Mount Dragon (33 page)

Carson looked over at de Vaca. Her face was flushed, and her hair wild. A fleck of foam from the sweaty horse lay across her thigh. She grinned. “Not bad,” she said. “You almost caught me.”

Carson flicked his reins. “You cheated,” he said, hearing the peevishness in his own voice. “You got the jump on me.”

“You have the better horse,” she said.

“You're lighter.”

She smirked. “Face it,
cabrón
, you lost.”

Carson smiled grimly. “I'll catch you next time.”

“Nobody catches me.”

Reaching the ruin, they dismounted, tying their horses to a rock. “The Great Kiva was usually in the very center of the pueblo, or else far outside its borders,” de Vaca said. “Let's hope it hasn't collapsed completely.”

The ravens circled far overhead, their distant cries hanging in the dry air.

Carson looked around curiously. The walls were formed from stones of shaped lava, cemented together with adobe. Walls and room blocks rose on three sides of the U-shaped ruin, the fourth side opening onto a central plaza. Potsherds and pieces of flint littered the ground beneath their feet. Much of it was covered by sand.

They walked into the plaza, long overgrown with yucca and mesquite. De Vaca knelt down by a large fire-ant hill. The ants had fled inside to escape the noonday heat, and she carefully smoothed the gravel with her fingers, examining it closely.

“What are you doing?” Carson asked.

Instead of answering, de Vaca picked something off the mound and held it between thumb and forefinger. “Take a look,” she said.

She placed something in his palm, and he squinted at it: a perfect little turquoise bead, with a hole no wider than a human hair drilled through its center.

“They polished their turquoises using blades of grass,” she said. “No one is really sure how they got the holes so small and perfect, without the use of metal. Perhaps by twirling a tiny sliver of bone against the turquoise for hours.” She stood up. “Come on, let's find that kiva.”

They moved to the center of the plaza. “There's nothing here,” Carson said.

“We'll separate and search beyond the perimeter,” de Vaca replied. “I'll take the northern semicircle, you take the southern.”

Carson moved out beyond the edge of the ruin, tracing a widening arc, scanning the desert as he did so. The huge storm and drying winds had erased any signs of footprints; it was impossible to tell whether Burt had been there or not. Centuries before, the subterranean kiva would have had a roof flush with the desert floor, with only a smoke hole on the surface revealing its presence. While it was likely the roof had collapsed long ago, there was a chance that it had remained intact and was now completely concealed by the shifting sands.

Carson found the kiva about one hundred yards to the southwest. The roof had collapsed, and the kiva was now nothing but a circular depression in the desert, thirty feet across and perhaps seven feet deep. Its walls were of shaped rock, from which projected a few stubs of ancient roof timbers. De Vaca came running at his call, and together they stood at its edge. Near the bottom, Carson could make out places where the walls were still plastered in adobe mud and red paint. At the base, the wind had piled up a crescent of sand, completely burying the floor.

“So where's this sipapu?” Carson asked.

“It was always in the exact center of the kiva,” said de Vaca. “Here, help me down.” She scrambled down the side, paced off the center, then knelt, digging in the sand with her fingers. Carson dropped down and began to help. Six inches into the sand, their hands scraped against flat rock. De Vaca brushed the sand away excitedly, moving the stone aside.

There, in the sipapu hole, sat a large plastic specimen jar, its GeneDyne label still intact. Inside the jar was a small book with dented corners, bound in a stained, olive-colored canvas.

“
Madre de Dios
,” de Vaca whispered. She lifted the jar out of the sipapu, pried open the lid, and pulled out the journal, opening it as Carson looked on.

The first page was headed
May 18
. Below the date, the page was covered in dense, precise handwriting, so tiny that two lines were written in each ruled space.

Carson watched as de Vaca flipped through the pages incredulously. “We can't bring this back to Mount Dragon,” he said.

“I know. So let's get started.”

She turned to the beginning.

May 18

Dearest Amiko,

I write to you from the ruins of a sacred Anasazi kiva, not far from my laboratory.

When we were packing my things, that last morning before I flew to Albuquerque, I stuck this old journal into the pocket of my jacket, on impulse. I'd always planned to use it for bird sightings. But I think now I've found a better use for it.

I miss you so terribly. The people here are friendly, for the most part. Some, like the director, John Singer, I think I can even count as friends. But we are associates before we are friends here, all pushing toward one common goal. There is pressure upon us; tremendous pressure to move ahead, to succeed. I feel myself drawing inward under such pressure. The endless desolation of this awful desert magnifies my loneliness. It is as if we have stepped off the edge of the world.

Paper and pencil are forbidden here. Brent wants to keep track of everything we do. Sometimes, I believe he even wants to keep track of what we think. I'll use this small journal as my lifeline to you. There are things I want to tell you, in good time. Things that will never appear in the on-line records at GeneDyne. Brent is, in many ways, still a boy, with boyish ideas; and one of those ideas is that he can control what others do and think.

I hope you will not worry when I tell you such things. But I forget; when you read this, it will be with me by your side. And these will be but memories. Perhaps the passage of time will allow me to laugh at myself and my petty complaints. Or feel pride at what we have accomplished here.

It's a long walk out to this kiva, and you know how poor a rider I am. But I think it does me good, to spend this time with you. The journal will be safe here, under the sand. Nobody leaves the facility except the security director, and he seems to have his own strange desert business to attend to.

