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28: The Orphan
"Two months... and still nothing..." Kara thought to herself as she went through yet another set of experiments. Her eyes were getting blearier now and she tired more easily than she used to.
She felt... old. Her skin was still that of a normal, forty-something Iscandari female, but her insides felt as though they needed a good rest. The trip up the stairs from the library to her and her husband's quarters now made her heart rate rise to an abnormally high – at least it was high for her - rate. Her joints ached in ways she hadn't known they could and her nights were becoming shorter. She went to bed early and rose early – often after only a few hours of sleep.
So many had died already... The last of the older generation of Iscandar had all been buried within the last week. It had been a difficult time for them all, especially Starsha.
Lazarus, the Historian had been the latest to succumb to the dreaded disease. Starsha had been with her til the last, and on her death bed, Lazarus had named Starsha the next Historian of Iscandar. Not that it made that much of a difference now... Sooner or later, even the youngest of them all would pass on. But Kara was determined that something would be found before then.
"I will not die before I find it.Yahweh, help me; I have done everything I know to do... Please... for the sake of my children and the rest of Iscandar, show me what to do..." she prayed.
Then, setting aside her first failed experiment of the day, Kara thought for a very long time, standing in the quietness of the empty lab. The silence seemed warm – comforting somehow. She didn't see any sign from Heaven, no melek* came down give her the answers to her troubles, but somehow she felt at peace.
Then, to her surprise, she remembered something she had been working on since this whole atrocity first reared its ugly head.
Scrambling to begin, she set the stage for what would be her final experiment – her last-ditch effort. There were no other possibilities to try now – nothing that she or the Iscandari scientific community knew about at least. But over these past two trying months since that first week of death, she had been formulating a theory, and now... now she would put it to the test.
Kara sat down – she found that standing for too long these days was not feasible anymore, for even though she still retained her muscle mass, she had discovered that her body was not as strong as it used to be.
She took out a sample of her own cells to study, a sample she had taken only a few days ago.
As she had seen in every other person whose cells she had looked at, a number of them were now deformed. Her skin cells remained untouched, but every one of her internal organs had been affected, thus the lack of external evidence of Deun's virus.
Nothing like this had ever been seen in Gamilon-Iscandari society before. It was entirely foreign to them. Digging through cells to reengineer them before birth was illegal, but not unheard of, but even that process was constructive in nature – working with genes to make them bring about the desired results, not destroying them.
As she looked at the sample she had taken, Kara began to see something she had not seen before.
Magnifying the sample so that she could dig down to the DNA itself, she scrutinized every inch of the screen that displayed her cells. Most of the sequences were completely intact with no mutations or discrepancies whatsoever, but then she came across one sequence, the main one involved in the aging process. The sequence had not received much attention from Iscandari scientists over the years as many of the scientific community had been hesitant to attempt to alter normal lifespans and so, had left it alone, opting not to even look at it, lest they be tempted to try the unethical.
Doing so could have been seen as attempting to "play God." History noted only one such individual on Iscandar who had been involved with speculating about anti-aging theories, and she had died years before – predating Queen Ilya of Iscandar's reign by several years.
At one time Kara wouldn't have seen a problem with delving into the past. Lazarus would have been ready and willing to help, but now with the Historian gone and Starsha not having had any formal training in the art of darash*...
Kara shook her head, sending herself out of her self-induced stupor and back into the hard reality of the situation she was in.
"The nachash has attacked us in the most cowardly way possible!" she fumed inwardly in righteous anger, "He would kill us all from the inside." she shook her head, tears beginning to well up, "No soldiers; no ships; no blockades. Our bodies will simply kill themselves on their own." She wanted to let out a scream full of frustration, but when she opened her mouth, all that came out was a low groan.
Suddenly, her communicator bleeped. She looked down at it and was puzzled by the name she saw on it.
She took the call, and immediately wished she hadn't.
"Why me...?" Starsha thought as she set alone on her own bed in her empty quarters. "What did I do to deserve this appointment...?"
The princess examined the Historian's personal Interface – one that Starsha knew she would never use as she had her own. But the passing on of the Historian's Interface was more symbolic than anything. It meant that Lazarus had valued her enough to entrust her with the keeping of the history of all of Iscandar – what time it had left. The princess would continue to record and preserve Iscandar's history until there was no more history to record – or until she met her own demise at the hands of Deun's monstrous scheme.
