Immunity Index Page 4

  Just asking. I want to send you some information.

  About what? It could only be one thing, one exciting thing, the mutiny. Yes, Mamá.

  I’ll send it to you with a secure courier.

  Okay. Lately life had been one long series of frustrations, and now something would change—for the better, Mamá was sure, and Irene wanted to believe that. They chatted a little more.

  Mamá asked, How is the pedazo? The piece—the piece of her heart and soul, a nickname for Nimkii in the language that meant family and affection for Irene. No one besides Mamá knew how thoroughly she loved him, and while her mother might never forgive her for failing to become an artist like herself, she seemed to accept Irene’s love of nature and its wonders. Then Mamá, who had gotten up ridiculously early to set up an art show, had to go.

  Mamá, the artist. Irene was a work of art, of genetic art, unique—Mamá always said that. Irene had talked about that once with Peng. He was an old friend of Mamá’s, both of them with similar artistic aspirations. His answer was a little cagey, as usual, and said his art was all about making people who could be their best, and every single person was unique by genetics and environment. For Irene, being that close to art all the time hadn’t made her feel good about becoming an artist. Irene had seen how her mother struggled, and hardship hadn’t turned her into a better person.

  Irene also didn’t look at all like Mamá, who had invented the story of a brief love affair to explain the difference. A lot needed to be unpacked in that, and someday the right day might arrive when they could talk about it.

  She guessed it was finally was safe to go downstairs. Ruby was at her desk in the living room and never liked to talk to her much anyway, so Irene had the kitchen to herself. Still, the silence felt edgy. She ate some toast and drank a little cheap synthetic coffee, the best the family could afford, as she checked the official news on her phone. Yes, new restrictions had been proposed, but only for resettlement of refugees, not routine travel. And yes, a minor cold was circulating, but not another killer epidemic, so don’t worry about it. Finding the Line didn’t have a new video. Too bad. It would have skewered the flag-versus-cold thing hilariously.

  By the time she slipped on her fluorescent orange staff vest and left the farmhouse, the sun had just risen over the horizon and the sky was clear.

  Alan and Will had been busy. A big American flag, creased from long storage, hung tacked to the window frame on the barn’s second story. A smaller flag flew from a staff in front of the farmhouse, and two little flags, the kind handed out for rallies or parades, were taped to the outer gate on Nimkii’s pen. The bright colors of the flags contrasted with the worn, faded paint on the barn and house.

  She hoped good weather would attract visitors. If none came today, Alan’s aggrieved prayers at dinner would be especially hard to listen to, asking not for blessings but curses. If there is a god, he/she/they/it is not petty and vengeful.

  Meanwhile, without help as usual, she had to feed Nimkii breakfast, and as she did, she thought about ways to attract visitors and money. Maybe an observation tower would provide a better view of Nimkii, but even a simple construction project would cost a few thousand dollars. A robot to help with chores would never happen.

  Would passenger pigeons really help? What attracted a lot of visitors was the zoos for mythical creatures like engineered unicorns, dragons, and bigfoots, no matter how poorly made and sickly they were. Nimkii was different, real. Peng had found a research paper that included Nimkii’s DNA and called it extraordinarily well thought through.

  An hour later, she heard horse hooves on the driveway. The staff at a stable a mile away urged riders to visit the farm and the mammoth, and every time mounted visitors came, Nimkii would stop what he was doing to watch the horses.

  But the visitors would come from the south and observe the worn graffiti on the pavement—predating Irene’s arrival—of the word cloNE surrounded by a circle and cut through with a slash. Ban clone. Irene felt dismayed by the graffiti and by its poor execution, upper- and lower-case letters mixed for no reason and a rather squarish circle—like it or not, she would always be the daughter of an artist. More important, it threatened Nimkii. She’d asked Alan about spray-painting over it.

  “It’s not the best way to greet visitors,” Irene had said.

  “It’s almost faded away anyway,” Alan had answered. Neglect was his specialty.

