Prototype. Part 25

"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 s.h.i.+fted, 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 h.e.l.l 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 b.i.t.c.h 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 been cut. It hadn't even taken him two minutes to accept it, pa.s.sively, as if it were expected, unavoidable. For once she might have welcomed a minor tantrum. It would have at least united them against a common foe opposed to continuing whatever progress they had made.

"At the very least," Sarah said, softening, "whether we go there or not, don't you think the decision should be Clay's?"

Adrienne crossed her arms. "You know what he'll say."

"Uh huh," Sarah nodded. "So do you. That's why you're mad."

Tapping her foot - there was nothing else to argue with. "Well it is my car," she said, as petulantly as she could, and then there was nothing to do but laugh with the terrible gallows humor of surrender.

An old year waned, a new year took its place.

They greeted it quietly, privately. In motels, there were no holidays, there was only waiting. They watched the television and drank a few bottles as midnight came and went - ginger ale only, so Clay could share in the flow.

She was back on speaking terms with Sarah; the silence hadn't lasted long. It had seemed pointless to begin the new year on opposing sides of contention. If carried into the car tomorrow, mile after mile, it would feel intolerable.

She noticed that Clay spent time doodling on the notepad beside the phone, leaving the sheet behind when he retired to his room. She inspected it, found a simple drawing of a bottle blowing a cork through a blizzard of confetti, with the mutant phrase, Wring out the old, wring in the new.

And he was gone, in a sense, a part of him. Symbolic though that midnight deadline may have been, the pendulum slice of the clock had severed ... something.

With midnight's chime she had been discharged, as surely as a soldier returning from foreign lands. A soldier come home to hear someone tell him, You're a civilian once more. Maybe you committed some questionable acts in the name of duty, but we'll not speak of that again. Your responsibility is over. Oh, and one more thing...

Try to blend in, would you?

Thirty-One.

They rode into the new year, taking turns driving.

The drone of the car became lulling, Sarah's mortal enemy; she hated to risk a nap. It felt crucial to be awake and alert, lest something slide past the window during her slumber, something she might never have occasion to see again.

Civilization seemed to grow denser the farther east they traveled, more and more land sacrificed to bland G.o.ds forged from steel and asphalt and reflecting gla.s.s. They rolled through the clotted express lanes of cities whose buildings stood like vast tombs, glowing from dead light within, and hermetically sealed against the cold and snow and rain, against voices that dared raise doubts, sealed against thought itself. These hives bred conformists by the millions.

But much of the countryside was hardly more rea.s.suring, its fields lying fallow, stark as skeletons bleached by time. These, the graves of rusting, sharp-boned hulks that used to be tractors and combines, bogged down in mud or mired in financial tar pits.

And Chapel Hill, North Carolina, waited - for Clay, mostly, but Sarah couldn't deny her own curiosity. Clay's had been piqued as soon as she had suggested this detour. She'd had to be the one to do it. Adrienne had refused to actively involve herself in advancing such a scheme, going along only for the skeptical ride, as it were.

Clay had seemed to relish this new control over his destiny - at last, a choice. His mysterious mentor in Boston would keep for another few days, now that a newer obsession burned: the chance to incise deeper into his brain than any scalpel could reach. Perhaps they could peel back the layers and see what lay beneath, underlying his entire existence. He had spoken of such possibilities with fevered hope, while Sarah prayed the odyssey might prove worthwhile.

She feared that, come one place or another, Clay was hurtling toward some ultimate confrontation; if only he could be ready when it arrived.

They made it a two-day trip to Chapel Hill, and it was rife with stops along the way. Most anywhere served to shatter the monotony of the interstate. Sarah began to see the importance of seeking out whatever human oddities she could find during these brief sojourns, the people who stumbled to the cadence of their different drummers.

In convenience stores she browsed racks of postcards, in Tennessee buying a dozen of the ugliest she could find to send to their friends back home. Clay helped her choose while Adrienne pumped unleaded, and as Sarah paid for the cards he pointed at the nametag worn by the plump checkout clerk. Kathleen - August Employee of the Month, it read.

