Preuss, Paul - Re-Entry

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Countdown; Earth, 204 N.E.

Physician, heal thyself.

—Luke iv, 23

The snake eats itself, the dog chases its tail.

—G. Spencer Brown, Laws of Form

"Can you go home?" Susan had asked him, and in his profound hangover he'd

profoundly misunderstood her. What she'd wanted to know was whether he was

awake, and strong enough, and steady enough, to walk out of her life. Preferably

forever. It was not a friendly question.

But he'd taken it metaphysically, and for a moment his foggy brain had wrestled

with possibilities. Could he go home again? What would he do differently, if

suddenly he were given the chance to do it all over?

'Take these," she'd said, thrusting a triad of pills at his face. His half open

eyes had recognized a battery of lipotro-pin derivatives: energy, good will, a

sense of well-being, waiting under bis nose. The clouds of depression would

lift, the sun would come out, the bluebird of happiness would sing.

He'd shifted bis gaze to the gray-brown San Francisco fog outside Susan's soleri

window. Lying on his back on her couch, looking straight up, be couldn't see

anything else. Cold poisonous tentacles of despair, coiling over the glass half

dome. And inside bis skin, it was worse: he could smell the dried sweat and the

vomit, taste the congealed mucus on his tongue. Oh, he'd been a very naughty boy

this time....

"Come on, Phil, take it and get out of here. Chemical sympathy is all you get.

I've got work to do." -

He'd taken the pills, dreading the memories they would restore. Then Susan had

hauled him off the couch and pushed him through the door.

Those were his first wobbly steps on the way home.

Stage One; from Earth to Darwin, 206 N.E.—and before

Humboldt drove upward into star-spangled space, balanced on a column of fire

from her annihilator engines. All her crystal promenades and portals were

ablaze. On this "night" (by the ship's clock) the regal liner was more than

three months from Earth, and only hours from Earth Station, the binary black

hole system that gave forth on all the known accessible worlds of the Starry

Archipelago.

Barring some unimaginable last minute emergency, Humboldt would proceed

unchecked, diving with headlong grace into the space-time vortex around the

orbiting holes, to emerge in no time in the vicinity of Darwin's Star a few

dozen light-years away. The passage of the holes was scheduled for three o'clock

in the morning, ship's time; before then there would not be the slightest

interruption in the smooth .8-gee acceleration Humboldt maintained for the

comfort of her passengers.

Those passengers gathered now by twos and threes and fours, to recline in

leather-cushioned luxury beneath the sunset desert sky and battlemented mud

walls of ancient Timbuktu. Palm fronds rattled in the cool breeze from the air

conditioners. Boredom alone would have brought them to tonight's lecture in the

Sun Grove lounge; that it was to be delivered by Philip Holder insured a full

turnout.

Now if only Phil himself would turn out, fretted Evan Bruneau, Humboldt's

sensie-handsome young Third Officer. He smiled warmly at Vivee Chillingsworth,

and her diamonds, and her escort Robby Fain. Fain winked at Bruneau as he

steered the widow Chillingsworth under the grape arbor and into the lounge, but

Bruneau knew that Robby was only teasing.

Bruneau was beginning to fear the worst; the good doctor Holder was very

distinguished indeed, but more often these past couple of years for his epic

binges than for his contributions to the annals of medicine.

Not that Bruneau was a moralist. His major task was to keep Humboldts passengers

entertained on the ship's long, long voyages among the major ports of the

Archipelago, and Holder, a frequent passenger, was an invaluable resource: he

had an intimate knowledge of the cultures of the inhabited worlds, gained

through years of research, and he was an incurable raconteur. In return for

Holder's services as a lecturer, Bruneau was happy to cancel his bar tabs.

It was after 21:00 already. If Holder didn't show up in a couple of minutes,

Bruneau would have to send a steward around to the bars (Humboldt had eight).

And if Holder wasn't in one of them, Bruneau would be forced to admit defeat.

He'd show the travelogue sensie instead, and bis name would be mud.

Of course he'd know damn well where Holder was. That was another part of then-

unspoken arrangement: Holder took his pounds of flesh (all female, mostly

young), and somehow Bruneau managed never to think of the introductions he

arranged as pimping. Perhaps that was unfortunate— in the present case it left

him no excuse to go rousting one guest out of another's bed. (Excuse me, Loa

darling, but Phil promised...)

But here came Loa Westcliffe now, fully dressed In diaphanous jumper, and all

alone.

Bruneau grinned with relief. "So nice to see you here, Loa darling."

"Where the hell else would I be, dear?" Westcliffe asked, tossing metallic green

locks. "Phil show up yet?"

