Issue 21 Preview: One Hundred Forty, by Samantha Rich

This piece is featured in Issue 21 of Barrelhouse magazine.

When Katya interviewed for the job at the cloning project station, they gave her a tour of the facility. It was located well outside of Yakutsk, accessible only by truck. She rode in the bed of the truck on the ride out from the university, her back braced against the side and her feet sliding across the rutted metal of the bed.

Semyon, one of the junior scientists, showed her the stable, where rows and rows of mares stood quietly in crosstie stalls, dozing in the late afternoon light or lipping idly at their hay. He showed her the storage rooms with shelves of syringes, bottles of hormones, boxes of gloves, giant pump jars of lubricant—all the bits and pieces needed to care for equine pregnancies being induced en masse and at a rapid rate. She nodded blandly, noting also the stacks of hay bales and bags of grain, the brushes and hoof picks, all the tools she would need for the job they were offering her, overseeing the horses’ day-to-day work and care.

He took her into the main building next, pointing out the cafeteria and the bunkrooms for when late nights or overnights were required. And finally, they went to the labs, where she saw the frozen corpse of the little foal. Or rather, she saw what was left of it, post-necropsy and dissection. The head was still intact—eyes closed tight, thank God.

That was the second to last big freezer; in the last one, Semyon showed her the racks of frozen embryos they had grown from the little foal’s preserved blood cells. “Two hundred,” he said proudly, tapping one of the foil-wrapped glass tubes. “We start implanting them in the mares next week. It’s very exciting. What do you think? Will you take the job?”

#

Of course she took the job. She was a student from a Yakut family still climbing its way out from under the long-running efforts to turn them into good Russian—that is, Soviet—that is, Russian again—citizens and forget their old ways of life. Katya’s father drove a truck for one of the oil companies. Her mother worked in the mailroom at the university. They did well enough, and they were proud of her for going to school, but she had to contribute all she could, and this was the only job she had been offered.

Her parents lived in Yakutsk, and she grew up in an apartment, but her aunts and uncles and cousins all still kept horses and livestock on the plains. She had spent as much time with the animals and the land as she possibly could, her whole life. The moment she started bringing in a good salary and could pay for herself, her parents would retire outside the city, back on the land again. And so would she, someday. It was a promise, a fate. It was what she wanted with all her heart.

Now, she cared for the mares patiently growing clones of the little foal pulled out of the permafrost. She made her way through the barn in loops every morning, first with grain, then with hay, then refilling water buckets, looking each mare over carefully at some point in the cycle. Then she walked them out to the paddocks, two at a time, so they could graze and roll and doze in the sun. While they were outside, she cleaned the stalls and prepped everything for the evening feeding. Then she caught the next truck back to the university, attended her classes and did homework, and came back again to repeat it all.

It was peaceful work, caring for animals that made soft whuffs of recognition when they saw her, that watched her with dark, liquid eyes, that lived in the constant state of suspended dream that marked beings at peace with their place in the world.

#

Lenskaya or Lena horses (Equus caballus lenensis), named for the Lena river that runs through the Yakutsk, lived in Siberia in the late Pleistocene. The foal in the freezer at the station was 42,000 years old, all of that time spent tucked away in the permafrost that was now crumbling around the Batagaika depression. Katya knew the rough outline of the species’ encyclopedia entry. She knew that they were short and round with heavy bone structure and thick heads. They were designed to live in an unforgiving environment, and to endure deeply cold winters. They were made for the world of their time.

The world now was very different. She couldn’t imagine what the clones would feel the first time they lifted their heads from the blood-and-fluid-slicked ground beneath their mothers, and opened their eyes.

#

The first nine implantations failed early in the pregnancies, as did many others on an ongoing basis. There wasn’t a progression of any kind from embryo 1 to 200; they were all developed at the same time, with the same process. Each mare that miscarried was brought into heat again through hormone shots and re-implanted as soon as possible. It was strictly a numbers game.

