J. Daniel Sawyer - Clarke Lantham 01 (7 page)

Hell, I wasn’t here to for the lecture anyway—I was just here to hijack him after the show. I’d figured by coming early I’d get better access, and maybe pick up enough of the jargon to talk to him coherently, then grab him during lunch before he gave his talk. It was a great idea—which gives you an idea of the way my luck runs.

Damn shame I hadn’t brought my No-Doze.

“Now, what does my own specialty of embryology and fertility research, have to do with any of this? At the intersection of genetics and embryology we begin to learn the ideal conditions for interspecies surrogacy.” And there’s where he really lost me.

Anyone who pays a slight bit of attention to the news or had seen that movie about the dinosaurs could follow the rest of it in broad strokes, but when he got into the artificial uteruses and showing the pictures of dissected reproductive tracts I just about lost my smoothie. Too much like that one knife murder scene I ran into my first year as a street cop.

The talk ran the better part of an hour. The panel discussion between Sternwood and the four bioethicists ran for another ninety minutes, two of them eviscerating Sternwood’s premise, one of them extolling his virtues, and the fourth attempting—largely unsuccessfully, to broker a compromise by contending that most of the program would be impossible for at least another decade.

Sometime during my third nap, the room erupted in applause. I’d half-slept through three or four waves of applause before—this one was sharp and spontaneous. Wishing I had brought toothpicks to prop my eyes open, I sat up and attempted to look around. The houselights were up, and the English guy was back at the podium.

“Now, I’m sure you’re all desperate for a break, so if you’ll make your way out to the courtyard you’ll find sunshine and refreshments and probably in a moment our panelists, I think.” He lifted his eyebrows and turned off his mic, and everybody clapped again.

As the crowd started to break up, a vaguely familiar-looking young man in a smart charcoal sportcoat and pony tail sporting a cold, angry face bounded past my seat, taking the wide stairs two at a time, and pushed through the exit. I didn’t have time to figure out why I recognized him before the exiting crowd started buffeting me every which way.

It took me another five minutes to negotiate crowd etiquette between my seat and the aisle, and another couple moments to find my way out into the lobby.

2:45 PM, Sunday

Twenty minutes later, Dr. Sternwood hadn’t made it out of the auditorium yet. A peek back inside convinced me that he hadn’t snuck out a back door. He leaned against the panel table at the front, holding forth for a dozen or so excitable students and colleagues. At this rate I was going to have to hijack him.

“No,”
Sternwood
shouted as I approached, “It’s impossible. You can’t get beyond third-level differentiation in vitro. The program depends on the ability to closely replicate the uterine environment. We have to start with living analogues and work backward from there.” He checked his wristwatch. “I’m sorry, but we really need to move this outside.”

The clump didn’t really break up, but it loosened a bit so the professor could sling a satchel over his shoulder and lead the way up the stairs. I waited a quarter of the way up and fell in step as he past.

“Doctor Sternwood,” I handed him my investigator’s license. “Clarke Lantham, do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

He squinted at me like I’d just lost about thirty IQ points in his estimation. “I’m rather busy today. Call my assistant and set up an appointment.”

“It won’t take a minute,” we hit the top of the stairs and plunged through the small lobby to the spiral staircase leading up to ground level, “Doctor Warner at Children’s Hospital Oakland sent me.”

He grunted something that might have been “Oh.” It might also have been nausea at the thought of an old student. I gambled on the “Oh” and handed him the phone, tapping the screen to wake it up as the sunlight hit me from above.

“What’s this?”

“Birth defect.”

“That’s a barber’s problem.”

He handed it back to me as we hit the top of the stairs in the middle of the uterus. It had been Gravity’s headshot.

“Sorry.” I flipped to Nya’s picture and handed it back to him. “My mistake. I’m trying to find out what this is. Doctor Warner told me she hadn’t seen it before, but if it existed you’d be the man to ask about it.”

Sternwood slowed. He held his hand up to shield the phone from the glare off the south spur of the building. I thought his eyebrows were going to crawl up to his hairline. Surprise? Apparently.

“Where’d you get this?”

“Sorry, that’s confidential.”

