The Beginning of Sorrows Read online

  Zoan faced the magnificent cat, motionless as stone. The savage light of blood-lust fired in the green eyes. Suddenly, without warning, she launched herself. The movement was too quick to follow, just a tawny flash of light. Zoan, unafraid and stern, threw up his hand and cried out with a loud voice, a sound from the depths of his soul. Mid-leap, the jaguar dropped. Growling gutterally, she advanced, her paws silent on the green grass. She stopped right at Zoan’s feet, looked up at him with those hypnotic green eyes . . . and then, like a kitten, started rubbing her face against Zoan’s leg. She was big enough and strong enough that she almost unsettled him.

  He leaned down to rub her head, right between the ears, just as he knew she would like. “No, you can’t have calf for breakfast. But never mind, I’ll find you something else you’ll like.” Zoan gave one glance at the yearling. “You go back to your mother, you foolish calf.” Sharply he clapped his hands. Wild-eyed, the yearling wheeled and raced across the field, his hoofs making a miniature thunder that faded quickly. “Come along, Cat,” he murmured, giving the jaguar a final pat on the sleek flank. He ambled toward the barn, and the jaguar followed him as meekly as a pet dog.

  A simple, clean peace washed over Zoan. The Wrong is over and the Bad Thing didn’t happen. He felt good about this and began to sing. He had a pleasant, surprisingly deep baritone voice and the song he sang was an ancient one. He had no idea how old it was, and he didn’t know what the words meant. It just seemed he had always known it.

  Ring around the rosy,

  Pocket full of posies,

  Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

  “How did he do that, Niklas?”

  Alia Silverthorne watched Zoan and the jaguar. She was standing beside Dr. Niklas Kesteven, a big, shambling man with thick, curly brown hair worn very long. Indeed he was built so strongly with his barrel chest that he seemed to overshadow her. He had watchful eyes, dark brown shaded by thick lashes, and a mustache and beard of the same shade. His teeth were big and white and there was a small space between the front two that he had never felt it worthwhile to repair.

  He turned to study the woman who stood beside him. “You’re curious about things, aren’t you, Alia?” He examined her in an analytical fashion—much as he would have examined an insect under a microscope. As a scientist it was his habit to put everything in a box, but he had not been able to do this completely with this woman. She was twenty-five years old, twenty years his junior. Methodically he picked out from the gray depths of his brain the facts concerning Commissar Alia Silverthorne. Such statistics came easily to Kesteven, for he had that sort of memory.

  He knew, for example, that Alia had failed to make it through Navy SEAL training. The fact that no woman ever had did not comfort her, and the fact that the navy had given her the opportunity didn’t minimize her antagonism toward all things military one bit. As the Bard said, Hell hath no fury as a woman scorned . . ., he reflected, and Alia Silverthorne could simmer with fury, though she never had with him. However, he had long known, and seen, that her failure was a bitterness that lurked under the surface of her confident and smooth demeanor.

  After Alia’s tour of duty with the U.S. Navy, she had applied to the Sixth Directorate, the enforcement arm of the Man and Biosphere Project. Though they preferred to be called “the MAB Project compliance monitors,” they were in fact enforcers, and well-trained and elite ones at that. Alia was well-suited for this job, for she was, though rather short, extremely strong and agile. She had a tremendously short reaction time, for she had mastered every form of the martial arts in existence, and was deadly in hand-to-hand combat. Her daily training schedule—self-imposed—was still excruciating. Niklas supposed she was still punishing herself for not being good enough to be a SEAL.

  “Yes, I am curious,” Alia was answering his idle question. “I always have been. I’ve just got to know how that boy stopped that jaguar from having the calf for breakfast.”

