Prototype

Thirty-Two

Maximum efficiency depended on isolation; of this Valentine was convinced. The greatest movers among humanity — the Alexanders, the Saladins, the Stalins — might be the ones who commanded armies, but even they would remain forever vulnerable. The machinery of their power could grind to a halt by the designs of a single, well-placed individual. The mind, the will, that toiled in perfect isolation could never be betrayed by another.

Only by itself.

And so Patrick Valentine wondered if he might not soon find himself slipping. Opening his house to another this way, he was bound to feel the impact, his focus diluted. Come tomorrow, Daniel Ironwood would be here a week. The impact did not go unnoticed.

Even now, his bedroom was no refuge. Daniel's voice, from the first floor: "Patrick! Get down here! Right now!"

Scowling, he rose. He tossed aside the inventory lists he'd been scanning, supplied by Teddy this afternoon, a grocery list of the ordnance in a Maryland armory that soon would donate to the cause.

Downstairs he found Daniel on the floor, wound tight and coiled before the TV, an arm extended, bird-dog still. The face on the screen they knew well; they woke up with it every morning, and still he could never quite surmount that initial vertigo when seeing it worn by someone else.

Valentine watched, listened. The story was half-over, but the rest was not difficult to fill in. News from Texas: Lawyers for Mark Alan Nance had exhausted their final appeal, and no one was cutting him any slack for the Helverson's defense. Execution was on for the middle of next week. In the grimmest room in Huntsville, a table waited with straps and tubes, needles and plungers.

Valentine could picture that table as clearly as if it were waiting for him, too. Perhaps it someday would.

"They're really going to stick him this time. Aren't they?" Daniel spoke with rare reverence. Behind his thick amber lenses his eyes may have been awestruck.

"Turn that thing off." Valentine heard the pause before the click, Daniel assessing bullshit tolerance and deciding tonight there was none. He collapsed into his favored chair, frowned at Daniel; the remote control still dangled from the kid's hand. "Don't you ever read a newspaper?"

"What can I say?" Daniel shrugged. Those damned glasses; too hard to tell where his eyes were most of the time. "I like sound bites. It makes the news go down like a protein shake."

"Probably want your food prechewed before you get it, too."

"No, I lied," he said, backtracking. "I hate getting my hands all inky. Women like clean hands. Speaking of … when the hell am I going to get laid, here, Patrick?"

"In a few nights. The middle of this week."

"Why not tonight?"

"Because I say so."

It was a parent's answer, a peculiar thing to hear slipping from his own lips. But coupled with glowering eyes it was sufficient. There came no more argument.

He could have explained himself further but decided against it. The truth? It wasn't the proper time to start letting him pass his nights in the penthouse with Ellie. Everything was cold, hard function here — Valentine never lost sight of this, even if he spared his protégés the worst of it — and letting Daniel sleep in her bed would have served none. Yet.

Timing was everything. The world was a vast machine, and if one looked beneath the veneer of chaos that it wore as a disguise, one could see how so many components were geared to their own clockwork mechanisms.

Ellie Pratt, a single cog, kept track of her monthly cycles at his insistence. If she was accurate, she would be fertile again beginning the middle of this week. An ovum would once more slide down its fallopian conduit, and that egg was his, bought and paid for. If he chose to reserve it for the sperm of another, that was his right.

Only then would he allow Daniel Ironwood to lie with her, like a father giving his blessing to an incestuous union between two offspring separated at birth, whose hormones overruled social taboo. Only when she lay ripe would he turn Daniel free of his leash, and only then could nature take its course. The moment had to be optimal, equal halves lust and fertility.

This could have been the problem with Timothy Van der Leun — Valentine had miscalculated timing. Brought him in, let the two of them get acquainted, allowed Van der Leun free access from almost the moment his flight had touched down. They had first gone to bed days before her window of ovulation, which Valentine recognized as his own libertarian mistake. Familiarity breeds contempt, or in this case, impotence. Timothy Van der Leun had been useless.

