The Games (13 page)

“Yeah, she’s hooked,” Ben interjected.

Silas bent for the ball, then tossed it from one hand to the other. He turned and regarded the basketball hoop thoughtfully.

“There is something about this game that I’ve really missed,” he said.

“Oh yeah?” Ben asked, his voice, incredulous, rising an octave.

“When you’ve got the ball in your hand and you’re staring at the hoop, it’s easy to push everything else away.”

“When was the last time you touched a ball?” Ben asked.

“You focus on the rim, calculate distance, concentrate …” Silas flicked his wrist and sent the ball tumbling through the air. It connected firmly with the front of the rim and bounced back in his direction.

“Why the sudden interest in athletics?” Ben asked.

When Silas didn’t answer, Ben pressed, “Did something happen that I don’t know about?”

Silas grabbed the ball again and tossed it over to Vidonia. She caught it and turned it in her hands, looking at him. Looking at him.

“Shoot,” he said, finally.

She didn’t hesitate. She brought it up to her chest and heaved. The ball carved its little parabola across the blue sky. Air ball, not even close.

Silas picked the ball from the grass and stepped back onto the pavement, dribbling in long bounces. “Used to play a lot when I was a kid. You don’t have to think. You just aim and throw; your body does the math for you. There’s something to that, probably.”

“Did something happen today, Silas?” Ben asked.

“Yeah, something happened.” Silas shot again. This time the ball rasped through the net. He turned back to Vidonia. “You’re probably wondering why you’re here.”

“It had crossed my mind,” she said.

“You’re curious why we’d want a xenobiologist.”

“This isn’t a field where it’s common to get job offers in the middle of the night from halfway across the country,” she said.
Particularly from Olympic Development
, she thought.

“Well,” he said, as he bent to retrieve the ball, “as you’ve probably guessed, since you say you are familiar with my work, the organism in question isn’t of extraterrestrial origin. I should get that out of the way at the beginning. But it is alien. Yes, I think it fits the broadest definition of that word—alien—but it is from here, right from this facility. That’s why we called you.”

“So this
is
about the gladiator competition,” she said.

He nodded.

“Is it the contestant?”

“It’s supposed to be. We’re not sure what it is, actually. We were hoping you could help us find out.”

“I don’t think I understand what you mean.”

“We need you to help find out what it is we’re dealing with.”

She paused. “Please don’t take this the wrong way. But with all due respect, shouldn’t you already know?”

“We should, but we don’t.”

“It is an engineered organism, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

She crossed her arms in front of her, wanting to ask more. Instead, she said the only thing that really mattered. “I’ll help any way I can.”

“Thank you.”

Silas dribbled the ball.

“What went wrong today?” Ben asked Silas.

Silas turned toward him. “That’s a long story,” Silas said. He shot the ball again, and it sprang away from the hoop at a high angle. He trotted after.

“I don’t mind long stories,” Ben pressed. “What happened?” The glib undercurrent in his face had drained away now.

Silas tossed him the ball. “Three points, shoot.”

Behind his glasses, Ben’s blue eyes were bright in the angle of the sun. The ball rotated in his hands. He bent, straightened, shot. The ball spanked high against the backboard and skipped across the pavement, toward the grass.

Silas snagged it as it bounced. “Nothing so important,” he said. “And maybe not such a long story, really, come to think of it.”

Silas shot the ball. It dropped through the hoop with a swish of net.

“It opened its wings today,” Silas said. “That’s all. It stretched them out, eight feet, maybe.”

Ben’s face lost some of its tension. “That’s what has you out here shooting baskets?” he asked.

“No, you should have seen it. Those wings. It was goddamned beautiful, Ben. That’s what has me out here.”

“I
T HAS
wings?” she asked. Unless she was mistaken, there was little room for flight beneath the steel netting of the gladiator arena.

She followed alongside the two men as they walked through the grass toward the lab. From this perspective the buildings were low, squat boxes of glass and steel. The windows reflected green tress, blue sky, white clouds.

