Xeno Sapiens (17 page)

“
You know what we’re
doing?”

“
I was there.”

“
You
were in surgery?”

“
After I got cleaned up, yes. I
mounted the path slides.”

“
Do you approve?”

“
When you said you were going to give
him his life back, I didn’t get it. Now I do. I only hope I’ll be
in such good hands if something like that ever happens to
me.”

“
You don’t think I’m using him as a
guinea pig,” she asked with well-worn sarcasm. “Another boost for
the vaunted Milner ego?”

“
I know,” Jimmy said, “how you feel
about him.”

“
There are those who don’t see it that
way.”

“
Screw them,” Jimmy said flatly. “Who
needs people who are afraid of what they’re doing? If they think
they’ve lost control, this is the last place they need to be.
Yellow bastards,” Jimmy sneered, “who can’t face up to their
responsibilities when things get a little hairy. They’re no great
loss. My parting words to them would be ‘don’t let the door hit you
in the ass on the way out.’ This is no little job. This is
history
.”

“
You sound like me,” Ingrid
said.

“
Better I should sound like you than
those around here who let their Bulldog mouths overload their
Chihuahua asses.” Jimmy blushed. “Sorry.”

“
I’ve heard worse.” She sounded tired,
worn out. “I wonder if my judgment is as good as it should be.
Fatigue causes mistakes, and mistakes we can’t afford. There’s Seth
to worry about, as well as Alex.”

“
I can cheer you up some, there,”
Jimmy said helpfully. “All is not lost.”

“
What do you mean,” Ingrid asked
without much interest.

“
We’ve got the codons for a
brain.”

She looked up quickly. “You’re
serious?” She regarded Jimmy warily.

“
That’s what we were working on when
the wringer blew apart.”

“
You’ve got the sequences? They
weren’t damaged?”

“
We took all precautions. They’ve been
checked and rechecked. I think we should go ahead.”

“
I guess.” Ingrid looked away, the
subject abruptly losing interest for her. She wondered how Alex was
doing.

“
Maybe you should go to bed,” Jimmy
suggested. “You look pretty rough.”

“
I ought to see how Alex is doing. I’m
the reason he’s in the shape he’s in.”

“
Professor Caudill has been with him
all day,” Jimmy said serenely. His eyes were distant and his face
had taken on a tranquil, dreamy quality. “His systems have been
shut down to nil with curare. The guys in the RNA lab have busted
their asses all day to get the sequences. You’ll know what happens
as soon as Professor Caudill does. It might be best if you forget
for a little while.”

“
I can’t sleep. All I can think about
is whether or not he’ll get better. I wonder if he can go back to
what he was.” She bared herself for the ultimate truth. “I don’t
know what he’ll think of me. What will he think about what I’ve
done to him?” She finally broke down and slow tears crept down her
cheeks.

Tears welled up in Jimmy’s own eyes,
quite surprisingly. He tried to comfort her.

“
That’s the last thing you should
worry about. You’ll have given him his life back.”

“
But what if it doesn’t work,” she
said. Hers were the eyes of a predator beguiled by her own
ferocity. “What will he think when he finds out I’m the one who cut
his arm off? When he finds out I refused to let him go to the
hospital? What will he think when he finds out I took his life in
my hands?”

“
It’ll work,” Jimmy said. He took
Ingrid’s hand. “He’ll never be anything but grateful.”

“
And what if it
does
work,” she said with morbid passion.
“What then? Men don’t understand. I don’t want to be the one who
saved his arm. I don’t sit well on a pedestal. I go on the rag and
when I wake up I look like a three day holiday for death. I’m
not
God
.
Don’t you understand that?” Part of her anger came from the fact
she had only realized it herself after Clifton’s
accident.

“
Ingrid,” Jimmy stammered. “It...I...”
He stopped, having no idea what to say.

Then, like the dim thudding of a
pendulum in a distant room, footsteps slowly and steadily tramped
up the hallway. There was something so plodding and implacable in
those steps that Ingrid was afraid. Heavy footsteps meant bad news.
They stopped at the door.

Alan Caudill’s six and a half foot
frame filled the doorway. The middling light in Ingrid’s office was
not enough to overpower the hallway fluorescents and Caudill’s face
was in shadow. Two clear half moons hovered in space where his
glasses perched. His head was tilted to the side. Ingrid and Jimmy
waited for the pronouncement.

“
We have the codons,” he said in that
new, peculiarly clear voice. No trace of his mumble
remained.

“
Alex’s arm is
regenerating.”

There had been something of a sensation
as Seth’s skin began to form in early 2003. It was clear that Seth,
though an amalgam of a thousand different genetic recombinations,
was going to go his own way.

Rather than being pink, or brown, or
red, or yellow, his skin had thickened and turned a doughy gray;
dark and dense enough to protect from background cosmic rays, but
still light enough for vitamin D metabolism. That skin, combined
with the huge-pupilled eyes in their cat’s eye sockets, made Seth
look for all the world like one of those gray-skinned aliens which
had been reported, and not surprisingly. Exobiologists had long
theorized a similar form for humanoids which existed in less
hospitable environments than earth

Merrifield recalled his thinking it was
autocratic of Ingrid to name him Seth. Now, as he looked at Seth’s
face -the elongated skull, dark, wraparound eyes, tiny nose and
gray skin- he idly wondered if Ingrid knew Seth was a son of
Eve.

On the day of Clifton’s accident, Josh
Hall was about to eat a tuna fish on rye- a sort of homage to Jesus
Christ on his feeding of the masses- when his secretary buzzed him.
Hall accepted the call with little good grace, his Christian
charity succumbing to the demands of his empty stomach.

