Vestiges of Time (7 page)

“Yes, all in all, everything is proceeding even better than we had expected. We anticipate no problems in cloning several hundred replicates from the cells of your tissues.”

“That’s very good,” AkweNema said, a strange, uneasy expression passing across his face. “Perhaps Thefe- Ra could give the general a tour of the replication facilities.”

“Of course,” KaphNo said, and gestured toward two white-clad men who stood discussing something at a table not far away.

The two men joined us and were introduced. The elder, a tall, thin, almost cadaverous man with a great shock of white hair, was named ThefeRa and was both a physician and a microbiologist specializing in replication processes: in short, a “genetic engineer.” He was, under KaphNo, the project’s head.

The other, a shorter, heavier, young man, with unusually handsome features, was named SkorTho. He also was a microbiologist and served as ThefeRa’s second in command.

When the introductions were completed, ThefeRa led us into the section of the laboratories that was. to be of particular interest to me.

“This is our operating room,” the white-haired physician said, gesturing with his left hand toward a large set of white doors. He glanced at AkweNema and KaphNo, then back at me, and said: “When you are ready, General, it is here that we will take the sample tissues from which your replicates will be grown.”

“A painless operation, I assure you,” AkweNema put in, sounding like the physician he was. “A simple biopsy, a few thousand cells you’ll never miss. That’s all.”

I shrugged.

Farther on: ThefeRa gesturing, speaking. “In these rooms the cells we will have taken from your body will

be placed in special media which will provide them with ample nutrition and in which they will be encouraged to grow, to reproduce. At this stage, all we want is to establish that the cells will breed true—that is, skin cells produce more skin cells, muscle cells more muscle cells, whatever.”

“In essence,” KaphNo interjected, “the sample cells from your body will be encouraged to reproduce themselves a number of times over, so that when we are finished here we will have a much larger amount of tissue with which to work.”

It all sounded rather grotesque to me, and I wasn’t certain that I wanted to see that actual process. I mean, that would be
my
tissue, all raw and naked, growing like the still-beating heart of some long-dead chicken. Ugh!

“Not so long ago,” KaphNo was saying into my gruesome thoughts, “the process of developing a viable replicate was a much more complex and less trustworthy operation. We have refined and simplified the process greatly here in recent years, thanks largely to the efforts of ThefeRa and SkorTho.”

The two genetic engineers somehow managed to look both humble and proud at the same time.

“Not so long ago,” KaphNo continued, “we could reproduce only viable female replicates by a rather messy and involved process which involved the transplantation of a cell nucleus from the body of a donor into a fertilized egg cell from which the nucleus had been removed, and then this egg had to be implanted into the womb of a surrogate mother.”

Looking proud of himself and his co-workers, the old scientist said, “Well, now we have been able to bypass the egg-cell implant stage and the surrogate mother altogether. We can persuade an even rather specialized cell to develop embryonically. The womb of the surrogate mother has been replaced by some

thing that I can only call a marvel of engineering. You will see what I’m referring to shortly.”

“The next step,” ThefeRa said into the silence following the end of KaphNo’s speech, gesturing toward another pair of white doors, “once we have what we feel to be a sufficient culture to work with, will be the separation of individual cells from the clone mass. That’s where the word ‘clone’ comes from, you know, a Greek word meaning ‘throng.’ We apply it to a heterogeneous mass of genetically identical cells.”

“I know,” I said, not mentioning that a version of the Greek language had been my native tongue. They didn’t need to know
that.

“And that is why,” KaphNo said, “we prefer the word ‘replicate’ to ‘clone’ when speaking of the
individual
produced by this process.”

I nodded, understanding.

“Once replication has sucessfully begun,” the physician ThefeRa continued, “the embryos—for at this stage they can be considered embryos, having no zygotic stage in the true sense of the term—are transferred to another room. For the first few days the embryonic replicates are kept under constant surveillance. At this stage we lose about one out of every three embryos.” “Lose?” I asked, unable to constrain myself. I was getting curious about this whole thing; after all, weren’t they going to grow some new
me
s here?