Sternwood turned to the throng following us. “I’m sorry, something’s come up. I’ll be at the reception at five. We’ll continue this discussion then.”

He didn’t talk to me all the way up to the fourth floor Starbuck’s. It seemed that it took coffee to unlock his tongue again. Guy was probably a cop in a former life.

“So, are you working for a lawyer?” He leaned up against a frame beam on the floor to ceiling windows, his left hand in his pocket, his right hand holding the coffee. If he’d been rattled before—which I wasn’t convinced of—he wasn’t now.

“No. Private party.”

“And this doesn’t have anything to do with Antony’s Syndrome?”

“What’s that?”

That seemed to satisfy him. “That girl,” he nodded at the phone, “Has what looks like Antony’s Syndrome.”

“Never heard of it. Rare?”

“Very.” He took a sip of his cappuccino.

“How do you diagnose it?”

“Look at the face.” He shrugged and grunted.

“Why were you worried that I worked for a lawyer?”

“Oh, that.” Another sip. “I wrote a paper on it in April ‘03 JAMA, so I’m the world authority. Every once in a while someone files a wrongful birth lawsuit against a fertility clinic and they want an expert witness.”

“Irritating.”

“Mmm.” He took a larger swallow, then dropped his right hand to his hip and tapped it unconsciously with his forefinger. “So if you’re not working for a lawyer, what do you want with me?”

“Just trying to figure out what this thing is.”

“And not for a lawyer?”

“Not at all.”

“All right. I’m going to hold you to that. If I get subpoenaed you’re going to hear from
my
lawyer.”

“Fair enough. So what else is it besides the face? How can you tell Antony’s Syndrome?”

“Hmph. The face isn’t enough?”

“Humor me. You didn’t publish in JAMA just because it looks weird.”

“Fine.” He smiled. He’d had a good sense of humor in his lecture—what little of it I didn’t sleep through—and he hadn’t left it back on the dais. One more sip of the cappuccino, and a smile at a private joke. “There are a few behavioral markers—low latent inhibition, sexual precocity…”

“Low latent inhibition…?

“Oh. It’s a gating disorder where the brain pays attention to things it’s supposed to filter out. People that have it tend to be really creative or they tend to go crazy. Schizophrenics, conspiracy nuts, fiction writers, photographers…”

“Okay, got it. What else?”

He swirled the balance of the coffee around the bottom of the cup. “Let’s see. Arrested language development at puberty, attenuated verbal processing, high degrees of empathy, emotional outbursts…”

“Problem kids.”

“Right. Usually they don’t live past about fifteen.”

“Why’s that?”

“High risk tolerance.”

“Drugs, sex, extreme sports…”

“That kind of thing. This girl,” he nodded at the phone still in my hand, recording him, “She died?”

“I hope not.”

“Well, don’t hope too hard.” He grimaced, “I followed those cases for fifteen years, never found one to get out of young adulthood.”

“Just the risky behavior?”

“Isn’t that enough?”

“I guess. I just figured they might have weak hearts or something—like, don’t Down’s kids have heart problems?”

“I never found anything like that, no. These kids just…I don’t know,” He looked out the window, “It’s more like they’re born in prison, but can’t stand it. You may know about how some species just won’t breed in captivity…”

“Like pandas?”

“Right. These kids seemed like they couldn’t live in captivity.”

“Strange.”

“Civilization isn’t for everyone.”

“I guess not. So this disorder, what can you do about it?”

He drained the last of his drink and crushed the cup in his hand. “Nothing, it’s a congenital neurological problem. Best you can do is behavioral therapy.” He started walking back toward the elevators—evidently, he’d said all he thought there was to say.

I scrambled and caught up with as he was hitting the call button at the elevator. “Sorry, just a couple other questions. This disease—genetic?”

“That’s what I argued in the paper. Abnormal disjunction of the chromosome 2 makes them theoretically infertile—at least,” The doors slid open and I stepped inside after him, “I’ve never seen evidence of any of them having any children.”

“Anything else?”

“No. If you want more detail, look at the article. I might be forgetting something.” The elevator hit the ground floor and opened again. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m about to be late for the next panel. Good luck with your inquiries.” He gave my hand a friendly shake, and then jogged out the door and across the uterus.