"I couldn't say, really, I just..."

"In other words, no. If I were you I'd run quick as a bunny down to the Mirror

Room and fish him out of his martini, or you're not going to have a show

tonight." Her pale gray eyes were not smiling; she did not take the prospective

loss of an hour's amusement lightly.

Bruneau went white, and without wasting a word he bounded toward the lift with

improbably long and accurate strides.

Meanwhile Phil Holder sat all alone, sipping thoughtfully on what would have

been his second Scotch after dinner—if he hadn't skipped dinner. A perfectly

sane man would not

have taken the risk of intoxicating himself even a little in the last hours

before an act so audacious as the one Holder now contemplated; Holder, though,

was neither completely sane nor completely foolish. He knew his capacity for

alcohol with intimate precision. He wanted people to believe he was drunk as

usual; moreover, the drinks would take the rasping edge off his nerves, as much

a danger to his plans as alcohol's dullness. And even granted that all the

excuses he could think of amounted to no better than a pile of shifting

rationale, still his drinking would serve as an excellent test of his sincerity:

did he dare remain sober?

He checked his wrist unit: 21:10. Where the hell's Bruneau? Doesn't he care?

Holder took another sip of the foul-tasting Scotch—reputedly an excellent

unblended variety from Lothian, which he drank only for the sake of its

unmistakable odor. He hated Scotch. He grimaced and put down the bulb. Glass

clicked against glass. Glass everywhere.

He rubbed his hand over his face, feeling rubbery skin, trying to avoid his

yellowing eyes in the bar's ubiquitous mirrors. He'd just as soon never see this

particular version of his face again, anyway: a fortyish face, handsome in a

soft-edged, dissolute sort of way, tanned almost black and engagingly wrinkled

by the suns of a dozen worlds—yet somehow looking preserved.

The mirrored walls of the lounge, intended to make a modest space seem larger,

closed in on him instead, mocking him with his own image repeated endlessly

around him, a dozen decadent versions of himself converging at infinity,

reflected in the walls of this alcohol-filled killing bottle.

He was saved by the sudden appearance—a dozen desperate appearances at once—of

Evan Bruneau. H... slap my wrist if Tm pushing, but this was the night you..."

Holder watched Bruneau try to get control of his face, which reflected relief

and contempt before settling into determined obsequiousness. Holder almost

laughed, but he was truly grateful for Bruneau's timely arrival.

"Oh Jeezus Ev, I've let you down again, have I? Probly too late now, huh? Lemme

buy you drink, anyway...."

'That's awfully good of you, Phil, but you could do me a much, much greater

favor." Bruneau grinned sweatily. "The ;|act is, it's just a tad past 21:00...."

',;. Holder peered owlishly at his watch. "Say, you're right as rain, Ev.

There's still time!" Holder pushed himself vigorously away from the bar,

stumbling against Bruneau. ** 'Scuse. Guess me arse is numb."

Bruneau steadied the shorter man with one hand and pressed his thumb against the

countertop charge plate—for all his fumbling, Holder had never been in danger of

paying his own bill. Bruneau steered Holder firmly toward the door.

The lift flashed upward, past a dozen opulent decks visible through the clear

extruded crystal of the pneumatic tube. Holder leaned cozily on Bruneau's

shoulder and closed his eyes. "Ev, 'd I ever tell you about the time at

Epseridan U. when I was so sozzled and I was supposed to give this speech so

I..."

"Sent your friend on instead, pretending to be you?"

"I did tell you!" Holder exclaimed with delight. "And he was so damn convincing!

Ran through all the charts and graphs, knew 'em better than me. Had to call a

stop to it, though," said Holder sternly. "He made too much sense to be a real

ep'demiologist... mislead the public ..."

"Dont get any ideas, Phil. It wouldn't work." Bruneau sighed.

"Oh hell, / know that*' Holder was indignant. "These people already know you."

"But if you really don't feel up to it.. .**

"Relax, kid. IT! be fine," said Holder, miffed. He stood up straight as the lift

doors whispered open.

The projected stars of the desert night twinkled more brightly as the sky light

dimmed in the Sun Grove. Holder stood remarkably steady on the edge of the low

dais, holding the room controls in his left hand. He'd warmed up his audience

with professional aplomb, starting with a few jokes about drunken professors.

Imperceptibly, not letting on that he was turning serious, he began including

scraps of real ideas in his banter.

In the shadows at the back of the room Evan Bruneau allowed his gold-braided

shoulders to relax—it looked as if Phil were going to pull it off after all.

