" 'Long hair'! You're sure of that."
"As sure as the woman in Paris who told this to the family's detectives." Lark shrugged. "When Rowan was seen in Donnelaith it was also with a tall thin male companion who had long black hair."
"And you haven't heard one word from her since the night before she sent you this stuff."
"Correct. She said she'd get in touch as soon as she could."
"What about the call? Any record? Did she call collect?"
"She told me she was in Geneva. She told me what I already told you. She was desperate to get this stuff to me. That she'd try to get it out before morning, that I was to bring it to you. She said that she gave birth to the subject in question. The amniotic fluid was in the pieces and bits of towel. Her own blood, sputum, and hair was included for analysis as well. I hope you did that analysis."
"You bet I did."
"How did she give birth to something that isn't a human being? I want everything you've discovered, no matter how random or contradictory. I have to explain all this to the family tomorrow! I have to explain it to myself."
Mitch curled his right hand and pressed it to his mouth to cover a slight cough. He cleared his throat.
"As I said, it isn't Homo sapiens," he began, looking directly at Lark. "It may look like Homo sapiens, however. Its skin is much more plastic--in fact, you only find skin like that in human fetuses, and apparently the creature will retain this plasticity, though only time will tell. The skull appears to be malleable, like that of an infant, and that too may be permanent, but it's impossible to tell. It still had the soft spot, the fontanel, when it was last X-rayed; indeed there's some indication the fontanel is permanent."
"Lord God," said Lark. He couldn't resist touching his own head. The fontanels of babies always made him nervous! But then Lark didn't have any children; mothers seemed to get used to it, having little critters around with skin-covered holes in their skulls.
"This thing was never a conventional fetus, by the way," said Mitch. "The cells from the amniotic fluid indicate it was a fully developed diminutive male adult when it was born; it probably unwound itself with remarkable elasticity and walked away from its mother, the way a young colt or a young giraffe walks away after birth."
"A total mutation," said Lark.
"No, put that word out of your mind entirely. This is no mutation. This appears to be the product of a separate and complex evolutionary process. The end product of a whole different set of chance mutations and choices over some millions of years. If Rowan Mayfair hadn't given birth to this--and it is certain now to me from the specimens that she did--my guess is we would be dealing with some creature developed in full isolation on some unknown continent, something older than Homo erectus or Homo sapiens, much older in fact, and with an entire spectrum of genetic inheritance from other species, which human beings don't possess."
"Other species."
"Exactly. This thing climbed its own evolutionary ladder. It is not alien to us. It evolved from the same primal soup. But its DNA is much more complex. If you took its double helix and flattened it out, it would be twice the length of that of a human being. The creature seems--superficially at least--to have carried up the ladder with it all kinds of similarities to lower life forms which we as humans no longer have. I've only begun to break it down. That's the problem."
"Can you work any faster? Can you find out more."
"Lark, this isn't only a matter of speed. We're just beginning to understand the human genome--what's a junk gene and real gene. How can we break down the genotype of this thing? It has ninety-two chromosomes, by the way--that's double the number of a normal human being. The makeup of its cell membranes is obviously very different from ours, but how I can't tell you, since I can't tell you very much about our own cell membranes since nobody knows what they're made of, either. That's the dominant theme here. The limits of what I know about this being are the limits of what I know about us. But it is not us."
"I still don't understand why it can't be a mutant."
"Lark, it's far too much of a departure. It's way beyond the orbit of mutation. It's highly organized and complete in itself. It's no accident. And it's just too beautifully developed as it is. Think in terms of percentages of chromosomal similarity. Man and the chimpanzee are ninety-seven percent similar. This thing is no more than forty percent similar at most. I've already run simple immunological tests on its blood which prove this. That means it diverged off the human family tree millions of years ago, if it was ever part of the human family tree. I don't think it was. I think it was another tree altogether."
"But how could Rowan be the mother? I mean you can't just--"
"The answer is as surprising as it is simple. Rowan also has ninety-two chromosomes. The exact same number of exons and introns. The blood, the amniotic fluid and the tissue samples she sent confirm it. I'm sure she'd figured out that much herself."
