Tom Hyman (37 page)

Katrina had further muddied the situation by developing an attachment to him. She was immature and clinging, and prone to getting herself into trouble. She was also a heavy drug user, and despite the baroness’s threats she was unable to give them up. She had been arrested several times; twice Stewart himself had pulled her out of trouble.

Stewart persuaded himself that he was just biding his time. He would tolerate whatever he had to, and eventually things would go his way.

Once the Jupiter program was established, the money would start coming in, and he could free himself of his indebtedness to the baroness. He could rebuild and expand his companies and see his empire grow again.

And he still clung to the hope that he would eventually persuade Anne to come back to him.

The baroness came out of the shower with a fresh towel wrapped around her. “I was thinking that it might be a good idea if we got married,”

she said.

Dalton stared at her, dumbstruck.

She smiled teasingly. “Are you against the idea?”

“I don’t know. But I certainly assumed you were.”

The baroness sat on the edge of the bed and began drying between her toes with the towel. “I’ve changed my mind.”

“Why?”

“Neither of us is suitable for a conventional marriage, of course.

You’ve been divorced twice, and are about to be divorced again. I’ve never remarried because I knew beforehand that it wouldn’t work. But the kind of arrangement that the two of us now have could just as easily be continued in the legal framework of a marriage. And under those circumstances, there would never really be any reason to get divorced.”

“Why get married in the first place, then?”

“There are business advantages. For both of us. And that’s really how I would view a marriage—strictly as a business contract.”

“Anne and I are still a long way from divorced. And there’s Genny’s welfare to think about.”

“Of course. She’s the main reason that we should do this,” the baroness said. “I can help you get custody.”

Stewart brought his eyes up from the baroness’s vigorous toweling of her thighs. “How can you do that?”

“Obviously, if you’re going to marry again, the court’ll look more favorably on you for being able to provide a wholesome family environment for your daughter.”

Stewart wondered if the baroness was making a joke.

“And that, combined with an extremely generous financial settlement, should do it. Your wife has no money of her own, after all. She should be grateful for a reasonable arrangement—frequent visiting privileges, that kind of thing.”

“The child is much more important to Anne than money.”

“Nothing is more important to anyone than money, if there’s enough of it. Your wife grew up poor. She doesn’t want to be poor again. And she doesn’t want her daughter to be, either. She can be persuaded.”

“Why do you want me to have custody? You don’t like children. And you and Genny certainly didn’t hit it off.”

“We must have her, that’s why. Think it through. So far she’s the only proof that the Jupiter program works. Her presence will be wonderfully persuasive. Nobody will be able to resist Jupiter after seeing her. Without her, we run the risk of losing our investment.”

Her words hit Stewart like a slap. He felt furious. “You’re talking about my daughter as if she was a sales gimmick.”

The baroness sat up. “But you must see my point. And you do want custody of the child, don’t you?”

“Anne’s a very good mother.”

“I’m sure she is. And what about you? Do you want to be a good father? Genny cannot live with both of you.”

The baroness got up from the bed and disappeared into her dressing room. She reappeared a few minutes later, wearing black silk lingerie.

She had combed her blond hair out and anointed herself with a particularly potent perfume. “You can stay, if you like.”

No. He needed time to think. “I’m driving back to Munich,” he said.

A light rain was falling, and Dalton Stewart drove slowly. All the way down the narrow, twisting turns of Route 16 south from Regensburg through Saal and Abensberg, and on the broad engineered stretches of the E-6 Autobahn from Geisenfeld to Munich, he reflected upon what the baroness had said.

He did want custody of Genny. And Anne would put up a ferocious battle to keep her. So marrying the baroness would probably help him get custody. But then what?

He remembered the rumors about the baroness—the suspect circumstances surrounding the deaths of both her father and her husband.

He stared through the windshield at the deep orange glow cast against the clouded night sky by the lights of Munich, still twenty miles distant.

The baroness didn’t want him. It made no sense. She wanted Genny.

And marrying him was the only way she could get her.

And once she became Genny’s stepmother, she’d have no need of Dalton Stewart.

Christ, he thought. He had made a business deal with the Devil.

Anne pushed her chair back from the desk. She had made some error, she decided.

She repeated the experiment. She inserted the RCD with her own genome on it into the computer and carefully followed the directions for transferring the data into the database of Goth’s program, reading the instructions out loud to herself as she proceeded. Then she repeated the process with Dalton Stewart’s genome.

When these steps were complete, she instructed Jupiter to do what Goth had presumably designed it to do—analyze the two genomes and produce the blueprint for a third one that would marry these two, correct any genetic flaws, and add its own mysterious genetic enhancements.

Once the program had done this—and it took a while, because even at the lightning speed with which this computer could crunch data, it had to compare and select among billions of base pair combinations before constructing its new genome—Anne then fed Genny’s genome into the database and asked it to compare its freshly created blueprint with Genny’s.

Anne had expected the results to show a one-hundred-percent match. The arrangement of all the billions of base pairs along the chromosomes of the two genomes should be identical in sequence.

But they weren’t. For the second time, they showed a roughly ninety-nine-percent match. And that, in genetics, was not accuracy; it was not even a close miss. It meant that the sequences 304

I differed in several million locations. It could just as well be the genome of a chimp or a pig.

She considered the possibilities.

Could some of the genome data itself be flawed? Unlikely. She was sure that both her and Genny’s genomes were correct, because she had obtained three genetic samples for each of them, gotten three separate genome readouts from three separate laboratories, and run numerous computer cross-checks on them. She had gotten perfect matches every time.

Dalton’s genome had been taken from hair samples collected by Anne from one of Dalton’s hairbrushes. Anne had also had multiple tests run on these, and again they had come out identical.

Was the Jupiter program itself flawed?

