by John Darnton
"Christ," exclaimed Jude. "Is that really possible?"
"I'm afraid so."
"Then we've got to find the rest of them," said Skyler. "That's why they've taken the clones with them. We've got to find them before they're killed, too."
Tizzie turned off the microscope, straightened the lab, and they walked down the corridor back to her office.
"There're a lot of loose ends," said Jude. "For instance, these guys in the Group, like Tibbett and Eagleton—do they have clones?"
"Who knows," replied Tizzie. "My guess is that they do. But the clones would be too young to help them. You can't transfer an organ from a young child into a sixty-year-old man and expect it to work."
"Do you think"—Jude lowered his voice a notch—"that I have another clone? A young one?"
She was amazed that Jude could be thinking about himself at a time like this, that he'd missed the subtext of the conversation back in the lab. He should have been more concerned about Skyler.
"I think you probably had one. The question is: did they give him the treatment? Did he come down with progeria? If they didn't, he's probably alive somewhere. If they did, he's dead."
Jude fell quiet, then went off to the men's room.
Standing before the door to her office, Skyler looked directly into Tizzie's eyes.
"So the bottom line is, if I just got inoculations, maybe I have a chance. If it was gene therapy, I've had it."
She couldn't speak, so she just nodded—yes.
¨
On Monday, an unaccountably pleasant day for mid July, Tizzie walked to work across to the East Side, feeling a glimmer of hope. Maybe, somehow, things would work out all right. Maybe they'd find the clones somehow and call in the "good" FBI. Maybe Skyler's sickness would lift, like those strains of malaria that recurred with less and less severity. Maybe they'd discover a vaccine and save her father.
Her thoughts darkened: that was a lot of "maybes."
She resolved to visit her father soon. It was hard on her, because he was failing so rapidly, and she didn't know what to do or say, standing there in his gloomy bedroom. She had never felt that kind of awkwardness in his presence before, and she knew where it came from: she couldn't forgive him for all the secrets that had been uncovered over the past two months. Still, she could pretend for his sake. In any case, she shouldn't let two weeks pass without seeing him. He needed her more than ever, now that her mother was gone.
The receptionist greeted her warmly, and her secretary brought her a steaming mug of coffee and placed it next to a stack of mail on her desk, fussing over her.
Five minutes later, the secretary poked her head in the door and said: "You've got an important call."
She picked up the receiver. It was St. Barnaby's Hospital in Milwaukee. The woman on the line had that kind of compassionate but straightforward voice that is accustomed to dispensing bad news.
"Ms. Tierney. I'm calling because your father was admitted to our hospital early this morning. He is not doing well, and I think it best—if you would like—for you to come see him—as soon as possible."
She added—unnecessarily, "He has been asking for you."
The secretary came in with an airline schedule as Tizzie scribbled down the address. It made her want to scream: St. Barnaby's. Room 14B. The Samuel Billington Pavilion.
She barely had time to call Jude before she left for the airport. He didn't want her to go—too dangerous—but she wasn't going to risk arriving too late, the way she had with her mother. She promised she'd be careful.
At the hospital, they seemed to expect her. She walked in, holding in her hand the scrap of paper with the room number on it, and before she spoke, the receptionist gave her complicated directions, involving a change of elevators and walkways through atriums filled with potted palms. The Billington Pavilion was lavish, with a chrome-covered elevator bank and a nurse's station done in travertine marble of rough-hewn edges. Fourteen B occupied a full corner at the end of a corridor, and it turned out to be not a single room but a three-room suite that looked like hotel accommodations. A woman in a sky-blue uniform showed her the way and motioned her into a sitting room with easy chairs done up in chintz.
She didn't sit down. She threw her jacket on the chair and opened the door to the adjoining room, which was dim, the only light coming through the slats of blinds drawn across the window. The bed was at the center of the wall, so imposing that it seemed to be the only furniture in the room. She could hear machines going, and also the thin, reedy sound that she took a moment to identify—her father's breathing.
There was no one else there—only him.
His eyes were closed, their lids seemingly quivering. His head was sunk into a large pillow, and the indentation made it look heavy, like a small, hard melon submerged in a canopy of white-tufted milkweed. He looked so frail and even puny—that was the horrible word that kept intruding into her mind.
She pulled a chair up and sat next to him and watched him. That might have been a mistake, looking at him like that for such a long period of time. Her thoughts began to drift. She didn't know what she felt, now that the time had come. He didn't look like himself, this wizened pile of flesh and bone. Was he really her father? Could he really have been part of that whole horrible scheme—he who used to tuck her into bed at night and keep the monsters at bay by telling her stories in a loving monotone until she fell asleep? Was the monster—in fact—him?
Something touched her hand, and she jumped, startled. It was his hand. She held it and looked at him—his pink, watery eyes open, staring at her. He looked lucid. He licked his lips—he wanted to talk.
Was this it? Deathbed communication. The stuff of literature, the time for honesty and absolution. It felt so strange, sitting there, holding his bony hand, feeling so much and so many contradictory things, loving him and despising him for what he'd done. She felt outside the whole situation, outside everything that was happening. It scared her to feel so cut off.
