Altar Of Eden

“So you’re saying someone bred them this way on purpose. Is that even possible?”

“I can’t rule it out. Genetic science has come a long way and continues to push boundaries. At ACRES, we’ve successfully cloned wild cats. We’ve even merged a fluorescent protein from a jellyfish to produce a cat that glows in the dark.”

“Mr. Green Genes. I read about that,” he said. “In fact, it’s one of the reasons why I called for you. I needed an expert on genetics and breeding. Someone to tell me who could have produced this bizarre cargo.”

He led her through the hold. A wire cage held a mass of winged bats the size of footballs.

“Vampire bats,” Lorna said. “But they’re ten times the size they should be. May be a form of primordial gigantism.”

Similarly a caged fox down the row was the size of a bear cub. It hissed and growled and threw itself against the bars. They quickly moved past, stopping briefly at a tall cage that held an ordinary-size parrot, but it had no feathers.

It cawed loudly, leaped to the front bars, and studied them while cocking its head back and forth. Jack had a hard time hiding his disgust. There was something so alien and wrong about its appearance.

Lorna just moved closer. “When baby parrots first hatch, they’re featherless or covered only with a light down. I don’t know if this one’s stunted into an infantile state, or if it’s a throwback, too. In fact, it’s theorized that birds are the closet living relatives of dinosaurs.”

Jack didn’t argue. The creature-leather-skinned and beaked- definitely had a prehistoric look to it. But what really got him unnerved was the sharpness of its attention.

The bird leaped back to its perch, spouting a garble of Spanish. That aspect of the parrot-the ability to mimic-remained intact. It began to screech a string of numbers in English, its pronunciation and diction sounding perfectly human, if pitched slightly sharper.

“… three one four one five nine two six five…”

They continued onward, then Lorna stopped in midstep. She stared back at the cage as the bird continued to screech out numbers. It went on and on without stopping.

“What is it?” he asked.

“That parrot… those first numbers… I can’t be sure…”

“What?”

“Three one four one five. Those are the first five digits of the mathematical constant pi.”

Jack remembered enough from high school geometry to know about pi, represented by the Greek letter n. He pictured the number in his head.

3.1415…

Awe filled Lorna’s voice as the parrot continued its numerological tirade. “Pi has been calculated to trillions of digits. I’d love to find out if the numbers the bird is mimicking are sequentially correct. And if so, how long of a sequence the parrot has memorized.”

As the bird continued without pause, Jack noted a hush fall over the hold. The mewling, growling, even shuffling of the other animals grew quiet, as if they, too, were listening. Eyes, reflecting the light, seemed to stare toward them from the dark cages.

With a shake of his head, he moved on. He had a crime to investigate.

“What I really wanted to show you is back here.”

He led her to the larger pens at the stern end of the hold. One pen held a nursing lamb and its mother. But rather than curly wool, the animals’ coats hung straight to the ground, more like a yak’s pelt than a sheep’s. But that’s not what Jack wanted to show Lorna.

He tried to urge her on, but she paused at the next cage. The occupant of that pen lay stiffly on its side atop the hay floor, legs straight out, eyes wide and fixed, dead. It looked like a miniature pony, but the creature was no larger than a cocker spaniel.

“Look at its hooves,” Lorna said. “They’re cloven. Four toes in front, three in back. The earliest ancestor of the modern horse- Hyracotherium-was only the size of a fox and had the same digital division.”

She crouched to examine the dead body. The hoof of one toe had been torn away. Its head bore signs of fresh concussions, as if it had panicked and thrashed against the bars before it died.

“Looks like something scared it to death,” she assessed.

“I can guess what that might have been.” Jack headed toward the very back of the hold. “This way.”

She followed. Irritation entered her voice, along with a thread of deeper anger. “What were these people doing? For that matter, how did they do it?”

“That’s what I hoped you could answer. But we have a bigger and more immediate problem.” They reached the last pen. It was large and heavily barred. Hay covered the floor, but no animal was in sight. “We found the door dented and broken open when we came down here.”

“Something escaped?” Lorna glanced from the empty pen back toward the passageway and stairs, clearly recalling the blood trail.

“We need you to tell us what it was,” he said.

She frowned at him. “How?”

He pointed as something buried beneath the hay shifted. A weak mewling followed.

Lorna glanced to him, her face shining with curiosity. He pulled the door and held it open for her to enter.

“Be careful,” he warned.

Chapter 4

Lorna ducked through the low door and into the pen. Inside, the space was tall enough to stand upright. Still, she kept slightly crouched. Most of the hay had been pushed and piled to the back of the pen. She studied the space with a critical eye. Her nose picked up the strong ammonia smell of old urine. She avoided stepping in a sludgy pile of scat, loose and watery.

Whatever had been caged in here had been ill.

The hay pile at the back shifted as something burrowed away from her. It backed into a corner and could retreat no farther. The mewling had stopped.

Lorna crossed, knelt, and gently picked the hay away. She spotted snowy fur with faint gray spots. A long tail lay tucked around the curled, frightened shape. Small feline ears lay flat against its head.

“A leopard or jaguar cub,” she whispered.

“But it’s white,” Jack said by the doorway. “Like some sort of albino.”

She stared at the cub’s pinched blue eyes. “No. Eye color is normal. Likely it’s a form of inherited leucism. Where only the skin pigment is lost. Either way, it’s definitely some type of panther.”

“I thought you said it was a leopard or jaguar.”

She understood his confusion. It was a common mistake. “Panther’s not really a taxonomic term. The genus Panthera covers all the big cats. Tiger, lion, leopard, jaguar. And a white panther could be a version of any of those cats.”