Starsha got up and began to pace again.
She had been doing this for days.
Adrianna had often asked her what she was so preoccupied about and why, but Starsha didn't want to talk to the Jeshurunian – who seemed totally unaffected by the strange virus. There were too many things swirling around in her mind to make sense of them right now.
The other big question the princess now wrestled with was, "Why hasn't Admiral Talan sent help?" It had been two full months. Why had nothing changed?
Ever since that last contact with the strange young man – the audio-only conversation she had held with him – he had not appeared on the Interface link, and there had been no sign of help from anyone, much less from Gamilon.
Instead of being frustrated with the young man, she found herself concerned for his well-being. He had seemed so sincere about contacting her again that she believed without reservation that if he could have contacted her, he would have.
The one thing that kept growing in her mind as her time grew shorter and shorter was that there was much more going on than she knew about. Something big was happening on her world and on Gamilon. She only wished she could understand what it was.
Suddenly the girl's communicator buzzed.
"Computer, who's calling me?" she asked.
"Your mother." the device replied.
Starsha took a deep breath, knowing that whatever it was, it must be important. Her mother was in the middle of working to discover the mystery behind what ailed her people. If the Queen was calling her, then something had happened. She only prayed that it was something good.
"Mother?" the princess answered the call.
"Starsha." Kara's voice sounded odd, and the girl had no more to go on than that, as the call was audio-only.
There was silence for a moment then the worst words she had yet to hear in her short life met Starsha's ears, "It's your father... come as quickly as you can. Your sisters are on their way to the infirmary now."
Alarm ran through her, "Yes... yes, I'll be there immediately."
"It has to have been an accident." Starsha grasped for some shred of hope. "It's not time yet. It's not been long enough. He still has months to live."
The princess ran out of her apartment and very nearly flew down to the infirmary, much faster than she should have. She could have tripped on a step and broken something, but at this point, she didn't care. By the sound of her mother's voice, she had to get there now.
Within a couple of minutes she ran through the infirmary door.
The attending physician stopped her; the princess told him that she had come to see her father and by the man's reaction, Starsha knew that her hopes were in vain.
The physician pointed the princess in the right direction and Starsha soon found her mother and father.
The princess entered the room in which her father lay. She was the first to arrive.
"Starsha!" Kara greeted her daughter. "He – he's worse than he should be." she choked.
The girl ran the few steps between her and her father's bedside. She looked down at the king, wondering when her father had acquired such an unhealthy pallor. His skin was pale and he had broken out in a sweat, though it appeared that he was asleep – or possibly in a coma.
"Aba*...?" Starsha ventured, "Aba, it's me, Starsha." she sat down slowly in a chair on the opposite side of Alexander's bed as her mother.
There was no response at first, but Starsha persisted, giving her father's shoulder a gentle shake, "Father?"
"Star... sha?" finally, the king's eyes slowly opened. "Starsha, what are you doing here?" he asked.
"I'm here to see you, Father." the princess said through gathering tears. "Astra and Sasha are coming too."
"But why is everyone here?" Alexander asked in his tired voice. Both Starsha and her father looked to Kara for the answer, "What has happened, Kara...?"
The queen tried to speak without crying, but she couldn't. "It – you – the disease has accelerated." she bit back a sob, "There's no more time, my love..."
Alexander reached out and with one hand he took wife's hand, and with his other, his daughter's. "If I am to die today," he took a deep breath – or rather, the deepest breath he could, "Then there is no one else I would rather be with right now." suddenly, Alexander coughed, a long, labored cough that shook him violently. Afterwards, he lay back again and sighed. "Kara... you've never been anything but wonderful to me."
The queen smiled through her tears.
"I love you." Alexander said simply, "and I am so thankful for the years we've had together." Then he turned to his daughter, "And you, Starsha, my middle child – the one no one could ever really make sense of..." he smiled at her, "You were made this way for a purpose; never doubt that. Yahweh will have his way. I doesn't matter what people like Deun think or do. No one can spite the Almighty."
"I know, Aba," Starsha whispered back, "It's just... hard to see sometimes..."
"Believe me, my child, I know..." Alexander confided.
Then there was a moment of silence among the three.
"Starsha, never forget that I will love you, no matter what happens. Whatever comes – whether it be death, or war, or anything else... I am your father, and you will always be my daughter."
"But this is my fault..." she sobbed.
