What do I do next? Where do I go from here?
In defeat, she turned, staring at Lymon’s bed, remembering his body against hers. That was twice now that she’d had him in a bed. The first time, she’d been too ridden with fatigue. This time, it had been the horror of her nightmare that had come between them.
“What’s it going to take, Lymon?” She walked into his adjoining bathroom and pulled down her pants. She squatted and relieved herself in his toilet. At the sink, she washed her face, dried on his towel, and used his comb to make order of her ratty hair.
She did a final check in the mirror, wished for a toothbrush, but declined the use of his. Some things just remained inviolately personal.
Her shoes waited at the side of his bed where she’d left them. Steeling herself, she walked out into the hallway. Male voices could be heard from the kitchen
As she approached the arch that separated kitchen from dining room, she hesitated. Yes, that was Rex’s faulty alto. He was saying, “ … I don’t care. It’s got to stop.”
Sheela stepped through the arch and asked, “What does, Rex?” Both men looked up: Rex with distaste, Lymon with worry. Sid was apparently—and probably most wisely—elsewhere.
She passed the stove and counters to where Lymon and Rex sat across from each other at a small table, two cups of coffee between them. Lymon’s was half-empty, Rex’s still full.
“You and Lymon.” Rex gestured with his hands. “I know it’s your life, Sheela, but it’s going to get out.”
“What is?” She crossed her arms, leaning back against the counter.
“I repeat: You and Lymon.”
“What about us.”
“Do I have to spell it out? You’re an adult, sure. You ought to be able to have sex with anyone you want.”
The explosion came from deep in her wounded soul. In a leap she was on him, bending over him, finger jabbing at his face. “We’re not having sex, Rex! I wish to God we were, but we’re not! You got that?”
Rex swallowed hard, trying to back away. “Then, what are you doing here?”
From the corner of her eye she caught the amused expression poorly hidden on Lymon’s face, but centered her hot gaze on Rex’s half-panicked visage. “I’m here because I needed to talk to someone I could trust.” She could see the incomprehension in his eyes, and that, more than anything, defused her. “You just don’t get it, do you?”
“Get what?” he almost squeaked.
She took a deep breath and backed away, met Lymon’s neutral eyes, and shook her head. Turning, she walked to the cabinets and started rummaging from door to door.
“What are you looking for?” Lymon asked.
“Coffee cups.”
“Third from the left.”
She found a cup, walked over to Lymon’s Capresso machine, and pushed the green button until all the lights were flashing. As the machine ground, hissed, and filled her cup, she let herself fume.
When she turned back, Rex had a slightly chastened look on his face. Sheela stalked across, pulled out a third chair, and seated herself. She gave Rex a frosty glance. “What if Lymon and I decide to take our relationship to the next level?”
Rex looked uneasily back and forth. “Sheela, I don’t want to—”
“Just answer the question. What? You’d quit? Out of what? Jealousy? Is that what we’re talking about here? Or would it be insecurity?” She slapped the table. “Damn! Don’t tell me you’re in love with me! Is that it? You couldn’t stand to think of Lymon and me together?”
Rex made a wounded face. “No.”
“Then, what?”
He sighed, lifted his coffee, and sipped. Buying time, no doubt. “Look, you do whatever you want with whomever you want, all right. I’ll keep my nose out of it.”
“Then what’s your problem?”
“Are you going back to work?” Rex said it so hopefully.
Sheela chuckled dryly. “Oh, God, is that it? You’re seeing your cash cow stumble?”
“Look, we’ve had this conversation.”
“I’ll call Felix. Have him nullify our contract. You’re free, Rex. No penalties. I won’t make a fuss.”
Rex stopped short, sputtered, and seemed to have suddenly discovered an upset in his stomach.
“Wait a minute, Sheela, I’m not saying I want out.”
“Then why are you here, and why are we having this conversation?”
Rex closed his eyes, reopened them to glance uneasily at Lymon, and asked, “Do we have to talk about this now?”
Sheela smacked her lips and said, “Yep.”
Lymon was halfway to his feet. “I could—”
She reached out, grasping him by the wrist. “You’re staying.”
Lymon looked slightly uncomfortable as he reseated himself. She decided that she liked that. “You are the two most important men in my life right now. Here’s the word: I’m not doing another movie for a while. I need some time for myself. I have things I need to see to. You are either with me, or against me. Lymon, I already know is with me. Where are you, Rex?”
She knew the look she was giving him; she’d used it with great effect on-screen. Apparently it worked just as well in person. Rex began to squirm.
“With you.”
“Good. You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“Because, Rex, if you’re not, I can still make that call to Felix.”
He nodded, unhappy, but apparently on board. “I know. It’s not necessary.”
She released Lymon’s arm and took a sip of coffee. “Good. I want you to call Dot and make sure that my schedule is cleared for the next month.”
“Cleared for …” Rex began hotly, then caught himself. “Okay, Sheela. What about after that?”
She smiled wearily. “Then I’ll do whatever picture you and Tony can come up with.” That, or, who knew, she might be anything. Even dead.
