by Jeff Long
“That’s what I’m saying,” she said. “Don’t.”
“Then I might as well leave.” He was testing the limits. Hers, his, he couldn’t say.
“You could,” she said. “Or you could give it a little time.” Her ponytail chased her shoulders.
“There’s not much time out there.”
She stopped. He sidestepped the collision. She threw her hand towards a squat building. “Nirvana. One of our supercomputers. In the old days it stored an HIV database. Now we run code on it with Corfu data. If I had my way, we’d still have the Blue Mountain. But Cavendish took it with him into South Sector. I tried to stop him. It’s four times more powerful. Do you understand what I’m saying? There’s a limit to my power.”
They crossed a bridge named Omega, which spanned a small canyon. Ahead lay the city, no great beauty, but bustling and alive. A white van pulled alongside them. It had black tinted windows, and Nathan Lee saw his own reflection. Miranda didn’t waste a glance on it. After ten seconds, the van drove on.
“Los Alamos used to be a very safe town,” she commented. “Then it grew up.”
Partway across the bridge, the snow began falling. The flakes fell out of a blue sky, and Nathan Lee stopped to let them gather on his palms. The flakes were white and warm. He looked around, and no one seemed to notice.
Miranda came back to him. “Ashes,” she said. Her baseball cap and shoulders were sprinkled with it.
Nathan Lee pinched the ash between his fingers. He smelled the breeze. “A forest fire?” he said.
“Burn day,” she told him.
“Garbage?”
“Medical refuse,” she said. “Intellectual debris. Don’t worry. It can’t hurt you. The incinerators burn hot. Two thousand degrees Fahrenheit, something like that.”
She turned and went on. He brushed his hands clean, and continued the chase.
They entered a large cafeteria perched on the edge of the canyon. The view was five-star; the ambience was pure junior high school. There were boisterous cliques and bookworms jabbing the open page and partners bent over their homework. He saw plates with meatloaf and pan pizza and squares of red jello. There was even a soda machine with Pepsi or Coke, regular or diet. You could forget the rest of the world in here. Maybe that was the idea.
Suddenly he was famished. He didn’t belong here, but all of a sudden he was hungry for this place. The room bulged with sunlight. The chrome surfaces sparkled. The people were at peace.
Even standing still at the end of the line, Miranda was a whirlwind. Everyone seemed to know her. People approached with requests and small emergencies. Her cell phone rang. She gave her attention in short, laser bursts. He tried to guess her age under the cap brim. Late twenties, early thirties? She was necessary to them all somehow. And now she was necessary to him. He was baffled.
She handed him a tray and plowed into the buffet. They took a table away from the noise. Her fingers were polished bright orange from laboratory chemicals. Her cheeseburger disappeared in five bites.
Nathan Lee ate sparingly. His hands trembled. Peas spilled from his fork.
“The clinic can treat your malaria,” she said.
“I’ve got malaria?”
“We’re careful up here. The blood test screens for everything.” The green eyes studied him. “Which jungle did you pick that up in?”
He gave up on the peas. “It started in Kansas. I wondered about that.”
“Kansas?” She thought. “Malaria? Can you remember, did the mosquitos have a tilted resting position? Classic Anopheles.”
“I just slapped the little bastards.”
“Bitches, actually,” she corrected him. “The disease barriers are crashing.” Her eyes drifted away from him.
He noticed, on the wall behind her, a large computerized display of the planet. Red signified plague zones, and blue the untouched land regions. Great ragged holes maimed the South and Northeast. The Pacific Coast states were a single bright red arc. Washington, D.C., was no more. The plague had been so close at his heels?
“I had the map put in here to keep people focused,” she said. “But it only ruined their appetites.”
“I guess so.” Somewhere in that creeping mass of color was his daughter.
“That was for about ten minutes. Then they got over it. Now no one looks up there anymore, except for the office pools. They bet on where the virus will peak next. It’s my fault. I jaded them.”
“How much time is left?” he asked.