Embryo Number Ten was the first to be carried to term. Katya saw the mare showing signs of labor during her morning round of chores, and stayed at the station instead of going to her classes. All of the mares chosen for the project were proven mothers who had carried two foals to term, although that was no guarantee of future success. This time it went smoothly, though, and Katya knelt in the straw to guide a small, slick creature into the world, cradling him in her lap and clearing mucus from his nostrils so he could draw his first breath.

 He was undersized , by modern standards and compared to his mother. It made sense; the horses of the Pleistocene had no need to be big enough to carry a human or pull a plow. A small stature made it easier for them to survive the winter on limited forage. But it was still strange to be able to hold him in her lap like this, almost like a toy.

Number Ten never opened his eyes to the world; that first breath he drew was also his last. He died in her arms, there in the dirty straw, his body unresponsive to the mare’s nudges and efforts to clean him.

Katya carried the body to the lab for necropsy. Semyon met her at the door and thanked her for going out of her way. All she could think to say was that it was no trouble.

#

Numbers Twelve and Fourteen also came to term and died within moments of birth. Seventeen survived for an hour; she brushed his forelock back and nuzzled him in the warm quiet of the barn, and he met her eyes. His were wandering, searching, sleepy with peace and ignorance both of what it had taken to bring him here and that he would soon be gone again.

Twenty-Six lived for a few hours, though he never managed to walk. His mother licked him clean and urged him to his feet long enough to nurse for a few moments before he collapsed to the straw again, exhausted by the stunning work of holding on to life. Katya carried him outside so that he could see the sun before he died, unlike his brothers. His nostrils twitched at the smell of fresh air—well, outside air, thick with the smells of the station except when the breeze off the plains cleared it for a moment.

His eyes widened at those breezes, and he tossed his head a little, rubbing it against Katya’s arm. She hugged him close, ignoring the calls of his mother back in her stall, until his body shuddered and he went still against her chest, like the others.

#

The days passed; the numbers blurred together. Number Fifty-One lived for two days. He walked on his own, even, taking awkward stiff-legged steps behind his mother. Katya let herself hope, let her heart lift a bit as she watched him, but a few more moments of observation showed that his heartbeat was uneven and his breath desperately shallow. There was no room for hope.

The head of the project sent a note down to separate the mare from Fifty-One and hurry his death, but Semyon pocketed it and told Katya to pretend it never came. “The old man will never set foot in the stable, after all,” Semyon said with a lopsided smile. “He won’t know one way or the other.”

Katya touched his arm in the most gratitude she could bear to show and went to check on the other gravid mares, heavy and sleepy in the afternoon light. She stroked their necks and spoke softly to them before leaning down to check their udders and vulvas. They swished their tails and stamped their feet in mild protest, but another gentle word and touch to their sides soothed them back into their dozing.

This peace wasn’t what the Pleistocene horses would have known; if they dozed in afternoon sunlight it was with one of them always on guard, alert for danger. There was no vague knowledge that food would be brought to them in buckets with sweet, nutrient-rich supplements on top, only the instinctive drive to graze and seek out roots or bark that held those nutrients in traces at best.

The way their bodies protected their babies and gave them their best chance to grow and live, though; that was the same. They didn’t know that these babies in particular were alien, artificial things, grown from cellular material that never should have been here, not in this time.

Best to be ignorant of truths that you have no hope of understanding, Katya thought to herself as she walked to the end of the row of stalls and stepped into the stable yard to take a breath and blink away the hint of tears in her eyes. That was the only chance to live a life with any kind of peace.

#

Mobile phones had to be stored in a locker while on the science station property. Katya locked hers away when she arrived and fetched it again when she left, scrolling quickly through SMS messages while she waited for the truck going back to university. Her friends at school asked her if she was planning to attend any of her classes at all between now and the end of the semester; she dismissed those without reply, since I’m not planning anything at all wasn’t an answer they would accept or understand.

There were also a few messages from her cousins, asking about how she was and how her job was going. They knew that she was working with horses, though not the details of the experiments going on. It was a topic that they could talk about for days if given the chance.