"This is no more your fault than it is mine, Starsha." Alexander said, more strongly than he had said anything else in the past few minutes. "Yahweh will have His way, despite Deun. This I know."
The conviction with which her father spoke ignited something within the princess, and though she was sad, she was now hopeful too. "I love you, Aba." she threw her arms around her father's neck and wept.
She was soon joined by her mother.
Then, silently and without warning, King Alexander of Iscandar passed from one world and entered the next.
It was several minutes after this that Astra and Sasha bolted through the doorway.
When they saw the looks on their mother and sister's face, they knew they were too late and, joining Kara and Starsha around their father's bed, they too cried for their loss, but in their grief they knew that this was not the end of his life, but merely the beginning of something much, much more real and wonderful.
In the days immediately following King Alexander's death, the people of Iscandar mourned his passing even as more and more of them were laid to rest in their graves. Time seemed to fly more quickly than any of them wanted it to. Then, a full month after the king died, Queen Kara also succumbed to the virus and followed her husband in death.
Astra, Starsha, and Sasha took each new death with understandable difficulty – especially their mother's. Kara's passing left the princesses without a living parent – a fate that many of the older children and teenagers on Iscandar now shared with them.
Through it all, Starsha faithfully recorded the days and events that she was able to find out about, but with the deaths of the older and middle-aged adults many routine duties fell to the younger people – the only ones still alive.
More time passed and as it did, Astra seemed to disappear more and more often into the palace gardens – which she kept up by herself now as the gardeners were no longer there to care for it, and so, it fell to Starsha to do what needed doing.
The middle princess sent out a planet-wide call to everyone still living on-planet to come to the capitol in whatever vehicles they could and to search their areas to make sure there were no younger children stranded on the smaller islands without transportation.
Within a week of the initial call, a flood of young people swept into the capitol. Older teenagers and young adults piloted boats and ships – sometimes not very well – into the harbors and shipyards. Younger teens held the hands of children and carried infants and toddlers who could not walk the whole way from their craft to the capitol city proper.
From there, every young person found and took up residence in the homes and buildings that their parents' and grandparents' generations had resided in not three months ago.
It was a sober time, and Starsha was so preoccupied with keeping the remnant of her people alive that she began to forget about the strange young man she had spoken with twice what seemed like a lifetime ago. She also didn't realize that, somehow, the responsibilities of leadership had been gradually shifted onto her shoulders.
"Yahweh... has it truly been such a short time...?" Starsha prayed as she traversed the hallway that her mother had walked through only a month before. "Please, help us, even now, to find some way to stop this disease... Please..." she pleaded again as she had every day since they had first learned that this malady was not a natural occurrence.
On down the hall she went until she came to one door – her mother's old lab – where she had been just before King Alexander's death.
She didn't really know why she had been drawn here; the only things still remaining in the lab were Queen Kara's failed experiments – those and her notes on her failures to find the cause of the disease, and some sort of cure for it.
Starsha walked in and took a deep. steadying breath as she surveyed the room. She had only been in here once before, and everything was still just exactly as she remembered it. There was even the faint lingering smell of her mother still hovering in the lab.
The scent brought with it memories of the past, but Starsha knew that memories would not help her right now, so she resisted the urge to go back in time and started looking through her mother's notes.
For hours she stared at the small screen of Kara's notebook. Half of what was written in it, Starsha couldn't make any sense of, but the other half was surprisingly intriguing to her.
It appeared that, even though Kara had not known what was happening exactly that, in the end, she had indeed discovered what was causing the problem.
"'A mutation of the gene chiefly influencing the aging process,'" Starsha read aloud to herself then commented, "No wonder no one discovered it... They won't touch that section of Iscandari DNA..."
Starsha read further, "'In the history of Iscandar there has only ever been one person who has had dealings with this section of our genetic makeup.' Who in the universe is that?" The princess set down her mother's notes and took out her Interface. Slipping the instrument onto her left hand, Starsha waited for the Interface to activate.
She was soon rewarded with "Please state your search parameters."
"Search, scientist, and aging process." the princess stated.
"Searching now. Your results will be displayed momentarily. Please wait."
In a couple of seconds two search results appeared, but the Interface announced, "There are no search results that contain both of your search terms."
The princess ignored the computer and bought up first one record, and then the other that the Interface had offered.