“That’s the hundred-dollar question. New strains keep jumping up. It’s difficult.”
“Difficult?” He pulled his attention from the map. Sweat beaded his forehead. He wiped it with a paper napkin. They had everything here. And the best they could come up with was “difficult.” Not that he cared. He had his own needs, starting with Ochs…and a sharp knife. He had the knife now, a steak knife, up his sleeve. That was a start.
“Do you know who we are?” she demanded.
It sounded like a trick question. “The good guys,” he said.
“The greatest concentration of genius in history,” she declared. “Forget the Manhattan Project. Forget the race for the moon. Forget the cancer wars. There’s never been so much intelligence gathered in one place focused on one goal as right here, right now.”
After all the poverty and mean highways, this place did seem different. They were clean and unguarded. Laughter echoed in the sunbeams. For the first time in memory, he didn’t smell rank sweat or fear. Probably not one carried a weapon. They didn’t hunch defensively over their plates. No one wolfed their food…except for this living hurricane across the table. It came to him. They were gods and goddesses in Patagonia shorts, Bolle sunglasses, and, here and there, the inevitable argyle socks. Their eyes were the greatest proof. They were free. Free of looking over their shoulders, of scouring the ground, of measuring their neighbor. They had faraway eyes.
“And I’m losing them,” Miranda stated. “Experiments start, but never finish,” she said. “Labs are mired. Morale is plunging. The research proposals get more bizarre by the day. We’re not scientists anymore, just alchemists. There’s no peer review, no time for tiered testing, no publishing. I have no idea what most of these people are doing anymore. Chasing after white rabbits.”
Worry lines sprang across her forehead, and for a minute she looked very old. But her face could not hold the age. Suddenly he saw through the circles under her eyes and the bowed shoulders. This woman—this mother to a people—was barely more than a teenager. It jarred him.
“We’re falling behind,” she said. “Giving up. I’ve tried everything I know. I even brought in a group of medicine men to purify us. Navajo and Zuni shamen. Nothing works.” She rapped her knuckles on the table.
“People pray for you,” he said.
“What?” She seemed to come awake.
“On my way across America, at their meals, when they say grace, when it’s time to put the kids to bed, they add a little blessing for Los Alamos.”
She frowned. “They shouldn’t do that.”
“It sounds like you can use some extra help.”
“How about you. Do you pray for us?”
“No.”
“Me either,” she said. “We have enough voodoo up here.”
“They’re with you, that’s what I meant.”
His eyes flickered to the doomsday map. Tendrils of plague dangled from Chicago, a crimson man o’war.
“Keep working at that,” she said, pointing at his hamburger. “I have a meeting. I’ll have someone in the office get you settled. Take the afternoon off.”
“I want to thank you,” he started.
“I know,” she said. “You’re much obliged. You owe me a life. Don’t worry, you’ll work it off.”
“You have work for me?”
“I’m going to have to justify you somehow,” she said. “Is it true you were an anthropologist?”
“That was the plan.”
“You looted the Golgotha site?”
Ochs, he thought. No sense fudging it. “Bones. Bits of wood. Metal splinters.”
“And you were a prisoner?” She had him cold.
“Yes.”
“Perfect,” she said, and left.
THEY ISSUED HIM a tiny apartment in the city and gave him a clearance badge for Alpha Lab. Everything else was free to any citizen: food, clothing, a bicycle. His first evening he stood by the window for hours, bewitched, and shy. It was a city of light.
This was Georgia O’Keeffe country. The sunset was fire. On the rooftops of surrounding apartment buildings, families and friends gathered to barbecue, drink microbrews, and watch the close of day. In the far distance, the Sangre de Christo mountains lived up to their name, running bloody with light.
Darkness never truly descended. Los Alamos had patched together its own nuclear power plant with spare parts and surplus plutonium. The city was brighter than an amusement park. The streets were brilliant. Music played on stereos. He left his window open, and the mountain air was cool. Across the way, a young couple danced. It was lovely. At last he drew the curtains and went to sleep.
