Ancestor (28 page)

Rhumkorrf picked up a flat stone from the water’s edge. It slipped out of his mitten-covered hand twice before he held it firmly enough to throw. The rock skipped once before plunging into a three-foot wave.

“Need flatter water for that,” Colding said.

“Now you’re a physicist?”

“Come on, Doc. Talk to me. We need to help Jian.”

Rhumkorrf shrugged. “Pressure and stress exacerbate her symptoms, and we’re under the gun, as they say. There is only so much we can do for her.”

“That’s a cop-out answer and you know it.”

Rhumkorrf kept staring out at the water, seeming to focus on Horse Head Rock some two hundred yards from shore.

“She was fine for months,” Colding said. “Now she’s struggling. Hallucinating. We have to stop it before she tries to kill herself again.”

“I increased her dosage.”

Rhumkorrf tried to pick up another rock, but it kept falling out of his oversized black knit mittens. He gave up after the third try, stood straight, and stared out at the choppy water.

Something was wrong here. Rhumkorrf was the visionary, the planner, but nothing in this project happened without Jian’s genius. And yet Doc
didn’t seem remotely concerned that her biochemistry had changed, that he might have to scramble to find a new medicine that worked.

“I’ll bring in someone else if I have to,” Colding said. “Another physician who can help her.”

Rhumkorrf suddenly shifted into a visible state of anxiety just a few degrees below panic. “If you bring another doctor out here, or take her to the mainland, the Americans might find us and shut us down.”

Colding held up both gloved hands, palms up. “If you can’t help her, what do you want me to do?”

“Do
your
job,” Rhumkorrf shouted. “Keep us safe, keep us secret until I finish my work.
Jian’s
job is to help me create the ancestor, something that she’s doing exceedingly well right now, so maybe we just need to take the good with the bad.”

The prick didn’t give a rat’s ass about Jian. All he cared about was the experiment.

“You’re a medical doctor,” Colding said. “You’re supposed to help people.”

“That is
exactly
what I’m doing. Helping millions of them. Haven’t you noticed, P. J., that when she gets like this she is at her most brilliant? It’s for the greater good. You of all people should understand that.”

Colding stared down at the little man, the cold forgotten for the moment. Realization set in. Rhumkorrf wasn’t concerned about finding a new medicine, because he knew the current medicine would work just fine … if she got the proper dose.

“You motherfucker,” Colding said. “You shorted her meds.”

Rhumkorrf shrugged and again looked out at Horse Head Rock.

Suddenly it was hard to think. Colding wanted to kick Rhumkorrf right in the teeth. “How long has this been going on?”

“Five weeks. Had to be done, and it worked. You understand.”

Colding snapped out his left hand and grabbed the back of Rhumkorrf’s neck, squeezed it tight as he pulled the smaller man close.

“Don’t you
touch—”

Rhumkorrf couldn’t finish his sentence, because Colding’s right hand locked on Rhumkorrf’s throat, pressing down on the Adam’s apple. Rhumkorrf’s gloved fingers tried to pry the hands away but couldn’t find purchase. Another memory flashed in Colding’s mind, this time of Magnus back on Baffin Island, squeezing just a little bit harder to get Andy to stop struggling. Colding’s hands tightened. He also gave one short shake, bobbling Rhumkorrf’s head.

Eyes wide with terror, looking up through glasses knocked askew, Rhumkorrf stopped moving.

“Fix it,” Colding said. “Or I’ll fix
you.”

He pushed Rhumkorrf away, a little too hard. The man stumbled and fell, skidding across the snow-covered sand. Hand on the ground behind him, he looked up at Colding. Colding suddenly saw the scene through Rhumkorrf’s eyes—a bigger man, a
stronger
man, towering over him, ready to hurt.

Sanity snapped back into place, and with it, deep embarrassment.

“Claus … I …”

“Stay away,” Rhumkorrf said. “I’ll correct her medication, just stay
away
from me.” He scrambled to his feet and ran for the steps to the mansion, giving Colding a wide berth as he passed.

Colding didn’t know what bothered him more, that he’d flipped out and put his hands on Rhumkorrf, or that for a brief instant he’d used Magnus Paglione as a template for proper behavior.

