tell him how grateful I am for our conversation. Assure him that he has clarified for me one of the great questions about God's purpose."
"Yes, I'll tell him," said the young man earnestly.
Of course he would garble the message hopelessly.
Sister Carlotta bent over and kissed Anton's cold, sweaty forehead. Then she rose to her feet and walked away.
So that was the secret. The genome that allowed a human being to have extraordinary intelligence acted by speeding up many bodily processes. The mind worked faster. The child developed faster. Bean was indeed the product of an experiment in unlocking the savant gene. He had been given the fruit of the tree of knowledge. But there was a price. He would not be able to taste of the tree of life. Whatever he did with his life, he would have to do it young, because he would not live to be old.
Anton had not done the experiment. He had not played God, bringing forth human beings who would live in an explosion of intelligence, sudden fireworks instead of single, long-burning candles. But he had found a key God had hidden in the human genome. Someone else, some follower, some insatiably curious soul, some would-be visionary longing to take human beings to the next stage of evolution or some other such mad, arrogant cause - this someone had taken the bold step of turning that key, opening that door, putting the killing, brilliant fruit into the hand of Eve. And because of that act - that serpentine, slithering crime - it was Bean who had been expelled from the garden. Bean who would now, surely, die - but die like a god, knowing good and evil.
CHAPTER 10 - SNEAKY
"I can't help you. You didn't give me the information I asked for."
"We gave you the damned summaries."
"You gave me nothing and you know it. And now you come to me asking me to evaluate Bean for you - but you do not tell me why, you give me no context. You expect an answer but you deprive me of the means of providing it."
"Frustrating, isn't it?"
"Not for me. I simply won't give you any answer."
"Then Bean is out of the program."
"If your mind is made up, no answer of mine will change you, especially because you have made certain my answer will be unreliable."
"You know more than you've told me, and I must have it."
"How marvelous. You have achieved perfect empathy with me, for that is the exact statement I have repeatedly made to you."
"An eye for an eye? How Christian of you."
"Unbelievers always want other people to act like Christians."
"Perhaps you haven't heard, but there's a war on."
"Again, I could have said the same thing to you. There's a war on, yet you fence me around with foolish secrecy. Since there is no evidence of the Formic enemy spying on us, this secrecy is not about the war. It's about the Triumvirate maintaining their power over humanity. And I am not remotely interested in that."
"You're wrong. That information is secret in order to prevent some terrible experiments from being performed."
"Only a fool closes the door when the wolf is already inside the barn."
"Do you have proof that Bean is the result of a genetic experiment?"
"How can I prove it, when you have cut me off from all evidence? Besides, what matters is not whether he has altered genes, but what those genetic changes, if he has them, might lead him to do. Your tests were all designed to allow you to predict the behavior of normal human beings. They may not apply to Bean."
"If he's that unpredictable, then we can't rely on him. He's out."
"What if he's the only one who can win the war? Do you drop him from the program then?"
***
Bean didn't want to have much food in his body, not tonight, so he gave away almost all his food and turned in a clean tray long before anyone else was done. Let the nutritionist be suspicious - he had to have time alone in the barracks.
The engineers had always located the intake at the top of the wall over the door into the corridor. Therefore the air must flow into the room from the opposite end, where the extra bunks were unoccupied. Since he had not been able to see a vent just glancing around that end of the room, it had to be located