by Jeff Long
But Elise was silent.
Grunting under the weight of their weapons and riot gear, the cops dismounted first and took positions. Like children on a field trip, the scientists filed out of the bus. Several of the elders needed a hand descending the steps. It was early September, and the air was chill up here at eight-thousand feet. They clustered uncertainly, some bundled in wool blankets with the Rancho Encantado logo.
“Good morning,” Cavendish cheerfully greeted no one in particular. His eyes swept across them, a head count. He noticed Abbot. He noticed Golding. He recognized power.
“Ha,” someone tossed back at him. Now that they were on the outside of it, the passengers were shocked by how much punishment the schoolbus had taken.
Cavendish seemed oblivious to the spoliation. “Follow me,” he said. “You’re late. It’s almost time.”
“This better be good,” a woman enunciated loudly.
“Damn good,” another added.
They were rude, Abbot saw, because they were intensely curious and didn’t want to admit it. Also, Cavendish scared them. The group started inside. Cavendish waited while Abbot helped Elise down the steps.
“Still on the mend, Dr. Golding?” Cavendish asked pleasantly. His eyes were cornflower blue. He had long black lashes. Unfortunately the touch of gentle handsomeness exaggerated what was otherwise a pinched mask. Rightly or wrongly, any wonderment looked cruel on his face.
Abbot felt Elise’s hand tense on his arm. “Sorry, Dr. Cavendish,” she replied. “The surgeons got to me in time. You’ll need to wait a few more years for my job.”
“You misunderstand me,” said Cavendish. “The air is thin up here. Newcomers have trouble the first few days.”
“I’m not a newcomer,” she said.
What is going on here? wondered Abbot. This was more than normal bureaucratic friction. Abbot opened his mouth, then decided against meddling. This was Elise’s territory, her rogue employee, their issue. He looked away. The bus driver was spraying the riot cops’ Kevlar armor with window washer fluid and wiping them off with paper towels.
“On the other hand,” said Cavendish, “you haven’t visited in nearly half a year.”
“Which is why I ordered each department to report monthly. And you refused. You’ve drawn a curtain of silence around this project. I don’t like surprises.”
“Yes,” said Cavendish. He refused to wither. He wanted her job, or at least not her oversight. That was evident to Abbot. The man desired a kingdom all his own.
Cavendish led them into the building.
THEY DESCENDED by elevator. The lighted wall panel displayed three floors above the surface, and three below. They went to a fourth level, and there were probably deeper ones. This wouldn’t be the only building with stacked sub-basements, Abbot knew. During the Cold War, Los Alamos had been constructed as just that, multiple Alamos that could withstand a nuclear siege.
The elevator deposited them in a small lobby with red and white tiles. Several doors led off. They entered a positive pressure air lock. The warm inner air blew against Abbot’s face like a tropical breeze. Midway through the air lock, he recognized a simple ultraviolet-ray gate. It bathed each visitor with a low-level wash of radiation to kill external microbes on their clothing and skin.
“The delivery chamber,” said Cavendish. The far door slid open.
It was like emerging beneath the sea. The room was a virtual cavern, thirty feet high, glimmering with aquamarine light. Two of the walls were honeycombed with work stations that had their own sets of ladders and catwalks. A third wall held a row of glassed-off offices, like sky boxes at a stadium. In the center stood a large, spherical aquarium tank of glass ribbed with metal. The air was filled with a rhythmic beating.
“This is the final stage of our artificial womb process,” Cavendish explained. “That sound you hear comes from a fetal heart monitor.”
Immediately Abbot began assembling the clues. He timed the heartbeat, and if it was human, it was not infant. The water was brilliant blue. Synthetic amniotic fluid, he guessed. Three men and a tall woman in no-nonsense swimsuits were adjusting their face masks and scuba gear up on the deck overlooking the water. Something was about to be born.
Golding was flabbergasted. “How did you come by all this?” she demanded. “There was nothing like this in the budget.”
“My scrounger discovered most of it in the other lab buildings,” said Cavendish. “We had some things the other labs wanted. It was a straight exchange. No money involved. No paperwork. It doesn’t appear in the budget.”
