Channeling Cleopatra (16 page)

"No, of course not—oh, wait!" Gabriella
said, when a sudden delicious thought hit her that caused her to
grin mischievously. "Dr. Chimera will still be expecting a prepared
donor specimen for use on a special client who claimed Cleopatra's
DNA before anyone else knew the material was available. It seems
only right that we provide one."

CHAPTER 14

Chimera received Leda's message with an
ambivalence stronger than usual, even for someone who was, by
choice, of two minds.

On the one hand, the feminine side of
Chimera was pleased that their friend Leda had succeeded, that the
queen of the Nile had been found. That soon Cleopatra's thought
patterns, memories, attitudes, personality traits, and much of what
had been her character would once more be known. Perhaps many great
mysteries would be solved and great discoveries made possible
because of the queen's knowledge.

On the other hand, the part of Chimera who
was such a loving husband that he could not stand to allow his wife
the ultimate change from life to death without needing to keep a
part of who she had been alive within him felt that he was helping
abet a great mistake. Preoccupied Wilhelm Wolfe might be, but
Chimera's masculine side felt sure his friend and ally, the CEO of
Nucore, loved his wife as she was. He felt deeply that Gretchen
Wolfe would regret her blending.

The questions this evoked in Chimera sent
the scientist back to the laboratory, where the experiments kept
being interrupted by nagging spiritual questions applying to all
Nucore clients.

So it was with a degree of both relief and
dismay that Chimera received Leda's message that she was sending
her father with the properly prepared DNA specimen.

But when the Nucore-uniformed pilot handed
over the titanium metal transport tube, Chimera merely expressed
surprise that Duke had not personally delivered the specimen, as
Leda had specified.

"Oh, he was on his way when the earthquake
began," said the pilot, who seemed to be Egyptian.

"Was that what interrupted the electronic
transmission of the prepared specimen?" Chimera asked.

Chimera thought the pilot looked puzzled,
but of course, he would. He had no way of knowing about the
computer failure.

"Certainly it must have been," the pilot
said. "But all the same, Duke entrusted me with this and said it is
all ready and I should bring it straight to you. If you will excuse
me now, Doctor, I must pick up emergency supplies and return to
Alexandria."

"Of course," Chimera said. There was just
enough time to fetch the portable unit from the laboratory before
the motor launch sailed for the mainland, where Chimera caught a
ride on another Nucore plane heading for Austria to pick up
supplies. Having already received the scientist's message that the
desired material had been obtained and was en route, Gretchen Wolfe
sent a car to the airstrip.

Chimera had hoped to be able to spend time
with Gretchen, to remain with her until she awakened from the
blending. However, an emergency message from Kefalos about the dual
catastrophes of earthquake and flood in Alexandria required the
scientist's immediate return.

Once the process was complete, Chimera left
Gretchen sleeping, under the watchful eyes of her servants, with a
message to notify the scientist by phone when Gretchen awoke. All
the way back to Kefalos, Chimera had the feeling that something was
very wrong. Was it just that it seemed a shame that Gretchen, of
all people, required another personality? What would the blending
with sensuous and devious Cleopatra do to the straightforward,
compassionate Gretchen? Would she even be someone Wolfe still
liked? Chimera didn't care to think about it and felt once more
that this might be a terrible mistake. It had been wrong to do this
important blending secretly.

However innocently, Chimera had colluded
with Gretchen to deceive Wolfe, to go behind his back in a matter
that intimately concerned him. More importantly, however, it had
been performed without the lengthy, soul-searching interview
Chimera and Wolfe normally conducted. Gretchen was a friend, and
such an interview, for some reason, had seemed more intrusive than
the process of adding Cleopatra's personality to hers.

Chimera felt uneasily that it was more
urgent than ever to find a safe and predictable way to reverse the
blending.

