End Time (37 page)

No, wrong; she was reading the letters backward through the glass. From the bed it only looked like
latanetnA
. They called the room
Antenatal Number 10.

Ten beds to the room, five and five with an aisle down the middle; she felt absolutely lackadaisical with no urge to get up or do anything but turn her head to look around. Tubes snaked into her arms, but she lacked the ambition to learn their purpose—in any case they gave her no discomfort. She barely glanced at the other women in the beds nearby.

Periodically more women tramped past the glass wall on their way to Antenatal Number 9 or Antenatal Number 11. New women, more women; vacant-eyed and slightly bedraggled as if they'd come inside from a long walk in the woods. The new women glided past, looking neither left nor right, simply drifting along and vanishing from sight.

Then—in a sudden, abrupt shift—they, the mysterious “They,” hit the fast-forward button and things
sped up
. Instead of floating aimlessly about, everyone suddenly moved very quickly. Men and women in white lab coats flitted into the glass-walled room, and then flickered out again, their movements herky-jerky like film jumping through the sprockets too fast. Of course the ant people and the dancing men: good ants or bad ants? At last she understood all that stuff she babbled when she crashed through Guy and Lauren's picket fence in a rainstorm. The ant people who worked the colony,
bad red ants.
…

And those tubes, those tubes in her arms must be for drugs. In a dizzying flicker the white coats flew around her bed, fussed with her tubes, and suddenly the gurney raced down a hall, whooshing through swinging double doors. Then abruptly halted under the enormous stage lights of an operating theater. Beyond the glare people stood in a gallery gazing down. Red Ants in white coats.

She saw her own feet at the end of a white sheet, in stirrups high up in the air. An old geezer with a halo of white hair glided across her vision. Oh yes, that dry, clean-shaven scientist from the Braincast lecture with the glimmering eye. The last time she'd seen this odd man with the white hair was on that first Light Tesla trip—in a lecture hall holding forth on cyborg mosquitoes and sensory proteins in the human brain.

What was that gobbledygook again?
The refinement of chemosensory proteins allows us infinite stimuli and response
: explaining how the desire for reproduction lured Eleanor and the other women from Van Horn to the abandoned meatpacking plant. So that seemed to be only Phase One of the project. Now for Phase Two.

He spoke to an unseen audience in the gantry above the OR; his flinty voice filled her head:

“Pi R Squared. Outbreeder Eleanor Singh. Team Leader presiding.”

Eleanor hadn't a clue what the sly professor meant by that. But she did get the impression the old scientist with the dry voice stood on the verge of doing something unpleasant.
Doing something to her
. She tried to say,
No thank you, I'd rather not; could we please
—

An oxygen mask covered her face, and the operating theater slipped away. The last thing she noticed: a shiny mechanical surgeon robot with a thousand pointed instruments in its multiple remote-control hands gliding up between her legs—or was it a giant metallic wasp with multiple feelers and multiple stingers?
What, a Wasp?

Multiple what?

Eleanor's eyes snapped open in her cozy gabled-house room.

The time on her laptop read 3:57 p.m. She tried the door handle; nope, still dead-bolted. Were they going to let them out for dinner?

But something else nagged her too.

What had the shiny old egghead, the “Team Leader,” called her? He'd used a strange word:
outbreeder
.

Outbreeder Eleanor Singh. Out
what
?

Eleanor was an Aerospace gal, not a Life Sciences gal—but a few clicks on the laptop got her an answer. Outbreeding, a form of hybrid reproduction: the crossing of distantly related individuals, producing better plants, cattle, dogs, to create stronger offspring. Superior substance. Superior ability. Genetic enhancement.

Enjoy the
New and Improved
human being.

Only the technicians in the Ant Colony weren't doing it to guinea pigs or brown cows—they were doing it to women. And women like her. And if this was the way they operated, working in the dark, out of sight—that was evil. Taking superlative qualities in their breeding stock and reinforcing them over and over: but to create what?

Übermensch? Superman? A few clicks brought her to a version of Nietzsche's
Thus Spake Zarathustra
:
“I love those who do not first seek … beyond the stars … but who sacrifice themselves to the earth, that the earth may one day belong to the Superman.”