“Fuck,” he said.

He waited a few seconds to give Rhumkorrf plenty of room, then walked toward the steps that would take him up to the mansion.

He’d check in on Jian, and then go find Sara.

Implantation +16 Days

AT THREE IN the morning, Jian found herself alone in the C-5’s upper-deck lab. She blinked and looked at the work log she’d called up on her computer. It couldn’t be. But there it was, the keystroke log didn’t lie.

She’d just done a protein analysis. The results had looked familiar. Now she knew why—she had done the same analysis yesterday, and the day before. But she didn’t remember doing either of them.

She called up more logs, looking at her work. Some things she remembered doing, some she did not. Maybe it was the lack of sleep. She couldn’t even manage twenty minutes of sleep before the mishmash animal of her dreams came for her.

Doctor Rhumkorrf had brought her meds today, not Mister Feely. Rhumkorrf said he had made an adjustment. It would take a little while for her body to acclimate. Three days, maybe four, to get back to normal, he had said. She’d start feeling a little better as early as tomorrow. And when she
did
feel better, could she please please
please
make sure she told Mister Colding?

She knew she wouldn’t feel better. Doctor Rhumkorrf was lying.
Everyone
lied to her.

But the
numbers
didn’t lie.

Maybe her failure caused the dreams, the spiders. The rats. The
mishmash
. The
numbers
.

Movement on her left. She turned and took a step back all at the same time, then felt a dribble of pee trickle hot down her leg.

An orange spider.

Big as her whole head, staring at her. Jian’s hand shot to the desktop, where she’d left her Dr Pepper. She grabbed and threw all in one motion, the open bottle trailing brown and white froth as it shot toward the corner.

The spider scrambled out of the way as the plastic bottle hit the floor and spun, spraying the area.

“Zou kai!” Jian screamed. “Zou kai!”

The spider was gone. Must have slipped into a crack or something, even though she couldn’t see a crack. Damn spiders.

The
numbers
. She had to fix the numbers, fix the numbers so the ancestors would come out right.

But …
ancestors
… for people parts?

That was it! How could they expect to produce an
animal
with transplantable organs? Out of a cow? She could fix it, she could fix it all, make the whole project work. They just needed a different kind of host.

She put on gloves, then opened the liquid nitrogen container. She carefully pulled out sample trays and set them aside until she found the one she wanted. The one nobody else knew about. She put the other trays back inside, then carried her special sample to the elevator and descended to the empty lower deck.

Some of the cows were asleep. The ones that were awake watched her. Sir Moos-A-Lot had an orange rat on his head. It didn’t seem to notice that the rat was gnawing on a black-and-white ear, red blood spilling down the cow’s big flat cheek. The cow just stared at her, oblivious.

Stupid cow.

Jian quietly walked down the center aisle, trying to ignore several sets of cow eyes that followed her motion. She opened the storage cabinets in Mister Feely’s area. There, a sterile envelope that had what she needed: a catheter that looked like a thin turkey baster.

Jian grabbed the catheter package. She placed it and the sample tray on the lab table.

Embryo transfer in most in vitro procedures was done by a doctor, and guided by ultrasound. Ultrasound would take an extra set of hands. Jian did not have an extra set of hands. Too bad the orange spiders couldn’t help. They had lots of hands.

She’d be on her back, but doing it herself would only take about five minutes.

And besides … they were
her
eggs. She could do whatever she wanted with them.

Implantation +16 Days

CLAUS RHUMKORRF SAT at the ultrasound station, waiting for Tim to finish running the transducer across Molly McButter’s belly. Claus had taken a liking to Molly, but that was simply because the cow showed above-average intelligence. And he liked the way she nuzzled against his chest when he scratched her ear (but only, of course, when no one else in the lab was looking).

Jian, thank God, was looking better already. She’d even combed her hair. Two more days, three at the most, she’d be back to her normal, far-less-creative self. That was okay, though, because they were in the homestretch. No question anymore—the ancestors
would
live to term, and all data indicated they
would
walk on their own.

