by E. Coulombe
“Right. And shut up George.” Andrew laughed at his friend, and Emma realized it had been a long time since she’d heard that sound from him. “But,” Andrew continued, “there was a good deal of mixing amongst the Saxons, the Franks, and the Romans and the…the….”
“Celts.” Emma said.
“That’s it. The Celts.” He smiled at her. “The original inhabitants. Anyway, all those inbred populations started interbreeding on that relatively small island. Result? Newton, John Locke, Shakespeare. To mention a few. Seems to me some incredible minds and adventuresome spirits came out of that mixing pot called Great Britain.”
“Andrew,” Kerri interrupted “you could be onto something here.”
“Or perhaps not” Emma interjected. “As I recall, the royal families of Europe routinely mixed blood to cement political alliances, with English royalty related to German, Russian and French aristocracy. I don’t recall any exceptional offspring coming from those marriages. Do you?”
“No. Just hemophilia being passed around.” answered Andrew.
“But remember your theory about the American pioneers?” said George. “Small, isolated European villagers come to the melting pot. You deemed the American ‘pioneer spirit’ a synonym for ‘hybrid vigor’! I thought it was brilliant, Andrew, as did your students at the time.”
“As I do now,” Kerri said softly. But the drums had already started, signaling the start of hula, and only Emma heard her.
Lit only by the torches ringing the hula mound, the alluring female bodies swayed to the rhythm of the drums. George was visibly enchanted, and he alone stood and clapped when the dance ended; the Nakoans laughed at his enthusiasm.
“So, Kerri,” a red-faced George said as he reseated himself and turned to face her, “are you enjoying your visit? Obviously I am!” He blushed even more when Emma glanced in his direction.
“Actually, I'm not just visiting,” Kerri answered. “I've come here to work.”
He gulped his coconut maitai. Judging from the expression on Emma’s face, this was news to her as well. “And what work is that,” he said, trying to mask the facetious tone in his voice.
“Three years ago I was working with directed mutations in bacteria at the Harvard School of Public Health….”
“Which is how we connected,” Andrew interjected from the far end of the table, leaning around his brother.
“Right, typical time lag,” Kerri continued, “the article on that work was just published this year. And then an additional time lag was that it took Andrew even longer to get the magazine out here. Anyway, I’m not doing that now. More recently I’ve been working with hox genes.”
“Please, go on,” Emma prompted, when George did not. In deference to his hostess he was reluctant to continue the conversation in this direction.
Kerri charged on. “Well, developmentalists have wondered for decades how the cells of an embryo organize themselves into a body. How do they know which end is the head, which the tail? What gene decides that? What signal turns a single celled egg into a segmented adult organism? They were able to describe development but they could never explain it. Been working on it for a long time.”
“Yeah, since around 1850,” George quipped.
Kerri nodded. “Recently researchers at a lab in Europe went so far as to grind up 2,000 chick embryos looking for the gene that gave the signal. That led nowhere. The discovery, when it finally came, was from a surprising direction. Insects.”
“Insects?” Emma repeated.
“Yes, isn’t that weird? They discovered the gene in a fruit fly. The signals that orchestrate growth from an egg into a fly larva, and then into an adult fly. Those signals came from a set of genes they named hox genes.”
She stopped to catch her breath, and George freshened her drink and filled his own glass with pineapple juice and rum. Grant frowned at both of them. As a general rule, alcohol was not consumed on Nakoa. No one had told George who had carried over several bottles of Maui rum as a gift, which his hostess was too polite to refuse.
No one spoke as Kerri took a large sip from her glass. It was clear that she wasn’t yet finished. “The hox genes control everything. The growth of the limbs, the wiring of the spinal cord, the creation of the gut. Everything! And what’s really incredible,” Kerri’s long blond hair flipped to the side as her hands gestured a lineup. “They found out that the hox genes are lined up along the chromosome in the same order as the body parts, like neck genes come before spine genes, which come before wing genes, and so on, and they turn on one by one and keep moving on down the chain until in the end…Voila! You have the fruit fly body plan laid out before you!”
