Prophet of Bones (4 page)

“One last time. To tell you.”

“Your parents don’t have to listen. We can still hang out when he’s not around.”

“We can’t,” she said. “My parents don’t want me to.”

“Why?”

“Your father.” She lowered her eyes. “My parents think he’s crazy.”

*   *   *

Later that night, Paul stood in the dim attic light next to the cages.

“This is what I wanted you to see,” he told his mother.

His mother stood in the half-light.

“What is this?” There was something in his mother’s voice. Some mixture of emotions he couldn’t identify. She stood facing the cages, a startled expression on her face.

Paul held Bertha up by her tail for his mother to see. The mouse was a beautiful golden brindle, long whiskers twitching.

“She’s the most recent generation,” Paul said. “An F4.”

“An F4, you say?” She shook her head with wonder. “Where did you learn these terms?”

“Books.” Paul smiled as he looked down at the mouse. “She’s kin to herself.”

“So this is your project for the fair?”

“Yeah. I’ve been working on it for a long time.”

“That’s a big mouse,” his mother said.

“The biggest yet. Fifty-nine grams, weighed at a hundred days old. The average weight is around forty.”

Paul stroked the mouse’s tawny fur. The little nose twitched—long colorless whiskers that existed at the very edge of visibility. Paul gave the mouse a tiny sunflower seed, and it rose up on its haunches, gripping the seed in tiny front paws. Paul had always thought there was something strangely human about a mouse’s stance when it fed that way.

“What have you been feeding it to get so big?” she asked.

Paul put the mouse on her hand. “It has nothing to do with food,” he said. “I feed all the mice the same. Look at this.” Paul showed her the charts he’d graphed on the white poster board, like the figure in his life sciences book, a gentle upward ellipse between the x- and y-axes—the slow upward climb in body weight from one generation to the next.

“One of my F2s tipped the scales at forty-five grams, so I bred him to several of the biggest females, and they made more than fifty babies. I weighed them all at a hundred days old and picked the biggest four. Then I bred
those
and did the same thing with the next generation, choosing the heaviest hundred-day weights. I got the same bell-curve distribution—only the bell was shifted slightly to the right. Bertha was the biggest of them all.”

“You just bred the biggest ones?” his mother said.

“Yeah. I keep the big ones in the glass aquariums, apart from the others.”

“It was easy as that?”

“It’s the same thing people have been doing with domestic livestock for the last five thousand years. Cattle are bigger now than they used to be. Sheep give more wool. Our chickens lay more eggs.”

“But this didn’t take thousands of years.”

“No, it kind of surprised me it worked so well. This isn’t even subtle. I mean, look at her, and she’s only an F4. Imagine what an F10 might look like. I think I can make them even bigger.”

She laughed nervously. “It sounds like you want to turn them into rats.”

“Rats are a different species, but I bet with enough time … hundreds of generations … I might be able to get them close to that size.”

Her face grew serious. “You shouldn’t talk like that.”

“It’s just directional selection. With a diverse enough population, it’s amazing what a little push can do. I mean, when you think about it, I hacked off the bottom ninety-five percent of the bell curve for five generations in a row. Of course the mice got bigger. I probably could have gone the other way if I wanted, made them smaller.”

“You father won’t like this,” she said. She handed the mouse back to Paul.

“I know. I’ll tell him about it at the science fair. After I’ve won. He can’t get mad at me then.”

His mother’s brow furrowed. “I don’t know,” she said. “What if he finds them before the fair?”

“He won’t,” Paul said. He put the brindle mouse back in the aquarium. It scampered across the cedar chips toward the food dish. “Besides,” he said softly, so that his mother couldn’t hear. “This is all I have now.”

“Just be careful,” she said.

“There’s one thing that surprised me though, something I only noticed recently.”

“What’s that?”

“When I started, at least half of the mice were albino. Now it’s down to about one in ten.”

“Why does that matter?”

“I never consciously decided to select against that.”

“So?”