The first one had to do with the laws that had been passed centuries ago against tampering with the very section of DNA that she desperately needed to find out about now.
The other result briefly mentioned something about a couple of scientists illegally attempting to experiment with anti-aging remedies.
She was just about to close this second result when something caught her eye.
"Epigenetic Research and Development Center..." the name seemed to jump out of the holographic display.
"Please restate your search parameters." the computer mistook her whisper for a request.
On a whim, the princess said, a bit more loudly this time, "Epigenetic Research and Development Center."
"Searching now. Your results will be displayed momentarily. Please wait."
"As if I've nothing else to do." Starsha sighed and waited the half-second it took the Interface to spit out its results.
There were a myriad of things to look through: dossiers on every doctor and geneticist who had ever worked or studied at the ERDC up until the present time; patient records – passkey protected; blueprints of the buildings; awards the Center had given out for excellence, and a hundred other things that meant nothing to Starsha.
She had sifted through about two hundred such results when she finally stopped and said, "Search within given results."
"Please state your –"
"I know; I know." the princess interrupted the computer, "Search, 'aging.'"
"Searching now. Your results will be displayed momentarily. Please wait."
"If I have to hear that one more time, I might scream." she thought to herself as she waited once again for her answers. "How did Lazarus ever put up with this thing for so many years...?"
"Now showing your narrowed results." the Interface announced.
A list of five results appeared and Starsha began to read through them one by one, "'The patient is an again female – ' obviously not what I need," she began to ramble to herself,
"'We've seen a number of aging employees – ' no, not that.
'The aging process of the fruit fly –' definitely not.
'The aging columns in the foyer –' also not what I'm looking for..." here she stopped for a moment, discouraged that these first four results obviously had nothing to do with what she was seeking. She almost stopped reading right there, but, deciding that she might as well keep reading since there was only one more result, she continued.
"'She does not seem to be negatively affected by the experimental anti-aging adjustment I've made in her DNA...'" the sentence almost took Starsha's breath away as she read it and she reread the statement five or six more times, just to make sure she had read it correctly.
She wanted to jump up and shout for joy right then, but rational thinking took over and made her concentrate on digging deeper – finding out what was really going on here.
"Computer, display the last result in its entirety."
Up popped the file – part of the medical journals of a man named Holden Krom.* Starsha read the entire file through three times. What she found made her feel very odd. The record was about a woman named Kyren who had come to Krom for help in genetically engineering a child for her. Krom – to his later regret – had agreed, but, unbeknownst to this "Kyren" woman, he had taken the liberty of executing an experiment on the child – rebuilding a strategic DNA sequence to provide an anti-aging effect. It would allow the girl – who was named Trelaina – to age normally on into her adolescence and early adult years, but then her aging process would slow to a fraction of the normal rate.
Fascinated by the article, Starsha read through the footnotes Krom had included, including several expressions of gratitude he had recorded at the very end of the document. Among them were Krom's parents, a few good friends, and one particular mentor and teacher by the name of "Frincha."
"Search all records containing the name 'Frincha.'" Starsha said.
"Searching now. Your results will be displayed momentarily. Please wait."
The princess groaned, but did not, as she had thought, scream.
Several things appeared before her and Starsha scrolled through them all. They were about a geneticist on Iscandar who had lived before the time of her grandmother, Queen Starsha, and the reign of her great-grandmother, Queen Ilya.
Nothing seemed too significant, until she found something written by Yuria, the palace gate-keeper during Queen Janina's rule – the queen preceding Ilya. It looked like some sort of record of who had come and gone in the palace. Among the list of names was nestled "Frincha."
Then, further down the list there was an entry highlighted in green.
Starsha opened it.
At the top of the file there was a note: "This information is available only to the royal family. No other Interface user will be able to access this information."
Starsha went on, thoroughly intrigued to find out what kind of information would be so highly restricted that even the Historian would not be able to read it unless they were from the royal family.
The princess started to read.
"Tonight a woman brought a child to me – an abandoned little girl with no family and no home. She hadn't even been given a name yet. The woman – she said her name was Frincha – asked me to find a home for the child. As I looked at her, I found myself unable to give her to anyone else. Right then I knew she would be special, and so I named her and took her into my family, reserving her for my son when he and she were of the age to wed. I named her Ilya."
Here Starsha stopped, an odd feeling rising in her gut.
