Year Zero (6 page)

Nikos halted. The cutting was nearly complete. “Come closer,” he said. “There is an unexpected reward. It lasts only a few seconds, once I breach the glass. Make yourself ready.”

“For what?”

“The air inside. An atmosphere twenty centuries old.”

The Egyptian understood. He leaned in. Their heads were touching. “Ready?” said Nikos, and they both emptied their lungs.

Nikos completed the final rotation. With a jewelers gummy stick, he lifted the top off the capsule. Immediately both men inhaled.

The Egyptian closed his eyes. He smiled. The scent was ancient, part herb, part oil. As if sampling a narcotic, he sipped the odor of antiquity through his nostrils. He drew it into his lungs. He released the air slowly, tasting its parts. Now he understood why Nikos had offered him no food. This feast, so rare and subtle, was best appreciated on an empty stomach.

The Egyptian opened his eyes. Nikos was peering into the capsule. It was empty except for a serous material at the bottom, some kind of thickened liquid. “Perhaps the relic disintegrated,” he said. “That happens, especially if the relic was organic. No matter, the labs can still provide details from the residue.” Six times, one for each lab and himself, he dipped a cotton swab inside the glass shell. The tips came out brown and sticky. Each swab went into its own test tube. When he was done providing for the labs, Nikos touched his fingertip to the edge of the glass and rubbed the residue between his fingers. He sniffed at it again, then touched his finger to his tongue. The Egyptian did not go so far. Nikos made several notes under “A,” then wrote, “B,” and bent to cut the second capsule from its threads.

They repeated the act three more times. Each time they inhaled the first rich, momentary burst of air. Only one capsule contained an object. In capsule C, at the foot of the cross, they extracted a flat splinter of metal. “Iron,” said Nikos. “Part of a nail, what do you think? Or a lance head. The metallurgy is quite different. And if there is any blood residue, it will show up in the lab work, too.”

He broke pieces from the splinter and placed them into test tubes the Egyptian opened and closed for him. What was left of the metal sliver he set on a gauze pad. When they were finished, there were six sets of four test tubes. The Egyptian helped him pack the test tubes in padded mail tubes that were already addressed to laboratories in Europe, Israel, and South Africa. Nikos took the tray with the pieces of the
domo
and the opened capsules into his refrigerated chamber. He arranged the dismembered artifact on a glass shelf alongside the rest of his collection. With that they were done. Nikos closed the panels across the glass chamber.

The Egyptian felt tired, but energized. “When will you get the lab results?” he asked.

“Within the week,” said Nikos. “I am a favored customer.”

“You must tell me what they say.”

“I feel good about this one,” said Nikos. “Perhaps it’s just the company this time. But I sense this one was special.”

They were in a celebratory mood. “Medea,” Nikos called out. After a minute, his wife appeared at the doorway. “Bring wine. Join us.”

She and the Egyptian’s wife returned with glasses and a bottle of French chardonnay. Nikos pulled the cork, poured the glasses, kissed his beautiful wife. He felt grand.

They raised their glasses in toast.

“To the mysteries of life,” Nikos said simply.

He had never contemplated the term “extinction event.” As he drank his fine wine, it would have been inconceivable to him that he had just opened the door upon the end of mankind.

M
T
. D
ESERT
I
SLAND
, M
AINE
A
PRIL

S
ave us, Father,
Miranda prayed to the black winter sea.

Waves crashed against the cliffs. Rime snaked around her L.L. Bean boots, then slithered back into the depths. The teenager shivered and went on searching for the light, in special need of it this morning.

A million miles away, a narrow gap opened on the edge of infinity. Dawn was coming. She was not superstitious, but Miranda took hope. Perhaps they would not kill her monster.

Heartened, she turned from the cliffside and quickly crossed the overlook’s parking lot and Crooked Road. Except for her Schwinn ten-speed chained to a pole, the place was empty. The summer tourists were long gone. The ice age had arrived: spring in Maine.

Miranda started up a steep path between pines and scrub oak plastered by nor’easters. Her pale breath leaked among the bare branches. It was like something out of a fairytale. She looked back and her footsteps in the frost were her only friend.

She moved swiftly, faster than a walk, not quite a run. When she had first begun the daily visitations to the quarry, the trail took forty painful minutes. Now, after three months of twice-a-days, she could knock it down in fourteen flat. Her long legs had sprouted calves and thighs. Maybe she was going to outgrow the stick body after all. She was starting to get looks from some of the guys. Mating looks. As if she had spare time.

The sky bleached grey. She reached the quarry and went directly to its edge. Once upon a time men had cleaved the black granite from this hole for bank buildings, libraries, and national monuments. Today, filled with a century of water, it had returned to nature. “Winston?” she called. A pane of ice sheathed the pond’s surface. There was not a motion down there, not a sound except for her own forlorn voice echoing back up.

