Selected Stories: Volume 1

by Kevin J. Anderson

  “Sense? Those people at the south gate have an excuse: they’re ignorant. But we worked together, so I thought—”

  “You didn’t think twice about me when you published that paper, the one on mammoth genes.”

  “Right, you did some of the preliminary scans on the gene lines. A grad student for two years, then left.”

  Kinsman took on a self-righteous air. “I disagreed with the work, once I understood what you were doing.”

  “So what was your gripe? Was it because I ‘didn’t think twice’ about you?”

  “Neither of you even asked if I wanted my name on that paper.”

  Alex shook his head. “You were doing straightforward stuff. Not original. Sorry if we didn’t acknowledge you—” He couldn’t even remember for sure.

  “Oh, there was a paragraph at the end, thanking me and a dozen others, sure.”

  Alex smiled slightly. “You wanted to be on the paper. Is that what this is about?”

  “No, damn it!” But Kinsman’s flushed face belied his words. “I just thought you’d listen to me because I was a lab grunt for you once. Maybe your money has insulated you from the arguments against this entire—”

  Alex held up a hand, quick and decisive. “Already heard them. Before I took you on as a grad student, I had invented most of the arguments. Or my wife had. But we thought it through. Decided for ourselves.”

  Kinsman blinked, looking taken aback at Alex’s bluntness. He must have had plenty of time to rehearse this confrontation while backpacking across Helyx wilderness property, Alex mused, but a lot of emotion churned in his face. There had been a lot of grad students in Alex’s lab then, most of them doing routine tasks to get experience. Somehow this one had left little impression on him. But clearly that old, simple paper had been a big deal to Kinsman. Students normally didn’t get their names on technical papers unless they did something creative, but Kinsman had apparently taken that irritating grain of sand and turned it into this pearl of a grudge. Alex had never been really good at judging people, but his years leading a stupendously successful company had sharpened what little skill he naturally had.

  Nothing brings enemies out of the woodwork more effectively than success.

  “Okay, let me talk some sense into you.” Alex gestured toward the old oaks that towered near the barn and the ranch buildings. The immense, gnarled trees were majestic and stately—and full of birds. “Look over there, Dr. Kinsman. Beautiful birds, graceful. You should see them fly at sunset, like a cloud.” Even without squinting, he could pick out a dozen nests in the branches, and the constant shifting, cooing, fluttering made the branches tremble.

  “I didn’t come here to look at birds, Dr. Pierce.” He spat out the title.

  Alex turned to him sharply. “You should. Once they blackened the skies; billions of them in North America when Columbus landed. But it was in their nature to nest in huge colonies, only in big stands of oaks or beeches, which made them easy prey. Over the centuries settlers cut down the oaks and beeches for firewood and lumber, or just to clear farmland. Hunters shot millions of those birds, usually for sport, though they shipped the carcasses to the cities by the barrelful.”

  Kinsman looked impatient, then startled. “Those are—”

  “Passenger pigeons lay only one egg each spring. They couldn’t possibly reproduce faster than they were slaughtered. It was genocide, pure and simple, Dr. Kinsman, perpetrated by human beings. The last passenger pigeon died in 1914 in the Cincinnati Zoo, and the species was extinct in a historical blink of an eye. Until Helyx brought them back.” Alex couldn’t keep the happy pride out of his voice.

  Kinsman, though, looked disgusted to the point of being ill. “Extinction is Nature’s way, Pierce—for whatever reason. You can congratulate yourself for the hubris of your genetic breakthroughs, but can you honestly say the world is a better place because you have brought back a … pigeon?” He waved dismissively toward the oaks. As if at a signal, several of the birds took flight, ruby-throated, with lovely gray body feathers and long pointed tails. “Your means are dangerous, and your ends are utterly inconsequential. Pigeons!” The fire in Kinsman’s eyes made Alex reconsider the wisdom of having sent his security chief away so quickly. “You’re a big shot businessman—what possible market can there be for passenger pigeons. For zoos? Pets? Meat?”

  “Market talk is what I feed the Board, but that doesn’t even start to explain why I’m here.” He allowed a small, self-deprecating smile. “I didn’t want to go down in history as Dr. Diarrhea.” Alex turned from the split-rail fence. “Come have a look. Maybe we can use a crowbar to open your mind.”