Miranda woke him at three in the morning. He thought it was a dream. He hadn’t heard a telephone ring in three years. “They found your saddlebags right where you said,” she said. “We’ve had a look. Most of the specimens were worthless. Two or three might have some promise. I thought you might want to see.”
“Tomorrow?” he said.
“Today is tomorrow,” she said.
“You mean right now?”
“Aren’t you curious to see what you begat?”
SHE GAVE HIM a running tour of Alpha Lab’s buried parts. It was, he comprehended, less an introduction to the building and work, than to an idea. They paused at one window, and his saddlebags were in one corner, with the contents of the Smithsonian packet spread out on a work table, cut to pieces, and neatly tagged. They entered a hallway lined with freezers. “Our database.” She opened a big freezer door. Frost poured out like smoke. The thermometer read minus-70 degrees. She took the lid off a Styrofoam packet numbered with magic marker, and hundreds of thin vials of yellow fluid stood nested in holes.
She ran her fingers along the freezers. “Jerusalem,” she said. “Four hundred and twenty-three souls from the first century. Or at least their DNA. Which is the same thing, in a way.”
“These come from the bones?”
“Bones, teeth, hard tissue. Dried blood chips from wood and metal fragments.”
“That’s not possible,” he said. He wasn’t completely unfamiliar with genetic archaeology. “You can only extract DNA from soft tissue. It has to be preserved.”
“You’ve been out of the loop a few years.” She patted his arm condescendingly.
“Stem cells,” he stated. He wanted to sound knowing, or at least not completely benighted. Intellectual pride? he wondered to himself. What pride? Was he trying to impress this woman? He scoffed at himself.
“Stem cells are too primitive for what we’re doing,” she said. “Too generic. They’ll grow into anything you want, and we tried them in the beginning. But what we needed were clones who might be carrying immune responses to the virus. That meant selecting a more developed cell from the samples. Lymphocytes. T-cells. B-cells, C-cells. The whole family. Memory cells.”
“I could have used a few more of those back in grade school,” joked Nathan Lee. He’d forgotten. This was the No Humor zone.
“Wrong kind of memory,” she said. “T-cells memorize immune responses and store them away for a rainy day. Take chicken pox. Over the centuries, our ancestors were exposed to it, and with time they co-evolved with the parasite. A killer gradually became a benign gradeschool disease. Now whenever you’re exposed to chicken pox, your memory cells remember its protein configuration and tell your body to manufacture the exact antivirus to destroy it. The memory cells are like ancient libraries. They hold the secrets of thousands of microbes our ancestors survived.”
Their next stop, or pause, was at the PCR room. Polymerase chain reaction was a method of dividing the double strands of DNA and synthetically creating two helixes from one. The two became four, the four became eight, ad infinitum. Twelve machines the size of pinball machines were quietly at work. Everything was automatic.
He was struck by the blending of the ordinary and high tech. Among the PCR machines and computer screens and electron microscope “towers” lay common household utensils: a teflon spatula, pyrex pans, a baker’s measuring cup, a corkscrew. Yellowed Dilbert and Far Side cartoons were favored wall decor. Pictures of children mingled with out-of-date copies of Nature and Outside.
Miranda led him into a lab and she showed him an unraveled strand of DNA floating in a beaker. “One of your guys,” she said.
“This is from the relics?”
She nodded, staring at the strands. “You wouldn’t believe how empty the human genome is,” she said. “It’s humbling. At the genetic level, we’re practically worms and flies.”
Nathan Lee tried to guess what any of this had to do with him.
“It’s all a matter of executive intelligence,” she said. “The Blind Watchmaker, tinkering at random.”
“God?” he said.
“Chance,” she hastily answered.
She showed him how to twirl the strand around a glass straw like a piece of spaghetti. “Now what happens?” he asked.
“For this little fellow? We’ll stain him with marker dyes and search for mutations and disease genes.”
“Corfu?”
“The memory of it,” she reiterated.
“And then?”
“If he shows promise, bring him through.”
