Xeno Sapiens (3 page)

Josh Hall was the outspoken leader of a
radical religious sect known as the ‘Natural Christians’ publicly,
and privately, by some, as the Neoclassic People’s Temple. Hall,
even with his twelve hundred dollar suits and fleet of Cadillacs,
could still make Jerry Falwell sound like Madlyn Murray
O’Hare.

He advocated a return to the ‘natural
order’ as God intended. The ‘natural order’ to Merrifield’s mind
was pestilence and suffering. Not so secretly, Merrifield believed
this to be Hall’s agenda. He didn’t want to help; he wanted to burn
down the whole house of cards. Hall didn’t believe in doctors or
science, just prayer. The horror stories were becoming as plentiful
and tawdry as junk jewelry at a five and dime.

One story -a story with all the
earmarks of an urban legend, but one which rang true to Merrifield-
weighed on him. Allegedly, a ten year old girl had had contracted
gangrene after being scratched by a rusty nail. The girl’s parents,
acolytes of Josh Hall, had refused to allow their daughter to be
saved by a quarter’s worth of penicillin. Instead, they stayed by
their daughter’s bedside and prayed as the gangrene escalated to
septicemia and their daughter became more feverish and pain wracked
before finally perishing. Penicillin might be a poor substitute for
God, but it would have been a damn sight more effective.

“
So,” Merrifield said, coming back to
the present. “What do you think?”

“
I think that once the shock dies
down, the things we’ll have learned along they way will shut up the
hue and cry from John Q. Public. It will be a
fait accompli.”

“
We have no guarantees,” Merrifield
said. He swiveled around in his chair and tapped a pencil on his
desk. His unbuttoned jacket allowed a generous portion of white
shirted belly to roll over his belt.

“
If it can be done, she’s the one to
make it happen. I think we’ve got a better chance with this than
with some of the other white elephants we could lay at the
government’s door.”

“
How do you want to go on?”

“
I’ve set up a meeting a week from
today. She has to know we’re all willing to have our heads on the
chopping block.”

“
Easy enough,” Merrifield said. “How
did she take not being told everything outright?”

“
She knows how big money projects
work. She knows we don’t want to tip our hand too soon. She’ll
respect that.”

“
You think so?”

“
I’ve done pretty well following my
instincts. They’re good ones.”

“
Better leave the thinking to me,
Cliffy,” Merrifield admonished.

Merrifield slowly turned his chair
around. Out the large picture window in his office, he looked down
on the city of Tampa. “You can go now, Alex,” he said absently.
“Please brief me again before our meeting.”

“
Fine.”

Clifton stood. He wished he could call
Merrifield a hot blooded, bucket-headed imperious fool, all apt
qualifiers. Still, despite their ostensible amicability, Clifton
always remembered who was boss.

Outside the window, life went on its
routine in the city, its streets and buildings and alleys unaware
of the schemes and plots hatched within its borders
everyday.

Ingrid walked across the brick
courtyard laid out in front of the Courier bio lab. Brisk September
had planted its chill kiss on the rest of the nation, but had no
power to pucker in northern Florida. Stiff Palmetto trees ground
away mechanically in the salty sea breeze while a rainbow of
Azaleas bloomed in the controlled, glass environment of the Speith
greenhouse.

Her heels clacked like tabla drums
against the bricks. She had slept uneasily the previous night, less
from her apprehension at what her decision might be than from the
blackly exciting information in the manila folder.

Her initial reaction had been one of
dismay that anyone would have the moral effrontery to even attempt
such a thing. But as she had read, her reaction had morphed into
morbid curiosity and finally, a dark fascination. Could such a
thing be done? She now understood why the project had been
entrusted to a complex that was as powerful and faceless as the
government itself. Such things as were proposed could only be done
under the auspices of power so great that it could crush
opposition, economies, or entire nations with a phone call or a
directive as simple as ordering a cheeseburger and
fries.

“
Mornin’, Ingrid.”

Ingrid looked up. Hubert Ashe pushed
his cart of cleaning supplies before him like a burden. He was the
stereotypical janitor and handyman with a feather duster in his
back pocket and an engineer’s cap on his head. He could have been
anywhere between forty to two hundred years old.

“
Good Morning, Hubert. How are
you?”

“
Tolerable.” He gave her a paternal
scrutiny. “You, now. Looks like somebody could walk to town on your
lower lip. Don’t look like you slept much, either.”

“
I hoped it didn’t show that
much.”

“
Sticks out like a sore thumb. You
been out drinkin’ and carousin’ with them young men, I’ll wager.”
He grinned benignly.

“
You know better than that. You’re
right. I didn’t sleep much. I’m thinking about leaving the
University.”

Hubert gave her a closer scrutiny. He
picked a brown stained and splintered toothpick from his mouth and
pursed his lips gently. The wrinkles in his neck showed up plainly
against his white jacket. He straightened up behind his cart and
looked into the burning sun, his hands in his back
pockets.

“
Nice day,” he said, staring into the
distance. “Real nice. Seems the sun shines brighter when it has to
take the sting out of bad news. We’ll miss you.”

“
I haven’t made up my mind, yet. I
haven’t even mentioned it to my father. You’re the first to
know.”

“
Where you gonna go?”

“
Away,” Ingrid said vaguely, Clifton’s
warning and the enormity of the information in the file still fresh
in her mind. “Up north, sort of.”

Hubert snapped his fingers. “I’ll bet
you’re goin’ to New York. You be careful, gal. They’s a shifty lot
up there. You get out to one of them bars and some slicker come
struttin’ up to you like a Tom Turkey and offer you a job as one of
them Radio City Rackettes.”

