Lucy by Laurence Gonzales Page B

closer to the desk and felt her foot touch something. She looked down. When she saw Stone’s backpack, she had a thought and bent to unfasten the top. The pack contained the notebooks she’d collected. She had no idea what he’d been doing all those years while he was studying bonobos. He hadn’t published in twenty-five years. He didn’t even have a university affiliation any longer. He was quirky and shy, polite to a fault, yet difficult to get to know. The last of his family had left him money, and Stone had given up writing grant proposals. Maybe his notes would hold some clue that could lead them to a relative of Lucy’s mother.
    They were small orange sketchbooks, about four by six inches, numbered and dated. She removed a few from the backpack. They smelled of the naphthalene that he’d used to prevent them from rotting in the jungle. She flipped through a couple of them. The text was densely lettered in pencil in a small but neat hand. She laid them out on the big wooden desk and arranged them in chronological order. Then she went to refill her coffee cup.
    Jenny tiptoed through the kitchen, noticing that Lucy had done a good job of cleaning up. She went to the front hall and peeked into the living room. Lucy was lying on her stomach on the floor in a shaft of sunlight, still wearing the orange robe. Her bare feet were in the air and she was twiddling her toes as she read one of the popular books about vampires. She glanced up and smiled at Jenny, then went back to her reading. Jenny thought, She’s perfect in every way. Nothing strange about her at all. And she does chores. Jenny knew already that she would miss Lucy when she returned to England.
    She went back to her study and sat in her favorite chair in a sunny corner. She opened the first notebook, begun more than a quarter century before, and read, “I will not attempt here to give a reason for undertaking this project. That is more of a philosophical task and one more appropriate to another time and place, if not perhaps another author. For now I will only recount what I do and how well or badly it goes. In any event, if all goes well, my children will speak for me, as I will instruct them in who they are and why they are here.”
    She paused, curious about the tone and vagueness of Stone’s notes. What did he mean, “this project”? What project? This certainly didn’t seem like the conventional field notes of a scientist. But she recognized in it the polite and cordial tone he’d always adopted when speaking with her on the radio: Yes, I must have you over for tea very soon …
    She read on: “Having thoroughly investigated interspecific hybrids, I have no doubt that what I plan to undertake is physiologically possible even without the extraordinary preparations I have made. There is now convincing evidence that even after chimpanzees and humans diverged from each other genetically some six million years ago, they continued to breed and produce hybrids (see Prager and Wilson, 1975). With modern biogenetic techniques, there seemed no theoretical barrier to returning to a condition in which interspecific breeding would be possible.”
    She felt a morbid thrill at the thought: I hope he’s not talking about what it sounds like he’s talking about. She turned back to the notebook, alert and slightly alarmed as well.
    “Indeed,” Stone wrote, “the genetic structures of human and bonobo are more alike than those of horse and donkey, which can breed to produce a mule. And healthy hybrid individuals have been born through a cross between bonobos and chimpanzees as well. The many similarities are well detailed elsewhere. The key, in my view, was to first create a hybrid karyotype by inserting fragments of human chromosome material into the genome of the bonobo. This would ensure, for example, that the CMP-sialic acid hydroxy-lase gene was deactivated and that the retrotransposon subfamilies of LINE-1 nuclear elements known as L1Hs were present. It