Chimera (Parasitology) (37 page)

One of the USAMRIID scientists held up a hand, signaling the rest of the room to stop what they were doing. They all did, even Fishy and Fang, as he turned to face the window. He looked at the Colonel, eyes grave behind his goggles, and waited.

“Please,” I whispered.

The Colonel closed his eyes and raised his hand in a thumbs-up. The procedure was approved.

They did not pull a curtain across their makeshift surgical theater: They left everything open and exposed for the world to see. I had already looked away once. I would not look away again. Colonel Mitchell was right. I owed them that.

Bit by bit, Fang extracted Tansy from the brainpan of her host, picking her free of the jumbled brain tissue an inch at a time, until the entire damaged length of her was visible. He sliced a piece of the host’s original brain loose along with her head, allowing her to keep her floral mouth clamped down on what she mindlessly believed to be a source of nutrition. The gender label was inaccurate at that point, I suppose—Tansy was no longer a “she,” not without the shell of her host to give her definition. But Ronnie had always been male, even when he was moved into a female body. I couldn’t make myself stop thinking of her as my sister, my
sister
, and to be honest, I didn’t want to. Only the labels were allowing me to look at the slick, pinkish-gray length of her with anything other than pity. She was so damaged. Dr. Banks had used her so cruelly.

That’s what you are too,
I thought, and my stomach churned acid-hot and nauseous. I was a length of boneless tissue, somehow enhanced by science to the point where it could hijack an entire human body and make it my own. I was not a human being.

But the brain tissue left behind when Tansy was removed
from her host’s brain didn’t look so different from Tansy herself, did it? It was soft and boneless and pinkish gray, without structure or form. She had fit into it so well because she was virtually the same thing. Maybe we had never been that different. Science hadn’t created monsters. It had just given brains the capacity to move from one body to another, to feed without dependence on the host, to masticate and chew, to
live
. We were made to live. We were survivors.

“Come on, Tansy,” I whispered. Colonel Mitchell shot me a surprised look, but all my attention was on the delicate surgery being performed on the counter behind Joyce’s comatose form. Fishy had covered Tansy’s host with a sheet; life support was ongoing, but that was more a matter of their not wanting to share the room with a corpse before they had to than it was anything else. Tansy was no longer a resident in that hollow shell, and the original owner, whoever she had been, had moved out years before.

Fang had stretched Tansy out in a Pyrex baking dish filled with agar solution, and was now carefully, delicately excising her segments from each other, bisecting them one at a time and moving them to different quadrants of the comforting jelly. Most would be frozen, assuming we could find a freezer that we were allowed to use; only the primary segment, that beautiful, terrible flower, would be placed inside Joyce’s unused brain. The rest were backups at best, and egg factories at worst—if we lost Tansy completely, Fang could culture a new head segment from her eggs, effectively cloning her. But I didn’t know how much of Tansy would carry over into that second generation, how much epigenetic data would be passed down, parent unto child, so that she could live again.

I was almost sure, watching him work, watching how much care he took and how deep the furrows in his forehead had grown, that it wouldn’t be enough.

Then he finished his work on Tansy, and turned away from the agar, and picked up the bone saw.

Colonel Mitchell’s hand clamped down on my shoulder, pressing so hard that I winced, although I didn’t pull away. He was allowing us to do this. He had granted us access to his daughter, against all better judgment, against all reason, because he wanted his daughters to be together, even if we had to be together as new people. His marriage was probably over. Mom—Gail—was going to leave him when she realized what he’d done. Slow understanding wormed through me, replacing the acid in my belly with wonder.

He’d given up any chance of saving his marriage because he wanted to make up for his actions toward me. He was giving me back my sister, both my sisters, because I mattered that much to him. I turned, looking up at his face as the bone saw bit into Joyce’s skull. He was watching Fang work, and while there were tears in his eyes, they weren’t falling. Not yet. Because he wasn’t watching his daughter die: he was watching the world give her another chance at survival.

“Thank you, Daddy,” I whispered, turning back toward the window. Fang had removed a small square of bone from the back of Joyce’s head. I couldn’t see her exposed brain from where we were standing, but I didn’t need to. Brains, as a rule, look basically the same from person to person—incredibly unique and utterly individual in the eyes of a neurosurgeon maybe, but to me still just slabs of pink-gray fatty matter, shot through with veins and furrowed with deep canals.

Fang reached into Joyce’s brain with forceps and scalpel. He worked in silence for almost a minute before he called, “Fishy, the sample.”

Fishy picked up Tansy’s primary segment with a pair of forceps and carried it gently over to place them in Fang’s waiting hand. I thought I saw Tansy thrash, once, and I clung to
that motion, because it meant she was still alive. Then Fang was lowering her into the opening at the back of Joyce’s skull, and if Colonel Mitchell was going to call this procedure off, he was going to do it now, he would have to do it now, he wouldn’t have another chance—

His hand remained clamped hard on my shoulder, hard enough that it was going to leave a bruise, but he didn’t say a word. He didn’t ask Fang to stop. He just let it happen.

Colonel Mitchell was crying, big, wet tears that rolled silently down his face, as he watched Fang close up the surgical site and suture Joyce’s skin back down. There would be some scarring, unfortunately; the facility just wasn’t equipped with the sort of stimulating lasers he would have needed to close her wounds without leaving any sign that they’d been there. But maybe that was for the best. Maybe this was the sort of thing that had to be remembered, just so you could believe that it was real.

I was crying, too, but unlike the Colonel, there was no grief in my tears. I had cried myself dry over Joyce enough: I knew that she was gone. Until this moment, I hadn’t allowed myself to really believe that Tansy could still be saved, that
Tansy
might make it back to the broken doors, and hence back home to us.