I will come again, soon.

 

May 25

My darling wife,

It is a terribly hot day. I keep forgetting how much water one needs in this frightful desert. I will have to bring two canteens next time.

It is no wonder, in this waterless landscape, that the entire religion of the Anasazi was directed at the control of nature. Here, in the kiva, is where the rain priests called on the Thunderbird to bring the rain.

 

Oh, male divinity!

With your moccasins of dark cloud, come to us
,

With the zigzag lightning flung out on high over your head, come to us soaring
,

With these I wish the foam floating on the flowing water over the roots of the great corn
,

Happily abundant dark clouds I desire
,

Happily abundant dark mists I desire
,

Happily may fair blue corn, to the ends of the earth, come with you
.

 

This was how they prayed. It is a very ancient desire, this thirst for knowledge and power, this hunger to control the secrets of nature, to bring the rain.

But the rain did not come. Just as it does not come today.

What would they think if they could see us now, laboring day after day, in our warrens beneath the earth, working not only to control nature, but to shape it to our will?

I can write no more today. The problem I've been given is demanding all my time and energy. It's hard to escape it, even here. But I will return soon, my love.

 

June 4

Dearest Amiko,

Please forgive my long absence from this place. Our schedule in the laboratory has been fiendish. Were it not for the requisite decontaminations, I believe Brent would have us working round the clock.

Brent. How much have I told you about him?

It's strange. I never knew that I could feel such profound respect for a man, and yet dislike him at the same time. I suppose I might even hate him. Even when he's not actually pushing me to work faster, I can still see his face, frowning, because the results are not as he would like. I hear him whispering in my ear:
Just five more minutes. Just one more test series
.

Brent is probably the most complex person I've ever met. Brilliant, silly, immature, cool, ruthless. He has an enormous internal storehouse of witty aphorisms which he brings forth for any occasion, quoting them with great delight. He gives away millions while arguing bitterly over hundreds. He can be suffocatingly kind to one person and unbearably cruel to the next. His knowledge of music is extraordinary. He owns Beethoven's last and finest piano, the one that supposedly prompted him to write his final three sonatas. I can only guess at the price.

I'll never forget the first time I spoke to him. It was when I was still working in GeneDyne Manchester, shortly after my breakthrough with GEF, the filtration system. Our preliminary results were excellent, and everyone was excited. The system promised to cut production time in half. The team in the transfection lab were beside themselves. They told me they were going to nominate me for president.

That's when the call came from Brent Scopes. I assumed it was congratulatory; perhaps another bonus. But instead, he asked me to come to Boston, on the next plane. I had to drop everything, he said, to assume leadership of a critical GeneDyne project. He didn't even allow me to finish the final tests on GEF; I had to leave that to my staff at Manchester.

You remember my trip to Boston. I'm sure I must have seemed evasive on my return, and for that I am sorry. Brent has a way of pulling you in behind his banner, of electrifying you with his own enthusiasm. But there seems no reason not to tell you about it now. It will be in all the newspapers in a matter of months, anyway.

My task—putting it simply—was to synthesize artificial blood. To use the vast resources of GeneDyne to genetically engineer human blood. The preparatory work had already been done, Brent said. But he wanted someone with my background, and my expertise, to see it through. My work on the GEF filtration process made me the perfect choice.

It was a noble idea, I admit, and Brent's delivery was superb. Never again would hospitals suffer from blood shortages and emergencies, he said. No longer would people have to fear contaminated transfusions. No longer would people with rare blood types die for lack of a match. GeneDyne's artificial blood would be free of contamination, would match all types, and would be available in limitless quantities.

And so I left Manchester—I left you, our home, everything I hold dear—and came to this desolate place. To pursue a dream of Brent Scopes, and, with any luck, make the world a better place. The dream lives. But its cost is very high.

 

June 12

Dearest Amiko,

I have decided to use this journal to continue the story I began in my last entry. Perhaps that was my purpose all along. All I can tell you is that, after leaving this kiva on my last visit, I felt a tremendous sense of release. So I will continue, for my own sake if not for posterity.

I remember one morning, perhaps four months ago. I was holding a flask of blood. It was the blood of a human being, yet it had been manufactured by a form of life as far removed from human as possible:
streptococcus
, the bacterium that lives in the soil, among other places. I had spliced the human hemoglobin gene into
strep
and forced it to produce human hemoglobin. Vast quantities of human hemoglobin.

Why use
streptococcus?
Because we know more about
strep
than about almost any other form of life on the planet. We have mapped its entire genome. We know how to snip apart its DNA, tuck in a gene, and sew everything back together.

You will forgive me if I simplify the process. Using cells taken from the lining of a human cheek (my own), I removed a single gene located on the fourth chromosome, 16s rDNA, locus D3401. I multiplied it a millionfold, inserted the copies into the
strep
bacteria, and grew them in large vats filled with a protein solution. Despite how it sounds, my dear, this part wasn't difficult. It has been done many times before with other genes, including the gene for human insulin.

We made this bacterium—this extremely primitive form of life—ever so slightly human. Each bacterium carried a tiny, invisible piece of a human being inside it. This human piece, in essence, took over the functions of the bacterium and forced it to do one thing: produce human hemoglobin.

And that, to me, is the magic—the irreducible truth of genetics, the promise that will never grow stale.

But this is also where the difficult work really began.