Xeno Sapiens (12 page)

It wasn’t an unpleasant thought, just a
new one. She believed the borders of their friendship were becoming
very cloudy.

Well, why not? He’s a very
nice man. Nothing like the brainless goons you’ve had crushes on
before. Granted his hair is a little thin, but grass doesn’t grow
on a busy street. But we’ll have to let it lie, unfortunately.
We’ve much too much to do and hardly any time to get it
done.

She sat at her desk, intending to look
over some paperwork, but sheer weariness and sleep overtook
her.

Her memories of her mother’s illness
were incomplete, but so vivid in the particulars she did recall. It
had worsened after Ingrid’s surgery. Ingrid had been born a blue
baby, a congenital defect, fittingly enough. The smiling doctors
who had saved her had performed surgery to correct a tetralogy of
Fallot and freed her from a short life of squatting every few steps
to raise her blood pressure and force venous blood into her lungs
instead of through an incomplete septum and into her
body.

She had awakened after her removal from
the recovery room to the sight of mommy and daddy standing
worriedly over her bed. Even then, when Ingrid was nine years old,
mommy’s face had been ashen and thin and Ingrid had no way of
knowing that she hadn’t been able to keep anything on her stomach
for weeks, and very little in the prior years. Her pregnancy had
been advised against and she had suffered because of it.

Mommy had smiled and tried to hug her,
but made a bad job of it because of the two large tubes stitched
into Ingrid’s abdomen. The tube made a “Y” that ran down from some
point above her head and terminated in the wounds on her belly. The
tube had been filled with blood, she remembered. She also
remembered the Indian doctor who spoke pidgin English who had
removed the tubes, ripping out little gobbets of flesh as bright
red blood had spurted all over the clean, white sheets.

Ingrid told her mother she was sorry
for what she had put her through. Mommy only smiled. Years later
Ingrid had come to her own decision about children. She was a CF
carrier and she would not take the risk of transferring to a child
of her own that despicable malady that had taken her
mother.

Three weeks after Ingrid came home, her
mother took her turn in the hospital, but it was a stay from which
she would not return. While Ingrid’s cheeks bloomed with healthy
color and filled out without a bluish cast, her mother’s face
contracted and whitened as the Cystic Fibrosis slowly drowned her
lungs in their own mucus while the interminable wait for a heart
and lung donor went on. The disease wouldn’t allow her digestive
system to process nourishment and it raced like a mad bastard
through her body, gobbling up her life energy in its lethal
gluttony. Ingrid’s hair grew long while mommy’s hair, once so thick
and black, grew brittle and lusterless. The little girl’s once
breakable body grew lithe and strong while mommy’s filled with pain
and wasted away.

On one of their visits to the hospital,
they had come into the room to find mommy sitting up in her
hospital bed, rocking back and forth, and crying silently. The
plastic call button clutched in one bloodless, bony hand was
grasped so tightly it could hardly be pried loose. Mommy began to
moan and blubber when she saw daddy, her pain so great she was
unable to form words.

Daddy’s face filled with an appalling
virescence, changing from sickly green to angry red. The veins in
his neck bulged bull like. Ingrid smelled his rage over the thick,
gagging scent of hospital disinfectant, used to cover the smell of
disease and death.

Daddy’s body trembled and his grip on
her hand tightened until she cried out. His face emptied of color,
having changed from green, to red, to white in the space of
seconds. He released Ingrid’s hand and thrust his fist into his
pocket. Ingrid heard the jingling of keys and change, a sound she
always associated with her father. He pulled out a couple of
crumpled and soggy dollar bills and shoved them in Ingrid’s
hand.

“
Go downstairs and get something to
eat, honey.” His voice was steady, barely damming his anger. His
face was hideous, white with burning eyes. “Don’t get anything with
salt, you can’t have it for a little while. Don’t argue with me,
just go.” He patted her on the rear to move her along. “Go on,
now.”

