The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh, Volume One (21 page)

Equally dark eyes, possessed of the same fierce intelligence, appraised Roberta, taking obvious note of the American woman’s youth and apparent good health. “Perhaps you too will see fit to bear one of the products of our collective effort?” Kaur suggested.

Roberta nearly choked on her
poori.
“Whoa there,” she sputtered once she caught her breath. “I mean, I think what you people are doing here is great, and I can’t wait to be a part of it, but you’ve got to give me a little time to get used to that last part. Lab work is one thing, but this ... !” She shook her head doubtfully, looking to both Takagi and Lozinak for support. “I’m not sure I’m ready just yet to turn into a human incubator.”

Kaur appeared undeterred by Roberta’s horrified reaction. “We’ll see,” she said with unnerving confidence.

Neither of the other scientists contradicted her.

Where the hell are you, Seven?
Roberta thought anxiously.
Things are starting to get just a little too creepy
. ...

CHRYSALIS BASE

INDIA

MAY 17, 1974

WHITE MICE SQUEAKED
and monkeys jabbered as Gary Seven
awaited his audience with Williams’s unnamed superiors. A menagerie of what he guessed were prospective lab subjects shared his captivity within a cramped storage area somewhere on one of the underground complex’s lower levels. He did not find it encouraging that the Chrysalis’s experiments had already extended to primates.
That’s too close to human DNA for comfort,
he thought, knowing that only a few minor chromosomal differences separated Homo sapiens from its nearest simian cousins.

At the moment, he felt a more than usual kinship with Earth’s great apes, given that he was locked inside a cage that smelled distinctly of chimpanzee. Straw carpeted the cement floor beneath his feet, while both wrists were handcuffed to the bars at the front of the cage. Thankfully, he had this particular cage all to himself, although a large Bengal tiger paced back and forth in the adjacent cell, occasionally snarling at its new two-legged neighbor. Unfortunately, the big cat was nowhere near the conversationalist that Isis was.

An imposing male guard, whom Seven quickly identified as a Sikh by the man’s uncut beard, steel wristband, and ritual dagger, stood by watchfully outside the cage, along with Williams, who fidgeted impatiently
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near the entrance to the storeroom, glancing frequently at his watch. “Where is she?” Williams said for possibly the tenth time. “I thought she was coming soon.” Even though they had escaped the punishing heat of the surface, the portly scientist was still perspiring heavily. “Can’t you shut those bloody animals up?” he snapped at the turbaned guard. “All this caterwauling is giving me a splitting headache.”

The guard shrugged philosophically. Clearly, quieting restless lab animals did not fall within his job description. Seven shared the Sikh’s fatalistic attitude toward their mildly cacophonous surroundings; compared with some of the environments he’d visited in the past, on Earth and elsewhere, this zoological prison was fairly easy to endure. He was more concerned about what was going on beyond the walls of the storeroom.

His own watch had been taken from him, but Seven estimated that it was approximately 1:30 in the afternoon, Indian time, when the door swung open to admit a tall Indian woman in a white lab coat, carrying a black leather doctor’s bag. He recognized her face immediately
Sarina Kaur,
he mused. His eyes narrowed as he compared the missing prodigy to her photos.
Of course, I should have guessed she was the woman Offenhouse described.

Her obvious pregnancy disturbed Seven. He hoped that Kaur had not been so rash as to practice genetic engineering on her own unborn child, but feared the worst.
That makes my task ten times more difficult,
he realized,
and puts the very future of this planet at much greater risk.
With effort, he tore his troubled gaze away from the woman’s protruding stomach.

Kaur inspected him right back, looking more curious than concerned about her uninvited guest. “My apologies for your admittedly dehumanizing accommodations,” she said calmly. Self-assurance bordering on arrogance suffused her voice, which spoke perfect English, presumably for his benefit. “I’m afraid this base lacks proper detention facilities. An oversight, in retrospect, but not one I ever anticipated we would have cause to regret.” She sighed and applauded softly. “To be quite honest, Mr. Seven, you’ve come much further than I ever expected any outsider to get.”

