Prototype

were like? I think I’d rather take chromosome twelve.”

She rolled her eyes. He was good. Oh, he was good. “But maybe a lot of what was dominant in their genes turned out to be recessive in yours. And vice versa.”

“And maybe not.”

“But maybe so. A congenital soldier and a passive alcoholic? Neither one sounds very much like you.”

He nodded, working his tongue inside his cheek; backed into a corner at last and he knew it. “Well, we could debate this all day and never really be sure of anything, other than that Helverson’s syndrome isn’t a good thing to have,” he finally said. “Just a few cracked eggs in the genetic omelet. They’ll have us figured out eventually.”

“To a degree. Probably never completely.”

“They’re reading those DNA codes right this minute, you know. They’ll have their map. They’ll know us inside and out.”

The Human Genome Project — such lofty goals propelled it, but it made her nervous as well. In full-bloom, the power of genetic knowledge would eclipse even that of nuclear fusion, yet thus far no one was even regulating it. Historically, great power was often wielded by clumsy hands at best; at worst, savage ones. For their owners understood only the mechanics of what they manipulated, never the grand underlying mysteries.

“And suppose they do have that map someday,” she said. “You can look at a map of the Grand Canyon, but you can never get any true sense of what it’s like until you stand at its rim. You can look at the full orchestral score of Beethoven’s Fifth, laid out right in front of you, every note… but it’s only the bare frame. You can’t hear the music in it.”

“And what do you think might happen,” Clay said, “if you took a page or two from that score, and repeated it at random? It’d wreck the whole symmetry, wouldn’t it?”

“It could. But depending on the skill of the musicians, they might just make it work.”

He weighed this, kicked idly at a chunk of ice to send it skittering ahead of them along the sidewalk. “Well… Beethoven’d probably still be pissed.”

It felt as if they had arrived at a friendly stalemate. She the proponent of self-determination, he the unwilling proselyte still waiting to be convinced. It was an existential dilemma, all right, and she began to wonder if her victory might not come about only in his living of it. That realization on Clay’s part could lie years ahead, and she might never hear of it.

Clay frowned, a little bitter, a little bemused. “You know what the genetics labs are finding, now that they’re starting to really get into the DNA codes? I read this not long ago.”

“What’s that?”

“Down on the level of those three billion base pairs that make up the DNA chains? A lot of it, all it is, is junk. Whole long strings of those pairs… they don’t make up amino acids, they don’t do anything, they’re just there. It’s all junk, it’s static, it’s waste. It means nothing.”

“I didn’t know that.” Leave it to him to have found a wrinkle she’d missed.

“Don’t you see? It’s like life, broken down to the ultimate fractal: a few points of significance, and a lot of filler.” He appeared oddly pleased with this conclusion; not triumphant, more worn down with the weight of it, as he walked with shoulders rounded.

They slowed, forced to stop at a corner by a red light as the traffic shifted, flowing before them in automated currents, like a school of minnows — many fish, one mind. The two of them had gone far enough, it seemed, and turned to retrace their steps.

“It’s the ultimate joke on us,” Clay said. “It has to be. It took so many thousands of years to get to the place where we could finally read it.”

“So who told the joke?”

“Ask that and you’re getting into a whole new area,” he said. “That’s the riddle.”

* * *

They went their separate ways back at the motel, she to her room and Clay to his. He professed need of a shower, a long one, that he had left Timothy Van der Leun’s feeling very unclean. It could take quite some time, she knew. There were residues that could defile a person in places where water could never flow.

Sarah asked how it had gone and Adrienne covered most of the highlights. Briefing Sarah had become second nature by now, had even begun to feel like the proper thing to do.

“Is he okay?” she wondered.

“He’s a survivor.” Adrienne hung up her coat, pried the calf-high boots from her legs. “It’s what he does. For all I know it may even be what he’s programmed for.” Stopping then, “I shouldn’t have said that, listen to me, he’s winning me over to his point of view.”

“Maybe he’s programmed to do that, too.”

“No, I think that’s general human nature,” she said. “You’ve obviously not spent enough time in meat markets listening to the male of the species convince you that his other car really is a Porsche.”

“You make it sound so inviting. But anyway,” said Sarah, in that dismissive, wheedling way she adopted sometimes, a sign she was readying for a radical turn of thought. “As long as you’re being so open-minded this afternoon…”

Adrienne greeted this the way a bull greets the flapping of the cape.

“How do you feel lately about taking Clay to see Kendra Madigan?”

Ah. The hypno-regressionist once more rears her controversial head. Clay’s collective unconscious waiting like an oil well for Kendra Madigan’s drill? She should have guessed.

“Haven’t we had this conversation before?”

“I think we agreed to disagree, but then it was more or less academic, wasn’t it? Because we expected to be staying in Denver until we went home.”

Adrienne began shaking her head. “I don’t see that going to Boston changes anything.”

“It changes everything. Kendra Madigan’s along the way.”

“Like hell she is. She’s where? South Carolina?”

“North.” Sarah scowled mildly: You knew that. “It can be on the way if we want it to be. We are blessed with maps of this side of the country.”

And it seemed absurd to be arguing about this once more. It was a battle of entrenchment rather than resolution. Not even a squabble worth having; it was boring. Go ahead, she might as well say, if we’re going to fight then why don’t you up the ante so we at least have something worthy of a good argument.

And then Sarah did precisely that.

“Adrienne,” she said. “Please don’t get angry —”

Oh?

“— but I’ve already been in touch with her. Before we left Denver. She thought she remembered me from the reception after her lecture at ASU.”

Why, of course. Of course she would. This was Sarah; Sarah made an impression on people. The anger and resentment built from there: How could you? How could you think of doing such a thing without consulting me first? But of course that answered itself. The word bitch was employed; possibly underhanded. Such heat, such fuss, but in a perverse way it did feel divine, an excuse to vent steam that had nowhere else to go.

She was interested, was Kendra Madigan. According to Sarah, she wanted her crack at Helverson’s syndrome as well. Didn’t they all.

“Explain something to me,” Adrienne said, “Now that you’re finally getting decisive about something, why does it have to be my patient?”

“In about eight hours, Clay’s not your patient anymore. So you can either be his friend, or you can be someone who wants to exploit him… or you can be someone who looks to be developing a very unhealthy obsession over keeping him to herself. So which is it going to be?”

None of the above, was that an option? Sarah was stabbing at her with the truth; unkind cuts, all. This is the way we fight — not with bludgeons, but with scalpels. Come midnight, Clay was a psychologically free man. This was something she would have to get used to, and promptly. Therapist no more, at best a consultant.

Before they’d left Denver, it had taken her two days to work up the nerve to tell Clay that her funding had