'*... the truth now—it's the lure of the primitive that brings you all to

Darwin, isn't it? Even I still feel it, and I was born and raised here. Even

though I know better than you that ifs a tailor-made brand of primitivism."

Holder laughed.

He fiddled with the room controls as he talked. Slowly an unage began to fade in

all around him, filling one whole end of the darkened room: tree ferns and fat

cycads growing out of dark rich humus, and farther away, the mist-shrouded

shapes of giant redwoods. The plants were merely life-sized, but nevertheless so

big they seemed out of scale. Nothing moved in the dim ruddy light, not even the

tendrils of mist; Holder had not yet activated the scene.

He kept talking all the while. "Once upon a time, hi the good old days—you know

what I mean; I call it the Garden of Eden syndrome—one way or another we all

keep trying to go back. Now, a few years ago I spent some time with the yogis on

Ichtiaque. I learned some things from them, I learned some things about them, I

was lucky enough to solve a problem that had eluded other investigators...." A

few members of the audience murmured politely to indicate they were aware of the

research that had won Holder the Freund Prize. "... whereupon a collection of

armchair experimentalists decided to give me a prize for it," Holder said

blandly, cutting the sycophants dead.

Bruneau was surprised at the acid sharpness of Holder's tone; Holder was a man

who usually lapped up praise. But Bruneau thought that, all in all, Holder was

doing remarkably well.

Bruneau looked at the holofilm with interest. The scene was new to him; Holder's

talks usually began with panoramic views of Upper Cretacia from Mount Owen, one

of Darwin's more inspiring vistas. Holder had brought the forest scene to full

illumination, and had tapped the button that allowed partial animation. Fog

drifted through the trees; water dripped in fat splashes from the spiny fronds

of the cycads; insects flitted through the shadows. The motion cycled on an

imperceptible dissolve, every few seconds—whatever happened later in the scene,

Holder was saving it

It wasn't a professional sensie with smelly-feely tracks, yet it filled the

visual field, and even standing at the back of the room Bruneau felt he was

inside the tableau.

"The yogis, attempting to get back to a presumed state of harmony with Nature

that never could possibly have existed, are the strictest imaginable

vegetarians," Holder was saying. *No animal products of any kind: no milk, no

eggs, they Won't even kill ticks. Yet they were afflicted by a very specific

disease that, so far as we knew, could only be transmitted by eating the meat of

infected loquemels, funny little goat-like creatures indigenous to the planet.

As it turned out, the thing that was making the yogis sick was probably also

keeping them alive."

Holder fingered the controls and the scene stopped cycling. He looked

incongruously at home, standing amid the fronds of the prehistoric forest in his

dark conservative suit and cape, but of course the primeval jungle was illusory.

His head was cocked back and his eyes were fixed on a spot a few dozen meters

back among the dark tree trunks. Unconsciously, every eye in the audience

followed his gaze.

"Seems the disease was carried by a parasite that infested wild loquemel. In the

larval stage, this tiny bug lives in besan pods. Besan provides the yogis with a

staple part of their diet, and they were unknowingly eating an awful lot of the

little grubs with their carelessly cleaned besan—thereby catching the disease.

But those same grubs were providing them with their only complete proteins!

Without that animal protein they would have been just as bad off, or worse."

Holder chuckled. "We couldn't tell them that, of course. We persuaded them to

switch to a different source of besan that just happened to be crawling with

healthy bugs."

At this moment there arose repeated loud crashes in the brush, coming from the

place in the trees Holder was watching. Over the sounds of vegetation being

shredded and crushed came a different, more ominous sound, a guttural, slavering

gurgle, mingled with violent expulsions of breath.

Holder seemed oblivious to his audience's mounting tension. After all, they were

all sophisticates; they'd all seen a thousand skillfully produced sensies,

replete with the most ingenious special effects.

Almost casually he attempted to undercut the excitement. "By the way, I was

thirteen when I took this piece of film, on an expedition organized by my

father. Good old Dad. For those of you who go in for this sort of thing, it was

shot with a Leitz, with the reference beam reflectors set back there on the

trunks of those sequoias, about four meters up."

Bruneau was among those lulled into looking for the equipment Holder mentioned.

As his eyes searched the background, the branches of the redwoods whipped aside

and Bruneau found himself staring down the throat of a roaring Tyran-nosaurus

rex.

Even though he was a dozen meters from the toothy ap-

parition, Bruneau jumped. A collective gasp went up from the audience.

Holder giggled. "Oh come on, this is just a kid's home movie. In a couple of

weeks you'll be on Darwin, where you can see the real thing."

The animal stepped forward. "There! Did you see it?" Holder shouted.

