by Jeff Long
Neandertals! Clones from two thousand years ago! This place was a marvel.
“What am I supposed to be doing?” he said.
“It’s time to take the next step,” she said. “I want you to take a step backward. A step away.”
“Away from what?”
“You’re an anthropologist. They’re a tribe, of sorts.”
“You want me to study them?” That sounded simple enough. He was an archaeologist, not an ethnographer. But why spoil a free meal? Simplicity ruled. Los Alamos was supposed to be a stop on the map. Once he got Ochs to sing, he meant to vanish, no ties, no debts, no regrets.
“No contact,” Miranda answered. “There are cameras in their cells. Just watch and listen. Eavesdrop on their thoughts.”
The clone shouted out. It sounded like “Rebekah”. He was calling for a woman, his wife, perhaps, or daughter. Calling to her from the other side of death. Did he think she would join him?
The cry shook Nathan Lee. The voice closed away. They took the man from the room, off to some lab. In the quiet that followed, a swimming pool net dipped from above, scooping out parts of the fetal sac.
“You want me to make human beings out of your animals,” he said.
“You don’t approve of what we’re doing?” she said.
“Does that change anything?”
She was looking at him. “No one’s sure how much they actually remember,” she said. Probably not all that much. Their previous life has never been our purpose here. But they cry. They shout out. Maybe you can give them a little solace.”
“Solace,” he said.
“We created them.”
“Do they know that?”
“That’s beside the point. It doesn’t matter if they have no idea who we are. You can’t just disown your own children.” She was solemn, as if he were somehow part of her redemption.
19
The Bones Speak
THE BEGINNING OF AUGUST
Nathan Lee entered their world of monsters.
For a week, he did not go down into the so-called Orphanage, their warren of cells in sub-basement Five. Instead he took up residence in the Necro Archives, the human tissues room. It had lapsed into a sloppy grab bag of specimens. He set about organizing the samples, in part to organize his thoughts, but mostly to acquaint himself with the bones in preparation for their living flesh. There were teeth, dried muscle, withered organs in jars, baggies and vials, skulls, fingernails, and long bones numbered with magic marker or red fingernail polish. One of the twenty-three men had been made from silver, so to speak, from a Herod-headed coin speckled with blood flakes.
At last, after six days, Nathan Lee felt ready. He took the elevator down to the Orphanage. Captain Enote led him through the long, silent hallway, and it looked like a death row for robots, all shiny and metal. There were twenty quarantine cells on the right, and twenty on the left. The complex had been built by a contractor whose specialty was super-prisons. Nathan Lee paused by an empty cell, and went in, wanting the feel one more time.
“Familiar?” the Captain asked him from the doorway.
“They never did anything like this to you in Kathmandu,” Nathan Lee said.
There was no life in here, not even an insect. Everything was metal or indestructible plastic. Each cell held a bed, a toilet, and a sink. There was a shower nozzle in the high ceiling, a drain in the floor, and surveillance cameras mounted behind bubbles. Micron screens filtered the air that vented in and out of their rooms. They lived in a sterile state.
Moving on, he peeked through some of the Plexiglas slots at eyelevel, and the prisoners were mostly dozing. They had paper blankets, and no clothes. Once a day the shower nozzle sprayed them with soap and disinfectant. “They can’t see out,” said the Captain. “But they know we’re here. Did Miranda mention, no contact. Observation only.”
Ten times. “Got it,” said Nathan Lee.
On their way to the monitor room, the Captain pointed at door number One at the very end. “You don’t bother with that one,” he said. “Ever.”
The monitor room lit dark and cool. Two guards sat in chairs that could slide back and forth on roller wheels along the banks of screens. Nathan Lee did a quick count. There were eighty screens, two for each cell. Only the screens of the occupied cells were glowing. The Captain went to the pair of screens for Cell One, and turned them off. He introduced Nathan Lee to the guards.
