Xeno Sapiens (15 page)

A nurse removed an empty unit of blood
from the rack above Clifton’s head and replaced it with a full one.
It was his third and a little of his color had returned.

Caudill had taken control of the
surgical theater. Under stress, his mumble had vanished.

“
How’s his pressure?”

“
One hundred over sixty,” one of the
surgical assistants, Steve Foley, answered. “It’s up, but nowhere
near normal.”

“
This is hardly a normal procedure, is
it, Steve,” Caudill said sharply.

Steve, properly chastised, buttoned his
lip.

“
Syringe,” Caudill said, jerking his
head toward a table on which were arrayed a variety of cruel
looking medical instruments and a single syringe filled with an
oily, yellow liquid. Steve slapped the syringe into Caudill’s
gloved hand.

“
SV 40 virus,” Caudill said. His voice
was that of a medicine man receiving a talismanic substance. “Gonna
map you out, Cliffy.”

Caudill snipped the tattered edges of
the grievous wound. He bent over the table and injected the entire
contents of the syringe into the stump. Steve had witnessed the
accident and had managed to remain somewhat calm, but almost blew
his groceries as Caudill thrust the needle into the gray and grainy
flesh.

Caudill plunged and withdrew the
needle, working it around into all parts of the ravaged flesh. He
doused the shattered nub of bone with the virus. Steve didn’t know
how Caudill could be so cold and machine-like with a man who was
supposed to be his friend.

“
What will that do,” Steve
asked.

“
In a few days,” Caudill said gently,
“you may well see what it will do.” He touched the stump
wonderingly with a gloved hand. “Gonna fix you up, Cliffy. Gonna
make you good as new.”

********************

Ingrid held her voice steady by brute
force as she explained what had happened to Merrifield. Usually
unflappable, Merrifield looked as if he had been
horsewhipped.

“
It cut the arm completely
off?”

“
Yes...No,” Ingrid said. “It was still
attached by a thread. I cut it.”

“
You cut it,” Merrifield asked,
wide-eyed.

“
What is it with you people,”
Ingrid shouted,
suddenly furious. “Are all you people thick? I cut it, I cut it, I
cut it! Yes, goddammit! I’ve got my reasons. Can’t you people give
me a frigging break?”

“
Calm down, Ingrid,”
Merrifield roared.
He glared at her and his gaze never wavered as he spoke. “You’re
going to give yourself a rupture.”

“
I’ll give myself any fucking thing I
want,”
she
shouted back. She leaned over Merrifield’s desk. “Are you all so
stupid you can’t see what we’ve been doing here for the past year?
Don’t you think Alex would be better off with a functional arm
rather than a piece of crippled deadwood, or nothing at
all?”

“
I don’t know what you’re talking
about,” Merrifield said.

“
We’re going lo make him a new arm,
you stupid bastard,” she spat. She stood up, her face showing an
expression of part triumph and part fear she had overstepped her
power.

Merrifield’s eyes narrowed to cat’s eye slits and his hands
were placed flat, palms down, on his desk.

“
Did you call me a stupid
bastard?”

“
You have to understand, Jon,” Ingrid
said penitently. “I was upset. I
am
upset...”

“
Don’t temporize, Ingrid,” Merrifield
said dangerously, as if that were the worst thing she could
do.

“
Nobody high hats me,” he fumed. “Not
you, not Clifton, not God Almighty and his twelve disciples. You
would do well to remember that.”

“
You smug sonofabitch,” Ingrid said
with dawning contempt. “Your precious project is in that incubator
because of me. If I walk, there’s not a soul here who can finish it
for you. Believe me, mister, I’ll be out of here like a
shot.”

“
You wouldn’t dare,” Merrifield said.
“You’ll never have another chance like this. You wouldn’t leave
everything you’ve worked for.”

“
Fuck all I wouldn’t. You’ll never
find anybody else who can do what I do.”

They sat silent for several moments.
Each of them held big sticks and the other knew it. Heated emotions
began to cool by degrees.

“
We’ve arrived at an impasse,”
Merrifield said.

“
If that’s the way you want it,”
Ingrid said stubbornly.

“
Alright, Ingrid,” he said. He sighed,
a man letting go of his ego for the common good. “I’m sorry. We’ll
do it your way.”

“
Apology accepted.” Ingrid felt some
compassion for Merrifield. He was a man used to having things his
own way and he was being dunned by a slip of a girl young enough to
be his granddaughter.

“
No one has ever spoken to me like
that,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s guts or nuts, but it worked.”
He shifted in his seat. “We’ve got something more immediate to
consider now. How is Alex?”

“
He’s in surgery,” Ingrid said
steadily. Her rage at Merrifield had temporarily shunted aside her
feelings for Alex, but now they threatened to return. She forced
herself to continue in a tidy, bloodless allocution.

“
His right arm is gone just below the
shoulder. I imagine Alan has stopped the bleeding by now, but the
arm was beyond reattachment.”

“
Good God,” Merrifield said. He looked
at his desk and rubbed his temples with the heels of his
hands.

“
Don’t do that, Jon. Please. I’m
having a hard enough time going on as it is.”

He looked into Ingrid’s colorless face
and the black pits of her eyes. And why not? She had been through a
lot in the last half hour.

“
I’m sorry. Go ahead. Take your
time.”