KaphNo answered: “This science is still in its infancy, General. And it is here in this room that we must catch the bulk of qur mistakes. Faulty stimulation of genetic patterns. Failure of replication processes. Mutations—even underground here there’s more radiation than we would like. Other genetic defects caused by the very methods we are using. One third of the embryos we bring into this room are not suitable for further cultivation. By the time the embryos leave this room, we will have lost seven out of every

eight of the cells we started with. That is why we need a relatively large number of cells initially.”

Again I felt that tug of revulsion. Maybe I didn’t have as strong a stomach as I’d thought.

“At the end of this stage, however,” ThefeRa picked up the narrative, “we can be certain of the survival of a large percentage of the embryos. From here they will be transferred to the room ahead and on our right, where we can begin to apply certain growth-accelera- tion techniques we have developed that will . . .”

On and on we went, from room to room, lab to lab, ThefeRa and KaphNo leading, AkweNema and I behind, the microbiologist SkorTho silently bringing up the rear. And as we went I was shown the various stages of growth through which the replicates would pass, was shown various human replicates in the actual process of growth and development, spanning years of maturation in days.

“We have three types of vessels for the postnatal replicates,” said ThefeRa at one point. “We have coined the word ‘encanter’ for the replication vessels, which you are about to see. The smallest of these are for replicates with a chronological maturity from ‘birth’ up to six years.”

An encanter, it turned out, was something like a cross between a Skinner box and an overgrown test tube and looked something like a deranged chemist’s idea of a tropical-fish aquarium.

ThefeRa led us into a long, low room, the walls of which were lined with glass cylinders each about four feet tall and two feet in diameter. Beside each cylinder was a large electronic console more complex than the controls of a good-size cargo skudder, with banks of dials, gauges, meters, buttons, switches, and CRTs. The cylinders themselves were topped by large metal rings from which tubes or pipes ran back into boxes and junctions in the wall. From the bases of the cylinders similar tubes ran into similar boxes and junctions at

the bases of the consoles. In all there appeared to be several hundred of these cylinder-console combinations. The cost must have been enormous.

Then ThefeRa led us down the row of cylinders until he reached one that stood a hundred feet or so from the door through which we’d entered.

“This should prove interesting to you,” he said, gesturing for me to come nearer.

Before I even reached ThefeRa, several things about this particular setup became obvious to me. Initially: the console that stood beside and was connected to the cylinder was not dark and quiet as had been the others —its panels were lighted, tiny indicator lights flickered on and off, meters showed various readings, and the console itself hummed with electrical life. Next: the cylinder beside the console was less transparent than the others, filled with a thick, murky fluid that seemed to be in constant motion.

“See him?” ThefeRa asked.

I bent slightly, peered into the cylinder. I saw him.

The form of a naked boy of about five years old hung/swam suspended in the liquid, long, dark hair swaying in the gentle motion of the cylinder’s fluid contents. His eyes were closed, and my first impression was that he was dead—a grotesque display of child murder committed by some maddened scientist of the underground laboratories. Then I saw that his chest rose and fell with a slow but unmistakable rhythm.

“The liquid in which he floats contains oxygen which the lungs are capable of extracting,” ThefeRa said, seeing the look in my eyes. “He is alive and well, developing physiologically normally in almost every way.”

“Except for the rate of growth,” KaphNo said, coming up behind me. “We began the replication process eight weeks ago, and now he shows a maturation of about five and a third years.”

“How—how long,” I stammered, “how long until he’s, ah, mature?”

“We will able to carry him to a maturation level of eighteen years over a period of just less than ten months. But don’t try to work out the direct chronological equivalents in normal maturity. There is not a one-to-one congruity. Some stages we can accelerate more, some less.”

I nodded, too flooded with information to speak at that moment, and in my silence the scientists led me on down the row of encanters and showed me the two “brothers” of the boy—two more replicates genetically identical with the first, triplets growing in the laboratories of the BrathelLanza deep beneath the surface of the Earth.

