Sandpaper Kiss

by Angel Wedge

  That had all gone wrong when Faulkner had spent too much time with the children. He stopped seeing them as specimens, and started to think of them as pets, or even as his own children. Even if he hadn’t fathered them in the usual way, he had still created them using his own DNA, and once he realised that he couldn’t think of them as not-people any longer. One transplant had been too many; if he’d known how many of the vulnerable children would die on the operating table before they obtained a viable liver to save his daughter, he would never have approved the procedure.

  This time would be different. Lucretia 17 was the strongest of the clones, the only survivor. She had grown at many times the normal rate, and much to everyone’s surprise her mind seemed to have blossomed just as fast as her body. In just a handful of years, she had developed both the intellect and personality of a rebellious teenager. She had even chosen a new name for herself, a detail which Faulkner was secretly glad of. He knew the operation could be a success. Barishkov’s new specialist pretty much guaranteed that. But Lucy would not be able to survive the loss of her heart, and no father could bring himself to make that terrible decision.

  He had once chosen to put unnamed clones at risk to save his own daughter. When they had died he had felt like something inside him died as well, and the weight of that decision had never left him. Now it was a different question, whether he would kill one of his daughters to save the other. Born or grown in a tank, that didn’t matter now. He’d thought when he first played with the infant 17 that she seemed more intelligent than he would expect for her age. Then one of the nurses had decided to teach her, and the girl had spoken to him.

  He couldn’t bear to let either of them die, but he knew now that he didn’t have a choice.

  “Father,” her voice was little more than a whisper, and though he could tell himself he felt her hand move in his, it might just as easily have been his imagination. She had been unconscious for days now, but woke occasionally and unpredictably. That was why he had sat with her in every moment he could spare, not wanting to miss his last chance to talk to her. He turned to look at her, and forced a smile, but he couldn’t hide the tears in his eyes.

  “I’m going to die, aren’t I?” he had to lean closer to catch her words.

  “I’m sorry,” it was all he could say, “I’m so sorry. I thought I could find a cure. And all I could do…”

  “You found something,” and that comment surprised her father enough to momentarily pierce his melancholy mood, “The other doctor told me. You can save me, but it would hurt somebody else. I think that wouldn’t be fair.”

  “I didn’t want to worry you with that. It’s such a hard choice. I might be able to save you, but Lucy would die instead. It’s a choice I never thought I’d have to make, and…” he just trailed off, his voice becoming almost as quiet as hers. How should he tell his daughter that he couldn’t make the decision that could save her? How could she understand?

  “Then I’ll say it,” she said, “It’s me who’s sick. I don’t want to hurt anybody else. It’s okay.”

  “Lucretia…” He wanted to say how much he loved her, how much he would miss her. He wanted to praise her courage, and to express his pride in her moral compass. But he just couldn’t find the words, so instead he leaned forward and put his arms around her, holding her as close as he could through the tangle of wires and tubes.

  “Don’t be sad. You did everything to make me happy. So many holidays, we went everywhere I wanted to go in the whole world. When the government doctors locked me away, you made this place for me and took me away again. And maybe I can see mom again…” It clearly took some effort, but she smiled. Then she spoke one last time, and he would always wonder if she knew that she wouldn’t get another chance to say it: “Will you write in my diary for me? Write that I’m not scared, and what happened. And then I want Lucy to have it. I think she’s more than a friend, or even more than my sister. She’s kind of the next me, so I want her to know what it was like for me.”

  Conrad Faulkner struggled for words. He wanted his daughter to know that Lucy would never be a replacement for her, that the whole project was there to help her live. Then he met her gaze, pink eyes showing happiness. Maybe she wanted to pass on her name; a youthful reiteration of the maxim that had allowed his own father to accept his mortality. He had said many times as his health declined that he wouldn’t be truly dead as long as his son built upon his research in some way. Conrad hadn’t really understood, but had welcomed anything that made the old man comfortable. Maybe that quiet confidence had skipped a generation, and Lucretia would be happy enough to pass on the baton. Lucretia 17 – Lucy – was already the girl’s clone, and closest confidant. Seeing them together, you’d never realise there was such an age gap. Maybe she could be a kind of spiritual successor too.

  Chapter 27 — Plan of Attack

  I closed my eyes in sympathy as Marcos’s voice trailed off. I wished I’d thought to read that entry sooner, a double page entered in black ink with a surprisingly flowery script that must by Dr Faulkner’s hand. Lucretia hadn’t been able to record her own last moments, so her father had done it for her. After that, having adjusted my expectations, I realised that the illegible chicken-scratch on the next dozen pages must have been traditional Chinese, written by claws that had never held a pen before.

  I couldn’t contain the tears as I realised how close those two girls were, and at the same time how different their lives had been.

  Now, we had an urgent mission to attend to. I had to focus my whole attention on the steering as we left the stream bed, so I couldn’t pay any more attention to that story until we’d got a fair deal for the animal and human test subjects and for those who’d worked at the lab. I knew this path was possible because we’d come this way on the journalists’ first field-trip from Lucretia Falls, but sometimes it still looked like we were facing a dead end. The road grew more treacherous, the Jeep tilting heavily to one side or the other, and I had to throw all my weight against the wheel. We barely moved faster than a walking pace, but we couldn’t risk someone else finding the vehicle if we left it behind.

