Relic

by Douglas Preston

  The Mbwun riddle was like that. He, Kawakita, had been the only one to suspect it, to see it, and—now—to prove it.

  The whine of the centrifuge began to decrease in pitch, and soon the COMPLETED light began blinking a slow, monotonous red. Kawakita got up, opened the lid, and removed the tubes. The rabbit blood had been divided into its three constituents: clear serum on top, a thin layer of white blood cells in the middle, and a heavy layer of red blood cells at the bottom. He carefully suctioned off the serum, then placed drops of the cells into a series of watchglasses. Finally, he added various reagents and enzymes.

  One of the watchglasses turned purple.

  Kawakita smiled. It had been so simple.

  After Frock and Margo had blundered up to him at the party, his initial skepticism had quickly changed to fascination. He had been on the periphery before, not really paying attention. But practically from the minute he’d hit Riverside Drive that evening—carried along in the stream of countless other hysterical guests who’d rushed from the opening—he began thinking. Then, in [461] the aftermath, he began asking questions. When later he’d heard Frock pronounce the mystery solved, Kawakita’s curiosity had only increased. Perhaps, to be fair, he’d had a little more objective distance than those who’d been inside the Museum that night, fighting the beast in the dark. But whatever the reason, there seemed to be small defects with the solution: little problems, minor contradictions that everyone had missed.

  Everyone except Kawakita.

  He’d always been a very cautious researcher; cautious, yet full of insatiable curiosity. It had helped him in the past: at Oxford, and in his early days at the Museum. And now, it helped him again. His caution had made him build a keystroke capture routine into the Extrapolator. For security reasons, of course—but also to learn what others might use his program for.

  So it was only natural that he’d go back and examine what Frock and Margo had done.

  All he’d had to do was press a few keys, and the program reeled off every question Frock and Margo had asked, every bit of data they had entered, and every result they had obtained.

  That data had pointed him toward the real solution to the Mbwun mystery. It had been there under their noses the whole time, had they known what questions to ask. Kawakita learned to ask the right questions. And along with the answer came a stunning discovery.

  A soft knock sounded at the warehouse door. Kawakita walked down the stairs to the main floor of the warehouse, moving without sound or hesitation through the gloom.

  “Who is it?” he whispered, his voice hoarse.

  “Tony,” said the voice.

  Kawakita effortlessly slid back the iron bar from the door and pulled it open. A figure stepped through.

  “It’s dark in here,” the man said. He was small and wiry, and walked with a distinct roll to his shoulders. He looked around nervously.

  [462] “Keep the lights off,” said Kawakita sharply. “Follow me.”

  They walked to the far end of the warehouse. There, a long table had been set up under dull infrared lamps. The table was covered with drying fibers. At the end of the table was a scale. Kawakita scooped up a small handful of fibers and weighed them, removing several, then dropping a few back on. Then he slid the fibers into a Ziploc bag.

  He looked at his visitor expectantly. The man dug his hand into his pants pocket and extended a wad of crumpled bills. Kawakita counted them: five twenties. He nodded and handed over the small bag. The man grabbed it eagerly, and began to tear open the seam.

  “Not here!” said Kawakita.

  “Sorry,” the man said. He moved toward the door as quickly as the dim light would allow.

  “Try larger amounts,” Kawakita suggested. “Steep it in boiling water, that increases the concentration. I think you’ll find the results very gratifying.”

  The man nodded. “Gratifying,” he said slowly, as if tasting the word.

  “I will have more for you on Tuesday,” Kawakita said.

  “Thank you,” the man whispered, and left. Kawakita closed the door and slid the bolt back in place. It had been a long day, and he felt bone tired, but he was looking forward to nightfall, when the sounds of the city would subside and darkness would cover the land. Night was rapidly becoming his favorite time of the day.

  Once he reconstructed what Frock and Margo had done with his program, everything else fell into place. All he’d needed was to find one of the fibers. But that proved a difficult task. The Secure Area had been painstakingly cleaned, and the crates had been emptied of their artifacts and burned, along with the packing material. The lab where Margo had done the initial work [463] was now spotless, the plant press destroyed. But nobody had remembered to clean out Margo’s handbag, which was notorious throughout the Anthropology Department for its untidiness. Margo herself had thrown it in the Museum incinerator several days after the disaster, as a precaution. But not before Kawakita had found the fiber he needed.