“Mr. Swift wants to get to know the boys,” he said. “He’s cleared to come in here and watch the screens. He can listen on the headphones. You can talk to him. Share the files.” The Captain pointed at the screens for Cell One. “She stays out of it. Clear?”
“Yes sir,” they said.
One of the guards got a chair for Nathan Lee, and made room at the end of the long counter for his yellow notepad. “You want some bean?” he asked, and poured the coffee in a chipped mug.
As he was leaving, the Captain said, “how long did you spend in that Asia jail?”
It was deliberate. The two guards’ ears pricked up. Now they knew a convict was sharing the booth with them, which was fair enough. “Seventeen months,” said Nathan Lee.
“Don’t go try to bust anybody out,” said the Captain.
“No contact,” recited Nathan Lee.
“Let’s see where you get here,” said the Captain, and he left.
Nathan Lee strolled along the bank of monitors, orienting himself. He matched them up to his notes, man by man. On paper, each was a tooth, skull, or bit of wood. On the screen, they were not much more, just bits of humanity worn out by their short lives. Many bore livid surgical scars, which surprised him. What kinds of things had been done to them in South Sector? They acted less like prisoners than patients in a cancer ward. If they moved, it was only slowly. You felt their pain.
“Oh yeah,” said one of the guards. “South Sector’s hell on them.”
“What about him?” Nathan Lee asked. The clone was more scar than skin. He was missing part of an ear. His face looked like a badly sewn baseball.
“The fugitive,” answered the second guard. “He got loose last winter. He hit the razor wire, tangled in it, and just kept fighting. He tore himself free and made it halfway to the Rio Grande. The trackers said it was like following a paint bucket with a hole in it. He just about bled out and froze to death, they say. Finally found him in some cave dwellings down one of the canyons. After that he got rated high risk. None of the researchers wanted to work him no more. So Miranda added him to the collection.”
“How long have they been here?”
“Miranda salvaged the first of them five months ago.”
Each clone had an identification number tattooed on the back of their neck and at the base of their spine. The tradition of naming lab animals, whether they were slugs or chimpanzees, was as old as research. The guards had their own nicknames for the clones: Cueball for a bald fellow; Rutabaga and Cabbage for two catatonic men; Stiff for a clone with priapism; Yessir for the clone with a nervous tic; Johnny Angel for the blue-eyed handsome one.
“Do they talk?”
“Hoot, howl, mumble, scream. One used to sing. He quit.”
“Can I see their files?”
“Help yourself.” A guard pointed at the file cabinets.
Instead of biographies, each had lab reports, much of it classified and blacked out. That was inauspicious. Miranda was right, labs within the Lab treated one another as enemies. On the brink of destruction, the scientists were at cross purposes with their own survival, hiding their work. And yet their experiments and secrets were written on the flesh of their subjects. Some of the clones had survived four or five labs before being delivered back into their maker’s care. Not one had his own real name. Not one displayed a life before this life.
Nathan Lee laid their files in front of their respective screens. Those were now, what was then? He wanted to start from scratch, to erase their numbers, to reach back through the artifact two thousand years.
It was slow, frustrating work. He spent hours waiting for a movement or word on any screen. Their daily cycles were synched around food and the daily soaking. They wanted to dream away their captivity. Nathan Lee understood their torpor. He had done the same until his prison revealed itself as a palace. Restoring the past, he had restored himself.
The guards were interested in his work only because they were bored. When they weren’t too busy playing guitar with a rubber band or making paper clip chains, they might record events while Nathan Lee was gone. An event could be anything: a mumble, a scream…and then, on the third day, a name.
“There,” said Nathan Lee, replaying the tape. He jacked the volume up. “Do you hear it now?” He didn’t speak the name. He wanted to draw the guards into his discovery. He was going to need their help with the observing. But to them, the clones were a bare step up from vegetation. He had to convert them somehow. His father had taught him there was no other way to climb a big mountain. They had to find the spirit themselves.
“Isaiah?” One of the guards frowned.
“Did he really say Isaiah?” whispered his partner. His name badge read Joe. “Like in the Book?”
