Writers of the Future, Volume 30

  “Your director has agreed—”

  “And if humanity wants to see a live elephant, we’ll implant a frozen embryo of Loxodonta africana into what? A cow?”

  “Look,” Harper said, “we’re within ten years of being able to grow an organism, any organism, in an artificial womb. When the human population drops to pre-2075 numbers, we’ll bring back not only sheep and cattle, but other species.”

  “You actually believe we’ll revive nonfood species?”

  “With current advances in virtual adventures,” Harper said, “why would humanity need to see a live elephant, doctor?”

  He spun the last of his noodles on his fork, ate them, and put down his fork. He chewed, his elbows resting on either side of the bowl, his fingers laced together displaying the hairy backs of his phalanges. He wasn’t far from knuckle-walking himself.

  “I came here out of courtesy to your director,” he said. “Personally, I think she’s afraid of you.” His smirk lingered.

  “Unlike bacteria, humans can’t mutate to resist Earth’s attempts to kill us off,” Mackenzie said. “Instead, we invent new drugs, put an end to pandemics, extend life indefinitely. And you think we’ll give back some ground to those we exterminated?”

  “Look, I’m just the messenger here—”

  “But even a messenger has a conscience.”

  She pushed back her chair and stood, looking him in the eye. “I have a procedure to attend to.”

  With the last of the Serengeti under cultivation for biofuel production and polar bear habitat melted in the first half of the last century, it had been clear that endangered species studies would go the way of the space program. Mackenzie had left human medicine to study what was left of wildlife. Virtual safari wasn’t enough. She needed to look into the eyes of living animals—needed animals to look into hers.

  Standing with her hand on the door lever to the gorilla night quarters, she couldn’t bring herself to open it. She peered through the steel spy slot watching Lucy, a middle-aged lowland gorilla, lift her handler’s upper lip with a callused black index finger.

  The young handler, Sierra, complied. She opened her mouth as she would for a dentist so the gorilla could examine her teeth. Sierra pursed her lips and repeated a kissing sound. It appeared she’d been entertaining Lucy for some time, waiting for Mackenzie to arrive.

  Deep in concentration, Lucy reflected Sierra’s facial expression and tried to duplicate her sounds.

  It wasn’t unusual for a handler to become attached to her charges, and Sierra had spent far more time with Lucy since her husband’s death. She was too young for such trauma. She often stayed long after her shift was over, even though Mackenzie couldn’t afford to pay overtime. When an animal fell sick, Sierra always volunteered to stay for night watch.

  Mackenzie felt her rage ebb, replaced by a numbing sadness. How could she tell Sierra?

  “Almost.” Sierra demonstrated an exaggerated lip smack for Lucy.

  Mackenzie’s dog, Puck, was curled in Sierra’s lap. During the last war, modern dogs had suffered the same fate as the fifteen hundred canines Cleopatra had served Julius Caesar and his troops for supper. Dogs didn’t do well on synthetic protein, and had become too costly to feed. Little Puck was what used to be called a terrier mix and did just fine on scraps left by the lions. Figuring out how to feed him after the F.R.E.S. closed was the last thing Mackenzie should be thinking about.

  She set the ultrasound machine on the floor, slid open the steel door and stepped inside.

  “Sorry I’m late.”

  She was about to tell Sierra there was no point in monitoring a fetus that would never be born when the young woman brushed a stray strand of ginger hair behind her ear and, smiling, laid her palm on Lucy’s belly.

  “I feel it moving.”

  The first ultrasound at six weeks had revealed a large fetus for its gestational time. Now, the image on the monitor couldn’t be right. Mackenzie adjusted the frequency and tried again.

  “She’s a good thirty percent bigger than expected.… What was the implantation date?”

  “September twenty-fifth,” Sierra said, leaning around to look at the screen. “What’s wrong?”

  “The head is …” Mackenzie dragged the marker across the width of the fetus’ skull and clicked to record the measurement. “Five-point-five centimeters. September twenty-fifth? Could that date be inaccurate?”

  “I recorded it myself. What’s the matter?”

