Prototype. Part 7

"It doesn't seem enough."

"Sure it is. People can deal with some unG.o.dly stressful situations, as long as they know what they are. It's when they don't know what they're up against that they start to break down." Sarah scooted close enough to drop both hands onto Adrienne's thigh. "That's why there's myth, to help people deal with those unknowns that are just too threatening to leave unknown."

"But Sarah, that's the problem here: an entire huge unknown area just opened up and swallowed us both. I had to tell him because his condition might be significant to his problems ... and because it's going to attract a lot of attention to him that I don't think he's going to want at all."

"And that's what you're most afraid of. You know that, don't you?"

Adrienne frowned at her. What?

"Losing control. Having him taken away from you."

Objections rose: He's my patient; I just want what's best for him. But of course it was true: She felt she was most qualified to make those judgments. Was this why doctors could squabble so over patients as if they were territories instead of people? With flags of conquest and discovery speared into their bodies? To surrender to someone else's authority, then, was weakness and retreat.

"That doesn't make me selfish, does it?" Adrienne said.

"We're all selfish, it's what motivates us."

As if to prove it, Sarah braced her hands on Adrienne's knees and leaned forward to kiss her, hungry greedy mouth at her own and bright eyes continuing to stare as she held the kiss. Wide mouth breaking into a broad smile then, wanton, just before she drew Adrienne's lower lip in and bit. Neither hard nor soft, bordering on that delicious threshold of tender pain.

Hands next, meeting before each went to the other body, to shoulders, and to b.r.e.a.s.t.s with straining nipples, and to bellies flexing with quickened breath, and to groins; so much moist heat. From her own, from Sarah's, Sarah so easy to get to, naked beneath the T-shirt but for panties. Sarah straddled her lap, then rose on knees, pulling Adrienne's head roughly to her, and Adrienne drew back, opened her eyes to see the shirt, its tribal mask design staring at her. Whereas it had been funny before, now she found something ominous about it. The mask, the unchanging face created to hide the real one, the countenance that could not be reasoned with.

"Take that off," she whispered fiercely, and Sarah peeled it, cast it free, not even suspecting. It struck the rainstick, sent it falling to the rug for one last sprinkle of pebbles and bone.

She'd have been happy to let it happen there on the sofa, or to slip to the floor and spread each other wide upon the rug, but Sarah's plans were otherwise. This was to be no quickie. Adrienne let Sarah pull her up, to her feet, up to the bedroom and down on her back again, where the last of the clothing came off.

They embraced, they rolled; teeth bit and lips soothed, and tongues traced wet trails from mouths to b.r.e.a.s.t.s to navels to c.u.n.ts and back again. Their hands were slippery, drenched with one another's dew. Adrienne bent her back across the bed, slid her hands along Sarah's risen inner thighs and lowered her head, peeling Sarah open with fingers and tongue. Tasting her damp and hot, teasing her with pointed flicking tongue tip, tickling her with soft blond hair, at last plunging her mouth into the wet fire.

And when Sarah came, it was hard, loud, powerful hips flexing and thighs clamping onto Adrienne's head. Then Sarah went scrambling for the night table where they kept their toys. Adrienne heard the sc.r.a.pe of the drawer, all aching mouth and wet face, gasping for breath as she saw Sarah coming for her - not empty-handed. No choice in the matter, just Sarah sculpting her onto knees and elbows, leaning across her back and wrapping one arm down and around her middle, with the other working the phallus into her. Roughly, but not without love, and Adrienne was about to strangle on her own cries. It was like being violated, willingly, and if she said to stop, Sarah would, but Sarah's power came from knowing it would never happen.

Adrienne looked back over her shoulder, saw Sarah first in profile, then as she turned to meet her eyes: Sarah in sweaty gleaming heat, with clenched teeth and furious stroking arm. For a moment she imagined the face from the T-shirt over Sarah's own, cannibal mask leering down; surely the symbol of what was going on here, the message implicit in every grinding twist of her hand...

You are mine, and so is control, and I will devour you and I will savor the taste of everything taken because you wanted to give it all along.

The body could never lie.

Nine.

Ryker, from Arizona a.s.sociated Labs, came clean with Adrienne later that week. She still wasn't sure what to make of the fact that he had for days - days - sat on what could have the most significant impact yet on Clay Palmer's case.

