Mercedes Lackey & Rosemary Edghill Bedlam's Bard 04 Beyond World's End

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research, as what good was a breakthrough you couldn't replicate at will?
She'd made do with primates chimps siphoned to Threshold from other projects or bought on the
black market. On paper and more or less in fact Threshold was a small pharmaceutical research
company. Most of its employees were engaged in legitimate research into the neurochemistry of the
brain. Few of them even suspected the existence of the Black Labs that occupied the cellars of the
building, the place where Jeanette Campbell did research that went far beyond simple cures for ADD,
narcolepsy, clinical depression, bipolar disorder, and the like. Some of the hundreds of primates shipped
to Threshold every year even went to the careful legitimate experiments of the people in the labs upstairs,
but more of them went to the Black Labs.
The brain structure of a chimpanzee was similar to that of human beings, and some of them even
knew sign language. Jeanette wasn't interested in talking to them, but language use modified the deep
structure of the brain and gave her a benchmark by which to measure the effects of her drugs.
She had three consistent results from her drug protocols to date: dead chimps, crazy chimps, and
superficially unaffected chimps. She'd lost count of the number of brains she'd centrifuged, looking for
results and reasons. But she was getting closer. That was all that mattered.
"Thinking," Robert echoed scornfully. "You want to get up off your dead ass and do a little more
than think? Beirkoff told me you were going to be ready for another trial today."
Beirkoff was Jeanette's personal assistant somebody had to do the record-keeping gruntwork
who was in on Threshold's big secret but she'd always known he geeked for Robert. It was how the
world worked.
"Yeah, well, I am ready," she said, getting up and putting her guitar down. The reflection in the glass
mocked her like an evil angel, showing her the hated reality so far from her dreams. "Beirkoff should have
the chimps prepped. I can shoot them up and leave the cameras running, then check them out in the
morning. It's better to do this sort of thing at night, anyway."
No need to put into words the nebulous feeling, not even a hunch, that something about the drugs
would just work better in the small hours of the night when most people were asleep. Once upon a time
she'd fancied herself a magician, but in the years since then Jeanette had put both magic and superstition
behind her. She worked entirely with what was, abandoning dreams.
"What's your hurry, anyway?" she asked incuriously.
"I'm not paying you to sit around playing that damned guitar," Robert said grudgingly, and Jeanette
smiled inside, though she allowed no vestige of that expression to reach her face. In fact, Robert was
paying her to sit around playing that dammed guitar, and whatever else she wanted to do with her time.
Her work was as much inspiration as anything else and the accidental discoveries along the way had
proved her worth. She'd come up with a compound that induced abject terror in its subject and one that
destroyed the sleep centers. Both killed the subject in anywhere from 24 hours to a week, but Robert
had liked them, even though they'd never be mentioned in Threshold's quarterly report to its parent
company. He'd taken them off somewhere and never told her what he'd done with them, but Jeanette
knew those discoveries were what had bought her a free pass for the foreseeable future.
"I'm going to go down and inject them now. Want to watch?" she said.
Robert gestured, indicating she should precede him. It was one of the few things she actually liked
about Robert. He wasn't squeamish.
She walked out of her office and down the grey-carpeted corridor to the room that held the airlock
that would let her into the primate lab. She didn't bother with a clean suit the whole fantasy of biological
contamination was just a useful fiction for any of Threshold's legitimate employees who might stumble
accidently onto her work area. No one but Robert and Beirkoff really knew what it was she did here,
and neither one had the brains to follow her science. Secrecy was power. She remembered that from her
magical days.
When she walked in, the full-spectrum lights brightened slowly to their daytime levels, washing every
corner of the main floor in pitiless illumination, illuminating the row of cages so brightly that their contents
seemed like unliving mannequins. The room was warm, and smelled strongly of ozone, ammonia, and
fermenting fruit. She looked up, and saw the blinking red lights of the cameras. They'd record every
move that anyone made in this room from half a dozen angles, no matter the light level, and store the
images in digital computer memory for instant retrieval, so that later Robert and Jeanette could scrutinize
and speculate about every squeal and twitch of the subjects. The oldest files were purged on a six-month
rotation, leaving no trace of themselves behind. Robert ran a clean operation.
Her subjects were in the five cages along the wall, brought in from the larger primate lab at the other
end of the building. Beirkoff had sedated each of them an hour ago, so that now they were torpid and
manageable, but most of the sedative had already been processed, so that chemical residue wouldn't
screw up her study.
Satisfied that everything was in readiness, she went over to the big refrigerator at the end of the
room past the stainless-steel exam table with its drains and shackles and punched a nine-digit code
into its locking key pad.
The light at the top of the pad turned from red to green, and Jeanette opened the door. Inside, it
looked like any other lab refrigerator, with anonymous bottles and bundles neatly stacked and labeled on [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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