Year Zero (11 page)

The second time Abbot met him had been after the Neandertal incident. Using DNA from a frozen dental nerve in a preserved mandible, and “borrowing” a Jersey milk cow for the womb, he had cloned a Neandertal infant. Again his creation shocked the world, and carried an underlying twist. Since
H. neandertalis
was by strictest definition not
H. sapiens,
Cavendish had managed to break the taboo against human cloning without technically breaking it. The psychological barrier was crossed. Human cloning had arrived.

A Presidential commission, chaired by Abbot, had dutifully listened to the moralists and Chicken Littles. During the course of the hearings, Abbot had come to respect Cavendish. The young man’s contempt for timid research sprang from a deep vein of misanthropy. He had smarts and
cojones,
and the cunning of a young Turk. In certain ways, he was a dead ringer for Abbot himself back before he’d learned the public was not a tool, it was the toolbox.

“I thought he’d been outlawed,” one of the scientists said.

“Censured, not outlawed,” a woman said. “He’s still being allowed to dabble. Here. Subsidized with taxpayer money!”

It was Abbot who had “disappeared” Cavendish into Los Alamos after the Neandertal controversy. Elise despised the man, but accepted Abbot’s reasoning. Science could not afford to lose a mind like Cavendish’s. At the same time, they couldn’t afford to have him running amok in the world at large. At Los Alamos—in theory—his genius could be caged under the watchful scrutiny of his greatest critic, Elise. The problem was she had fifty other projects to oversee, plus budget meetings and a university system to help administer. Her heart attack had effectively halted all oversight. No one was quite sure what Cavendish had been up to for the last six months. An artificial womb was in the making, Abbot knew that much. And Miranda was somehow involved.

He looked for her out his window. As the years caught up with him, Abbot missed his rebel daughter more and more. It was no surprise she had not come out to greet him. Cold, lofty Miranda. The daughter of her cold, lofty father. Elise read his disappointment. “We’ll find her,” she said. “She wants to see you.”

“Don’t pretend,” he said, “please.”

“Take her on her terms,” Elise said. “That would be a start. Be proud of her.”

“You think I’m not?”

“Paul,” she said, “Miranda is not your enemy.”

“What?”

But Elise was silent.

Grunting under the weight of their weapons and riot gear, the cops dismounted first and took positions. Like children on a field trip, the scientists filed out of the bus. Several of the elders needed a hand descending the steps. It was early September, and the air was chill up here at eight-thousand feet. They clustered uncertainly, some bundled in wool blankets with the Rancho Encantado logo.

“Good morning,” Cavendish cheerfully greeted no one in particular. His eyes swept across them, a head count. He noticed Abbot. He noticed Golding. He recognized power.

“Ha,” someone tossed back at him. Now that they were on the outside of it, the passengers were shocked by how much punishment the schoolbus had taken.

Cavendish seemed oblivious to the spoliation. “Follow me,” he said. “You’re late. It’s almost time.”

“This better be good,” a woman enunciated loudly.

“Damn good,” another added.

They were rude, Abbot saw, because they were intensely curious and didn’t want to admit it. Also, Cavendish scared them. The group started inside. Cavendish waited while Abbot helped Elise down the steps.

“Still on the mend, Dr. Golding?” Cavendish asked pleasantly. His eyes were cornflower blue. He had long black lashes. Unfortunately the touch of gentle handsomeness exaggerated what was otherwise a pinched mask. Rightly or wrongly, any wonderment looked cruel on his face.

Abbot felt Elise’s hand tense on his arm. “Sorry, Dr. Cavendish,” she replied. “The surgeons got to me in time. You’ll need to wait a few more years for my job.”

“You misunderstand me,” said Cavendish. “The air is thin up here. Newcomers have trouble the first few days.”

“I’m not a newcomer,” she said.

