Gynophagia Chronicles: Samantha
Thursday, September 10, 2218, 7AM
Seabrook Manor, Athens, Georgia
Narative Reconstructed by Peter Howard
“It’s as astonishing as it is dangerous!” said Dr.LeBeau, Dean of the UGA Biology Department and head of the Genetics Lab. “It’s exciting and frightening! All these girls are homozygous in a what promotes heterozygosity!”
“In English, Doctor,” intoned Professor Jessup.
Gianni sat with the professor, Dr. LeBeau and his own brother Simon Carver in the “breakfast nook” at the estate. It was actually half a gazebo attatched to the manor on the edge of both the kitchen and the Professor's private lounge area. Dark, tinted double pane windows overhead kept it from becoming hot in the southern sun. The horseshoe shaped table made it easy for Elsa to serve the four men there. She wore only a short bistro apron and slippers. Her nakedness as well as her pregnancy a condition of her employment. She served with a pleasant smile, silent and unobtrusive, always ready to fill a cup of coffee or take away a plate, or to bring more breakfast pastries.
Michael was rather fond of Elsa. He'd impregnated her himself five months ago, and the litter would be a boy and two girls. Not that he was attatched to them. He had, of course, impregnated maids before. His ofspring, and those of Simon, lived out back in the servant's quarters with all ten maids and six groundskeepers and stayed in the nursery there. As per the conditions of employment, the children were property of the Professor, including the boys, and he could do with them as he pleased. Last night Michael, the professor and Simon had dined on veal selected from there.
Michael had been home a week and, with little else to do but wait for the good Doctor’s evaluation, had visited his younger brother Simon on the sly twice, just to pass the time. The professor, of course, disapproved of Gianni touring Savannah during the day, preferring him to remain at home, or find quarters in Augusta or Charleston in which blend in.
Simon, to the outside world, was an only child, and the Professor was not his father. Simon lived in Atlanta and attended a few classes the University of Georgia while he worked on his master’s thesis in Law and Political Science. One of his classes, Elementary Genetics, just happened to be taught by Doctor LeBeau. Gianni knew Simon did so mainly to pick up the multitude of girls in the class who seemed to swoon at the younger man’s Anglicized accent garnered from his undergraduate years at Oxford. There was the barest resemblance between Michael Gianni and Simon Carver. Both had tall, wiry statures, piercing blue eyes and softly chisled feathers. But Simon’s skin tanned well, where Gianni’s did not. His sandy blonde hair he kept longer than the professor would normally tolerate, and looked like the type of man Glenn would be friends with... a Beach Bum Jock type… none of which Simon was. No, Simon was as honed an operator as Gianni. They both had the ability to pass each other in a nearly vacant room and never know the other was there, and even if they did, not recognize each other. Gianni had no doubt it had happened, perhaps more than once.
Last night, the Professor took a phone call from Dr. LeBeau who was emphatic that they meet immediately if not sooner to discuss his amazing discovery.
“It’s amazing! These girls are designed to breed. They’re perfect in every way genetically, which by itself is astonishing, though not unheard of in individuals. It’s rare for a woman to have a single genetically perfect child, much less two... though it has hapened. But this.... is extraordinary! All by itself, betrays genetic tampering. But the idea of Heterozygosotisic Homozygousness is… unthinkable!”
“So,” Gianni said as he put down his cup of coffee. “They pass on traits? I’m not exactly following what Heterozygosticasity…”
“Keep in mind, it would not have been possible to discover any of this without state of the art equipment. It would have taken months to map their genes…”
“Doctor,” the professor said. “Please answer Michael’s question.”
“What?” said Dr. LeBeau. “What was the question?”
“I’m not understanding what you mean by heterozygostic homozygous…”
“Oh, I’m so sorry… I forget you don’t study these things. Zygosity is a specific trait inherent in an organism. Homozygosity is a trait that is the same, heterozygosity is a trait that is different. But we often use Homozygous to referrer to Homozygous Dominant Genes. Well, these girls have that trait, but applied in a very, very… shall we say, unique way… though I can’t say unique because they all seem to share it and there are eight of them… but I digress… these girls have this homozygous trait that, in procreation, dominates to create heterozygosity!”
“So,” Gianni said. “The they share a gene that makes them different?”
“Well… It’s actually a very poor way of describing what we believe, and I stress, BELIEVE the gene does. I’d need live eggs to confirm these findings… but these girls are so homozygous their genes are likely to dominate genes from black African breeding partners, something even more astonishing in that no one in my profession will acknowledge to be possible…”
LeBeau’s enthusiasm was quite pleasant most of the time. It was his parsing that infuriated, and Gianni wondered if the doctor lectured in this fashion and if so, how Simon could possibly stand it. LeBeau was the only outsider the Professor trusted in any fashion, even being aware that Simon and Gianni were “family.” He had endeared himself to the Professor long before Gianni was born, and even after decades living in Georgia, his accent still betrayed a hint of his Creole roots. He’d struggled greatly, the Professor once told Gianni, to suppress that accent when he found the student body in Ithaca based Cornell Medical School to be quite prejudiced toward it, rather than his black skin. He found himself shunned in his first year at Cornell due entirely to his New Orleans heritage. That the man graduated Magna Cum Laude in three years and completed his doctorate by the time another three had passed put him on a path to his current post, as one of the most respected researchers on the Eastern Seaboard.