Ingrid thought of the unappealing scar
bisecting her chest. “Doubtful.”

“
Well, mind you don’t forget what I
said, anyway.”

“
I never do.” She lowered her voice.
“Can I tell you something?”

“
You could talk all day. I’d
listen.”

“
Ever since I was a little girl, I
wanted to be perfect. Not just for me, but for my daddy. After my
mother died, I was all he had left of her. You understand this is
something I could never tell him?”

“
Yes.”

“
I devoted myself to research. Now
I’ve got an opportunity that comes along once in a million
lifetimes. Maybe it’s never come along before. But I don’t know if
I can leave what I’ve got here to go off to some uncharted
territory. Especially now, since the furor has died down and I’m
back to being a halfway normal person.”

“
You don’t know if there’s a pot of
gold at the end of the rainbow?”

“
Something like that.”

Hubert’s answering smile was warm and
wide in his sun reddened face.

“
You’re a good girl, Ingrid. Like I
said, we’re gonna miss you, but your mind is made up, ain’t
it?”

She knew she had never really
deliberated the question. She only wanted someone to tell her it
was alright.

“
You always know what I want to hear,
don’t you?”

“
I just tell you the way it is. You
gonna have trouble tellin’ your daddy?”

“
I don’t think so. Daddy wants what I
want.”

“
Your daddy don’t look at you like the
son he never had?”

“
I’ve never thought he was
disappointed in me.”

“
He shouldn’t be. You’ve made your
mark here, and this little burg isn’t big enough to hold you. It’s
time to move on to bigger things.”

“
I wonder,” Ingrid said gloomily. “I’m
almost afraid to go on to anything with even the barest whiff of
controversy.”

“
Would your own conscience set right
with you if you deprive the world of all you can do?”

He’s saying I’m selfish.
Was he right?

“
I don’t talk so well, but I ain’t
stupid. I read the papers and I hear what’s going on. It was a raw
deal, what they tried to do to you.”

Ingrid slowly reddened, part
embarrassment, but mostly anger, and she didn’t kid herself about
that. During her sophomore year she had been apprenticed to Dr.
David Grey, head of the life sciences department and within three
months the student had raced ahead of the teacher. She began
hearing the word prodigy quite often, genius a little less
often.

She had been fascinated with the
concept of Parthenogenesis; the spontaneous development of an
unfertilized ovum into an embryo. She had learned that the ‘virgin
birth’ was, in reality, pretty common. Perhaps one child in ten
thousand was a product of parthenogenesis: a natural clone of the
mother.

She had begun her studies with albino
rats. From the females she extracted unfertilized ova and destroyed
their nuclei with UV light. Into these ready made incubators she
placed the stomach cells of a big, ill tempered male albino rat
named Herod. The ova somehow recognized they had a full complement
of chromosomes and began to divide in normal cell meiosis. When the
surrogate ova reached the blastula stage, she surgically implanted
them into the wombs of several non albino rats. After a three week
gestation, fourteen albino rats, exact genetic duplicates of Herod,
were born to normal mothers. Ingrid had succeeded in cloning a male
offspring from a dissimilar ovum without benefit of
fertilization.

Parthenogenesis with a
twist.

In step two, Ingrid sacrificed a few
more of Herod’s stomach cells to the surgeon’s knife. She removed
the Y chromosome and replaced it with the X chromosome from a
female, non albino rat. She repeated the cloning procedure and was
rewarded with a litter of albino rats from a non albino mother. The
substantial difference here was that a male albino rat had supplied
the nuclear catalyst with a change in sex chromosome and produced
female versions of Herod.

Next, she hurried along nature’s own
processes. After cataloging the formidable sequence of DNA
phosphates and sugars, she set about synthetically reconstructing
the chains of genetic instructions. And here Synthetic was the
operative word.

Tedious was far too tame a word for the
work and Ingrid had enlisted the aid of a cybernerd named Jake
MacMillan to help her list the multitudinous codons that made up
the chain of a single chromosome. She had burned a lot of midnight
oil to come up with the huge, six thousand page volume of the rat’s
genome.

She then synthesized the proteins, a
far easier task, by using commercially available hybridomas to
churn out specific proteins. From viable ova she removed the X
chromosomes, then scattered the mix of synthetic chromosomes into
her prepared dish of ova, a process known as shotgunning. The ova
absorbed the synthetic chromosomes in almost equal proportions of X
to Y.

The ova with the normal X chromosomes
were fertilized immediately by an X or Y sperm cell. A few of the
ova with the single Y chromosome appeared to be fertilized by Y
sperm cells, but spontaneously aborted after a few divisions. In
the crazy, internal circuitry of DNA the cells realized that the YY
combination was not what nature had intended. Ingrid had no idea
what type of organism might spring from a YY zygote or, God forbid,
a triple Y zygote.

The ova with logical XX and XY pairs
developed normally. Out of the hundreds of growing zygotes, a few
reached the trophoblast stage. Ingrid implanted these into female
rats. These rats gave birth to offspring in a normal male to female
ratio.

All of her efforts had produced
twenty-eight baby rats. There had been no spontaneous abortions of
the implanted zygotes or doctored egg cells (aside from the double
Y ova), and no known birth defects in the babies. When the babies
grew to maturity, they bred naturally among themselves. They proved
to be quite fertile and fluorescent in situ hybridization tests of
the offspring’s chromosomes showed no atavism.

Only after the last litter was delivered could she fully
comprehend what she had done. She had succeeded in cloning an
organism. Big deal; cloning had been done before. What
was
a big deal was that
she had cloned an organism using synthetic, tailor made
chromosomes