Tom Hyman (29 page)

Her color is orange—and yellow, sometimes.”

“How about your dad?”

Genny drew in a big breath. “His colors are dark, and sometimes I can’t tell what they are. Sometimes he’s kinda greenish blue, but then he gets red sometimes, too. Real red—just like the fireplace, when the logs are all burned up and there’s only some … I forget what you call them….”

“Embers?”

“Embers. Daddy looks like embers, sometimes. Especially when he’s mad. Or when he’s in a hurry. Mommy says he’s always in

‘ a hurry.

-g Paul Elder sneaked a look at Anne and smiled. “Don’t embarrass your mommy.

“I’m used to it. But I must say she doesn’t usually ramble on like this with strangers.

“Dr. Elder’s not a stranger, Mommy,” Genny insisted.

Elder helped Genny down from the examination table. He handed her his otoscope and she looked into her rabbit’s ears with it.

“Auras,” Elder murmured, walking back to his desk. “I believe your daughter Genny can see auras.”

He saw the expression of alarm on Anne’s face and quickly reassured her. “She’s not ill. It’s not that. But it is unusual.”

“What is it? What does it mean?”

“She can see an aura of color around people’s heads. It sounds farfetched, I know, but apparently some individuals have this ability.

It’s rare, but it does exist. My grandmother had it. People made fun of her, so she didn’t talk about it in public. But there was no question that she saw some kind of colored margin around most animate objects. I’ve since read up on the subject a bit. No one’s yet come up with an accepted scientific explanation, but it’s probable that Genny sees some kind of emitted heat energy that’s visible in a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that most of us are not sensitive enough to perceive. In any case, it’s a genuine ability, and it’s perfectly harmless.” He grinned. “I wish I could see auras. It might help me in my diagnoses.”

Anne’s earlier anxiety came flooding back. “You think she’s psychic?”

“Some psychics do have this ability. But my grandmother wasn’t psychic.

So, I don’t know the answer.” Elder squeezed his lower lip thoughtfully between thumb and forefinger.

“What surprises me most is that your daughter has this sensitivity at such a young age. That would seem very rare. Fascinating.”

Anne asked the obvious question: “Is it Goth’s doing?”

Elder didn’t deny the possibility. He asked Anne for Genny’s folder and leafed through it again. “This MRI she was given-when was it?”

“A year ago. Just before her first birthday.”

“I’m no expert at reading these things, but—would you object if I arranged to give her another one? They’re expensive, of course, and she’s not ill, but if you really want me to pursue this matter . .

.”

“Oh yes, I do. Please. Anything you want to do. I’d be so grateful.

The cost won’t matter.”

“Okay. I’ll schedule her for one. Also, I don’t see any tests of her general sensory acuteness here. We might just test her eyes and ears—see what they show.”

“Whatever you think.”

The doctor looked over in Genny’s direction. The little girl was busy trying to wrap Rabbit’s head in an elastic bandage. “You mind if we do some tests on you, Genny?”

Genny shook her head solemnly. “I don’t mind.”

Elder looked back at Anne, bending forward in her chair.

“Look, this may all be quite fruitless, you realize. I understand your worry. But from the look of things, you’ve got a perfectly normal child. A superior child, but a normal one.”

“That’s what my husband said. That’s what this program of Goth’s is all about. Creating superior children. They plan to start testing it in Europe.”

“They?”

Anne explained the business partnership that her husband and the Baroness von Hauser had entered into to develop Jupiter.

Dr. Elder reacted sharply. “I thought the program died with Harold Goth?”

“No. Dalton managed to keep a copy of it.”

“What does your husband say? It seems he should be a considerable help here.”

“I’ve left him.”

“Because of this?”

“Yes.”

“I see. Do you know if he has any data from Goth’s work?

Goth must have done experiments.

“I don’t know.”

; “What about the program itself? Can we look at it? It’s likely to be the only way we’ll be able to determine what Goth actually - did to Genny. Short of just watching her grow up.”

“It’s locked up somewhere. I doubt my husband would allow me to show it to you. He considers it a priceless company secret.”

