Hybrids

Chapter Thirty-four

Bristol Harbour Village was the dream of a developer named Fred Sarkis: five luxury condominium-apartment buildings perched atop a shale cliff on the shore of Canandaigua Lake. One of upstate New York’s Finger Lakes, Canandaigua was a long, deep gouge in the landscape formed by Ice Age glaciers.

BHV had been built in the early 1970s, before the economies of Rochester, and so many other upstate cities, had gone into the toilet. It was a bizarre artifact of its time, like Habitat from Expo ’67. When Mary first saw it, at Louise Benoît’s recommendation, she’d thought they should film the next Spider-Man movie there: there were all sorts of bridges linking its multilevel outdoor parking garages with the actual apartment buildings that would have been perfect for the web-slinger.

Apparently, though, the development had never quite worked out the way it had been planned, and despite such luxuries as a Robert Trent Jones golf course just up the street and nearby Bristol Mountain for skiing in winter, there were always a large number of units for sale or rent. The real-estate agent Mary had spoken to went on about how Patty Duke and John Astin, back when they were married, had stayed there one summer. Mary rather suspected that once she learned that two Neanderthals were now here, that fact would become a new part of her sales pitch.

The apartment Mary had rented was a two-bedroom, 1000-square-foot unit split over two levels. It still had what must have been the original god-awful orange shag carpet; Mary hadn’t seen anything like it in decades. Still, the view was beautiful—looking directly across the width of the lake. The upper balcony, off the master bedroom, had an unobstructed panorama; the lower balcony looked out into the top of the tenacious trees that had grown up out of the crumbling cliff face. From either of them, one could see the cement walkway jutting out to the outdoor elevator shaft that dropped the hundreds of feet to the marina and man-made beach below.

“Now, this is an interesting place!” said Ponter as he stood on the lower balcony, clutching the railing with both hands. “Modern conveniences amid nature. I almost think I am back on my world.”

Mary was using an electric grill on the balcony to cook steaks she’d bought at Wegman’s. Ponter continued to look out at the lake, while Adikor seemed more interested in a large spider that was working its way along the railing.

When the steaks were done—just a shade past raw for the boys, medium well for her—Mary served them, and Ponter and Adikor tore into theirs with gloved hands, while Mary carved hers with a knife. Of course, dinner was the easy part, thought Mary. At some point, though, someone was bound to bring up the question of—

“So,” said Adikor, “where shall we sleep?”

Mary took a deep breath, then: “I thought Ponter and I would—”

“No, no, no,” said Adikor. “Two are not One. It’s I who should be sleeping with Ponter now.”

“Yes, but this is my home,” said Mary. “My world.”

“That’s irrelevant. Ponter is my man-mate. You two have not even bonded yet.”

“Please!” said Ponter. “Let’s not fight.” He smiled at Mary, then at Adikor, but said nothing for a few moments. Then, in a tentative voice, he offered, “You know, we could all sleep together…”

“No!” said Adikor, and “No!” said Mary simultaneously. Good grief! thought Mary. A hominid ménage à trois!

“I really think,” continued Mary, “that it makes sense for Ponter and me—”

“That’s gristle,” said Adikor. “It is obvious that—”

“My beloved,” said Ponter, but perhaps since mare was the Neanderthal word for “beloved,” he started again, using a different approach. “My two loves,” he said. “You know how deeply I care about each of you. But Adikor is right—under normal circumstances, I would be with him at this time of month.” He reached out and touched Adikor affectionately. “Mare, you must get used to this. It’s going to be a reality for the rest of my life.”

Mary looked out at the lake. This side was in shade, but sun was still falling on the far shore, a mile and a half off. There were four air-conditioning/heating units in the apartment, Mary knew—one at each end of each floor. She’d been turning on the fan on the one in the master bedroom before going to bed each night, so that the white noise would drown out the cacophony of birds that hailed the dawn. She supposed if she put it on high, it might keep her from hearing any noise coming from the other bedroom…

And Ponter was right. She did have to get used to this.

