Xeno Sapiens (5 page)

As she was about to leave, she turned
apologetically to Jake.

“
I’m sorry. I’m just not ready
yet.”

“
No problem. No harm done.”

“
No,” Ingrid replied. “No harm done.”
Her voice held a peculiar note of gratefulness and Jake could
clearly hear the unspoken
“not yet”
at the end of her thoughts.

It was dark now and she hurried into
the gloom, her mind ajumble with the thought that perhaps the gods
were right; that fire should not be given to man. She had thought
of that night from time to time over the next three years. No harm
had seemed to come of it.

But she
hadn’t
gotten away with it. Somebody had tracked them, Jake and
her, and now they wanted her. She was certain that Merrifield knew,
and probably Clifton, too. Maybe Jake hadn’t been as careful as he
had thought and he had been tracked through cyberspace and through
him, she had been discovered.

The question was, was she now ready to
accept the mantle of responsibility to go along with her genius?
Her first response should have been a horrified refusal, but those
who wanted her had done their homework. Her one holy quest in life
could never be accomplished within the normal channels of the
scientific community and Merrifield knew it.

Her published accomplishments were
acclaimed by some in the scientific community, vilified by others.
The Natural Christians claimed she was attempting to usurp the
power of God. Most vitriolic were the attacks on the fact that she
had developed YY and YYY zygotes. Never mind these zygotes had
spontaneously aborted. What type of monster, these groups mused
aloud, had Ingrid been trying to create?

For the next three years, Ingrid
studiously avoided contact with the press and confined her research
to more prosaic and boring endeavors, never becoming as ambitious
or brilliant as she had been during those few short months with
rats. All this was a factor that weighed heavily in favor of her
considering working in a covert project, out of the light of
scrutiny, with the sanction of the world’s most powerful
government.

“
It shouldn’t have happened,” Ingrid
told Hubert. “I was only trying to help.”

“
Walking around with a chip on your
shoulder ain’t gonna change what they tried to do to you,” Hubert
said. “You got to do what you’re meant to do, ’cause flyin’ in the
face of Fate never has a good end. It ain’t good to hold a grudge,
but them that spits on you always get what’s comin’ to
’em.”

Jack Milner was watching a football
game on TV and drinking a Pabst when Ingrid came in.

“
Hi, old man.” She leaned over and
kissed him on his bald spot. He reached up and patted her
arm.

“
Good to see you,” he said, never
looking away from the TV. “I was wondering if you were going to
stay married to your test tubes.” He didn’t offer her a beer, for
which she was grateful.

“
Did I catch you at a bad
time?”

“
Never a bad time for you.” He set his
beer down on an end table. An interlocking set of white rings
marked the favorite resting place for his beers. He turned the
volume down with his remote.

“
You didn’t have to do
that.”

“
Wasn’t much of a game. You want
something to eat? I don’t have anything cooked, but there’s plenty
of stuff in the reefer.”

“
No. Thanks, anyway. I wanted to talk
to you about something pretty important. Daddy, what would you
think if I left the University?”

Jack’s only visible reaction was a
slight raising of his eyebrows.

“
Do you mean a vacation?”

“
No, nothing like that. I’ve been
offered a job.”

“
Is this job worth leaving school just
a few months short of finishing your internship?”

“
I’ve already got enough hours in at
the trauma center and the ER to complete my internship,” Ingrid
reminded him. “All I need is my thesis. Right now I’m a little
burnt out on busted heads and gunshot wounds.”

“
This job won’t be here a few months
from now?”

“
No, it won’t. This is now or never. A
one shot deal.”

“
What kind of work would you be
doing?”

Ingrid weighed the advisability of
following Clifton’s warning to the letter. If only a quarter of
what was proposed in the folder could be done, that twenty-five
percent could rock the world. Did she want to saddle her father
with that? She decided she didn’t.

“
I’ve been in contact with the
government for the past year...”

Jack leaned forward. “The United States government?
The
revenooers?”

Ingrid looked innocently skyward,
giving her father his silent answer.

“
You never told me about
it.”

“
I wasn’t sure they were serious.
Until yesterday. A man named Alex Clifton came to see me. He told
his tale and laid out his cards. They want me to work on a covert
genetics project.”

Jack sat back. “So you won’t be able to
tell me anything about it?”

“
You know the drill.” Ingrid felt part
ashamed, part aglow with the feeling of power it gave her to be
privy to information that couldn’t be parceled out even to blood
kin.

“
For all that uncertainty,” Jack said
weightily, “you’re willing to give up your post at the University
and move away from home?”

“
What post at the University,” she
countered irritably. “I’m a glorified substitute teacher. I know I
sound like a little girl about to get into a get rich quick scheme,
but I didn’t think you would poke fun at me.”

Jack clasped his rough, red hands
between his knees. A carpenter’s hands that had sawed and hammered
and built for forty-five years. They had held Ingrid on the nights
she had cried herself to sleep after her mother’s passing. The
memories were still fresh even so many years after Cystic Fibrosis
had taken Phyllis. Ingrid had been his own precious jewel, a
shining gem to be treasured like water in a wasteland.

“
Come over here, Ingrid. Sit by
me.”

Ingrid sat cross legged on the floor by
Jack’s chair.