He flicked the controls and froze the tyrannosaur in place, cycling on a

snorting breath. The bulk of the great beast's sixteen-meter length was back in

the brush. Its huge head was carried relatively low and thrust forward, with

rows of sharp teeth curved like Arabian daggers. Its nearly 9,000-kilogram

weight was balanced on colossal three-clawed drumsticks in a running stance:

head, body, and ridiculous stick-like forelegs ahead, massive tail out of sight

behind,

Holder answered his own question. "No, none of you were paying attention." He

reversed the film, and the forest swallowed the creature's head. "Down there, to

the right! Look!" be shouted, as he instantly switched the film to forward.

Smooth naked skin glimmered in the shadows of the underbrush.

Holder froze the image: it was a very young man only partly visible through the

foliage. He wore a necklace of long curved teeth, a coil of rope over one

shoulder, and apparently nothing else. His color was a rich, translucent bronze,

his long golden hair flew out in braids behind his shoulders, and he sported a

full blond beard and mustaches.

"The very picture of the perfect barbarian, eh?" Holder said cheerfully. "He

could be a Viking, a Celt, even a Cro-magnon—right down to the skin color. How

many centuries have gone by since people were that pale?" Holder walked through

the immaterial forest undergrowth until he was standing beside the frozen

figure. "How did this outlandish creature come to be here, playing anachronistic

cave man?"

Holder stood still a moment, then walked back toward the front of the dais,

leaving the ghostly shape behind him. His voice was suddenly mournful. "In a

way, I've spent my life trying to find the answer to that question. I've even

written treatises on the so-called feral tribes of Darwin. But I still cEont

know." In the darkness Holder's expression was unread-t$fe. "Unhappily, I was

never able to discuss it with our t|Bmitive' friend, here."

Bruneau's ears pricked up. Holder's voice sounded dejected, but peculiarly

insincere. What mischief was he about?

Holder started the film. The running man disappeared instantly into the

undergrowth. The tyrannosaur bellowed and exploded from the trees, taking three

frighteningly rapid strides forward. Muffled curses and squeals of fright came

from the audience in the HumboWs lounge.

The odd daintiness of the animal's bird-like gait was more than offset by the

visible, audible effects each time a clawed foot hit the ground: the entire

scene shook dizzily with each thudding step, betraying the unseen laser

recorder's vibrations on its tripod. The nightmare animal stopped in the middle

of the mossy clearing, the red expressionless eyes atop its skull staring

fixedly from under bony orbital ridges. Its mouth hung open, and its breath came

in liquid grunts.

Bruneau shivered. He was awfully glad now that Holder's film was mere sound and

picture. Even in his imagination, the stench of the carnivorous dinosaur's hot,

wet breath was almost overpowering. Then a horrible thought occurred to Bruneau—

just as the great reptile's head twisted and darted forward into the brush.

There was a horrible scream, indisputably human.

"Oh, really, Phil, you mustn't!" Bruneau protested loudly, taking a step

forward.

"For those of you who are still with me," said Holder, "have a look at this...."

Then Bruneau realized he'd been completely fooled; Holder had not been sober for

an instant! The whole episode was a boozy practical joke. Nauseated groans and

shouts failed to deter the intoxicated doctor, who continued to expound. Bruneau

lunged toward the stage to interfere, but found his way blocked by members of

the audience who were in a hurry to leave.

Inside Holder's "home movie" too, there were running figures. Bruneau had time

to make out a boy in his early teens—Holder himself?—running toward the

thrashing in the bushes, and a middle-aged man who suddenly caught up to the boy

and cuffed him out of the way.

Bruneau was almost to the dais now. The fern leaves towered over his head. And

then the tyrannosaur stood erect. It, too, towered over Bruneau, so high and

awesome that Bruneau almost stumbled in fright. The red gobbets that dripped

from its jaws resembled nothing like a man.

"... incidentally demonstrates the answer to a question that puzzled

paleontologists for ever-so-long, before the re-creation of rex," Holder was

remarking, nonchalantly. "Scientists could conceive of no possible adaptive

purpose for the creature's tiny forelegs...."

"Phil, for God's sake!" Bruneau shouted.

"But they are quite useful, as it turns out," said Holder.

The carnosaur ducked its head and lifted a pan- of short, curving little

foreclaws to its mouth. Then it began ....

"Picking its teeth," Bruneau murmured. "Oh, God." He jumped onto the dais and

walked toward Holder. "Phil, please...."

Holder looked at him. "My g'ness, Ev." A bewildered expression came over his

face; he bunked. "Have I gone too far?"

"Yes, Phil. Much too far indeed," said Bruneau, trying to hold his temper.