Kerri stopped. Emma almost felt sorry for the girl when complete silence followed her speech and everyone just stared at her, unaware that the men were mesmerized. “So please Kerri,” Emma politely prodded, “tell us about the work you will be doing here.”
Having finished her own maitai, Kerri took a large gulp from George’s, which he had left sitting in front of her. “Well, that was the fruit fly, and the vertebrate guys, to be honest, they didn't pay much attention. The body of a fruit fly wasn’t the body of a human – what would they have in common? Heads and appendages, that’s about it. To find the last common ancestor between them you’d have to go back 550 million years. It was probably a worm, or an eel, or a jellyfish. In any case it didn’t even have limbs. So even ten years after this discovery, few biologists realized that the same signals that led to wing development in flies might have something to do with chicken wings, or much less, with human limbs!”
“But you did?” George asked, his skepticism more evident this time.
“Yes. I did.” Kerri either didn’t catch his tone, or simply choose to ignore it.
Emma excused herself and left the table for a moment to help Nani unwrap the desserts. George went to assist, and they returned with bowls of mangoes with sweet rice and coconut milk, and lilikoi pie. George, eyes wide, said “Emma, you’ve outdone yourself.”
She smiled. “Do try the mango sweet rice George.”
He ate several large bites before turning back to Kerri. “Please go on.”
Kerri continued. “By searching for something that looked similar in large libraries of chick DNA, I found two related chick genes and then a third. And I was even able to prove it by removing it and creating a wingless chicken.”
“What?” George said, “you actually turned off a gene in a developing chick embryo and made it grow without wings?”
“Right,” Kerri beamed.
Andrew was almost beside himself. Again, he leaned around Grant to butt in. “Isn’t that absolutely amazing George? Can you imagine the impact of that discovery?”
Emma noted Andrew’s enthusiasm. It’s his nature, she thought, he’s a scientist, and right now he was enjoying this discussion with a fervor she hadn’t seen for quite some time. At least not since their arrival on Nakoa. Well, I guess it’s good he’s excited, she thought, but she also knew where his intensity could lead, and why she’d insisted they leave Harvard. It scared her more than a little to see a hint of the fervor that before had become obsession.
She was relieved to hear Kerri describe her work. It sounded demanding of both equipment and supplies. Things that she wouldn’t find out in this far corner of the world. But her momentary relief soon ended when George asked Kerri what Emma could not. How did she plan to continue that work in Hawaii?
“That project is done for now, I’m just making final edits to the paper. Recently though, after talking with Andrew, we thought I might be able to do something more. Like to utilize hox genes to change a body part from one phylum into that of another.
“Whoa!” George raised his eyebrows. “You mean you want to make that chick not just wingless, but have it sport a fin as well?”
“Something like that,” she shrugged and smiled demurely. “And yes, your doubt is well placed. But just imagine. If one could do it, well, then, it could explain certain
aspects of past evolution, and perhaps….” Kerri slowed down, treading carefully, “I could predict future changes.”
“Bravo!” George cheered genuinely. “Hats off if you can do something that monumental! But aren’t your chances for success somewhat slim?”
“Well, they were … until I connected with Andrew.” Kerri’s dimpled beauty shone down towards the end of the table. “He understands the genetic changes between phyla in a far reaching way. He has already proposed streamlining my work with a more effective experiment.”
Emma’s heart sank. She sensed trouble here. She was used to graduate students enamored with her husband. It had never amounted to anything, quite honestly, he’d hardly even noticed. But this self-possessed and beautiful, woman – this woman had rekindled a more dangerous passion in her husband, one she didn’t want to revisit. If Emma understood correctly, Kerri was a controversial scientist herself, and was now proposing another high risk project with her husband. Andrew was not going to maintain his hard won equilibrium for long. But, she held her tongue, steered the conversation towards mundane topics, and spoiled George with a second piece of her lilikoi pie with roasted homegrown coffee.