Ingrid passed the nurse’s station on
her way to the elevator. A nurse was filing her nails. The call
board behind her was lit with a single red light. She looked up and
smiled at Ingrid when she passed, then went hack to filing her
nails. Ingrid looked back at daddy. He was looking at the nurse
with a gaze as black as the heart of Satan. He saw Ingrid looking
at him and he raised a trembling, imperious finger and pointed
toward the elevator.

When Ingrid came back, daddy was
nowhere to be seen. The nurse who had smiled at her was ghastly
white and no longer filing her nails. Her throat hitched painfully
and her mascara was smeared around her red eyes. She looked up as
Ingrid passed and, instead of smiling, looked away quickly. She got
up and hurried down the corridor on some errand.

Daddy was sitting by mommy, holding her
hand. Mommy was asleep. Daddy explained that the nurse had given
mommy a shot to make the pain go away and it had made mommy
sleepy.

Ingrid cried that night. The ugly
reality of imminent death, something no nine year old girl should
have to face, had smitten her like the cruel and ungentle hand of a
merciless giant. She felt the force of the ungodly being as only a
child who has not outgrown trolls and boogeymen could. It was
foulness and corruption, sarcastic laughter ringing out from a
moonscape of dreams and endlessly watching eyes.

In the end, mommy was no match for the
disease. Death toyed with her awhile longer. It laughed
sardonically at the doctors trying to alter its inevitable mission;
leering with a cold eye at their scurrying antics, and medicines,
and helpless searches for a suitable organ donor.

Sleeping now, she tossed fitfully. Had
she really meant to beat death since that day? Refusing to fight it
on its own battlefield, but wanting to cheat it? Life from
lifelessness was only as fair, she thought, as lifelessness from
life.

The guilt was not gone. There had been a bargain, an
empathy: her mother’s life sacrificed for hers. During her teen
years, she would look at the long scar that traveled from her
collarbone, between her budding breasts, almost to her navel and
wonder if the scar was the only penance she would have to suffer to
atone for her mother’s death. She called the scar her zipper and
many times she wished she
could
unzip it and take her healthy, functioning organs
out with her bare hands and give them to her mother who was now no
more than bones, as payment for her life.

How operatic, Gothic, and totally
stupid. She had been cut from her neck to her ass, nothing more.
The doctors had rearranged her innards and added some nylon,
plastic and stainless steel. But they couldn’t fix her mother with
such materials. She had needed more than medical science had the
capacity to deliver. Now was Ingrid’s chance. But always in the
back of her mind, the certainty she would have to pay for what her
mother had given her was like a slowly beating drum that you got
used to, but could never quite shut away.

Let the wanton hypocrites who worshiped
Josh Hall as some second-rate, comic-opera messiah blame her. They
believed it was all in God’s hands; Ingrid did not.

As she slipped deeper into sleep, the
darkness outside the Alamo became somehow brighter, as if imbued
with a milky glow. The two rent-a-cops at the gate, who were
actually soldiers, felt it, but could not explain their mixed
feelings of fright and relief to anyone the next day.

Perhaps death, the old monster himself,
had drawn back from this tiny section of the world.

Ingrid said, “It’s stunning, isn’t
it?”

Merrifield had seen what was in the
incubator on the other side of the three inch thick glass before,
but he was still awed by what Ingrid had accomplished in the
preceding sixty days.

Inside the incubator- wired with
electronic monitoring systems, plastic feed tubes, trays and
bottles of chemicals, and God only knew what other kind of bizarre
trappings-was a complete human skeleton and the ligaments binding
the bones. Just that, nothing else.

The inside of the incubator was in
eerie twilight, lit only by black light, carefully monitored and
controlled to allow the most effective dosage of UV light to strike
the bone. The incubator was more sterile than the chip factories of
Silicon Valley. Access to its interior was strictly limited by
Ingrid. Not even Merrifield had been allowed inside.