"Quit living in the past," he told her, and she began to cry. Fifteen miles down the road Sarah wondered if the girl would quit her job instead. It might do the trick.

She laid out the postcards the next morning over breakfast, writing one long sequential letter that flowed over all twelve. On each she gave instructions as to who was receiving the next card.

"What are you doing?" Adrienne asked, on her third cup of coffee and only now coming alive.

"I'm manipulating our friends from across the country," she said. "They'll have to get together for a party and everyone brings a postcard just to make sense of anything. It'll be in our honor and we won't even be there. I'll let you know when it's time for you to sign the last card."

Through the steaming scents of pancakes and bacon and eggs she noticed Clay's unwavering gaze, locked from across the table upon the postcards. "You can sign it too," Sarah told him.

"What's it like," he said quietly, "having a dozen people to write to? When I first left Minneapolis, I tried sending a few letters to people from high school, but no one answered."

Perhaps it was too early in the morning, her every essence exposed and unprotected, but the question bit, and bit hard. It came perilously close to drawing tears, for as she saw him stare at the postcards, ugly things though they were, she realized that he would view them as something far more. Seeing them as people he would never meet, never know, lives he could never touch even if he had the skills.

"It's like ... being part of a tribe," Sarah said. Having noticed that Adrienne had paused with bitten lip, her coffee cup halfway between table and tongue.

He looked across the diner, at the menagerie of travelers and locals, nothing in common but the morning and four greasy walls. "The modern tribal character, I don't think it's defined by its members. You know who really defines it?"

"Who?"

"Its outcasts," he said, then got up, and said he would wait in the car, that to wait in the cold would do him good, and she understood.

One could s.h.i.+ver only if one was alive.

Sarah continued to dwell upon tribes along the road, as they crossed into North Carolina. Clay had given driving a whirl this morning, giving it up when a headache sent him to the backseat. He moaned and wondered aloud if the bones of the skull did not at times loosen just enough to crash into one another for the sake of the pain it would cause, plate tectonics between parietal and occipital, temporal and sphenoid.

"I need a tribe, a primitive tribe, where everything is so elemental," he said, rising up to gaze out the window. "Science failed me, pretty much, I think. Psychology's just held its own - no offense. Maybe what I really need is a shaman."

Adrienne looked at Sarah from behind the wheel, and it seemed friendly enough. They had been peaceable but had kept their hands to themselves for the past couple of days, and the primary thing she'd felt for Adrienne - though the last she would admit to her face - was pity. Every mile driven, to Chapel Hill and to Boston, was just another step toward the altar of her obsolescence in the mystery of Helverson's syndrome.

"Isn't this more your field?" Adrienne spoke with an air of deference. If there was resentment she hid it well. "Tell us a story."

Sarah blanked for a moment, all the tales she had absorbed over her lifetime dissipating into dust, forgotten like cultures buried by aeons. Then she found one, a new tale, perhaps the one to bridge all the gaps inside this car.

"Once upon a time, not very long ago at all," Sarah said, and they grew as still as children, "there was a budding - and some would say exasperating - anthropologist. She'd just traveled from the desert land of her birth to the land of the mountain people, so she could be with someone she loved very much, who in turn was off trying to help a mountain man she cared a lot about. It wasn't long before the anthropologist and her lover got into a teensy argument, and the lover said something about the anthropologist finding a lost tribe in the mountains. And the anthropologist said all the lost tribes were gone, just about, that the next time one was found, that'd probably be it, there wouldn't be any more.

"Now, although she didn't much let on, the thought of that made her more sad than she even would have expected, because she knew just who she was thinking about, a tribe she'd only heard rumors about, so she decided she never wanted them to be found, because the possibility of them being out there was a lot more important than the confirmation. The living mystery was more important than having it solved. And because if they were found, they wouldn't get to remain who they were anymore, it just never seems to happen that way. People who're found when they don't know they're lost seem to lose an awful lot in the finding. So maybe it'd be better for them, and for us, if they stayed lost."

