GRAY MATTER (31 page)

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Authors: Gary Braver

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“How’s Miss Amber doing?” Malenko asked, sipping his coffee.

“A little dopey,” Phillip said.

“Of course.”

As with all the patients, she had been administered an IV containing a mild tranquilizer that diminished anxiety over being away from home. They had also given her cyclohexylamine, also known as Ketamine, an anesthetic that produced amnesia, effectively blotting out all recall of the enhancement procedure. It was a remarkable drug, almost one hundred percent effective.

While Oliver took the bags upstairs to the bedroom, Malenko followed Phillip down the main hallway to the door in the rear storage room off the kitchen. He unlocked it and the next door at the opposite end, and they descended the stairs to the cellar.

They proceeded into the long bright tunnel that ran nearly a hundred feet under the backyard woods. At the far end was the operating room. Along the tunnel walls were windows spaced a dozen feet apart—one for each dormer. A dormer for each patient. The glass on the windows was thick and one-way visible, a reflecting surface on the obverse side giving the impression of a simple wall mirror, framed to complete the illusion. Because they were underground, the air was cooler and less humid than above. It was also filtered against dust and microbes.

Malenko stopped at the first room and pulled up the blinds on the one-way glass.

Inside was a little girl of six dressed in blue shorts and a white and blue pullover. He tapped the door lightly then let himself in with a master key.

Amber Bernardi. She was a plain child with large dark eyes and black hair. She was also the daughter and only child of Leo and Yolanda Bernardi, owners of Bernardi Automotive Enterprises which had Volkswagen and Porsche dealerships all over New England. Three days ago, they had dropped her off to be enhanced. There was the usual separation crisis: The child cried and fussed until they sedated her after her parents left. Then she was driven here for preop procedures.

To fill her time and minimize distress, they had provided her with television, videos, toys, games, and books. Vera or Phillip would occasionally drop
in to chat or take her to the playground. Because of the sedatives, she was quite manageable.

“So, how is Miss Amber today?”

“Fine,” she said, drawing out the syllable.

She was sitting on a chair looking at a book while holding one of the stuffed dancing dolls. Years ago they had ordered a couple dozen of them from overseas because they proved to be a hit with the children. It seemed an appropriate choice, since it was a nearly life-sized version of Ganesha, the elephant god of India.

According to Hindu legend, Ganesha was born as a normal child to Shiva and the goddess Parvathi. But Shiva liked to roam the world. After his son was conceived, he went on a journey and did not return for several years. Because Ganesha had never seen his father, he did not recognize him while guarding his mother’s house. Since his mother was taking a bath, Ganesha demanded that Shiva go away. Angered that the young stranger told him to leave his own house, Shiva chopped off Ganesha’s head and went inside. Realizing that Shiva had killed his own son, Parvathi wailed in grief and demanded that Shiva bring Ganesha back to life. When he confessed that the boy’s head was severed, Parvathi instructed him to take the head off the first living thing he saw and attach it to Ganesha’s body so he could live again. It so happened that an elephant walked by. Instantly, Shiva beheaded the animal and attached its head to his son. Today Ganesha is revered as the god of wisdom.

It was the symbolism that had originally attracted Malenko to the creature. The kids referred to him as Mr. Nisha.

Amber flipped through the book looking at the pictures because, of course, she could not read. “When am I going home?”

“In three days.” Malenko held up his fingers. “How’s that?”

“But I wanna go home now,” she said, her voice thin and distant.

“Well, not for another three days.”

“How come?” she whined.

“Because.”

Because
, he thought,
you’re a stupid little girl and your parents have dropped a million dollars so you won’t grow up to be a stupid woman who will get herself knocked up by some equally stupid boy and end up wasting away your family’s fortune because you were incapable of a decent education and couldn’t get a decent job and
would spend your life producing stupid babies, at least one of whom would go to prison to the tune of $40,000 per year. That’s how come.

“Would you like some milk and cookies?” he asked sweetly.

“Nah. I have some,” she said, and pointed to a paper cup and plate on the floor. She looked at him with flat vacant eyes. “I want some Saltines. I want some Salteeeens.” She began to blubber.

“We’ll get you some in a minute,” he said and got up. He gave her a lasting look. In twelve months, she would be completely transformed—almost another species. After all these years, it still awed him what he could accomplish here. They were right: He was a miracle worker. Perhaps Shiva. Or maybe Jesus, raising the dead. Or Jesus’ father, creating new life.

As he closed the door on Amber, Malenko’s mind tripped back to when the miracles began.

It was 1985, and Lucius had been summoned to the headquarters of the Kiev State Police where two KGB agents led him to a one-way glass wall that looked into an interrogation room within which sat two men in prison clothes smoking cigarettes. The older agent, a Vladimir Kovalyov, explained, “The one on the right is a former researcher from the Steklov Physics Institute of the Academy of Sciences. He was caught selling secrets. The other man shoveled sand in a cement factory in Zhytomyr. He killed a policeman in an antigovernment rally.”

Six days later, the two men were lying side by side on tables in a makeshift operating room the government had set up in the basement of Malenko’s lab. The physicist’s name was Boris Patsiorkovski. He was fortyfour and the father of one. The stupid man’s name was Alexei Nedogoda. He was twenty-nine and the father of two. They were enemies of the state, Malenko told himself, and he sawed off the tops of their heads.

A hundred and twelve political prisoners later, Malenko had perfected surgical methodologies and had experimented with unilateral and bilateral implantation, using different harvest sites, different implants, different proportions, different postoperative drug therapies, and so forth. With each operation he learned something new about transplantation and the brain’s capacity to respond.