  Niklas slipped his arm around the woman. He had the sense of tight strength in her firm body, and he clearly felt her reaction to him. He had always been good with women, able to read them, able to bring them to do whatever he wished them to do. This one, however, was a little different; perhaps that was why he kept her close. Even now he felt her instinctive response—she turned slightly, moving so that she pressed more closely against him—yet at the same time he sensed that part of her was holding back. Still, when she looked up at him, there seemed to be no aloofness in her gaze. Her eyes were golden brown, with an areola of hazel around the pupils, lending her a strangely intent look. Alia had straight, no-nonsense brows and her heavy brown hair was cut in the rather masculine manner that was so fashionable among female commissars: short, spiked crew on top, with a small queue bound behind her head with a plain silver ring.

  She was impatient with his casual assessment of her, particularly the way he was making foul faces at her hair. Niklas hated her hair. “Go on, Niklas, tell me about your pet, Zoan. You never have. I’ve heard some of the lab rabble call him ‘Frankenstein.’ Why is that?”

  Kesteven withdrew his arm from around her waist and leaned against the side of the Humvee V. The two had come out at dawn to watch the sunrise, and had watched, unnoticed by Zoan, as he had encountered the jaguar. Kesteven had been a professor for many years and there was still some of that in him. Although his lecturing days were over, he did enjoy explaining things to Alia.

  “Zoan’s the only successful product of two programs in the SS Biome lab—Experimental Embryology and the Structured Embryonic Development Studies.”

  “Oh, that’s EE and SEDS. I remember the static about them.”

  “Exactly. They were formulated to bring a human embryo to full-term in an artificial environment.”

  “Yes . . . but they sort of faded off the screen . . .”

  “Little wonder.” Kesteven’s voice grew chilly and his eyes suddenly flared with something close to anger. “The EE/SEDS team were fools. For twenty years, at the beginning of the century when the demand for artificially carried children was great, they tried. The embryos were fertilized artificially, then implanted into mechanical incubators.”

  “Twenty years? With no success at all?”

  “Not for fifteen years. All the embryos died, most of them in the first trimester. Then they had a breakthrough from ‘15 to ‘28, about a 50 percent success rate in bringing the embryos to the second trimester. Two percent of them came to the third trimester. But only one embryo was ever carried to full-term in the incubators.”

  Alia studied Niklas Kesteven’s eyes. She was a strong woman in ways other than physical, and she wasn’t intimidated by him, not exactly; but her relationship with Niklas was not at all what she wanted. He treated her with condescension sometimes. Although she was not brilliant, she was keenly intelligent. Her only formal education had been in military tactics and strategy. With no scientific background at all, Alia felt ill at ease around him, as he often showed such disdain for anyone who was not a scientist, and a brilliant one at that. However, Niklas usually was affectionate with her, and kind most of the time. Alia knew about all of his other women, but she comforted herself with the fact that he always came back to her. She did not know it, but Niklas Kesteven was her greatest weakness. Now she frowned and asked tentatively, “So— you’re saying that Zoan is a creation of that program?”

  “Yes. Actually he’s my success. It was I who thought of adding allantois to the amniotic fluid in the incubators. It wasn’t part of the protocols, but the EE/SEDS team trusted my judgment.”

  He watched her, his eyelids dropping to conceal his eyes. It gave him a mildly supercilious expression, and Alia gave in to his ego and asked him, “All right, Niklas, what is allantois?”

  “It’s an element of reptile and bird eggs, not normally found in human embryonic development. It stores and purifies the nitrogenous wastes of the embryo. Zoan was the first implant to have allantois added and he was brought to full-term. Oddly enough, he was the only
one who ever survived; soon after his birth the program was canceled. He was the first, and the last . . .”

  A frown creased his face. “Zoan wasn’t a strong baby. He suffered from ‘failure to thrive,’ a condition that had all but disappeared from medical technology. Put simply, it meant that he was sickly. It was a fairly common syndrome in the previous century, in the babies of alcoholics and drug abusers. But it was unheard of by the time Zoan was born. Anyway, he had respiratory infections, colic, inexplicable fevers. He had jaundice before he was a month old. I didn’t think the little yellow worm was going to make it.” He laughed harshly. “That was when the EE/SEDS team ran fast and took cover.”

