“I went through it with him,” Sonia reminded her.
Savi nodded. “I’m sorry, Sonia,” she said. “He didn’t want people to live forever.”
“I heard a speech he gave once,” Hawker said. “He talked about forced sterilization, culling the herd. Was he really that radical?”
Sonia looked embarrassed at this revelation. “Father didn’t really believe in those things. He was just trying to make a point. What he wanted was birth control and responsibility and family planning.”
Savi spoke up. “When Ranga and I were children, Mr. Hawker, we traveled with our mother. She was a nurse. She went on missions to the poorest parts of the world. Slums like Dharavi, outside Mumbai, or Kibera near Nairobi. The poor live there among filth you couldn’t imagine, crawling all over one another like ants. They survive just long enough to have more children and increase the population and suffering. Medicines and food are delivered by those who wish to help. People like our mother. And so fewer die in childbirth, fewer die in childhood, and ever more are confined to utter misery.”
Hawker remained quiet.
Savi turned toward him. “Have you ever been to a place where parents burn their children with scalding water, Mr. Hawker? Or poke their eyes out with a stick so they will be more pitiful when they go and beg? Or kill them because they cannot afford to have one more mouth to feed?”
“You’d be surprised where I’ve been,” he said, coldly.
“Then you understand why my brother spoke as he did,” she replied.
As Hawker listened he got the feeling that Savi and Sonia had practiced defending Ranga for a long time. And in a way, Hawker did understand. In the poorest, most overpopulated parts of the world, Western help in the form of medicines and food had wreaked havoc. In lands where large numbers of children were the norm because so few survived to adulthood, Western efforts had changed the equation drastically.
Where once a family had ten children and counted on two or three to become adults, now nine or ten did. Five generations used to take the population from four to twenty; now it took them to a hundred or more. There was simply not enough food or jobs or water or land for such growth.
But to pretend that only evil and misery came from such places was a conceit of the rich and a lie. He’d seen great love and affection and joy in some of the poorest places he’d ever been to.
“I’m not judging him,” Hawker said. “I’m only trying to understand. And to figure out who took his life and stop them from harming anyone else, including the three of you.”
For a second Savi looked embarrassed. “I’m sorry, it’s just …”
“It’s okay,” he said, then turned to Sonia. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get to your father in time. But he mentioned a breakthrough. Said he was near the answer. I think the people who killed him were after that. Do you know what it was?”
Sonia’s face brightened. Her eyes found Hawker and appeared both tremendously innocent and somehow prideful and strong and wise all at the same time.
“After years of pure research, Father decided to take a different route,” she said. “He studied animals blessed with long life spans, tortoises and parrots and things like that. And then he worked with stem cells, and compounds that could affect those stem cells.”
She glanced toward the forward cabin.
“Some of mine have been given to Nadia. They’re a part of her now. It seems to be helping.”
“And the breakthrough?”
“Father became convinced that if a genetic defect that destroyed telomeres existed in nature, then the opposite must already exist somewhere as well. He began to research stories of long life and even legends of immortality. It seemed so very odd, but he felt there would be some truth to whatever stories existed.
“He became friends with a man named Bashir, an Iranian archaeologist. They were quite a pair. Two bitter old madmen, it seemed. Father looking for immortality and Bashir chasing a dream he said he’d once lost in the desert sands.”
“What dream are we talking about here?” Hawker asked, recognizing Bashir’s name.
“Bashir’s great obsession,” she said. “Every equal of my father’s. He claimed he’d once found the grave of Adam. And clutched in Adam’s hand was a scroll of copper, which Bashir had become certain would lead him to the Garden of Eden.”
Hawker felt as if he were treading water, reaching for the bottom with his feet only to find each time that there was no ground beneath him.
“The Garden of Eden?”
“I know how it sounds,” Sonia said. “But Bashir believed they could find it, and Father believed he could save Nadia with what he would discover there.”
Hawker fought to contain his skepticism. “And what would that be?”
“A miracle from God, to some. A miracle of science, to my father,” she said. “The hope of immortality.”
He looked at her. “Immortality?”
She nodded. “In the book of Genesis, it was called the Tree of Life.”
CHAPTER 30
Scindo stood with Cruor in the same darkened room in which he had been named. He was here for a different reason now. Another man stood in front of them, an older man with gray hair and reddish brown skin. Cruor called him Bashir.
“We have something for you,” Cruor said.
“I want nothing of yours,” Bashir said.
Cruor laughed, a deep, sickly laugh.
“What I give you was never mine, but once it was yours. Or so you say.”
From Bashir’s features and accent, Scindo knew he was Middle Eastern, Persian as opposed to his own Arabian heritage. Why he was present, Scindo didn’t know; that he’d been beaten was obvious. There were bruises around his face, and he hobbled when he walked.
He was also missing an eye, but that scar was old.
“You were friends with Ranga,” Cruor said to the prisoner. “He told us what you believed.”
“You tortured it out of him.”
“This was before we caught both of you, before Ranga had betrayed us.”
“You murdered him for leaving you,” Bashir said.
“No,” Cruor said. “We punished him for betrayal.”
“What right do you have to punish anyone?” Bashir asked, straining, angry.
“We claim the right, as gods have done for millennia,” Cruor said. “Ranga understood this. He was part of it. He knew the punishment. We all know it.”
Cruor carried with him a long cardboard tube, which he placed down. Scindo did not know what lay inside.
“I won’t help you,” Bashir said. “I have been tortured before. What can you do to me that they have not already done?”
Cruor reached out and grabbed Bashir by the face, pulling him closer and examining the old scar.
“We can do worse,” he insisted. “I promise you.”
Cruor released Bashir and shoved him backward into a chair. He picked up the long cardboard tube and opened it.
Scindo had expected to see a weapon, a spear or a sword or some kind of blade. Instead what he saw looked like a thin, curved piece of metal.
Cruor placed it down on the table and began to unroll it.
Bashir stood. He moved forward slowly, as if drawn to the table.
As Scindo watched, Cruor unbent the copper sheet, rolling it out with great effort and precision. Eventually, when the sheet had been made somewhat flat, he and another man clamped the edges to the table.
Scindo stared. He saw that symbols had been pounded into the copper.
“You have been looking for this half your life,” Cruor said. “We give you a chance to read it.”
Bashir looked up.
“Be careful you do not lie to us. We will have others to check what you say.”