Tom Hyman (13 page)

Karla Schmidt, her private secretary, came in. “Everything for this afternoon is on your desk, Baroness.”

The baroness looked at the pile of correspondence and telephone slips.

Several hours’ work.

“Photographers are coming at two from that English magazine, Baroness.

And Herr Hellmann from Deutschebank at three. Lotte Brandt about the new ad campaign at threethirty. And a woman from Earthly Scents at four.”

“What does she want?”

“A new perfume endorsement.”

“Not another one?”

“You’re enormously popular,” Karla said.

“You think so?”

“You’re a role model to women everywhere, Baroness.”

“Do you think I’m a role model?”

Karla blushed. “Of course.”

Karla had worked for her longer than any other secretary. She often wondered why the poor woman put up with her; she knew she was a slave driver.

By six o’clock the baroness had cleared the day’s business. She summoned Karla back to her study.

“What about Stewart Biotech?” she asked. “Have you found out if it’s a public company?”

“It’s not, Baroness. The Stewart family owns eighty percent of the stock. The rest is in the hands of Stewart lawyers and Stewart’s chief assistant, Henry Ajemian.”

“That’s a pity.”

The baroness had for a while entertained the notion of trying a secret buyout of Stewart Biotech. She was still furious that Stewart had outmaneuvered her with Goth.

But she had hardly given up. The profit potential in Goth’s program was simply enormous—far greater than anything she had ever invested in. Still, there was something bigger in Jupiter than money. If it worked, it would open up a new dimension in her life—something beyond the now well-worn satisfactions of international business and finance, or the invisible political power she was amassing. Jupiter represented an opportunity that was impossible to quantify. And it beckoned to her like some forbidden thrill, some ultimate kind of satisfaction beyond normal mortal experience. Jupiter was the chance to influence the human race in a way it had never been influenced before. It was the chance to play God.

But if she was going to get possession of it, she knew she’d have to scramble. She had underestimated this Dalton Stewart.

He was smarter than she had thought.

The baroness sighed at her own Machiavellian scheming. How naturally the determination to dominate others came to her. She had spent a lifetime perfecting it.

She said good night to her secretary, spent a few minutes reviewing some papers, and then turned off the desk lamp. She leaned back in her big leather swivel chair and stared at the painting on the wall. It was the work of an obscure artist from the late medieval period and depicted the Virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus to her breast. Mother and child both wore halos. It was pretty standard stuff from the period, and not terribly well executed at that. But something about it spoke to the baroness. Perhaps it was the expression of suffering on the faces of mother and child. The painting reminded her of the trauma her birth had caused her own mother-the woman had nearly bled to death—and the disappointment she had caused her father, who had wanted a son.

She grew up wanting to be a boy; it was the central emotion of her childhood. She had prayed that she would wake one day and find that God had made a mistake and that she was a boy after all. Because boys were strong and girls were weak. If she had been born a boy, her father would not have taken everything from hen-her childhood, her virginity, even her fertility. The shame of those years burned in her still. She had wanted so much to love him, but he had made her hate him instead.

No one defended her through those years—no one, not her mother, not the servants, not her governess. No one. Her father ruled. Everyone was terrified of him.

Outside the household it was the same. Wilhelm von Hauser was far too important a personage in the community for anyone to risk his displeasure. Even the family physician—a despicable little toad of a man—colluded against her. He treated her for venereal disease. How old was she then—ten? He arranged an illegal abortion when she was only thirteen. The doctor who performed it was a drunk.

She found out when she was twenty-two that he had so scarred her uterus that she could never have any children.

Survival demanded strength, so Gerta became strong. She learned how to kill her emotions. And she learned how to be patient. And one day her prayers were answered.

When her father was sixty-six, he had a stroke that left him paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair. He remained alert and conscious, but he was unable to move or speak.

She was appointed his legal guardian. Since she would inherit his majority interest in Hauser Industries upon his death, she convened the board and had herself named the company’s new CEO.