  The visitors were an elderly couple. They hitched their horses on the outer fence around Nimkii’s pen before Irene could warn them that he might lumber too close and spook the horses. Well, she’d have to hope he would behave for a while, although he was already staring at the animals.

  “Hi! Welcome to Prairie Orchid Farm,” she said as she approached, smiling. Maybe one of them was the secure courier.

  “Good morning,” the woman said without warmth. The man just stared at Nimkii, who was reaching his trunk toward the horses, sniffing. If they were couriers, of course they would be discreet about it.

  “This is Nimkii,” Irene said, trying to act receptive.

  “We know,” she said.

  The man took out a camera drone from a backpack. “Is he really dangerous?”

  “Only if he sees you as a rival, and he might,” Irene said. “This is his territory.”

  The man tinkered with his drone and launched it. The woman began to walk around the pen, silent, eyes narrowed. Usually visitors liked to chat, and she had to give a potential courier a chance, so she remained near him as he directed the camera to record Nimkii from various angles.

  “Why all the flags?” he said with a frown.

  “The owners put them up.” He still frowned. “I’m an intern. I recently got a degree in environmental ecology at UW–Madison.” She hoped her meaning would seep through—and confirm her identity.

  “Then you know.”

  Know what? About rationing? About Nimkii’s substandard living conditions? About an imminent mutiny?

  Nimkii approached, rumbling.

  “I hope he doesn’t scare the horses,” she said. That was very possible, although they seemed more interested in nibbling the timothy grass that grew alongside the fence.

  “What does he eat?”

  Irene went through the list. Visitor or courier, she wanted to be friendly. “It’s based on elephant needs, with more calories for a colder climate.” She didn’t add that it was all guesswork.

  And because the farm had so little money, they were feeding him trimmings from Christmas tree farms, oat straw, soybean husks, and even sawdust pellets. Despite that, Nimkii seemed healthy.

  “He should be roaming free and feeding himself,” the man said. “You should just open the pen and let him out.”

  She wasn’t sure if he was kidding. Nimkii ought to range freely. The thought burned every time she had it, which was often. “Well, there are farms around here, so it would cause problems.”

  “So you’re saying there’s no way he can lead a natural life.”

  She didn’t have a good answer. “I’m hoping to enrich his environment. Toys, more space, different foods.”

  The man grunted, called his camera back, and fiddled with it for a bit. Then he said, “Look what I did.” He used his phone projector to show her not a secret message, but a video with Nimkii apparently wandering through nearby meadows—a breathtaking and heartrending vision.

  He added, “That’s how he ought to live. He’d live longer.”

  “I know.” I know that better than you do. And you’re not Mamá’s courier.

  Nimkii trumpeted at the horses and arched his trunk. They backed off as far as their reins would let them, flashes of white around their eyes. The man rushed to untie them from the fence posts and lead them away.

  “The mammoth could take care of himself in the wild,” he called to her.

  Irene doubted that and wished she were wrong, but Nimkii had no experience with foraging or defending himself. Maybe she could teach him that somehow—in
case things went wrong, like an epidemic delta cold or a mutiny with bad consequences. She ought to start lessons soon, somehow.

  The woman joined him, and they chatted a bit between themselves, then mounted the horses and left without saying goodbye, but at least they paid the suggested visitor fee. She tried to forget about them but couldn’t.

  Later, Will came home, carrying a fishing pole and three little trout in a net, set the tackle in the barn, and tied up his dog, a typically friendly chocolate-brown Labrador who deserved to be free and treated like a member of the family. Instead it was usually leashed and ignored like a piece of equipment. Will disappeared into the house with the fish. Irene had her doubts about the cleanliness of the local rivers. When Irene entered the house to get a cheese sandwich for lunch, Will and Ruby were out on the front porch, and she heard them talking about how Alan had volunteered to deliver flags. Ruby thought he had better things to do.

  Irene had just finished eating when a family pulled up in the gravel driveway, two adults and a teenage son who looked glum and utterly bored. Was one of them the courier?