Breathing the still air of a Palo Alto’s mid-afternoon is something like trying to extract oxygen from a sock full of microwaved rice. It doesn’t really move, no matter how much you try to suck it in, and if you could, it would sear all your lung tissue out anyway. Maybe ninety-five degrees and dry enough to make your nose bleed.

For a part of the world that peaked above ninety for maybe a week every year, this was a special, tailor-made version of hell.

I swapped the fake eyeglasses for shades to save my eyes from the glare off the glass of the east wall and hung a left out toward the parking lot across the green.

Probably in deference to the heat, the conference organizers had set out some cold treats vending tables in the shade of the trees in the vaginal park. Good thing too—on the large green across the way, between myself and the parking lot, the rally that I’d seen gathering on my way in was now in full swing.

Just what I needed, a thousand-armpit-strong mist of patchouli and pot scented activism with all the navigation difficulties that created. They just doubled the distance between me and my car.

I’d have to walk around. I knew I should have parked on the south side.

I dropped three bucks for a sherbet cup and started the trek around the crowd, passing up signs comparing the attendees to the Nazis, accused them of playing god, poisoning the food, kowtowing to totalitarian corporate interests, and—though it didn’t seem immediately relevant to me—demanding the de-funding of the Pentagon.

I’d at least gotten what I needed out of the trip. The recorder on my phone will have caught the complete symptoms list—several of them matched pretty well what I’d seen and heard about Nya so far. He said behavior problems and named a couple psychological disorders—that was probably why she had the shrink. Her psycho therapist mother would insist.

Once I got around the edge of the crowd I leaned against one of the shade trees that edged the green and watched the protest for a couple minutes, out of habit more than anything.

It was the usual mix of hippie-wanna-bes, well-dressed liberal arts students, and at least two professional agitators from some of the local revolutionary groups who I’d seen on watchlists and low-rent wanted posters.

As I watched, a fresh crop of signs moved out through the crowd to the fore, blocking the bearer from my view. This set singled Doctor Sternwood out for special contempt—one declaring him the antichrist of the biosphere, another comparing him to Josef Mengele, and a third illustrating the good doctor
in flagrante delicto
with a chimpanzee and declaring “If Sternwood wins, the apes are fucked.”

A whistle from my right snapped my head around. The cops had arrived. No riot gear yet, but they were setting up a perimeter. If the mood of the protest changed they’d lock the place down and I wouldn’t be able to get out.

I took the last bite of the sherbet and tossed the container into a trash can at the road’s edge, but when I glanced back at the crowd to pick my way through I saw an unexpected familiar face.

Gravity.

I flashed back to the long-haired young man I saw ascending the stairs in the lecture hall—same guy, but in dockers and a sportcoat rather than the cutoffs and tank top he wore now. Playing both sides? Or was he in there gathering intelligence? Maybe planting a…

Oh, hell.
Maybe a long shot to think that a twentysomething DJ was a terrorist bomber. Maybe.

But he hadn’t been carrying anything when he left the auditorium, and almost everyone but me in that place had a laptop or a satchel or something of the kind.

And if he wasn’t, I was going to get thrown in the clink while my references tried to convince DHS that I wasn’t making a terrorist threat myself.

I took off across the lawn at a run, away from the cops, toward the parking lot. Tearing open my Civic’s passenger door, I opened the glove compartment and grabbed one of the dozen prepaid cells I keep on hand. I slammed the door shut and dialed 911 as I walked around the car.

“911, what is your emergency.”

I used the hoarsest, most hacking voice I could. “Listen to me very carefully. There’s a bomb in the main conference room at the James H. Clark Center at Stanford. Evacuate the building at once.”

“How do you know this, sir?”

“I saw them plant it.”

“Thank you, and can I get your name?”

“Rick Deckard.” For some reason, all the talk of future tech had
Blade Runner
flashing through into my mind.

“Thank you mister Deckard, please hold while I connect you with the Stanford Police.” She put me on semi-transparent hold and brought the campus dispatcher on the line and brought him up to speed. I had maybe another twenty seconds before they pulled the GPS transponder from the phone, and another minute after that before a cop showed up from the perimeter line back at the green.