Had it been a deliberate lie, or simply a withholding of facts for the sake of convenience, while Ryker and company figured out how to best address the situation for their own ends? Her guess leaned toward mercenary origins. The compet.i.tion for leverage in medicine, particularly in research, was no less cutthroat than in most other private-sector ventures simply because human welfare was involved. There was also funding to consider. Funding meant the chance for greater accomplishment, which in turn meant prestige, and led to funding greater still...

They'd led her to believe that they thought Clay was the first of his kind, the first gross chromosomal abnormality discovered in over two decades - news that would have penetrated their world like a ricocheting bullet. Could they really have expected her to believe that they - immersed in the science of genetics - had not immediately recognized that this was not the case?

The bottom line?

While the numbers were tiny, there were others.

Clay was not alone in the world.

Ryker followed up his phone call apprising her of this shock with a package of records compiled on the others found to have a third copy of chromosome twelve.

The defect had been discovered six years ago, in the genetics division of a Boston research center named MacNealy Biotech, and had been christened Helverson's syndrome after the first scientist to doc.u.ment it.

Known cases prior to Clay were at an even dozen: five in North America, one in Venezuela, four across Great Britain and Western Europe, and two in j.a.pan. Not all, however, were still alive. The Venezuelan, who had worked in the north coast oil industry, had committed suicide last year. A British soldier of fortune had been killed in Central America. As well, one of the Americans was on death row in Texas, following a string of gas station robberies that had left three attendants dead...

And Adrienne could see the pattern forming already, another aggression linkage to rival, even surpa.s.s, the panic b.u.t.ton pushed by the discovery of the double-Y.

Still, one look at the overview was enough: Based on the few known cases, the hope that Helverson's syndrome was totally benign was not encouraging. Statistics on the group were broken down to demonstrate over and over generally maladaptive patterns. There was an inarguable trend here toward explosive temperaments, random acts of impulsive violence, self-destructive tendencies, and, to a lesser extent, schizophrenia. It cut across every national boundary and appeared independent of such variables as ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and education.

Interesting, though, how every last one was male, with none older than thirty-five. As well, she noticed another unifying factor: All came from industrialized countries. This said little in itself - the technology to map out chromosomes was far less prevalent in third-world nations, although more was being done in such places all the time as static local populations were found where various disorders plagued large numbers of the people. Such closed-system settlements const.i.tuted living laboratories in which to trace genetic disorders through multiple generations. Perhaps, in time, some agrarian society would yield its first Helverson's subject. Until then...

Here they were. Like bad omens.

In reading the overview, it was easy to forget that each one was a person who appeared to have undergone his own variation of Clay's life. They had been afflicted and did not even know by what, much less why.

Did they all feel the pain of the outsider, who does not even fit on a molecular level, and did they reprogram that pain into anger? Did they go through each day with heartbeats and brainwaves out of tune with those of the ma.s.ses? She saw their lives as testament to a cruelty in nature that went beyond ill intent: nature's profound indifference, giving periodic mutant rise to her variants, then leaving them to struggle and thrive, or wane and die, on their own.

It caused her to stop and stare at the skin of her bared forearm, its smooth and pale underside. There, deep within, written in protein codes 100 trillion times over: herself. What guarantee did she have that there was nothing concealed in that text of life and death, hidden like a bomb in a skysc.r.a.per, ticking, waiting for its moment? Waiting to burst into terrible flower - tumors or breakdown of systemic function, something that might leave her mind intact while her body withered, or steal the mind while the body housed its deterioration for decades to come.

She was no less susceptible to the indifference of nature than any of them.

It made her all the more eager to set the overview aside, to quit thinking of them as a faceless aggregate and view them as individuals. She began to open each separately sealed case study, files and medical records and interview transcripts and photos.

One...

After another...

After another...

And it became obvious that there was at least one physical manifestation of Helverson's common to each of them.

They looked as if they could be brothers.

By the third one Adrienne wasn't even reading, just tearing into the files to get at the pictures, spreading them out into rows. All of them stared up from the tabletop like a bizarre family reunion. Variations, to be sure: hair color, eye color, skin tone. But structurally, the resemblance was eerie, all of them much like Clay: the subtle arch and curve of bones made streamlined, contoured as if to lean into wind; small bladelike noses and firm chins, and jawlines that curved efficiently around; watchful eyes, wary, few of them smiling. It was even noticeable beneath the more overtly Asian traits of the two j.a.panese.

They were not unattractive - to the contrary, in most cases - but taken together, they could not help but be unsettling. And in the smooth contours of their faces, so perfect in image after image, there was something almost reptilian about them- And d.a.m.n it, she was regarding them as a group again.