She replied with some little stories about the mares and foals, carefully edited into a world where there were no deaths or miscarriages and the pregnancies were, presumably, not sourced to frozen clone embryos. Maintaining the confidentiality of the experiments and the science station in general was important, or so she had been told. She’d signed several documents promising she wouldn’t give any information away, and if she was ever going to finish this degree, she needed to keep her word.

#

Foals Seventy, Eighty-One, and Eighty-Six had terrible birth defects—twisted and stunted limbs, a hole in the middle of an upper palate, an extra eye attempting to grow beneath the left ear. One such birth would be random and dismissible; even two could be noted as a statistical quirk. But three, and falling so close together in the order that the embryos were grown and set up in the freezer--that brought everything to a halt.

The scientists scoured their notes, the security camera footage of the work done months before, the remains of the foals themselves. Katya stayed away from it all, hiding in the barn with the mares, who still needed care and attention no matter what was going on in the labs. She dreaded the solutions that the scientists might come up with, or at least the ones other than Semyon, whom she had caught more than once brushing a forelock affectionately off a forehead, or warming the instruments in his hands before he used them.

Fortunately he was the one they sent down to the stable with a case of abortifacient vials and a box of syringes. “All the way through Embryo One-Hundred Ten,” he said, scrubbing his hand over the rough stubble of his fresh-shorn hair. “It’s a loss to the work, but they think they’ve isolated the problem to that range.”

Katya brought the first mare forward and clips her into the cross-ties. “What did they find was the problem?”

“Contaminated instruments.” Semyon shook his head as he drew up the syringe. “Careless. Chemicals, and just… dirt, I suppose. Got into the cells for that range of embryos. Messed them all up.”

Katya knew that the embryos in the freezer were only growths of cells with no spark, no awareness. She didn’t hurt on their behalf. The ache in her chest was for the poor things that did grow and develop, slip kicking into the sun of this world only to pass out of it again in pain and confusion, all because Grigory or Pasha couldn’t clean his spot at the bench.

“They think the next range is clean?” she asked, placing a steadying hand on the mare’s shoulder as Semyon gave the injection. “They should survive?” At his raised eyebrow, she amended herself. “Or have as much of a chance as any of the others, at least.”

“That’s what the boss said.” Semyon capped the needle and dropped the syringe into his waiting bucket. “Poor girl, she’s going to feel bad for a bit, now. Get her back to her stall and bring over the next one.”

Katya did as she was told. It took them an hour to get through the mare incubating Embryo Number One-Hundred Ten, and then they stood outside with cigarettes and cans of beer that Semyon produced from his kit, until it was time to come back into the stable and clean up the products of miscarriage fouling the straw.

#

Semyon appeared the next morning shortly after she arrived, presenting her with a cup of coffee and a buttered bun. They stood in nearly the same place as they had the night before, listening to the mares stomp and huff in their stalls.

“I know yesterday was hard for you,” he said.

Katya shook her head. “It’s part of the work.”

“Still. That doesn’t make it pleasant.” He sighed slowly through his nose and took a drink. “It’s important work, though, Katya. You understand?”

She wrapped the uneaten half of her bun in its paper packet and tucked the whole thing away in her jacket. Perhaps she would want it again later. “I hope so. I do. Right now it’s hard to see any point.”

“There’s so much we can get from this. Genetics, fertility, biology, so many things. I know you know that. You’re just sad right now and it’s making you a bit stupid.”

She shook her head again, her mouth curving in a smile she didn’t feel. “I suppose so. Bringing all these babies into the world just for them to die does make me sad.”

“What we learn is worth it, Katya. The science is worth it. You know this. I know you do.”

“I do! I do.” She finally turned to face him, and even met his eyes. “I know it takes sacrifices to advance. I wouldn’t be alive myself without them in the past. I understand. But I think it’s important to feel sad about it, too. To at least acknowledge it, and say thank you.”