But the hope that tissue grafted from high-IQ brains into duller ones to produce smarter people was dashed. No enhanced cognitive powers were detected in the recipients. Thirty-three subjects had died, most of the rest had been rendered brain-damaged. After four years the project was terminated.

The magnitude of that sacrifice had bothered the young Malenko early on. Here he was a physician attempting to bestow benefits on human life, not eliminate them. But the reality was that each of the prisoners had been scheduled for execution; so, in effect, they were making heroic self-sacrifices for the state. And after his fifth or sixth transplant, he was too absorbed in his quest to be bothered by higher moral issues. His concern was enhancement not ethics.

Within the last two years of his tenure in the Ukraine, and while the Communist system was beginning its death rattle, Lucius Malenko made his ultimate breakthrough—and one which would carry him to this day.

The reasoning was exquisite in its simplicity. As had been empirically evident, the transplantation of
embryonic
tissue had failed to establish specific nerve pathways because they were too new to take cues from the existing host brain to produce cells and connections in those areas associated with intelligence. Likewise,
mature
brain matter was too old to reseed target sites. That left the inevitable option.

“This one’s a goddamn little tiger.” Phillip turned his head to show the scratches on his cheek and neck.

“Occupational hazard,” Malenko said. “How’s she adjusting?”

Across the hall, Oliver pulled up the blinds on the one-way glass to another dormer. “As good as can be expected.”

Her name was Lilly Bellingham, and she was sitting on the bed staring at a piped-in video of
Roger Rabbit
. She was wearing Farmer John bib blue jeans over a yellow T-shirt, and her long yellow hair was held back in a ponytail. Because of the sedatives, she was docile. On the table beside her sat a tray of macaroni and cheese, salad, milk, and chocolate cake—all untouched.

As Malenko watched her, he thought how at seven Lilly was still at the optimum age. In spite of popular claims, the turbo production of brain-nerve cells did not decrease after the third year of life, creating a permanently hardwired organ. On the contrary, the gene that stimulates axonal growth—that increases communication throughout the brain—is active up to age eleven. After that, the ability to make gross anatomical changes diminishes—which is why a prepubescent child can still learn a foreign language without an accent while his parents can’t, though they might learn fancier vocabulary. Because children of higher intelligence possess brains of greater neuroplasticity, they have a greater capacity to learn, better memory storage, and better access to those memories.

At this very moment, behind those big green eyes, little Lilly Bellingham’s cortex was busily wiring itself for increased neurotropic functions, making of itself a faster, smarter CPU while her hippocampus, like the hard drive of that computer, was organizing that memory for easy access—and all the while taking in the foolish antics of Roger Rabbit.

“She’s not eaten,” Malenko said.

Phillip shook his head and showed him the clipboard schedule of meds, feedings, and her vital signs. Malenko studied the charts then slipped the board into the tray by the window. “If she doesn’t by this evening, we’ll have to go with the drip.”

Phillip nodded. “She wants her daddy. When he shows, she’ll eat.”

She had been picked up last week at a swimming hole in upstate New York. Phillip and Oliver had done well. They had snatched her from a beach using as decoy one of the other children from the camp, effectively fooling the mother long enough to make the switch.

Were she to grow to maturity, Lilly would be brilliant. But she was dirtpoor. And in spite of good Samaritans and all those financial-aid programs, chances were that dear sweet Lilly would end up filled with drugs and booze and living on welfare, festering at the bottom of the social compost heap, raising trailer-park brutes. What good was genius when tethered to the bed, the bassinet, and the kitchen stove?

Besides, she was also worth a million dollars.

Malenko took the clipboard. Lilly Bellingham. Age seven. From Henley, New York. Forty-eight inches tall. Forty-three pounds. And she had an IQ of 168.

And tomorrow, little Amber Bernardi.

Malenko bid a silent
night-night
to little Lilly and moved down the corridor to the window at the end.

Travis Valentine. He was asleep on his bed, a book on butterflies lay open beside him. The TV monitor flickered mindlessly.

According to the tests and functional scans, he had very high language proficiency—ninety—ninth percentile, in fact. Left-brain incandescence. He would probably grow up to be a first-rate writer or lawyer.

And if the parents decided not to keep him a dim bulb, so might young Dylan Whitman.

B
ecause he was now on night shift, Greg didn’t get to bed until around seven A.M. So he was in a deep sleep when the phone rang at nine-thirty that Wednesday morning.

A female identifying herself as Patty Carney from the medical examiner’s office in Boston said she had read his bulletin from last Thursday. Greg was still too furry with sleep to register the name. The forensic pathologist.

“We had a homicide victim two days ago. You probably read about it. A kid from Hawthorne, killed by his mother who then killed herself?”

“Yeah, sure.” The story was all over the media.

“Well, we did an autopsy on the kid, and when we removed his brain we found that he had the same skull perforation clusters as in your bulletin. Thirteen along the left side of his head from the frontal cortex above the eyebrow to over the ear. But there’s a difference from the others. He had eight other holes on the right side of his head, too. And they were clearly done in a medical neurological procedure, probably when he was very young, from the healing signs. But I can’t tell you what for.”

“What’s his name?”

“Julian Watts. The obit’s in today’s paper. The funeral’s tomorrow.” She gave him some of the details. “I sent you a scan of the photo taken from the inside of his skullcap. I don’t know what they’re from, but I thought you’d be interested.”

Greg was suddenly very awake, and his heart was pounding. He thanked the woman, saying that he would get right to his computer for the scan.

“Oh, yeah. One more thing,” Patty said before hanging up. “His brain was over one point six kilograms.”

“Is that significant?”

“Well, the normal fourteen-year-old male’s brain weighs one point four kilos. His brain was nearly half a pound heavier.”

“How do you explain that?”

“I can’t.”