“This one is cloned from the mother,” said Dr. LeBeau holding one of the profile sheets. “That was pretty obvious. “And the mother is not at all homozygous, though she is quite nearly genetically perfect, and this one has been altered only a little bit. Does the mother have blue eyes?”
“I not aware of it, Michael?” asked the Professor.
“I’m not sure. I have never seen any but a black and white photo…” that was a lie. He’d never once laid eyes on Jessica Jane Wells.
“I’d be interested in knowing, because I think they altered the eye colour of this daughter. Green, I think. There’s one other that is quite similar to both of them, but not a clone. She was tampered with, but she is indeed a daughter. My guess is that she look quite a bit like both these two… oh, and another anomaly, there are two here that have no genetic relation to any of the others. Are we sure they’re part of the same family?”
“We are,” assured Gianni as the professor gave him an accusatory look. “I confirmed the relationships myself. There are birth certificates to prove all of it.”
“I’d be interested…”
“No you would not,” said the professor. “As I told you, your interest is in the genetics, not in names or faces.”
“Of course,” said Dr. LeBeau, suitably chastised.
“Doctor,” Simon piped up for the first time this morning. “I don’t think you’ve answered Michael’s question.
“What was the question?”
“What do you mean by Heterozygosotisic Homozygousness?”
“What I mean is that these women were designed to procreate with anyone!”
“And that makes them different how?” asked Gianni.
“It makes them different because they could conceive with a father, a brother or a son and produce offspring that never suffers the deleterious effects of inbreeding. From what I can see, these genes render that possibility... impossible!”
The professor had exclaimed only twice in front of Gianni, and both times it involved the actions of one of his many sexual partners, who never seemed to live long after the outburst.
“My God!” said the professor.
“It is, of course, only a theory based on the evidence you’ve provided. I do believe it to have quite a solid basis.”
“How long before you can confirm this theory?” asked the professor.
“With what I have? Years. Decades perhaps… or maybe never.”
The professor’s excitement waned as he sat back in his chair and sipped the espresso one of the house-girls served.
“How much effort might have gone into creating these girls?”
“My god…” said the doctor. “I can’t even imagine… tens of thousands of man hours for each, I’d think…”
“Why? What would it give them?”
“Eve. Or Eves.”
“Eves?”
“Genesis. Adam’s rib. Eve. These girls can breed with anyone and pop out genetically perfect or near perfect children… exactly the kind of mother you’d want to re-populate the world…”
“So… more information, and a subject to study,” Simon said as he looked out the back window over the expansive yard.
It was nearly ten in the morning, and Dr. LeBeau had only just left. Gianni sat at the table looking at the profile of the clone. She was one of the eldest, and he wasn’t sure which one. The two who LeBeau had singled out as not being genetically related to the Wells were the middle girls: Patricia Jean Wells and Michelle Karen Wells. He now regretted he had organized the samples by litter rather than a way in which he could determine exactly who was who. I suppose if I saw the mother I would know which was the clone…
“How are we planning on getting a subject?” Simon asked. He cut a fine form in his U.G.A. sweater and rather shaggy blonde hair. Gianni thought he would enjoy auditing one of Simon’s classes just to watch the does piss themselves trying to get his attention.
“Simon,” said the professor. “That is for Michael to determine. “We don’t want to know.”
“Sorry, Professor,” Simon said. “I need to go anyway. I have a class at one, and I’d like to spend some time in the computer lab…”
“Why did you bother taking more classes?” Gianni asked.
“Kills time,” he said. “And it gives me access to girls…”
“You’re worse than Michael,” said the professor. “You should, at some point, learn to control you’re libido. Neither of you is very good at it.”
Simon shrugged, shook their hands and left.
“He’s chaffing, I think,” said Gianni.
“He’ll have his day,” said the professor. “I’m actually thinking of sending you to São Paulo and assigning him to take over your operation.”
Gianni nodded, knowing why. The presence of Johnny DeSilva, Jake Tucker and the Carringtons in California, with whom Gianni had prior history, was not the professor’s idea of an ideal situation. None of them knew Simon or of Simon’s existence, so his running into any of them would pass unnoticed.
“But that will have to wait till Simon completes his thesis,” the professor said. “In the meantime, go back to California.”
“For?”
“For what the good doctor ordered: more information and a specimen. Since you made contact with your old mentor, you should know that Carmine DeSilva was the source of all we had prior to your return. It’s very likely that Johnny was his source as he is, forgive me, Carmine’s Johnny on the Spot. Find out what you can about how Johnny is getting his information.
“Anything else?”
“If you can engineer a way to collect one of those girls, do so. But don’t take undue risks.”
“Very well. Anything else?”
The professor was pensive, he stroked his long chin.
“Sir?”
The professor held up his hand… “I want you… to find out how badly Carmine will be hurt if they decriminalize lesbians.”
Gianni raised a brow, surprised at the odd request. Playing politics was not something the professor had ever seemed to care about, but Gianni knew better than to ask a “why” question of the professor.
“Him and a lot of his friends, sir. It could criple their business.”
“I don’t care about his friends. They can rot. Just Carmine. Now, get out… I have work to do.”
Get out meant out of the professor’s general vicinity. The vicinity the professor considered his was anywhere within five hundred miles. By two, Gianni was on a flight back to California.