Hybrids (21 page)

Bristol Harbour Village was the dream of a developer named Fred Sarkis: five luxury condominium-apartment buildings perched atop a shale cliff on the shore of Canandaigua Lake. One of upstate New York’s Finger Lakes, Canandaigua was a long, deep gouge in the landscape formed by Ice Age glaciers.

BHV had been built in the early 1970s, before the economies of Rochester, and so many other upstate cities, had gone into the toilet. It was a bizarre artifact of its time, like Habitat from Expo ’67. When Mary first saw it, at Louise Benoît’s recommendation, she’d thought they should film the next Spider-Man movie there: there were all sorts of bridges linking its multilevel outdoor parking garages with the actual apartment buildings that would have been perfect for the web-slinger.

Apparently, though, the development had never quite worked out the way it had been planned, and despite such luxuries as a Robert Trent Jones golf course just up the street and nearby Bristol Mountain for skiing in winter, there were always a large number of units for sale or rent. The real-estate agent Mary had spoken to went on about how Patty Duke and John Astin, back when they were married, had stayed there one summer. Mary rather suspected that once she learned that two Neanderthals were now here, that fact would become a new part of her sales pitch.

The apartment Mary had rented was a two-bedroom, 1000-square-foot unit split over two levels. It still had what must have been the original god-awful orange shag carpet; Mary hadn’t seen anything like it in decades. Still, the view was beautiful—looking directly across the width of the lake. The upper balcony, off the master bedroom, had an unobstructed panorama; the lower balcony looked out into the top of the tenacious trees that had grown up out of the crumbling cliff face. From either of them, one could see the cement walkway jutting out to the outdoor elevator shaft that dropped the hundreds of feet to the marina and man-made beach below.

“Now,
this
is an interesting place!” said Ponter as he stood on the lower balcony, clutching the railing with both hands. “Modern conveniences amid nature. I almost think I am back on my world.”

Mary was using an electric grill on the balcony to cook steaks she’d bought at Wegman’s. Ponter continued to look out at the lake, while Adikor seemed more interested in a large spider that was working its way along the railing.

When the steaks were done—just a shade past raw for the boys, medium well for her—Mary served them, and Ponter and Adikor tore into theirs with gloved hands, while Mary carved hers with a knife. Of course, dinner was the easy part, thought Mary. At some point, though, someone was bound to bring up the question of—

“So,” said Adikor, “where shall we sleep?”

Mary took a deep breath, then: “I thought Ponter and I would—”

“No, no, no,” said Adikor. “Two are not One. It’s I who should be sleeping with Ponter now.”

“Yes, but this is
my
home,” said Mary. “My world.”

“That’s irrelevant. Ponter is
my
man-mate. You two have not even bonded yet.”

“Please!” said Ponter. “Let’s not fight.” He smiled at Mary, then at Adikor, but said nothing for a few moments. Then, in a tentative voice, he offered, “You know, we could all sleep together…”

“No!” said Adikor, and “No!” said Mary simultaneously.
Good grief!
thought Mary. A hominid
ménage à trois!

“I really think,” continued Mary, “that it makes sense for Ponter and me—”

“That’s gristle,” said Adikor. “It is obvious that—”

“My beloved,” said Ponter, but perhaps since
mare
was the Neanderthal word for “beloved,” he started again, using a different approach. “My two loves,” he said. “You know how deeply I care about each of you. But Adikor is right—under normal circumstances, I would be with him at this time of month.” He reached out and touched Adikor affectionately. “Mare, you must get used to this. It’s going to be a reality for the rest of my life.”

Mary looked out at the lake. This side was in shade, but sun was still falling on the far shore, a mile and a half off. There were four air-conditioning/heating units in the apartment, Mary knew—one at each end of each floor. She’d been turning on the fan on the one in the master bedroom before going to bed each night, so that the white noise would drown out the cacophony of birds that hailed the dawn. She supposed if she put it on high, it might keep her from hearing any noise coming from the other bedroom…

And Ponter
was
right. She
did
have to get used to this.

“All right,” she said, at last, closing her eyes. “But you guys have to make breakfast, then.”

Adikor took Ponter’s hand, and smiled at Mary. “Deal,” he said.

There was already a large safe in Jock’s office, built into the far wall; it had been the first renovation Jock had ordered when the Synergy Group had bought this old mansion. The safe, embedded in concrete, met Department of Defense guidelines for being both secure and fireproof. Jock kept the codon writer in it, only bringing it out for supervised study.