“Your scrounger?”
“Acquisitions specialist, if you will. I’ve used him before. He’s knocking around here somewhere, a big fellow, very resourceful. I decided to bring him on board.”
“This isn’t a pirate ship,” said Golding. “Just what is going on here?”
“Making do, Doctor,” Cavendish answered. “Making do.”
An assistant hurried forward with a folded EKG readout marked with pencils and red and blue ink. Cavendish let the folds spill across his lap and the computer console. “We’re in target range,” he declared to Abbot and Golding. “If you’ll join the others, we’re about to begin.”
They crossed a steel-grate bridge and joined the others at viewing stations midway up the aquarium wall. Blue light rippled across Elise’s face. They heard a splash above. One of the divers appeared in a burst of white bubbles and long thighs. “She could be her mother,” said Elise. With a start, Abbot recognized Miranda.
The other divers joined her. They floated in a circle, heads up, waiting. In a minute, a Plexiglas box the size of a small telephone booth was lowered into the water. The divers converged and quickly opened the box to reveal an opaque, veined sac. The sac had a limp coil of cable or cord attached.
Their fins feathering the water, the divers each cradled a side of the sac. They were vigilant of the colored wires leading up to the surface. One was the fetal monitor, Abbot judged, the rest read other vital signs.
Then he saw what lay curled inside the sac. Elise groaned.
Candled by underwater lights, the hunched, curled silhouette almost resembled the Thinker. Anticipation crackled among the scientists. They were looking at a free-floating womb. The organ pulsed.
But to Abbot’s eye, the figure in the sac looked too large. Flexed in its fetal curl, it was easily the size of the divers hovering about. Even the Neandertal infant had been just a quarter this size. Had they created a giant?
“Cavendish!” an outraged voice came from their ranks. “Where are you, by god!”
“Here,” said Cavendish. “I’m still with you.”
They looked up. He had backed onto a small lift and now sat above them beside the tank. His face was lit green by his computer screen. “Thirteen weeks ago, a cloned embryo was implanted in the synthetic womb you now see suspended in our birthing tank.” He spoke swiftly and clearly. No Q & A allowed. He was racing that heartbeat.
Thirteen weeks! thought Abbot. From conception to birth, just three months? Then he thought, Miranda. He remembered her little monster Winston, born in a state of full maturity.
“Our womb represents a revolutionary advance,” Cavendish continued. “The sac is built from nylon for tensile strength and from the embryo’s own DNA. As the fetus grew, so did the womb. The umbilicus is made of embryonic DNA recombined with the genes for spider silk, which allowed for the attachment of a plastic tube. Throughout gestation, nutrients—again, grown from the embryo’s own stem cell material—have been fed through the cord, which was also connected to an ordinary heart machine. That oxygenated the blood and carried away impurities. The fetal environment was maintained at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit.”
His audience was not pleased. “The bastard’s gone and done it,” a man grunted.
“But thirteen weeks?” They were still baffled. It was clearly human, and yet not possibly human.
Cavendish ignored the hubbub. “His birth—it’s a boy, I’
ll spoil the surprise—was timed for your participation. I’m pleased to announce that his time has come.”
“Stop,” a voice shouted. “Stop before you start, by god.” The crowd parted. Sir Benjamin Barnes was a reedy, old Brit supported by a briar-wood cane. One of the fathers of DNA science, he had used his Nobel to create a personal fortune, bed international beauties, and generally sabotage those trying to follow in his footsteps. “This freak show of yours will be our ruin. The rabble, you have no idea….”
Cavendish maintained his Mona Lisa smile. He let the old man finish.
“If you had been properly trained, sir,” Barnes said, “you would know that science is a slow, quiet, cautious thing. It is necessary to give people time to make sense of our discoveries. To digest, you see.”
Cavendish cocked his head, listening to the heartbeat. It was growing faster. It contradicted caution. “No time for that, I’m afraid,” he said. “Unless you mean to kill this innocent being with your virtues.”
Old Barnes rapped his cane against the floor. The rubber tip did not make a sound. “That’s coercion. I object. Strenuously object.”
