Free The Only Ones by Carola Dibbell Page A

even look up from his screen. “If I get results using your eggs and soma, hmm. Well, I could use it therapeutically, of course. It can be very effective on damaged tissue, for instance I could use it to patch your,” he coughed, “uterus, in case we ever need you for Host.” Once he started coughing, he kept coughing so bad that he went for water in the room where I had the bath and he had put his head under the faucet, my first day at the Farm. This room was so small, I have to squeeze myself in behind him while he drank from the tap.
    “If Rini wants a virgin Host,” I go, “why would she pay to patch my uterus for Host? I’m never going to be a virgin Host. Did she tell you to patch me up for Host?”
    “She doesn’t know,” he says, between gulps. “She doesn’t need to know.” Then he stood up from the tap. “I’d just be doing this on my own time—for science. Just to see what happens.” He wiped his beard off, looked at his watch and seemed to be thinking. Then he gave me a smile I never saw him give anyone, even Henry. “Want to give it a try?”
    I said sure.
    So he went out to the freezers and got a few cryoPaks from the drawers, then grabbed lab suits, Hygiene gloves and masks from a closet, and we suited up. He headed down the hall behind the green light, with me following as fast as I could, to where three steps I never knew were there led down to another hall, very dark and cool. We came to a door to a little room. He told me go in this room. One wall had an inside window that I saw Rauden through in a minute, in another little room, where he lit one dim light. There were buckets, metal boxes, a table with a machine on it, and a monitor he turned on. I could see his fingers in it. I feel almost like the Seal Room test, the other way around.
    He gets on a seat and fiddles with some things, sliding around, because the seat has wheels, like Henry’s wheelchair. I sat on a stool in my room. Then he stopped sliding and just put his hands in his lap and sat.
    I saw a different Rauden, all at once. Normally the guy is so nervous, you think he can’t do anything, then, when he takes blood or spit or soma, he moves fast and clean? But it’s not even like that. He didn’t move at all. He sat very, very still, and I sat, period, both of us in dark rooms, not saying anything, with a window in the wall between, a long time.
    Then he moved. He took the dishes out of the cryoPaks, put one in a kind of cooker, punched a button, pulled a mic, and whispered, “Defrosting ova!” I heard something beep.
    He put the dish in the machine. It came up on the monitor, with four circles in it, clear except for a smaller circle in each that got dark stuff in it. “Enucleating ova!” he whispered. Well, what is that? A stick starts poking one of the clear circles. Poke, poke, poke. Then it got inside. It kept poking, till it poked the smaller dark circle. Skoosh! The dark stuff went up in the stick, the stick went away. Another one came back. The whole thing happened three more times. When he was finished, Rauden looked at me, over the mask. He seemed excited. I was too.
    He whispered, “Extracting nucleus from somatic cell!” He did it with a dish of blobs. He got the dark stuff out of them with sticks.
    Now it’s the first dish, with the first four clear circles, empty. “Ready to transfer somatic nuclei to prepared ova,” he goes. Then he sits very still. Very, very still like before he started. Then he says, “Here we go.” Back comes a stick with dark stuff in it, poking one circle. Poke, poke, poke, poke, so gentle, till it got in, then skoosh, the stuff went down the stick and when it skooshed out, it was that same dark little circle again, but inside this circle now. He did it with all of them. It took quite a long time. Then he looked over the mask, and even with just eyes you can see a great big grin. “Now for the shock!”
    He squirted something on the circles. He lifted the whole dish of