Yet it was so hard not to. Like brothers, as if some father with wanderl.u.s.t had, thirty-five years ago, began to circle the globe and sow the seeds of a deviant progeny. His sperm somehow overpowering the theoretically equal influence of maternal genes, to leave these women's wombs growing with children solely of his creation.

Again, she was letting her imagination roam too far. Further reading showed that even such an astronomically low possibility as a common father had been ruled out. Genetic testing was nothing if not precise in ascertaining parental lineage, although the remote possibility of some very distant common ancestor had not yet been ruled out. For the time being, though, they had only chromosome twelve in common.

She was brought back to thoughts of Down's syndrome and the stunning resemblance between most of those who bore it. Short and stocky, with slanted eyes and similarly shaped heads, frequently affectionate like eternal children, they had always struck her as brothers and sisters of their own extended family, beyond the claims of blood kinship. They were their own; apart, yet linked.

And here, now? Before her?

The opposite of Down's?

Was it such a farfetched notion? For, in time, didn't nature strive to balance everything with its polar counterpart?

Nature did, so often, exhibit a love affair with symmetry.

She monitored Clay daily after having broken the news of the karyotype to him. Physically he would be fine, his bludgeoning of the window having caused nothing worse than some damage to the cast and a hairline fracture in a healing carpal bone, while the claw marks on his torso had been bandaged.

He emerged from sedation uncommunicative, less sullen than simply withdrawn, and gradually coming out of that within a few days. He was showing improvement by the time Adrienne learned of the others, although she had decided to withhold that from him until he was back on more stable emotional ground. Naturally he would want to know what they were like. Understandably, he would find the truth of no encouragement.

"I accept it," he finally told her, during their next Sunday session. Looking drawn and pale, too many weeks away from a sun that he apparently needed, like a tonic, from time to time.

And she told him that was important, accepting the fact of Helverson's, as long as he wasn't accepting some preconceived notion that it rigidly predestined his life. Nature, nurture, the debate had raged for centuries, and would likely never be settled to the satisfaction of everyone. It was important he keep in mind that he was more than mere proteins and programming.

"Do you think it's possible we know when things are wrong with us?" he asked. "Deep, fundamental differences that set us apart. Even if we don't have names for them, or even know where to point in ourselves ... we just know? You think so?"

"Obviously you do," she said, turning it back.

He glared for a moment, and she saw the faces of the others buried in him, as if he carried ghosts. "Can't we have sixty seconds of conversation without you deflecting it around into some therapeutic proverb?"

Adrienne blinked. Very good, Clay. It was actually a boost to see him rise up like that. If he hadn't gotten some of his fighting spirit back, he wouldn't have cared.

"I think," she told him, slow enough to measure every word, "some people have a greater self-awareness than others ... and I think it's possible that could extend to the physical or chemical makeup of their bodies."

"Thank you," he said, with a rare smile of victory. It faded soon enough, replaced by a look of haunting recollection. "I never told you why I came down this way."

"You told me you had a lot of thinking to do."

He nodded. "But why then? Why up and decide one day that I needed it more than I did the day before?"

"Something happened?"

"Something I saw." Clay took a deep breath, leaned back with his eyes shut in their darkened hollows, saying nothing until he began to bite his lower lip. "I don't hold jobs well," he began at last. "You probably guessed that already. But for the past year or so I worked for the Department of Sanitation in Denver. And that was all right, I got along okay doing that. I guess I've lost that one now, too, though.

"When we'd finish the pickup rounds and haul the truck back to the dump, sometimes I'd go wandering around all those mountains of trash. Everything the city was retching up, there it was. We could poke through it, and if there was anything we wanted, it was ours. Most of the time I wasn't even looking for my own benefit, I was looking for stuff for Graham. Remember Graham?"

"The artist." It had been weeks since Clay had mentioned him.

Clay nodded, sat straighter. "I'd bring him things I thought he'd like to use, for inspiration or whatever. Sc.r.a.ps of metal, bits of machinery. He's doing something with power tools and appliances and things like that, but he won't tell anybody what it is, so I'd just grab anything that looked halfway interesting.

"So there it was, one afternoon, the middle of September, one of those days when you can barely feel it, but there's a chill coming. And I was scouting around this one edge of the dump where I probably shouldn't have been, because that's where the cranes were working. They lower those scoops, like big swinging mouths from metal dinosaurs, and rearrange the piles. They'd tell us it's dangerous to get around, but what the h.e.l.l, that's when you can turn up the most interesting junk.

