The Mutagenic Cycle and Other Stories

By James White

Kick off your shoes and kick back with this six-pack of sci-fi cool, chock full of thugs, drugs, femme fatales, and cosmic secrets.

The Mutagenic Cycle...

A thief discovers the drug he stole is more than merely mind-altering, and the designer from whom he stole it more terrible than humanly possible ... love and betrayal clash in a world in which the only escape from slavery is to become inhuman ... one man provides hope to a world devastated by genetic catastrophe.

Other Stories...

A down-on-his-luck journalist interviews a man who may be a god, a kook, or the perfect solution to a life of misery ... a group of intrepid explorers touch the edges of space only to discover ancient terror ... a man discovers disturbing hidden powers behind human motivation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James White
• Release date: Aug 22, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465835857

James White

Dr. James White is Professor of Plant Biology at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA. Dr. White obtained the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Botany and Plant Pathology/Mycology from Auburn University, Alabama, and the Ph.D. in Botany from the University of Texas, Austin in 1987. Dr. White specializes in symbiosis research, particularly endophytic microbes. He is the author of more than 400 articles, and author and editor of reference books on the biology, taxonomy, and phylogeny of microbial endophytes, including Biotechnology of Acremonium Endophytes of Grasses (1994), Microbial Endophytes (2000), The Clavicipitalean Fungi (2004), The Fungal Community: Its Organization and Role in the Ecosystem (2005; 2016), Defensive Mutualism in Microbial Symbiosis (2009) and Seed Endophytes: Biology and Biotechnology (2019). He and students in his lab are exploring diversity of endophytic and biostimulant microbes and the various impacts that they have on host plants.

Book preview

James Michael White

Copyright © 2011

Cover art: The Gods Must Be Crazy

Artwork copyright Fantasio fine Arts / Oliver Wetter - http://fantasio.info

License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the copyright of this author.

NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Yes, that means the author made this stuff up.

Contents

The Mutagenic Cycle

Whiteness

Waiting for Ilsa

June in Dacca

Other Stories

Apeiron, Aziz

I, Like Alice

No More Light

Whiteness

I REMEMBER VEGA with those wings spread out wide against the night, the soundlessness of her fall as snow floated down all around her, and the utter cold of that silence. Forty stories she fell, spinning around and around amid glittering Amsterdam lights, hair flowing like white fire behind her head, feathers so white. She was so sleek in that white dress, that cocktail dress I bought her the day before.

The whiteness of that moment.

The whiteness of her fall.

The whiteness will not leave me.

I sip imported coffee I learned to enjoy in Jakarta and stare out the window of the little Bremen shop where I sit overlooking the Weser river. Early December rain furs the gray water where, centuries ago, Hanseatic League ships used to sail in search of trade. Somewhere out there, perhaps within the cold depths of the Weser itself, lives the once human thing whose products show me whiteness, true whiteness, for the first time.

It's not what you think.

Not a color.

Whiteness is what you become in that moment when you Evolve.

The buxom Fräulein returns to my table with a Krups Kaffee pot and a smile that is incongruous in this city where the natives seem to enjoy scowling at each other as much as at foreigners. She's of the sturdy Nordsee type, with unattractively short blond hair. But a nice smile.

"Nehmen Sie mehr Kaffee?" Her voice is high and full of strange hope. Perhaps the other employees have a bet with her about me: Maybe the thin, strangely shaped and scarred foreigner won't take coffee; maybe he won't eat anything but raw meat; maybe he should be enticed to leave.

"Ja und ein Stück Kuchen, bitte." I point to a picture of chocolate cake prominently featured in the Speisekarte even though my German was perfectly clear. Sometimes folks don't like to let-on that they can understand what a mod says to them. A reaction, I think, to the accent that life in the New World gives you.

The Fräulein fills my cup, says, "Danke sehr," and hurries away.

I'm a sight. I know that. The suit I've worn for the past two days covers the worst of my scars — the places where the horns and spikes went through, the places where the claws caught and the talons ripped. Accelerants fixed those wounds, but the scars remain. Cheap accelerants.

On the Weser, a blue and green tugboat blows its horn at a ship coming down from Bremerhaven. It's a long, low note. A mournful note on this chilly gray day. If I could hold onto that note, follow it wherever it went, into every home and office and shop, down the tiny streets and through passing cars, I would. I'm still looking. Still looking for Her.

