They made their way to the elevators, and Nelson pushed the button for the third floor.
“So where do things stand?” Silas asked.
“It’s anesthetized, and the surgical team should be ready any minute.”
“The vitals?”
“Not good. The old girl is worn out, just skin and bones. Even the caloric load we’ve been pushing hasn’t been enough. The fetus is doing okay, though. Still has a good, strong heartbeat. The sonogram shows it’s roughly the size of a full-term calf, so I don’t think there should be anything tricky about the surgery.”
“The surgery isn’t what I’m worried about.”
“Yeah, I know. We’re ready with an incubator just in case.”
Silas followed Nelson around a corner and down another long hallway. They stopped at a glass door, and Nelson slid his identification card into the console slot. There were a series of beeps, then a digitized, feminine voice: “Clearance accepted; you may enter.”
The view room was long, narrow, and crowded. It was an enclosed balcony that overhung a surgical suite, and most of the people were gazing into the chamber below through a row of windows that ran along the left wall.
At the far end of the packed room, a tall man with a shaggy mane of blond hair noticed them. “Come in, come in,” Benjamin said with a wave. At twenty-six, he was the youngest man working on the project. A prodigy funneled from the eastern cytology schools, he described himself as a man who knew his way around an oocyte. Silas had taken an instant liking to him when they’d met more than a year ago.
“You’re just in time for the fun,” Benjamin said. “I thought for sure they wouldn’t be able to drag you out of bed.”
“Three hours’ sleep is all any man needs in a thirty-six-hour period.” He grabbed Benjamin’s outstretched hand and gave it a firm shake. “What’s the status of our little friend?”
“As you can see”—Benjamin gestured toward the window—“things have progressed a little faster than we expected. The surrogate turned the corner from distressed to dying in the last hour, and it’s triggered contractions. As far as we can tell, it may still be a little early, but since you can’t sail a sinking ship”—Benjamin pulled a cigar from the inside pocket of his lab coat and held it out to Silas—“it looks like our little gladiator is going to have a birthday.”
Silas took the cigar, smiling against his best efforts. “Thanks.” He turned and stepped toward the glass. The cow was on its side on a large stainless-steel table, surrounded by a team of doctors and nurses. The surgeons huddled around their patient, only their eyes and foreheads visible above sterile masks.
“It should be anytime now,” Benjamin said.
Silas turned to face him. “Anything new on the sonogram visuals?”
Benjamin shook his head and pushed his glasses up his long, thin nose. For the first time his face lost its optimistic glow. “We did another series, but we haven’t been able to glean any additional information.”
“And those structures we talked about?”
“Still can’t identify them. Not that people haven’t had a field day coming up with ideas.”
“I hate going into this blind.”
“Believe me, I know.” Benjamin’s voice soured. “But the Olympic Commission didn’t exactly leave you with a lot of room for maneuvering, did they? The fat bastard isn’t even a biologist, for Christ’s sake. If things go wrong, it won’t be on your head.”
“You really believe that?”
“No, I guess I don’t.”
“Then you’re wise beyond your years.”
“Still, one way or the other, Evan Chandler is going to have a lot of explaining to do.”
“I don’t think he’s that worried,” Silas said softly. “I don’t see him here, do you?”
THE SCIENTISTS stood crowded against the glass, transfixed by the scene unfolding beneath them. Inside the white stricture of lights, a scalpel blinked stainless steel. The cow lay motionless on its left side as it was opened from sternum to pelvis in one slow, smooth cut. Gloved hands insinuated themselves into its abdomen, gently separating layers of tissue, reaching deep. Silas felt his heart thumping in his chest. The hands disappeared entirely, then the arms up to the elbows. Assistants used huge curved tongs to stretch the incision wide.
The surgeon shifted his weight. His shoulder strained. Silas imagined the man’s teeth gritting with effort beneath the micropore mask as he rummaged around in the bovine’s innards.
The first surgeon put the bloody shape on the table under the lamps and began wiping it down with a sponge and warm water, while another doctor peeled away the dense layers of fibrous glop that still clung to it.
The surgeon’s voice sounded over the speakers in the view room from a microphone in his mask. “The fetus is dark … still covered by the embryonic sack … thick, fibrous texture; I’m tearing it away.”
Silas’s face was nearly pushed against the glass, trying to get a better look over the doctor’s shoulder. For a moment he caught a glimpse of the newborn, but then the medical team shifted around their patient and he could see nothing. The sound of the doctor’s breathing filled the view room.
“This … interesting … I’m not sure …” The doctor’s voice trailed off in the speakers.
Suddenly, a shrill cry split Silas’s ears, silencing the excited background chatter. The cry was strange, like nothing he’d ever heard before.
The doctors stepped back from the wailing newborn one by one, opening a gap, allowing Silas his first real glimpse.
His mouth dropped open.
LATER THAT morning, the storm that had been threatening for hours finally moved in with all the subtlety of a shotgun blast. Thunder boomed across the expansive field of California mod-sod. Dr. Silas Williams watched from behind the window of his second-story office, hands folded behind his back, drinking in the scene. The familiar ache in his bad ear had finally begun to ebb, becoming tolerable again. It always seemed to act up at the most inopportune times, and he hadn’t let himself take anything stronger than aspirin because of what he knew was coming. He’d need his edge today.
Outside his window, the few well-manicured windbreaks of oak, hickory, and alder that stood scattered across the vast green promenade seemed to sway and shake with anticipation. Their branches bowed in the gusts that swept in from the west. In the distance, he could see the road and the cars—their headlight beams turned on against the darkening mid-morning sky.
He’d always felt there was magic in these moments just before the rain, when the sky brooded and rumbled its promises. The last few moments before a hard rain seemed to exist outside of time. It was the eternal drama, old as nature. Old as life. A dull curtain of precipitation spread west to east across the landscape, instantly soaking the grass. For a moment, he clutched at the wispy borders of ancient half-memories of other storms on other continents, of tall savanna grass waving and genuflecting before the monsoon.
The first fat drop spattered the window. Then another, and a dozen, and the window ran like a river, smearing away the outside world. As the sky darkened further, and the scene beyond the window lost its form in the streaming rain, his reflection materialized in the glass before him. He considered the visage gazing intently back at him. A good enough face, if a little weatherworn. For the first time in a long time, on this day of birth and rain, his mind cast back to his childhood. To a face so like his own.
Silas remembered his father in flashes—long legs, a towering silhouette that tucked him in at night. Huge hands with long, rectangular palms. Masculine. Solidly there.
Then not.
Silas’s father was killed in a refinery fire when he was three, leaving behind only the faintest ghosts of memories for his son. Most of what Silas knew of his father came from his mother’s stories and pictures. But in many ways, it was the pictures that spoke most eloquently.
The family portrait that hung in his mother’s living room for decades showed a huge, broad-shouldered man with tight curls shorn low to the scalp. A gentle half-smile dimpled his left cheek. He was sitting next to Silas’s