[130]
“Your installation is impressively remote,” Seven admitted, returning the compliment, “not to mention admirably well concealed.” If Kaur wanted to maintain a veneer of polite conversation over the reality of his imprisonment, he was willing to accommodate her for the time being.
I’ll probably learn more that way.

Two stern-faced bodyguards, in matching blue uniforms, stood attentively behind Kaur, crowding the already cramped storeroom. Williams fluttered nervously outside the perimeter defined by Kaur’s guardians, watching their charismatic charge with an obvious mixture of admiration and anxiety. “It’s all Offenhouse’s fault,” he gulped, trying his best to look indignant. “He let this spy find out all about the flight.”

Despite Williams’s hasty indictment, Kaur appeared uninterested in assigning blame, at least for now. “Has he been searched?” she asked without looking at Williams. Her preemptory tone left little doubt as to where the pudgy Brit ranked on Chrysalis’s pecking order.

“Yes, of course,” he assured her. Retrieving a clear Ziploc bag from the original guard, he handed Seven’s personal effects to Kaur, who gave her own black valise to one of the guards. “Just some odds and ends,” Williams said dismissively.

Kaur carefully scrutinized the contents of the bag: Seven’s watch, wallet, keys, and pen. “No weapon?” she asked, raising an inquisitive eyebrow. “That strikes me as unlikely.”

“We searched him thoroughly,” Williams insisted, tugging at the collar of his shirt. If nothing else, the director of Chrysalis had surely put the fear of God into her subordinate, “He’s unarmed.”

Kaur seemed unconvinced. “I wonder,” she murmured. Seven watched as she opened the bag and personally inspected his belongings. His face betrayed no hint of extra attention when she got to his servo. “Nice pen,” she commented, rolling the slim silver utensil between her fingers. “For taking notes on our operation?” she asked, giving Seven a quizzical look through the bars of his cage.

“Something like that,” he answered tersely

For a moment or two, he thought Kaur was going to put the servo aside without detecting its true nature. Then she gave the supposed pen a second look, twisting and manipulating its shiny silver casing
[131]
until, with a electronic beep, a pair of metallic antennae sprouted from the sides of the device. A victorious smirk lent a somewhat malevolent cast to Kaur’s refined features. “Well,” she intoned archly, “what have we here?”

Williams’s ordinarily ruddy face went pale. “I didn’t realize—I mean, how could I?” He was obviously not having a good day. Kaur’s personal bodyguards glowered at him scornfully, for compromising the director’s security, while the original guard just looked glad that the other man was taking the heat. “The important thing is, we
did
confiscate the bloody thing,” Williams blustered unconvincingly.

Kaur paid no attention to the Brit’s excuses. Instead she pointed the tip of the servo at Seven as she fiddled with the controls. “You might want to be careful with that,” he warned her sincerely, his poker face masking a degree of genuine apprehension on his part. From where he was confined, it was impossible to tell how Kaur might have adjusted the servo’s settings; for all he knew, it was now set to kill. The twin antennae vibrated and beeped, targeting Seven. He held his breath, waiting.

At the last minute, right before she fired, Kaur shifted her aim to the tiger instead. Invisible energy hummed momentarily, and the tranquilized feline drooped onto the straw-covered floor of his cage, settling in for a long nap. Seven watched the animal’s striped torso rise and fall with every sleepy breath, relieved that no one—including the tiger—had been seriously harmed.

“You might have killed it,” he chided Kaur. “I thought tigers were an endangered species.”

She deactivated the servo, whose antennae receded back into the silver casing. “At the moment, the most endangered species here is you, Mr. Seven.” She contemplated the disguised servo with amusement, then placed it in the pocket of her lab coat. “Or should that be Mr. Double-Oh-Seven?” she quipped.

Kaur’s little demonstration had served two functions, Seven realized: to test the capacities of the servo, yes, but also to demonstrate just how far Kaur was willing to go to protect her project.
Very efficient,
he thought, making a mental note not to underestimate this woman.

