Prototype

* * *

In practical terms there was no such thing as neutral ground, not when he lived in this city and she did not. The whole of Denver was Clay’s turf; she was just passing through. People were territorial that way, without even realizing. It would be a mistake to pretend otherwise, just because asphalt yielded no crops.

Sarah tracked him down to a part of town she supposed all cities had, where train tracks snarled together like stitches across a wounded earth, and blackened trestles stood weary from the generations; where vacant lots grew choked with weeds that were brown even in the bloom of spring; where low brick buildings sat rotted and scabrous from disuse. Relics, their windows in shards and once-proud faces scabbed and corroded, they were corpses awaiting the blessing of burial.

Sarah parked her car on an old gravel lot that the earth was slowly reclaiming, hunted a minute and found the rip in the chain link fence, right where it was supposed to be. She turned sideways to squeeze through, huddling in her down vest as she moved along a walkway of crumbling concrete, in the shadow of a smokestack.

She found the door that had been jimmied aeons ago, slipped into the abandoned factory. Dim hallways radiated a chill that must have taken years to seep into its walls. Along one, she found a pale rectangle, the ghostly afterimage of some long-removed time clock.

Clay was in the factory’s cavernous center, as stilled as the chamber of a dead heart. From somewhere, an office perhaps, he had salvaged the metal framework of a surviving chair, sat surrounded by pits and the huge industrial bones that had once anchored vast machines before they’d been ripped out, sold or scrapped. The silence roared, and beneath it she could almost hear a dim echo of clattering gears.

“Hey. I know you,” she said, her voice nearly swallowed, a prayer floating in a cathedral.

“Sarah.” Clay sounded surprised, a little curious. Calm, though. Calm was good. She had hoped he would not feel invaded.

“You haven’t, like, drawn a line I have to keep outside of, anything like that, have you?”

“No,” almost a laugh, and he waved her over.

“Graham told me you come here sometimes.” She found a spot on the concrete floor that didn’t look too filthy, sat cross-legged. “He drew me a map.”

“Better keep it, it may be worth something someday.”

“Forgot to get it signed. Stupid, huh?”

His eyebrows nudged upward but he said nothing, as if too polite to agree. She sat looking at him for a few moments. Liked his face, always had. It was nothing unique, as she understood; at least twelve other guys out there had it, too. She had even peeked at the pictures just to see for herself how eerie something like that really was, faces from a hive identity, linked by a strange and darkly wondrous mystery of conception. Still, he made the face his own. Everyone wore their hurts and hungers a little differently.

“What did this place used to be?” She looked up, around. Weak sunlight filtered in from half a dozen skylights and windows.

“I don’t know. It was here before I got here, to Denver. I just like to come. It’s easier to think here, some reason. Quiet.” He shrugged. “I never cared about knowing what they did here before. I don’t care what they built. It’s just what it is now. When you don’t know, it feels like it’s always been that way.”

Sarah grinned. “Why ruin it, then?”

“Exactly. Look.” He pointed, swept an arm from wall to distant wall. They were mottled in shades of gray, washed from ceiling down with accumulated water stains. Mineral traces and contaminants had left abstract patterns. “It looks like cave paintings from the Paleolithic era or something.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah!” Scanning, embellishing with a tiny push of imagination. She pointed with a mittened hand. “There’s a mastodon… and a wild stag.”

“And there are the hunters.”

“We need a fire,” she told him. “And bones. And raw meat.”

“Bones,” he said, and sighed. Pointed toward the far corner, where shadows clung thickest. “There used to be some over there. Probably not human, but I don’t know what. Graffiti too, I think some idiot cult used to come here for sacrifices.”

It brought her plunging back, the late twentieth century — oh, that. Sad. Some of the magic fled already. Clay had a point about keeping willfully ignorant of the past.

“Did Adrienne send you after me?” he finally asked.

“It was my idea. But I told her first.”

“She wants me back twice a week plus social calls, I guess.”

“She’d like that. She thinks it’s important. And for whatever my opinion’s worth, I think so, too.”

She watched the creases deepen across his forehead — this Clay Palmer, the one who stared at water stains on factory walls and saw cave paintings, who looked at them with such yearning he might really want to breathe the air of some primeval dusk and, by the light of fires, scratch pigments into rock. She tried to balance this Clay against the one who had demolished a bar stool in front of the woman she loved.

“Helverson’s syndrome,” he said. “What do you think caused it?”

Sarah laughed, hopeless, stuck her hands to either side of her head and rubbed furiously. “I don’t know. This is not my area of expertise.”

He smiled down from his chair, swathed inside a faded old army field jacket. “So who’s here to know?” Losing his smile; she had noticed they were few and never lasted long. “I mean, we show up just within the last thirty-five years or so, it looks like, all around the world. Got more in common than probably most blood brothers have. I’m not saying it has any meaning… but there’s got to be a cause of it.”

Probably so. And all the more elusive for the fact that no one could ever know what it was, but could only guess. She tried to hold onto thoughts, conjectures, found them slippery as eels. But her own thoughts she could sort in time. Of greater interest, and importance, was what Clay made of it all.

“Last week Adrienne and I had a session the day before I got those reports. We were talking about the extra chromosome and how maybe it was a spontaneous mutation in some evolutionary way, for some reason. I figured that made as much or more sense as anything. After I got those reports… and after I’d been to your place… I went out and got some books on genetics. I’ve done a lot of reading on the subject the past week. A lot. Did you know that human beings have put about three and a half million new chemicals into the environment, things that don’t exist in nature?”

That many? She wished she’d heard him wrong. “No.”

Clay nodded. “Most of it’s benign, inert, but still, you’ve got hundreds of thousands of potential mutagens. You know, wrong person gets too close, wrong time, that’s it: You’ve got a misprinted gene. Maybe more. And the thing is, once mistakes go into the gene pool, you can’t dredge them back out. They’ll always be there, repeating through the generations.”

Lifeguards at the gene pool, she thought, some strange word association, that’s what we need.

“But that’s not what I wanted to tell you about. Ever hear of the peppered moths in Manchester, England?”

She told him she never had, and he flashed an almost wicked smile: Oh, you’ll love this.

“For who knows how long, there’s been this big population of the peppered moth around Manchester. Up through the middle of the nineteenth century, ninety-nine percent of them were the same color, this pale gray shade, helped them blend with the tree bark so birds couldn’t spot them very easily, come in and pick them off, eat them. The other one percent was gray-black. They think it was a mutant strain. But over the next fifty years, the percentages reversed, because during that time England’s industrial revolution really got cranking, and around Manchester there were all these factory smokestacks covering the countryside with soot and crap. The trees and everything got darker, and the pale moths, they stood out like blinking lights, just about. The birds didn’t ever have to skip a meal. But the moths adapted. The mutation took over to darken the species’ color so they’d survive. There’s even a name for it: industrial melanism. By the time the naturalists figured out what was going on, they realized it was happening everywhere industry was going up. And it wasn’t just moths.”

Silence; reflection. She was still envisioning moths and smokestacks and the confusion of marauding birds when Clay drew back in his chair, something like embarrassment crossing his face.