by Jeff Long
“What is your name?” a man called out.
Nothing in her radiant face conveyed knowledge. She seemed not to register the question. Her peacefulness was startling.
“Why have you come here?” someone asked.
Her mouth opened, but no language came out, only a sound like the beginning of a song. Her innocence stilled them. They listened to her single note of sound. It went on and on.
She raised her arms out to the sides. Something wondrous happened. Wings of color flashed and disappeared as her hands lifted up. Her flesh had become a prism. She faced the sun, and her entire body threw a penumbra of rainbow.
“What kind of creature is this?” someone asked.
Someone might have recognized her, even in her condition, if she were a daughter of this island. As it was, no one in this town had ever met Medea, the fifth wife of Nikos Engatromenos. She was a stranger to them regardless of her flesh.
An old woman in black dared to go forward. Clutching her rosary, she reached out and touched the angel. The strange creature lifted her head and turned blindly in the direction of the old woman. A murmur rifled through the crowd.
The old woman brought her face closer and made her judgement. She knelt. “Evloyite,” she said. Normally it was a greeting reserved only for monks. She said it again. Bless me. Rainbows danced upon the old woman’s black dress.
Devotion overtook the crowd. It was spontaneous. In their collective minds, the woman was nothing less than an angel fallen to earth.
Word spread. Hundreds of people came close to genuflect and reach out to touch her. Those close enough crossed themselves with beads of her sweat. Others tore off bits of their clothing to press to her miraculous flesh.
In the distance, a horn sounded from the sea. The 12:10 ferry from Brinidisi was approaching. Dock workers and merchants and taxi drivers and cafe owners detached from the crowd and hurried to greet the boatload of tourists.
Medea sang to them. She glistened. On foot, with wings of light, the plague had come to meet its messengers.
5
Crossing the Line
NEW MEXICO
SEPTEMBER, FOUR MONTHS LATER
Their yellow schoolbus burst from the mob. Splattered with eggs and blood and neon paintballs, it looked psychedelic, like a time machine from the Age of Aquarius. Abbot glanced around him. Peeking from the windows, some of his fellow passengers could have been flower children with their stringy hair and old jeans. In fact they were international scientists on their way to the Mesa, better known as Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Every seat was filled. There were young and old, rich and poor, weird and plain, each one of them on the cutting edge of their research. From the rear, he saw bleached blond buzz cuts and pierced ears, long hair, bald monk pates, pencil necks, wrestler shoulders, mad scientist frizz, and expensive blow-dried perms, male and female. Some were high-bred cosmopolitans able to navigate the most convoluted dinner conversation. Others were near dumb with introspection and shyness. Some lived by Bach, others by Puff Daddy. Many were university academics or ran labs for the government or private industry. Several had branched out and beached tens of millions with their own biotech start-ups. The majority were biologists, who tended to be more social and grounded than, say, mathematicians or particle theorists. Abbot thought that had to do with their proximity to living beings, regardless of how minuscule. In one form or another, they handled the mortal coil. It kept them from spinning off into surreality.
Abbot was the chief of the National Academy of Sciences. The riot reflected on him. He had orchestrated for them a quiet taste of the Southwest. Rancho Encantado was a resort north of Santa Fe. The Dalai Lama had stayed there once. There was a picture in the lobby of him with a cowboy hat. For the first two days, the scientists had presented papers, showed pictures, and ridden horses. This morning they had risen early and eaten a pancake-and-eggs breakfast, and boarded the bus. And driven straight into that howling gauntlet awaiting them on Highway 40.
There was no questioning the mob’s hatred for the scientists. The demonstrators had let the eggs rot in the sun for days. You could smell the sulfur dioxide on the riot cops hunkered in the aisles and in the well of the bus door. Their ninja-turtle armor dripped with gouts of neon paint and spoiled food, and the scientists leaned away from them. The paint and rotten food were mischief, thought Abbot. But the blood was pure malice. It was human, donated by the pint from radical anarchists. In these times of AIDS and Hep-C, throwing blood was not a statement, it was an act of terrorism.