Holder peered at Bruneau, apparently puzzled by the anger in his friend's voice.

Confidence drained out of him.

"Come on, Phil," Bruneau sighed, feeling the barest twinge of remorse. "I'll get

you safely to bed."

"Oh. Sure. Sure, Ev, I'll come with you." Holder absently tossed the room

controls into the make-believe bushes.

"Oh, Phil!" For a moment the exasperated Bruneau considered searching for the

controls, but decided it was more important to get Phil Holder safely put away.

He took him by the arm; Holder stumbled against him.

Bruneau escorted the confused doctor out of the room, guiding him gently past a

number of angry guests who jostled him and hissed their spite. But as Bruneau

made his way slowly up the aisle he noted that a good many passengers seemed not

the least upset by the graphic sensie display. Bruneau saw Loa Westcliffe and

Robby Fain and Vivee ChilHngsworth among the audience who continued to watch in

slack-jawed masturbatory rapture as, behind Bruneau and his bewildered charge,

in the depths of the starship's elegant lounge, the apparition of Tyrannosaurus

continued to munch, and pick delicately at the stringy remains of its dinner.

'•Clarissa Sirich was in at the beginning; indeed, as became apparent only much

later, her presence defined the beginning as such, though she was not herself

the initiator of those historic events hi Cole's laboratory/Born on April 25th,

1979 O.E., her name was originally Margaret Tanner, and she was the daughter of

the renowned research biochemist..." (from Darwin; A Millennium of Conservation)

Stefan Lazarev was twenty-two years old, an experienced operator of heavy

equipment, but more used to the suburbs of Moscow than the permafrost regions of

the sub-Arctic. He had lately been recruited by the Komsomol and assigned along

with a half dozen other bulldozeristy to a railroad construction camp north of

Tommot, where he was helping to build a major new spur connecting the Baikal-

Amur Mainline at Nagornyy to the city of Yakutsk on the Lena.

On this particular afternoon Stefan was working alone, following a line of

stakes set out the day before by a surveying crew, cutting an access road

through the birch trees and stunted firs with the blade of his big American Cat.

Spring comes late to the taiga, but brings with it a profusion of sweet

wildflowers and lush green grass and long warm afternoons that stretch into

soft, perfumed twilights. In such a climate love blooms as quickly as the

flowers. The tousle-haired youth was thinking about a girl named Valentina from

the track gang, not about safety, as he brought the noisy uiesel to a halt near

the banks of a little brook.

Stefan climbed down from the Cat and stood stfll a moment, feeling the sun on

his face, hearing the whisper of wind in the leaves. Then he carried his lunch

tin to the dappled shade of a ring of birches. His only concession to caution

was to bring along a beat-up old hunting rifle against the sudden, if unlikely,

appearance of a bear.

He was little prepared, then, when having chewed his way through half a chunk of

black bread he heard a sudden agonizing groan behind him. He leaped to his feet,

spewed 'out his mouthful, and snatched up the rifle. Spinning around, he was

just in time to watch with horror as his Cat's enormous steel blade slid beneath

the surface of the earth, followed by a rattling splash of gravel. The little

meadow brook was pouring into a crater where lately his wonderful new machine

had been parked.

To lose a bulldozer! He refused to believe such a tragedy had befallen him. He

raced to the edge of the hole and peered down in anguish.

Stefan had been warned about ice caves, and at the time he had thought he was

paying attention to the lectures. But perhaps only bitter experience can

convince one that the ground over much of Siberia is no ground at all, but only

a thin layer of top soil over ice many meters deep, many millennia old. With

each annual thaw the ground cover becomes rotten and treacherous.

Stefan sat on the soggy ground beside the hole and fought back tears. After a

long while he came to his senses, realizing that the Cat could be salvaged

easily enough by the work camp's big crane, and that the immediate need was to

retrieve his loose tools and personal gear. The bulldozer was tilted up at a

sharp angle, its blade facing him about a meter and a half below. He stood and

leaped down onto the wide curved blade. It was spooky, clambering around in the

cold dripping half-light, swearing, and hoping that the massive machinery would

not sink further into the ice in the next moment. Eventually Stefan had gathered

all the gear he could get his hands on and began to climb back out of the chill

pit

While he was studying the frozen face of the sinkhole, looking for a sturdy

handhold to help him to the top, Stefan saw the vague dark shape of the ice-

locked mammoth.

Sheer accident brought Hank Cole and Yurii Amosov together for the 1999 annual

meeting of the International Society of Cryobiology in Sri Lanka. Cole was in

the Colombo Hyatt's veranda bar waiting for his wife and son to return from a

shopping trip, and Amosov wandered in to wait for the restaurant to open. Both

events being delayed, the two men got to talking.

