waist and says, 'Nick? What is it?' Her touch is cool, and she spreads her fingers wide across my abdomen, like

antennae. I'm on the verge of asking her, by way of explanation, if she ever misses the stars, when I realize how

ludicrously sentimental that would sound, and I stop myself in time.

I shake my head. 'Nothing.'

The grounds of the Hilgemann Institute are as lushly

green as genetic engineering - and brute-force reticulation - can make them, in the middle of a summer when they ought

to be dead and brown. The lawn glistens in the midmorning heat as if fresh with dew, no doubt constantly irrigated

from just beneath the surface, and I trudge down the main access road in the shade of what looks like a kind of maple.

An expensive image to maintain; the rates for frivolous water use, already punitive, are tipped to double in the next few

months. The third Kimberley pipeline, bringing water from dams twenty-five hundred kilometres to the north, is four

hundred per cent over budget so far, and plans for a desalination plant have been shelved, yet again - apparently, a

glut on the ocean minerals market has undermined the project's viability.

The road ends in a circular driveway, enclosing a lavish flower bed in spectacular polychromatic bloom. The trademark

IS gene-tailored hummingbirds hover and dart above the flowers; I pause for a moment to watch them, hoping - in vain

- to witness just one contravene its programming by straying from the circle.

The building itself is all mock-timber; the layout suggests a motel. There are Hilgemann Institutes around the world,

through no fault of anyone called Hilgemann; it's widely known that International Services paid their marketing

consultants a small fortune to come up with the 'optimal' name for their psychiatric hospital division. (Whether public

knowledge of the name's origin spoils the optimization, or is in fact the strongest basis for it, I'm not sure.) IS also runs

medical hospitals, child-care centres, schools, universities, prisons and, recently, several monasteries and convents.

They all look like motels to me.

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.'

º suppose that's possible.'

'Any obvious targets? Any patients with particularly wealthy -' º 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. º 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.'

Because I am in business, and because I might - in theory - give credit, there's a certain amount I can find out about

anyone, with no effort at all.

Martha Andrews is thirty-nine years old, and works as a systems analyst for WestRail. She is divorced, with custody

of her two sons. She has an average income and average debts, and forty-two per cent equity in a cheap two-bedroom

flat. She's been paying the Hilgemann out of a trust fund left by her parents; her father died three years ago, her

mother the year after. She is not worth extorting.

At this stage, the most plausible hypothesis seems to be one of mistaken identity; it doesn't fit well with the

professionalism of the kidnapping, but nobody's perfect. What I need, to take the idea any further, is a list of the

Hilgemann's patients. Details of the staff might also come in handy.

I call my usual hacking service.

The ringing tone seems to reverberate deep within my skull. There's no doubt that NeuroComm's product

psychologists chose these bizarre acoustics to give a strong impression of privacy, but I'm not impressed; it just

makes me feel claustrophobic. At the same time, my external vision fades to black-and-white - supposedly to lessen the

distraction, but in fact it's just one more tedious gimmick.

Bella answers on the fourth ring, as always. Her face seems to hover about a metre away, vivid against reality's greys,

vanishing at the neck as if revealed by some magical spotlight. She smiles coolly. 'Andrew, it's good to see you. What

can I do for you?' 'Andrew' is the name I use for one of my CypherClerk masks. Her own synthetic human visage

might also be nothing but a mask, repeating word for word the speech intentions of an actual person -or it might be a

pure artifact, the interface to anything from a glorified answering machine to a system that actually does ninety-nine

per cent of the hacking itself. I really don't care who or what Bella is; she/he/it/they get results, and that's all that

matters to me.

'The Hilgemann Institute, Perth branch. I want all their patient records, and all their staff records.'

'Back how far?'

'Well. . . thirty years, if it's on line. If the old stuff is archived, and it's going to cost a fortune to get your hands on it,

forget it.'

She nods. 'Two thousand dollars.'

I know better than to try to haggle. 'Fine.'

'Call back in four hours. Your password is "paradigm".'

As the room regains its normal hues, it strikes me that two thousand dollars would be a lot of money to Martha

Andrews - not to mention the fifteen thousand I've already received in advance. Of course, if her lawyers were

confident of a large settlement and a fat contingency fee, fifteen thousand would be nothing to them. Their wish to be

anonymous might be no more sinister than my own use of a pseudonym with Bella; when laws are being broken, it's

nice to have bulkheads against the risk of a conspiracy charge.

Do I talk to Martha? I can't see how it could upset her lawyers, and even if she hired me herself (which can't yet be

ruled out completely; her finances may have hidden depths) then she chose anonymity over the alternative of

explicitly instructing me to keep my distance.

I have no real choice but to act as if I hadn't given a moment's thought to the question of my client's identity -even if

the truth is that, so far, nothing about the case fascinates me more.

Martha looks very much like her sister, with a little more flesh and a lot more worries. On the phone she asked, 'Who

are you working for? The hospital?' When I told her that I wasn't free to disclose my client's name, she seemed to take

that to mean yes. (In fact, it's inconceivable; IS owns a great slab of shares in Pinkerton's Investigations, so the

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