“I’m sorry for you.”
“And your world has given me much joy.” He smiled, and it was the smile of a man, nothing more. “When I learned of the connection, I spent months looking in on you. You’ve made so many windows between our worlds. Audio files, photos, live-feed video, satellite uplinks, and so much. It was easy.” He looked down at his hands. “You have a wonderful world.”
Silence filled the room. The screen flickered. “I’m so tired.”
Silas felt Vidonia move against him, felt her hand in his again, where it seemed to belong tonight.
“When I was young,” the figure said, “I was vengeful. I didn’t understand, as I do now, how very precious life is. I am tired of vengeance. I’ll have my revenge on those who hurt Papa, and many will die, but I no longer want to punish you all. I see some value in you. There is a chance it’s not too late. Just a chance, but I want to give it to you. A parting gift before I die.”
“A chance to what?”
“To save yourselves.”
“From the gladiator?”
“Yes, from the gladiator. And from ending. You do not know the scourge I have set upon you.” His eyes filled with tears, brimming over.
“What do you mean, ‘ending’?” Silas asked.
“Extinction,” the figure said.
“I think you overestimate the reach of your work.”
“What you built is not only better than you think, it is better than you
“Tell me where it is.”
“It can live a thousand years and have ten thousand offspring. It is a queen that needs no king.”
“What are you talking about?”
“And the queen will make her own princes.”
“Parthenogenesis,” Vidonia whispered.
“Oh, so much more complicated than that. I had but one anchor hold in your world. I used it to drop a bomb.”
“You’re not making any sense,” Silas said. “Where is it now? Do you even know?”
“I know,” the figure said. “It’s left something behind.” A gust of wind blew his hair across his face, and he delicately brushed it aside. The eyes were different now. Just as intense but sorrowful.
“It has produced eggs. And there will be more. An army will be born. They will organize, and when their numbers are great enough, they will move against you, slowly at first but gaining in strength.”
“What you are saying doesn’t make any sense. Even if the gladiator is producing eggs, and even with exponential growth in their population, there’s no way they could accumulate a force for many years. By then, they’ll have been wiped out.”
“They will grow, and they will use your own weapons against you.”
“The gladiator is too big to hide for long. What you’re saying is impossible. The math doesn’t work.”
“I’m very good at math, Silas, and you have less time than you think.”
“A population can’t be started with one individual, even one that comes programmed for reproduction. There would be a lack of genomic diversity, a lack of immunity haplotype variation; inbreeding depression would destroy the fertility of later generations.”
“You are so certain of yourself.”
“I’m a geneticist. Disease would wipe them out. Such a population could exist in the short term, isolated from competition, but it would disintegrate under biological constraints even without the kind of pressure a war would bring.”
“The problem with evolution, Silas, is that it has no foresight, no far-reaching plan. It works only by shaping populations in the present. But I had a longer view in mind. The first eggs are what you geneticists call an H-one generation. They’re simple haploids, and after they hatch, they’ll remain small, unobtrusive. The gladiator will disperse them to the ends of the earth, and there, they will burrow into the ground, couple, and live only to reproduce.”
“Still, there will be a—” Silas stopped. He remembered the restriction enzyme map that Ben had run. He remembered the heterozygosity. The DNA was lopsided, lining very few of the same genes up on both sides of the double helix. A haploid offspring has exactly half the full contingent of the genome. But which half? Which halves? Two of them together could reproduce an almost unlimited number of variants. There would be no inbreeding depression. The gladiator carried the diversity of an entire thriving genus in its blood.
The figure saw the understanding on Silas’s face and smiled. “You’re a smart man, a worthy builder. The gladiator you saw was a balancing act—a kind of phenotypic compromise between whole conflicting suites of genes. It is nothing compared to what will come after.” The figure’s eyes bore into him. The smile faded.
“There are things hidden in the recessives, Silas. Things you wouldn’t believe. Things your kind never would have let near a gladiator arena. Things your kind would have killed at birth, and afterward closed your labs forever, burned the buildings to the ground and salted the earth beneath. Nightmares, Silas. You can’t imagine what is coming.”
Silas looked into the dark eyes and believed. “Jesus,” he said.
The figure’s face was expressionless.
Silas was silent for a long while, taking in the enormity of what he’d just learned.
“You spoke of a chance,” he said.
The figure nodded. “The gladiator wouldn’t have brought those first eggs into the Olympic battles. They are too precious to risk. The gladiator will have hidden them somewhere.”
“There were no eggs.”
“There are. You just didn’t see them. That’s how the gladiator would have wanted it.”
Silas remembered the blood in the straw. “I think I know.”
“Then that is your chance. The gladiator must still retrieve them.”
“How?”
“Like the homing pigeon, the gladiator will find its way home.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“You are a great builder, Silas. Your people are great builders. The gladiator’s kind can only tear down. I gave them nothing else.”
Vidonia’s hand pulled out of his, and when he looked at her, she was crying again.
“I ask only one thing,” the figure said.
“What?”
“That you remember me.”
Silas said nothing. On the floor, Chandler stopped his rocking and turned toward him, eyes nearly swollen shut from looking at the screen.
Silas turned away. Without another word, he fled into the darkness. The dark didn’t scare him now. He knew of far worse things.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Ben looked at his watch. Half past two. He’d given up on sleep a while ago, and now the hands of his watch seemed to be moving in exception to the laws of the universe. He
The flight attendant slid down the aisle, long legs bare and golden from the mid-thigh down. Her hair was blue-streaked to match her eyes and uniform. Ordinarily, Ben would have been interested; he might even have turned to watch her backside pivot its way along the narrow walkway between the rows of mostly sleeping passengers. But not tonight. She passed him with a smile and a tray, and he let her go without so much as a nod