“That’s too bad.”

“I’ll try to get it for you.”

- Elder looked down at Genny speculatively. “Okay. In the meantime, let’s do those tests.”

“What do you think?” Dalton Stewart asked.

Hank Ajemian tightened his collar around his neck and looked out at the snow-covered mountain ridges that fell away to the north and east.

“Nice view.”

Dalton Stewart laughed. “That all?”

Ajemian pulled a tissue from his pocket and sneezed into it.

“The only thing around here I’d call nice.”

The two men were standing on the terrace of a fifty-room mansion, built originally as a vacation retreat for the Romanian Communist despot Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena. The mansion, with its surrounding three hundred acres of field and forest on the western slopes of the Transylvanian Alps south of the city of Sibiu, now belonged to the Baroness von Hauser, and it was bustling with activity.

A staff of twenty-five geneticists, doctors, nurses, technicians, and administrators had moved into the echoing stone-and-glass palace and converted it into a laboratory and clinic where this final version of Dr. Harold Goth’s Jupiter program was at last to get its initial trials. The first half-dozen of twenty carefully screened local women volunteers had arrived the day before. Their genomes had been obtained and analyzed, their eggs fertilized with their husbands’ sperm in vitro, and the zygotes altered genetically according to Jupiter’s blueprint. Now they were ready for the ZIFT procedure—the delivery of the altered eggs into their fallopian tubes.

“The middle of nowhere,” Ajemian complained, surveying the surrounding vistas of forest and mountain.

“It’s perfect,” Stewart replied. “When we start bringing in paying customers, they’ll want a lot of privacy. And the Romanians won’t give us any trouble.

“Sure. The baroness bought off the whole Romanian government. In the long run, bribery’s not a good policy. When they inevitably throw these bums out, she’ll have to bribe a whole new bunch, or get thrown out herself.

“You’re too cynical, Hank. If the pilot program’s a success here, we can always move the operation to another country.”

“Sure. And bribe everybody all over again? How many countries will allow it? Not many.”

“We only need one.”

“There’s something else that’s been bothering me,” Ajemian said, swiping at his nose. “Now that the baroness has a copy of Jupiter in her possession, what’s to prevent her cutting us out altogether?”

Stewart cast Ajemian a sharp, disapproving look. “A legally binding contract, for one thing.”

“The baroness has a history of getting around legally binding contracts.”

Stewart shrugged. “We’ve gotten around a few ourselves, Hank, if the truth be told.”

“They were her goons, New Year’s Eve in Coronado,” Ajemian said.

“What are you talking about?”

“She was after Jupiter. She sent them to break into Goth’s lab and steal the program.”

“I’ve thought of that. But we have no proof. It could have been Yamamoto, Fairchild, Prince Bandar. Even President Despres.

Even somebody we don’t know.”

Ajemian shook his head. “It was the baroness.”

“Even if it was, so what?”

“You can’t trust her.”

“We don’t have to trust her,” Stewart said. “There’s always some risk in any cooperative venture. And in this situation we didn’t have any other choice.”

“We could have declared bankruptcy.”

“That’s not a choice. Anyway, the baroness won’t try to cut us out.

At least not at this stage.”

“Why not?”

“She needs my daughter. Until other children are born under Jupiter and reach the age of three or so, Genny’s the only living proof that Jupiter works. The baroness is well aware of that. We have nothing to worry about for several years.”

Ajemian sighed. He was exceedingly depressed by the re-entry of the baroness into Dalton Stewart’s life. She had saved Biotech from bankruptcy, but the price had been steep. Ajemian was convinced that she would not only steal Jupiter from them but end up taking Stewart Biotech as well.

She seemed to have some kind of hold over Dalton that mystified him.

And it wasn’t just financial. Was she blackmailing him?

He didn’t think so. Nobody knew more of Dalton Stewart’s dark secrets than Ajemian. He was practically the curator of the collection. If the baroness had tried blackmail, Stewart would certainly have told him.

That left sex.