It was at least internally consistent. It made no mistakes with the material that Anne could cross-check. She had suspected at first that it might be designed to create automatically a different genome from the same two sets each time they were fed into it.

That was what nature itself did, after all. Except for identical twins, every new union of sperm and egg from the same man and woman produced a different child, with a slightly different genome.

But the program appeared to be designed to accommodate this.

It offered specific instructions that allowed the operator to determine in advance which of a whole range of variables she wished to manipulate and provided her a specific scale of choices to follow. It also allowed the operator to scan any genome fed into it and get back a detailed readout of all these variables.

Anne had done all that. She had loaded into the program the identical choice of variables it had informed her were in Genny’s genome, and she had rechecked herself every step of the way. But it didn’t matter.

Jupiter simply refused to reproduce Genny’s genome.

What possibilities were left?

That the hair taken from the brush didn’t belong to Dalton Stewart? Or that Dalton wasn’t Genny’s father? Goth could conceivably have substituted someone else’s sperm. For all she knew, he could have used his own.

No, no, no. That was all wrong. Genny’s genome had been screened genetically when she was only a few weeks old, and the laboratory results had shown unequivocally that Dalton Stewart was her father.

So it came back to Jupiter. The program was flawed. Yet how could that be?

There was her daughter, Genny—a most extraordinarily gifted child.

But not just gifted: Genny possessed capacities not known to be in the human gene pool. She appeared to be a unique specimen of Homo sapiens, something never seen before. Where else could these characteristics have come from except from Jupiter?

If the program itself was not at fault, what was left?

Anne could think of only one further possibility: she wasn’t using the program properly. Yet if that were so, why did it seem to work at all?

Why didn’t it just flash a big “ERROR” message at her? Or turn itself off? Anne wished she knew more about computer software.

Anne rebooted the computer, called up the Jupiter program, and looked at the sign-on screen. There was nothing to indicate authorship or anything else. Just the enigmatic direction “LOG ON).”

She hit the Enter key and looked at the next screen. It contained a menu of options. The relevant choice here was item 6: “ENHANCED GENOME

CONFIGURATION. She pressed 6 and got a second menu. The relevant item here was number 4: “GENOME PARAMETERS. She pressed 4 and got the long list of genetic variables to choose from. The next direction was

“ENTER DATA,

FIRST GENOME.

Goth was no doubt a genius, Anne thought, but how had he had time to learn computer programming on top of all the work he was doing in genetics? Programming, especially at this level, was unquestionably a demanding, timeconsuming discipline.

She turned the computer off and thought about it. Someone-some programmer somewhere—must have written it for him. She decided to try and find out.

The next morning Anne called a woman she knew from school who worked for Stewart Biotech and, under the pretext of doing some freelance research for someone, asked her for any names that might be in the Biotech files of programmers who specialized in writing software for scientific applications. She got back a dauntingly long list of 145

names. Over a period of days she reached all but three of the names by telephone. They, in turn, f gave her other names to call. She eventually talked to over three hundred programmers. None of them had ever worked for Harold Goth.

After three weeks of effort, the task began to seem hopeless. A programmer could be lying to her, fearing that any past association with Goth might be harmful. Or the individual who wrote Jupiter might not have specialized in scientific applications at all.

That would open the door to thousands of other possible candidates.

Anne was about to give up altogether when she came across a copy of a genetics textbook in the New York Public Library that Goth had written fifteen years earlier. There were a few paragraphs in the book that dealt with the importance of computer technology in applied genetic research. A footnote at the bottom of the page credited a man named Axel Guttmann of Stanford University for some of the technical information. Goth, she remembered, had once held a teaching post at Stanford.

She called the head of Stanford’s biology department, a woman named Margaret Contardi. Axel Guttmann had indeed worked there, Contardi said. She also remembered that he had worked with Goth on some project or other; she couldn’t recall what it was. It was a long time ago.

Guttmann was a wizard with computer languages, Contardi told hen-and particularly good with scientific applications.

“Is Professor Guttmann still at Stanford?”

“Oh, no. He left years ago.”

Anne’s heart sank. “Do you know where he went?”

“I’m not sure. I think he took a job with the federal government.

With the military or some federal agency. I don’t recall any more than that.”

After dozens of calls to different branches of the federal government, Anne finally located someone at the National Institutes of Health at Bethesda, Maryland, who remembered Guttmann.

“He did some classified work for the Department of Energy,” a deep male voice replied. “I think he’s at IBM now.”

Anne called the Poughkeepsie headquarters of IBM. After a wait for the switchboard to route the call to his extension, she found herself talking directly with Axel Guttmann.

Guttmann admitted that he had known Goth. Beyond that, he wouldn’t say much. But he was willing to talk to her. He invited her to come to Poughkeepsie—and to bring the Jupiter program with her.

The following Sunday, Anne left Genny in Mrs. Callahan’s care and drove up to IBM headquarters in Poughkeepsie, an hour and a half north of Manhattan.

She found Axel Guttmann waiting for her in the nearly deserted main lobby of one of a cluster of buildings that made up the IBM campus. He was big, with a florid face, masses of black hair, flashing dark eyes under eyebrows as thick as brushes, and a big black handlebar mustache over a mouth of big teeth with a great deal of gold inlay.

Incongruously, he was dressed in a cheap white shirt, nondescript wrinkled gray trousers, and black shoes. A German-Czech refugee who had emigrated to the United States in 1968, after the Prague Spring, he looked like a Gypsy king whom someone had stuffed into the drab uniform of a computer nerd.

His eyes betrayed a surprising furtiveness. They were constantly moving and shifting, as if he were afraid something unpleasant might be creeping up behind him. Anne wondered if this was a legacy of his years under communism or simply a nervous habit.