His labored breathing made it hard to understand him. She poured him a glass of ice water and lifted it to him in a bent straw, holding him up gently by the back. He weighed so little, it was like lifting the pillow.
His lips moved, so she leaned down and put her ear to his mouth, feeling his hot breath as he formed the words.
"You know everything."
Was it a declaration or a question? She couldn't tell.
"Yes," she said. "Everything but why."
He was quiet so long, she wasn't sure her answer had registered.
But then he began to talk, at first slowly, and then with more urgency as he rallied to tell her everything.
"It was for you. All for you. We wanted to give you a gift. We gave you life, and we wanted to give you more life. It was going to be so beautiful, so perfect. The first ones ever. You were going to live it—not wish for it, not dream about it. But live it."
She listened then, as he described the Lab in its early days in Jerome, trying to make her understand how exciting it had been to stand at the threshold of scientific discovery, to "do things that had never been done before." He told it as a narrative from the beginning, but, drifting in and out, he came back at different junctures and left great gaps, so that the story was disjointed and spliced out of sequence. She had to re-edit it back as he spoke.
He described Rincon, the mesmerizing power of that person. He told of the first great discovery in the underground chamber in Jerome—how to pull cells apart in the blastomere and keep them alive and make them grow separately. The long discussions about doing that to their own offspring, the endless debates in bed at night—what was best, what was right and what was wrong, the dictates of science. The fertilized egg had looked so small under a microscope, it was hard to believe it came from them. And so finally they had agreed to create what he called her "reserve"—he said the word three times before Tizzie understood it. Not once did he use the word "clone"—or, for that matter, the word "sister."
"We were abl
e to not think about them. They were away on that island. We didn't visit, we didn't see them, we didn't talk about them. Only Henry—he was the only one who went there."
He talked about creating the trio of Orderlies from the embryo of a sociopath. He talked about the break with Jude's father, which came because of his attack of conscience, his opposition finally solidifying on the day Skyler was "activated" as a fertilized egg. And he talked, slowly and sadly, about the car crash that had killed Jude's father, which had not been an accident at all. Finally, he recounted his own break years later with the Lab, which had not been total—they were not stupid, they had learned from what had happened to Jude's father—and how difficult it was to stand up to Rincon. It was all out of love for Tizzie. They did not approve the use of the inoculations; it was too experimental, too risky for them to subject their only child to it.
"And I was right," he gasped, with a hubris that Tizzie thought unseemly.
He talked about the discovery of how to clone from an existing adult—almost ten years before Dolly—and how this had opened wellsprings of money, as the lure of life extension was sold to what he called "the high rollers." By that time he was out of the group, working quietly in Milwaukee, in touch only through Henry, who dropped by to keep an eye on him and make sure that he did not betray them by cooperating with law enforcement authorities.
Her father began suddenly to fade away again. She tried asking him questions.
"Do you know where they are now? Where is the Lab now?"
He frowned, his head moved—but was he saying yes or no?
She asked him about Rincon.
"Where is Rincon?"
He tried to talk, but was seized by a sudden coughing fit. His eyes widened in seeming alarm. Then the coughing subsided and he closed his eyes and he didn't reopen them. He fell back into the pillow in a deep sleep, and then later lapsed into a coma. About three hours after that, he died—more or less peacefully.
Walking down the corridor, Tizzie was too stunned to know what she was feeling. Here she had been waiting weeks—months, really—for him to die, and yet when the time came, she was feeling so many different emotions they seemed to cancel each other out, leaving her simply exhausted.
She was nearly at the elevators when she passed a large examining room with its door open. Something out of the corner of her eye made her glance in, and what she saw stopped her. A large woman was seated imperiously on an examination table, dressed in a hospital gown, and a doctor and several nurses were buzzing around her. Illumination from behind caught the woman's gray hair, as if in a spotlight; it sparkled and radiated wildly in all directions and seemed to cover her head like an aura.
Tizzie almost gasped, so powerful was the sight. The grouping was arranged like a Renaissance painting, The Adoration of the Magi or Giotto's frescoes at St. Francis in Assisi, the nurses attending with their heads lowered, almost bowing, the doctor holding his stethoscope to the woman's belly like a blessing.
Then Tizzie noticed something. The woman was elderly—perhaps in her sixties. Her physique was large and her face was strong, with elongated features and a strangely thin and sensitive mouth. But most riveting of all were her eyes, which shone like two lumps of luminous coal pressed into clay. The woman felt Tizzie's gaze, and as she stared back with those black eyes, she seemed to look deep within her.
So engrossed was Tizzie that she almost missed the most striking feature of all—the woman had a huge belly protruding upward, a rounded hill of tightly-stretched skin that she was exposing to the doctor. My God! She was pregnant. She had to be at least twenty-five years past the normal birthing age.