There was still hope in the world, and the proof of it was on the stretcher in front of me, being hooked back up to the machines that would keep her breathing until the integration was complete. Tansy was going to live again.

Now we just had to find a way to say the same about the world.

January 2028: Sherman

S
herman? Your mother is asking for you.”

I turned toward Batya, irritation gathering in my chest, and opened my mouth to chastise her. Then I paused, catching myself. She was right. Dr. Cale was my mother, no matter how long we had been estranged, or how much it sometimes pained me to consider that I, Sherman Lewis, conqueror of the known world, existed only because of her dedication to science and her insistence on following her experiments to their logical conclusion. I might not have been the result of a sweaty night of bodies rubbing against bodies, but I was her child all the same. It was, perhaps, time for me to acknowledge that, to even embrace it—because if I accepted her as she had already accepted me, things might go easier for all of us.

“How is she?” I asked. The question came easy, because the question was honest. If she was hunger-striking or ill, I would have more difficulty dealing with her. I had never been able to handle it well when she was sick.

“She’s amazing,” said Batya, and her voice was filled with shy, starstruck wonder. Of the chimera in my camp, I was the only one who’d worked directly with our creator. She made me with her own two hands, and I had taken the knowledge of my
creation and used it to create children of my own. But it was hard for them not to look at Dr. Cale like she was some sort of fallen god. She was our creator. How could they not love her?

If they had known her as I had known her, it would have been easy. She had never been a loving mother, not to me: not when she had her precious Adam right there, so apparently flawless, and born of her body in a way that none of the rest of us could ever match. He had broken her,
crippled
her, and she doted on him for his innocent crimes, because how could he have known?

I shook myself out of the memory and plastered a smile across my face, trying to look reassuring, for Batya’s sake. She didn’t know Dr. Cale as I did, and Mother had always responded better to worship than she did to insolence. Let Batya have her delusions. Maybe they would find a way to serve us.

“I’ll be right there,” I said. “I just need to finish setting up this simulation.”

Batya nodded, but she didn’t leave, lingering in my doorway like a moth clinging to a light. I frowned.

“Was there something else?” I asked.

“We did as you told us, and sorted the people we took from the lab into ‘useful skills’ and ‘potential hosts.’ Most of her staff are willing to work with us as long as she is. I guess pragmatism is a human trait.”

“It is indeed,” I agreed. If it hadn’t been, we would never have been created. How a species that was so blissfully willing to betray itself had managed to remain dominant for so long was beyond me. Well, soon enough, they would be gone, and we, their successors, would not make the same mistakes.

“You had some names you wanted us to watch for.”

“Yes.”

“Um. Nathan Kim was present—”

“I know that, Batya; I handcuffed his smug little hands behind his back myself.”

“—and you have him listed as a potential host, not as a resource. But he’s a parasitologist, Sherman. He understands how we work almost better than we do. More importantly, he’s Dr. Cale’s biological child. She’s not going to forgive us if we cut his head open and put an implant inside.”

“And why not?” I demanded. “We’re her children. He’s her child. Shouldn’t she be delighted to combine her two greatest creations? If I didn’t need to remember all the things I’ve learned, I would take him for myself.” Sal already loved him. She would learn to love him again, with someone else living behind his eyes. She was adaptable, my beloved little traitor, and she would do whatever she felt was necessary.

Maybe putting him into the general pool of host bodies was a bad idea. “Wait,” I said, raising a hand. “I think I
will
save him for myself. Do his blood work, make sure we’re genetically compatible, and then allow him to work with his former colleagues. I’ll need him eventually, I’m sure. This body can’t last forever.”

“Dr. Cale—”

“Mother has chosen us over them every time the decision has been put in front of her. Her recent recalcitrance to commit to our cause is more a matter of lingering loyalty to her species than any misguided belief that humanity deserves this planet. So we let her keep the boy she birthed for right now, until her loyalties are swayed, and then we make it clear what his purpose is. By the time we get that far, she’ll rejoice at the idea that his body can serve our cause.”

Batya still looked unconvinced. I sighed and reached out to rest my fingertips against her cheek, focusing on bringing her heartbeat into rhythm with mine. She gasped at the touch, her eyes going half-lidded with the shock of the stimulus.

I hated to do this to her, but sometimes she needed to remember who was in charge here. Sometimes she needed to remember that it was not—would never be—her.

“Listen to me, little Bat,” I murmured. “My mother is a forgiving soul as long as you keep dangling the promise of new scientific discovery in front of her. I left her because I knew that in order to earn her love, I would have to bring her something greater than Adam ever could. All he brought was newness. I am bringing her the world. You are not going to interfere with that because you have somehow managed to pick up a dose of human sentimentality. Do you understand me? We’re going to remake the world in our image, and Mother is going to help us, but that can only happen if we make her understand why our way is the
only
way.”

“I understand,” said Batya, eyelashes still fluttering against her cheeks like the wings of captive birds. She was beautiful, when she wasn’t wrapped up in her own righteousness. It was truly a pity that she spent so much time in that state.

I wished, not for the first time, that I had time enough to work on her properly, to condition her to the point where her interests and mine would more perfectly align. Alas, that sort of time was a luxury we would not have for a while yet, if ever. Conquering a world was so much more work than I had ever anticipated.

“Tell my mother that I will be coming to her soon,” I murmured, and brushed my lips across Batya’s brow. She shivered at the touch. I let her go, smiling beatifically as she stepped back, out of my grasp, but never out of my reach.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “Everything is going to be fine.”