The newspapers would treat it as one more demonstration against the G.E.s, or genetic engineers. Token peaceniks would decry the random violence, but denounce the evil scientists. The sheriff would stress his restraint, the governor would extend apologies. It was all theatrics. Abbot knew how these things worked. Someone very high up had authorized putting some fear of God into the distinguished members of Genome XXI, the twenty-first symposium of the Human Genome Project.
Abbot mulled over his enemies. There was a vicious Senate battle in progress over budget cuts. The sciences were being treated like parasites. In the name of his creationist constituents, Senator Jimmy Rollins of Kansas was once again frothing at the mouth, a feeble mind, a cheap plagiarist. It could have been the European Union lobby, of course, still trying to block genetically modified “frankenfoods” from their shores. Or the farm unions, working for leverage.
“Stop fretting,” Abbot’s seatmate said. Her name tag read Elise Golding/UC. The “UC” was too humble. In fact the University of California was almost an empire unto itself, including even Los Alamos. Fossilized bubblegum stuck to the wall beside her plaid skirt. She patted his arm. “It’s the times, Paul.”
Her salt-and-pepper hair was bound in a thick ponytail. The low sunlight glinted off the planes of her face. The radiance stripped her face of its crow’s-feet and laugh lines. For a moment she appeared thirty years younger, that same young woman he’d first met, ironically, at a wild stormy protest against the Vietnam War. She had been on the faculty at Cornell, he at MIT. Everyone had been full of daring that day. And night.
“Those weren’t just fundamentalists and anti-abortionists,” he growled. “You saw their signs. All the Luddites were there in force. Greenpeace, Earth First, WAAKE-UP, the animal rights people, the AFLCIO goons. It was a lynch mob.”
“And you provoked it,” she said.
“Good grief, Elise, they just attacked a childrens’ schoolbus.”
“They attacked an idea.”
“Driven by demagogues and talk radio and tabloid nonsense.”
“Admit it, Paul,” she said more quietly. “You’re mad because your plan backfired.”
“What plan,” he said.
“You used us.” Her eyes flashed like grey steel. She had a low tolerance for falseness of any kind. Shenanigans, she called it. It was why he’d placed Miranda under her guidance. Elise was an ethics lesson in motion. “You drew a line in the sand. They crossed it. It’s that simple. Politics. You’re just as guilty as they are. You wanted to make a statement, and it bit you on the ass. It got ugly. Thank goodness no one got hurt. These windows aren’t bulletproof, you know.”
“Now we have to ask the rabble’s permission to do science?” he blustered. “Someone has to take a stand, Elise. It’s not just gen-tech they’re after, you know. All the sciences are under fire. I see it on the editorial pages, in the budget cuts, in the empty classrooms. We’re sliding backwards into the Dark Ages. Next they’ll be burning books. Or us.”
“You want them to love you.”
“Of course not,” he snorted.
She continued. “You do. You want them to feel the spark of discovery and be awed and thank us. And one day, Paul, they will again. Maybe we’ll give them a new energy source. Or a cure for the common cold. Or a vaccine for this Mediterranean thing. These things move in cycles. But you have to accept that for every glorious Apollo moon landing there’s some Galileo upsetting their
apple cart. For every Salk or Curie, there’s a Darwin calling them monkeys. For every Carl Sagan or Stephen Hawking trying to illuminate the masses, there’s a Mengele or Teller giving them nightmares. We’re not in the hugging phase right now, that’s all. And hosting a convention of geneticists in their backyard won’t get you there.”
“Backyard? We’re in the middle of nowhere.”
“You know what I mean. You arranged headlines. You gave that 20/20 woman an interview last week. You could have focused her on the search for this Mediterranean virus, you could have made us heroes. Instead you talked about evolution. What was all that about mutation as God’s plan? And why on earth did you pick a ranch in the desert instead of just housing these people at Los Alamos where it’s secure?”