  Despite his other trials, the supreme challenge had been growing the plant from a single fiber. It had taxed all his abilities, his knowledge of botany and genetics. But he was channeling all his ferocious energies into one thing now—thoughts of tenure vanished, a leave of absence taken from the Museum. And he had finally achieved it, not five weeks earlier. He remembered the surge of triumph he felt when the little green node appeared on an agar-covered petri dish. And now he had a large and steady supply growing in the tanks, fully inoculated with the reovirus. The strange reovirus that dated back sixty-five million years.

  It had proven to be a perversely attractive type of lily pad, blooming almost continuously, big deep-purple blossoms with venous appendages and bright yellow stamens. The virus was concentrated in the tough, fibrous stem. He was harvesting two pounds a week, and poised to increase his yield exponentially.

  The Kothoga knew all about this plant, thought Kawakita. What appeared to be a blessing turned out for them to be a curse. They had tried to control its power, but failed. The legend told it best: the devil failed to keep his bargain, and the child of the devil, the Mbwun, had run wild. It had turned on its masters. It could not be controlled.

  But Kawakita would not fail. The rabbit serum tests proved that he would succeed.

  The final piece of the puzzle fell into place when he remembered what that cop, D’Agosta, had mentioned at the going-away party for the FBI agent: that they had found a double-arrow pendant belonging to John [464] Whittlesey in the creature’s lair. Proof, they said, that the monster had killed Whittlesey.

  Proof. What a joke. Proof, rather, that the monster was Whittlesey.

  Kawakita remembered clearly the day everything came together for him. It was an apotheosis, a revelation. It explained everything. The creature, the Museum Beast, He Who Walks On All Fours, was Whittlesey. And the proof lay within his grasp: his extrapolation program. Kawakita had placed human DNA on one side and the reovirus DNA on the other. And then he had asked for the intermediate form.

  The computer gave the creature: He Who Walks On All Fours.

  The reovirus in the plant was astonishing. Chances are, it had existed relatively unchanged since the Mesozoic era. In sufficient quantities, it had the power to induce morphological change of an astonishing nature. Everyone knew that the darkest, most isolated areas of rain forest held undiscovered plants of almost inconceivable importance to science. But Kawakita had already discovered his miracle. By eating the fibers and becoming infected with the reovirus, Whittlesey had turned into Mbwun.

  Mbwun—the word the Kothoga used for the wonderful, terrible plant, and for the creatures those who ate it became. Kawakita could now visualize parts of the Kothoga’s secret religion. The plants were a curse that was simultaneously hated and needed. The creatures kept the enemies of the Kothoga at bay—yet they themselves were a constant threat to their masters. Chances are, the Kothoga only kept one of the creatures around at a time—more than that would be too dangerous. The cult would have centered around the plant
itself, its cultivation and harvesting. The climax of their ceremonials was undoubtedly the induction of a new creature—the force-feeding of the plant to the unwilling human victim. Initially, large quantities of the plant would be needed to ensure sufficient reovirus to effect the bodily change. [465] Once the transformation was complete, the plant need be consumed only in small quantities, supplemented of course by other proteins. But it was critical that the dose be maintained. Otherwise, intense pain, even madness, would result as the body tried to revert. Of course, death would intervene before that happened. And the desperate creature would, if at all possible, find a substitute for the plant—the human hypothalamus being by far the most satisfactory.

  In the close, comforting darkness, listening to the tranquil humming of the aquaria, Kawakita could guess at the drama that had played itself out in the jungle. The Kothoga, laying eyes on a white man for the first time. Whittlesey’s accomplice, Crocker, had no doubt been found first. Perhaps the creature had been old, or enfeebled. Perhaps Crocker had killed the creature with the expedition’s gun as the creature disembowelled him. Or perhaps not. But when the Kothoga found Whittlesey, Kawakita knew there was only one possible outcome.

  He wondered what Whittlesey must have felt: bound, perhaps ceremonially, being force-fed the reovirus from the strange plant he himself had collected just days earlier. Perhaps they brewed him a liquor from the plant’s leaves, or perhaps they simply forced him to eat the dried fibers. They must have attempted to do with this white man what they had failed to do with their own kind: create a monster they could control. A monster that would keep out the road builders and the prospectors and the miners that were poised to invade the tepui from the south and destroy them. A monster that would terrorize the surrounding tribes without terrorizing its masters; that would ensure the security and isolation of the Kothoga forever.

  But then civilization came anyway, with all its terrors. Kawakita imagined the day it happened: the Whittlesey-thing, crouched in the jungle, seeing the fire come falling from the sky, burning the tepui, the Kothoga, the precious plants. He alone escaped. And he alone knew [466] where the life-giving fibers could still be found after the jungle was destroyed: He knew, because he had sent them there.