  Inside, the lab was a mix of cool high-tech surfaces and ancient woods, the barn’s past never wholly banished. Consoles and elaborate digital diagnostics stood next to old feed cabinets, still useful for storage. High spotlights gave the scene an evenly lighted patina and crisp, conditioned air fought the old horsy smells and new disinfectants. Chrome countertops sat next to wooden fences and thick wire-mesh cages.

  “Not many people get to see this, Dr. Kinsman,” Alex said.

  “Not many people should.”

  Why do I try? he thought. If Kinsman wasn’t a colleague …

  Inside a shoulder-high pen stood two gawky-looking birds like giant chickens with stretched necks. They had mottled brown feathers, lizard-like feet, and towered nearly ten feet tall.

  “This is our first mating pair of moas, a New Zealand bird that went extinct sometime in the 1600s.” Elated notes crept into Alex’s voice, but he saw no wonder in Kinsman’s eyes. “We’re currently in our third-generation retrograde development of the Tasmanian tiger, too. But the lack of a close sibling-species as well as general difficulties in dealing with the marsupial gestation process has caused some delays.”

  He glanced toward the set of thick doors and reinforced windows at the back of the Pleistocene Hospital. Kinsman looked suspiciously at the closed-off rooms … but Alex didn’t think the man was ready for that sight yet. “Other resurrected animals,” he explained with an offhanded comment. “Look, I don’t have time to show you everything. It’s obvious you’re more interested in proselytizing than in science.”

  A rotund bird higher than a man’s knee waddled across the floor, looking comical, its black beak blunt and ugly, its eyes innocent. Two stubby wings betrayed the flightless nature of the bird, which moved at a rapid, though ungainly, clip. A tufted curlicue of feathers poked up like a pigtail from its rear. The bird prodded around in corners, pecked at imaginary insects, as if it had forgotten where its food dish was.

  This time Kinsman stared. “Dodos, too?” The dapper man leaned forward and took out his pen, pointing it at Alex as if it were a symphony conductor’s baton. “Where will you stop, Pierce? Do you intend to bring back smallpox as well? Or any number of vermin the world is better off without? Have you no respect for the natural order?”

  Alex picked up the ungainly bird and carried it squawking to a bowl of grain. The dodo immediately forgot its annoyance and began to gobble the corn. “These birds lived quite nicely on the island of Mauritius until European sailors came and killed them for food. That wasn’t so bad, but the sailors also let loose dogs, rats, and hogs, which ate the dodo’s eggs. It took only a century or two for the entire species to be wiped out.” He scratched the feathers on the turkey-sized bird. “What, exactly, is natural about that?”

  Kinsman directed a condescending look at Alex Pierce—who captained a gigantic corporation, who had developed a cure for the digestive misery of billions—as if he were an ill-educated child. “You can’t possibly predict the long-term consequences of your tampering. Forced breeding, gene selection, wombs implanted with embryos they were never meant to carry. Why must you push things so much?”

  “Because I don’t have time to waste,” Alex said mildly. “Evolution can meander all it likes. We have calendars.”

  Kinsman sniffed, clicked his pen twice in a nervous gesture. “Mankind is part of the
natural order, Pierce, the dominant species on Earth, while other species failed along the way.”

  “Sometimes with a little help from us. What’s wrong with rectifying that?”

  Kinsman tossed his pen onto a cluttered desk and actually clasped his hands together in a melodramatic beseeching gesture. “What makes extinction caused by human interference so different from extinction due to, say, a huge asteroid impact? Will you try to bring back dinosaurs next?” He scoffed. “Or woolly mammoths? I’ve heard what you have back in your valleys.”

  Alex maintained a noncommittal expression. “Rumors.”

  “Satellite photos.”

  Alex didn’t respond, trying to hide his surprise that Kinsman and his protesters could have gotten such high-resolution images from the Feds.

  Kinsman pressed his advantage. “I want to see them, Pierce.”

  Blocked from view by a thick stand of Ponderosa pines, the corral had once been used for breaking horses. But Helyx had reinforced the fences, added motion detectors and voltage zappers, and made the barricades much taller. As needed.

