Vestiges of Time

by Richard C. Meredith

  The rear doors of these rooms led to a common hallway that finally ended in a huge bedroom—literally a bedroom, for its entire floor was a single great mattress that reached from wall to wall. A mahogany-paneled console stood in the middle of the room under a circular illumination disk surrounded by mirrors that covered the remainder of the ceiling. EnDera didn’t have to tell me what the mirrors were for, but she did tell me that the console was a combination wet bar, entertainment center with holotank, and clothes closet. She opened one panel of the console to show me the costumes it held for me, an assortment of outfits that included, among other things, a harshly cut uniform that had a very, very military look about it. They were prepared, I could say that about them, these people of the BrathelLanza.

  And so was EnDera.

  “Now,” she said, lowering herself to the mattress- floor, having kicked off her shoes as we entered the room, as I had done also, “I will try to convince you of the wisdom of joining us.”

  “Okay,” I said, a huskiness suddenly coming to my throat.

  She handed me one of the glasses filled with wine. Despite all I’d already drunk that evening, I felt I needed that one too.

  “Come join me, Master HarkosNor,” EnDera said softly, one hand holding the wineglass, the other going to the fasteners that held her gown together in the back. “I think I can at least persuade you to do that.”

  The gown fell away from her breasts and crumpled around her hips. She began to work herself out of it.

  “Yes, you can do that,” I said, and lowered myself beside her.

  She did persuade me.

  Of Replication

  When I awoke the next morning, my mouth filled with the unpleasant aftertaste and thickness of too much wine consumed the night before, and an incipient headache, I found that EnDera was way ahead of me. She had already been up for a while and there was a hot breakfast awaiting me, complete with a steaming cup of coffee—the most inviting thing I saw at the breakfast table, except for EnDera herself, who now wore only a lacy apron that was hardly a covering and couldn’t have been much protection against anything, and a bright flower with yellow petals in the darkness of her long hair. Her welcoming smile was as bright as the flower she wore.

  “Did you sleep well, my lord Harkos?”

  “The sleep of the just and guilt-free,” I said with a touch of sarcasm I don’t think I really meant—at least I didn’t mean for the sarcasm to be aimed at EnDera.

  “What?”

  “Nothing, nothing,” I said, and sat down at the table, now realizing how hungry I was.

  “The lord DessaTyso, AkweNema, and KaphNo will be coming to see you soon,” she said as we ate. “Akwe punched up before you awoke to check on you.”

  I nodded, with a mouthful of food, but made no effort to speak.

  “Akwe was hoping that you’d come to a decision and would speak with them of it this morning.”

  I nodded again, and sipped the hot coffee.

  “Well, have you?”

  After swallowing the coffee and gesturing for En- 52

  Dera to refill the cup, I said: “Last night I said I didn’t think I was really being given much choice in the matter.”

  “That’s what you said.”

  “Well, I’m not. Am I?”

  “Certainly you are. Nobody’s forcing you to do anything.” Was there a mocking smile barely hidden by her composed features?

  “Tell me, frankly, what would happen to me if I refused.”

  She looked at me with a blank expression for long seconds.

  I sipped hot coffee again. “Come on, tell me.”

  “Honestly, Harkos, I don’t know, but. .

  “Ah!” I wagged a finger at her. “If the BrathelLanza is a secret revolutionary organization, as it obviously is, and if the existing government is out to crush all such revolutionary movements, as it obviously must if it is to remain in power, then is AkweNema—the brains behind this revolution, as he seems to be—is he going to turn me, a potential government informer, loose to tell all I know to the government in possible exchange for ‘rewards’ from them?” That was some mouthful to speak that early in the morning, especially since I’d just scalded my tongue with coffee.

  EnDera shook her head. “I don’t know exactly what they would do in that case.” Her eyes seemed to say otherwise.

  “I don’t know exactly, either, but if I were in Akwe- Nema’s shoes, I could think of several things—but none of them would be very pleasant for Master HarkosNor, soldier at arms and intrepid hero.”

  “I see what you’re saying.”

  “It’s got to be the old carrot-and-stick game, EnDera.” I paused, gave her a long, hard, questioning look that somehow evolved into a leer. “And to tell you the truth, my dear, I much prefer the carrot to the stick, one particular carrot indeed.”

  At this she broke into a reluctant smile. “Then you’re going to accept?”

  “Like I said, do I have any choice?”

  When AkweNema and KaphNo led me deeper into the underground complex of the BrathelLanza and began showing me the various parts of it, I was reminded of another underground complex on another Earth, distant across the Lines from this one, and of the people there who had also been plotting a revolution, colonial North America scheming to rise against Mother England. But that place .no longer existed; destroyed by its builders to prevent its capture by the people who came to rescue me from them. And now Sally was waiting for me Somewhere Else. And I missed her and wondered when I would ever see her again.

  Portions of the Underground here were devoted to offices and to sleeping quarters for both the permanently subterranean personnel and those who worked and partially lived in the world above and came into the Underground only on occasion, such as AkweNema and the lord DessaTyso, who still had active parts to play in the society of the surface. Farther back, the offices and quarters gave way to supply dumps, to equipment and materiel they were slowly collecting, building, enlarging, in preparation for the day when the BrathelLanza and its allies would come out of their hidden places and attack the power structure that ruled NakrehVatee.

