The Dog Said Bow-Wow (33 page)

Then for a time he spoke of that most cosmopolitan of cities, of its mosques and minarets and holographic pleasure-gardens, of its temples and palaces and baths, where all the many races of the world met and shared their lore. He spoke of regal women as alluring as dreams, and of philosophers so subtle in their equivocations that no three could agree what day of the week it was. He spoke too of treasures: gold chalices, chess sets carved of porphyry and jade, silver-stemmed cups of narwhale-ivory delicately carved with unicorns and maidens, swords whose hilts were flecked with gems and whose blades no force could shatter, tuns of wine whose intoxicating effects had been handcrafted by the finest storytellers in the East, vast libraries whose every book was the last surviving copy of its text. There was always music in the air of Byzantium, and the delicate foods of a hundred cultures, and of a summer’s night, lovers gathered on the star-gazing platforms to practice the amatory arts in the velvety perfumed darkness. For the Festival of the Red and White Roses, streams and rivers were rerouted to run through the city streets, and a province’s worth of flowers were plucked and their petals cast into the flowing waters. For the Festival of the Honey of Eden…

Some time later, Darger shook himself from his reverie, and discovered that Surplus was staring blindly into the distance, while their little pony stamped his feet and shook his harness, anxious to be off. He gripped his friend’s shoulder. “Ho! Sleepy-head! You’ve wandered off into the Empyrean, when you’re needed here on Earth.”

Surplus shook himself. “I dreamed…what did I dream? It’s lost now, and yet it seemed vitally important at the time, as if it were something I should remember, and even cherish.” He yawned greatly. “Well, no matter! Our stay in the countryside has been pleasant, but unproductive. The Evangelos bronzes remain lost, and our purses are perilously close to empty. Where shall we go now, to replenish them?”

“East,” Darger said decisively. “East, to the Bosporus. I have heard — somewhere — great things of that city called…called…”

“Byzantium!” Surplus said. “I too have heard wondrous tales — somehow—of its wealth and beauty. Two such men as ourselves should do marvelous well there.”

“Then we are agreed.” Darger shook the harness, and the pony set out at a trot. They both whooped and laughed, and if there was a small hurt in their hearts they did not know what it was or what they should do about it, and so it was ignored.

Surplus waved his tricorn hat in the air. “Byzantium awaits!”

“YOU’RE GOING TO
love this guy,” the Project Director said.

“I doubt it,” the Financial Officer said. “Quite frankly, I have my doubts about the entire project. I really can’t see dedicating that much capital to a…well, pardon me for saying this, but a fantasy, really. Where’s the profit? What’s the point? I’m afraid you’ve chosen the wrong one to pass on this.”

“But that’s exactly why I
did
choose you,” the Project Director said. “If I can get your approval, the others will be easy.”

“You’re a visionary,” the Financial Officer said. No one could have mistaken this for a compliment. “Shall we get on with it?”

The Project Director touched a device on the table beside him, and said, “Mr. Adams? Would you come in now?”

The door opened. Adams was a lanky man in his late twenties, all wrists, elbows, and throat. He had high cheekbones, and a bright and glittering eye. He grinned as he came in, as if he couldn’t wait to explain himself.

Introductions were made. He took a seat. Then the Project Director said, “Well, we’re finally gearing up to decide whether to fund the project or not.”

“Good!” the young man said too loudly. He blushed. “Excuse me, I get a little overexcited on this subject.”

“No, no, enthusiasm is a good thing in a researcher.” The Project Director smiled encouragingly.

The Financial Officer cleared his throat. “So, I gather you’re talking about cloning dinosaurs,” he said in a dubious tone.

“No, sir. You’re thinking of
Jurassic Park
. Wonderful movie. I saw a video of it when I was a kid, and I knew right then and there that I wanted to study dinosaurs when I grew up. But, alas, no, that’s all hog-wash. Even then they knew, really, that it couldn’t be done.”

The Financial Officer looked baffled. “Why not?”

“Okay, let’s crunch a few numbers. The human genome contains about three billion base pairs…”

“Base pairs?”

“Base pairs are—” The young man paused. “Can I wildly oversimplify?”