  Or perhaps Whittlesey was already gone when the tepui was burned. Perhaps the Kothoga had been unable to control, once again, the creature they had created. Maybe Whittlesey, in his pitiful, terrible condition, had set his own agenda, which hadn’t included sticking around as the Kothoga’s avenging angel. Perhaps he’d simply wanted to go home. So he had abandoned the Kothoga, and the Kothoga had been destroyed by progress.

  But, for the most part, Kawakita was indifferent to the anthropological details. He was interested in the power inherent in the plant, and the harnessing of such power.

  You needed to control the source before you could control the creature.

  And that, thought Kawakita, is exactly why I’m going to succeed where the Kothoga failed. He was controlling the source. Only he knew how to grow this difficult and delicate swamp lily from the depths of the Amazon jungle. Only he knew the proper pH of the water, the right temperature, the proper light, the correct mix of nutrients. Only he knew how to inoculate the plant with the reovirus.

  They would be dependent on him. And, with the genetic splicing he had done through the rabbit serum, he’d been able to purify the essential strength of the virus, engineering it to be cleaner while diminishing some of the more unpleasant side effects.

  At least, he was fairly sure he had.

  These were revolutionary discoveries. Everyone knew that viruses inserted their own DNA into the cells of their victim. Normally, that DNA would simply instruct the victim’s cells to make more viruses. That’s what happened in every virus known to man: from the flu to AIDS.

  This virus was different. It inserted a whole array of [467] genes into its victim: reptile genes. Ancient reptile genes; sixty-five-million-year-old genes. Found today in the lowly gecko and a few other species. And it had apparently borrowed primate genes—no doubt human genes—over time, as well. A virus that stole genes from its host, and incorporated those genes into its victims.

  Those genes, instead of making more viruses, remade the victim. Reshaped the victim, bit by bit, into a monster. The viruses instructed the body’s own machinery to change the bone structure, the endocrine system, the limbs and skin and hair and internal organs. It changed the behavior, the weight, speed, and cunning of the victim. Gave the victim uncanny senses of smell and hearing, but diminished its eyesight and voice. Gave it immense power, and bulk, and speed, while leaving its wonderful hominid brain relatively intact. In short, the drug—the virus—turned a human victim into a terrible killing machine. No, the word victim did not fairly describe one infected with the virus. A better word might be symbiont. Because it was a privilege to receive the virus. A gift. A gift from Greg Kawakita.

  It was beautiful. In fact, it was sublime.

  The possibilities for genetic engineering were endless. And already, Kawakita had ideas for improvements. New genes the reovirus could insert into its host. Human genes as well as animal genes. He controlled what genes the reovirus would insert into its host. He controlled what the host would become. Unlike the primitive, superstitious Kothoga, he was in control—through science.

  An interesting side effect of the plant was its narcotic effect: a wonderful, “clean” rush, without the unpleasant down of so many other drugs. Perhaps that was how the plant had originally ensured its own ingestion and, thus, its propagation. But for Kawakita, this side effect had provided cash from which to finance his research. He hadn’t wanted to sell the drug originally, but the financial pressures he’d experienced had made it inevitable. He smiled as he thought of how easy it had been. [468] The drug had already been given a name by the select coterie of eager users: glaze. The market was avid, and Kawakita could sell as much as he could make. Too bad it seemed to go so quickly.

  Night had fallen. Kawakita removed his dark glasses and inhaled the rich fragrance of the warehouse, the subtle odor of the fibers, the smell of water and dust and internal combustion from the ambient air, mingled with mold and sulphur dioxide and a multitude of other smells. His chronic allergies had all but vanished. Must be the clean Long Island air, he thought wryly. He removed his tight shoes and curled his toes with pleasure.

  He had made the most stunning advancement in genetics since the discovery of the double helix. It would have won him a Nobel Prize, he thought with an ironic smile.

  Had he chosen that route.

  But who needed a Nobel Prize, when the whole world was suddenly there for the plucking?

  There came another knock at the door.

  THE END.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Douglas Preston, who worked for several years in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, is the author of the acclaimed nonfiction works DINOSAURS IN THE ATTIC and CITIES OF GOLD, and of the novel JENNIE. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

  Lincoln Child has collected and edited numerous ghost and horror story anthologies, including DARK COMPANY and DARK BANQUET. Formerly a trade editor with St. Martin’s Press in New York, he how lives in Morristown, New Jersey.

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  Lincoln Child

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