  The practice of using a common, populous species to carry the embryos of endangered animals had been started in the twentieth century. Not long after, researchers at the San Diego Zoo perfected blocking the surrogate’s immune response to the foreign embryo, and then it was enough for the host animal to belong to the same taxonomic family as the implanted embryo and be large enough to physically carry it. As early as the 1980s researchers had saved the Mongolian wild horse from extinction by using domestic horses as surrogates to spawn a whole herd at once. Using common lowland gorillas as surrogates, mountain gorillas weren’t far behind on the list of rescued species.

  With widespread loss of habitat, most large, biome-specific species were nearing extinction, except those that had plagued cities for centuries—rats, pigeons, rabbits. The surrogacy method had become the only means to assure diversity in a limited population. Semen and ova frozen decades ago could be used to inject a breath of genetic fresh air into a given population.

  “Lucy’s got a month left,” Mackenzie said to Sierra, “but this baby is the size of a full-term newborn. And the cranium is abnormally large. I need a blood panel and an amnio.”

  “Everything’s going to be all right, though, right, Mac?”

  How could she tell Sierra that the fate of this fetus had been determined by the National Resources Board? That concern over an abnormality was just a distraction?

  “I don’t know yet,” Mackenzie said.

  “But you’re not going to terminate …”

  “We’ll see,” Mackenzie said. She swallowed the burn in her throat. “Let’s get the tests done, huh?”

  The director wore a gecko sculpted into her buzzed green hair, its tail a long lock that curled over her shoulder. The look might have been stylish when the director was sixty, but the artificial sun that filtered through the solar tube made it look more like a caterpillar.

  “I’ve already scheduled a crew to handle primate termination,” she told Mackenzie. “I don’t want you to have anything to do with it.”

  “They’re my responsibility,” Mackenzie said, hearing the quaver in her voice. “No one touches them but me. At least promise me that.”

  The director rocked back in her chair and pursed her lips. “Okay, Mac. If that’s what you want. They’ve given us three weeks. Wrap things up your way.”

  Mackenzie sent her handlers home early. She would take the night watch herself.

  The waterfall in the jungle habitat was off for the night. The synthetic boulders radiated heat from a day of desert sunlight.

  Sweat soaked through Mackenzie’s shirt.

  She sat down on a rock and broke the seal on the birthday present she’d bought for her husband, Henry. He would understand. She took a long swallow. It was pretty smooth for an Indonesian algae spirit. She’d tell him that. She’d tell him about the end of her life’s work. In three weeks the program director would find select restaurants serving a clientele hungry for exotic flesh. Mackenzie couldn’t stop wondering what people would pay for a Siberian tiger steak.

  She took another swig of Green Sin.

  Puck reached out a tentative paw, begging for a taste. She let the dog sniff it, which put an end to the begging.

  The moon peeked through the glass roof panels, veiled by the photon fog of the city. An air taxi sliced across the moon’s face and rain emitters sent drifts of droplets over banana and palm, ba
mboo and strangler fig. The humid exhalation of the plants’ dark cycle had begun, transmuting carbon dioxide into the chemicals of life, into leaf and root, flower and seed.

  Rain beaded on Mackenzie’s face and hair.

  All over the world, in the comfort of their tiny beehive residence modules, people virtually vacationed on tropical islands long swallowed by the sea, climbed mountains now topped by luxury resorts, tracked Bengal tigers in jungles now reduced to palm oil cultivation, all without a millisecond of thought about bringing their bodies along, without ever actually encountering another species. Virtual safari could never duplicate the fear of the hunted, a fear men had known once, long before the coming of the first rifle. Nor could it convey the soul utterings that pass between animal and man, the communion of survival that both united and divided them. How had we become so separate?

  “Hummmmmm-Mmmmaaaa.”

  The sound came from the primate quarters. The gorillas couldn’t sleep either.

  Mackenzie tried to imitate the greeting vocalization. “Hummmmmm-Mmmmaaaa.”