Sacrificed to the earth. But bred for what?

Sent forth to conquer.

Those fantastically engineered Skeeterbugs she saw at Herr Professor's last lecture leapt into her mind. The blood of earth goddesses fed enhanced SKTR-13 mosquitoes, injecting Übermensch fertility juice like a broad-spectrum insemination into anyone and everyone at the designation of Team Leader.
Outbreeders.

Eleanor stopped analyzing. The sounds from the other bedrooms in the house had grown louder, more urgent. Moaning from next door as if the mousy librarian lady were in pain. Eleanor thumped her hand against the wall, trying to get the woman's attention.

“Are you all right?” No answer. She thumped again. “Can you hear me?”

Then the faint reply: “Eleanor, shut up.”

And coughing. A bout of coughing that went on for a long minute. Then two minutes. Then dragged into three … The woman's coughing became more ragged, deeper and more painful. Finally it petered out. That much coughing could kill a person. Break a blood vessel, give you a heart attack. The sound of wheezing came through the wall. The woman wasn't quite dead yet.

Eleanor sat back on the bed and gazed out the window. She could see the woodpeckers in the trees again, pecking the trunk like they did every late afternoon. But this time they just seemed to be hanging on to the bark. Occasionally she could see the slash of white across their faces, the sharp red crown when they shifted a little. But their movement seemed sluggish. Instead of vanishing in the flick of an eye, these guys couldn't care less. All their natural energy drained away.

Suddenly one of the large birds chirped—a single, harsh
kuk!
—and fell from the tree trunk, a lifeless lump. The other large woodpecker fell right after him with a hollow flap. Eleanor saw the two wonderful birds lying at the base of the tree. A gust of wind ruffled their feathers; but there was no mistaking dead.

From elsewhere in the house a woman's voice sobbed long and deep—Eleanor could hear the penetrating sobs coming up from the floorboards. As if the poor soul had discovered something too terrible to name. Things were not right, and not getting any better.

Once again, the Light Tesla stared at her from the flat laptop screen. The ball of light pulsed for a moment, then faded. A feed from the Ant Colony came through. First that familiar image:
π
r
2
. The Pi R Squared symbol dissolved, and a young man's face appeared. A fellow with sandy hair and dark circles under his eyes as if he'd spent a whole night worrying himself sick. And Eleanor immediately recognized him as the persistent questioner from that Braincast lecture with the DNA and SKTR-13.

He wore a white lab coat and sat at a bare desk. The vid cam on his laptop picked up little bits of his surroundings. The young man sat in a dim run-down office, paint flaking off scabrous walls. An exposed pipe dripped water.

“I found an old telephone jack in another part of the plant away from the main facility.” He paused, looking around him as if expecting the Gestapo to break in any moment and drag him away. The young man looked nervous—like he was making some kind of confession. Five seconds of silent staring.

“My name is Dr. Webster Chargrove. We've been doing something very bad at Pi R Squared. And I don't know how to stop it. I'm making this record now in the hope that someday, someone will find it. Then pass it along. Especially you, Big Sis.” He paused to work up his resolve and then found the grit.

“Not long ago I was charged with retrieving comet dust from the Wild Three Aerogel collector at the Dugway satellite recovery. We should have known better than to do that. But even before the pod recovery our Skeeterbug Braincast System made targeting errors. Women showed up here who didn't belong, and other people who didn't belong.”

Eleanor recalled the old security tape; the video feed of dazed and confused movie director Broderick Lady Fallows, hobbling along on one busted pump.

“At first we sent the undesirables, the
misfits,
as we called them, back onto the street. Homeless, crazy women, abducted by aliens, nobody cared, nobody noticed. But then for security reasons we kept them here, and began recycling. Harvesting as much as we could. Stem cells, bone marrow, plasma—” The young man took a breath. His face dropped in shame.

“We should have shut down, found the glitch in the BioDesign. Instead we made it worse. We introduced the comet-derived glycine into our original glycine base. I did that. That was me. I used the new material as a template for allele genetic outbreeding.”