  Still farther on were large, brightly lighted exercise areas and drill fields carved out of the earth and stone, in which was completed the training of the cadres that would soon issue forth to begin the training of others around the nation. The uniforms they wore, the men and women who were presently the crack forces of the BrathelLanza, were not greatly unlike those worn by the armies of many another world: blouses and slacks

  of tan—khaki, the word was in some places—metal helmets, heavy boots; and the weapons with which they exercised were bright and sparkling, highly sophisticated automatic rifles and pistols capable of throwing leaden slugs or explosive shells great distances with a high degree of accuracy, compact particle-beam weapons and hand-held lasers capable of projecting fragments of shattered atoms, electrons, protons, beams of coherent light and heat. Unfortunately, however, the soldiers were not as sophisticated as their weapons. But then, I suppose, that’s why they wanted someone like me.

  And beyond the training areas lay the biological laboratories. This was where I would be occupied initially. Only later would I be spending the bulk of my time in the training areas, drilling my troops and advising the training of others.

  We entered the bright, antiseptic labs, smelled the clean, almost sterile air, watched the efficient movements of the physicians and scientists and technicians as they went about their esoteric business—esoteric to me; but now I could see that old KaphNo was finally in his element. He seemed a different man, alive, excited, animated by his love for the laboratories and what was taking place in them.

  “Everything is ready for you, Master HarkosNor— or should I say ‘General’ HarkosNor?” KaphNo said, beaming at me. “We could even begin today if you wish.” He paused for a moment, ruminated. “We have several human replicates, which you will see later, in various stages of maturation, developing with no indication of trouble
.

  “In fact,” he said, speaking more slowly, more emphatically, “we even have several fully matured replicates living in the Underground now. You would not be able to distinguish them from other people—in fact, I’ll see that you meet one of them soon, and you can see for yourself what I mean.

  “Yes, all in all, everything is proceeding even better than we had expected. We anticipate no problems in cloning several hundred replicates from the cells of your tissues.”

  “That’s very good,” AkweNema said, a strange, uneasy expression passing across his face. “Perhaps Thefe- Ra could give the general a tour of the replication facilities.”

  “Of course,” KaphNo said, and gestured toward two white-clad men who stood discussing something at a table not far away.

  The two men joined us and were introduced. The elder, a tall, thin, almost cadaverous man with a great shock of white hair, was named ThefeRa and was both a physician and a microbiologist specializing in replication processes: in short, a “genetic engineer.” He was, under KaphNo, the project’s head.

  The other, a shorter, heavier, young man, with unusually handsome features, was named SkorTho. He also was a microbiologist and served as ThefeRa’s second in command.

  When the introductions were completed, ThefeRa led us into the section of the laboratories that was. to be of particular interest to me.

  “This is our operating room,” the white-haired physician said, gesturing with his left hand toward a large set of white doors. He glanced at AkweNema and KaphNo, then back at me, and said: “When you are ready, General, it is here that we will take the sample tissues from which your replicates will be grown.”

  “A painless operation, I assure you,” AkweNema put in, sounding like the physician he was. “A simple biopsy, a few thousand cells you’ll never miss. That’s all.”

  I shrugged.

  Farther on: ThefeRa gesturing, speaking. “In these rooms the cells we will have taken from your body will

  be placed in special media which will provide them with ample nutrition and in which they will be encouraged to grow, to reproduce. At this stage, all we want is to establish that the cells will breed true—that is, skin cells produce more skin cells, muscle cells more muscle cells, whatever.”

  “In essence,” KaphNo interjected, “the sample cells from your body will be encouraged to reproduce themselves a number of times over, so that when we are finished here we will have a much larger amount of tissue with which to work.”

  It all sounded rather grotesque to me, and I wasn’t certain that I wanted to see that actual process. I mean, that would be my tissue, all raw and naked, growing like the still-beating heart of some long-dead chicken. Ugh!

  “Not so long ago,” KaphNo was saying into my gruesome thoughts, “the process of developing a viable replicate was a much more complex and less trustworthy operation. We have refined and simplified the process greatly here in recent years, thanks largely to the efforts of ThefeRa and SkorTho.”

  The two genetic engineers somehow managed to look both humble and proud at the same time.

  “Not so long ago,” KaphNo continued, “we could reproduce only viable female replicates by a rather messy and involved process which involved the transplantation of a cell nucleus from the body of a donor into a fertilized egg cell from which the nucleus had been removed, and then this egg had to be implanted into the womb of a surrogate mother.”

  Looking proud of himself and his co-workers, the old scientist said, “Well, now we have been able to bypass the egg-cell implant stage and the surrogate mother altogether. We can persuade an even rather specialized cell to develop embryonically. The womb of the surrogate mother has been replaced by some

  thing that I can only call a marvel of engineering. You will see what I’m referring to shortly.”