Local legend told of a broken-hearted town girl casting herself Mayan-like into the granite cenote. Her ghost was said to haunt the waters. True or not, the quarry was deserted. High school lovers didn’t visit. There were no Saturday night keggers, no skinny-dipping. For 153 days now, the place had belonged to her and little Winston. Only at last evening’s feeding had Miranda noticed the tire marks on the old fire road and fresh footprints in the frozen mud, a lot of them.

The shock had still not worn off. They had found her out.
You’ve killed him,
she despaired to herself.

Since the age of four, Miranda had been disciplined to expect better of herself, no resting. Her tutors had been carefully screened and highly specialized. At her father’s instruction, they inhabited her days, serving as mentors, never nannies, never friends. No one ever told her to slow down, kick back, smell the roses. It was known that she would peak young. Miranda had read the literature, talked to shrinks, eavesdropped on the Mensa chat rooms. Genius of her freakish degree burned bright and fast. She fell into that same peculiar realm of the extraordinarily beautiful, striking awe into complete strangers. The difference was that Miranda saw no beauty in her mirror, only the dark, bruised circles under her eyes from insomnia.

It felt like exile in this northern light, but she was far from all alone. Jax, as the Jackson Laboratory was known, employed nearly a thousand people year round. But island life got notoriously edgy once winter set in. The suicide rate and wife abuse rose with the gas bills. She felt caged among postdoc fellows who treated her like a little sister, jailbait, or a comrade in their own weirdness. Town kids her own age seemed alien. She could explain string theory, but not freak-dance or snowboard or apply mascara. It wasn’t for lack of trying. With ruthless precision, she had speed-read
Cosmo
and
Talk,
gotten pierced and cornbraided, and memorized the cultural hot buttons. But none of it took. The pop lyrics made no sense to her, the clothes didn’t fit. Surfing for soul mates, she found only repetitious e-sex. She knew how to open a human cell and tease out the secrets of life, but strangely not how to live it.

Now that they’d discovered Winston, there was going to be a storm of psychobabble about the line between brilliance and alienation. As a girl, she’d gotten used to having no privacy except the inside of her mind, with even that up for grabs. When she was nine, she’d discovered them monitoring her keyboard strokes on the computer. At ten, she cracked the safe holding her med and psych records, and it was like reading the biography of an inmate.

Winston was her first real act of rebellion. She’d thought she was being so careful. But they had her now, and him.

Miranda lowered herself down a giant’s staircase of cut ledges to the water’s edge. She took three bundles of raw fish wrapped in newspaper from her daypack. He should have appeared by now. It was 6:30. He knew this ledge. Together they’d become creatures of habit.
Where are you, baby?

For a moment, she feared they might have taken him away already. Another thought occurred. Maybe Winston’s physiology had kicked in. She was still unsure which of his physiologies ruled, but it was possible he’d begun hibernating. If that was the case, short of draining the quarry, they wouldn’t catch him before spring.

Miranda was no swimmer, much less a diver, but she’d visited his watery nest in her imagination. It would be a hole with a cozy shelf and its own air pocket, and fish bones and his little hoard of things. Ever since lugging Winston here in a five-gallon plastic bucket, she had noticed what an avid collector he was. He gathered heaps of bright pebbles on different ledges by the pond’s edge. He herded together the red and yellow oak leaves that floated on the surface like a whaling fleet, then separated them by color. She liked to think his nest was furnished with all kinds of salvage from the bottom sediment, Coke bottles and beer cans and rusted stonecutter’s tools. Maybe he’d found the skull of that poor girl and carried it to his nest as a sweetheart.

The sun nudged higher. Pencil points of light pierced the forest screen. The sheath of ice began to skin open, vaporizing into cold white steam. “Winston?” she pleaded to the water.

“Don’t tell me you’ve named the thing.”

The voice came down to her from the forest.

Her heart gave a leap. It had throw weight, that voice, and the majestic pacing of a Shakespearean actor. In many ways Paul Abbot was an actor. Besides playing kingmaker to scientists and sorcerer to politicians, he performed a bit role as her father. Not one of his best performances.

She turned. He was standing on the upper rim. His Burberry was unbuttoned. It hung like a cloak from his broad shoulders. He looked leonine. There was no telling how long he’d been waiting in the shadows. He was not out of breath. There was no mud on his tweed slacks. That meant he had not taken the trail. They must have unlocked the gate and driven him up the old fire road.

“I didn’t think you would come in time,” she said. That was the truth. There was never any telling where in the world her occassional phone calls would find him: D.C., Tokyo, London, Atlanta. But here he was.

“In fact, my visit is overdue,” he sternly replied. “Please come up here. Away from the water.”

They had told him, Miranda realized. There were no secrets in her world. Mysteries, yes. But her hiding places and concealments always failed. “How long have you known?” she asked. Where had she erred?

“Months,” he said. “We’re still uncertain about your technique and timing. But once you transferred this…Winston…to the fish tank in your room, the evidence mounted.”

From conception through birth then, the secret had held. Miranda began reviewing the months afterward, September and October and November. She sorted through the hours and faces. They couldn’t have known much before October, she decided. Otherwise they would have stopped her back then. “Why now?” she asked.