[132]
“I am not a government agent,” he informed her deadpan, “and this is not a movie.” He looked Kaur squarely in the eye, determined to reason with his captor if that was at all possible. “What you are doing here could have very real consequences for the entire world.”

“I should hope so,” she replied. “Have you seen the current state of the world? It could certainly stand a welcome dose of rationality and superior intelligence.” She patted her swollen belly in a way that confirmed Seven’s most dire expectations.

“Be careful, Dr. Kaur,” he cautioned. “The heedless pursuit of genetic superiority almost always leads to strife and attempted tyranny, pitting the worshippers of perfection against those judged to be inferior.” He watched Kaur’s face intently, hoping to discern some crack in the woman’s forbidding self-confidence.
Too bad I can’t tell her about the Borg,
he thought, considering them to be an excellent cautionary example, for all that they preferred cybernetics to genengineering. “Don’t you think the people of the world are divided enough already, without adding new and artificial grounds for discrimination and conflict?”

Kaur frowned, perhaps lacking an immediate rebuttal. “I would be considerably more interested in debating such matters with you,” she stated coldly, “if I knew who you are and whom you represent.” She stepped closer to his cage, so that only the bars of the enclosure separated them. He could have grabbed her, had he been so inclined, if his wrists weren’t handcuffed to the bars. “Enough chitchat,” she declared, examining him as though he were a genetically deficient retro-virus. “Tell me who sent you.”

“I work for myself,” he said, which was true enough, at least on a terrestrial scale. His nearest supervisor was several light-years away, and not remotely human.

“Which makes you what?” she demanded. “A mercenary? An opportunist?”

“A concerned citizen,” he retorted, “and one who has every reason to object to the reckless experiments you are conducting here.” In fact, he had yet to determine the exact nature of those experiments, but he wanted to give Kaur and her associates the impression that
[133]
they had nothing further to hide from him.
The more Kaur tries to defend her work, the more I’ll learn.

“There is nothing at all illegal about our research,” she pointed out, “although I admit we’ve bent some rules here and there when it comes to financing and obtaining the necessary equipment. Last I heard there were no laws against creating superior human beings, not here in India, nor in your native America.” She peered at him speculatively. “That
is
where you’re from, Mr. Seven, isn’t it? The United States?”

“I like to think of myself as a man without a country,” he answered.
In more ways than one.

“How very cosmopolitan of you,” she observed sarcastically. Seven detected an edge of irritation in her voice. “I’m losing patience with your evasions, Mr. Seven, if that is indeed your real name.”
It is on this planet,
he thought. “You realize, of course, that I cannot allow you to leave here before you have answered my questions. The security of the project depends on it.”

Somehow I doubt that I’d be going anywhere regardless,
Seven thought. He detected in Kaur a ruthless streak that reminded him of too many of the fanatics and megalomaniacs he and Roberta had encountered over the last few years.
Is it the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation that breeds these extremists,
he wondered,
or is this sort of ethical tunnel vision simply an intrinsic part of human nature?
For the future’s sake, he hoped Kaur and her kind were just a temporary symptom of humanity’s painful transition to true civilization.

“What about the vast quantities of bacteria you’re stockpiling? Is that for the good of mankind, or just your own chosen heirs?” A flicker of surprise disturbed Kaur’s composed veneer, alerting Seven that he had scored a hit, even though he had genuinely hoped he was mistaken.
Just like on Lanac VI,
he thought regretfully, chagrined to see history repeating itself once more. “What sort of vile biological toxin have you concocted, Dr. Kaur? How many people have to die to clear the stage for your miniature messiahs?”

Kaur did not waste time with denials. “Evolution is a cruel process, Mr. Seven. Why burden future generations with the crushing failure of our own overpopulation?” Although briefly startled by Seven’s
[134]
knowledge of her plans, her calm self-confidence swiftly reasserted itself. “Barring decisive action on my part, the population of India alone is expected to exceed one billion by the year 2000. Can you imagine the sheer daunting impossibility of trying to feed, clothe, and govern that many human organisms, let alone the rest of the world? That is not the legacy I wish to bequeath to my children.”