Semyon nodded and touched her arm gently, and Katya took another sip of her coffee to show she wasn’t angry. Not at him, at least. They stood there in the yard for a while longer, while the sun made its way higher, until the mares gave in to their frustrations and started calling for the morning meals, sharp and loud.

#

The next few births were clean, to everyone’s relief, but the foals still died after no more than a few days. Katya knew that she was becoming overtired and overly sensitive. Taking everything personally would make it impossible for her to do the job, and now she needed the job even more badly, to make sure she could pay for the next semester when she would make up the three classes she failed from lack of attendance due to being at the stable.

Her nerves and her grief distracted her from most of what was going on with the scientists, but eventually the next crisis made its way into her sphere of attention. Its route wasn’t surprising--this crisis began killing off her horses, too.

She was washing a mare after her delivery, holding the tail to one side while she wiped down the genitals and thighs with warm soapy water. She saw black streaks on the sponge and frowned, pausing for a moment, then tracked back along her own movements to see sticky black gunk dripping thick and clotted from the vulva, making its way in slow tracks toward the ground.

Katya’s throat caught, leaving her struggling for breath, and she took a step back, releasing the mare’s tail and letting the sponge fall to the ground. When she stepped clear, into the aisleway, she saw that the same black stuff was coming from the mare’s nostrils, and the corners of her mouth.

She didn’t scream; it was a rule pressed deeply into any child who grew up with horses that one never screamed around them unless the goal was to make them panic and run. She ran instead, bolting down the aisle and across the yard to the science station, where Grigory and Semyon caught her when she tripped over the threshold and fell.

#

If she had been paying attention, she might have heard them discussing it before, but then, she might not have. They were doing their best to keep it under wraps, since it was a fairly good-sized problem, after all.

The mares weren’t the only mammals in the station excreting black gunk at most orifices. Three of the scientists were, too. It was visible under their skin as well, in patches that looked like bruises in the light.

“Contamination,” Semyon said again. Katya wondered how many times she was going to hear that word, working here. “We think it’s a fungus, from the permafrost. Somehow we brought it back. Instruments, maybe, or the foal’s body itself, we’re not sure. But, well. Fungus. Now it’s figured out how to grow here.”

“It’s been months,” Katya pointed out. “What took it so long?”

He shook his head. “Ah, my girl, life is a strange thing, and fungus even stranger. We’ve called around to see if there are any mycologists who will keep it under their hats, but it would be a pretty big discovery to just throw away, you know? It’s the kind of thing they’d want to shout about.”

“Plus it might spread,” she said after a moment, when he seemed content to fall silent. “It might be dangerous, and we’ve brought it out of the permafrost into the world.”

He sighed, shoving his hands deep in the pockets of his coat. “Ah, Katya. That’s true. But the frost is melting, remember? The Batagaika depression is spreading. It was going to come into the world anyway. Maybe we’ve done a good thing, by getting a head start on it.”

Katya doubted that very much. And as the days passed and first the mares and then the scientists grew iller and then began to die, she tasted the bitterness of being right. 

#

Andrei Ivanovich, the lead scientist, appeared in the stable one morning. She couldn’t recall him ever setting foot there before.

“Young lady,” he said, his voice rough in his throat. She realized, looking at him more closely, that his eyes were sunken in dark shadows, and his face was pale. He must not have slept for days, chasing this mycological problem. “Come here, please.” She obeyed, and he held up one hand, suddenly looking concerned. “But stay a bit back.”

“What can I help you with?” she asked, startled by her own voice. She’s spoken to no one but the horses, Semyon, and her roommate at the school on those occasions when she makes it back there to sleep instead of collapsing in the straw of an empty stall and rolling herself in a horse blanket.

He takes a vial from his pocket and studies it with a frown. “You haven’t gotten sick? You’ve shown none of the symptoms?”

She shook her head. She’s feared it, so much. She’s checked her eyes, her nose, the corners of her mouth; she’s scraped her labia and anus raw when she wipes, looking for traces of black fungal discharge. But nothing. “None.”

“And the clones. They haven’t shown any signs?”