  Tituba answered with a chuff. The ancient matriarch’s near-blind eyes were just visible through the spy slot in the steel door. Dark fingers appeared, hooked through holes in the mesh that ventilated their cells.

  Mackenzie inserted her key in the hydraulic door lock, and with a short buzz and green light, all six cells rolled open.

  The gorillas strode out in a silent procession, knuckle-walking shadows in the moonlight. They followed Tituba to the pool where the old gorilla sat and dragged her fingers through the water, scattering a hundred silver moon-disks.

  Mackenzie sat on her heels beside them, dipping her pale hand with theirs.

  The fetal karyotype was extraordinary.

  The chromosomes were displayed in sequence on the holo, bright and dark bands color-coded for specific genes. Mackenzie brought chromosome 12 up for magnification, feeling Sierra’s breath on her cheek, perched as she was over Mackenzie’s shoulder.

  “What the hell?”

  “What is it?” Sierra said.

  Maybe there was something wrong with the software. Mackenzie went to the binocular scope directly and counted. The little wormlike chromosomes still totaled twenty-three pairs.

  “Mac?” Sierra hung over her shoulder.

  “Gorillas have twenty-four pairs of chromosomes,” Mackenzie explained. “But this fetus has twenty-three.”

  When Sierra made no response, Mackenzie looked up from the scope to find Sierra frozen, her eyes on the karyotype, her brow bunched in obvious confusion.

  “There are no genetic abnormalities in gorillas that present as a loss of chromosomes,” Mackenzie said. “It just doesn’t happen.”

  She increased the magnification on the karyotype. It looked as if the ninth and fourteenth chromosomes had joined. She opened a page showing a normal human karyotype. Ape chromosomes 9 and 14 had spliced somewhere along the evolutionary path to form the human chromosome 12. But if this had occurred spontaneously in Lucy’s fetus, it would form an ape palindrome of the larger human chromosome 12. This was no palindrome.

  Mackenzie turned around. “This is intriguing. I wonder if it’s viable.”

  “What does that mean? Viable?”

  “If I were to take it now, would it live with an abnormality like that? It would be interesting to see what features a mutation like this would show.”

  Sierra took hold of Mackenzie’s hands. She was shaking. “But you’re not going to take it now, right, Mac?”

  “What’s going on, Sierra?”

  “You can’t take the baby, not yet.” Crying, Sierra squeezed Mackenzie’s hands tighter. “You need to understand.”

  “Understand what?” Mackenzie stood and took Sierra in her arms. “What’s got you so upset?”

  “Haven’t you ever tried for a birth license, Mac?” Sierra was frantic now. “You and Henry?”

  Mackenzie had no intention of bringing another human into this world. She’d spent her life trying to give other creatures a chance.

  “No.”

  But in Sierra’s face she saw the utter desperation she’d only heard about. Of the billion or more couples who applied for a birth license each year, only ten percent won the lottery, and most of those bribed the officials. This dictated a population growth rate of negative one percent per year … theoretically.

  Mackenzie searched the eyes of the young woman before her. It all fell into place. Sierra’s husband had signed up for a drug trial even though he had a decent job writing code. He became one of the twenty thousand casualties in the Amilozyonide test group, a “martyr for pharmaceutical progress,” they’d told Sierra when they paid her the settlement.

  “Humans have twenty-three pairs of chromosomes,” Mackenzie said.

  Sierra’s lower lip quivered and the tears came.

  “Your husband got paid enough up front for the Amilozyonide test,” Mackenzie said. “Enough to buy a license.”

  “We wanted a baby, Mac. I know you understand. Please understand.”

  Mackenzie stepped back and Sierra slid down the wall to the concrete floor, sobbing into the knees of her coveralls.

  No doctor would implant a couple’s embryo if the father was dead. It was against the law. Sierra probably had close to a dozen fertilized, genetically scrubbed embryos (no hereditary diseases were tolerated) sitting in a cryotank waiting for a womb. She’d found no doctor willing to go to jail to implant her. But bribing a tech to give her the embryos? That wouldn’t be too difficult. And switching her embryo with the mountain gorilla’s, easier still. Humans shared the gorilla’s taxonomic family Hominidae. With immunosuppressants, Lucy’s womb would accept Sierra’s embryo as if it were her own.