I was not told their names—if they yet had names —or who had donated the cells from which they were growing. Perhaps it wasn’t important.

Then we went on to the next set of encanters, larger than the first, designed to hold replicates from maturation levels of about six years to about twelve years. In one of these I was shown what ThefeRa called “one of our happier replications”—a naked, black-haired girl who somehow looked astonishingly familiar, floating, sleeping in the murky liquid.

“Don’t you recognize her?” ThefeRa asked.

“Yes . . . yes, I think so.”

“Little OrDjina,” KaphNo said with a laugh, “that’s what we call her. And as you can easily see, she is a replication of our lord DessaTyso’s mistress. A beautiful child, isn’t she?”

I nodded but couldn’t find words to speak.

“On the day of her final decantation, a little over four months from now,” ThefeRa was saying, “a celebration is planned. That should be interesting— two Ladies OrDjina in our Underground.”

I wondered exactly what he meant by that, but I didn’t ask.

Finally we followed ThefeRa to the last of the encanter chambers, a room which held the largest cylin

ders of all, those built to hold replicates at maturation levels from twelve years to maturity. Only one of these encanters was occupied; it held the form of a lovely young girl of about fifteen, her hair a startling shade of red.

AkweNema, without speaking, brushed around the rest of us and took a place directly in front of the large glass cylinder. For a long while he gazed silently into the murky fluid. There appeared to be moisture in the comers of his eyes. No one spoke.

Finally he turned awkwardly from the encanter, and faced us, his eyes seeking mine. He spoke: “My daughter.” Then he left the encanter room alone and went back toward the other sections of the Underground, muttering something to
hims
elf that may have been “May the Dark Lords have mercy on us all.”

ThefeRa was the first to speak. “His true daughter is dead. A tragic skimmer accident a few months ago. She was almost sixteen years old, just a bit more mature than her replicate here. We were able to retrieve some still-living cells and are growing this replicate for Akwe. She will reach maturation in about two months if we continue the process.”

“But that’s not enough,” KaphNo said, an unexpected softness in his voice, an affection for the red- haired man and his dead daughter. “If only we had complete cerebral recordings of her! With those we could give him back his daughter just as she was.”

Huh? I asked, but silently, to myself.

Old KaphNo turned, wiped incipient tears from his eyes, grasped my upper arm with a surprisingly strong hand, and led me out of the encanter chamber.

“Cerebral recordings, General. I haven’t spoken of them, have I?” he asked when we were again in the corridor.

“No, you haven’t.”

“Well then, it’s time I told you about them. They

play a very important part in our plan. Now, I am certain that you are familiar with the fact that the human brain constantly gives off certain forms of electromagnetic emissions, brain waves, the so-called alpha waves and so forth; that is to say
...”

Of the Underground

That night I lay in the room-filling bed beside EnDera, both of us -warm and satiated, drifting toward a welcome sleep—or at least EnDera seemed to be. I wanted to sleep but found it impossible. There was too much in my head. Clones and replication processes. Brain waves and cerebral-recording techniques. Replicates of the lord DessaTyso’s beautiful mistress and of Ak- weNema’s dead daughter floating in tanks of life-supporting fluids. The identical boys in similar encanters. Wars and rumors of wars in a world the complexities of which I could not yet begin to understand. The vast underground city of the BrathelLanza—for it was almost a city in size and complexity, similar in some respects to the underground city-fortress of the Paratimers and the American Republican Army on another Earth.

And that s
imil
arity with the place called Staunton disturbed me. Not s
imil
arity in detail, for there was little or none of that. But in scope and concept, in size and complexity, and especially in purpose. Staunton and
this
Underground, so similar in many general ways, had both been built for the purpose of overthrowing the existing power structure and replacing it with another.

The Paratimers—whatever the hell they
were,
and I didn’t know—had financed and helped build the underground city of Staunton.

What of the underground city of the BrathelLanza? ...

I supposed that EnDera needed the sleep—she had 64