“Yes,” said Nathan Lee.
They were speechless. The bones could speak. The numbers had names. As Joe pointed out in disbelief, holy names.
“I’ll be back in five minutes,” Nathan Lee told them. “Keep listening for more.”
He raced up to the Necro Archives and rummaged through the drawers, and raced down again. Back in the monitor booth, he laid a heel bone in front of them, and it still had the nail driven through its side. “Isaiah,” he said.
It was a small thing. In a stainless steel cell two thousand years from his home, a nameless man had reminded himself of his own name. But now the guards understood. The Year Zero had just opened its door for anyone who dared to enter.
20
Fire
AUGUST 10
As the chieftans arrived at the Council chamber, they helped themselves to Krispy Kremes and Starbucks blends, the last of the franchises kept alive by soldiers’ wives. Miranda took her seat at the long, oval table with the other lab directors, and they waited for Cavendish, who had summoned them. They had no idea what the urgency was. His office had simply given them twenty minutes to assemble.
Maps and charts were hastily being pinned to the walls. A large video screen glowed blue and empty on one wall. Miranda looked through the window at the Pajarito massif looming to the west, the remains of a vast, ancient volcano upon which other, smaller volcanoes had later boiled up and gone dead. Its geology fit them like a myth, a giant mountain underlying all their smaller mountains, the Lab hiving off smaller labs, the immense energy of their history and science growing cold as stone.
She glanced around the table, and the faces were weary. The hope had leached from their eyes. They didn’t kibbitz or fire jokes or buttonhole one another. They sat and quietly waited like people on a long march resting. The former head of Virus Diseases in WHO’s Geneva headquarters was eating doughnuts beside a wispy Nigerian from England’s Porton Down, once the leading viral diagnostic lab in Europe. The ex-director of the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp sat across from the ex-director of the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Hamburg. A dead ringer for Omar Sharif, from the Aga Khan University in Karachi, was trying to keep his eyes off the bosomy blonde from Johannesburg’s Institute of Medical Research. On the streets you heard French and Hindi and Russian and Chinese, but the lingua franca was American, not English, but American with its slang and fighter-pilot shorthand.
Besides the virus hunters and medical ninja, there was a whole zoo of cloning and bioengineering expertise here: a mouse man, a cow man, a sheep lady, even a snow lion specialist who had spent years in the field shooting the cats with sedative darts and collecting their eggs and sperm to be frozen for the day snow lions no longer existed. Now the endangered species was man.
The door opened. Cavendish appeared, wheeled in by his tall, solemn clone. Cavendish’s gnomelike face seemed more pinched and weary than ever. His illnesses were whittling him down to a twig. Miranda wanted to feel sorry for him, but she knew Cavendish didn’t pity himself. In turn, he didn’t pity anyone else.
A happy, rumpled, dazed-looking man trailed behind. It took Miranda a minute to place him. He was with atmospheric sciences. What was he doing here? The department had become something of an antique. Who needed a five-day forecast anymore, much less the temperature in Timbuktu? Global warming? No one cared.
Cavendish started in on them with his usual bile. “You’re going in circles,” he said. “I see it between the lines in your lab reports. The paths of investigation have bent back upon themselves. It’s not good enough.”
“And a very good morning to you,” someone muttered under his breath.
“But we have made a discovery,” Cavendish continued. “Maybe it means something, maybe not.” He gestured with a finger.
The weather man stepped forward. Behind him, the video screen came alive with satellite images of the earth. Clouds hung like cotton wisps. The planet looked serene. “Bob Maples, meteorology,” he said. He couldn’t quit grinning. “I head the Red Surveillance team.”
Maples clicked a remote control. The earth images switched color. The majestic blue ocean turned mottled with thermal pools. The continental masses loomed dark except for North America, which held pools and veins of red seepage.