Christal shoveled food into her mouth as she studied Gregor McEwan. Since taking up her regimen of strenuous exercising, her appetite had grown accordingly. With the revelations given her by Brian Everly, her interest in McEwan had blossomed.
He had brought her to the cafeteria, apparently during the dinner hour because most of the other tables were filled with casually garbed technicians. A group of neatly groomed young men talked and laughed in the back as they bent over one of those little games played with black and white marbles.
“I’m not sure that holding you is such a good idea,” McEwan noted, a thoughtful expression on his angular face. “The cost in food alone is exorbitant.”
“So, let me go,” she countered as she raised a spoonful of bangers and mash.
He lifted an eyebrow. “Not until we can come to some sort of agreement.”
“You know Hank?”
“Who?”
“Hank Abrams. The guy who caught me, along with April and Gretchen.”
He grunted, nodding. “They’re a different part of the team. They work for Neal Gray. He’s in charge of obtaining the samples. Why?”
“Hank said they wanted to make a deal with me. Up to now, no one has given me an incentive. And, Greg, I’ve—”
“Gregor, please. Greg makes my teeth hurt.”
“Gotcha. No dentist on board, huh?” Christal chewed and balanced her spoon. “As I was saying, Gregor, locking me up in that little room where I can only stare at the walls and a round hole of ocean isn’t buttering me up. It’s pissing me off even more than I was pissed off to start with.”
“Christal, I’m sorry, but you’re considered a security risk. Put yourself in our position; would you just let someone with your capabilities wander around loose? To get into what kind of mischief?”
She wiped her mouth with her napkin and attacked the slice of apple pie. A gleam of interest lay behind his eyes. She knew that look, had seen it in men’s eyes since she’d turned twelve.
All right, she’d use any vulnerability she could. She smiled. “Gregor, the point I’m trying to make is tha
t you’re a piss-poor salesman. Sending Hank down to try and bargain didn’t start you off on your best foot. Get my drift?”
He warmed to her smile. “Then, I’m to understand that you’d be reasonable?”
“Sure.” Her fork clattered on the empty plate. The two bodyguards were watching from their seats down the table. “Look, I’m as reasonable as the next person. But let’s lay out the way it is, all right?”
“I’m listening.”
“You guys steal my client’s DNA. April socks me in the gut. Then Gretchen whizzes a slug past my head. Hank and April drug and kidnap me and carry me off to the ZoeGen, where you lock me into a tiny cubicle—enforced solitary confinement, right?”
He gave a slight wince.
Christal pointed a finger at him. “Now I’ve got a shitload to explain to my boss. The LA police, the FBI, my family—everybody’s alerted to my abduction. I can tell you my mother is absolutely frantic by now. In short, this Neal Gray fellow just made a major fuckup.”
“I see your point.”
“Do you?” Christal leaned back. “Gregor, let’s say I want to play ball. Like I said, I’m reasonable. Not only that, I’m ex-FBI. I know the system. I know how deep you guys are in now. As I see it, you’ve got two choices.”
He leaned forward, elbows on the table. “And they are?”
“One, you keep me bottled up in my little room until the Sheik comes to check out his latest prize; then you wrap chain around my neck and throw me overboard to go sightsee on the Titanic. The problem with that is that Christal Anaya has vanished forever, and unlike your missing geneticists, I’ve got powerful friends with money who probably aren’t going to let loose of this thing.”
“And the second option?”
“We come to an agreement.” She shrugged. “It’ll cost you, but I can go back, assure everyone that I had to make a split-second business decision. That I’m sorry for upsetting people, but Genesis Athena made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. I can turn the official wrath so that Lymon Bridges, my previous employer, takes most of the heat. I make amends with my family, buy mom a new car, and apologize for worrying her.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Why would you do this?”
She chuckled, gesturing around. “For the same reason you did. Come on, tell me, Gregor, you were abducted in the beginning, weren’t you?”
He sighed, giving in. “Aye. They came out of the mist one morning when I was dying of a hangover. I was terrified, hauled off at gunpoint, and drugged. Much as you were. It wasn’t until I began to see what they were doing, realized the possibilities …” His eyes had taken on a glow. “Christal, there’s a bloody fortune to be made here! What the twentieth century was to technology, the twenty-first will be for biotech. Imagine being in on the ground floor of a company like General Electric or Microsoft. That’s what Genesis Athena will be. But more, because today we’re talking global, not just national.”
“Okay, but I’m still a little hazy on how this all works.”
He grinned arrogantly. “All right, think of it like this: We have nearly six billion people in the world, but they’re still people. They have the same old human desires for health, family, and security. People will pay to obtain those things.”
“And Genesis Athena can guarantee security?”
“Maybe not complete security, but security from illness, from birth defects, augmented immune systems, resistance to certain diseases”—he grinned—“the return of a dead loved one.”
She frowned at that.
“Oh, come on, Christal! Think about it. The greatest single tragedy in human history is that of the lost child—the young adult taken before their time. Society as a whole can bemoan the notion of cloning a dead infant. It’s a different story when it’s your infant, whom you loved and cherished, whom you would give your very life, your soul, to bring back.”
“Maybe for some.”