"But what about Rowan's past records? Didn't anybody ever notice this woman had double the number of human chromosomes?"
"I've verified everything through blood samples on file at University from her last physical. She has ninety-two chromosomes, though there is no evidence in the rest of the physical picture to indicate the additional chromosomes were anything but dormant in her case. Nobody ever noticed because nobody ever took a genetic blueprint of Rowan. Who would? For what? Rowan has never been sick a day in her life."
"But someone..."
"Lark, DNA blueprinting is in its infancy. Some people are totally opposed to doing it on anyone. There are millions of doctors all over the world who have no idea what's in their own genes. Some of us don't want to know. I don't want to know. My grandfather died of Huntington's chorea. My brothers don't want to know if they carry the gene for it. Neither do I. Of course sooner or later I'll have myself tested. But the point is, genetic research has just begun. If this creature had surfaced twenty years ago, it would have passed for human. It would have appeared to be some kind of freak."
"So you're telling me Rowan isn't a human being?"
"No, she is human. Absolutely. As I was trying to explain, every other test taken on her throughout her life has been normal; her pediatric records, all normal, growth rate normal. Which means that this entire set of extra chromosomes was never switched on during her development...until this child started to grow in her womb."
"And what happened then?"
"I suspect its conception triggered several complex chemical responses in Rowan. That's why the amniotic fluid is full of all kinds of nutrients. The fluid was dense with proteins and amino acids. There is some evidence that a substantial yolk remained with this developing creature long after the embryonic stage. And the breast milk. Did you know there was breast milk? It's not normal density or composition. It contains infinitely more protein than human breast milk. But again, it's going to take me months, maybe years, to break all this down. It's a whole new type of placental we are dealing with here. And I barely have what I need to begin."
"Rowan was normal," said Lark. "Rowan carried a package of apparently useless genes. When conception occurred these genes were switched on to start certain processes."
"Yes. The normal human genome functioned consistently and well in her, but she had these extra genes intertwined within the double helix, waiting for some sort of trigger to cause their DNA to begin its instructions."
"Are you cloning this DNA successfully?"
"Absolutely.
But even at the rate that these cells multiply it takes time. And by the way, there is another curious aspect to these cells. They're resistant to every virus I've hit them with; they're resistant to every strain of bacteria. But they are also extremely elastic. It's all in the membrane, as I said before. It's not human membrane. And when these cells die--in intense heat or intense cold--they tend to leave almost no residue at all."
"They shrink? They disappear?"
"Let's say they contract, and there you have one of the most provocative aspects of this thing. If there are others like it on this earth, they have left no evidence in the fossil record for the simple reason that the remains tend to contract and disintegrate much more quickly than human remains."
"Fossil record? Why are we suddenly talking about a fossil record? One minute we have a monster..."
"No, we never had a monster. We have a different sort of placental primate, one with enormous advantages. Its own enzymes dissolve it at the moment of death, apparently. And the bones, that is another whole question. The bones don't appear to have hardened. I don't know for sure. I wish I had a team of men working on this. I wish I had the entire Institute--"
"Is this stuff compatible with our own DNA? I mean can you split the strand and combine it with our--"
"No. God, you surgeons are geniuses. Forty percent similarity isn't enough. You can't breed rats to monkeys, Lark. And there's some other violent reaction going on. Maybe just too much conflicting genetic instruction being given by its DNA. Damned if I know. But they sure as hell don't combine. I haven't been able to culture it with any human cells. But that doesn't mean it can't be done. The thing might have come about because of very rapid repetitive mutations inside of nucleotides in a given gene."
"Back up, I can't follow that. Like you just said, I'm a surgeon."
"I always knew you guys didn't really know what you were doing."
"Mitch, if we did know what we were doing, how could we do it? When you need us, and pray you never do, you'll bless us for our ignorance and our sense of humor and our sheer nerve. Now...this thing...it can't breed with humans?"