  Inside the enclosure, Susan studied two of the first-generation hybrids, giving each one a standard monthly physical exam. Maybe Kinsman would be satisfied with this.

  When she saw her husband pass through the double gate, Susan’s face lit up. They had spoken via earlink after he’d arrived back from Miami, but both of them had been too absorbed with ranch duties to see each other before now. They would have plenty of time tonight, camping out under the stars, back where no one could find them.…

  Susan rang the old notes in him with a little breath, a flash of a smile. He had called those eyes “molasses brown” because when he looked into them he felt stuck and never wanted to look away. High cheekbones, luxuriant brown hair, a delicious set of curves artfully set off in a blue blouse atop trim black jeans. She greeted Alex with a broad smile, but when she saw Kinsman follow him into the corral, she immediately adopted a more businesslike expression.

  “Susan, this is Geoffrey Kinsman. Remember, he was a grad student back—”

  “Oh, yes. And now a member of our loyal opposition.” Her voice was neutral, neither friendly nor antagonistic.

  “I came to see your mammoths. I didn’t know whether I could believe the appalling—”

  Susan immediately clued in with just a glance at her husband. “Actually, these are ‘mammophants.’ Just a first-generation hybrid, still far from being an actual mammoth, Mr. Kinsman.”

  “Please, it’s Doctor Kinsman. I got my degree at—”

  “This one is Short Stuff,” she continued without the slightest hesitation and stepped close to the oldest of the mixed-breeds, a docile gray-haired beast with rumpled skin and big eyes, a trunk shortened to a few feet, and no tail. “We used mammoth DNA from Siberia, inserted it into a female elephant’s egg, and let the mother bring the baby to term with a lot of uterine monitoring.”

  Playfully, Susan reached up and slapped Short Stuff’s rump, and the tall beast ambled a few feet, then stopped to munch from a pile of sage-green hay piled near a corrugated water trough. “And she’s a sweetie.”

  Alex knew the details, had lived with them for a decade. Short Stuff was not a pure mammoth because she had spent twenty-two months in an Asian elephant’s womb, sharing the chemical and hormonal bath evolved for elephants alone. But the womb had proved similar enough to a mammoth’s, or the hybrid would have spontaneously aborted.

  “We’re learning the hard way that there’s a critical conversation between the genes and the womb,” Susan said. “Call it feminine knowledge. So we’re still working to get the right dialog between the mammoth genes and the wombs of each new generation.”

  Indeed, Short Stuff’s womb had turned out to be a much better approximation, and using the sperm of the first male, Middle Man, their offspring was even closer.

  “You can sure see the original elephant genes showing through.” Susan lifted Short Stuff’s leathery left ear, as big as a blanket. “No woolly mammoth had this large an ear. It would lose too much heat in an Ice Age climate. Most of Short Stuff’s body was designed for the tropics—she’s got a hide that stands up under strong sun. Still, you can see the beginnings of hair, an extra coat to keep her warm. A step in the right direction.”

  She talked faster as Kinsman’s frowning displeasure became more obvious. Susan moved to the other big animal in the corral, the first hybrid male. He snorted, curled his trunk, but she fearlessly thrust a hand into the sparse pelt beneath the massive mouth to reveal stubby, gray-brown shafts. “See Middle Man’s tusks? Pretty short for now, but they’ll grow longer than any elephant’s.”

  Susan rubbed her hands along Middle Man’s midsection, eliciting a pleased sort of grunt.

  Kinsman ground his teeth—the first time Alex had ever seen anyone do that, outside of movies. “And what is the point of this nonsense animal? The pure species died out long ago, and your interbreeding process creates only a succession of polyglot monstrosities.”

  Susan gave him her patented I-don’t-suffer-fools-gladly expression. “Exactly. Did you think species just jumped in one shot to a completely different form? That’s why it’s called evolution.”

  Kinsman eyed the two hairy elephants in the corral. “Evolution didn’t make these forms—”

  “Right. We did,” Susan shot back. “Unlike evolution, we have a goal. Short Stuff and Middle Man are investments for the next generation.”