Cole wasn't even attending the meetings—he and his family were vacationing and

he'd dropped in to say hello to a colleague from the States. As a molecular

geneticist, Cole had a passing acquaintance with some of the techniques of cryo-

biology, but it wasn't really his line.

It wasn't Amosov's line either, but he was at the meetings on purpose. A

vertebrate paleontologist, a successor of the energetic Vereshchagin at the

Zoological Institute in Leningrad, he was seeking to learn more about the

effects of different conditions of freezing and thawing on mammalian cells,

hoping to apply this knowledge to the study of Pleistocene animal tissues

recovered in various states of preservation from the frozen tundra.

Amosov and Cole hit it off immediately, and after a couple of drinks the two

men—both possessed of impish senses of humor—had concocted the most outrageous

scheme....

A few months after-Stefan Lazarev's bulldozer fell into an ice cave Hank Cole's

lab at Stanford received a shipment by air from Leningrad. Cole's graduate

student Margaret Tanner helped open the well-insulated case of steel-jacketed

bottles bearing the multilingual label, "Warning: Liquid Nitrogen. Do Not Open

Manually," with a long list of detailed instructions. Inside the bottles were

tissue samples taken from many parts of the body of "Natasha," history's first

completely preserved adult woolly mammoth. None of these samples were in the

best imaginable condition. Most, frozen too slowly, had been damaged by salt

concentration as the cells dehydrated and shriveled, and a few, frozen too fast,

had suffered disruption from needle-like ice crystals. A tiny fraction of the

cells, however, exhibited nuclei in excellent states of preservation.

DNA is an extraordinarily stable molecule (if it were not, inheritance would be

a very chancy business indeed), and from the nuclei of Natasha's cells Cole

proposed to obtain enough intact DNA to model a typical set of somatic cell

chromosomes. The ultimate aim of the study was to compare the mammoth and the

modern elephant by locating those genes that specified slightly different

sequences of amino acids in proteins otherwise common to both creatures.

It was important to know that any differences were indeed due to evolution and

not to several centuries in the deep freeze. Applying sophisticated statistical

analysis to many different partial models—some visual, derived from electron

micrographs or soft X-ray replicas, others mathematical and chemical, based on

advanced electrophoretic, chromotograph-ic, and enzymatic techniques—an

idealized mammoth genetic sequence was at last obtained.

Cole and Amosov wrote up a spate of papers, signed them jointly, and sent them

off to the journals. But they did not sit back and wait for notoriety to strike.

Selecting several slices from Natasha's intestine, Cole carefully brought the

frozen tissue to the normal internal temperature of an elephant's body, using a

buffering solution Amosov bad derived, which included "antifreeze" glycoproteins

from the blood of Arctic fish. Cole's choice of intestinal cells was not random.

Evolutionary theory suggested that the association of digestive and reproductive

functions was not God's dirty joke—cells near the gut were the best nourished,

and had the best chance to survive.

Cole microsurgically removed apparently perfect nuclei from choice thawed cells

and slid them gently into fresh de-nucleated cells from living African

elephants. If the mammoth's genes could function without error inside the

elephant's cells, it would be good evidence that the Cole-Amosov model was

correct. Several months passed. Cultures descended from some of the transplants

continued to thrive.

Then Cole proceeded to thaw another set of mammoth cells. This time the

recipients of the mammoth's DNA were an elephant's egg cells. An application of

hormones started the hybrid gametes dividing and multiplying in vitro.

While Cole, dressed in an immaculate white coat, performed these delicate

sterile operations in the gleaming stainless-steel environment of his laboratory

in the handsome biochemistry building, Margaret Tanner and two other grad

students wrestled with the realities of biomedical research on an earthier

level. Several hundred yards from the School of Medicine a rude wooden compound

had been set up under the shade of huge eucalyptus trees on the dusty plains of

Leland Stanford's famous horse farm. The farming that went on inside the

compound had nothing to do with horses.

A half dozen female specimens of Loxodonta africana had been borrowed from the

San Francisco Zoo along with an amused keeper. Every day an adult African

elephant typically consumes thirty-five kilograms of hay, alfalfa, oats, or

vege-

RE-ENTRY

tables. Cole's students spent their days with pitchforks and shovels in their

hands, not microscopes.

After consultation with expert breeders Cole had decided to impregnate the

elephants with frozen sperm from the nearest captive bull, who lived in

Portland's Washington Park (most zoos would as soon do without a male's nasty

temper). The complex changes in the uterus brought about by the onset of

pregnancy can be mimicked by applying estradiol and progesterone, but Cole

wanted to take as few chances as possible. The impregnation itself was done

manually by Cole's unfortunate pupils.