Fortunately, he had also been replaceable.

They were interchangeable, for Valentine's purposes. And even Timothy hadn't been his first choice. That honor had befallen the one in Los Angeles, a twenty-four-year-old scavenger and sometimes grifter named Bryce. Valentine had already been in contact with Bryce for two years, had supplied him with more information on his anomaly than he ever would have received from orthodox science.

"I've got a job for you," Valentine had told him over the phone one night. He'd been blunter with his metaphorical offspring at the time, believing they might naturally defer to him because of his age, his experience, his success at survival. "I want you to impregnate a very special young woman."

While there was no indication yet that the Helverson's males had inherited their mutation from a parent, it wasn't known what characteristics they might pass along to their own children. Only Mark Alan Nance had conclusively sired a child, but it had been the kid's death that had led to Nance's genetic testing in the first place. The family had later refused to allow an exhumation; leave the baby dead and buried.

Imagine the possibilities: a child conceived by not one but two Helverson's carriers. Would two such genetic dominants distill Helverson's into an even more potent manifestation? Valentine had a need to know, and it might take conventional science years to come up with an answer.

He had ordered, he'd threatened, and still Bryce had refused to cooperate. Valentine's fury had been great: What, after all I've done for you? But it had been a valuable learning experience. He could not expect them all to share his thirst for knowledge, nor count on indiscriminate sex drives to ensure their cooperation, and above all he couldn't bully them. They had to be seduced, teased along.

So he'd written off Bryce, moved on to Timothy Van der Leun precisely because his will had seemed less formidable. Another abortive attempt, though he'd at least secured cooperation first.

He was working his way down the list, Valentine supposed, and it was looking as if number three might work out just fine.

As a physical specimen, Daniel Ironwood was splendid, trim and hard, and while he smoked much, he rarely coughed, even on rising in the morning. His perspective on whatever didn't directly concern him, however, seemed blithely indifferent. Last week it had taken him three days to ask the obvious question: Where had Ellie come from? How had Patrick Valentine managed to acquire a Helverson's female about whom the genetics databanks were unaware?

It had been a simple process, at least conceptually; far more time-consuming in the execution. More than two years ago he had tired of the slow pace with which Helverson's subjects were being uncovered. At that point the Cassandra Study was merely a proposal, though even if it had been implemented the next day it still wouldn't identify the subjects already out there. It found babies. He didn't want babies. He wanted adults, and thus far the adults were being found by accident, and all of them could be counted on a pair of six-fingered hands. So Valentine took matters into his own.

On the hypothesis that those who had yet to be found would be as socially maladaptive as those who had, and prone to scuttling along subterranean currents of society, he decided to advertise in the classifieds. He composed Researcher seeks-type ads that went on to describe the general psychological profile that had been emerging. Please send letter of introduction, date and place of birth, and photo. Qualified applicants would be paid for their time. He blanketed the country with them, in the personals columns of every major daily and underground paper, liberal weekly, and psychotic fish-wrap he could find. It was not cheap, but it was effective.

He had rented a central post-office box, and replies came by the thousands. The letters he ignored, which sped up the process immeasurably; the pictures were all he was interested in. The pictures told the true story, even if the tale was rarely heard.

Three. He turned up three…

One of whom he tried to contact and was never able to reach. The other two he courted slowly, eventually verifying them as genuine Helverson's subjects through Stanley Wyzkall at MacNealy Biotech. Of those, however, another turned rabbit after being informed of the diagnosis, and wanted nothing further to do with him. Only Ellie Pratt, formerly of an Atlanta suburb, hung in with him for the duration, although she more than compensated for the loss of the other two.

She was, after all, a rarity.

She was just that: a she.

In Ellie's picture had been the first page of the story: an unmistakable resemblance. Valentine had long since gotten used to the idea that Helverson's traits transcended ethnic boundaries, but it was dizzying to see them borne by a young woman. Softened by femininity somewhat, but there they were: the same streamlined contours of her bone structure, and eyes wolflike in their bright awareness. Her razored violet hair made her features all the more striking, angular.