Jock sat at his desk. On one corner of it was the conversion box Lonwis had put together that would allow designs created on Jock’s PC to be downloaded into the codon writer. Jock was looking at one such design. His monitor—a seventeen-inch LCD, with a black bezel—was showing the notes and formulas Cornelius Ruskin had prepared. Of course, Jock had told Cornelius that his interest was purely defensive—wanting to see what a worst-case scenario would be if a device like the codon writer fell into the wrong hands.

Jock knew he should have turned this device over to the Pentagon—but those bastards would want to use it against
humans
. No, this was his opportunity—his one chance—and he had to seize it. Right now, early on in the contact between the two worlds, it would look like an accident: a nasty bug that had slipped through to the other side. Regrettable, but it would leave Eden uninhabited, and there’d only be one
Homo sapiens
casualty—Cornelius Ruskin, after he was no longer of any use.

Ruskin, of course, only knew what was necessary. For instance, as far as he, and most of the genetics community, knew, the natural reservoir for the Ebola virus—the place it lurked when not infecting humans—was unknown. But Jock was privy to things Ruskin was not: the U.S. government had isolated the reservoir back in 1998:
Balaeniceps rex
, the shoe-bill, a tall wading bird found in swamps in eastern tropical Africa. The information had been classified, lest an unfriendly power make use of it.

Ebola was an RNA virus whose genome had been completely sequenced, although, again, Ruskin wouldn’t know that; that information had also been classified, for the same reason. So, presumably as far as Ruskin was aware, the sequence Jock had asked him to manipulate was just a random viral string, not the actual genetic code of Ebola.

Ebola came in several strains, named for the locations at which they had been first identified. Ebola-Zaire was by far the most deadly, but it was only transmitted through bodily fluids. In contrast, Ebola-Reston, which doesn’t affect humans, is transmitted through the air. But Ruskin had had no trouble—purely as part of an exercise, of course—in programming the codon writer to swap a few genes, thereby producing a hybrid version that should have Ebola-Zaire’s virulence combined with Ebola-Reston’s ability for airborne transmission.

A few more tweaks cut the modified virus’s incubation time to one-tenth of what it had been in nature, and boosted the kill rate from ninety to better than ninety-nine percent. And one final tweak had changed the genetic markers that specified the virus’s natural reservoir…

The second part of the project had been harder, but Cornelius had taken to it like a dog to a bone; it’s amazing how much a $200,000 consulting fee can motivate someone.

The concept was simple enough on paper: keep the virus from being activated unless the host cell had certain characteristics. Fortunately, when Ambassador Tukana Prat brought ten of the most famous Neanderthals of all with her to the United Nations, they had freely shared much knowledge. One of them, Borl Kadas, had provided all the information that had been gleaned from the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome, which had been completed back in the year Jock knew as 1953. That database had provided the information needed to make sure the virus would kill only those it was supposed to kill.

Now only one problem remained: getting the virus over to the other side. At first, Jock had thought the simplest solution would be to infect himself with it—after all, it would have no effect on a hominid with twenty-three pairs of chromosomes. But the tuned-laser technology used for decontaminating people crossing between worlds would have easily zapped it from his body. Even diplomatic pouches were decontaminated, so simply storing a supply of the virus in one of them wouldn’t work, either.

No, he needed to get an aerosol bomb over in some sort of container that was opaque to the laser pulses used by the Neanderthals’ decontamination equipment. Jock himself had no idea what would do the trick, but his optics team—originally assembled to study the imaging technology in Companion implants, and handpicked from the best Bausch & Lomb, Kodak, and Xerox had to offer—would certainly be able to work it out, especially since the tuned-laser technology was also one of those the Neanderthals had freely shared with
Homo sapiens
.

Jock picked up the phone on his desk, and dialed an internal extension. “Hello, Kevin,” he said. “It’s Jock. Would you, Frank, and Lilly please come down to my office? I’ve got a little job for you…”

Mary found a simple short-term solution to the problem of working in the same building as Cornelius Ruskin. She would come in late in the day and work on into the evening; Cornelius would leave shortly after she arrived—or, if she was lucky, even before she got in.

Ponter and Adikor came in from Bristol Harbour Village with Mary; they had no way to get around except for having her drive them. But they spent most of their time working on the quantum-computing project with Lonwis Trob, and often with Louise Benoît—although she kept more normal hours, and had already gone home today.

Mary was writing a report for Jock, detailing everything she’d learned from Lurt, Vissan, and others about Neanderthal genetics. The work simultaneously elated and depressed Mary: elated her because she’d learned so much, and depressed her because the Neanderthals were decades beyond her people in this area, meaning so much of the work she’d done in the past was hopelessly obsolete, and—

Massive footfalls—someone running down the corridor.

