“No doubt you’re saying that to everybody.”

He supposed that he deserved such suspicions. “I’m not, it happens to be true.”

“I’ll just have to be there, then. These EEGs are an unholy mess. Not only are the alpha and lambda waves close to unreadable, nothing else follows any established patterns. I suspect that we’ll have to relearn brain function before we can figure out what’s going on here.”

“You feeling all right?”

“I’ll tell you when and if my symptoms require more attention. I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Tom—”

“You’re sure? Wouldn’t it be just a little fun?”

“Feeling sorry for yourself? I was trying to be kind. Just let me do my work. If I have any more problems, believe me I’ll tell you.”

Sarah was in agony. She forced herself to appear interested in the meeting, but all she could think of was eating. Soon there would have to be some kind of reckoning.

They all looked so evil—or so blind. “We have a most interesting picture,” the geneticist droned. Sarah couldn’t even remember his name. He fumbled with the overhead projector, finally casting a karyotype of Miriam’s chromosomes on the meeting room’s whiteboard.

Poor Miriam, she was becoming a bunch of charts and graphs. But what could they tell of her beauty? She was the most free spirit Sarah had ever known. Free, and also brave. Sarah had decided that the transfusion had really been an act of courage and love. Miriam wanted to transmit her gift to mankind.

She had chosen Sarah as the recipient because Sarah knew so much about aging. There was brilliance in such a choice. They were all making a great mistake about Miriam. In a sense they had not the right to disturb the experiment any more than they had the right to imprison Miriam. She was a genius, perhaps even beyond that. They owed her trust, not suspicion and the violence of involuntary commitment.

The transfusion was an act of courage. As the recipient, was she not also called to courage?

How dare they consider a blood wash.

A wave of hunger made Sarah gasp. Tom and Hutch were both looking at her. She managed a smile. ‘Miriam will know how to take care of me,’ she thought. ‘She would never have done such a thing in ignorance.’

The geneticist’s drone reached her ears again. “To complete the cytogenic analysis, we stained for G-banding and Q-banding. The specimen presents the longest chromosomal chain yet observed in a higher animal: sixty-eight chromosomes. No trisomes or other identifiable translocations or breaks are observed.”

Sarah could hardly sit still. If they had been more cooperative Miriam would probably already have helped her with this terrible feeling. It was greater than a simple appetite. Sarah didn’t want food. This felt like some kind of addiction. Hunger. God help her.