“
It’s like something out of
Brave New
World,
isn’t
it?” Merrifield spoke with almost religious reverence. His eyes
never left the skeleton.

“
Almost,” Ingrid said. “But better.
This is real.”

The skeletal frame was eight feet long
from crown to heel. Heavy boned, yet perfectly proportioned for
both strength and agility. The codons had come from three different
tissue samples. No single cell contained the precise order Ingrid
wanted. She settled on a combination of three gene packages made up
of some thirty thousand codons and had them assembled on a single
RNA strand.

The skeleton’s legs were long and
graceful. They had come from a United States Olympic track star who
had donated some of his cells, having no idea what they would be
used for. The skeleton’s arms had come from a huge, black pulp
logger who stood nearly seven feet tall. The rest of the skeleton
had come from one of the largest and strongest men Merrifield had
ever known, an Iowa wheat farmer named Charles Weaver.

The pelvic girdle was wide, a must for
the huge bands of abdominal muscle Ingrid planned to attach. The
ribcage was huge and spacious, plenty of room for a large heart and
lungs. Where the ribs met the sternum, the cartilage glistened a
ghostly, whitish blue. The skeleton’s massive skull lay serenely on
the incubator’s work table, toothless because teeth were not made
of bone. Fascinatingly, incrementally increasing exposure to gamma
rays such as would be found outside the protective cloak of the
earth’s magnetic field had altered the DNA of the osteoblasts,
resulting in radical remodeling of the skeleton.

The nasal passages had increased in
length, forcing the cranium upwards and backwards, elongating it.
The ocular orbits had opened, ostensibly in evolutionary response
to the expectation of less diffused light. They stretched, in a
cat’s eye mask, from the diminutive bridge of the nose almost to
the center of where the temple would be on a normal
skull.

“
How did you get it so large, so
fast?” Merrifield asked.

“
Enzymes and pituitary hormones. Once
the cells started dividing, it took off. It was really amazing to
watch it as it grew. It started at the pelvic girdle, then to the
skull and down to the legs at the same time, as if it were
following a pattern.”

“
Certainly you had the mRNA programmed
in the ribosomes?”

“
Sure, but how does it know what shape
to take? All we know about the genes is that they instruct the
cells to manufacture specific amino acids. That still doesn’t
explain how it shapes those building blocks.” Ingrid shook her
head. She crossed her arms against her chest and looked longingly
at the skeleton.

Merrifield saw her expression and
thought he knew what she was thinking.

“
Even with all we know,” he said
quietly, “some things are still a puzzle, aren’t they?”

“
They are,” she agreed. “But there’s
no puzzle that can’t be solved, is there?”

“
Sometime earlier, I might have said
yes. Now, I don’t know.” Merrifield had always believed the project
could be done, but he hadn’t expected to discover they were making
it work with only the slightest idea of how cellular processes
worked. It was a more than a little daunting, like mixing highly
volatile chemicals in the dark.

“
Did you know,” Ingrid said, “The
skeleton doesn’t even have any nerves or blood vessels? It’s only
now developing marrow.”

Merrifield was aghast. “Surely you
jest. How are you keeping it alive?”

Ingrid tapped her temple. “ATP active
transport and Osmosis. Seth gets a bath in glucose solution most of
the day. When we take him out for display purposes, he gets a
saline bath and his solution gets changed to keep the
sodium-potassium ratio balanced. Occasionally, we have to run the
solution through a dialysis machine when toxins build
up.”

“
You named him Seth? Isn’t that a
little autocratic?”

“
Naming him
Adam
would have been autocratic.”

“
If you say so,” Merrifield responded
doubtfully. The project had passed realism for him long before.
“What’s next?”

Ingrid spoke in her best lecture voice.
“The heart and circulatory system. We’ll use a heart lung machine
temporarily, and he can be fed intravenously. We won’t have that
big a problem with waste products until the musculature forms, but
the liver and excretory systems will be on line by
then.”