Just yesterday, Abbot had seen classified reports from the National Security Agency and Homeland Security recommending an immediate three-month shutdown of U.S. borders. He was on the inside of that call. It would be a draconian measure—no air, sea or land travel, no shipping, no business trips back and forth to Paris, no spring breaks in Cancun—and it would have to be done by Presidential directive. Politicians and bureaucrats would stonewall it until doomsday. The economy would plunge. The President was wavering. But the foot-and-mouth epidemic and the mad cow scare in Europe a few years back, and more recently America’s brush with anthrax, were turning out to be handy lessons in rapid response. The President was close to signing the directive. For now, however, there no sense panicking the public. It was agreed at the very top levels, business as usual. Even Elise was out of the loop.
“The Med outbreak is a million miles away to most Americans. Besides the Europeans are handling it. That’s not our story here. It’s a free country, Elise. That’s my point. Science is still part of the world.”
“And to make your point, you put us at risk. We were lucky.”
She had him. In a sense, they were his, each of them, from these biologists to the astronomers and robotics wonks and butterfly chasers and all the other scientists he represented. As the so-called Science Czar, he nurtured them with funding which he enchanted from Congress, corporations, and true believers. He sheltered them with his fixers and spinmeisters and his Mosaic influence. He shaped their research with his master plans. He rewarded them for their genius. Even those from other countries moved within his orbit, ambassadors to his empire. And yes, he did feel guilty about the mob. He was their king, and it was his job to safeguard each and every one of them. Elise was right. They were lucky. Those paintballs could have been bullets.
“I love this hour of the morning,” she suddenly announced, and he glanced at her. She was pretending to look out the window glutinous with egg and spittle. The mob had frightened her. Now she simply wished to get on with the day.
Over the years, Abbot had refined his version of why they had not married back in the beginning, and she had, too. They talked about it sometimes. If only you’d said this or done that, they would say. The bottom line was that they had not married. They had drifted on to other lives, found mates, made families, then lost their mates. Death had taken her Victor just six months ago, and tried to take her, too. The surgeons had repaired her broken heart, but she was still frail. Impulsively Abbot wanted to take her hand in his, to hold it without the excuse of fear or consolation, just to remind them both of what might have been. But he did not. If they were younger and it mattered, perhaps. But neither of them would marry again. That’s how it was.
The bus wound toward the mesa top. They passed through Los Alamos, and its plain buildings and green park could have been anywhere in 1970s Middle America. It was a company town. Their business was simple: Big Science.
The bus stopped at a bridge above a sheer canyon. Traffic normally flowed into the research complex beyond. But this morning, following the demonstration outside Rancho Encantado, heavily armed Pro Force soldiers were ready and waiting. An officer with a clipboard mounted the bus and walked down the aisle to where Abbot and Golding sat. Golding knew right where to sign the paperwork. He said, “Thank you, ma’am,” and started handing out security badges and dosimeters. Soldiers waved the bus through a makeshift barricade. As they crossed the bridge, the air of tension relaxed. The sight of machine guns on hummers was a novelty to many of the scientists. They treated the security badges and radiation tags like tickets to a James Bond theme park.
Occupying some twenty square miles, the laboratory grounds were hived off into technical areas containing research facilities and office buildings. Back in the early ’50s, when Godzilla and the Blob were leaving wakes of fear, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission had been tasked to study mutations caused by ionizing radiation. If they were going to start dropping H-bombs or building nuclear reactors, the government wanted to know the consequences. With time, the Mesa had gotten a makeover of sorts. The Atomic Energy Commission had become the Department of Energy. Los Alamos had come under the administration of the University of California. Genetic research morphed into the Human Genome Project. And now two former peaceniks, Elise Golding and Paul Abbot, were largely in control of the birthplace of the Bomb.
They reached an empty parking lot in front of a newly built structure. ALPHA LABORATORY, read a sign. The bus stopped. A solitary, twisted figure awaited them in a wheelchair. He looked like a broken fighter pilot, his wheelchair a veritable cockpit bristling with gadgets, joysticks, and a built-in computer terminal.