“Mare! Mare!”

Adikor had appeared in Mary’s doorway, his broad, round face terrified. “What is it?” Mary asked.

“Lonwis Trob—he’s collapsed! We need medical aid, and—”

And, except for Bandra, who knew the joke about the hunters calling 9-1-1, the Neanderthals had no idea how to summon such a thing; nor could their Companions call anyone on this side of the portal. Mary rose and ran down the corridor to the quantum-computing lab.

Lonwis was flat on his back, his eyelids fluttering. When they opened, they showed only smooth blue-metal spheres; the parts with the mechanical irises had apparently rolled up into his head.

Ponter was kneeling beside Lonwis. He was using the back of one hand, effortlessly it seemed, to compress Lonwis’s chest over and over again—a Neanderthal version of CPR. Meanwhile, Lonwis’s golden Companion was speaking aloud in the Neanderthal language, describing Lonwis’s vital signs.

Mary picked up the phone on one of the desks, dialed 9 for an outside line, then 9-1-1.

“Fire, police, or ambulance?” said the operator.

“Ambulance.”

“What’s wrong?”

“A man having a heart attack,” said Mary. “Hurry!”

The operator, a woman, must have had the address on a screen in front of her, based on the incoming phone number. “I’m dispatching an ambulance now. Do you know how to perform CPR?”

“Yes,” said Mary. “But someone else is already doing that, and—look, I should tell you up front. The man having the heart attack is a Neanderthal.”

“Ma’am, it’s a serious crime to—”

“
I’m not joking!
” snapped Mary. “I’m calling from the Synergy Group. We’re a U.S.-government think tank, and we’ve got Neanderthals here.”

Ponter was continuing to compress Lonwis’s chest. Adikor, meanwhile, had opened up Lonwis’s medical belt and was using a compressed-gas injector to pump something into Lonwis’s neck.

“Can I have your name?” said the operator.

“Is the ambulance coming? Have you sent it yet?”

“Yes, ma’am. It’s on its way. Can I have your name?”

“It’s Mary N. Vaughan. That’s V-A-U-G-H-A-N. I’m a geneticist.”

“How old is the patient, Ms. Vaughan?”

“A hundred and eight—and no, I am
not
joking. It’s Lonwis Trob, one of the Neanderthals who visited the United Nations last month.”

Stan Rasmussen—a geopolitical expert who worked down the hall—had appeared in the doorway. Mary covered the handset and spoke quickly to him. “Lonwis is having a heart attack. Get Jock!” Rasmussen nodded and hurried away.

“I’m going to transfer you to the paramedics,” said the 9-1-1 operator.

A moment later a different female voice came on. “We’re five minutes away,” she said. “Can you describe the patient’s condition?”

“No,” said Mary, “but I’ll put his Companion on.” She picked up the desk set and carried it across the room, setting it down near Lonwis. She then spoke to Lonwis’s implant: “Switch to English, and answer all the questions you hear. Help is on its way…”

Jock, Ponter, and Adikor had rushed off to Strong Memorial Hospital, along with the still-unconscious Lonwis Trob. There was nothing Mary could do to help, and, at Jock’s urging, she had stayed back at the Synergy Group.

It took Mary a good hour to calm down enough to get back to her work, but finally she did so…only to have it blow up in her face.

One of Mary’s friends back at York had been a Linux evangelist, trying to convince everyone in the genetics department that they should abandon Windows and switch instead to the open-source operating system. Mary tended to stay out of computer wars—she’d remained neutral years before in the Mac-versus-PC skirmishes—but every time her Windows-based PC displayed that blue screen of death, she felt like throwing her support in with the Linux crowd.

And now it had happened again, for the second time today. Mary did the three-fingered salute, but after sitting through the interminable wait for the system to reboot, she found that it stubbornly refused to reacquire its network connection.

Mary sighed. It was 7:00P.M. , but she could hardly call it a day; Ponter and Adikor would need her to give them a lift back to Bristol Harbour Village whenever they returned from the hospital.

Of course, there were lots of other computers here in the old mansion that housed the Synergy Group, but, well…

Jock had one of those nifty Aeron chairs Mary had read about in the Sharper Image catalog. It was supposed to be super-comfortable, an ergonomic heaven. Granted, he had probably adjusted all its heights and tilts for his rangy body, but, still, she could get a feel for it if she worked in his office.

Mary got up, and headed down the staircase, which was carpeted in a wine red. Jock’s office door was wide open, and Mary walked in. Jock had a big bay window, looking south over the marina. Mary shivered at the view, despite it still being warm inside.