“Through what?”
“This way,” she said.
They gloved and masked before entering a large, hot room murky with humidity and low-lit with blue night lights.
“My brood,” she softly said. “Yours, too.” Her cheekbones were slick and blue.
Then he noticed the big sacs floating in spherical tanks. Each contained a human form, large and heavy. They were growing people in here.
“From the relics?” he said. His mind whirled. They went into the next chamber. Divers floated in a big glass tank. One of the tanks descended into the water. The divers scissored open the sac with the casual precision of butchers.
A human being slid through the incision, his hair and beard gliding in the water like long, black Medusa snakes. His finger and toenails were like pale bony globes. Nathan Lee saw the man open his eyes. He blinked. He opened his arms wide, and his body was feeble. The muscles lacked tone. He had a eunuch’s soft tummy and thin neck. Then the divers were hauling him out of view.
“He’s from an earlier batch. In all we’ve birthed over fifteen hundred of them, usually multiples of the most promising ones. Your three won’t be ready for another thirteen weeks.”
Nathan Lee was stupefied. The great mystery of the place folded into itself. Absurdly, he had tears in his eyes.
“Is it so terrible?” she asked. He didn’t wipe away his tears.
“I don’t know,” he said. He heard watery coughing overhead as the clone took his first breath. Thirteen weeks ago, those lungs had been a tidbit of bone or leather in a vial, locked away for hundreds or thousands of years. Now a living man lay up there!
Out of sight, the clone began yelling and laughing with joy.
Nathan Lee looked up.
“They do that sometimes,” Miranda said. “They seem to remember dying. For them this is the afterlife. Some come out from the tank like him. Others aren’t so pleased.”
Nathan Lee tried to sort his questions. There was so much to ask. Her science tugged at him. It felt like a great temptation.
“What happens now? To him.”
“Testing is another division.” She was emphatic. “Other labs. South Sector.”
The clone’s hilarity echoed. He was babbling away. The language was distinctly not English,
and Nathan Lee couldn’t make out any of the actual words. But on the edge of his linguistic ear he started to recognize a faint, guttural rhythm. “Is that…?” He listened harder.
She was watching him.
He remembered the dusty, sunstruck ruins of Aleppo, and a village in the hills above, a tribe of ancient refugees. “Is he speaking Aramaic?”
“You tell me.”
“I know a few words.” He started for the stairway.
She caught his arm. “We don’t to speak to them.”
“But why?”
“It could endanger our research.”
“I don’t understand.” He felt dizzy. A man from two thousand years ago! A time traveler!
“It has never been important to what we do. It’s safer to treat their speech as nonsense. Mindless babbling.”
“But it’s not nonsense,” said Nathan Lee. “He’s thanking God.”
“I’ve gotten some of them back from South Sector,” she said. “Twenty-three of them so far. Uninfected specimens. Noncarriers. It was difficult. But they’re here, in the floors below. We keep them isolated.”
“What are you doing with them?” he said.
“Keeping them safe.”
“Safe from what?”
She turned her eyes away. “We’re looking for immunity,” she said. “So far we’ve found some who survived an earlier form of the virus. They’re partially immune to this modern outbreak. They can still get infected. But the symptoms don’t manifest in them so quickly. We’ve done computer simulations. They might live another three years before the pathogen kills them.”
“And you have twenty-three of them here?” said Nathan Lee. He couldn’t get over the technology.
“Yes.”
“What about the other fifteen hundred?”
Her green eyes peered at him from between her cap and mask. She didn’t answer him. “We have a Neandertal,” she said. “Totally immune.”
“You cloned a Neandertal!”
“That wasn’t for medical research. It was before Corfu. Anyway, she’s proved the species barrier. Subspecies, to be exact.”
“What does that mean?”
“For some reason, the girl’s naturally resistant. It could be the chemical barriers in her skin or respiratory tract or something in her GI tract. We don’t know. Her resistanace doesn’t transfer to us, though. We know that much. She’s a dead end.”