“Yeah, but it will never fly,” Ben said. “Too complicated. No one has ever bioengineered that trick from scratch.”

“I don’t know about that anymore,” Silas said. He hooked an arm around the ball and carried it against his hip. He turned to her. “C’mon, I guess it’s time we introduced you to Felix.”

“Felix?” she asked.

“A little nickname,” Ben said. “The petri dishes were labeled alphabetically alongside the Helix project heading. Embryo F was the first to start dividing in one of the surrogates. F-Helix.”

“Cute.”

“It’s been called a lot of things, but cute isn’t one.”

She raised an eyebrow. “But it’s beautiful?”

“Beautiful and cute are two different things,” Ben said. “Sharks are beautiful.”

“How far back did you take the design process?” she asked.

This time it was Silas who answered. “All the way to raw code.”

“Down to individual gene splices?”

“Down to nucleotide base-pair sequence,” Silas said. “We
made
genes.”

“I didn’t realize that was possible.”

Silas looked suddenly uncomfortable. “Genome assembly took a year. We used a blank to start.”

“A blank?”

“Oh, that’s what we call a cow ovum without the nucleus. We’ve got the patent on that one.”

“Kind of like a seedless orange.”

“Yeah.”

“So where’d you get this amazing seedless cow?”

“We engineered it. It’s actually one of Benjamin’s ideas, and how he ended up working for me in the first place. Now we’ve got an entire brood of them as frozen blastocysts. You can denucleate an ovum manually, but it’s a very slow process, and it weakens the cell. It’s much better if the ovum naturally lacks its nucleus.”

“So you thaw one out every time you produce a gladiator?”

“No, this is an entirely new process. We’ve never gone all the way back to raw code before. Cell infusion was the most difficult part, and we decided to use the scatter approach and thawed several hundred blanks. DNA insertion killed 99.7 percent of the cells. Three survived, and of those three, only one successfully implanted in the cow’s uterus.”

“I’m still not sure what exactly is expected of me,” she said.

“Pretend it’s a specimen dropped from the sky,” Silas said. “Pretend that you don’t know where it came from or what makes it tick. Pretend that it’s the organism that will take the theoretical out of theoretical xenobiology.”

“I’ve been waiting a long time for an organism like that.”

“What would you do to try and understand it? How would you predict how it might develop?”

Her mind whirled at the implication. She followed the men into the building. How could they know so little about their own creation?

Five minutes later, she understood.

S
HE GAZED
through the thick glass of the nursery. Ben and Silas stood behind her, giving her space.

She wasn’t sure what she was seeing at first, but her heart beat quicker in her chest.

Alien, yes, she agreed.

That was the only word she could think to describe it. She had never seen skin like that. The fluorescent lighting reflected in its deep blackness. The blood-red hands.

She knew enough about genetic engineering to know the thing she was looking at shouldn’t have been possible. It was too far ahead. She had expected an uncomfortable Frankenstein, a predator hewn together in bits and pieces from across order Carnivora.

Like most scientists, she followed the gladiator competition closely, and nothing she’d ever seen or read had led her to anticipate what she was looking at now. She watched the creature through the glass, and slowly, by degrees, she came to agree with Silas on another point. It was beautiful. But it was a terrible sort of beauty.

“How?”

“We still don’t know,” one of them answered for both.

H
ER LAB
took only two days to assemble.

The supplies she requested arrived more quickly than she would have thought possible. She found it somewhat unsettling, in fact, to receive a piece of equipment within hours of requesting it—equipment that might cost more than she would earn in ten years. She was used to
the pace of the university, where requests were ignored or just flat out scoffed at until you had slogged through reams of documentation and waded through months of purchasing committees. Yesterday, most of her special orders had arrived via jet, leaving her to wonder at the vast resources at the project’s disposal.