“So, when I did culls … when I decided which ones to breed, sometimes the weights were about the same on two mice, so I’d just pick one. I thought I was picking randomly, but now I’m not so sure. I think I just happened to like one kind more than the other.”

“Maybe you did.”

“So what if it happens that way in nature?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s like the dinosaurs. Or woolly mammoths, or cavemen. They were here once; we know that because we keep finding their bones. But now they’re gone, and we can only see them in museums.” He paused. “God made all life about six thousand years ago, right?”

“Yes.”

“But some of it isn’t here anymore.” Paul looked at his mice. “What if it’s like that with God? It wouldn’t have to be on purpose, just a few percentiles of difference, the slightest perturbation from random, this big hand reaching down, picking which ones stay and which ones go.”

Paul put the lid back on the aquarium. “Some kinds die out along the way.”

5

It happened on a weekend. Bertha was pregnant, obscenely, monstrously. Her distended abdomen spread around her as she squatted on her haunches and nibbled at a piece of lettuce.

Bertha sat alone in the smallest aquarium, an island unto herself isolated on a table in the middle of the room. A little tissue box sat in the corner of her glass enclosure, and Bertha had shredded bits of paper into a comfortable nest in which to give birth to the next generation of goliath mice.

Paul dropped another piece of lettuce into the cage and smiled.

Whiskers twitching, Bertha lumbered forward across the cedar chips and sniffed the new arrival.

Then Paul heard it: the sudden hum of the garage door. He froze.

His father was home early.

When the garage door finally stopped, Paul heard his father’s car ease into the open parking bay below. The brakes squeaked as the car pulled to a stop, and then his father cut the engine. Paul considered turning off the attic light but knew it would only draw suspicion. Instead he waited, hoping.

The garage was strangely quiet, the only sound the ticking of the car’s engine down below. Paul listened, waiting for the tread of his father’s footsteps heading into the house. The sound didn’t come.

Paul’s stomach dropped when he heard the creak of his father’s weight on the ladder.

There was a moment of panic then—a single hunted moment when Paul’s eyes darted for a place to hide the cages. It was ridiculous; there was no place to go.

The creaking ladder grew louder as Paul’s father ascended.

“What’s that smell?” his father asked as his head cleared the attic floor. He stopped and looked around, a pale disembodied head jutting from the floorboards. “Oh.”

And that was all he said at first.

That was all he said as he climbed the rest of the way. He rose to his height and stood like a giant, taking it in. The single bare bulb draped his eyes in shadow. The muscle in his jaw clenched and loosened. “What is this?” he said finally. His dead voice turned Paul’s stomach to ice.

“What is this?” Louder now, and something changed in his shadow eyes. Paul’s father stomped toward him, above him.

“Are you going to answer me? What is this!” The words more shriek than question, spit flying from his mouth.

“I, I thought—”

A big hand shot out and slammed into Paul’s chest, balling his T-shirt into a fist, yanking him off his feet.

“What the fuck
is
this? Didn’t I tell you no pets?” The bright light of the family, the famous man.

“They’re not pets, they’re—”

“God, it fucking stinks up here. You brought these things into the house?”

“I’m sorry, Dad, I—”

“You brought this
vermin
into the house? Into my house!”

“It’s a projec—”

The arm flexed, sending Paul backward into the big cages, toppling one of the tables—a flash of pain, wood and mesh crashing to the floor, the squeak of mice and twisted hinges, months and months and months of work.

His father kicked at the wood, splintering the frame, crushing the cage in on itself, stomping it to twisted wreckage. “You brought these things into
my house
!”

Paul scrambled away, just out of reach.

His father followed, arm raised, and the big hand came down on Paul’s shoulder, knocking him to the floor, where his chin split against the rough wood. And still his father came, stomping toward him, while Paul rolled away. His big leg lashed out and missed. And he came again, arm raised high—but then stopped, attention snagged. His head turned toward the glass box. He strode to the middle of the room. He grabbed Bertha’s aquarium in his big hands.

“Dad, no!”

He lifted it high over his head—and there was a moment when Paul imagined he could almost see it, almost see Bertha inside, and the babies inside her, a final generation that would never be born.