She walked over to Jock’s super-chair, all black metal and plastic, with a fine-meshed black back that was supposed to allow one’s skin to breathe while seated. Feeling like a mischievous kid, she lowered herself into the chair and leaned back.

My God
, she thought.
A product for which the hype was actually true!
It was wonderfully comfortable. She used her feet to rotate the chair left and right. Mary knew Aerons cost an arm and a leg, but she
had
to get herself one of these…

After relaxing in the chair for a few more moments, she settled back to work. Jock, who had left this room in a hurry when Lonwis Trob had his heart attack, was still logged onto the network. Mary suspected her own password would work from here, but wasn’t positive, and so she decided to leave well enough alone, and continued working as if she were Jock. She opened up the “Neanderthal genetics” folder on the server, and—

Mary’s eyebrows shot up. She spent most of her time in this folder, but there were two icons displayed that she’d never seen before. She felt nervous: although Mary was pretty good at backing up, she was afraid the crash she’d had upstairs had corrupted the directory tree.

She decided to check by double-clicking on one of the icons she didn’t recognize—it showed a red-and-black double helix. Mary knew most of the genetics apps on the market, and their accompanying document icons, but this one was unfamiliar.

After a moment a window opened. It said “USAMRIID Geneplex—Surfaris” in the title bar, and a screenful of text and formulas appeared below it. USAMRIID was an acronym that appeared often enough in the genetics literature: United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. And Geneplex was obviously the program’s name. But “Surfaris” didn’t mean a thing to Mary.

Still, she looked at the window’s contents, and was absolutely astonished. Some of her own earlier work here at Synergy had involved trying to use the quorum-counting facility of bacteria to determine an actual tally of how many chromosome pairs were present—twenty-three or twenty-four. But that hadn’t worked. First, the quorum mechanism seemed to lack the ability to distinguish quantities that precisely. And, second, chromosomes only resolved themselves out of the chromatin during mitosis, which, of course, was hardly the usual state of affairs within a cell.

But Jock had apparently had someone else also working on this problem, and that geneticist had come up with a much simpler technique. In a Gliksin, what had been ancestral chromosomes two and three had fused, producing a much longer chromosome. The genes that had been at the end of chromosome two now abutted the genes at the beginning of chromosome three, somewhere in the middle of the new, combined chromosome.

The same genes existed in a Neanderthal, but they did not abut. Rather, the last gene on chromosome two was followed by a telomere—the junk-DNA cap that did nothing but protect the tip of the chromosome, like the little plastic-wrapped bit at the end of a shoelace. Likewise, the first gene in chromosome three was preceded by another telomere, the end cap on the leading edge of that chromosome. So, in a Neanderthal, you’d find these sequences:

At the end of chromosome 2:


…[other genes][gene ALPHA][telomere]


At the beginning of chromosome 3:


 [telomere][gene BETA][other genes]…


Those sequences wouldn’t exist anywhere in Gliksin DNA. Conversely, in Gliksin DNA, millions of base pairs away from any telomere, you’d find this sequence, a combination completely absent from Neanderthal DNA:

…[other genes][gene ALPHA][gene BETA][other genes]…


A logical extension of Mary’s original work—and a perfect, infallible way of distinguishing between the two kinds of humans, even when a cell wasn’t undergoing mitosis. It was precisely what Jock said he’d wanted: a simple, reliable method to distinguish a Gliksin from a Barast.

Mary was pleased to see that all the tests were invoked. In theory, one could test for only one of the three conditions. Finding either of the first two sequences—either gene ALPHA or gene BETA next to a telomere—clearly denoted
Homo neanderthalensis
. And finding the third sequence—genes ALPHA and BETA adjacent to each other—denoted
Homo sapiens
. But things could always go wrong, and so the test to identify a Neanderthal used a little logic tree, explained, presumably for Jock’s benefit, in plain English:

Step 1: Are Genes ALPHA and BETA found side by side?


If
yes
, abort (this isn’t a Neanderthal)


If
no
, this is probably a Neanderthal: go to Step 2


Step 2: Is Gene ALPHA found next to a telomere?


If
yes
, this is still likely a Neanderthal: go to Step 3


If
no
, abort (this should never happen in a Neanderthal)


Step 3: Is Gene BETA found next to a telomere?


If
yes
, this is definitely a Neanderthal: go to Step 4


If
no
, abort (this should never happen in a Neanderthal)


The abort conditions in steps two and three were fail-safes. They occurred if the genes ALPHA and BETA were not side by side (as determined in step one)
and
neither ALPHA nor BETA were next to a telomere—combinations that should never be found in either kind of hominid DNA.