The heartbeat quickened. “Sir Benjamin votes for death, then,” Cavendish said. “And the rest of you?”
Abbot watched the brinksmanship. He knew the outcome, or thought he did. The child would be born. But not before Cavendish bent them to his will. He was assaulting their hypocrisy. Human cloning was the other shoe waiting to drop. For years people had been pretending the shoe was in a state of zero gravity. They had the technology, the genetic map, the skills…but not the daring.
The band of scientists stood silent. The heart drummed faster over the speakers, urgent, profound. Elise spoke up. “You’ve twisted nature inside out,” she said.
“What’s new?” Cavendish replied. “Include yourselves. It’s what we do.”
“It is precisely what we do not do. That is Sir Benjamin’s point.”
Abbot waited. Would Cavendish shrug? Call them fools? He was smarter than that. “As I learned the story,” he replied evenly, “Prometheus did not ask the gods for permission to borrow fire. He reached out his hand. And he snatched it from them.”
“And was punished for eternity,” Elise reminded him.
“Yes, but he knew the risks. And he took them,” said Cavendish. “And he lit our darkness.”
The fetal monitor beat at them. The figure inside the sac had started to struggle weakly. Floating in the tank of water, Miranda ran her hand over the sides as if to soothe the unborn child.
Elise resisted Cavendish. “Why?” she said.
“To quote the great Oppenheimer,” Cavendish said, “when you see something that’s technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.”
“But what’s the purpose?”
Cavendish shrugged. “Who knows? Someone will find one someday, I’m sure.”
All eyes fixed on Elise. She was Cavendish’s boss. He had surrendered authority to her, but only to force her surrender to him.
“Deliver the poor thing,” she muttered.
“As you wish.” Cavendish gave a single decisive tap at a key on his wheelchair’s computer panel. It was the signal.
One of the divers snipped the colored wires with a pair of scissors. The heartbeat fell silent. In the silence, they heard a distant voice counting down to zero. The wires were drawn up and out of the water.
A scalpel appeared in Miranda’s hand. She made a careful incision. The sac opened. Its contents gushed out in a pinkish plume. The plume obscured their view. The other divers helped open the incision as the scalpel moved. As they peeled away the placental sleeve, more organic debris floated outward. Between the divers and the plume, it was impossible to see the newborn.
Then the clone drifted free. He began to sink like a falling climber, upside down, the umbilical cord trailing like slack rope. Abbot thought the scalpel must have slipped, because a long black stream floated from the head. It wasn’t blood, though, but hair, three or four feet of it.
Miranda kicked hard and dove lower. In slow motion, she opened her arms and caught him from below. His hair settled around her shoulders.
This was no infant. The clone opened his arms and unfolded his legs, and at the end of each limb was a rack of curled, tangled nails. He had a beard. A whole lifetime of hair and nails, Abbot realized. The clone’s body hair was stark black against skin that had never seen the sun.
The other divers joined Miranda, and together, cradling the man between them, they drafted upwards. As they passed the observation windows, the clone suddenly woke to his new world. He opened his eyes. And they were blue. Cornflower blue. “Look!” someone gasped.
Inside her dive mask, even Miranda appeared shocked.
The face was unmistakable. Cavendish had cloned himself. It grew more audacious than that.
The eyes opened wider. The clone turned his head, taking in the surroundings. He noticed the audience of scientists watching from the other side of the glass. A faint smile appeared in his streaming beard.
“Did you see that?” Abbot whispered to Elise.
“Of course, I saw,” she seethed. “He’s doomed us. The genie is out of the bottle now.”
“No, Elise. The smile. He smiled. He recognized us.”
6
Monster
KATHMANDU/BADRIGHOT JAIL
THIRTEEN MONTHS LATER
Like a gargoyle in wirerims, Nathan Lee sat crosslegged in the windowsill with Grace’s storybook in his lap. He’d been at work with it for nearly a year. It was early in the morning. Blue fog lapped against what were left of his toes. Behind him on the floor, three lepers lay dreaming in a huddle.
The palace belonged to me, he neatly printed. At night I listened to my heart beating and the quiet claws of gecko lizards. To the lizards, I was king.
