Prototype

by Brian Hodge

  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. Th
e 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.

  Thirty-Three

  Adrienne was proud of herself. Up before nine, a shower and a hurried breakfast in the room, twenty minutes on the road to Kendra Madigan's home, and not a single derisive comment the whole time. She was either growing up or becoming inured to this odyssey of Clay's. Certainly her stake in it had dwindled with each day and passing mile, until there were moments when she felt like little more than a concerned bystander.

  "It's after ten," she said along the way. "What do you want to bet there's a supervisor or two in Tempe who'll be wondering where I am before the day's out?"

  "It's Monday morning," Sarah chimed. "Do you know where your job is?"

  Kendra Madigan lived in a quiet neighborhood with a great many trees. The homes were modern but tried not to be. A screened porch here, a row of columns there, a backyard gazebo visible up the block … small touches of an elder South that appeared stapled onto the new, rather than serving as parts of a genuine whole.

  She answered her own door, which briefly took Adrienne by surprise. Subconsciously awed, perhaps, that the woman had thrice published controversial — and best-selling — books on the shadowy layers of the human mind. Didn't people of her ilk employ assistants to dispose of such trivialities as doorbells? Kendra Madigan didn't, and that made her somehow more real, more — dare she entertain the thought? — potentially likable. But even charlatans had their charms, did they not?

  She looked much as Adrienne recalled from her appearance in Tempe, if sporting a touch more gray in her closely trimmed hair. At the moment she wore light yellow sweat-clothes that fit her impeccably. Her skin was richly black and she was in her late forties, given to posture and a gait that Adrienne persisted in seeing as statuesque. She did not so much walk as glide, would not so much sit as levitate.

  "I do remember your face now," she told Sarah while leading them in. "Those occasional letters you wrote? I never could quite put a definite face with them, but let me tell you, you're who I hoped you would be."

  "Letters?" Adrienne said.

  Sarah blushed, caught in the act. "I bought my own stamps."

  Kendra Madigan turned to Clay, even before introductions were formally made. Very smooth, Adrienne observed. Drawing him in at the first possible opportunity.

  "When I lectured at the ASU campus," she told Clay, "they gave a reception that afternoon. Boring things, horrible things, most everyone standing around engaged in intellectual pissing contests, but if they're meeting your fee you do feel an obligation. At this one, one of the grad students was … well, let's describe him as very vocal in his condemnation of me, on theoretical grounds."

  "He was being an asshole," Sarah translated.

  Kendra bestowed a luminous smile. "And you're the one who doused his flame by managing to spill two brimful glasses of champagne into his lap. I remember well, it was the highlight of the afternoon. I never complimented you as I should've, though. You almost made it appear accidental."

  "Looks like I left too early that day," Adrienne said, and it felt as one of those rare bittersweet moments in which you glimpse a lover in a light all her own — Sarah, wholly apart from Adrienne, as if there might not have been an Adrienne, ever. Just Sarah alone, acting on impulse and later neglecting to recount the story. She wished she could have seen it, Sarah delivering comeuppance, sophomoric though it was. She should have been there.

  Kendra led them through the house, charming, disarming, a weaver of spells. From a distant room a grandfather clock intoned a solemn half-hour stroke — ten-thirty. As they passed a broad, open stairway that led to the second floor, Adrienne grew curious to see her bedroom, her private bath; see the real mistress of the house. Was she a closet sloven?

  A rec room ran along the back of the house, and here Kendra took their coats, hanging them in a closet. She sat for a moment to unfasten strangely hooked collars from around her
ankles, then pointed to a metallic framework in one corner that Adrienne had assumed was used for chin-ups.

  "I was doing my morning gravity inversion when you rang," she said. "Fifteen minutes per day. Wonderful for facial skin, they say, and I'll vouch for that. But now I hear it puts dangerous blood pressure on the eyes. They never cease finding the ghastly side effects, do they? Beautiful or blind, why does it have to be such a choice?"

  Clay shrugged. "Either way, your back should hold out fine."

  "Yes. Yes," she said, as if never having considered this. "In life there are few constants, but that must be one of them. You're absolutely right."

  She maintained the small talk for several minutes, and to Adrienne it was apparent that she was attempting to set them all at ease, especially Clay. Had they slept soundly? Where were they staying? Some fierce weather they must have come through farther north. Obviously their situation deviated from the norm she would be used to, with no time to work leisurely around to a protracted session. Now and again, to Clay alone she would direct a question or two, fairly innocuous, subtle in its probing; gaining a feel for the way he answered, how he responded to her.

  Adrienne focused primarily on Clay during such exchanges, her first occasion to watch him relating to another therapist. She began to wonder if she'd not been too hard on herself, too preoccupied with her failure to deliver grand miracles to see evidence of the smaller ones that had been wrought over their months of effort. For this was not the same Clay she had first encountered, who tested his therapist as an adversary. This was not the Clay who had suggested she compensate for his inability to masturbate.

  This was a Clay Palmer who was open to trust.

  And if he could trust, he had hope.

  Kendra requested they follow her down a hall to her office, and what a far cry it was from those Adrienne was used to. Sarah had grown wide-eyed and loose-necked, shuffling a slow pirouette, staring with a naked and grasping wonder at the masks that lined the walls. Here were faces of ritual that, Kendra told them, predated all texts, all histories, faces dipped from wellsprings of myth. Masks from the Old World and the New, from both hemispheres; from Mexican village to Borneo rain forest, from Inuit ice field to African bush. Faces for death and for life, faces for healing, for the supplication of implacable nature, faces for the appeasement of gods whose names she would never hear. And while Adrienne rationally knew that behind those empty eye sockets lay nothing but walls, she still felt watched.