Carola Dibbell - The Only Ones

But now I got started with the questions, I keep asking and asking, while I follow him to the freezers. “And if the, what you said, IVF doesn’t work?”

He is opening drawers. I think he’s looking for empty cryo-Paks. “Well! I might try a bit of cloning. Enucleate a few of your eggs and transfer some nuclei from your soma.”

Man! I really got used to how Rauden talks. “With nobody’s product but mine?”

He finds a cryoPak, puts the covered dish with my breast soma inside, writes on the outside with a pen, and puts it in a freezer drawer. “Yes, it would be a,” he coughed, “single Donor SCNT. It’s done sometimes.” He shuts the freezer drawer and heads to the Box Room.

Well, I just kept on with the questions. It’s like a chasing game I used to play with Cissy Fardo, so long ago. I followed him to the Box Room where he sat at his gizmo and punched keys, and I sat on a box, like the first time I was ever in this room. “And if that works?”

He doesn’t even look up from his screen. “If I get results using your eggs and soma, hmm. Well, I could use it therapeutically, of course. It can be very effective on damaged tissue, for instance I could use it to patch your,” he coughed, “uterus, in case we ever need you for Host.” Once he started coughing, he kept coughing so bad that he went for water in the room where I had the bath and he had put his head under the faucet, my first day because I didotofha at the Farm. This room was so small, I have to squeeze myself in behind him while he drank from the tap.

“If Rini wants a virgin Host,” I go, “why would she pay to patch my uterus for Host? I’m never going to be a virgin Host. Did she tell you to patch me up for Host?”

“She doesn’t know,” he says, between gulps. “She doesn’t need to know.” Then he stood up from the tap. “I’d just be doing this on my own time — for science. Just to see what happens.” He wiped his beard off, looked at his watch and seemed to be thinking. Then he gave me a smile I never saw him give anyone, even Henry. “Want to give it a try?”

I said sure.

So he went out to the freezers and got a few cryoPaks from the drawers, then grabbed lab suits, Hygiene gloves and masks from a closet, and we suited up. He headed down the hall behind the green light, with me following as fast as I could, to where three steps I never knew were there led down to another hall, very dark and cool. We came to a door to a little room. He told me go in this room. One wall had an inside window that I saw Rauden through in a minute, in another little room, where he lit one dim light. There were buckets, metal boxes, a table with a machine on it, and a monitor he turned on. I could see his fingers in it. I feel almost like the Seal Room test, the other way around.

He gets on a seat and fiddles with some things, sliding around, because the seat has wheels, like Henry’s wheelchair. I sat on a stool in my room. Then he stopped sliding and just put his hands in his lap and sat.

I saw a different Rauden, all at once. Normally the guy is so nervous, you think he can’t do anything, then, when he takes blood or spit or soma, he moves fast and clean? But it’s not even like that. He didn’t move at all. He sat very, very still, and I sat, period, both of us in dark rooms, not saying anything, with a window in the wall between, a long time.

Then he moved. He took the dishes out of the cryoPaks, put one in a kind of cooker, punched a button, pulled a mic, and whispered, “Defrosting ova!” I heard something beep.

He put the dish in the machine. It came up on the monitor, with four circles in it, clear except for a smaller circle in each that got dark stuff in it. “Enucleating ova!” he whispered. Well, what is that? A stick starts poking one of the clear circles. Poke, poke, poke. Then it got inside. It kept poking, till it poked the smaller dark circle. Skoosh! The dark stuff went up in the stick, the stick went away. Another one came back. The whole thing happened three more times. When he was finished, Rauden looked at me, over the mask. He seemed excited. I was too.

He whispered, “Extracting nucleus from somatic cell!” He did it with a dish of blobs. He got the dark stuff out of them with sticks.

Now it’s the first dish, with the first four clear circles, empty. “Ready to transfer somatic nuclei to prepared ova,” he goes. Then he sits very still. Very, very still like before he started. Then he says, “Here we go.” Back comes a stick with dark stuff in it, poking one circle. Poke, poke, poke, poke, so gentle, till it got in, then skoosh, the stuff went down the stick and when it skooshed out, it was that same dark little circle again, but inside this circle now. He did it with all of them. It took quite a long time. Then he looked over the mask, and even with just eyes you can see a great big grin. “Now for the shock!”

He squirted because I didotofha something on the circles. He lifted the whole dish of circles and put them very careful in a large plexi box, shut the top, patted it, then tiptoed from the room. I went out of my room too, down the dark hall to where a different door was open to outdoors and Rauden sat in the sun on some green steps near a tree covered with leaves. We were inside so long I forgot how sunny the day is, but there are shadows too, and a small breeze.

He already took his mask and gloves and even glasses off and now he closed his eyes. I almost think he would of gone to sleep for once, but the phone rang inside. He still looked relaxed when he was through taking the call. His skin even looked better. He looked shy. Music was playing. “I always like Sonny Rollins, after I do nuclear Transfer,” he told me. “That’s with an O.”

Ok.

And he lit up a cigarette. Where did he find that? He smoked it in the sun and when he finished, leaned back on the Quonset metal wall and told me a lot of things. He said if it works, the things he just made start splitting maybe in a day or so, the way it works the regular way, or is supposed to. If you were going for multiples, you separated at whatever cell number, up to eight, you had in mind. He did this routinely. “The first cloners used human hair for the separation.”

I’m leaning on the Quonset metal too. “What do you use?”

He turned his head and gave me a really long look. If I had to guess what he was thinking, he was thinking, who’d believe her, even if she told? “Sound waves.”

He can be sure I’m not going to tell anyone that.

I just closed my eyes and felt how warm the Quonset metal is, from the sun. “How long before you know if it worked?” I asked and don’t even open my eyes.

“Forever,” he said. “This is so totally experimental. It would take the child’s entire life — maybe the child’s child’s life — to know if it really worked. Well! It’s still an open question what it does to all the fucking livestock we made! Not that they die young, though some have, and there is that business with the telomeres — well! You don’t need to know about that.” And he was quiet for a long time.

There went the small breeze again moving the branches of the tree, and this shadow from them is moving over us where we leaned, like the shadow was tickling us. I honestly think I never been out in a nicer day than this.

“But if it doesn’t work, period,” he said at last, “we’ll know that in a few days, if they die.”

He went back inside to check the box.

So. He got everything he could from me. I have to go back to Queens.

We could still hear the music behind us when we headed down the road in the truck. “What do you think is going to happen?” I asked.

He said he didn’t know, and we both laughed, like now Inez is asking the questions and he’s the one who says he didn’t know. “If we get working viables,” he added, “there would be a Bonus, if you came back.”