Chapter Nine
Kane always carried his knife hooked onto the waistband of his shorts. He stuck the blade down between the creature and his leg, and then sliced up the middle, prying it off. It was no jellyfish, he realized. It was huge, a couple of feet long, and looked like some kind of rounded starfish with suckers on the bottom. Those suckers had pinned his leg to the reef. Damn, that was nasty, Kane told himself as he rubbed the throbbing red sore on his leg.
But just then a small wave came up over the reef, and it knocked the knife from his hand. Dammit, you making too many mistakes here, he told himself. He felt below the surface for the knife, and finally, his hand brushed against the plastic handle. Something was hanging off of the blade when he picked it up. He carefully raised the knife above the water's surface and examined the attachment. It was small, only about six inches long, and shaped like a lobster, but with only one claw sticking straight out the front. And it wasn't exactly a claw. It was more like an arm or a leg, with a paw on the end. Its head was covered with large black eyes; Kane counted five of them!
He held up the creature and peered at it in the waning light. He thought about taking it with him, but just then he felt one of those star-jellyfish touch his leg.
“Oh no you don't, not again,” he said to the water. He tossed the thing off of his blade, took one more look at his net drifting out to sea and turned to head back to shore. The water was deeper now, up over his knees, and the current pulled at his feet. Swell must be coming up, he thought.
The current was strong. He labored to walk against it, shuffling along on the bottom. That's okay, he told himself, take longer, but get there just the same. A powerful wave broke right behind him, and as the water rushed to shore he felt another sucker star begin to wrap itself around his leg. When he reached down to pull it off, something bit his hand.
“Whoa! What the hell?” he yelled as he brought his injured hand up to his face. The pain was so intense he didn't realize that the thing that had bitten him was still stuck to him. An odd round creature, with two rows of spines running down its back, but the spines were more like blades. In a reflex movement he rubbed it against his thigh to free his hand of the thing, and the blades sliced through his shorts, into his skin, making several large cuts, dripping blood into the water.
That's when Kane started to panic. “Enough of this shit!” he screamed. He started to run, with still at least fifty feet to get to shore. The loose rocks beneath him gave way. He lost his footing and fell sideways. His thigh touched the water, and within seconds, at least two of the sucker-covered creatures had wrapped around his legs.
They had him pinned to the reef.
Still holding the knife in his right hand, he started hacking away at the one on his left foot. Now another one wrapped around his right arm. He lost his balance and fell face forward onto the reef. Immediately, one wrapped around his left arm, and he lay sprawled out, completely pinned to the reef.
He lifted his head above water and screamed. No one could hear him.
The creatures pulled his body in all directions. He struggled to keep his face out of the water.
Then it began.
It began to squeeze. First his right leg, then the other, soon his entire body. It pumped harder and harder, like the device that measures blood pressure. He prayed it would stop before the leg collapsed underneath. “Ahhhhh!” he screamed. The distant drum beat louder and faster, and the thing pumped harder and faster, undulating -- to the rhythm of the drums? He swore it was pulsating on his leg to the rhythm of the drums! “Oh my God!” he cried as his leg bones shattered.
Semi-conscious now, he felt a sucking sensation on his ruptured leg. The thing was feeding off of his leg! And then the one wrapped round his other leg began to feed. His bones crushed beneath, his skin sucked to shreds, he screamed. No one could hear.
Just below the quietly lapping waves, the throbbing sucking started on his arm. The moon broke free of the clouds. He said a prayer in the shining light. One of the slimy things moved up his back, wrapped around his head, and pinned him face-down in the water.
Chapter Ten
After most of the villagers walked home and the luau was reduced to a few ukulele pickers, Emma’s party returned to Kihei. Emma suggested an after-dinner brandy out on the lawn and George fell into Andrew’s well-worn chair. He breathed in the quiet evening air. Calm waves made a soft, gentle, rhythmic noise off in the distance, and George felt a deep peace as he gazed up at the brilliant heavens above the unplugged island.