  Alex smiled; his wife was a better debater than he could ever be. And she wasn’t giving away anything technical, either, trying to swamp Kinsman with pizzazz. He did not need to know how far the plan had already progressed.

  Mammoth DNA was a heritage that belonged to all humanity—paid for with private money, part of the fortune Alex had earned as “Dr. Diarrhea.” Early on, before he’d learned to keep quiet about Helyx’s activities here, he and Susan had published a joint paper—the one Kinsman had done some routine lab work on—showing that the difference between elephants and mammoths was only a few dozen critical loci. The media speculation that provoked taught them to keep their work quiet. Every journalist could see the potential, write a quick deep-think piece. But making the project happen was a career.

  “You frighten me,” Kinsman said, looking from Susan to Alex. “Both of you. Our environment is a vast and complicated system that adapts to changes through delicate checks and balances. Dodos and passenger pigeons and moas—and, yes, mammoths—were removed from Earth’s equation long ago, and your meddling may well throw everything out of balance again.”

  “That’s an awfully sophisticated argument for a bunch of protesters who usually can’t come up with anything more pithy than ‘It’s not nice to fool with Mother Nature.’”

  Kinsman dismissed his cohorts down at the south gate. “They’re just afraid of genetic engineering on general principles. They don’t need any deeper argument than that.”

  “No, I don’t suppose they do. People like that have always used their ignorance as a weapon.” And often it turned to violence.

  Kinsman backed toward the gate, as if afraid to get any closer to the gentle hybrids. “Your work is immoral, even aside from the ethical issues. Introducing a big grazer into lands that cows and sheep have already depleted is sure to have a major impact on the environment.”

  “Helyx’s track record speaks for itself. We’re concerned about the environment—and it isn’t just corporate bullshit either,” Alex said with a sigh. Whatever hope he had harbored that a real biologist would be open to rational ideas faded as Kinsman’s sour scowl deepened.

  As a last shot, the man said, “You have to know that a lot of us in this world think what you’re doing here is, at the very least, ugly.” He flicked a disapproving glance at the furry mammophants wandering around the enclosure.

  Alex could tell the discussion was over, and he knew Susan was already close to losing her cool. “I could tell you things—ugly things—that’d make your ears curl up in self
-defense.”

  He remembered news images dating all the way back to the late twentieth century: Eco-terrorists burning fields of modified rice that would have grown in the alkaline soil and brackish water of the poorest Third World countries. Or ripping up experimental plantings of frost-resistant strawberries, like children throwing a tantrum. Later, assassinating a researcher who was developing a protozoan symbiote that would have enabled starving populations to break down cellulose and digest some forms of grass.

  And if they were caught afterward, the violent protesters always seemed smug and self-justified! Thick-headed fools …

  All of those things would have helped the human population, fed millions, improved the quality of life worldwide. And yet the rowdy rabble felt they were in a better position to decide what was best for the world than all the blue-ribbon panels of experts and all the United Nations committees. Yes, indeed, they sure seemed to have the best interests of humanity uppermost in their minds.

  He pointedly nudged Kinsman through the gates of the corral before Susan could lash out at him, then used the direct-connect uplink in his spex to summon Ralph and a security escort. “It’s time for you to go. You’ve had your say … I just wish you’d had your ‘listen.’”

  When they emerged from the dense pines around the corral, Ralph was already there to take him away.

  It wasn’t until later that Alex discovered Kinsman had left his pen behind inside the Pleistocene Hospital. Rather than hurrying to give it back to the educated Luddite—was that an oxymoron?—he tossed it into a desk drawer in disgust. He had better things to look forward to that evening.

  Alex rode his strong black gelding uphill, stretching himself and enjoying the zest of at last getting away from the office, far away, with Susan and the young ranch hand Cassie Worth. Clement Valley was about as deep in the wilderness as he could go and still remain on his vast acreage.

  After the irksome arguments and corporate busyness of the afternoon, this was heaven. He had spurned the convenience of using a company jeep; taking the horses felt more natural, more real. As the dense alders and ponderosa pines closed around the narrowing four-wheel-drive road, they rapidly left the log cabin lab buildings and the Pleistocene Hospital behind.