Katya shook her head again. One Hundred Twenty-Six had died the day before, and One Hundred Thirty was due to be born any time. The embryos in between had been miscarried. “They all die, but not of that. Or I haven’t seen any signs. Semyon takes them to be dissected, he would know if there was any fungus inside.”

“Not a trace.” He stood there for a moment, shoulders slumped, and she thought that he looked terribly old, older than made any sense for his work. This project was hard on the scientists, she supposed. And of course fear also ate away at the body and the mind, as surely as any mycelia.

“Are you of the native people around here?” he asked suddenly, sharply. Katya blinked, old defensiveness taking a moment to stir from its place in her chest. It caught up quickly, from years of practice.

“I am Yakut,” she said, folding her arms across her chest. As if he couldn’t tell by looking at her. As if it mattered. It wasn’t supposed to matter, wasn’t supposed to have since the Soviet days. “Why do you ask?”

He shook his head. “You are from here. These foals are from here. Neither of you gets sick.”

His words lay out a path, but she was too baffled to follow it. “They’re from here a very long time ago. I don’t think–”

“It might be an adaptation that suits the area. A genetic quirk. A reaction to a local mineral, perhaps, or lack of it.” He lifted his gaze to the rafters of the barn and studied them for a moment. “We don’t have enough time to trace it out.”

Fear spikes in her throat, a hiccup in her heart. “What do you mean?”

“We can hardly let it get loose in the world, can we.” He rubbed the back of his neck and turned away, shoulder slumped. “Well. Thank you.”

“What should I do?” she asked, knowing even as she said it that he wouldn’t have an answer. Fear drove answers away like the horses switching their tails at flies, and she has seen so much fear around the station, these last few weeks.

“Keep caring for them, I suppose,” he said wearily, already moving toward the door. “Until someone tells you differently. They still need to be fed and all.”

#

They did still need that. They still needed her soothing hands and carefully-held-soft voice and her willingness to haul hay and grain and buckets of water to them twice a day. She watched the mares weaken. She delivered the foals from those still strong enough to manage the labor of birth. She eased the last passage of the dying.

No word came from the scientists except Semyon’s helpless shrugs. He grew sick, too; she could see the bags under his eyes and imagined she could see the shadows under his skin, mycelia growing. She didn’t ask pressing questions; when no one was paying attention, she fetched her phone and sent a message to her cousins.

Bring a goat, please. Two if you can. The mares are ill and I need to feed the foals.

Foals would nurse off a nanny goat as cheerfully as a mare, as long as the goat had something to stand on as the foals grew taller, to let them reach her udders. Katya looked around the barn and made a plan – where to stable the goats, where to stand them when the foals needed to nurse, how to care for the foals between their births and consistently swift deaths, until there were none left and she was free of here.

She couldn’t imagine where she would go. This stable, these wide-eyed infants, the smell of hay and straw and slow-creeping death: these had swollen to become the whole world.

#

Her cousins drove a whole day to bring her two goats, propped up between bales of straw in the open bed of their truck. Katya directed them to an empty stretch of road half a mile from the station and walked to meet them. It was nice to get away from the stable, to tilt her head back and feel the sun on her face, to smell grass and dust on the wind. 

She needed to remember to come out here more often. Maybe she could bring one of the stronger foals. This sun, this wind, this grass and dust would all be alien to them, nothing like what they were made to experience in the long-ago version of the Yakutsk plain, but there was still a world around them. They should have a chance to see it.

Her cousins hugged her roughly and lifted the goats off the truck bed, then stood in the roadside dust and lit cigarettes to revive themselves before the long drive back. “Do you like the job?” one asked her, rubbing his hand over his hair. “Tell us about the horses.”

She shrugged, knowing she couldn’t say too much, and couldn’t be too honest. “It’s all right. The mares are sick, though, that’s why I need the goats.”

“Sick with what?” the other one asked, wrapping his free arm around himself while he exhaled a stream of smoke. 