There was little opposition. She had already proved herself in the business world, and no one doubted that she was capable of running the company at least as well as her father had.

Next, she fired all the top management—all the people who owed their positions to her father—and replaced them with new people, loyal to her.

When she had consolidated her position in the company, she turned her attention to her father. She devoted herself to showing him just what it meant, just what it felt like, to be at someone else’s mercy—someone who had been taught cruelty from an early age. He learned a lot in those last days—about helplessness, about suffering.

About pain.

She kept him alive for six more months; then she let him go.

No man was ever happier to die.

Baroness von Hauser walked over to one of the study windows and opened it. A chill breeze ruffled the drapes. The thousand acres of field and forest that comprised the estate of Schloss Vogel lay invisible below her in the darkness of the new moon.

She was emotionally dead inside. She regretted the loss, but it was the only way she could ever have survived. She liked to think of her unwillingness to feel love or compassion as a rare kind of strength.

Love meant vulnerability, after all; and to be vulnerable was to negate the very purpose of her life, which was to rise to a position of such power that she could never be made vulnerable to anything or anyone again. Ever.

l What a terrible way to get pregnant, Anne thought. It was like a rape in slow motion.

Looking down, she saw her spread thighs and bare knees gleaming unnaturally white in the bright bath of light over the operating table.

Her feet were hooked in the table’s stirrups, and Dr. Harold Goth sat on a stool positioned between them, clad in surgical green gown and cap.

He was slowly inserting a long, flexible probe into her vagina.

She could see his latex-gloved hands twisting it steadily forward, and she could feel its hard, unyielding foreignness as it penetrated deeper inside her. Beside him was a small video monitor that allowed him to follow the progress of the probe with ultrasound.

“Relax,” Goth commanded. “Don’t tense your muscles.”

He sounded irritated. But of course that was the way he sounded most of the time. He had explained the entire procedure to her, but not voluntarily. She had had to drag the details out of him over a period of days. He seemed from the outset to have adopted the attitude that the matter was really none of her business.

She almost wished now that she didn’t know what he was doing. It was only making her more anxious.

Anne Stewart had found it hard to like Dr. Harold Goth. He was a stiff, introverted man with little warmth or charm.

She had spent the better part of four days at Dr. Goth’s unfinished clinic in the new wing of St. Bonaventure’s Hospital, where he had subjected her to seemingly endless batteries of tests and injections.

During those long hours in the clinic, she had tried to engage Goth in conversation on topics like music and literature. He wasn’t much interested. The only thing she found out was that he had a passion for Sherlock Holmes—a subject about which she knew nothing. Her attempts to impress him with her knowledge of biology had made him even more uncommunicative.

He did discuss the fragile X syndrome with her. He explained how he would extract the DNA from her fertilized egg, how he would isolate the gene on the X chromosome that carried the faulty DNA sequence, and finally how he would use restriction enzymes to surgically splice and replace the area of faulty sequence.

She tried to draw him out as well about the so-called Jupiter program—the collaborative venture in which he and her husband were so deeply involved. But the mere mention of the subject seemed to make him nervous. He would only mutter something about “extensive gene therapy,” or that it was all “too technical for the layman to understand.” He finally got her off the subject for good by telling her that his contract with Stewart Biotech did not allow him to discuss Jupiter with anyone.

“But I’m the wife of the man financing your work,” she protested.

Goth just pushed his eyeglasses back up the bridge of his nose and glanced away. “Then let your husband tell you.”

Today the doctor was collecting her eggs. (“Harvesting your oocytes”

was the phrase he had used; it made her think of the eggs as ripe little pumpkins.) Over the last several days her ovaries had been stimulated by injections of Pergonal to increase the egg production, and now Goth was performing what he called a “transvaginal aspiration.”