“
I wasn’t poking fun at you,” he said
gently. “A father has a way of forgetting that he can’t know what
it’s like to be a young lady. This all sounds like cloak and dagger
stuff. I can’t see you mixed up in something like that.”

“
You don’t approve.”

“
I didn’t say that, and I didn’t say I
didn’t believe you. It’s a lot to be hit with at one time. I knew
the day would come, I just hoped it never would.”

“
Then you don’t mind?”

“
Of course I mind, but I won’t
interfere.”

“
Would you rather that I turned it
down?”

“
That’s not my call. I’ll back you
either way. You’ll have no need to beard me in my lair with
anything you might or might not do. I won’t stand in your
way.”

Ingrid smiled a little. “At least you
didn’t tell me you only want what’s best for me.”

“
No need to belabor the obvious.” He
paused and cleared his throat. “When will you be...
leaving?”

“
You really want me to go?”

“
I really want what
you
want.”

Ingrid put her arms around his
neck.

“
I’ll let you know.”

“
Have you said your good byes
yet?”

Ingrid was glad to see that the mental
impression she had formed of Merrifield -that of a reanimated
Buddha- was accurate.

She led them in and served coffee,
sitting down in a chair opposite the couch. It was cool enough to
have the air conditioning turned off and she left the front door
open to allow the breeze to circulate. Quiet sunlight smiled
benignly on the numerous plants in her living room.

“
I’m tempted,” she said, “to pack up
right now. Except for a few things.”

Merrifield’s eyebrows contracted into
storm clouds.

“
You want to know more.”

Ingrid was silent for a moment, picking
her response.

“
You know, you act as if I’m asking
you for a favor. I have every right to know what’s expected of me.”
Merrifield didn’t seem all that thick on first acquaintance, but
you never knew.

“
You are,” Merrifield said. “I must
insist that whatever we say in this room does not travel beyond it.
I won’t ask you to sign anything or make any pledges. All I need is
your word that this trust will not be violated.” Merrifield was
grave, miles from the jovial man who had arrived mere moments
ago.

“
You have it.”

Merrifield deferred to Clifton and the
tension in the room eased.

“
Jon and I have discussed the most
effective way to introduce you to the project,” he said, “and we’ve
decided the best course would be to give you all the information we
have. Objectives, time tables, budget allotments, the whole
thing.”

Clifton snapped his briefcase open and
withdrew a moderately thick sheaf of papers bound in a blue,
plastic folder. He handed it to Ingrid, who gave it a cursory
glance.

“
That’s everything,” Clifton said.
“Project Change from beginning to end. You can read it at your
leisure, but we can go over the high spots now.” Clifton closed his
briefcase. To Ingrid, it looked like something he had rehearsed.
She hoped they weren’t setting up to play good cop bad cop. There
was plenty of room for a rubber hose in that briefcase.

Merrifield scratched the end of his nose. “Are you familiar
with black-light projects?”

“
Vaguely.”

“
Black-light projects are financed
through an unnamed group with discretionary funds placed back for
just such a use. Most of the time they deal with issues that are
borderline ethical or legal and when the press shows up, the
offending agency is insulated and we take the heat. You or I will
never know just which agency is paying the bills. Scared off
yet?”

Ingrid remained silent.

“
The end objective, as outlined in
that report, is the creation of a genetically enhanced human
being.”

Ingrid knew that much from what she had
already read, so it wasn’t a complete shock.

“
Why not cyborgs,” she asked. “Or
robots? That’s trendy now, isn’t it?”

“
When it comes to AI,” Merrifield
said, “the operant principle is ‘how dumb can we make this thing
and still have it do the job? Dumb as a cow? Dumb as a rock?’ For
most jobs a level of intelligence that would make a cockroach seem
like Albert Einstein is sufficient. We need more than that. To put
it simply,” Merrifield summed up, “machines break down. Machines
can’t think.”

Ingrid had read that much between the
lines. The next big question was how, and she asked it.

“
That,” Merrifield said, “is
your
problem.”

“
Creation,” she murmured. “You mean in
the literal sense?”

“
You’re a geneticist, Ingrid,”
Merrifield said with real weight. “You know what has to be done and
it will be up to you to figure out how to do it. That’s the
deal.”

Ingrid wasn’t yet sure what to make of
Merrifield. To say he was pleasant wouldn’t be right, but to say
she disliked his gruff, sometimes cutting and insensitive streak
wouldn’t be true, either. He was either too old to put the polish
on his chameleon act like Clifton, or too busy to care.

“
This prototype is to be free of all
defect, physical or mental. Further objectives are to instill
superior traits found in some humans, but not all.” This was a not
very lightly veiled allusion to psychic traits. “We are shooting
for extraordinary strength combined with superior intelligence, the
native ability to learn at an accelerated pace. This prototype will
be the blueprint for clonal replication.”

Merrifield studied Ingrid’s face for
surprise and saw none.

“
Cloning’s already been done,” Ingrid
reminded him.

Merrifield paused for emphasis. “True.
But in this project, cloning is not the...primary
objective.”

“
You want phylum exchange,” Ingrid
answered. Her eyes were bright with the exhilaration of catching
Merrifield with his guard down.