“All right,” she said, at last, closing her eyes. “But you guys have to make breakfast, then.”

Adikor took Ponter’s hand, and smiled at Mary. “Deal,” he said.

There was already a large safe in Jock’s office, built into the far wall; it had been the first renovation Jock had ordered when the Synergy Group had bought this old mansion. The safe, embedded in concrete, met Department of Defense guidelines for being both secure and fireproof. Jock kept the codon writer in it, only bringing it out for supervised study.

Jock sat at his desk. On one corner of it was the conversion box Lonwis had put together that would allow designs created on Jock’s PC to be downloaded into the codon writer. Jock was looking at one such design. His monitor—a seventeen-inch LCD, with a black bezel—was showing the notes and formulas Cornelius Ruskin had prepared. Of course, Jock had told Cornelius that his interest was purely defensive—wanting to see what a worst-case scenario would be if a device like the codon writer fell into the wrong hands.

Jock knew he should have turned this device over to the Pentagon—but those bastards would want to use it against humans. No, this was his opportunity—his one chance—and he had to seize it. Right now, early on in the contact between the two worlds, it would look like an accident: a nasty bug that had slipped through to the other side. Regrettable, but it would leave Eden uninhabited, and there’d only be one Homo sapiens casualty—Cornelius Ruskin, after he was no longer of any use.

Ruskin, of course, only knew what was necessary. For instance, as far as he, and most of the genetics community, knew, the natural reservoir for the Ebola virus—the place it lurked when not infecting humans—was unknown. But Jock was privy to things Ruskin was not: the U.S. government had isolated the reservoir back in 1998: Balaeniceps rex, the shoe-bill, a tall wading bird found in swamps in eastern tropical Africa. The information had been classified, lest an unfriendly power make use of it.

Ebola was an RNA virus whose genome had been completely sequenced, although, again, Ruskin wouldn’t know that; that information had also been classified, for the same reason. So, presumably as far as Ruskin was aware, the sequence Jock had asked him to manipulate was just a random viral string, not the actual genetic code of Ebola.

Ebola came in several strains, named for the locations at which they had been first identified. Ebola-Zaire was by far the most deadly, but it was only transmitted through bodily fluids. In contrast, Ebola-Reston, which doesn’t affect humans, is transmitted through the air. But Ruskin had had no trouble—purely as part of an exercise, of course—in programming the codon writer to swap a few genes, thereby producing a hybrid version that should have Ebola-Zaire’s virulence combined with Ebola-Reston’s ability for airborne transmission.

A few more tweaks cut the modified virus’s incubation time to one-tenth of what it had been in nature, and boosted the kill rate from ninety to better than ninety-nine percent. And one final tweak had changed the genetic markers that specified the virus’s natural reservoir…

The second part of the project had been harder, but Cornelius had taken to it like a dog to a bone; it’s amazing how much a $200,000 consulting fee can motivate someone.

The concept was simple enough on paper: keep the virus from being activated unless the host cell had certain characteristics. Fortunately, when Ambassador Tukana Prat brought ten of the most famous Neanderthals of all with her to the United Nations, they had freely shared much knowledge. One of them, Borl Kadas, had provided all the information that had been gleaned from the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome, which had been completed back in the year Jock knew as 1953. That database had provided the information needed to make sure the virus would kill only those it was supposed to kill.

Now only one problem remained: getting the virus over to the other side. At first, Jock had thought the simplest solution would be to infect himself with it—after all, it would have no effect on a hominid with twenty-three pairs of chromosomes. But the tuned-laser technology used for decontaminating people crossing between worlds would have easily zapped it from his body. Even diplomatic pouches were decontaminated, so simply storing a supply of the virus in one of them wouldn’t work, either.

No, he needed to get an aerosol bomb over in some sort of container that was opaque to the laser pulses used by the Neanderthals’ decontamination equipment. Jock himself had no idea what would do the trick, but his optics team—originally assembled to study the imaging technology in Companion implants, and handpicked from the best Bausch & Lomb, Kodak, and Xerox had to offer—would certainly be able to work it out, especially since the tuned-laser technology was also one of those the Neanderthals had freely shared with Homo sapiens.