The sad fellow was starting to lose Eleanor, and she struggled to keep up. Glycine, an amino acid, the building threads of life, part of the DNA chain—a primal neurotransmitter. Obviously the geniuses used it as a pathway into the human brain, like they said back in the Braincast lecture.

“That way we could introduce our genetic enhancements. These alleles included denser muscle mass, stronger bones, more flexible ligature. Greater lung capacity, an overall resistance to heat, cold, pain, solar radiation, disease. And inside the brain itself a more enhanced synaptic response. Just like we did on the mosquito. Except now on people. Über-humans. It was all supposed to be so good, so beneficial.”

The young man on the laptop shook his head in dismay, amazed at his own hubris and stupidity.

“We thought the glycine from outer space would be pure—as it had been endlessly radiated in a pristine airless vacuum. How could we know?”

BioDesign engineer Chargrove hit a few keys, and the feed cut to a new image:

Hatchery 4.
Another glass-walled room of ten beds, five up and five down with an aisle in the center. Safe, clean, nice music piped in. But something was very wrong here; all the women were sick, bloated red and gray faces. One face pasty white, another gray, another blushing red, yet another streaked black as though a living bruise. Then last of all yellow.

Young Chargrove's voice came through. “If you were prone to bronchitis you cough up blood. If you suffered childhood chicken pox your body becomes susceptible to shingles. Not just one disease but a thousand plagues. When the subject's liver finally liquefies we call it Yellow Jack.”

 

20

There Must Be a Way Out

Same hour. Same day. Moments later.

Eleanor's eyes fell from the laptop screen.

The Light Tesla had not only fixed Eleanor's memory but improved it. She recalled everything that had happened to her in that dreadful place: sight, sound, touch, taste, down to the last detail. Seeing it all once more …

In the bowels of the Ant Colony Eleanor pulled the crisp sheets off her chest. No stirrups, no robo-wasp with a mouth full of needles. Her meds had run out; shrunken fluid sacks hung above her bed. She detached herself from two IV needles and sat up in bed for the first time since her insemination. Her back ached; she gingerly touched a bedsore on her thigh. She looked at her fingernails; they'd turned into slatternly cat claws with cuticles to match. Three weeks' growth, maybe a month.

Suddenly awake and alert, she looked for a robe; this place was colder than she remembered from her shadowy waking periods. The Van Horn wives lay in their beds, attached to tubes and monitors in various altered states. Something was very, very wrong. Looking closer at her neighbors from Van Horn, it only got worse.

All the women in her postnatal section were dying.

Mrs. Biedermeier seemed to have ballooned up twice her size. A big woman to begin with, now a whale. Her face red as a plum, but so swollen her eyes had almost vanished from her head. A clear plastic respirator was inserted down her windpipe, and a pump moving her chest seemed to make her breathe, but otherwise there was no sign of life.

The skinny Mrs. Stanton looked like she'd lost two pounds a day for a month. The gold cross on the gold chain around her stringy neck stood out against her bluish gray skin, puckered with goose bumps. Sunken cheeks, nearly opaque eyes looked like those vampire corpses dug up after a dirt nap in the pine box. Mrs. Stanton breathed without a respirator but for all intents and purposes not long for this world.

Poor Mrs. Perkins seemed to have grown a tangerine-colored fungus about her face and exposed arms—orange mold, turning her into a human plushie squeeze toy. As Eleanor stared, a terrible lethargy seeped into her bones. Why flee? She'd just wind up like them.

Only the elderly, silver-haired Mrs. Quaid seemed to have survived their fearless Team Leader's insemination procedure in the operating theater. Her skin wasn't parchment yet, or deathlike or some strange color. Rather, Mrs. Quaid's face had twisted into a rictus. Mrs. Quaid was frozen from head to toe; limbs frozen, face frozen in a gaping laugh, a thread of saliva slipping from the corner of her mouth to a damp pillow.

Only her eyes were alive, darting back and forth. And in a horrible realization Eleanor saw sentience, intelligence in those flashing eyes. They implored her, digging into Eleanor's brain, frantically pleading: Mrs. Quaid was begging for her very soul for
someone,
anyone,
to come and kill her
.