* * *

Dr. Gretchen Wolfe, for her part, had
submitted to the blending with no second thoughts, no qualms or
reservations, once she decided to go through with it. That had been
back when she confided in Chimera that she feared she was losing
Wilhelm, and the only thing that could help her, as she saw it, was
a charisma transplant. She had narrowed it down to that.

She already had undergone surgeries to
correct her largish nose, her weakish chin, her sagging eyelids,
and thinning mouth. She had had her thighs liposuctioned and her
tummy tucked. Her skin had been abraded and lasered of all
correctable defects, and her hair professionally returned to the
golden glory of her youth. She finally admitted that she needed
makeup and had allowed herself to buy expensive but becoming
clothing, after years of preferring to shop frugally and give
generously to charities.

She feared she had even
neglected her patients in her quest to perfect her appearance, and
still Wilhelm didn't seem to notice that a basically reconstructed
woman was at his side every time she joined him. When she finally
resorted to the asinine "Do you notice anything different about me,
darling?" game, he had replied, as he always did, "You are
perfection itself,
liebchen.
You must never change anything. I love you as you
are."

Hah! And yet, did he ever
come to her at their home now? Always he was busy in deep
consultation with the international jet-setting beauties,
billionairesses, actresses, divas, that sort of woman, who came to
him to make themselves interesting inside as well as outside. It
was all for the blendings,
ja,
she knew. But she also knew that a man was a man,
and these women, they were very beautiful to begin with and
unscrupulous about married men even before they blended with the
greatest courtesans, temptresses, or heroines of history. Gretchen
knew that in some ways she was simple. She was a doctor. She was a
wife. She did not understand politics—not even hospital politics.
This caused her much trouble sometimes. She did not understand
sexual politics. She felt sometimes that Wilhelm had chosen her
simply to have a wife to be a shield against all of the women who
wanted him, and she had been so willing to please him, to do things
his way, how much trouble could she be? But now, that was not
enough. She needed to understand these things, or she felt she
would lose him.

After considerable thinking, Gretchen
finally knew who she had to have to give her not only the ability
to understand complex personal and sexual matters but also the
extra dimension of sensuality and intriguing mystery she needed to
hold her husband against such odds. She must have Cleopatra.

Truthfully, she didn't
really need
all
of
Cleopatra, but there was no choice in that. She reasoned that the
personalities that eventually emerged after the process were always
a blend of the two, with the stronger being perhaps more dominant.
It would be terrible if she turned into a full-time seductress. The
idea horrified her.

She wanted only to keep her own husband. She
wouldn't know what to do with other men. She didn't want to find
out.

Their marriage had been sound when last they
were together, she was sure. And she understood that her husband
must put himself into his very important work. She herself had done
the same thing in her practice as a pediatrician. At one time, it
had been Wilhelm who complained of her long hours in the clinic and
hospital, hours that had become longer once they discovered they
could have no children of their own bodies. Before they had come to
a conclusion what to do about that exactly, Chimera discovered the
process, and its development had consumed so much of Wilhelm's time
that he spent virtually all of his nights and days in quarters at
one of Nucore's facilities or another. He was closer to Chimera
than he was to her, and had she not remembered Chimera as Chime and
Tsering from their college days, the sweet couple whose love was so
much like she wanted her own to be, she might have felt jealousy.
Chimera had understood her at once and had promised to help without
reservation. Whether two people or one, Chimera was her friend,
too.

She had tried at first to go to Wilhelm, had
many times observed the procedure, conversed with Nucore
scientists, even made a few modest suggestions. She had considered
returning to university for an advanced degree in genetics. But no,
it would only put more distance between them and make her
unavailable for those rare times when Wilhelm could be with her.
Besides, she liked working with the little children. She was good
with them, yes. So sad that she and Wilhelm could not have their
own, but years had passed since they last spoke of the matter. Now
she, ten years older than Wilhelm, was well past safe childbearing
age, even if she could become pregnant.