“Just to summarize,” Maples said, “Red Surveillance tracks human catabolism on a mass scale.” He had a funeral director’s delicacy. We’re basically a sort of high-tech morgue. We use ASTER technology, Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer instruments built into various satellite platforms to track groupings of gases associated with decomposition. Red is the pseudo-color we keyed on our spectrographs for plumes of ammonia, methane, hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide, and so forth.”
Papers rustled. Throats cleared. They knew all of this. Peering through their satellite lenses, the ASTER specialists had become cartographers of the extinction event, plotting what was literally the last gasp of dead and dying cities. Over the past two years, they had watched the bright red flowers of gas bloom and then fade. Miranda’s plague map was nothing more than a compilation of all the plumes, past and present.
Maples heard their impatience and hurried through a series of beautiful earth shots, cutting to the chase. “For months there have been no measurable death plumes outside of North America,” he said. “All the other continents went dark last March. Overseas, the human die-off is complete. We pretty much quit watching. I mean there was nothing more to look for.” The grin returned. “Then around noon today, purely by accident, one of my people switched the search key. He programmed for heat, anything double the ambient temperature. At the time he was hitchhiking on the European Union weather satellite. Like a number of other unattended satellites, it’s drifted out of orbit, more space junk getting ready to fall from the sky. But the optics are all there, and it happened to be pointing in the right place at the right time. And this is what he found.”
The rapid montage of earth shots changed color. The red flipped to lime green and black. The streaming images slowed to a near halt. Miranda could just make out the dark spur of the Indian subcontinent. Along the bottom margin the videotape identified itself: EUMETSAT, 08/10, 12:04:52 PM MST.” The latitude and longitude were listed. The tape advanced. The clock counter turned to 12:05:09.
“There,” said Maples. “Did you see it?”
“See what?” someone said.
Maples grinned and bobbed his head. He was delighted. “Watch again, here.” He pointed at the arc of the Bay of Bengal. “Calcutta.”
The tape replayed. This time they saw it. A pinprick of light, scarcely a twinkle. Then it was gone.
“Yes?” a woman said.
“Exactly,” said Maples. “At first we wrote it off as a gremlin, a glitch in the hardware. Then we took a second loo
k.”
This time the image was magnified. The tape returned to 12:04:52. Calcutta winked at them. It was like a single faint star in a universe of darkness.
“Fire,” said Maples.
No one moved at the table.
The implications were staggering. They changed everything. No one dared to believe it.
“Impossible,” the WHO head challenged him.
“I know, I know,” Maples bobbed, all teeth, thrilled to be of help at last.
“Again,” someone demanded.
Maples replayed it. He jacked the zoom. There was no mistaking it. A fire had been burning in Calcutta at five minutes after midnight last night.
“A ruptured gas main, nothing more,” a woman remarked.
“That’s what we thought,” said Maples. “It couldn’t be human. Maybe it was a house fire sparked by lightning. Or an explosion caused by an earthquake. There’s all kinds of combustibles out there. A thousand other things it could be besides manmade.” Maples was waving his hands. “So we zoomed the lens. We programmed for 98.6 degrees. Computer enhanced it. And this is what we got.”
The pseudo-green scale magnified. The focus sharpened. The nocturnal image rose up between urban ruins. “Human body heat.”
There was the fire glittering brightly. And then a ghostly figure—the heat signature of a biped—approached the fire. Man, woman or child, it reached a stick into the fire, then withdrew and sat down.
“But there’s no one left out there. The virus passed through there a year ago.” The voice was raspy. Miranda didn’t look to see who was speaking. She couldn’t tear her eyes from the screen.
“Eleven months ago, to be exact,” said Maples. He was ready for them. He hit another button. “September, last year,” he said. The image changed to his Red Surveillance spectrograph. The Indian subcontinent was acid with red plumes. It looked like nuclear weapons going off. The image fast-forwarded. The red plumes stormed north as villages and cities putrefied. The ammonia clouds blossomed brightest above the cities. The great rivers turned arterial red. At last the red tempest faded, then disappeared. The subcontinent returned to peace. “January, this year,” said Maples.