Excerpted from "Down the Well" by Alaya Dawn Johnson"I enjoy watching children," she said. "It comforts me to remember that I too was a child once, and one day they too will be old."Her shiny olive skin was firm, but even the best youth-treatments couldn''t hide the purple veins that snaked around her arms like cables. She appeared to be in well-preserved middle-age; only I and a few other agents knew the truth. Her eight remaining fingers were casually laced over a knobby walking stick that she carried for show. A particularly knowledgeable observer might have noted that the cherry-red wood was at once lighter and stronger than any known on Earth. Dr. Constance Roya was a scientist in the ancient sense, when that term implied at least as much of a reckless love for adventure as an appreciation of form and method and the furtherance of human knowledge.
I turned my gaze from Dr. Roya to the park below. Children from the nearby ambassador''s school scrambled over banyan tree roots, hanging and swinging so adroitly that it suddenly seemed the separation between humans and apes was not so great as we liked to imagine.I said as much to Dr. Roya. Her answering smile was brief and indulgent. I had a sudden impression of those dark, full lips breaking me open, holding their silence."They''re children," she said, her voice incongruously deep and carrying for such a small body.
"Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny ."I stared--was she playing me? She laughed and shrugged.". Except when it doesn''t, Mr. Smith." I had told her my name. But she insisted on denying me what little individuality I had left. Could I blame her? She saw the agency acronym on my lapel; she knew what I''d come for.
"Dr. Roya, I think it''s time you showed me the lab," I said, hoping, like a child, to hurt her with my authority.She smiled again; I flinched. "A moment, Mr. Smith." I saw her clearly, then: beautiful and terrible, ancient and radical, a goddess as much as any human can be. Killing a hexapedal carnivore with a hand-made spear, hiding for two days from a giant amphibious jellyfish desperate for food, surviving alone in the Well for five years before the computers on this side even registered the malfunction--those rumors had floated around the agency for decades. I''d found it impossible to believe that such a small, unassuming woman had done all they said she did.
Now? Evidence acquired, knowledge attained, theory proven. Evolution occurred; Constance Roya could eviscerate me with a glance. QED. I took a step back."Do you know what those are?" she said, gesturing again to the park below.I hesitated. She couldn''t be referring to the children. So that left .
"Ficus benghalensis?"She raised an eyebrow. "An invasive species," she said. "Like a bureaucrat.""I''m not--"She began walking toward the elevator. She held her spine like a steel rod, her walking stick like a bludgeon. "Of course you are," she said, her voice brittle as fossilized bone. "With just enough knowledge to destroy the world."Dr.
Roya flicked on the lights. I expected a clinical fluorescent glow, but the light that filled the room was warm and dappled, as though glancing off summer leaves. It seemed, for a moment, like I could smell the fresh cut grass, evaporating dew, nightsoil fertilizer from the surface a hundred floors above."You convinced building services to pump in sunlight?" I said. But you couldn''t smell sunlight.Dr. Roya closed her eyes. I could hear the air whistling into her lungs.
"It''s the only way I can work," she said, after a moment.I took a discreet sniff. Just normal lab smells: alcohol and preserving chemicals, carpet cleaner, laundered lab coats, disposable gloves. The door to the Well airlock, marked with yellow paint and prominent security touchpads, smelled like nothing at all.She gave me a quick glance and walked to a recessed door on the far right. To each side hung one of Dr. Roya''s legendary illustrations: chimeras and monsters, living fossils and mythic beasts, all drawn to minute anatomical detail. I saw a spray of razor-sharp hairs in the nail bed of a giant flying sloth, perfectly designed to slowly bleed its airborne prey to death before landing.
On the other side hung an image that made me shudder, though I had studied it for hours when it first came across the classified feeds. A pair of gigantic red lips, disembodied from any suggestion of a face, washed up on a beach. It had multiple digestive pockets in the lining of its massive mouth, where it could store small sea creatures for weeks like fish in the window of a Chinese restaurant.Dr. Roya had opened the door, but walked back to where I stood, frozen before her pictures."It climbed out of the water," she said, pointing to the mouth. "On its lips. I thought it was going to eat me, but it died.