The eggs fertilized by the testy Portland bull did not long survive. In a series

of messy, intricate operations, Cole aborted the six cows and at the same time

replaced their nascent embryos with glass-grown blastocysts from his laboratory.

Now there was nothing to do but wait. One after another, all but one of the

pregnant elephants aborted again, this time spontaneously. Examination showed

fatal developmental flaws of the fetuses. Cole and bis long-suffering students

all but gave up hope.

Two years passed, and all that time a 40-year-old cow name Mabel held on. She

was a taciturn beast, and nothing seemed to upset her. Already she'd been the

mother of two natural young. Nevertheless, Cole had long since resigned himself

to the inevitable.

Miraculously the impossible arrived before the "inevitable.** Hasty phone calls

between Palo Alto and Leningrad brought Yurii Amosov on a special Aeroflot jet

just in time to be on hand the day Mabel, the African elephant, gave birth to a

perfectly healthy young woolly mammoth.

They named her Stefania, after Stefan Lazarev, the workman who had been her

unwitting godfather and who, all unknowing, had brought her back from the dead.

Her foster mother would nurse her for six years, like any ordinary elephant

calf. In twelve years she would be mature, standing almost four meters high at

the shoulder, covered with a fine wool undercoat with long black wiry hair

growing through it, and sporting spectacular in-curving tusks three meters long.

Stefania would always be an affectionate beast, willing to scratch her keeper's

scalp with her curiously double-"fingered" trunk in return for a handful of

carrots.

But on her birthday no one yet knew what to expect They

RE-ENTRY

could only hope that a living creature had been brought back from ten thousand

years' extinction, once more to walk the earth in majesty.

And from the sidelines Margaret Tanner watched, and pondered, and laid vague

plans for the future.

Pinpoints of reflected light glistened wetly on the surface of Holder's half-

open eye. He stared straight down. He had not stirred for hours.

A few centimeters beneath his nose, myriad filaments of glittering optical fiber

snaked around shadowy struts and beams. He looked through the floor of his first

class room-with-a-view, past its structural bones, its arteries of plumbing, its

light-fiber nerves, down through the ship's outer crystalline skin. The whole

sparkling skyscraper dropped away beneath the feet of Holder's bunk, where he

lay face down, his head and one arm dangling over the side.

The cliff-like face of the ship was a multi-faceted array of glowing crystals—

emerald, ruby, amethyst, yellow diamond— revealing themselves on close

inspection as instrument ports, observation galleries, promenades, and

individual suites whose walls had not yet been opaqued for privacy this night.

Far below, a pearly corona of light escaped beyond the edges of the energy

shield surrounding the veiled stern engines, the only visible sign of the

annihilators' unbearably bright flame.

Despite the immense structure's velocity of some 60,000 kilometers per second,

twenty percent of light speed, nothing betrayed Humboldfs motion through space.

Nothing moved at all, except here and there a shadow cast on a yellow pane of

quartz.

Before Holder stirred, all those shadows would stop moving.

After the fiasco in the Sun Grove, Evan Bruneau had steered Holder to his suite,

just managing to get his evening

RE-ENTRY

cloak off him before Holder batted him away, groaning. Bruoeau had straightened

him out on the bunk, pulled off his boots, spread a thin blanket over him, and

then retreated, blanking the lights as he went Holder was already snoring

loudly.

A-few minutes later Holder had started thrashing about— ending up half off the

bunk with the blanket bunched under him, presumably more comfortable. In the

course of these seemingly unconscious struggles he'd hit the bedside opaquing

controls, turning the walls and floor to "clear." He hadn't moved since.

Amid the jeweled wonders below him, one dark area held his attention: a cluster

of large, wedge-shaped objects blackly silhouetted against the luminous hull

like bats clinging to the roof of a crystal cave. These were Humboldfs planetary

land-ers, winged launches she routinely used to communicate with more remote

ports of call, planets that could not conveniently provide their own high-

orbital shuttles.

Darwin was by no means remote, being a prime attraction for wealthy tourists.

The planet had a well-appointed orbiting entry station with comfortable service

to the surface. Therefore, with superspace insertion due in less than fifteen

minutes and Darwin still some weeks away, Holder doubted anyone but himself was

giving the landers any thought.