Ajemian couldn’t understand the baroness’s appeal. Admittedly, she was attractive, in a severe Teutonic way; but once the real personality behind the facade began to emerge, Ajemian thought, any man in his right mind would run for his life.

But Dalton wasn’t exactly in his right mind these days. Ajemian had never seen him in more fragile shape emotionally. Anne’s leaving had devastated him. He had retreated deep back into his self-protective shell. Even Ajemian could no longer figure out what he was thinking about. And Dalton’s behavior was becoming increasingly reckless and self-destructive.

It was a shame. Dalton had been doing so well. His daughter had opened up his eyes to a whole new way of looking at the world.

Suddenly he understood what love was all about. His behavior had improved dramatically. A man who had been emotionally self-centered all his life now knew what it meant to care about someone.

Then the baroness, with one well-placed bombshell at that Long Island dinner party, had destroyed it all.

It was a damned shame, Ajemian thought. For the first time in his life, Dalton Stewart allows himself to feel something emotionally—and it blows up in his face.

Of course it was Dalton’s own fault. He had been unthinkably insensitive, not telling Anne what Goth was up to with Genny. If he had just explained it to her up front, she probably would have gone along with it. Anne was always eager to be agreeable. But it was too late. The damage appeared to be permanent. Despite his pleas, Anne was unwilling to forgive him. The marriage was over, and the chief beneficiary of the breakup so far appeared to be the baroness.

Stewart was looking at him. “I’m going to stay on here for a while,”

he said. “I’m going back to Munich with the baroness tomorrow. She’s giving me office space, and she’s found me an apartment. I want to stay on top of Jupiter. We can’t afford to fuck this up a second time.”

“What about New York?”

“You’re going to have to run things there for me for a while.

That okay?”

“Sure. But Biotech’s got a lot of problems.”

“Between faxes and the phone, you can keep me up to speed.”

“How long you plan to stay?”

“Probably until we get the first test group results.”

Ajemian’s jaw dropped. “Nine months?”

Stewart looked at him steadily. “I’ll be back and forth.”

The baroness appeared on the terrace, in the company of her creepy personal assistant, Karla.

Where in hell did she find these people? Ajemian wondered.

Everybody that worked for her was a little strange. A process of self-selection, Ajemian supposed. She liked to surround herself with weak, dependent types whose unquestioning loyalty she could command.

And that weird couple, Katrina and Aldous.

What was the story there? He had thought at first that they were her personal servants. Now he was beginning to suspect that they might be her lovers—both of them.

The baroness took Stewart by the arm and led him inside to meet Dr.

Laura Garhardt, the head of the resident medical and technical staff.

She ignored Ajemian completely, but Karla managed to throw him a nasty over-the-shoulder glance as she followed the baroness and Stewart inside.

The staffing for this new project was a case study of the baroness in action. Every single one of the twenty-five new employees were from the baroness’s companies in Europe. Not one was from Biotech. At Ajemian’s insistence, Stewart had offered his own slate of candidates, ut the baroness had found reasons to object to all of them. Stewart hadn’t put up much of an argument; he didn’t seem to think it mattered much, at this stage. The whole program was an experiment, he had told Ajemian, and most Biotech employees were understandably leery of it—especially since the work they would be doing was patently illegal in most countries.

So Stewart was perfectly content to let the baroness staff the place entirely with her own people, even though it meant that his influence on the project would be reduced to near zero at the very outset. By the time the place was ready to open for real customers, Dalton Stewart would be watching from the sidelines. And with the baroness’s people keeping the books as well, it was a given that she would cheat the living hell out of him.

Ajemian had to do something. He had been racking his brain for months.

The woman’s public image was so formidable she could get away with anything. She had frequently broken the law in her business dealings—sometimes outrageously—and yet she had never suffered more than an occasional slap on the wrist. Her companies were known to be flagrant polluters, yet not a single Hauser enterprise in Europe had even been fined in the last five years.

Anyone who had the nerve to go against her always seemed to get crushed. Her political power in Germany was so great no one dared touch her. Even the muckraking left-wing press, a very active force in the new Germany, shied away from her.