  The parents hurried to the far side of the pen, where Nimkii was. The boy seemed far too handsome and husky for his own good, as if he’d been tweaked, even cloned. If so, did he know? How did he feel about it? Irene knew how she felt, and all Peng’s well-intentioned words about how ordinary and normal she was had left her with different conflicts, not fewer.

  But if that boy was secretly a clone, too, then maybe his family was going to mutiny since he was now a second-class citizen. Maybe they’d carry a message.

  Rather than follow his parents, he approached her. He wore a visor-screen, and she wondered how much attention he was paying to his surroundings.

  “That’s the mammoth no one else wanted, right?” It sounded like an accusation.

  She tried to blame his hostility on boredom. “The herd in the Canada mammoth range is too closely related genetically, so he needed a different home.”

  “And the United States needs all our land to grow food.”

  “Yes. We hardly have room for wildlife of any kind anymore. It’s sad.”

  He squinted, perhaps not expecting agreement. “Is he really completely imprinted on humans?”

  “You’ve done your research.” Maybe the boy wasn’t so hostile, or maybe the conversation was a cover for a handoff. “We don’t know. And it would be hard to find out, at least here. These aren’t the ideal facilities.”

  “Is he smart, like elephants?”

  “Oh, yes. He recognizes different people, and when he hears a car, he comes to see if there are visitors.”

  “So he likes to see us?”

  “Yes. Look at how he went over to watch your parents. And sometimes when a bird calls, he answers it. He pays a lot of attention to his surroundings.” He also sometimes hiked around the perimeter of his little world in restless circles, and if he came upon a bird or small animal, he tried to kill it.

  “He’s never going to get to live a normal life,” the boy said.

  Why does everyone have to keep reminding me? “We’re trying to do the best we can for him.”

  “And this won’t really work for deextinction. There aren’t enough mammoths for genetic diversity. Or saber-toothed tigers, either. People should be really working harder to protect the wildlife we have. Hundreds of species go extinct every day.”

  Well, yes. He’d done his homework, and now he was delivering his report to a captive audience.

  “He’s not a real woolly mammoth anyway,” the boy said like a coup de grace and walked away to join his parents. She watched him leave, thankful he’d left just before she ran out of self-control. Definitely not the courier.

  The family said hardly anything more to her, which was fine. Her phone chirped. The father sent the fees, at least.

  “Thanks for the visit,” she said with all the fake cheer she could manage. Maybe more visitors wasn’t such a good idea if they only came to criticize. Nimkii watched them go, then paced around the perimeter of his pen, growling.

  “Pedazo,” she called to him, and he stopped to listen, “people understand you. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing, though. You didn’t ask to be what you are and where you are.” He couldn’t do anything about it, either. “I really need to get you a toy. How about an old tractor tire? You’d enjoy destroying that. One of them has to be easy to find, and free.”

  A tiger-striped squirrel raced past, someone’s genetic tinkering that now threatened to outcompete the native gray squirrel. What was real or normal anymore?

  She thumbed her screen for a distraction. The new resettlement proposal, it turned out, had looser limitations for people with a certain level of net worth, the ones who could afford private rescue services from disasters like hurricanes or sea rise. The poor were left to sink or swim in neglected refugee camps.

  Maybe the lack of visitors was due to worries about food and colds, and maybe those worries were making visitors peevish. Maybe. Would she ever know what was really going on?

  In the late afternoon, she took out her phone and checked on her friends. They said that even though no cases of the cold had been discovered, the Prez’s flag-waving ploy had created a backlash. People had interpreted it to mean that he knew the cold was coming soon, so stores and warehouses were being cleaned out as people stocked up on food and supplies. The official news, of course, remained upbeat. Patriotism would cure the cold. Sure. Everything about the day had been disappointing or bad.

  Meanwhile, it was going to rain, and she had to make sure that Nimkii’s food was securely stored.

  * * *

  Avril had a new plan. The mutiny was going to hold a protest, she was positive about that. She’d find out about it and show up, and then the mutiny people, the ones besides Cal, were sure to welcome her. Protest dates and times were secret so antiprotesters couldn’t break them up, but she’d find out, somehow.