I hacked it open with a stone knife after I drew this." She paused, with a wry smile I supposed she meant for herself. "This creature had a neural net the size of my thumbnail, but it went to a beach to die." She shook her head. "I brought back samples for the lab, but they rotted by the time you fellows rescued me. I''ve never been able to find it again. Hell, it probably went extinct ten minutes after I left."I caught something in her voice I recognized, though it took me a moment to place.
Some mutant hybrid of envy, wistfulness, and grief. The way I''d felt when I had dropped out of graduate school and taken a post at the agency.I tried, "It seems like such .""A waste," she finished. Her voice was uncharacteristically gentle. "Like most treasures."She let me stare for a few more seconds and then strode back to the open door. "Well, come on.
You should at least see everything."I followed her through. The light here was low and ambient, the temperature a chill twenty degrees Celsius. To my right and left rested shelf after shelf of specimens, some preserved in makeshift camp jars and others floating in specially-made aquariums that preserved anatomical detail down to the organelles. Standing there, dwarfed by the entire recorded biology of an alien ecosystem, I felt close to hyperventilating. Bug-eyed fish with prehensile fins, meter-thick tree limbs with giant blue leaves for wings and purple fruit for retractable eyes, millipedes as long as my body and thicker than my torso, with each segment differentiated into a cascade of arms.I had avoided museums since quitting school, though I made a hobby of collecting illustrations. But standing here among thousands of extinct species that were only a fraction of a fraction of the species even now going extinct, old school day terrors rushed back.
I felt as though time itself could crush me. I did not feel awe or joy or any transcendent moment of the scientific understanding of Einstein''s god. No, I was a peon again, terrified by the breadth of the universe, by my utterly insignificant place in it, by the eternity of my death and that of everyone I loved. The room swayed. I closed my eyes."Oxaloacetate, Citrate, cis-Aconitate, Isocitrate," I whispered, letting my mind go blank."The Krebs cycle as catechism?" Her voice was at my elbow. "No wonder they sent you to do this job.
"I forced myself to open my eyes. For some reason, her presence was reassuring. Or at least intimidating in a far less existential way. "I begged them," I said. Cracking myself open, hoping she would understand I wasn''t just another Mr. Smith.She touched my sleeve. It was meant for comfort, but my pulse jumped.
"So eager to put an old scientist out to pasture?"I shook my head. "I just wanted to meet you. If someone had to do it .""Better someone who understands my work? I should show you something."Around the corner from the specimens, a floor-to-ceiling clear plastic wall separated us from a waterless aquarium. Aside from a slime mold growing on the floor, the chamber was empty."Now look," Dr. Roya said.
Her voice seemed closer to a twelve-year-old girl''s, ecstatic with her first discovery of a toad in the garden. She turned down the lights.Suddenly, the room that had been empty was teeming with life. Ghostly obloid creatures, organs lit up like lights in a Christmas show, swam through the air. They were buoyed by a thick fringe of cilia that beat the air like a broom. Paramecia a handspan across?Dr. Roya pressed her face against the smudge-proof plastic. In such low light her treated skin was translucent as tracing paper; I could see a vein throbbing in her forehead.
She was eighty-seven years old, give or take a few weeks, according to the agency calculators. But she had been born just ten years before me. The Well extracted its price."Single cells," she said, in response to my unvoiced question. "They existed, briefly, in Earth''s past. I happened to catch some evolving during phase one.""In the air?""No, no, the project was at least a hundred million years away from getting out of the oceans. I brought them back here, did some old-fashioned genetic engineering.
I knocked out genes until my assistants threatened to quit. I took it as far as I could, and what do you know ."One paused before us, shuddered--like a dog shaking off mud--and suddenly split in two."Could they . do you think they could self-organize?"She closed her eyes, like the concept almost overwhelmed her. "The oxygen content of the atmosphere might pose technical limitations. But it''s possible. Even your bosses can grasp that much.
"I knew what she meant. The infinite possibility of time. "I have some forms," I said, awkwardly, when we went back into the lab.She laughed. "Of course. ''I hereby agree to sign my life away and bother you no more.'' That kind of thing?"The muscles in my neck felt taut, but I tried to smile. "That''s the agency for you.
Always signed in someone else''s blood."I had hoped to impress her, but her only response was to take the scroll and quickly tap through the documents. Tediously long,.