Katya was vague; something about a bacterial infection, using the scientists’ favorite word, contamination. They didn’t look particularly convinced, but they weren’t the type to push her, and they had a long drive home ahead of them. They exchanged hugs, reminded her to trim the goats’ hooves if they weren’t going to be outside enough to wear them down, and drove away.

Katya walked slowly back to the stable, a goat’s lead line in each hand. The animals wanted to delay and eat, so she let them. She wasn’t eager for what would come next. She wanted this moment.

#

One Hundred Thirty-Six was three days old and still wobbly on his legs. Not a good sign. Katya leaned against the wall and watched him totter over to where one of the goats stood patiently on top of a bale of straw, her lead line snugged tight to the ring on the wall, waiting just right for the foal to nurse off her.

Semyon came around the corner and the foal skittered away without taking a sip. Katya sighed. He would get to it eventually, she knew he would, but his unsteadiness suggested it would only buy him a day or two before he began to decline. She had pulled him from his mother while the mare was in the middle of dying herself. There wasn’t much hope or luck left here on the station.

“Katya,” Semyon said, his voice hoarse and urgent. She didn’t want to look at him, but she did. He deserved that much; he had always been kind to her and the animals.

“We’re leaving.” His white lab coat was streaked with red and black. “All of us who are left, we’ve received permission to fly to a station in Krasnoyarsk. They’ve set up quarantine for us. They’re sending a helicopter. They think they can help us. We sent our data ahead, and they think–”

He stopped, his gaze jumping from one place to the next. “We’re leaving.”

Katya glanced over her shoulder at the foal, who was making another advance on the nanny goat. “That’s good. I’m glad they think they can help.”

“You should leave, too.”

“I’m not sick.”

“Then go back to the university, or… or somewhere else.” His voice dropped, growing more urgent. “It may not be safe to stay here. I don’t know what they’ll do about the buildings. They’re contaminated, you know. It all is.”

Of course. Contamination, the endless fear. “I can’t leave the animals.”

“They’re all dying, Katya!”

She shook her head, turning away from him. There was one more mare left, her body stubbornly clinging to life until it could deliver its foal, the embryo that had been One Hundred Forty. The others had died, but this last one, and the goats, and One Hundred Thirty-Six for as long as he made it, and One Hundred Forty when he was born – Katya would be here for them.

Semyon stood there, waiting, but she didn’t turn to him again. After a few minutes, he left.

An hour or so later, she heard the sound of doors slamming and trucks pulling away from the station. When she went to the stable door, all the lights in the main buildings were dark.

#

Katya lay in the grass, her eyes closed, her face turned toward the sun. A weight held itself on her chest – One Hundred Forty’s head. He was dozing, his breath steady and even. The goats grazed nearby, part of and separate from the little group.

One Hundred Thirty-Six and the last mare had died the day before. One Hundred Forty was the only one left. She had written the number on a bit of paper, spelling it out in careful cursive, so there was a record. Sto Sorok, in Russian. The last one.

He was three days old, now. He was stable when he walked, bright-eyed and curious, and Katya thought he would be clever, if he lived. A troublemaker of a colt, always sticking his nose into everything.

He answered the question she had asked herself before, about what the foals could possibly think of this world that was so different from the one they should have been born in. He basked in the sunshine. He chased the wind. He flopped on his side in the soft grass and closed his eyes and breathed deep.

Katya didn’t know what was going to happen. She didn’t want to. Maybe helicopters would appear above the station, holding flamethrowers and acid. Maybe no one would ever come back, and the buildings would rot on the plain. Maybe the fungus would rise up from the soil and eat every thing remaining on earth that didn’t have the markers in their DNA that said they were of this place. Maybe the fungus would twist to ignore the markers, and take the rest of them, too.

That was all for another moment. Maybe the next one to come, but--not here yet.

She felt the sunlight, the steadiness of the earth, the slow-moving wind. She felt the foal’s breathing and smelled the warm scent of his body, ancient and new. She could hear the goats quietly cropping at the grass, doing the work that they were made for.