Cleopatra had had many children. Perhaps her
memories of her children would be of some comfort to Gretchen. She
had died so young, the queen, that perhaps she would be disgusted
to wake up in an aging body? But no. She knew pain, the poor girl.
Her death was by her own hand, no less. Of course, there were
extenuating circumstances. It was not as if antidepressants would
have changed things for a queen whose husband was supposedly dead
and whose country was being conquered, herself to be paraded in
chains through the streets of Rome. These things were personal
catastrophes, and although Gretchen felt that the queen had somehow
given up on life too soon, she could understand a little. Even so,
snakes! Gretchen shuddered, thinking about it. She would have to be
very firm with the former queen of Egypt about that, too. Under no
circumstances would snakes in the vicinity of her bosom be
tolerated.

CHAPTER 15

"Lady, does the phrase 'head for the hills,
the dam's breaking' ring any bells for you at all?" Pete Welsh
yelled over the din of traffic and the groaning of the dam as he
pulled Leda from the ruin of the beluga. He had reached her by
chopping down the door in a properly testosterone-enabled fashion,
rather like a bald Paul Bunyan with an ax that had fortunately and
magically materialized from someplace.

She was delighted that he had chosen to use
his muscles on her behalf at that moment. Otherwise, she would have
been smothered by beluga wreckage as she was almost smothered by
clean-room plastic a few moments before. But he didn't have to be
so snarly about it. He was just in a bad mood because the dam
really was breaking from the pressures of the sea outside it and
the ocean floor cracking up somewhere out there. The dig actually
looked quite stable—no cracks that she could see offhand but—

"Move it!" Pete barked.

"Okay, okay, but I can't head for the hills.
There aren't any." She realized he was perfectly right to try to
spur her to action. Oxygen deprivation was making her a little
drifty at the moment, not quite ready to heed the call to
action.

"Head for the sand dunes then. This whole
area has to be evacuated. We still might have a tsunami: and are
bound to have at the least a pseudo tsunami if the dam doesn't
hold."

He turned his red and sweating face away
from her and jogged up toward a freshly arrived gaggle of tourists,
yelling, "Run!"

That got her attention. It dawned on her
suddenly, as she stared at what was left of the lab, that while a
tsunami, real or pseudo, would be very scary, it was nothing
compared to Namid once he found out the canopic jar was lost in the
quake. And Daddy was gone. The most prudent thing would be to go to
the airfield and wait for him and have him take her straight back
to Nucore, the salvaged mini-disk tucked safely in the front of her
bra.

She wasn't an awfully good runner, but she
seemed to teleport to the road. Although power failures had plunged
the rest of the city into darkness, the thoroughfare was ablaze and
a-blare with the lights and horns of vehicles that were going
nowhere.

"Taxi, madame?" An unmarked elderly Buick in
front of her sprouted a head and torso from the driver's-side
window.

She felt like laughing and at first was glad
her sense of humor hadn't deserted her, then realized it was
probably hysteria. The guy was enterprising, if unrealistic.

"You think I want to hire you to let me sit
in your car while the sea breaks over the dam and drowns us?" she
asked, even as she spoke figuring he probably didn't speak enough
English to understand. "Or were you planning to carry me
piggyback?"

He ignored that last remark. "Where do you
wish to go?" His English was actually very good.

"You know the Nucore airstrip west of
town?"

"Oh yes."

"There. And I'd say step on it, except all
that would do right now is end up crunching your front end."

"Madame is very wise and uncommonly
understanding of the situation. It is an emergency?"

"Yes," she said as the ground shook again
and another clash of metal screeched a few car lengths ahead. "For
both of us."

"Yes " he said, following her gaze to the
dam, over which the Mediterranean was impatiently sloshing.
"Come."

He slammed the driver's-side door into the
vehicle beside his and jumped out, ran around the cab, popped the
trunk, and lifted out a bicycle built for two. He displayed this
with the same dramatic flare merchants at the market used to
present "an ancient necklace from the tomb of Nefertiti, oh yes,
the one she is supposed to have been given on her wedding day."