  “The next step,” ThefeRa said into the silence following the end of KaphNo’s speech, gesturing toward another pair of white doors, “once we have what we feel to be a sufficient culture to work with, will be the separation of individual cells from the clone mass. That’s where the word ‘clone’ comes from, you know, a Greek word meaning ‘throng.’ We apply it to a heterogeneous mass of genetically identical cells.”

  “I know,” I said, not mentioning that a version of the Greek language had been my native tongue. They didn’t need to know that.

  “And that is why,” KaphNo said, “we prefer the word ‘replicate’ to ‘clone’ when speaking of the individual produced by this process.”

  I nodded, understanding.

  “Once replication has sucessfully begun,” the physician ThefeRa continued, “the embryos—for at this stage they can be considered embryos, having no zygotic stage in the true sense of the term—are transferred to another room. For the first few days the embryonic replicates are kept under constant surveillance. At this stage we lose about one out of every three embryos.” “Lose?” I asked, unable to constrain myself. I was getting curious about this whole thing; after all, weren’t they going to grow some new mes here?

  KaphNo answered: “This science is still in its infancy, General. And it is here in this room that we must catch the bulk of qur mistakes. Faulty stimulation of genetic patterns. Failure of replication processes. Mutations—even underground here there’s more radiation than we would like. Other genetic defects caused by the very methods we are using. One third of the embryos we bring into this room are not suitable for further cultivation. By the time the embryos leave this room, we will have lost seven out of every

  eight of the cells we started with. That is why we need a relatively large number of cells initially.”

  Again I felt that tug of revulsion. Maybe I didn’t have as strong a stomach as I’d thought.

  “At the end of this stage, however,” ThefeRa picked up the narrative, “we can be certain of the survival of a large percentage of the embryos. From here they will be transferred to the room ahead and on our right, where we can begin to apply certain growth-accelera- tion techniques we have developed that will . . .”

  On and on we went, from room to room, lab to lab, ThefeRa and KaphNo leading, AkweNema and I behind, the microbiologist SkorTho silently bringing up the rear. And as we went I was shown the various stages of growth through which the replicates would pass, was shown various human replicates in the actual process of growth and development, spanning years of maturation in days.

  “We have three types of vessels for the postnatal replicates,” said ThefeRa at one point. “We have coined the word ‘encanter’ for the replication vessels, which you are about to see. The smallest of these are for replicates with a chronological maturity from ‘birth’ up to six years.”

  An encanter, it turned out, was something like a cross between a Skinner box and an overgrown test tube and looked something like a deranged chemist’s idea of a tropical-fish aquarium.

  ThefeRa led us into a long, low room, the walls of which were lined with glass cylinders each about four feet tall and two feet in diameter. Beside each cylinder was a large electronic console more complex than the controls of a good-size cargo skudder, with banks of dials, gauges, meters, buttons, switches, and CRTs. The cylinders themselves were topped by large metal rings from which tubes or pipes ran back into boxes and junctions in the wall. From the bases of the cylinders similar tubes ran into similar boxes and junctions at

  the bases of the consoles. In all there appeared to be several hundred of these cylinder-console combinations. The cost must have been enormous.

  Then ThefeRa led us down the row of cylinders until he reached one that stood a hundred feet or so from the door through which we’d entered.

  “This should prove interesting to you,” he said, gesturing for me to come nearer.

  Before I even reached ThefeRa, several things about this particular setup became obvious to me. Initially: the console that stood beside and was connected to the cylinder was not dark and quiet as had been the others —its panels were lighted, tiny indicator lights flicker
ed on and off, meters showed various readings, and the console itself hummed with electrical life. Next: the cylinder beside the console was less transparent than the others, filled with a thick, murky fluid that seemed to be in constant motion.

  “See him?” ThefeRa asked.

  I bent slightly, peered into the cylinder. I saw him.

  The form of a naked boy of about five years old hung/swam suspended in the liquid, long, dark hair swaying in the gentle motion of the cylinder’s fluid contents. His eyes were closed, and my first impression was that he was dead—a grotesque display of child murder committed by some maddened scientist of the underground laboratories. Then I saw that his chest rose and fell with a slow but unmistakable rhythm.

  “The liquid in which he floats contains oxygen which the lungs are capable of extracting,” ThefeRa said, seeing the look in my eyes. “He is alive and well, developing physiologically normally in almost every way.”

  “Except for the rate of growth,” KaphNo said, coming up behind me. “We began the replication process eight weeks ago, and now he shows a maturation of about five and a third years.”

  “How—how long,” I stammered, “how long until he’s, ah, mature?”

  “We will able to carry him to a maturation level of eighteen years over a period of just less than ten months. But don’t try to work out the direct chronological equivalents in normal maturity. There is not a one-to-one congruity. Some stages we can accelerate more, some less.”

  I nodded, too flooded with information to speak at that moment, and in my silence the scientists led me on down the row of encanters and showed me the two “brothers” of the boy—two more replicates genetically identical with the first, triplets growing in the laboratories of the BrathelLanza deep beneath the surface of the Earth.

  I was not told their names—if they yet had names —or who had donated the cells from which they were growing. Perhaps it wasn’t important.