In contrast to the males, Ellie had never exhibited much of a pattern of overt violence, although if she was ever truly angered, Valentine didn't think it would be wise to turn an unguarded back on her. Where the males lacked impulse control, she did not, reserving her anger for maximum impact, and forgetting nothing, ever. The first time Teddy met her, he'd chuckled heartily at her choice of hair dye. She waited four months, until overhearing him consider plugs to combat his own receding hairline, then sliced out two quick handfuls of what he had left. She then held the tip of the knife to Teddy's eye until he apologized for an insult he didn't even remember making.

Valentine supposed there would be ample Helverson's females to monitor, in time, once the dozens of infant girls found in the past two years had grown older. For now, though, there was but one identified Helverson's woman. And I found her.

Valentine had neither the training nor inclination to understand the intricacies of the genetic dance, but it had never seemed reasonable to him that Helverson's would exclusively target males. Wyzkall had, years ago, speculated that the trisome of number twelve might be interactive in some way, yet to be spotted, with the male Y-chromosome. Valentine accepted this on purely hypothetical terms, never believing it to be the actuality.

He could not have been more pleased to prove Wyzkall wrong.

Nor could he have been more pleased to find Ellie Pratt amenable to the proposal of motherhood-for-hire that spirited her from her dead-end life in Georgia.

Valentine found the irony irresistible: Money he made from the sale of mass destruction was now being funneled toward the propagation of the species — more to the point, the newest variant of the species.

Truly, science made for strange bedfellows.

"Listen, Patrick?" said Daniel. "I want to get something cleared up."

Valentine looked at him with expectation. He nodded once, yielding the floor.

"If I do get her pregnant" — all stone-cold business behind dark lenses — "I want a guarantee that I don't have any obligations to the kid. None. Okay?"

"I already told you, you never even have to hear about it if you don't want to."

"Not good enough." Daniel smiled from across the living room, a thin and simmering smile. "I want something more binding than your word. This goes wrong somehow, bam, and I get hit with a paternity suit, I'm fucked, I've got no way out of that. They'll prove it with one test and there I am stuck owing child support."

He did have a point. Were their positions reversed, Valentine liked to think he would have enough presence of mind to cover his backside for just this possibility. This was good thinking.

"So you want a contract freeing you from all obligations and responsibilities, then."

Daniel nodded. "Absolutely."

"I know a lawyer I can call tomorrow. We should be able to get it taken care of quickly, just have him change the gender bias in a standard surrogate-motherhood contract."

"Good. Good. I'm just the cum donor." Daniel stretched one leg out upon the floor, hung an elbow off the other propped knee, and seemed to regard him with fresh curiosity. "I'm wondering one thing, though. Why aren't you? Save you a lot of trouble with me."

Valentine sat frozen in his chair, even the mere mention of the subject enough to bring on a dull, hollow pounding in his groin, like the beat of an empty heart. He'd thought he might avoid this with Daniel, thought him incurious enough to never bring it up.

"I would if I could," was all he said.

Daniel grinned, pointed down below. "Shooting blanks, huh?"

He should have been angry, furious even, should have clouted Daniel across the jaw for making a mockery of what malignancy had stolen. But fury was far away, and he supposed he had the TV to thank for that — seeing the face of the one condemned to death, without having had a chance to meet him. The lost sheep. And contemplating, too, what might have become of the newest lamb, who had promised nearly a week ago to find his way here.

As Daniel sat on the floor, tiring of no response to his prod, Valentine stared at him and had to wonder if this was how fathers felt, real fathers, who looked into the faces of their sons and saw not only themselves, but that one final chance to vicariously achieve those precious goals that had exceeded their grasp. Fathers could be sad that way, and stoic.

He supposed it had always been that way.

He supposed that, whatever else changed in the world, it always would.