“Please do,” the Financial Officer said dryly.

“If the genome is the complete description of a living creature, then the base pairs are the alphabet in which that description is written. It’s a four-letter alphabet consisting of the letters G, A, T, and C, for Guanine, Adenine —”

The Financial Officer said, “Yes, I think we understand that part sufficiently now.”

Adams laughed. “I told you I was an enthusiast! Anyway, humans have over three billion base pairs. The fruit fly has one hundred eighty million. The
E. coli
bacterium has four point six million. And there’s a lizard that has one hundred eleven billion base pairs. So there’s a great deal of variation here.”

“How many would a dinosaur have?” the Financial Officer asked.

“Good question! Nobody knows, not really. But a good bet would be that it comes out somewhere in the range of a house finch. Say, two billion base pairs. Now most of that is going to be junk
DNA
— nonsense sequences that code for impossible protein substances, incomplete duplicates, and so on. Even so, we’re talking about a lot of very complex code. Now ask me what the longest string of fossil dino
DNA
we’ve recovered so far is.”

“How much?”

“Three hundred base pairs! And those were from mitochondrial
DNA
. The problem is that
DNA
is fragile stuff. And tiny. Most of the fossils we’ve ever found have been of the hard parts of animals. Bones, teeth, shells. Soft tissue is only preserved under extremely rare conditions. In fossils as old as the Mesozoic, it’s not the tissue itself that’s preserved, but an imprint of it. So the whole fossil cloning thing is just a pipe dream. It’s simply not going to happen.”

“Thank you,” the Project Director said. “I think that sums up the difficulties.”

“But even supposing we
could
somehow patch together a complete set of genes for a dino-zygote, we
still
couldn’t build one. Because we don’t have a dinosaur egg.”

“What would we need an egg for?” the Financial Officer asked. “I thought we were talking about cloning.”

“We need an egg because it’s a complex mechanism that not only nurtures the zygote, but tells it which genes to express and which to repress, and in what order. Having a zygote without an egg is like having all the parts for a supercomputer, and no instructions on how to put them together.”

“So…if it can’t be done,” the Financial Officer said. “I don’t understand why we’re even having this meeting.”

The Project Director chuckled. “Our Mr. Adams is a scientist, I fear, not a salesman.”

“Oh, but it’s only
cloning
that’s impossible,” Adams said intensely. “We can still have dinosaurs! “We can
back-engineer
them. We can build a dinosaur out of existing material. We start with a bird…”

“A bird! Birds aren’t dinosaurs.”

“Cladistically speaking, they are. Birds are directly descended from coelurosaurs, which means that they
are
dinosaurs, in the same sense that you and I, having backbones and thus being descended from the first primitive creatures with notochords, are chordates,
and
vertebrates,
and
mammals,
and
anthropoids,
and
human beings all at one and the same time. A bird is simply a dinosaur that’s evolved into something more elaborate. It’s a refinement, not something new.

“Most of the old instructions are still there, waiting to be turned on again. Tweak one simple gene sequence, and birds sprout teeth again! Tweak another and their wings have claws. Those traits that have been lost entirely can be borrowed from the genes of other creatures — crocodiles and salamanders and whatnot. It’s simply a matter of picking and choosing. After all, we know the outcome we want.”

“We can do this,” the Project Director said. “We have the tools.”

The Financial Officer shook his head in wonderment.

“Now we’ve got the genes, and we insert them into a specially prepared ostrich ovum, and let it grow into a full-sized egg within the mother.”

“An ostrich egg? Would that be large enough?”

“Very few dinosaur eggs were much larger. Apatosaurs were so tiny at birth that nobody’s been able to figure out how the mothers avoided stepping on them.”

“You’d be starting out with apatosaurs, then?”

“No, we’ll start out easy, with gallimimuses and troodons — beasts not too far distant, genetically speaking, from living birds. Then we’ll expand outward, to allosaurs and plateosaurs, stegosaurs and apatosaurs.”

“Marketing has decided to go with ‘brontosaurs’ rather than ‘apatosaurs,’” the Project Director said. “It’s got a more commercial ring to it.”