He left a four-inch space for art work. That would come later, maybe an aerial view of an Escher-style maze. Or a naturalist sketch of a gecko. He’d always been pretty fair at drawing. He would give it a thin sepia wash, or gently lay in some water colors with a dry brush. One had to be careful painting on this old rice paper.
I could look down and spy people going about their ordinary lives. He bent close to see the ink on the page. His candle kept flickering in the tin lantern. But no matter how loud I shouted, no one seemed to notice me. No one, until the day a little girl happened to look up at my window.
He loved this hour. He had made a habit of waking first among the prisoners. All too soon the dawn would break wide open. Roosters would screech; dogs would bark. Nine hundred men and boys would fill the yard, muttering prayers and hawking up the taste of night, clamoring, washing, bartering for extra rations of rice or for old Hindi movie magazines or rags of clothing. The noise would stretch into night, the clockwork of volleyballs batting back and forth and chess pieces clicking and lunatics chanting. But for now, his peace held and he could pretend to be alone with his daughter.
Long ago, Badrighot Prison had been a Rana palace. At this hour, in this fog, it was easy to make out the bygone glory. In buildings now occupied by murderers and political prisoners and rapists, rajas once listened to music. From terraces where prisoners now grew small red tomatoes and ginger roots, princes used to fly kites. Monkeys had capered in an arbor that no longer existed. Elephants and peacocks had drunk from a pool with emerald green lotuses. He had discovered all of this and woven it into his storybook.
The former palace had become his escape. Ironically it was escape that had brought him here. Since being jailed fourteen months ago, Nathan Lee had gotten loose three times. He wasn’t very good at it. The longest his freedom had ever lasted was fifteen minutes.
After his third escape, they had transferred him to this medieval compound with its towering brick walls. He’d gotten five years added to his twenty. As an extra punishment, they’d placed him with the lepers. It amounted to a death sentence. It wasn’t the leprosy that concerned Nathan Lee. He knew it was rarely contagious. But the lepers
were regarded as walking dead. They received less food than the other prisoners. Even on a full ration, Nathan Lee knew he would never last a quarter century in this Third World sewer.
The leper asylum stood off by itself and was considered more secure than the other buildings. It was like a box within a box. The guards watched it, but so did the prisoners. Even the untouchables loathed to have lepers mingling with the general population. Like geese, prisoners would cry the alarm if anyone tried to leave the building. The one person lower than them all was their sole Westerner. Their one and only man eater.
Nathan Lee remembered his trial only vaguely, as part of a larger nightmare of interrogation and jail and the horror of his frostbitten toes blackening on the bone. He remembered the pitiless Indian doctor with his scissors more than the judges or lawyers. Apparently some kind of animal had gotten to Rinchen’s body before the authorities did. Gruesome photos were introduced showing the ravaged corpse tangled in Nathan Lee’s pink climbing rope. Once the charge of cannibalism was raised, the American consular officer had quit sitting behind Nathan Lee in the courtroom. The Men’s Journal writer had moved closer.
In a sworn deposition delivered by diplomatic pouch, Professor David Ochs claimed Nathan Lee had tried to throw him, too, off the mountainside. “Monster,” concluded Nepal’s main newspaper, The Rising Sun. “The yeti lives.” The court agreed. Nathan Lee had grown used to the pitter-patter of prisoners spitting on him or flicking stones at his legs. What tore at him was how much Grace might be hearing of it. He could only pray Lydia would spare her.
To his surprise, the lepers were good to him. They doctored and fed him when he developed a fever. They gave him a straw mat and a blanket and a mosquito net belonging to a dead man. Some mornings they would ask grave questions about his dreams. It turned out he wept in his sleep every night.
Once a day, they were allowed to walk around the compound. It was usually the hottest part of the day, or the wettest, or the coldest. Most of the other prisoners retreated inside their own buildings while the lepers staggered and limped around the walking circuit at the foot of the walls. One day he found tusk marks high upon the eastern wall. Though the gouges had been plastered over, they were the ghostly evidence of royal elephants. That was the beginning of his book for Grace.