  “What did they do? Throw him in the sterile waste receptacle?” Alia grunted.

  “Not quite that bad, but I think Zoan would have died if it hadn’t been for me. He was being kept in a sterile lab with no color, no toys, no visual or audio stimulation. I told them to act like they had some trace of human brain cells and paint the room, play some music, hang a mobile or two. I told them to talk to him.”

  “Did they?”

  He shrugged, his sharp eyes narrowing as he watched the barn door where Zoan and the jaguar had disappeared. The sun’s rays, slanting over the gold and vermillion desert, were growing warm, and Niklas’s cheeks above the heavy beard were flushed. “Doubt it. They wouldn’t have had any idea what to say to a baby, unless they quoted him the periodic table or explained the DNA helix to him . . . still, it might have made a difference if they even did that . . .”

  “What do you mean?” Alia asked curiously.

  “Zoan survived, yes, but he still hasn’t thrived. Not mentally. As soon as he grew older, the assessments showed that he was different, and that’s why there was never a lot of publicity about this ‘success’ of EE and SEDS.”

  Alia nodded. “They didn’t want to publicize him.”

  “Yes, even when he was very young, the lack of energy, physical and mental, was obvious. Zoan was almost nonresponsive to any intellectual stimulus. He just seemed mentally unable to process information or to recall it. His physiological testing was exhaustive. He’s perfectly normal, including all brain wave patterns. He does have one interesting anomaly—an extremely high visual acuity. But that’s the only abnormal thing about him. That we can objectively measure, anyway.”

  “But—aside from charming jaguars—how functional is he in reality? He doesn’t seem very intelligent at all.”

  “Well, that’s the wrong word to use with Zoan. He’s functional, all right, it’s just on a level that I haven’t quite figured out yet. And the cooks and maids and other peons call him Frankenstein because he has almost no social skills.”

  “Because he’s a lab creation.”

  “Yes, although that’s not scientifically accurate.”

  “Well, you can’t really say he’s human.”

  Niklas gave her a hard-eyed stare. Alia, like most people, had not seen many people who were different, or odd, in any way. Most embryos who were determined to be handicapped were aborted promptly. Those that weren’t were institutionalized immediately. Society these days was not so tolerant of any individualists, for any reason. “I’d not be so quick to say that,” Niklas said in a bored tone. “Zoan’s just different. Unique, you might say.”

  “You still haven’t explained how he stopped the jaguar from attacking the calf.”

  “I can’t tell you that, but I have observed that he has a strange affinity with animals. He almost seems to join himself with them. I’ve studied it, off and on, for years. He’s very good at taking care of animals, better than the vets.”

  “But what does he actually do with himself?”

  “He does janitorial work, things like that. And he does take care of the farm animals. He even helps the vets sometimes with the biome samples we bring here. Last month someone brought in a wounded coyote; I forget what was wrong with it. Anyway, the vet told me that Zoan knew better than she did how to take care of him.”

  Alia eyed him with a hint of disbelief. “You’re fond of him.”

  “He’s fond of me.” Kesteven straightened, rubbed his beard restlessly. “Zoan’s always at ease with me. Never asks questions or demands attention. He’s always been that way.”

  Alia noticed that Kesteven did not exactly respond to her observation directly. It came to her suddenly that he was not a man particularly fond of anyone—really even of her. This pained her but, as always, she took great pains not to let Niklas know. In an odd way, she felt that this way Niklas had lost and she had won.