Jock picked up the phone on his desk, and dialed an internal extension. “Hello, Kevin,” he said. “It’s Jock. Would you, Frank, and Lilly please come down to my office? I’ve got a little job for you…”

Mary found a simple short-term solution to the problem of working in the same building as Cornelius Ruskin. She would come in late in the day and work on into the evening; Cornelius would leave shortly after she arrived—or, if she was lucky, even before she got in.

Ponter and Adikor came in from Bristol Harbour Village with Mary; they had no way to get around except for having her drive them. But they spent most of their time working on the quantum-computing project with Lonwis Trob, and often with Louise Benoît—although she kept more normal hours, and had already gone home today.

Mary was writing a report for Jock, detailing everything she’d learned from Lurt, Vissan, and others about Neanderthal genetics. The work simultaneously elated and depressed Mary: elated her because she’d learned so much, and depressed her because the Neanderthals were decades beyond her people in this area, meaning so much of the work she’d done in the past was hopelessly obsolete, and—

Massive footfalls—someone running down the corridor.

“Mare! Mare!”

Adikor had appeared in Mary’s doorway, his broad, round face terrified. “What is it?” Mary asked.

“Lonwis Trob—he’s collapsed! We need medical aid, and—”

And, except for Bandra, who knew the joke about the hunters calling 9-1-1, the Neanderthals had no idea how to summon such a thing; nor could their Companions call anyone on this side of the portal. Mary rose and ran down the corridor to the quantum-computing lab.

Lonwis was flat on his back, his eyelids fluttering. When they opened, they showed only smooth blue-metal spheres; the parts with the mechanical irises had apparently rolled up into his head.

Ponter was kneeling beside Lonwis. He was using the back of one hand, effortlessly it seemed, to compress Lonwis’s chest over and over again—a Neanderthal version of CPR. Meanwhile, Lonwis’s golden Companion was speaking aloud in the Neanderthal language, describing Lonwis’s vital signs.

Mary picked up the phone on one of the desks, dialed 9 for an outside line, then 9-1-1.

“Fire, police, or ambulance?” said the operator.

“Ambulance.”

“What’s wrong?”

“A man having a heart attack,” said Mary. “Hurry!”

The operator, a woman, must have had the address on a screen in front of her, based on the incoming phone number. “I’m dispatching an ambulance now. Do you know how to perform CPR?”

“Yes,” said Mary. “But someone else is already doing that, and—look, I should tell you up front. The man having the heart attack is a Neanderthal.”

“Ma’am, it’s a serious crime to—”

“I’m not joking! ” snapped Mary. “I’m calling from the Synergy Group. We’re a U.S.-government think tank, and we’ve got Neanderthals here.”

Ponter was continuing to compress Lonwis’s chest. Adikor, meanwhile, had opened up Lonwis’s medical belt and was using a compressed-gas injector to pump something into Lonwis’s neck.

“Can I have your name?” said the operator.

“Is the ambulance coming? Have you sent it yet?”

“Yes, ma’am. It’s on its way. Can I have your name?”

“It’s Mary N. Vaughan. That’s V-A-U-G-H-A-N. I’m a geneticist.”

“How old is the patient, Ms. Vaughan?”

“A hundred and eight—and no, I am not joking. It’s Lonwis Trob, one of the Neanderthals who visited the United Nations last month.”

Stan Rasmussen—a geopolitical expert who worked down the hall—had appeared in the doorway. Mary covered the handset and spoke quickly to him. “Lonwis is having a heart attack. Get Jock!” Rasmussen nodded and hurried away.

“I’m going to transfer you to the paramedics,” said the 9-1-1 operator.

A moment later a different female voice came on. “We’re five minutes away,” she said. “Can you describe the patient’s condition?”

“No,” said Mary, “but I’ll put his Companion on.” She picked up the desk set and carried it across the room, setting it down near Lonwis. She then spoke to Lonwis’s implant: “Switch to English, and answer all the questions you hear. Help is on its way…”