It was a pig-simple program for a computer to execute, but it was a bit more complex to code into a cascade of biochemical reactions, although apparently that was what Jock’s geneticist had done. Mary had no trouble following the formulas for enzymes produced at each stage of the reaction, and could see that the results would indeed follow the intended logic. At the end of it all, she expected to just see an enzyme or other marker produced whose presence could be easily tested for: an unambiguous flag saying, yup, this is a Neanderthal, or nope, it’s not.

But she wasn’t anywhere near the end of the process, as she saw when she scrolled down to the next screen full of formulas and text. Mary’s jaw dropped as she continued to read, discovering what step 4 was. Jock and many members of his team had come from RAND; Mary had gotten used to them speaking in cold-war clichés, but the next term stopped her heart for a second: “Payload delivery.”

If, and only if, the test subject was found to be a Neanderthal, a new cascade sequence was invoked that ultimately resulted in…

Mary could hardly believe her eyes. Her specialty was ancient DNA—that’s what had gotten her involved in all this to begin with, after all—but that didn’t mean she was ignorant of more recently identified sequences, especially those that had made front-page news around the world.

If the specimen was a Neanderthal, a payload was indeed delivered: a payload based on a filovirus that would result very rapidly in the development of a hemorrhagic fever.

A fatal hemorrhagic fever…

Mary leaned back in Jock’s chair. She could taste bile climbing her throat.

Why on Earth would someone want to wipe out the Neanderthals?

But, of course, the question really should be, Why, with
two Earths
, would someone want to wipe out the Neanderthals?

Hemorrhagic fevers were contagious. Gliksins couldn’t cure them, and she very much doubted Barasts could, either, for two reasons. First, by virtue of never having developed agriculture and animal husbandry, the Neanderthals had also never had to develop techniques for dealing with plagues. And, second, all known hemorrhagic fevers were tropical diseases—something the northern-living Neanderthals would have had very little experience with.

Mary swallowed hard, trying to force down the biting, sour taste.

But why? Why would someone want to kill the Neanderthals? It didn’t make…

Suddenly Mary remembered her little exchange with Jock back at the Debral nickel mine:

“
It’s
astonishing,” Jock had said. “
I knew in an intellectual sort of way that we’d screwed up our environment, but until I saw all this…
” He’d indicated the pristine countryside. “
It’s like finding Eden.
”

And Mary had laughed. “
Isn’t it, though?
” she’d said. “
Too bad it’s already occupied, eh?
”

A little joke—that’s all it was. But Jock hadn’t laughed. All you had to do was get rid of those pesky Neanderthals, and an Eden awaited…

It was horrific—but Jock had spent his life dealing with scenarios of mass destruction. What was horrific to Mary was just another day at the office for him.

Mary’s first thought was to erase the computer files—but, of course, that would accomplish nothing. There would doubtless be backups.

Her second thought was to pick up the phone and call—well, as a good Canadian, she naturally thought of the CBC, which could then spread the news to the four corners of this world. There was no way people would stand for this sort of genocide.

But she didn’t know how far along Jock was. If he was ready to go, Mary certainly didn’t want him to feel cornered, since he might release his disease vector as soon as he heard that the public had gotten wind of his plan.

Mary needed help, ideas, support—not just from Ponter or Adikor, but from another Gliksin, someone who understood how this world worked.

There were people she trusted back in Toronto, but was there anyone she could rely on here in the United States? Her sister Christine—the real Christine—of course, but she was in Sacramento, clear across the continent, thousands of—of
miles
—away.

And then it hit her.

The obvious answer, as much as her youth and beauty rankled Mary.

The woman who had saved Ponter Boddit’s life when he’d first arrived in this reality.

The quantum-physics postdoc that Jock had scooped up to try to replicate the Neanderthal computing technology.

Louise Benoît.

Not that Louise would be much help in medical matters, but—

But her boyfriend! Granted, Reuben Montego was no specialist, but he’d be a lot more help dealing with a disease vector than would a physicist.

Mary knew that she might never again get access to these computer files. She looked around Jock’s office and found a spindle of blank CDs (Kodak brand, of course, this being Rochester). She took one, put it in the computer’s CD drive, and clicked on the CD-burning application. Just to be on the safe side, she selected all the files in the folder. The whole thing topped out at 610 meg—small enough to fit on a single CD. She clicked the “copy files” button, and leaned back in the Aeron chair—which, just now, didn’t seem comfortable at all—wishing she knew some way to calm her racing heart.