“It would have been sooner. But we lost track of it,” her father said.

“No one expected you to move him. We thought maybe it had died. But then the reports started coming in. Finally they pieced together your trail. That was yesterday.”

Yesterday! Until then, Winston had been safe. Now that she’d been discovered, Miranda had to admit a touch of relief. Frankly, she was tired.

“Who told you?”

“Does it really matter?”

He was right. It didn’t matter. Ever since she could remember, powerful people had been reporting to her father, the “science czar.” Dr. Abbot, Nobel laureate and advisor to presidents, generals, and Congress, ruled the National Academy of Sciences with an iron grip. There was nothing to be gained by hiding his daughter’s actions from him. To the contrary, grants had a way of following in her wake.

“They swabbed your lab equipment, Miranda. They scraped tissue samples from your glassware. They found your artificial womb tank. Built on Yosinari Kawabara’s Plexiglas model. I called him in Tokyo, by the way. He said he never spoke to you.”

Miranda felt pride. “It wasn’t that hard to figure out.”

“Yes,” he said. “But my point is, the Jax people may have been one step behind you, but they’re not blind. Jax specializes in cloning mice for medical research. You introduce
Rana sylvestris
into their laboratories and you think no one’s going to notice?”

“Rana pipens,”
Miranda corrected him with satisfaction. Their sleuthwork hadn’t been so very precise.
R. sylvestris
was adapted to the woods. She had chosen
R. pipens
—the “northern leopard”—specifically for its pond bias. Back in the blueprint phase, it had seemed a perfect way to contain her creation. So far her logic was right on. The quarry was simply a larger aquarium, and Winston had shown no desire to leave.

“Frogs,” her father said. “You get my point. You mixed apples and oranges. And then started monkeying around with the genes.”

She marveled. That’s all they’d discovered, the frog material? “No one’s seen him, have they?” she said. “They have no pictures. No visual sightings.”

“They have educated guesses. You’ve created a new species. It’s recombinant. It’s derived from an amphibian. It’s carnivorous. And you contaminated your lab equipment.”

“What?”

“You cut yourself. There were traces of your DNA all over the samples.”

That’s what they thought? They hadn’t come within a mile of the truth. Then her anger flashed. Since when had they I.D.’ed her blood? “I didn’t cut myself,” she said, and let it sink in.

Her father was frighteningly quick. The truth hit him. He whispered, “You didn’t.” He was a mathematician by training. Cell biology wasn’t even his field. For that matter astronomy, particle physics, medicine, and atmospheric chemistry weren’t either. But his mind encompassed them all. He knew a lot about a lot of things.

She nodded yes.

“What have you done, child?”

“It was easy enough. I waited for the right time of the month. Then I harvested one of my own eggs.”

“Miranda,” he said. “Why not a mouse egg? Or frog?” He treated it as a personal violation, as if she’d crawled into his bed or raped herself. It made her feel indecent.

Chin first, she stated, “It was mine.”

The truth was that a frog’s egg would have been much easier to manipulate, because they were vastly larger than human eggs. But she’d taken one of her own eggs as a statement, to pronounce her utter belief in what she was doing. It was a commitment. Whatever happened, this was intrinsically her at the heart of it. Strangely, even as she had searched through her menstrual flow and found the egg and siphoned the nucleus from it to make room for the frog nucleus, Miranda had felt as if she were leaving herself and entering a vast beautiful design. It had been an epiphany of sorts. She was part of this world, not just an observing eye.

“That still doesn’t explain your DNA material in the samples,” he said. “If you properly enucleated your egg, it would be an empty vessel. The clone would be all frog.”

She shrugged, but felt a lifetime of guilt laid into her by her tutors. They had done their job well, shaping their charge into an overachieving, neurotic thoroughbred. “I didn’t get the whole nucleus,” she confessed.

He groaned.

“I botched it, okay. Some of me was left inside.”

“Some?”

“More than I realized.”

Miranda carried out her own punishment. She summarized her errors, which were multiple. First, she’d failed to siphon out her entire nucleus, leaving her egg rich with human DNA. Then she had taken a nucleus from the lining of a tadpole’s intestine. Too late, she learned that in frogs the sperm and egg cells first form in the stomach, then travel to the gonads for storage. Inadvertently she’d taken the nucleus from a sperm cell. In short, she’d fertilized her own egg. Technically, Winston was not a true clone, but a monstrous child teased together with micropipettes and glass bell jars and a customized mix of amino acids.

“A chimera,” he said. “You’ve crossed the species barrier. With human genes!” The Old Testament reproach, she’d expected. But there was something else in his voice. Fear. She’d never heard that in him. He was shaken.

“He’s harmless,” she said.

“Miranda,” he declared, “this thing is an abomination.”

She wanted to mock his term. What came next, a burning at the stake? But she restrained herself. “You haven’t even seen him,” she said. “He’s so extraordinary. You won’t believe what I’ve discovered. Something wonderful.”