There's a big man sitting on a stool by the door. He came in out of the rain a few minutes after I arrived, lit a pipe, and took his time staring, squinting, and frowning at me. He's still staring, this French-looking man with stubbly black facial hair that he's cultivating into a beard. He wears a cheap, dark overcoat, a silver ring on his right pinky, and acts like he's never seen a mod before, much less a burnout like myself. Would he believe I was once Evolved? Would he believe I fought the demon itself and lived — after a fashion — to tell about it? Of course not. No one outside the New World believes.

The pink-cheeked Fräulein returns with my cake and a "Guten Appetit," then scurries away once more. When the door to the kitchen closes, I hear voices. One of them is hers. My now human ears, no longer able to hear what they once could, strain to decipher the whispers. What I hear over and over is Teufel. Devil. As if I am.

Fine upstanding Germans don't like genetic freaks. The European Commonwealth voted to outlaw the new mutagenic drugs that could turn users into a designer's genetic whim. Even Denmark voted in kind. Truth is, I don't like genetic freaks either. Humans covered with fish scales never intrigued me, nor horn-heads, nor ammonia breathers, nor all the other inhabitants of the New World.

I just didn't know that when I started juicing. Change who you are. What you are. Change everything in a moment. The thrill was the only reason. The thrill of whiteness. That and Vega.

She who enticed me.

She who led me to the demon.

American? the Frenchy by the door mutters. He stares from beneath heavily-lidded eyes.

I ignore him, spear off a piece of cake with a polished silver fork, try not to bang the tines into blunt fangs that I filed in a stupid attempt to make myself appear more human. Filed off a little too much. Sensitive damned fangs.

Ugly American, Frenchy says, a little louder this time. You speak English, yes?

I push the cake fragment around the interior of my mouth. My tongue isn't too bad anymore, almost human, though I still slobber if I don't watch it. I stare at Frenchy with crashed eyes. That's what they call them when all the pigment's either gone or stressed. Mine are stressed, which means all of the dozens of colors and configurations I once muted them into have returned. Nothing dominant. Just a mixed-up mess of brown and blue and amber and red and green and gray and yellow and white and purple and black and orange. And so on. My eyes look like a painter's Technicolor dropcloth. They're the dead giveaway that I'm a burnout, even if you don't happen to notice that there's just a little too much hair on my face and the backs of my hands, or that my fingers are one joint too long, or that my ears are subtlely too long.

If you want to fight, I'll kill you. Frenchy takes it without reaction, which means he definitely does want to fight, but he's cool enough to let things take their time. If you want to talk, find someone else.

Frenchy takes his pipe out of his mouth, blows a curling cloud of faintly blue smoke, then eases off his stool. A six footer, solid through the middle, with enormous upper arm and a pudgy face, he is the kind of man who quafs beer by the liter, likes to slap his friends on the back, and enjoys trouncing skinny foreigners. Especially mods. He can't know what I've seen, what I've done, down in the New World. Can't know that I'd rip out his heart and carry it into Hades like Orpheus going after Eurydice. I don't have my talons anymore, but I do have a knife, and I know how to use it. The demon could attest to that.

The dark Turkish woman behind the counter says something to Frenchy. He just shakes his head. She shouts something into the kitchen. The Fräulein exits the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron, and sees Frenchy on his feet, staring at me in an otherwise empty cafe. She stalks toward him and shoots out a stream of forceful, quiet German, using bitte many times. Frenchy shakes his head again, smiles, then clenches his pipe between his teeth and says, Another time.

"Jai yen yen," I reply. Frenchy buttons his coat slowly, oblivious to the Thai warning so popular in the New World, and he keeps his eyes on me during the entire buttoning procedure, then he finally leaves, raising his collar against the rain.

It's been like that ever since I left Indonesia. The rest of the world isn't used to seeing mods. The United States isn't so bad, at least parts of it. L.A. and San Francisco and Miami have mod communities that allow free trade of a limited variety of temporary mutagenics, but even the U.S. fears Evolution.

It's the whiteness of course. The lure of the dream of alteration without consequence. The soothing power of the moment when possibility opens up and all things are accessible. Age, youth, beauty. Change. Most of all, change. Vita nuova. New life.

Truly.

The first time I glimpsed that glorious whiteness was when Vega put a needle in my arm. Juicing the demon's drugs. I was out for ten minutes, floating in whiteness, surrounded by it, embedded in it, warmed by it. Unbound by it. When I came to, I had two-inch claws on the ends of my fingers. Damned sharp. Instant rippers.

Took me two weeks to learn