  I lost track of which way we were heading. The deep shadows cast by the canopy above stopped me getting even a vague compass point from the sun, as well as disguising the time. Lucy spotted some landmarks though; she said she’d lived wild in the jungle for nearly a year between fleeing from surgery and being recaptured by the American troops Dr Barishkov had called in. It was still hard work to understand her speech, but I felt the faintest touch of her claws on my arm and she pointed in the direction we needed to go.

  In a way, it was pretty amazing that I trusted her so completely. I knew how much damage her teeth and claws could do, but I also knew she could control her body well and that she would never hurt me. But every time I turned to look at Marcos in the back seat I could see the way he looked at us. He still wasn’t sure about Lucy’s humanity, and he was nervous every time those claws came near me. But he could see something of his own people’s constant conflicts in the hybrids’ captivity, and he could empathise with that. If he had the faintest idea how close me and Lucy were getting, maybe he’d be more convinced of her humanity. Or maybe he’d call me crazy and vanish into the jungle. Maybe he’d be right; I still wasn’t sure myself now if all that was in my mind.

  As we skirted a cliff edge, we caught occasional glimpses of the sky where the treetops in the valley were lower than us. When Lucy pointed out the distant glint of lights off the Lucretia Falls complex’s solar array, I knew we were nearly at our destination. I did my best to park the vehicle where it wouldn’t sink and get stuck in the mud. Marcos had been hard at work while we drove; both throwing out ideas for discussion based on his knowledge of the native culture, and more practical tasks like using the tools of a simple field first aid kit to fashion a uniform from pieces of a tent, leaves gathered beside the track, and a few other odds and ends. We could have kept the dull priests’ robes provided
by Paul’s men, but they were long and unwieldy. Lucy could have skinned some creature to make a coat, as she had when we first escaped the lab. But Marcos’s idea would hopefully give us both the element of surprise and a psychological advantage. It had sounded good in theory, but when we saw the soldier’s handiwork I was amazed. This would be perfect.

  * * *

  The problem with a perfect plan is that there’s always something you don’t know. There’s always a detail you’re not aware of, or someone whose motives aren’t what you expect. I’d learned that already, and I was sure that this whole situation could have been avoided if people had just tried to understand what was driving Faulkner. Finding the truth was always hard, though. A story doesn’t come together like a tapestry, woven from different strands to make a perfect pattern.

  It’s more like the jumble of cables behind the TV, connecting all those wonderful high-tech boxes together to make a functional system. If you’re trying to unplug and replace one part, your hand finds every cable except the one you want. And even when you come across the middle of some cable that might be the right one, you can’t find out where it’s connected to until you follow it all the way, and that means untangling every little loop that it passes through. For all the parts I’d untangled, there were still sides of the story that I didn’t know; back-room deals and betrayals that I wouldn’t even see until we’d grabbed the thread that related to the tribesmen and given it a good, hard tug…

  Peter Carling sat back in his office chair. He really liked that chair, a somewhat worn and overstuffed recliner. In a way, it was a respite from his home, where Adrianna had spent a small fortune giving the place a makeover with designer furniture which was apparently the big name to be seen with this year. It would do wonders for their social standing, she said, but Peter wished he could focus a little more on sitting comfortably.

  He’d never argue with his wife over something she cared about, though, and of course it was important for a man in his position to present just the right public image. She was good at that, so he enjoyed a little down-market luxury during the quiet times in his office when he had nothing particularly important to do. Luckily, that was a good deal of the time. Carling was a United States Senator, and so the majority of his office hours were spent looking serious and judgemental while a whole parade of people came into his office to talk about their problems. Sometimes he could just ignore them and gaze out of the window, thinking about what to have done with his garden this year. Sometimes he’d actually have to sign something or put his name on a bill, which was probably the most challenging part of the job. It would probably be even harder, if he didn’t have his little team to tell him which decisions would swing well with the voters. But as often as he could get away with, he liked telling people where they could stick their proposals.

  Today, he’d put in a fair few hours listening to idiots with agendas. They were the people he represented, but even so he didn’t feel it was necessary to spend every minute going through their pleadings. He envied the Senate of a hundred years ago in some ways; you would have been old money or nobody, and his predecessors could have found it so much easier to know who they had to actually pay attention to. Now, anybody could spring to celebrity and you had to at least make a show of considering petitions from all corners. Sometimes even people on the other side of the world thought their problems had to come first, and the Internet could put anyone in the public eye. The man disturbing Carling’s well earned rest today had made himself very hard to ignore. He spoke with a firm Russian accent from the other end of some satellite link, and had come in from the start with threats of global controversy.

  “I am pleased to speak with you, Senator,” the man nodded, but never seemed to smile. His broad gestures were so precise, you could imagine that he’d rehearsed exactly how to wave his hands at each point to make the best impression. “I do not know much of the American political system, but Dr Cohen was most confident in recommending you when I said I needed to speak to an honest politician.”