Andrew finally broke the silence. “Well, George,” he said, “I think we've waited long enough. Now, tell us what really brings our favorite paleontologist to this speck in the middle of the ocean? I know you better than to think you’re here merely to vacation with us.”
“I guess Emma didn’t tell you yet…? Storrs Olson invited me to help identify fossilized bird bones discovered on Kauai. Just yesterday he showed me a bone…”
“Hold on, George.” Andrew raised his eyebrows. “You’re not getting away with this one. Olson is an ornithologist from the Smithsonian Institute. Why would he need your help with birds? Your area of expertise is mammalian evolution, or at least it was when you were chair of Paleontology at Harvard. We do have birds here, but there are no native mammals here in Hawaii.”
All eyes fixed on George, a situation much to his liking. He stood and blocked their plane of view with his wiry frame, and with a dramatic flourish of his hands said, “Always the astute one, aren't you Andrew?” Hands dug down into his pockets, his shoulders scrunched, he rolled forward onto his barefoot toes, attempting to mimic the sly Peter Falk of Columbo fame.
“Okay, you've caught me,” he admitted. “I was asked to come to Kauai because of my connection with you.”
Grant shifted in his chair, suddenly alert.
George continued. “Paul Hendricks is also at the dig on Kauai, pulling out snail fossils. The guys over there are excited because what they've found gives them a really detailed look at how evolution happened here. They're now able to track how the snails evolved as they became isolated in different valleys! And….” George paused, “you know where I'm going with this, don't you, Andrew?” But Andrew just smiled and looked away, leaving George out to hang. “Well, for some organisms there is an evolutionary progression from island to island as the islands were formed, and……”
“…..since Nakoa sits about twenty miles north of Kauai?” Andrew interrupted.
George bowed his curly head, clasped his hands behind his back and shrugged. “And is one of the high islands least disturbed by humans…...”
“So let me guess, George - Hendricks is dying to know what kinds of fossil shells…”
“Or maybe even live snails,” George interjected.
“…can be found on Nakoa.”
/> “Well, even more specifically, he hoped I could use my connections with you to come over here and comb the shores of Ko`olau Valley, on your western side -- which is the most isolated valley in all of Hawaii.”
“Ah ha, finally, the truth!” Andrew shouted, teasing. “But why didn’t you tell me about this before now? What’s the secrecy George? We're still old friends and you could have……”
“NO!” Grant's voice rang out. Everyone was startled, and Kerri moved to a more upright position, as though ready to bolt if need be. “Andrew, you know how hard we've fought to keep the government out of our business here on Nakoa! We’re the only unexploited island left in the chain. You let George do this, and it's guaranteed he'll find some new endangered species. As soon as he does, the State and the Feds will force open this island, because they want access, and then those damned Hawaiian activists will muscle their way over here. I don't think your friend,” Grant sneered and gestured to George, “should be allowed to explore beyond this compound.”
The outburst startled everyone in the group. But Andrew had seen his brother explode before—in fact, he’d been the recipient of Grant’s anger once, the summer after high school graduation, when Andrew had been preparing to return to the Mainland for college, and Grant begged him to stay on Nakoa.
“Why would you want to go back to the Mainland--that sorry, screwed-up place filled with people who hate us, who show us nothing but disdain?” Grant had asked.
“I just need to get away,” Andrew had said. “I need to get clear of all the memories…”
“How could you? We're the ones who care about you,” Grant had screamed, “not those idiots over there. Remember that kid named Ralph who was so stupid he thought Hawaiians were Indians and he called us Indian-lovers! And everyone thought that was so damn funny until I broke Ralph’s nose with one punch. Wasn’t so funny then, was it!” Grant shouted at Andrew. His intense anger distorted the air around his head, making it shimmer with a brutal, raw energy. That was when Andrew had learned that Grant carried burning resentment for those years of taunts and jeers and hateful stares, and that he'd buried it so deeply within it had festered and grown into a force powerful enough to shape-change space.