She unpacked new boxes of glassware, Pyrex, latex gloves, flasks and beakers, and a scientific scale that measured to the sixth decimal place. She unpacked goggles and long metal tongs and a box of syringes. She unpacked calipers for the measurement of anatomical features. She unpacked medical supplies and electronics, and she put them all away. Slowly, slowly, she unpacked her disbelief at being here. She put that away, too.

She put everything into drawers and cabinets and onto shelves, and each time took a moment to stare at the items she put away in an attempt to commit to memory where exactly she’d put them. She considered labeling the drawers but decided against it. Instead, she followed the same system she had at the university: a medical/biological/electronic gradient that ran from left to right across the room, with the most commonly used items always in the top drawers.

When the lab was complete, she spent the remainder of the evening watching Felix and going over the next day’s strategy in her mind. She had been waiting eleven years for an opportunity to use her knowledge and skills for something other than an academic exercise. That opportunity hadn’t come in the form she’d anticipated, but it was here, and she was going to see to it that the job was done right.

When she first began studying xenobiology, she’d been attracted by the newness of it all. It was a wide-open speculative field, the kind of field a person could make a mark in, the razor’s edge of new science. There had been an atmosphere of optimism then, within the scientific community, that it was only a matter of time before man discovered extraterrestrial life. The universe was, after all, just so damned big. Her field of expertise rose in anticipation of that day. The moons of Saturn and Neptune had seemed particularly promising, at least at the
single-cell level. But now the Sol system moons had all been probed, and if life was out there, then it was way out there. But she’d never regretted her field of study. She knew what drove her.

From an early age she’d hungered to understand the world around her. The sciences had drawn her just as naturally as a flame drew insects in Brazil. The Brazil of her youth.

Her mother had said, during that final argument all those years ago, that science had become her religion. Vidonia had denied it then, but as a ten-year-old, she had lacked too much the understanding of herself to explain the void it filled in her. Now, if biology was her denomination, she supposed that she had to admit to a certain degree of zealotry. But like many zealots, she had come about her faith through hardship.

She was born thirty-seven years ago in the slums of Bahia, Brazil. She’d never known her father. Of those early years, there was much she tried to forget: her mother most and least of all.

Her mother was a fancy girl, kept by men from time to time, and she wore her Catholicism like a shield against her sins. Life had been hard for them. Vidonia remembered the long periods of hunger, punctuated by occasional bursts of borrowed opulence. Her mother hadn’t been beautiful, but her skin was light, and for certain kinds of men, this was enough. Vidonia never learned her father’s name, but whoever he was, she knew she had his complexion.

She attended school for the first time when she was seven years old. She hadn’t been able to read, but still their tests had pointed her out, pulled her from the throng of slum children. They took notice of her, asked questions. They provided special tutors, and later, special classes. When she was ten, and they wanted to send her away, her mother resisted. By then, her mother had made several siblings for her to watch in the afternoon and needed the babysitter so she could go out and earn her money. Besides that, her mother learned there would be no formal religious training at the school for the sciences.

It was no wonder, really, how learning came to be so important to Vidonia. It had pulled her from the despair of the streets as no cathedraled savior ever could have.

Her educational route, after that, had run a circuitous course, leading her through ecology, microbiology, and genetics. Eventually, at the age of twenty-two, it led her to the United States, where she continued her studies in the life sciences.

Once she learned the rules that undergirded life on earth, it seemed only logical to attempt to apply them against a new backdrop. For her, the field of theoretical xenobiology was the inevitable destination of a long voyage.

Now, as she watched the strange organism romp through the nursery beyond the glass, she couldn’t help but feel that it had all been worth it. Here it was, at last. This creature was something different.

She didn’t understand fully how it came to be, but she didn’t have to. It was something new, and now it was her job to see if the rules had changed.

S
HE WOKE
early the next morning to her small, functional room. She’d decided yesterday that it suited her. She barely felt the water on her skin, tasted nothing of the toothpaste. Her clothes matched only because she had packed them that way. Her mind was elsewhere. She thought of John only in passing and only to marvel at having not thought of him the whole day before. Something about that felt good to her, not thinking of him, but she didn’t dwell.