“Cavendish,” one of the passengers hissed.
Someone said, “The dark prince.”
He looked much the way Abbot remembered him at the commission hearings in Washington two and three years ago. No buttons: a turtleneck. Penny loafers. The small chin shaved clean.
The occassion of the first Congressional hearing had been Cavendish’s infamous “meat tree.” Funded by Burger King, working in a private lab in Nebraska, Cavendish had conjured up a herd of headless cows. As a matter of fact, Cavendish’s cows did have heads, but genetically stripped to the basics, a tiny bone casing with a hole for breathing and one for tube feeding. He’d deleted eyes, ears, jaws, and horns, anything superfluous to rudimentary existence. Technically each animal had a brain. The nubbin of a brain stem ensured that the lungs respirated and the food digested.
Until then, no one had ever heard of Edward Cavendish. That changed. Skirting the academic publishing process, he’d released the story directly to the public. His photos had shocked the world. Meat trees, he’d dubbed his creations. He offered a variety of uses and excuses for them. The animals would provide a cheap protein source for the Third World. Housed in factories, they would save the rainforest and return America’s grazing lands to the buffalo. And since his mutant cattle were born into a state of coma, he pointed out, they felt no pain at “harvest.” They had no consciousness, no “animal soul,” meaning even vegans could eat them without qualm.
The pundits quickly jumped on the real underlying issue. If one could create headless cows for harvest, why not headless humans for organ transplants? For a few horrified weeks, Cavendish had dominated international attention, even edging out the latest supertyphoons in Bangladesh and car bombings in Quebec. The supermarket tabloids whipped public hysteria into a froth. Everyone had an opinion, from cowboys predicting the end of family farms to bishops and philosophers damning his twist on nature. All in all, the incident had been a bold, clumsy coming-out party for himself, a one-man show. Congress quickly passed a law against meat trees. But that wasn’t the end of Cavendish.
The second time Abbot met him had been after the Neandertal incident. Using DNA from a frozen dental nerve in a preserved mandible, and “borrowing” a Jersey milk cow for the womb, he had cloned a Neandertal infant. Again his creation shocked the world, and carried an underlying twist. Since H. neandertalis was by strictest definition not H. sapiens, Cavendish had managed to break the taboo against human cloning without technically breaking it. The psychological barrier was crossed. Human cloning had arrived.
A Presidential commission,
chaired by Abbot, had dutifully listened to the moralists and Chicken Littles. During the course of the hearings, Abbot had come to respect Cavendish. The young man’s contempt for timid research sprang from a deep vein of misanthropy. He had smarts and cojones, and the cunning of a young Turk. In certain ways, he was a dead ringer for Abbot himself back before he’d learned the public was not a tool, it was the toolbox.
“I thought he’d been outlawed,” one of the scientists said.
“Censured, not outlawed,” a woman said. “He’s still being allowed to dabble. Here. Subsidized with taxpayer money!”
It was Abbot who had “disappeared” Cavendish into Los Alamos after the Neandertal controversy. Elise despised the man, but accepted Abbot’s reasoning. Science could not afford to lose a mind like Cavendish’s. At the same time, they couldn’t afford to have him running amok in the world at large. At Los Alamos—in theory—his genius could be caged under the watchful scrutiny of his greatest critic, Elise. The problem was she had fifty other projects to oversee, plus budget meetings and a university system to help administer. Her heart attack had effectively halted all oversight. No one was quite sure what Cavendish had been up to for the last six months. An artificial womb was in the making, Abbot knew that much. And Miranda was somehow involved.
He looked for her out his window. As the years caught up with him, Abbot missed his rebel daughter more and more. It was no surprise she had not come out to greet him. Cold, lofty Miranda. The daughter of her cold, lofty father. Elise read his disappointment. “We’ll find her,” she said. “She wants to see you.”
“Don’t pretend,” he said, “please.”
“Take her on her terms,” Elise said. “That would be a start. Be proud of her.”
“You think I’m not?”
“Paul,” she said, “Miranda is not your enemy.”
“What?”