C. L. Farris

The Princess Clone: Mary Shelley Revisited C. L. Farris

Fascinating evolves into bizarre, when cave-diver Dave Morris sends a sample of 10,000-year-old brain tissue to his friend Stanley Duchinski. Stan is a nerdy biochemist with a zero social life, who decides to clone the tissue into a Native-American woman. Impatient for the world to learn of his success, he injects the embryo with a serum which causes her to mature at ten-times the normal rate. He names her Minnehaha. Congress has made human cloning a federal offense, and Stanley is already under surveillance because of his work with fast-growing grains. World hunger might be alleviated, but commodity markets would be drastically affected. When Minnie's surrogate-mother is killed in an accident, the FBI learns the secret. The couple flees to Mexico, where he eventually marries her. Stanley works desperately to slow Minnie's rate of maturation, but he is unsuccessful. When they reach the same apparent age, he injects himself with the growth serum. Shortly thereafter, Minnie becomes pregnant. The child is normal, and is given up to the care of two physicians. The physicians raise the boy to adulthood, not knowing he is carrying the synthetic growth gene in its recessive form.