The doctor turned, looked at Tizzie and frowned. The name on his badge flashed at her—Gilmore—and then the door flew closed. Tizzie stood there a moment, the vision of those coal black eyes fixed in her mind. Then she shook her head, left the hospital and went immediately to the airport. She would not stay for the funeral this time. She did not want to see Uncle Henry.
¨
She met Jude at the coffee shop near the Chelsea Hotel, crowded with the usual morning clientele—unshaven old men nursing cups of coffee, and long-haired and shaven-head rock musicians nursing hangovers. Couples of all types and sexual configurations shared tables.
Jude and Tizzie sat at the table in the corner, waiting for Skyler. She'd passed on everything her father had told her before he died. Now they were feeling stymied.
"So where do we go from here?" asked Jude.
"Hard to say. I can't think of anything. Back to the judge in New Paltz?"
"I doubt he'd be much help. Anyway, Raymond said he was ill."
"Maybe he'd talk to us. Tell us something."
"You mean a deathbed confession? Not likely."
Tizzie wondered if that was meant as an oblique reference to her father. She decided it wasn't. She had told Jude what her father had revealed: that his father's death had not been an accident, and the news had upset him greatly.
She had also described in great detail the bizarre sight of the pregnant woman with the coal black eyes and the doctor who was examining her with reverent caution.
"How about the other FBI guy? What's his name?"
"Ed something. Ed Brantley."
"You could call him."
"That's a crap shoot. Who the hell knows what side he's on?"
"Yes, but you came to trust Raymond. And Raymond trusted him."
"And Raymond's dead."
"Okay. I take your point."
She took a sip of coffee.
"Jude, we've got to do something. We can't just sit here."
Jude was about to answer, but a young man sat down at a table across from them within earshot. He was wearing a black leather coat, tight black chinos, black leather gloves with the fingers cut off and a panoply of silver rings and necklaces; his black hair stuck up in clumps, and his left ear was studded from top to bottom with safety pins and silver earrings. He jangled when he sat dawn.
He didn't look like a federal agent, Jude told himself. But you never knew. Raymond's death had gone a long way toward reigniting his paranoia.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a familiar figure through the window. It was Skyler. Seeing him just appear like that, walking down the sidewalk, Jude was able to make a split-second, halfway objective appraisal. It was like gazing in a mirror. The walk was very much like his own, a casual stride, head up. What impressed him was how much at home Skyler looked on the city streets now—how quickly he had adapted. Jude wondered, were the situation somehow reversed, if he would do as well.
When Tizzie saw Skyler, she looked at him closely. She had been examining him lately every time she saw him, trying to see if he looked older in any way. She couldn't tell.
Skyler entered, spotted them, waved and came over and sat down. He was carrying a copy of the Mirror, and he wore a self-satisfied smile.
"I got something," he announced.
"What?" asked Tizzie.
"First things first."
He ordered a cup of coffee, and when it came, he took a big sip.
"I can see how you get used to this stuff. They never let us have it on the island."
"Okay, wise guy," said Jude. "What's up?"
"Have you seen your paper today?"
"No, and I hate it when people call it 'my paper.' What's the big deal?"
"Page sixty-four. Check it out."
Skyler handed the paper across the table. The front-page headline was about a pornography shop that had opened two blocks from Gracie Mansion. It read: PORN MAKES MAYOR HOT.
He turned to page sixty-four and quickly found the item sandwiched inside a gossip column:
EGGHEADS TO MEET
New York—Young Leaders for Science and Technology in the New Millennium said yesterday it was going to hold its first meeting ever. The group of big-think heavyweights is going to hold forth at the DeSoto Hilton in Savannah, Georgia, next Tuesday. If you've made your vacation plans there and your IQ is below 150,
you may want to rethink.
"Holy shit," exclaimed Jude. "That's it."
The young man across the way looked up at them, startled at his outburst. "They've called a meeting and used Tibbett's newspaper to do it."
"Let's go up to your place," said Tizzie.
As they squeezed past the tables, the young man caught Jude's arm and looked at him through bleary eyes.
"Hey, man, you dudes look just the same," he said, slurring his words slightly. He seemed to be trying to focus on a question. "You in a band?"
"Yeah," replied Jude.
"What's the name?"
"Xerox."
¨
In Jude's room on the Chelsea's fourth floor, Tizzie and Skyler sat on the bed, while he worked the laptop at the desk. In the mirror on the wall above his head, he could see them, their lower halves, headless, side by side on the bedspread. He heard the musical sign-on, typed in his password, and connected to Nexis. The search box popped up.
First he tried to link Savannah and Young Leaders. Then DeSoto Hilton and Young Leaders. Nothing. The group had not met there before, or if it had, it hadn't made the papers. Anyway, the Mirror article said it was the first meeting.
For the next twenty minutes, he tried various combinations, but without success.
"So what's the problem?" asked Skyler. "We know where they'll be on Tuesday. We just go down there."
"Of course," said Jude. "But then what? We're looking for their headquarters, for the whole nest of vipers. We're looking for a colony of clones, for Christ's sake. We're not going to find that at the Hilton."