"I came around one side of this smelly mountain, saw where part of it had fallen away, where there was this little hollow. I just stopped, and stared.

"There was a dead man in there. Not like he'd been dumped and that was the most convenient place they could find. I think he'd been killed there, maybe even some kind of ritual thing. His wrists, they'd been spread out and tied to something half-buried in the trash - the legs of an old desk, it might have been. There he was, just slumped down, sitting in all this dried blood. He'd been gutted, all this stuff strewn out of his abdomen. Not random, either, there was order to it. But none of it seemed human to me, because he'd been there long enough for it to start drying out, so what it really looked like, to me, was pipes and tubes and conduits, like that. I'd never seen anybody's plumbing before, and that's what it's like. Meat machinery. So there he was, all dirty white, and not moving - plastic bags and paper and just general s.h.i.t hanging off him. And all I could do was stare."

Adrienne had to force herself to breathe. Imagining the scene for herself: an eviscerated man and the carrion stench that must have surrounded him, in the shadow of a valley between mountains of trash, while smoke from refuse fires churned overhead, machinery swaying in the background. She was seasoned, and rarely was she forced to conceal genuine repugnance, but this was one of those moments.

"The sight of him," she said, "it didn't ... upset you."

"It was repulsive. But you can't deny it: What's repulsive is also fascinating. I kept staring because it didn't seem real. Five or ten minutes, it must have been. And then one of the cranes swung over, and the whole hillside came avalanching down on him. Buried him completely. So I walked away."

"Without reporting it to anyone?"

He shook his head. "Except for whoever put him there in the first place, I guess I'm the only one who knows he's there."

Clay didn't say anything else, seeming distanced from that afternoon, describing it almost as if it had happened to someone else. She tried to use the growing spotlight of silence to coax more from him, but this time it wasn't working.

"What was it about the experience that made you feel you had to leave home for a while?"

He stared down, as if answers were to be found on the floor. "I'd been looking at him for a minute or two, trying to figure out how long he'd been there. Overnight, I was guessing. And then I had to stop and think: Well h.e.l.l, where was I last night? For a few seconds, I didn't know. No memory, nothing. I came out of it after a minute, and I knew I hadn't done it. But that didn't make me feel relieved, not really, because I started thinking, Well, if it wasn't me, maybe it could have been, and could I really do that to someone, if I went out of my head? It was like getting slapped in the face, and hearing somebody tell me, 'You've got a lot bigger problem than you ever thought.'"

Adrienne pulled herself out of it a little at a time - a vague feeling of uncleanness, the clash of values in how she could never have left a murder victim behind, a secret buried by a city's refuse - and likely Clay never knew she was trying so hard not to judge. She spoke again of predatory ethics versus the conscience he obviously had somewhere within, if not always accessible. Spoke of the way people could latch onto symbols of their guilt over events entirely unrelated. He was no killer. Was he?

Not yet.

"When you told me about my chromosomes," he said, mouth curling down, "that about did me in. But I asked, didn't I?"

Adrienne noticed that he was actually trembling. Another peek into vulnerabilities only rarely glimpsed. It reminded her of pets owned when she was younger, taking them to a kennel or the vet; thrust into circ.u.mstances beyond their understanding, their warm furry bodies seeming smaller as they huddled, gripped by fear's seizure. Her heart would break, always.

Clay, trembling.

"But I remembered a few weeks ago I said I'd keep talking to you because it could be one more step toward understanding myself. That's why I'm here now. I might not always like what I find out, or even take it very well ... but all I want to do is stay in this for the duration."

The quest for self-knowledge was a n.o.ble endeavor, as she saw it, but it didn't exist in a vacuum. Clay could look within, and she could show him where, could help dry the tears when what he saw there seemed too ugly or hopeless to bear.

But it had gone beyond that now: Clay one of the rarest genetic commodities in existence, one of less than a dozen living known Helverson's syndrome lab rats on the globe. What had been a routinely simple, balanced doctor-patient dyad was opened up to accommodate new strangers with degrees, with hypotheses, with agendas of own, and a never-ending catalog of questions.

Who comprises his biological family?

Has he any brothers, sisters?

Any children that he has fathered?

Any somatic deviations noted - physiological, biochemical, neurological, and so forth?

Any p.r.o.nounced differences in his healing faculties?

What behavioral patterns are exhibited when he is confronted with a controlled battery of stress-inducing stimuli?

May we have additional tissue samples?