"If this Frincha brought Grandmother Ilya to Queen Janina..." the princess began running through the potential implications in her mind, stopping only long enough to attempt to dig further into the past – to try to find the rest of the truth.
She wracked her brain to find the next logical step. Then it came to her.
"Search within given results."
"Please state your –"
"Search 'Ilya.'"
"Searching now. Your results will be displayed momentarily. Please wait."
Starsha did not even mind the annoying repetition now. She was on to something.
Only two results were returned, both highlighted in green. The first one was the one she had just read, but the second was something else.
It did not display any written content, instead, there was a small icon displayed on the file denoting that it was a recording rather than a written record.
"Computer, play back the second result..." she inhaled sharply, not sure of what she was about to see or hear, "in its entirety."
The face of a woman Starsha had never seen before appeared before her. The woman seemed to be... sad, or perhaps a bit sad and a bit of something else that Starsha could not discern. Then, she began to speak.
"Hello. I do not know when this recording will be found – or if it will ever be found." she began, seeming nervous for some reason, "All I know is that I have to admit to someone what I've done. If I publicly admit this, my career is over, so I choose to confess like this, to you, the descendant of the one I wronged – the one called Ilya of Iscandar."
Starsha's eyes widened and she held her breath as the woman continued.
"There was a woman... Kyren... who came to me and asked that I genetically engineer a child for her... Little did I know that a colleague of mine had been approached by the very same woman not two years ago and asked to do the exact same thing."
At this the princess nearly fainted, but she withheld her conclusions until she had heard the entire recording.
"We both met with the same results and Kyren rejected both baby girls my colleague and I engineered for her... My colleague adopted the girl he engineered. I, on the other hand, did as Kyren's husband asked me to and took the child I had engineered to the palace where Queen Janina took her in."
Starsha sat silently, trying to take everything in.
"But dropping Ilya off at the palace is not the 'wrong' I am referring to. That was actually the only good thing to come of this entire mess. No, the wrong I speak of is something much more serious – much more terrible than that." here, the woman looked away from the camera and said, "I, Frincha, did the forbidden. Not only did I engineer the child, but I took a certain... liberty... with her genetic code..."
The woman looked back at the camera just long enough for Starsha to see the look of horror on her face.
"I fell prey to the age old temptation – I asked myself, 'What if I could given this child – or her descendants – a much longer life?' I reconstructed the DNA sequence that controls her aging..." Frincha stopped again, sounding as if she were about to cry, but she composed herself and went on, "But I didn't just reconstruct it... I made it so that the gene would be inheritable – passed on from one generation to the next, and to hide my trespass... I made it so that the gene would not manifest itself until the third generation of Ilya's children... her great-grandchildren... and even then, not until their adolescence... And to further hide it... the only way that the gene would activate is if it were attacked by some outside source –"
"Computer, pause playback." Starsha said hastily, her voice so hoarse she could barely choke out the command.
The recording stopped immediately.
Starsha felt sick.
Ilya of Iscandar had been genetically engineered...
In one smooth motion, the princess picked up a long, sterilized needle from a nearby supply chest and plunged it into her chest, right between her ribs. Ignoring the pain, she withdrew a sample of cells from her pounding heart.
Carefully she placed the sample underneath the scrutiny of a magnification device and zoomed in until she could see the individual cells.
Staring at the sight in disbelief, Starsha frantically looked through the lab until she found the other samples of cells her mother had been using in her work. The samples had been preserved and were still in good enough condition for her to look at.
Removing her own cell sample. Starsha replaced it with one of the other samples labeled with the name of a deceased Iscandarian. The deformed cells from the now-dead man looked sick and grotesque.
Starsha again stared at the display, feeling as though she would explode at any moment.
Then, to confirm that her eyes were still working right, she placed both samples together, side by side, in the magnifier.
After a very long, very quiet minute, Starsha broke the silence with words that pierced her very being, "I'm... the third generation..." she whispered. And she wept bitterly over the perfectly formed cells she had just taken from her own heart.
Chapter 28 was inspired by:
- "No Night There" from the Herbster Evangelistic Ministries CD "Resting: A Memorial"
- "The King in His Beauty" from the WILDS CD "Rejoice!"
- "What Is Life?" from Kerry Baggett's CD "Consider Your Ways"
Chapter 28 Notes:,/p>
* Darash – "seeking" used here to refer to detailed research
* Holden Krom – a reference from the first book The Guardiana.