What is going on here?
wondered Abbot. This was more than normal bureaucratic friction. Abbot opened his mouth, then decided against meddling. This was Elise’s territory, her rogue employee, their issue. He looked away. The bus driver was spraying the riot cops’ Kevlar armor with window washer fluid and wiping them off with paper towels.

“On the other hand,” said Cavendish, “you haven’t visited in nearly half a year.”

“Which is why I ordered each department to report monthly. And you refused. You’ve drawn a curtain of silence around this project. I don’t like surprises.”

“Yes,” said Cavendish. He refused to wither. He wanted her job, or at least not her oversight. That was evident to Abbot. The man desired a kingdom all his own.

Cavendish led them into the building.

T
HEY DESCENDED
by elevator. The lighted wall panel displayed three floors above the surface, and three below. They went to a fourth level, and there were probably deeper ones. This wouldn’t be the only building with stacked sub-basements, Abbot knew. During the Cold War, Los Alamos had been constructed as just that, multiple Alamos that could withstand a nuclear siege.

The elevator deposited them in a small lobby with red and white tiles. Several doors led off. They entered a positive pressure air lock. The warm inner air blew against Abbot’s face like a tropical breeze. Midway through the air lock, he recognized a simple ultraviolet-ray gate. It bathed each visitor with a low-level wash of radiation to kill external microbes on their clothing and skin.

“The delivery chamber,” said Cavendish. The far door slid open.

It was like emerging beneath the sea. The room was a virtual cavern, thirty feet high, glimmering with aquamarine light. Two of the walls were honeycombed with work stations that had their own sets of ladders and catwalks. A third wall held a row of glassed-off offices, like sky boxes at a stadium. In the center stood a large, spherical aquarium tank of glass ribbed with metal. The air was filled with a rhythmic beating.

“This is the final stage of our artificial womb process,” Cavendish explained. “That sound you hear comes from a fetal heart monitor.”

Immediately Abbot began assembling the clues. He timed the heartbeat, and if it was human, it was not infant. The water was brilliant blue. Synthetic amniotic fluid, he guessed. Three men and a tall woman in no-nonsense swimsuits were adjusting their face masks and scuba gear up on the deck overlooking the water. Something was about to be born.

Golding was flabbergasted. “How did you come by all this?” she demanded. “There was nothing like this in the budget.”

“My scrounger discovered most of it in the other lab buildings,” said Cavendish. “We had some things the other labs wanted. It was a straight exchange. No money involved. No paperwork. It doesn’t appear in the budget.”

“Your scrounger?”

“Acquisitions specialist, if you will. I’ve used him before. He’s knocking around here somewhere, a big fellow, very resourceful. I decided to bring him on board.”

“This isn’t a pirate ship,” said Golding. “Just what is going on here?”

“Making do, Doctor,” Cavendish answered. “Making do.”

An assistant hurried forward with a folded EKG readout marked with pencils and red and blue ink. Cavendish let the folds spill across his lap and the computer console. “We’re in target range,” he declared to Abbot and Golding. “If you’ll join the others, we’re about to begin.”

They crossed a steel-grate bridge and joined the others at viewing stations midway up the aquarium wall. Blue light rippled across Elise’s face. They heard a splash above. One of the divers appeared in a burst of white bubbles and long thighs. “She could be her mother,” said Elise. With a start, Abbot recognized Miranda.

The other divers joined her. They floated in a circle, heads up, waiting. In a minute, a Plexiglas box the size of a small telephone booth was lowered into the water. The divers converged and quickly opened the box to reveal an opaque, veined sac. The sac had a limp coil of cable or cord attached.

Their fins feathering the water, the divers each cradled a side of the sac. They were vigilant of the colored wires leading up to the surface. One was the fetal monitor, Abbot judged, the rest read other vital signs.

Then he saw what lay curled inside the sac. Elise groaned.

Candled by underwater lights, the hunched, curled silhouette almost resembled the Thinker. Anticipation crackled among the scientists. They were looking at a free-floating womb. The organ pulsed.