“
When I got there, to the sequencing
lab, I mean, he’d already passed out. Jimmy had stopped most of the
bleeding, but there was blood everywhere. His arm was just hanging
by a tatter.” She stopped and dry swallowed. “So I cut it,” she
said brutally. “I cut it off because we don’t need it. Jimmy wanted
to take him to the hospital, put him in the hands of the butchers
who would try to reattach it. They don’t know anything about nerve
regeneration or RNA sequencing or any of the other things we know
about here. The best they could have done was a botched job. Even
if they had been able to reattach it, which I doubt, he would never
have opened a door with that arm, much less any of the delicate
work that’s his life. Is that what he would have
wanted?”

“
No,” Merrifield said.

“
And would you like to be the one to
explain to the hospital how and why it happened?”

“
Again,” Merrifield said,
“no.”

Ingrid laughed blackly. “I sound like Oscar Goldman. ‘We
can rebuild him, make him better...’ but, God, Jon, we
can
.
We’ve got the best minds and materials for generation of organic
substances in the world here at this very minute. We’ve already got
sequences of Alex’s DNA mapped out. We can regenerate his arm from
his own RNA strands.”

“
You’re forgetting that you’ve lost
one of your most important tools. The way you describe it, The
Helix Depolarization Chamber is out for the count.”

“
It’s blown all to shit,” Ingrid said.
“But this is strictly an RNA project. Alex will supply his own raw
material. We’ll take the vestigial components for embryonic
antigens from his own DNA. As far as his cells are concerned, he’ll
still be in the womb.”

“
You’re sure about that?”

“
Positive. The thing that’s been
missing all these years is that we didn’t know about the embryonic
antigens that would cause a person to reject their own RNA. Now we
do. Instead of trying to fight them, we’ll use them, trick them
into building his arm, just as if he were developing inside his
mother.”

“
It’s a bad time to ask,” Merrifield
inquired mildly, “but how is your objectivity about
this?”

Ingrid saw nothing that hinted of
mockery or sarcasm in Merrifield’s eyes, only
understanding.

“
I’m alright,” she said slowly. “It
doesn’t matter that it’s personal. It’s still within the limits of
the project.”

“
Okay,” Merrifield answered, “That’s
fine. I think we should both get down to surgery and see how Alex
is doing.”

“
I’ll have to watch from the gallery,”
Ingrid said. “I’d probably be more in the way than...”

Merrifield nodded. He got up and helped
her to stand. “Will you make it alright?”

“
If I can get through this day, I’ll
be so much better than alright.”

Elevated above the operating theater
was a room large enough to hold a dozen warm bodies. A panel of
real-time, digital readouts that reported the patient’s vital signs
were set at eye level. At some time in the past, some joker had
placed a small, hand-lettered sign beneath them:

Nicht fingerpoken! Keepen
das hans in das pockets und vatch der blinkinlkites!

On the wall behind them, several green,
construction paper cutouts of Christmas trees had been taped up.
Ingrid looked at them with red eyes.

“
Is it Christmas?”

Merrifield hesitated before
answering.

“
Yes. Christmas Day.”

“
Merry Christmas,” she
muttered.

A loudspeaker was set into the wall and
a small bench, used primarily for those who became woozy while
watching surgery, sat at the back, away from the observation
window.

Ingrid and Merrifield were the only
occupants. Spread below them was a panorama of green surgical tile
and glittering stainless steel. Regaled in flowing green surgical
scrubs were professor Caudill and a motley crew of the Lollipop
Guild. Surgical masks hid their faces, only their eyes visible, but
too far away for Ingrid or Merrifield to see what was in
them.

Clifton lay on the operating table as
the team glided back and forth between machinery and sinks and
tables like wraiths on dubious errands. With their faces concealed,
they could have been anyone; ghosts from a more treacherous and
romantic age, the reincarnations of Daedalus or Pandora, and
Professor Caudill as the most infamous misguided scientist of them
all, Victor Frankenstein. They toiled over Clifton who looked as
still and pallid as a corpse.

The scene of the lab workers attending the skeleton
recurred to Merrifield. He recalled with visceral clarity how it
had reminded him of gravediggers laboring sedulously and insanely
over a dead creature which was somehow still recognizable as being
able to be infused with life. The scene below him was much the
same. The surgical personnel scurried like rats and hovered like
vultures, taking orders from Alan Caudill as if he were some sort
of aqua-robed demigod. Worse still, Merrifield realized, he and
Ingrid were witnessing these bizarre procedures from above, as if
they were
elevated
over the mere technicians.

“
They should be finishing up anytime
now,” Ingrid said. Her voice was pensive and worried. Dark, ugly
lines had appeared beneath her eyes like halfhearted bruises. Her
hair hugged her skull like limp seaweed. She had chewed her nails
ragged.

“
You’d better stop that before you
chew them to the bone,” Merrifield admonished.

Ingrid took her fingers out of her
mouth and smiled absently. “Wouldn’t be much good without fingers,”
she said, then winced at her choice of words.

Merrifield saw her grimace. “Don’t
worry about it. You can’t take it so personally.”

“
I know. But it’s hard to look into
that operating room without feeling like I’m, I don’t know,
presiding
over
something.”

“
I was just thinking the same
thing.”

“
I never used to think like that. I
must be jittery over what’s happening.”

“
What
is
happening,” Merrifield asked.

“
I guess Alan has already injected the
SV 40 virus. They’re waiting for it to pirate the RNA and
replicate. Once that happens, they can trace down the chain and
turn the viral machinery into a carrier. A sort of surrogate
RNA.”

“
How do you keep the entire arm, say,
from the shoulder down, from growing back?”