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ceiling. Scientists and soldiers with families had donated toys.
There was no denying that people had tried to love the unlovable child.
For a time, the orphan had become something of a celebrity, a distraction from
the plague. Like Miranda, strangers would swing by during their lunch hour to
sit in the booth and eat their sandwiches while she played, blissfully unaware
of her spectators. This past Christmas, second graders had gathered outside
her window to sing carols. The kids had held a name contest, and hundreds of
suggestions poured in, from Britney and Madonna to Ice. Nothing quite fit.Sin
Nombre, they ended up calling her.No Name.
She was quirky, but ungodly gifted for a four-year-old. They marveled at her
right-brain prowess. At an age when children were barely imitating lines, she
was drawing the aspen tree outside her window with ten different colored
crayons. It was the same tree each day, but always different. She changed her
palette, her theme, the size of the tree, the emotions. Some pictures had
leaves, some bare branches.
Some used tiny suns or tongues of flame or birds for leaves. No one knew where
she had seen fire. Then they remembered the candle flames of second-grade
carolers.
Lately a figure had crept into her drawings, usually seated under the tree. It
was a stick figure to begin with, remarkable in itself for her age. With
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astonishing speed, a matter of a week or so, the figure had acquired fingers
and a face with disproportionate details. It was Miranda who finally figured
out the distortions. Lacking a mirror, the girl had felt her own face and
transferred them to the paper. The child was drawing self-portraits. Her
self-awareness staggered them. They compared her to Picasso. Lately that had
changed.
A month ago, the breakdown had begun. The child tore her clothing to shreds.
They found her walls plastered with her own feces and urine. From this side of
the glass, barricaded from the stench, it was possible for Miranda to see the
beauty and mystery contained in that mess of handprints and chocolate scrawls.
Other people only saw neurotic behavior, or possibly something worse.
Popular opinion shifted. The child, it seemed, was a freak after all. Over the
next few weeks, there were other disgusting incidents. The child clawed her
face and limbs bloody before they could subdue her and cut her already short
nails. She ate her crayons. She attacked a male nurse. Their little Picasso
had tripped into rage. The lunch crowd proved to be fickle, or at least weak
of stomach. Her descent into madness if that s what this was had no
entertainment value. Soon the girl s audience dwindled to one.
Miranda liked it better this way. She could sit alone and think her thoughts
and draw her own conclusions. The girl s decline made no sense to her. Why had
she gone downhill so suddenly? Had she seen something disturbing through her
window? Had one of the nurses been rough with her? All the while, Miranda
hunted for hints of vestigial memory, anything to connect the foundling to her
Neandertal past. Maybe the child had begun to remember things from 30,000
years ago. And yet that defied
Miranda s theory on memory. The girl had been born as an infant, not in adult
form like the other clones.
As her speech pathways developed, past memories should have been overridden or
crowded out.
According to her theory, the girl was atabula rasa, or nearly one, with modern
memories written over ancient ones.
Miranda remained faithful. She saw herself in the girl s solitude. There was
no cadging of toys the way you might see among siblings. This was an only
child. Though her playfulness had withered, a month ago she had been arranging
her toys in straight lines and playing elaborate games with them. Her Barbies
were kind to one another, always speaking in a gentle whisper. In English.
Linguists had claimed the child could never produce human speech. Based on
their examination of old
Neandertal hyoid and jaw bones, they predicted she would lack the vocal
architecture to pronounce vowels likea, i, andu, or hard consonants likek
andg. But littleSin Nombre sailed past their pronouncements. She chanted her
ABC s with gusto.
Everything had been going so well. And then, abruptly, this other, demonized
phase. The toys dismembered. The silence and retreat.
As the first clone to be born, the child was considered an index case. Her
descent was a topic of debate.
Perhaps clones simply came unraveled with time. The recent escape of that Year
Zero clone only confirmed the impression. It was relieving for many people who
were conducting research on other clones. It meant that for all their
similarities to human beings, the clones were different, like machines with
parts that wore out more quickly.
The door to the observation booth opened. The odor of garlic blew in. Miranda
looked and it was Ochs, and that was not good. They called him the Grim
Reaper. Cavendish used the giant to bear bad news, and to enforce it, too.
Every throne in history had rested on such henchmen.
Ochs had a big turquoise belt buckle from one of the pueblos. He was blunt.
The council voted, he
said. He shook his head slowly as if it were his sad duty. She has to go.
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Miranda had thought through her reaction. She went out of her way to never
pull rank. But something had to be done. I m going to speak to my father
about this, she said.
Dr. Cavendish already took care of that, Ochs said. Your father agreed that
the council s authority is absolute. They considered your request, and
rejected it. That s that.
The council: a rubber stamp. She deserves better.
I m sorry. He wasn t. It didn t matter, he was just the messenger. It made
no sense to talk to him.
Miranda tried anyway.
She s not even four, for god s sake.
A feral child, said Ochs. Autistic. Violent. Even in the best of times,
she d have to be institutionalized.
She already is, Miranda retorted.
With her own nursing staff and a room with a view. We can t afford the
resources anymore, Ochs said.
We,thought Miranda bitterly. The Cavendish regime. Something changed her,
she said. Something external. This isn t her fault.
That s beside the point, Ochs said. You saw the DNA results. She s a
genetic dead end. We have to free up our manpower and space. The cure rules.
That last part had become a war cry. The cure rules.
It justified anything.
She s innocent. This isn t fair.
She s being transferred, that s all.
To a cage in the earth.
Your cage. She ll be in Alpha Lab, your building in your technical area. Now
you ll be able to see her without having to walk all the way over here. Ochs
smiled at her.
Since Elise s death, Miranda had fought to keep the complex known as Technical
Area Three a safe haven from Cavendish s strategy of pitting them against one
another. Competition, he preached, not cooperation.The arena of ideas. In the
space of a few months, whipped along by Cavendish, Los Alamos had started to
show fractures.
There was growing conflict in the labs, miniature civil wars within the larger
civil war that was Los
Alamos National Laboratory. People had thrown tantrums. Shouted. Bullied. Back
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