  That was another reason Carling hadn’t been able to duck this call. Dr Aldred-Cohen was an influential researcher at pharmaceutical giant Glassner-Whyte-Jones, and was currently engaged in a huge propaganda war on the subject of drug patents. It seemed like these days, everyone wanted to stick their noses into running the country. That was a good thing for Senator Carling. If businessmen wanted to change the law, it would normally be through offering incentives to the members of the Commerce Subcommittees on Space Science, and Competitiveness, or Ethical Technological Advancement. Carling was a member of the former, and currently chairing the latter, so was in a position to rake in the lion’s share of the spoils from any kind of debate on the morality of new discoveries.

  It was a lucrative position for him, but also a hard one to maintain. His campaign office had managed to manipulate a few candidates to get a fledgling Senator from the next state onto the committee, giving the party enough votes that Carling’s committee was pretty much a formality, and would choose whatever he deemed appropriate. The young man had taken to back room negotiations like a duck to water, and the party was grooming him to take over the chair of Ethical Technology on Carling’s retirement. He’d helped him along the way, but earlier this year he’d started realising that his protegé wasn’t willing to wait that long to take charge. He’d needed some important,high-publicity issue to hand to the kid, and let him sink himself. Aldred-Cohen had handed him the perfect case, so now Carling felt he owed the scientist a favour. Speaking to this strange Russian guy was apparently it.

  He didn’t mind that much. His office had recently invested in a state-of-the-art video conferencing system, with full 3D capabilities. Some of his aides said the tech was amazing, though to Carling himself it was more a case of showing the world that he had the latest and greatest. Still, it had been galling to know that he wasn’t getting the benefits of this great new gadget, because nobody he wanted to speak to had the same technology until this guy called from wherever in the world he was.

  “I wish to come and work with America,” the crazy Russian was saying, “But there may be issues of extradition, some bureaucratic mess you understand. So I need someone over there to help smooth the way for me. I am sure there is a lot some of your companies could gain from my research.”

  “That’s quite a tough request. Is there something you can offer, to justify the effort our government would have to put in to keep you here? Vague promises of future research don’t really mean much to the guys who bankroll us.”

  “How about a fugitive your people actually care about. There’s a Mister Faulkner, hiding out in the same place I am. He’s fled America after kidnapping his teen daughter. I think he might even be doing experimentation on her, she looks very sick, but everyone here is too afraid to say anything. I think that what he is working on is both illegal and dangerous. But if I am to help the long arms of the law reach out for Faulkner, I will need a kind of witness protection, to stay in your so hospitable country. It’s only fair, right?”

  Senator Carling immediately spotted why Aldred-Cohen had passed this one on to him. He’d taken over Faulkner’s role in Glassner-Whyte-Jones after the first time Faulkner had run off with his daughter, several years previously. If Faulkner reappeared, that might cast an unwanted spotlight on whatever the lab was working on now. Somewhere amid the web of favours, it turned out useful for Carling to ensure that Dr Faulkner didn’t speak to the public too much when he got back. But how he would arrange that was another matter; no branch of the US police had any authority in whatever country this guy was calling from, and there wasn’t really a solid enough excuse to call it a national security issue. This would have to be orchestrated under the table somehow.

  But then he had a flash of genius. He’d handed Senator Jenner a hot potato before, over the difference between regulation on commercial and military research. It had looked like a difficult puzzle with a shot at glory trapped inside, but Carling had spott
ed that the problems were much tougher than they seemed. And his protegé had succeeded anyway, getting a great deal of respect from the Marine Corps. Which meant that he might just be able to manage getting a unit overseas on training to take a detour and extract an American scientist to face trial. It was perfect, because there was a big human interest angle that would make the project smell like gold dust to any publicity-seeking politician. Placating this Dr Barishkov would probably be time consuming enough to distract Jenner from his duties on the committee, and Carling knew enough little details that whether the operation was a success or not, he was sure he’d be able to spin it so that the press captured him in a good light.

  Peter Carling had held onto his position for a long time, and a good part of that was because he knew exactly how to make sure he knew secrets that would shatter the career of any potential challenger.

  * * *

  As the screen finally flicked over to a blue ‘No Connection’ banner, Barishkov was already picking up his bag and heading for the door. It had been a risk taking over the communication centre for more than an hour, but the other scientists rarely came up here. And of course Uvi was waiting at the bottom of the stairs, to ensure he wouldn’t be disturbed.

  “Let’s go,” he muttered to the giant black man, who just nodded. Uvi wasn’t like most of the other people of his tribe, he didn’t care too much about the oral tradition that prevented them from accepting the help of modern technology. He rarely spoke, which left everybody guessing about what his own philosophies might be, but he was quite talented in saying just the right thing to influence his people. Among their culture, it was quite easy to mistake reticence or hostility for a sign of wisdom. He was second in command of the group of natives defending the lab against any potential intruders, and the only one who had been able to see the ‘children’ for what they were, and he was the only one who Barishkov would trust to be near the clones once he took charge. It was a blessing in disguise that Faulkner hadn’t wanted the guards near his specimens, because the tribes would be so much harder to manipulate if they knew what they were protecting.