  Every day was the same to Zoan. When he was in the laboratory world of bombproof glass and titanium and reinforced white concrete, he felt somehow enslaved and subdued. But even when he was up under the blue sky and happy, one day was still much like another. This day had passed as had the others; he had milked the cow, fed the chickens, gathered the eggs. He had visited the biome animals that came and went, some to be studied, some to be tagged, some to be attended if they were sick or injured. On this day they had four rabbits, eighteen semi-wild mustangs, two prairie dogs, and a tarantula. He had spoken to all of them, and had told the attending veterinarian in a numb singsong tone that there was nothing wrong with that one lady prairie dog, except she had a burr stuck in her paw that was fevering her. He’d gotten it out, but the vet had better soak her paw and give her some medicine. Zoan had also mentioned in passing that she was pregnant with six kits. The vet, who was accustomed to Zoan’s mystical ways with animals, hadn’t asked any questions, and had hurried to medicate the female prairie dog.

  Now, as the darkness gathered, he dawdled his way reluctantly toward the house, trying to ignore the dread that always came when he left the surface and descended into the earth.

  From the outside the ranch house looked like a perfectly normal house. Even the inside had an ordinary appearance—a kitchen, a great room with an enormous fireplace, five bedrooms, four baths, massive western furniture. The veterinarians who made rounds of different labs, and usually two commissars, stayed in the house. It seemed perfectly normal.

  But there was one room that was different, and now Zoan approached the door carefully, as always. It frightened him, in a vague and formless way, to leave the soft world of grass, and dirt, and trees, and to pass through this door. It was just a bedroom. But one wall was different. It had no paintings, no decorations. It was simply a blank wall of an indifferent grade of old paneling. His jaw working, Zoan walked to stand in front of the blank wall and muttered, “Zoan.”

  A slight humming sounded. The wall slid sideways into a track, and then, with a very slight metallic hum, the twelve-inch-thick elevator door slid upward. Zoan stepped inside. The only elevator or access to the lab level was an anonymous white box. As the great door closed behind him, he braced himself for the descent. It was fast and smooth, but Zoan always felt a teeth-gritting jar that was more in his head than in his body.

  Level One of the lab complex was a sort of guard room and communication center, and a full squad of commissars was always there. Two elevators on the north and south sides of the circular structure accessed the five lab levels. Normally anyone and everyone who came and went in and out of the lab were cataloged by the commissars, even if they didn’t stop them to do so. But they never gave Zoan a second look; indeed, it seemed as if they never saw him at all. He moved in his slow, deliberate way to the lab elevator and again said quietly, “Zoan.” The steel door slid open, and he stepped into the mirrored cubicle, which he hated even more than the numbing white one from the ranch bedroom.

  The only signals or indicators on the elevator were the color indicators as the elevator moved downward through the various levels. The flash of colors—bars imbedded in one panel of the mirrors— fascinated him as they always did. He had memorized each level, and repeated them automatically as he passed them and the lights flashed. The highest level was painted green and he whispered, “Zoology.” Blue—“Climatology.” He watched as the yellow flashed warm go
ld. “Geology.” Blinding white flashes: “Botany.” Finally the elevator came to rest, red bars flashing luridly. He sighed, “Microbiology.”

  The door slid open and Zoan resignedly entered into this other world. He moved slowly down the corridor, which was painted a light, lifeless gray, as were all the rooms he’d ever lived in. A red band of color was implanted in the center of the corridor floor and again along the walls at waist level. All levels were coded with their own signal color, so if one found himself on the wrong floor, the color code would alert him to where he was.

  Zoan turned and passed into the kitchen and deposited the eggs and the milk, which he had put in two gallon containers, on the smooth surface of the counter that flanked one wall. Everything was smooth; there was no roughness. Acrylic, shiny steel, and glass offered no grain or break. Everything was the same pale gray, and the lack of color, as always, depressed Zoan. He heard some of the staff in the cafeteria, and slipped out the back door into the hallway. They taunted and teased him, which really didn’t bother him; but he felt tired, and wanted to sleep, not talk.

  Zoan plodded along to his own room, which was a cubicle that shared a bathroom with the Red Level janitor’s supply room. He entered and looked around for one moment, wishing he could sleep outside under the starry sky. The room was windowless, of course. Exactly ten by fifteen, it contained a bunk, an old metal locker, a shelf with a few books, a tiny pull-down desk and uncushioned oak stool.