  “What were you planning to do,” Mackenzie asked in a cool, even tone, “when Lucy gave birth to your child?”

  “I knew I could trust you.”

  “Trust me to lie for you? Sooner or later a Fed would scan your child and find no chip. What then, Sierra?”

  “But you’ll give me that chance, won’t you, Mac?”

  Mackenzie found Sierra bottle-feeding an orphaned chimp in the nursery.

  “Everything’s ready,” Mackenzie said.

  Sierra popped the bottle from the sleeping chimp’s mouth and rocked it, standing over the crib as if she couldn’t put the baby down.

  For the past two weeks, Sierra had filled her backpack with formula and diapers from the nursery. Synthesized gorilla milk differed from human milk by a small percentage of lactose and fat. Sierra’s baby would thrive on it.

  The last ultrasound revealed that the baby was just under 2.5 kilograms, a viable weight for a human infant but substantially larger than the 1.8 kilograms of a gorilla infant. Even if she induced labor, a human infant’s head would never pass through a gorilla’s birth canal, and Lucy was beginning to show signs of toxemia. Mackenzie should have taken the baby a week ago, but it wouldn’t have survived at that weight. Not in a veterinary ward.

  With Lucy in isolation, Mackenzie inserted the key into the hydraulic lock and opened the other cells for one last day in the jungle. Freddie charged, thrashing through the underbrush and voicing a guttural, “Houuwww-houuwww.” He made for the log where Mackenzie routinely hid his favorite peanut butter treats. Today, the treats were laced with a sedative. Once they were all down, Mackenzie would make sure they didn’t wake.

  In her amble toward the banana leaves, Tituba paused and looked over her shoulder. Her eyes met Mackenzies’s. She knew, yet she dug a treat from the log while Mackenzie wiped tears away and prepared the syringes with pentobarbital.

  With live-streaming over, Mackenzie cut the wires to the cameras in the operating room and each of the gorillas’ night quarters.

  Outside Lucy’s cell, she listened to Sierra sing a halting lullaby to the gorilla.

  I went to the
animal fair.

  The birds and the beasts were there.

  The old baboon, by the light of moon

  Was combing her auburn hair.

  Lucy had been trained to give her hand to her keeper for injections, but she was in pain now. Pacing the short span of her cell, she stopped only to sit and rock herself in time to Sierra’s tune, her breath coming in short huffs. She wasn’t volunteering her hand today.

  “Come out,” Mackenzie told Sierra.

  When she was clear of the door, Mackenzie raised the blowgun to her mouth. Gorillas were known to catch darts and throw them back. She had to be quick and accurate.

  Lucy was too weak to fight the cocktail of ketamine and medetomidine. She lunged forward, slammed into the grating of her feed slot, and fell.

  Mackenzie stepped into the straw bedding, climbed onto a narrow tile shelf, and cut the wires to the last camera. She turned the tiny device over in her hand and stuffed it into her pocket.

  The two women trundled the gorilla onto a low gurney and rolled her out of the cell. Mackenzie would intubate Lucy in the O.R. Gorillas were just as sensitive to opioids as humans, so she would maintain her on isofluorine. Sierra would have to monitor the gorilla’s vitals.

  “If her pulse drops below forty-five, decrease the gas by one percent.”

  Mackenzie had the pentobarbital ready, enough to kill both gorilla and human infant.

  With no need to scrub, she set to work making a midline incision. She would be quick; the baby would likely need suction and oxygen. But when she cut through the uterine wall and amnion and saw pink skin beneath, everything stopped, her scalpel poised above the gaping maw.

  She knew she should push the pentobarbital, send both the gorilla and this human child to rock together on the deep seas of some other existence.

  “She’s all right,” Sierra said. “My baby’s all right.”

  A tiny human arm flailed, covered in waxy white vernix, pink fingers splayed against shiny black gorilla skin.

  Mackenzie eased the infant from the incision.