Then his father’s arms came down like a force of nature, like a cataclysm.

Paul closed his eyes against exploding glass, and all he could think was
This is how it happens. This is exactly how it happens.

6

There is a place where the sky touches the ground. Martial Joseph Johansson knew that place. He stared out through the glass bubble of the helicopter as it tunneled through the downpour. Rain sheeted off the glass, transformed by the curvature of the windshield into writhing little rivers that streamed away, found edges, fell. Became rain again.

“Five minutes, sir!”

The horizon, Martial Johansson knew, was an illusion of perspective. Below a certain altitude, each point in the sky occupies the horizon when viewed from some specific corresponding vantage. A formula could be deduced involving the curvature of the earth, the altitude of the helicopter, and the distance from the observer. So from some theoretical miles-off viewpoint, the helicopter sat like a microscopic insect on the dark line of the horizon. A lightning bug in a storm.

Martial closed his eyes.

The helicopter bucked beneath him, a deep vibration felt in every cell of his body.

Beside him sat his assistant Guthrie, looking at his watch. His knuckles were white on the handle of his briefcase. Although he’d worked for Martial for six years, Guthrie still hadn’t gotten used to the frequent flights. Running a corporation the size of Axiom required Martial to be on three coasts, often in the same day. Mostly, that meant jets, but every now and then the helicopter was required. Guthrie still seemed a bit nervous in the helicopter, even in the best of weather. This was not the best of weather.

Martial coughed phlegm into a dark handkerchief. It took a moment for the coughing to subside.

“You okay?” Guthrie shouted over the roar of the helicopter.

Martial nodded.

The noise discouraged conversation. But this was okay. Martial was a man with little use for small talk.

The helicopter banked against the wind, and the world swiveled. Martial’s stomach went light and feathery as he looked out through the glass. They were almost there. He could see it. From this height, the facility looked like any nice hotel retreat. Or maybe a high school campus that Frank Lloyd Wright had designed—all hard angles and elegant symmetry. A structure built so perfectly into the landscape that you secretly suspected it had always been there. Huge and beautiful, a sprawling compound of laboratories and research buildings, interconnected by a series of covered walkways. This was Axiom’s epicenter, his third home.

The helicopter swiveled again, changing the world’s orientation. Lights and a red cross, a helipad—and standing there, against the rain, waiting for the helicopter to land, three men in suits.

Always three men. Martial liked it that way. His security detail. Though he’d learned a long time ago not to trust anyone completely—even those closest to him.

All three had guns, but only two of the guns were loaded with live rounds. Nobody knew which two.

Not even the men.

*   *   *

The helicopter touched down with a gentle thump. The door swung open and cold, wet air blasted Martial’s face.

He followed Guthrie out into the storm.

“Two transplants, and this fucking rain will be the death of me!” Martial shouted into the roar of the machine. The tropical storm had been born in the Gulf, two hundred miles to the south, and now it lashed the Gulf States, shedding its moisture as it moved inland.

Guthrie made some response, but the sound was yanked away. Guthrie ducked as he ran beneath the spinning blades. A common, involuntary reflex. Though Martial was a few inches taller, he stood upright and walked slowly, reaching up to hold his hat onto his head.

He’d done the math when he’d first bought the helicopter. He was six foot one. The blades, at their center, were eight feet off the ground. Therefore, he didn’t need to duck. Later he read of a man who’d died in a windstorm, his head taken off by the overhead prop. For though the blades were eight feet high at the center, they drooped while the helicopter idled down; and during gusty weather an idling helicopter could be rocked ever so slightly by the force of the wind, producing a slight pitch. Blades that were eight feet off the ground in the center might be suddenly, on one side of the helicopter, only five or six feet at their spinning tips. Martial took the news as a lesson: When God wants you, he will take you.

The three men in suits walked forward to greet them.

“Sir,” the first man said. This was Scholler. As big as he was dedicated, and one of Martial’s longest-serving personal guards.

They shook hands. “I trust you had a good flight, sir.”