That asshole Colding, manhandling him like that. How
dare
he. And yet Colding had been right. At least somewhat. If Jian killed herself, that didn’t help the project. With the most significant problem behind them, Claus could afford to be gracious and correct her meds. She still threw darting glances into the corners, but he estimated that behavior would vanish by the end of the day.

The progress bar filled up. A gold-hued picture flared to life. “Heilige scheisse,” he said, the words out of his mouth before he knew it.

Baby McButter had come a long way from its start as a microscopic ball of undifferentiated cells. If Claus hadn’t known better, he would have estimated the creature up on the screen to be four or five
months
along, not two
weeks
.

Jian stared at the picture. She shook her head as if to clear it, then stared at it again. “There has to be a mistake,” she said. “That fetus is at least a hundred pounds.”

“More,” Tim said as he came out of Molly McButter’s stall. “Try one-thirty.”

“No,”
Jian said. “Program say ancestors should be no more than forty pounds right now.”

“Your program versus
a scale?”
Tim said. “I think the scale wins, Froot Loops.”

“Stop with the names,” Claus said, feeling odd about his instant defense of Jian.

“I don’t care about Jian’s bullshit program,” Tim said. “Look at the damn readouts. Well over a hundred pounds in
two weeks?
Nothing grows that fast. Not an elephant, not nothing.”

Claus marveled at the life he’d created. The back legs looked much thicker than he’d theorized. The front legs looked strong as well, but were skinnier and longer than the back. That would suggest a creature that moved at somewhat of an angle, like a gorilla on all fours, as opposed to horizontally, like a running dog or a tiger.

The skeletal structure also showed remarkable growth. The ribs looked very thick and extended from the head all the way down to the hips, growing against one another almost like a kind of internal armor.

“Doc,” Tim said. “What are we going to do?”

“We observe and document,” Claus said. “We prepare for a C-section in a week. Maybe less.”

“That’s not what I mean, dude. Based on the growth patterns thus far, in another week these bitches could hit
three hundred pounds.”

Rhumkorrf nodded. “True, and adult weight could reach four hundred, maybe five hundred pounds. You’re right, the organs might be too large. We’ll adjust the genome for the second generation, but right away we can use livers, maybe even kidneys.”

Tim’s face wrinkled up as if he were looking at a very, very stupid person.

“What?” Claus said. “Now what is your problem?”

“I’m not talking about transplants and organs, you fucking nerd.” Tim looked at Jian. “You know what I’m talking about, Fruity Pebbles?”

“Mister Feely,” Claus said, “I’m not going to tell you ag—”

“Predators,” Jian said. “Teeth. Claws. Maybe three hundred pounds at birth, possibly
twice
that size within days. Where will we put them? What will we
feed
them?”

Claus looked at her blankly, then turned to stare at the workstation’s gold-tinted screen. He used the trackball to turn the fetal image, looking at it from every possible angle. Teeth. Claws. Muscle. Aggression. Attacking the camera, killing while still inside the womb.

“Perhaps,” he said quietly, “that is a valid concern.”

Implantation +17 Days

COLDING STARED AT the chessboard and contemplated his next move. He couldn’t screw it up, because he was winning—he was actually beating Jian. No one in the project had ever beaten her. Okay, maybe her brain was still a bit addled from the med shorting, but Colding would take a victory over her any way he could get it.

He had avoided Sara as much as possible in the last two days. After, of course, he’d gone to her room and broken the cameras there. He didn’t quite know how to tell her that Andy “The Asshole” Crosthwaite had a video of her, naked, making love.

He explained his distance by telling Sara that he had to focus on Jian, that he’d been slacking off more than a little on that part of his job. Sara understood. And he wasn’t lying, because he
did
focus on Jian, monitoring her progress, making sure Rhumkorrf gave the proper dosage. That and playing a lot of chess.

Colding moved his queen’s knight and smiled. “Check.”

Jian stared blankly out the lounge’s picture window. She seemed to have forgotten Colding was even there at all. She looked much better, though—clearly, the proper dosage was working.

“Jian?”

She just sat there, her hands turning a bottle of Dr Pepper over and over until the color was a light brown—the normal dark caramel shade mixed with the white of bubbles seeking escape against the bottle’s pressure. When she finally opened it, Colding thought, the thing would explode.