  A friend from high school—no, not a friend, just an acquaintance, Avril didn’t want friends like that—who attended a university in California had confirmed the protest rumor. “People keep whispering about it. It’s going to be huge. I hope they all get trampled and die,” he’d said on their high school alumni forum. A couple of other ex-classmates said they’d heard rumors, too, and likewise hoped the protesters suffered. Something big and nationwide—and Avril would be part of it.

  She thrilled with excitement and, she admitted to herself, fear. That dog. But she wouldn’t back down. She looked out of her dorm room window. She’d always loved being near Lake Michigan back home, and she tried to calm herself with the view of Lake Mendota. The dorm management had notified her that her roommate was about to arrive—the joy of having a room all to herself was ending—and she wanted to make a good first impression.

  The door opened. A young woman walked in tugging a cart piled with suitcases and boxes. She was tall and tan with long black hair and big dark eyes, and she looked at Avril and around the room, judging everything she saw.

  This moment would decide whether the school year would be heaven or hell. Avril decided to set the tone. She lowered her phone, smiled, and said, friendly but not too perky, “Hi, I’m Avril.”

  “Shinta.” No reciprocal smile.

  “I haven’t done much to the room. I was waiting for you.”

  “Good.”

  First impressions could be misleading, but Shinta didn’t seem friendly. “Can I help you with anything?”

  “No, I’ll take care of it. Go back to what you were doing. By the way, I’m Indonesian, not Chinese. I grew up in Dallas.” She had hints of both Indonesian and Texas accents in her speech. “I just want everyone to know. In case they decide to round up the Chinese. Which they should.”

  If Shinta believed that, she might also want protesters to be trampled to death. Still, they’d have to live together. Avril tried to think of something compatible to say. Shinta beat her to it.

  “We should set some ground rules. I assume the
right side of the closet is for me.”

  “Yes.”

  “Pffft. That’s all? This is ridiculous.”

  Avril’s heart stopped. She’d scrupulously left half the space empty.

  Shinta’s voice grew louder. “Who thinks that’s all the space we need?” She turned. “But we’ll split it, fifty-fifty. Half of not-enough.”

  “Yeah.” Avril breathed again.

  “The ground rules. Number one. We can’t be lovers. Not ever. That will only backfire sooner or later.”

  “Agreed.” The thought hadn’t crossed Avril’s mind.

  “And food: No sharing food. Or clothing. We keep things picked up and clean.”

  Avril nodded. The idea seemed amenable. Not the tone, though.

  “Music on earphones. We can decide later how to decorate. Now we should set up the furniture.”

  “You’ve thought this through.”

  “I want everything ready as fast as possible. I got here late, and I’m going to work hard and learn all I can, and that’s all I care about.”

  “Me too.” Not really.

  They quickly stacked the beds into bunks, agreeing—or rather, Avril conceding—that the lower one was for Shinta. They arranged the desks and other storage on either side of the window, with the left side for Avril. She excused herself as Shinta continued to unpack.

  She wondered about her new roommate as she walked out. Was she just a random student, or was she sent to spy on Avril? And if so, by which side? You can never trust anyone.

  She had contacts in the mutiny besides Cal. She’d spoken to a senior at Dejope Hall’s start-of-the-semester welcome party, a short, energetic woman named Hetta, the one who promised to get her in touch with someone else, who turned out to be Cal, but he was just a setback.

  She was going to find Hetta.

  * * *

  Berenike knew her grandparents were named Linda and Christopher Swoboda. They had lived in the Milwaukee area, and perhaps they still did, so she hurried to rummage through the customer database of the autocar franchise where she worked. The momentarily empty reception area had a counter on one end that held a screen and equipment, all of it emblazoned with the teal corporate logo for AutoKar. A pair of teal plastic benches waited for customers in front of a wall-sized window, where that morning she’d hung a small American flag on corporate orders, grumbling during every minute that it took her. Electronic panels on the opposite wall depicted cars slightly more lovely and spacious than the real thing.