But to Abbot’s eye, the figure in the sac looked too large. Flexed in its fetal curl, it was easily the size of the divers hovering about. Even the Neandertal infant had been just a quarter this size. Had they created a giant?

“Cavendish!” an outraged voice came from their ranks. “Where are you, by god!”

“Here,” said Cavendish. “I’m still with you.”

They looked up. He had backed onto a small lift and now sat above them beside the tank. His face was lit green by his computer screen. “Thirteen weeks ago, a cloned embryo was implanted in the synthetic womb you now see suspended in our birthing tank.” He spoke swiftly and clearly. No Q & A allowed. He was racing that heartbeat.

Thirteen weeks!
thought Abbot.
From conception to birth, just three months?
Then he thought,
Miranda.
He remembered her little monster Winston, born in a state of full maturity.

“Our womb represents a revolutionary advance,” Cavendish continued. “The sac is built from nylon for tensile strength and from the embryo’s own DNA. As the fetus grew, so did the womb. The umbilicus is made of embryonic DNA recombined with the genes for spider silk, which allowed for the attachment of a plastic tube. Throughout gestation, nutrients—again, grown from the embryo’s own stem cell material—have been fed through the cord, which was also connected to an ordinary heart machine. That oxygenated the blood and carried away impurities. The fetal environment was maintained at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit.”

His audience was not pleased. “The bastard’s gone and done it,” a man grunted.

“But thirteen weeks?” They were still baffled. It was clearly human, and yet not possibly human.

Cavendish ignored the hubbub. “His birth—it’s a boy, I’ll spoil the surprise—was timed for your participation. I’m pleased to announce that his time has come.”

“Stop,” a voice shouted. “Stop before you start, by god.” The crowd parted. Sir Benjamin Barnes was a reedy, old Brit supported by a briar-wood cane. One of the fathers of DNA science, he had used his Nobel to create a personal fortune, bed international beauties, and generally sabotage those trying to follow in his footsteps. “This freak show of yours will be our ruin. The rabble, you have no idea….”

Cavendish maintained his Mona Lisa smile. He let the old man finish.

“If you had been properly trained, sir,” Barnes said, “you would know that science is a slow, quiet, cautious thing. It is necessary to give people time to make sense of our discoveries. To digest, you see.”

Cavendish cocked his head, listening to the heartbeat. It was growing faster. It contradicted caution. “No time for that, I’m afraid,” he said. “Unless you mean to kill this innocent being with your virtues.”

Old Barnes rapped his cane against the floor. The rubber tip did not make a sound. “That’s coercion. I object. Strenuously object.”

The heartbeat quickened. “Sir Benjamin votes for death, then,” Cavendish said. “And the rest of you?”

Abbot watched the brinksmanship. He knew the outcome, or thought he did. The child would be born. But not before Cavendish bent them to his will. He was assaulting their hypocrisy. Human cloning was the other shoe waiting to drop. For years people had been pretending the shoe was in a state of zero gravity. They had the technology, the genetic map, the skills…but not the daring.

The band of scientists stood silent. The heart drummed faster over the speakers, urgent, profound. Elise spoke up. “You’ve twisted nature inside out,” she said.

“What’s new?” Cavendish replied. “Include yourselves. It’s what we do.”

“It is precisely what we do not do. That is Sir Benjamin’s point.”

Abbot waited. Would Cavendish shrug? Call them fools? He was smarter than that. “As I learned the story,” he replied evenly, “Prometheus did not ask the gods for permission to borrow fire. He reached out his hand. And he snatched it from them.”

“And was punished for eternity,” Elise reminded him.

“Yes, but he knew the risks. And he took them,” said Cavendish. “And he lit our darkness.”

The fetal monitor beat at them. The figure inside the sac had started to struggle weakly. Floating in the tank of water, Miranda ran her hand over the sides as if to soothe the unborn child.

Elise resisted Cavendish. “Why?” she said.

“To quote the great Oppenheimer,” Cavendish said, “when you see something that’s technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.”

“But what’s the purpose?”