Using the ultrasound monitor as a guide, he directed the probe into the vagina, up through the cervix, uterus, and fallopian tube all the way to the left ovary, suspended in the body cavity just outside the horn-shaped open end of the fallopian tube. One by one he burst the follicles surrounding the ripe eggs with the probe’s needle and gently vacuumed the eggs into the probe. The eggs traveled back through the probe and out along a length of thin tubing into a suction trap.

Even with the light anesthesia he had given her, the pain caused by the procedure was considerable. The nurse standing behind her mopped her brow with a cool, damp cloth. Anne tried to distract herself by focusing on the suction trap. It consisted of a small glass test tube with a two-holed stopper in the top. The tubing from the probe was pushed just inside one of the holes. A second piece of tubing ran out from the other opening to the suctioning device. When the suctioned eggs reached the trap, they simply settled to the bottom. She wished she could see the eggs, but they were much too small—a mere two-hundredths of an inch in diameter.

As uncomfortable as the harvesting of the eggs turned out to be, it was a pleasure compared with the harvesting of Dalton’s sperm the day before.

She and Dalton had had sex the night before in their hotel suite, and Dalton had made a big fuss about having to use a condom.

He had had a difficult time getting it on, and an even more difficult time removing it. The whole business had been messy, timeconsuming, and exasperating. It had put her on edge and made him angry. And of course it had ruined the sex.

Dalton stored the sperm-filled condom overnight in a glass jar in the hotel suite’s refrigerator and presented it to Goth the next morning at the hospital. The doctor gazed incredulously at the rubber prophylactic lying at the bottom of the jar. He told Dalton that he had done exactly the wrong thing. He needed fresh sperm, and preferably after a day’s abstinence. How many times had he told him that? But it was too late now. The procedure had to be done within the next few hours, no matter what. He directed Dalton to go immediately into the bathroom and masturbate into a plastic container.

Dalton was appalled by the idea. He was damned if he would do anything of the kind, he said, with everyone in the place standing around waiting for him. Goth insisted. Dalton still refused.

Anne finally saved the situation by forcing a compromise. If she and Dalton could have the use of one of the hospital rooms for half an hour, she would help him collect the sperm.

An empty room with a hospital bed was quickly found, and Anne and Dalton went inside and closed the door. Neither was in the mood for civil conversation, let alone sex. But it was a crisis, and something had to be done.

Since Dalton was unwilling to masturbate on demand, Anne did it for him. After a prolonged, sweaty effort, she succeeded in getting a quantity of her husband’s semen into a plastic container.

The episode led to a bitter argument later.

“That was the single most embarrassing damned thing I’ve ever been through,” he told her. “I hope the hell you appreciate it.”

Anne was stunned. “Appreciate it? Do you have any idea of what Goth’s putting me through? Don’t you think I feel just as degraded by the experience as you? How selfish can you be?”

“You’re the one who insisted on a child.”

Anne swelled with fury. For the first time she actually felt a powerful dislike for her husband. “You bastard,” she shot back.

“You’re the one who lied to me about the embarrassing condition of your genes.”

She had never called anyone a bastard before, let alone belittled a physical shortcoming. She had wounded him deeply, and she knew it.

They eventually apologized to each other, but the damage had been done.

The incident created a permanent distance between them, and it frightened her, especially when they had just made such an effort to reconcile their differences and commit themselves to having this child.

Anne looked down at the doctor again, bent to his task with his characteristic nervous intensity. The paper mask over his nose and mouth were causing his eyeglasses to cloud up. He removed them, wiped them hastily on his sleeve, and hooked the temples back over his ears.

She felt his hand pressing on her lower stomach. “You’ll feel a little pain,” he warned her. She closed her eyes and bit her lip.

In two days, she would have to come back for a second procedure—the reinsertion of her fertilized eggs into her fallopian tubes. Goth had explained to her what would happen in the meantime. Tonight, her eggs would be mixed with Dalton’s washed sperm in a specially prepared medium and left to fertilize in a petri dish. The newly fertilized eggs would be allowed to divide three times. Then they would be frozen with nitrogen gas.