The soft, soothing precisely polite voice of Humboldfs computer sounded from the

room's speakers, at a level of volume just sufficient to be clearly audible to

any passengers who might still be awake. "Ladies and gentlemen, in exactly ten

minutes the Humboldt will cease acceleration in order to prepare for superspace

insertion. This will result in a temporary condition of weightlessness. After

our ship emerges from superspace we will perform a simple maneuver in order to

align our main engines for deceleration. Immediately thereafter weight will be

restored. The total period of weightlessness will be approximately five minutes.

During this period, for your comfort and safety, restraining netting will

enclose your beds. To insure that everyone is safely restrained, your rooms will

be placed under automatic surveillance in exactly three minutes from now... .**

Holder did not move. He knew, as most seasoned travelers did, that the

surveillance cameras were never really turned off. Holder listened as the

computer explained that anyone

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who did not wish to stay in bed during the weightless period would be "assisted"

by a crew member.

"... therefore we now suggest that all passengers not in bed return to their

beds, lie down, and make themselves comfortable. Thank you! Ladies and

gentlemen, in exactly nine minutes the Humboldt will cease acceleration in order

to prepare for superspace insertion. This will result in a temporary condition

of weightlessness ..."

Superspace insertion required extraordinary precision, but there were no tricks

to it Provided a ship entered the space-time hyperfold at Earth Station at just

the right point, she would emerge from superspace at Darwin Station. It was that

ample. If the ship entered the fold at some other point, she would emerge near,

say, Tau Ceti, or Brindle, or any of a few dozen other selected planetary

systems—or for that matter, at any point within a spherical radius of a couple

of hundred light-years that happened to be blessed with a double Mack hole

system. A ship's point of exit depended wholly and simply on its point of entry.

Humboldt had been riding a ref-erence beam from Earth Station's robot

navigational monitor since acquiring the beam two weeks out from Earth,

Penalties for straying from the beam were severe. A misguided exit from

superspace through a single black hole was inescapably final: the ship and its

contents would emerge as a shower of radiation, never escaping the far event

horizon, serving only to enlarge the mass of the hole. Not only were double-hole

Stations essential to avoid singularities, by providing a fold in spacetime

rather than a tunnel through it, but also to provide null-gravity paths that

could keep a ship from being ripped apart by tides.

Thus a ship could leap a hundred light-years with ease to reach Ichtiaque or New

Albion, while other star systems only a few light-years from Earth remained

effectively off limits forever, accessible only through vast stretches of

ordinary sp&cetime.

The properties of hyperfold Stations had been thoroughly understood for

centuries, in an empirical way, and interstellar travel was commonplace—even

safer than air travel near a planet's surface. Besides the well-known properties

of double black holes, however, there were certain other properties, little

spoken of, speculative in the extreme, known only to a few— and never tested.

Until tonight

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"... will now enclose your beds. Please lie still. Do not be alarmed. The

restraining nets will leave an ample space for ordinary movement. They will be

withdrawn shortly, immediately after weight is restored. Should you require

assistance, do not hesitate to use the call button at the head of your bed...."

The tough, fine restraining net unfurled slowly from under the left side of

Holder's bunk. Carried smoothly up and over him on half-elliptical tracks

mounted on the head and foot boards, the leading edge of the net would fasten to

the right side of the bed by means of evenly spaced electromagnets.

Holder moved his dangling right hand slightly at the last possible moment. A

magnet in the descending net came to rest on his hand, failing to make contact.

He now had a space between contact points, less than a meter long. The netting

material should give just enough to allow him to slip through.

Patiently he waited, as he had for hours, drawing on the mental disciplines he'd

learned during a year spent on Ichtiaque. With ironic detachment he reflected

that had he learned all the yogis desired to teach him he would not be embarking

on this bizarre journey. But he was "nailed to the Wheel of Life," as the yogis

would have had it—he made use of their teachings only to control his body, not

his awful moral hunger.

"... do not be alarmed. Weightlessness will begin now. Do not be alarmed...."

Finally he felt it: acceleration stopped. The faint quantum glow at Humboldfs

stern vanished. Holder pushed gently against the floor with his fingertips. His

whole body floated off the bed.

He waited yet another half minute. He knew the safety officers used that time to

make a quick video inspection of the passenger quarters, to satisfy themselves

that all civilians were safely under lock and key.

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Countdown;Earth,204N.E.Physician,healthyself.—Lukeiv,23Thesnakeeatsitself,thedogchasesitstail.—G.SpencerBrown,LawsofForm"Canyougohome?"Susanhadaskedhim,andinhisprofoundhangoverhe'dprofoundlymisunderstoodher.Whatshe'dwantedtoknowwaswhetherhewasawake,andstrongenough,andsteadyenough,towalkoutofherlife....

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Preuss, Paul - Re-Entry

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