“Maybe for all, once the notion gets around.” Gregor waved it away. “Part of the resistance to the idea of creating life out of someone’s cellular DNA is that it’s still too new, reeking of the impossible. Of black magic, if you will.”
“And it’s not?”
“Heavens, no!” Gregor leaned forward again. “We’re not talking wacko Raelians here. It’s the future, Christal. It’s adaptive. Look ahead into the next hundred years. As the population continues to grow, life will become ever more competitive. We’re nearing a cap on our global resources. Maximizing productivity, knowledge, and redistribution of resources is the key to long-term survival. I’m not just talking at the individual level, but at the corporate, governmental, national, and international levels. It’s a matter of positioning, of pooling talent and employing it.”
“To do what?”
“Let’s say a country pours fifteen percent of its GDP into health in the prevention of contagious diseases, for degenerative and metabolic disorders, treatment of alcoholism and genetic disorders, not to mention care for the aged and infirm. For the sake of argument, we’ll give our government an annual budget of one hundred billion. That being the case, fifteen billion is going to health care.”
“Uh-huh. So what can Genesis Athena do?”
“What if we could approach that government with a genetic screening program that would save them ten billion a year?”
Christal blinked. “You’re joking!”
“No joke. Oh, granted, we can’t do anything about traumatic injury. People will continue to fall off buildings, crash their cars, get in fights, and burn themselves. No, what we can eliminate are the contagious, metabolic, and degenerative diseases. How? By simple gene therapies, by rapid genotypic scanning of fetal tissue from amniotic fluid. What would the government of South Africa pay to stop HIV cold? We can do that for them.”
“No way!”
“Way,” Gregor said flatly. “And here it is: We’ve isolated the gene sequence on the ape chromosome that makes chimpanzees resistant to HIV. For roughly two billion we can build the labs, equip them, and guarantee that no child born with that additional complex of ape genes will be HIV positive in South Africa again.”
She stared at him. “You’re serious.”
“Very much so. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. You ever been to South Africa? Roughly a third of the population is HIV positive. Johannesburg will change your comprehension. On one side of the street, I’ve seen a thirty-story glass-and-steel skyscraper. It might have been transplanted from downtown London, Frankfurt, or Hong Kong. The parking lot is filled with Mercedes, BMWs, and shiny Lexus autos. Across the street—I kid you not—is a refugee camp filled with a thousand people living in cardboard, tin, and plastic tarp shanties. They bathe and drink in the same ditch they defecate in.”
“Why?” Christal shook her head. “Why do they do it?”
“Because Africa is teetering on the verge of catastrophe. In the old days, the ANC was granted asylum by other countries. Now, they refuse to deny any refugee a similar chance at the future. Their borders are open to persecuted people fleeing the tyranny of demented egomaniacal leaders in Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Angola. So today in South Africa the First World exists in a patchwork crazy quilt with the Third, often only separated by a single boulevard. It has to be seen to be believed.”
“And Genesis Athena can fix that?”
“We can help.” Gregor tilted his head, inquisitive eyes on Christal’s. “Let’s go back to our hypothetical model. What could they do with another ten billion a year? Build infrastructure? Educate their people? Develop industries and train new workers? Perhaps put it into agricultural production to feed their people?”
“Let me get this straight. You’re telling me that Genesis Athena is out to save the world? That all this”—she waved around at the ship—“is part of a mission for mankind?”
Gregor stared thoughtfully at the table in front of him. “The brutal truth is that we’re a business. No better and no worse than any other. We intend to make a profit. We’re no different than a ho
spital, and in a sense, we offer the same services. Health in return for payment for services rendered.”
“And the cloning?” Did she dare mention the things Brian had told her? No. Not until she understood the dynamics.
“That’s what we call vanity, or luxury services.” He searched her eyes intently. “Like I said, it’s a business. We’re in a race to patent as many genotypes as we can. The same with the genes themselves, like the chimpanzee immune sequence I mentioned earlier. Meanwhile, we have people paying small fortunes to have us re-create a dead child. Our Elvis clones sell for one hundred thousand dollars apiece. We’ve cashed checks for over ten million on Elvis alone.”
Christal gaped. “Ten million? Just for Elvis? It’s hard to comprehend.”
“Imagine trying to explain automobiles and airplanes to someone in Victorian England in the 1890s. People would have thought you daft. In fact, they’d have looked much the way you do right now, Christal Anaya. They’d have had that same skeptical look in their eyes.”
“Do you really think you can do this?”
“Aye.” He smiled fondly. “That’s why I went with Genesis Athena. In another fifty years my name will be spoken alongside Bill Gates, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford. My processes will have banished HIV, multiple sclerosis, Huntington’s chorea, cystic fibrosis, and even susceptibility to such common diseases as tuberculosis, rubella, influenza, and rhinoviruses. My replicative procedures will be the standard for millions who wish to duplicate themselves. Lass, it’s going to revolutionize everything.”
Christal sensed his vulnerability. “I want to see this.”
He glanced up. “I beg your pardon?”
She waved around at the cafeteria. “I’m in a secure part of the ship, right?”
“To put it mildly, I think you’d be harder pressed to get into the White House than out of here.”
The Athena Factor Page 38