Sarah paused to sip at a bottle of grapefruit juice. She was the only one moving, the other two poised and tuned in, waiting. She felt embarra.s.singly in control; she really had them.

"The people the anthropologist was thinking about, they were mountain people too, but way at the frontiers at the edge of the world, almost, in the mountains of the Gobi desert in Mongolia. Mountains and deserts ... it wasn't until she was talking with her lover that the anthropologist came to truly appreciate the allure and the power of both places, because lies have a harder time living in them. So it seemed to her that this last lost tribe must have the best of both worlds where they were.

"The local Mongols called these people almas, and knew enough about them to describe them, and said they were short and stocky, and hairy, with broad features. Very crude clothes, made of animal skins, mostly. But not even the Mongols who'd lived around there nearly forever could talk with them, because their words were so different, and the almas were very shy people, too. But the Mongols did find the almas would trade with them, so they'd leave a parcel of skins or something on the ground, in the open, or on a big rock, where the almas could find it, and when they'd come back later it'd be gone, with something else in its place. Some other skins or tools or food that had been gathered ... obviously things that the almas thought had enough value to represent them to the people they were too shy to meet, and whose words they could never understand."

Sarah took another drink of her juice, and teased her tiny audience with more silence.

"So word got out, even from a region as remote as the Gobi Desert, and everyone who made it a point to pay attention to such things wondered who and what the almas really were. Obviously they were there, and not imaginary. The Mongols didn't have any reason to be making anything up. Finally, what a lot of people decided the almas might be was a surviving tribe of Neanderthals ... still alive in one of the wildest places on earth, where there wasn't even a rain forest to draw in outsiders just so it could be cut down. The kind of place that was valuable only to the people who lived there ... even the ones supposed to have been gone for forty thousand years. So it made the anthropologist wonder something: Do the almas still know something the rest of us have forgotten?"

She heard Adrienne give a satisfied, throaty chuckle.

"And that's where the story ends, I guess," she said, with a soft and hopeful smile toward the highway, toward the east, toward the other side of the world. "As far as the anthropologist knows, the almas are still there, still trading with their neighbors, and no one can say for sure who they are. Which is the way it should stay. So the story ends with the mystery and the wonder intact ... just the way all good tribal legends should end. Because shamans know that's the part of the story that teaches the lesson."

She listened to the hum of the highway beneath them, shut her eyes, and felt Adrienne's hand sliding tender across the seat to rub her knee. Listened until she heard Clay stir in the back, and speak up for more.

"And what's the lesson of this one, do you think?" he asked.

"That the almas found a place in the world where they could still live in peace, even if it was the only place on earth left for them. So the almas aren't really lost at all, not to anybody who bothers to understand. And if they can survive, in a time that's completely wrong for them ... maybe so can a few others who feel as lost as the almas must appear to the rest of the world."

She smiled back at Clay, who briefly met her eyes before looking away. She waited for more questions but none came, and she thought, for a change, that this was probably for the best.

They reached Chapel Hill in mid-afternoon and found a motel. Toward dusk, Sarah phoned Kendra Madigan to let her know they were in town, and ask when she would prefer they come to her home.

"Let's make it no later than ten-thirty tomorrow morning, all right? We'll have a long, long day ahead of us. And you'll promise me something? That each of you, you'll get a good long night's sleep tonight?"

"Promise," Sarah said.

"Let me ask you something about this subject of yours," and Ms. Madigan's voice had dimmed, quieted. "Is he p.r.o.ne to violence when he learns things he might consider unpleasant?"

Sarah's hand wrapped harder around the phone. "If it's about himself ... he'd more than likely turn his distress inward. What are you expecting?"

"I don't expect anything specific, Ms. McGuire. We'll just have to wait and see. And be ready. Because when someone's under a hypnosis this deep...? It really is impossible to expect what might come bubbling up from so far down."