Robert Sawyer - Hybrids

“Lonwis Trob-he’s collapsed! We need medical aid, and-”

And, except for Bandra, who knew the joke about the hunters calling 9-1-1, the Neanderthals had no idea how to summon such a thing; nor could their Companions call anyone on this side of the portal. Mary rose and ran down the corridor to the quantum-computing lab.

Lonwis was flat on his back, his eyelids fluttering. When they opened, they showed only smooth blue-metal spheres; the parts with the mechanical irises had apparently rolled up into his head.

Ponter was kneeling beside Lonwis. He was using the back of one hand, effortlessly it seemed, to compress Lonwis’s chest over and over again-a Neanderthal version of CPR. Meanwhile, Lonwis’s golden Companion was speaking aloud in the Neanderthal language, describing Lonwis’s vital signs.

Mary picked up the phone on one of the desks, dialed 9 for an outside line, then 9-1-1.

“Fire, police, or ambulance?” said the operator.

“Ambulance.”

“What’s wrong?”

“A man having a heart attack,” said Mary. “Hurry!”

The operator, a woman, must have had the address on a screen in front of her, based on the incoming phone number. “I’m dispatching an ambulance now. Do you know how to perform CPR?”

“Yes,” said Mary. “But someone else is already doing that, and-look, I should tell you up front. The man having the heart attack is a Neanderthal.”

“Ma’am, it’s a serious crime to-”

“ I’m not joking! ” snapped Mary. “I’m calling from the Synergy Group. We’re a U.S.-government think tank, and we’ve got Neanderthals here.”

Ponter was continuing to compress Lonwis’s chest. Adikor, meanwhile, had opened up Lonwis’s medical belt and was using a compressed-gas injector to pump something into Lonwis’s neck.

“Can I have your name?” said the operator.

“Is the ambulance coming? Have you sent it yet?”

“Yes, ma’am. It’s on its way. Can I have your name?”

“It’s Mary N. Vaughan. That’s V-A-U-G-H-A-N. I’m a geneticist.”

“How old is the patient, Ms. Vaughan?”

“A hundred and eight-and no, I am not joking. It’s Lonwis Trob, one of the Neanderthals who visited the United Nations last month.”

Stan Rasmussen-a geopolitical expert who worked down the hall-had appeared in the doorway. Mary covered the handset and spoke quickly to him. “Lonwis is having a heart attack. Get Jock!” Rasmussen nodded and hurried away.

“I’m going to transfer you to the paramedics,” said the 9-1-1 operator.

A moment later a different female voice came on. “We’re five minutes away,” she said. “Can you describe the patient’s condition?”

“No,” said Mary, “but I’ll put his Companion on.” She picked up the desk set and carried it across the room, setting it down near Lonwis. She then spoke to Lonwis’s implant: “Switch to English, and answer all the questions you hear. Help is on its way…”

“ And yet, some of us will stay permanently on Mars. Now, in the pages of science and science fiction there have long been notions of terraforming Mars-making it more Earth-like, by enhancing its atmosphere and liberating its frozen water, thus creating a world better suited for human habitation…”

Jock, Ponter, and Adikor had rushed off to Strong Memorial Hospital, along with the still-unconscious Lonwis Trob. There was nothing Mary could do to help, and, at Jock’s urging, she had stayed back at the Synergy Group.

It took Mary a good hour to calm down enough to get back to her work, but finally she did so…only to have it blow up in her face.

One of Mary’s friends back at York had been a Linux evangelist, trying to convince everyone in the genetics department that they should abandon Windows and switch instead to the open-source operating system. Mary tended to stay out of computer wars-she’d remained neutral years before in the Mac-versus-PC skirmishes-but every time her Windows-based PC displayed that blue screen of death, she felt like throwing her support in with the Linux crowd.

And now it had happened again, for the second time today. Mary did the three-fingered salute, but after sitting through the interminable wait for the system to reboot, she found that it stubbornly refused to reacquire its network connection.

Mary sighed. It was 7:00 P.M., but she could hardly call it a day; Ponter and Adikor would need her to give them a lift back to Bristol Harbour Village whenever they returned from the hospital.

Of course, there were lots of other computers here in the old mansion that housed the Synergy Group, but, well…

Jock had one of those nifty Aeron chairs Mary had read about in the Sharper Image catalog. It was supposed to be super-comfortable, an ergonomic heaven. Granted, he had probably adjusted all its heights and tilts for his rangy body, but, still, she could get a feel for it if she worked in his office.

Mary got up, and headed down the staircase, which was carpeted in a wine red. Jock’s office door was wide open, and Mary walked in. Jock had a big bay window, looking south over the marina. Mary shivered at the view, despite it still being warm inside.

She walked over to Jock’s super-chair, all black metal and plastic, with a fine-meshed black back that was supposed to allow one’s skin to breathe while seated. Feeling like a mischievous kid, she lowered herself into the chair and leaned back.

My God, she thought. A product for which the hype was actually true! It was wonderfully comfortable. She used her feet to rotate the chair left and right. Mary knew Aerons cost an arm and a leg, but she had to get herself one of these…

After relaxing in the chair for a few more moments, she settled back to work. Jock, who had left this room in a hurry when Lonwis Trob had his heart attack, was still logged onto the network. Mary suspected her own password would work from here, but wasn’t positive, and so she decided to leave well enough alone, and continued working as if she were Jock. She opened up the “Neanderthal genetics” folder on the server, and Mary’s eyebrows shot up. She spent most of her time in this folder, but there were two icons displayed that she’d never seen before. She felt nervous: although Mary was pretty good at backing up, she was afraid the crash she’d had upstairs had corrupted the directory tree.

She decided to check by double-clicking on one of the icons she didn’t recognize-it showed a red-and-black double helix. Mary knew most of the genetics apps on the market, and their accompanying document icons, but this one was unfamiliar.

After a moment a window opened. It said “USAMRIID Geneplex-Surfaris” in the title bar, and a screenful of text and formulas appeared below it. USAMRIID was an acronym that appeared often enough in the genetics literature: United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. And Geneplex was obviously the program’s name. But “Surfaris” didn’t mean a thing to Mary.

Still, she looked at the window’s contents, and was absolutely astonished. Some of her own earlier work here at Synergy had involved trying to use the quorum-counting facility of bacteria to determine an actual tally of how many chromosome pairs were present-twenty-three or twenty-four. But that hadn’t worked. First, the quorum mechanism seemed to lack the ability to distinguish quantities that precisely. And, second, chromosomes only resolved themselves out of the chromatin during mitosis, which, of course, was hardly the usual state of affairs within a cell.

But Jock had apparently had someone else also working on this problem, and that geneticist had come up with a much simpler technique. In a Gliksin, what had been ancestral chromosomes two and three had fused, producing a much longer chromosome. The genes that had been at the end of chromosome two now abutted the genes at the beginning of chromosome three, somewhere in the middle of the new, combined chromosome.