“Come on, bro,” Tim said. “There’s a problem with Cow Sixteen.”
Claus moaned. His back was so stiff. Where was he sleeping? On a cot. In a plane. He wasn’t even bothering to go back to the mansion anymore. Instead, he just slept in the C-5’s bunk room. And the body odor? That wasn’t Tim. Maybe a shower was in order. Claus opened his eyes to see Tim’s blurry, anxious face.
“Cow Sixteen?” Claus said as he reached for his glasses. “That one has twins or triplets?”
“It was twins,” Tim said. “But now the ultrasound shows only one fetus.”
Claus slid his glasses in place. Tim’s words hit home. He stood and walked out of the bunk room, Tim following close behind.
NOVEMBER 15: THAT’S NOT NORMAL
Implantation +6 Days
COLDING COULDN’T HELP but wince a little. Sure, it was science, but that didn’t change the fact that he was watching Tim Feely slide a tube into a cow’s vagina. A harness suspended the cow, keeping her hooves just a few inches off the ground. Tim wore long gloves that were smeared with a clumpy, whitish substance that Colding could only think of as cow smegma.
“A little deeper,” Rhumkorrf said. His voice had a flat tone but dripped with anger and tension. He sat at a portable fiber-optic workstation, staring intently at a screen showing a fleshy, pinkish tunnel—the view from deep within the cow’s womb.
The 3-D ultrasound workstation sat close by, pressed up against the door of the stall opposite Cow 16’s. Jian half hid behind the machine, trying to stay out of the way. Rhumkorrf had shoved the workstation there in disgust when the high-tech, gold-tinted image showed only one ancestor fetus where yesterday there had been two. Then he’d started screaming, apparently, which was when Jian sneaked away and asked Colding to come to the C-5.
“Deeper,” Rhumkorrf said. “Get it in there.”
“Love it when you talk dirty, Doc,” Colding said.
Rhumkorrf sighed and shook his head. “This is not the time for your stupid fucking jokes.”
“Yikes,” Colding said. “Just trying to lighten the mood.”
Trying, and failing. Rhumkorrf was mad because the cow had reabsorbed one of its twin fetuses. Reabsorption was when the mother’s body made some primitive yet calculated decision to not only abandon the small fetus but also break it down and reuse the raw materials. The problem was, reabsorption only happened when fetuses were a few ounces—it did not happen when they were roughly twenty pounds.
“Deeper, goddamit!” Rhumkorrf shouted. “I don’t have all day!” His comb-over was starting to fray.
In the cow’s stall, Tim started to sweat.
“Doc, come on,” Colding said. “Just take it easy.”
“I don’t need your input, Colding. Shut up or I will kick you out of here. Mister Feely, you insufferable idiot, can you do your damn job?”
That would be just about enough of that. Colding put a hand on Rhumkorrf’s shoulder, letting his thumb slide behind the trapezium muscle just to the left of the neck, pointer finger in front, just above the collarbone. He pinched the fingers together.
Rhumkorrf stiffened in his chair and hissed in a short breath.
“We’re all under a lot of stress here, Doc. Wouldn’t you say?”
“Yes,” Rhumkorrf said. “Of course.”
“Good. And you know shouting and stress affect Jian, so let’s just calm everything down. Tim is doing fine, don’t you think?”
Colding relaxed the pinch a little, but kept the muscle firmly between his thumb and forefinger.
“Of course,” Rhumkorrf said. “Uh… Timothy. My apologies.”
In the stall, Tim nodded absently. His attention remained focused on the fiber-optic tube.
Colding released the pressure and gave Rhumkorrf’s shoulders a quick, friendly rub. “There you go, Doc. All better.”
Rhumkorrf leaned forward, probably already forgetting Colding’s rebuke. On the monitor, a crystal clear image flared to life. Colding sensed Jian walk up on his right, Tim walk up on his left, all three of them looking over Rhumkorrf’s scattered comb-over at the image.
Rhumkorrf reached out, fingertips touching the screen. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“It’s bigger,” Tim said quietly. “It shouldn’t be that big… can’t be.”
A placental sac filled the screen, translucent pinkish-white lined with thin red and blue veins. Inside the sac, the fetal ancestor in profile. Its head looked twice as large as the rest of the body. Tiny paws folded up under a long snout, which was dominated by the huge, bluish, closed eye. Colding could even see a tiny, fluttering thing… the ancestor’s beating heart.
“Fetuses average twenty pounds,” Jian said quietly. “They grow twenty pounds in six days.”
Rhumkorrf’s fingertips traced the closed eye. He turned and stared at Colding with wild eyes, his anger gone.
“You see? We’ve done the impossible!”
Colding couldn’t find words. Until now, this had been something on paper, a process he administered just as someone might administer an assembly line or a manufacturing plant. Even the gold-tinted image from the 3-D ultrasound had seemed somehow… Hollywood. The live image from the fiber-optic camera finally brought it all home in full, wet color—this was a living creature. A man-made organism that had germinated somewhere in Jian and Rhumkorrf’s genius, then clawed its way into existence.
Colding tore his eyes away from the image to look at the little man who made it all happen. “Pretty frigging impressive, Doc.”
Rhumkorrf turned, smiled and started to reply, but a strangled scream from Jian cut him off. Terror wrinkled her face into a disquieting caricature, locked her attention on the workstation’s screen. As one, Colding and Rhumkorrf looked back to the monitor.
The fetal ancestor, eyes open, stared right back at them.
Rhumkorrf jerked his fingers away from the screen and almost fell backward into Colding.
An inexplicable wave of fear tingled up Colding’s spine before he remembered it was only a computer monitor and this was a picture of a small fetus, not some six-foot-long creature looking at him with a malevolent gaze.
Jian’s hands flew to her head and grabbed huge fistfuls of hair. “Tian a! It is coming for us!”
“Jian, calm down!” Colding snapped. “Claus, is that supposed to happen?”
“No,” Tim said. “Fuck no that’s not supposed to happen.”
Rhumkorrf’s skin looked even paler than normal, the hue of the walking dead. “I must say it’s a bit unusual, but it’s nothing to worry about.”
“What?” Tim said. “A bit unusual? Dude, you are so full of shit! Just look at the goddamn thing!”
“Mister Feely! I’m not going to—”
Once again Rhumkorrf found himself interrupted, this time by blurry motion on the monitor that drew everyone’s attention. The fetal ancestor turned its wedge-shaped head. Now two black eyes stared out from the screen, right through the translucent placental sack. Colding knew the fetus was actually looking at the fiber-optic camera inside the womb, but the tiny eyes seemed to be looking right at him.
“Odd,” Rhumkorrf said. “Most animals don’t open their eyes until after birth.”
The fetus opened its mouth and lurched forward, hitting the inside of the placental tissue and stretching it outward like a wet pink balloon. They all flinched. Jian screamed louder. The tiny head reared back, the sac’s stretched and torn whitish membrane sagged. Another violent thrust. The oversized head ripped through the sac in a cloud of swirling fluid. A gaping maw, pointy teeth. Jaws snapped shut and the image blinked into static.