Altar Of Eden

Curious, she moved to place the jaguar cub back into its cage. The cub had finished the bottle and was already contently half asleep.

Igor continued to watch her, tracking her as she returned Bagheera to a woolen nest of blankets. Once she had the cub settled, she crossed back to the parrot and leaned closer.

She spoke softly. “Hello, Igor.”

“Hello,” he mimicked back and climbed up and down the bars, still clearly nervous with his new surroundings.

She struggled to think of a way to help calm him-then remembered her visit to the trawler’s hold and had a sudden inspiration. She slipped a PDA out of her pocket and keyed up the calculator. She pressed the icon for a familiar Greek letter.

Once ready, she asked, “Igor, what is pi?”

The parrot froze on the cage door, eyed her again, then hopped back to his wooden perch. He stared at her with one eye, then the other.

“C’mon, Igor. What is pi?”

He squawked again, his head jogged up and down a couple of times, then he began a familiar recitation. “Three one four one five nine two six five…”

His head continued to bob with each number, rhythmic and regular. She stared at her calculator’s display. It was the mathematical constant pi. The number sequence was correct. The parrot’s nervous shivering slowly settled as he continued, passing beyond the number of digits on her PDA’s display. He sank low to his perch and crouched over his claws, clearly finding some solace in the concentrated repetition, like someone knitting or an old man working a crossword puzzle.

He went on and on, slipping into an almost hypnotic rhythm.

She lost count of the number of digits he spouted.

It had to be well over a hundred.

She didn’t know if the continuing sequence was just nonsense, but she planned on repeating the test at the first opportunity. She listened for several minutes in stunned silence, recognizing she would need pages and pages of the mathematical constant to see if the bird was correct.

How long a sequence has he memorized? And who taught him?

Before she could consider this further, the door to the isolation ward pushed open with a soft pop of its double seals. Igor immediately fell silent. She turned as the lanky figure of Dr. Carlton Metoyer strode into the ward.

“ Carlton,” she said, surprised by the director’s unannounced visit. “What are you doing down here?”

He offered her a warm fatherly smile. “I see you’ve finished feeding Bagheera.” He stressed the cub’s new name, his eyes dancing with amusement.

She inwardly groaned. She had only mentioned the cub’s name to her research assistant, but as always, word traveled quickly across ACRES. She felt a flush warm her cheeks. She was supposed to be a postdoctoral fellow, not a preteen with a new kitten.

“His belly’s full,” she said. “At least for the next couple hours. Then he’ll be crying for his bottle again.”

“That should give the lab enough time to finish their genetic analyses.”

“What’s been done so far?”

She was anxious for any news. After arriving at ACRES with the animals, she had spent all her time stabilizing the debilitated animals and assisting in the collection of blood and tissue samples. While she had performed the physical exams, the DNA samples had vanished into the main genetic lab-Dr. Metoyer’s exclusive domain. The director was world-renowned for his pioneering work on cloning and interspecies embryo transplants.

“We’ve barely scratched the surface,” Carlton said. “But an initial chromosomal assay has already revealed an intriguing quirk. We’re repeating the test right now, but I wanted to come down here and fetch you. It’s something you should see for yourself.”

He motioned and headed toward the door. He was clearly enthused about something and that excitement passed to her.

She followed, practically vibrating with curiosity. As she left she glanced back and spotted Igor staring back at her, perched again on the door. He had returned to his shivering.

She heard him whisper behind her.

“Want to go home.”

Chapter 8

Lorna hated to close the door on Igor’s plaintive plea, but she had a bigger mystery to solve. Still, a pang of sympathy coursed through her, dulling the sharp edge of her professional interest.

As the isolation door clicked shut, her boss was already halfway down the hall, moving with long, purposeful strides. He had been speaking, but she caught only the last bit.

“… and we’ve already started PCR tests to begin amplifying the key chromosomes. But, of course, DNA sequencing will take most of the night.”

She hurried to close the distance with Carlton -both physically and mentally. Together they headed down another hallway and reached the double doors to the suite of genetic labs that occupied this wing of the ACRES facility.

The main lab was long and narrow, lined on both sides by bio-hazard hoods and workstations. The latest genetic equipment filled shelves and tables: centrifuges, microscopes, incubators, electrophoresis equipment, a digital camera system for visualizing DNA, and racks of pipettes, glassware, scales, vials of enzymes and PCR chemicals.

Carlton led the way to where two researchers-a man and a woman-were crouched before a computer monitor. The pair stood so close together, both wearing white lab coats. They reminded Lorna of the conjoined monkeys, bonded at the hip just like Huey and Dewey.

“This is amazing,” Dr. Paul Trent announced and glanced over a shoulder as she reached them. He was young, thinly built, with wavy blond hair combed behind his ears, looking more like a California surfer than a leading neurobiologist.

Paul’s wife, Zoë, stood next to him. She was Hispanic. Her black hair was bobbed short-shorter than her husband’s-framing wide cheekbones, lightly freckled. Her lab coat did little to hide the generously curved body beneath.

The two were biologists from Stanford, wunderkinds in the field, earning their degrees before their mid-twenties and already well regarded professionally. They were in New Orleans on a two-year grant researching neural development in cloned animals, studying the structural differences between the brains of cloned specimens and their original subjects.

The pair of doctors certainly had come to the right place.

ACRES was one of the nation’s leading facilities involved with cloning. In 2003, they had been the first to clone a wild carnivore, an African cat named Ditteaux, pronounced Ditto for obvious reasons. And in the coming year, the facility was about to begin the commercial cloning of pets as a method to raise funds for their work with endangered species.