During the course of his conversation
with a man who refused to identify himself, his lunch was
forgotten. A cool heat came to life behind his brows and he saw his
chance to have it out with the old dragon. He couldn’t have planned
it better himself. Hall was in the midst of a three month, winter
crusade and could see no way to free himself before March, at the
earliest. Could we, he asked the caller, meet then? The caller said
that would be fine.

During the course of the project, a
staggering six and a half million pages of data had heaped up on
hard copy and Jimmy Sunners had been reviewing some of the
mountains of paperwork. The reports written on the day the wringer
blew apart were in a shambles, but not so bad he couldn’t glean a
new molecular configuration on one of the brain cell codons. An
extra oxygen had attached itself to a phosphate chain, forming a
peroxide. He dismissed it as an inconsequential intron. He, nor
anybody else, had any idea that the new configuration would form
zinc inhibiting cells in the brain. A zinc deficiency could induce
mental fugues, irrational behavior, and a generally lousy feeling
akin to coming down from tainted angel dust. The constant
urinalyses on Seth showed no problems. The excess zinc which his
brain didn’t use had been re-channeled to the development of a
supernormal nervous system instead of being pissed out, where it
would have shown a problem.

For two months Ingrid and Caudill had
taken turns sitting by Clifton’s bedside. It was an obsession from
which Ingrid could not be swayed. Most times when someone came in
to adjust the life support systems or give Clifton another dollop
of curare, Ingrid would be there, either staring at the
regenerating constituents of Alex’s arm with a mordant and
unhealthy fascination, or dozing, sitting up in a chair.

She had studied the regeneration of his
arm with ghastly, clinical curiosity. She watched as the nub of
bone became round and bluish with cartilage; watched it lengthen
and ossify into bone which grew from the break and made its
inexorable trip down to the elbow where ligaments formed, down to
newly grown forearm bones, and then to the bones of his
hand.

Once the skeletal components had
formed, it looked as if the flesh had been neatly stripped away by
careful and knowledgeable hands. The bones were elevated in a
plastic overwrap, compassed by an electromagnetic field. The
humming of the field generator was the sound of a sleeping spouse
on a summer night, a sure sign all was well.

The flesh of Clifton’s upper arm had
been kept from bleeding by a goopy, tarry-looking substance that
had been smeared on it. It had been kept from healing by strange
drugs unknown to anyone in the FDA, which would have banned them
had they known of them.

Ingrid became morbidly sure there would
soon be a trade off. It was the kind of reckless, irrational
thinking that had plagued her after her mother’s death. With every
new nerve and blood vessel Alex developed, she was sure Seth would
lose a system, or simply die as payment for sound flesh on
Clifton’s arm which had no right to be there.

Clifton’s arm bones became interleaved
with a lace of blood vessels that attached themselves to the bones
and flowed over the phalanges like grave worms. Nerves and muscles
developed simultaneously. They pulsed with life as blood surged
beneath them. Yellowy clear membranes formed around them. They were
moistly shiny, looking slimy and unpleasant to touch. Ingrid
watched all this with the certainty that she would pay for
Clifton’s arm with Seth’s life.

There ain’t no free lunch.
Everything has to be paid for. How many times can you snatch
someone from death’s grasp before it catches up? How many times can
you use your brain and your skills to outwit the old monster? Death
has been around billions of years. You’re only twenty-six. Nobody’s
ever beaten it. You’ve stood it off for a little while, but what
will the payment be?

Death doesn’t bargain; it
doesn’t care. It took your mother, it could have taken you. It took
the people of Jonestown, Guyana, children and all. The best you can
hope for is a draw, but even compromises have their price. You’ve
created life where there was only molecular structure before, but
death is waiting for it, too. You’ve lost sight of that, haven’t
you?

It’s waiting for Seth in
the form of a land mine in Lagos, or a garrote in Lebanon. There’s
a bullet with his name on it in Thailand, or a crowded restaurant
in Tunis. No matter what advantages you give him, death is there
for him in the crushing depths of the ocean; asphyxiation or
freezing in the thin atmosphere of the moon or Mars. You believe
the Lord giveth, but his dark angel Lucifer taketh away. You’ve had
your hand at playing God, but not even you can beat the devil, can
you?

“
No,” she whispered, not in answer to
her stream of consciousness, but in defiance of it. There had to be
a way. If there was a bargain, she sometimes wished it would be
Clifton’s arm for Seth’s life. The thought horrified her to tears
sometimes, but the more she looked into her own heart, the more she
knew it was true.

And truth, she knew, had an ugly way of
coming out in the end.

Ingrid had been awaiting Clifton’s
return to consciousness. It would be only a short while, now. Many
times in the past week he had struggled close to wakefulness, just
at the threshold of dreams. He moaned and tried to thrash his arms,
but the curare was too powerful.

His right arm was completely
immobilized by a contraption that would have been more appropriate
in the chamber of an inquisitioner. It had been necessary to keep
the arm still during the regeneration process, but Ingrid had
insisted the rig remain on even after the process was complete,
certain of impending disaster if the strategy were
changed.

She had been napping after having
remained awake the previous thirty-six hours, knowing both of her
projects were due to come to fruition at any time. Her hair had
grown long and unkempt. Split ends that might have given her the
appearance of an ancient, hee-hawing witch were kept at bay by an
accumulation of oil that turned her hair from honey blond to dingy,
dishwater gray.

She had been unwilling to give up the
hour it would take to get a shower. Her coworkers, had not
commented on her bloodshot eyes, sunken cheeks, or breath that
drifted out like chemical gas composed of onions, pickles, garlic
and stale bread that had comprised the microwaveable sandwiches
which had been her diet for the past two days.