“But it’s not-”

“— in accord with the rules of scientific nomenclature. Yes, yes. Tell me, which would you rather have — a living, breathing
Brontosaurus
, or plans for an
Apatosaurus
that never got funded?”

The young man flushed, but said nothing.

“Now, as I understand it,” the Financial Officer said, “you’ll be wanting to establish breeding populations. Won’t that be a little tricky? The environment has changed a great deal from Mesozoic times. Will the herbivores even be able to eat contemporary plants?”

“Oh, we can work up some chow for them. As for the environment… well, there’d be a certain amount of trickery involved there, I’m afraid. We don’t have any continental expanses of land at hand to turn over to them. But we’ve done wonders with zoos. We could create an environment good enough to fool the dinosaurs themselves. Good enough to make them happy.” Eyes gleaming, the young man said, “Give me the funding, and within the year I’ll show you something indistinguishable from a living dinosaur.”

“Would it actually be a dinosaur, though?”

“Would it
be
a dinosaur? No. Would it act and behave and think like one? Pretty damn close.”

“Well!” The Project Director slapped his hands together. “I told you our young fellow would give you a good show.”

The Financial Officer looked thoughtful. “I’ve only got one more question,” he said. “Why?”

“Why, sir?”

“Yes, why? Why even bother? Dinosaurs have been dead for…for millions of years. They had their shot. Why bring them back?”

“Because dinosaurs are wonderful animals! Of
course
we want them back. What is so beautiful and useless as a dinosaur? Who
wouldn’t
want to have them around?”

The Financial Officer turned toward the Project Director and nodded. The Project Director stood. “Thank you, Mr. Adams.”

“Thank you, sir! For giving me this chance, I mean. To explain what I want to do.”

Almost stumbling over himself in his eagerness to make a good impression, the young man left the room.

When the door closed, the Project Director and the Financial Officer looked at one another. Their human shapes wavered and collapsed, revealing their true forms.

The Project Director stretched, shaking out his feathers. “Well?”

“He’s wonderful!” the Financial Officer said. “He’s everything you said he would be.”

“I told you so. Humans are such delightful creatures! So inquisitive, so inventive. I think everyone will agree that they’re an ornament to the world.”

“Well, you’ve certainly sold
me.
”

“You’re satisfied, then?”

“Yes.”

“You’re prepared to support me for Phase Two? The creation of an environment, and establishment of a permanent breeding population?”

“If the female makes as good an impression, then yes. I’d have to say I am.”

“Excellent! Let’s interview her right now.”

The Project Director shimmered back into human form. He touched the device on the table. “You can come in now, Eve.”

THE DAIQUIRIS
were made with crushed ice and poured into cut-glass tumblers from a pitcher that sat on a towel on the hunt cabinet. The men wore jackets without ties and the women wore cocktail dresses. Herb Alpert’s latest album was on the hi-fi, turned down low so it wouldn’t disrupt conversation. The hostess had timed the roast so they could linger over their drinks.

Nobody acknowledged the patrol, smaller than mice, that was fearfully making its way across the room.

“Did you hear?” the hostess said eagerly. “Did you hear what Diana Vreeland said? She wants women to wear belts like rings. Four, five, six at a time — the woman’s perfectly mad!”

“But who could
wear
them?” Annie Halpern asked. “I’m not exactly Twiggy, you know.”

“And thank God for that,” her husband threw in.

She patted his cheek. “Isn’t he sweet? He always knows the right thing to say.”

“Then he’s the only man in the world who does,” Andy Wexler said belligerently. His wife reached swiftly for his drink, but he held it out of her reach. “None of that, now. I’m wise to your little tricks.”

Cindy Wexler laughed with embarrassment. “Why, dear, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m sure you don’t.”

The mission was completely fucked. It had been fucked from its inception, and probably for a long time before that. You didn’t get this bollixed up without lots and lots of planning. There’d been seventeen men in the platoon when they’d started out but only eight had made it this far, and yet they were still supposed to go on. The Lieutenant didn’t even understand what the point of this operation was supposed to be. The orders made fuck-all sense, as far as he was concerned.

Fuck it. That’s all you could say. Just fuck it.