In the Flesh and Other Tales of The Biotech Revolution [SSC]

by Brian Stableford

  “Just as long as it doesn’t grow to be half a kilometer long,” the dancer said. “I wouldn’t want it to be too smart, either—I can do without it wanting to take the lead.”

  I could tell that she wasn’t seriously interested in the science, so I stopped trying to explain. I didn’t like her at all. Mercifully, Caliban and Ariel didn’t like her any better, although that didn’t stop Caliban wanting to have fleshsex with her. Caliban became quite jealous of Dr. Prospero, in fact, and I sometimes had to cope with the hormonal fallout of that when I woke up. I always preferred waking up after Ariel, who was just as silly, but in ways that didn’t leave such discomfiting physiological traces.

  * * * *

  When I took the trouble to watch recordings of Elise Gagne dancing, I realized that the contempt I’d tried to insert into my comment on its complexity was quite unjustified. I had recklessly supposed that no human dancer could perform as elegantly as a sim, but sims are, after all, simulations. Dancing may be mute, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not a form of communication, or that its communications is more easily reduced to bytes than any other form of human interaction.

  I watched her dance from the viewpoint of an observer, and I danced with her by choosing the IDENTIFICATION option, although I always find it difficult to identify myself with a human, no matter what the human is doing, because their limbs work so differently. It’s much easier to identify with fabers, even though it’s hard for me to imagine what low-gee environments feel like.

  Elise Gagne was a very good dancer. She was also a very sexy dancer. I hadn’t expected the snakes to add anything to her routines but a certain vulgar symbolism, but I was wrong about that too. Her snakes were more than crude phallic symbols; their coils were their own, and hers. They complemented the sinuosity of her own body— which was not, I discovered, the result of genetic engineering or surgically-enhanced plasticity, but a matter of training and of art. I only had to watch half a dozen dances from a distance, and join in with half a dozen more, to appreciate how brilliant she was—and how much more brilliant she might be if she could get past the limitations imposed on her by stupid partners.

  I understood why she needed a smart snake—and I do mean needed, because she was an artist, and I understood that artists have needs that we common mortals don’t.

  Dr. Prospero was an artist too, as well as a scientist. Every true Creationist is.

  I would have stopped after a dozen dances, but Ariel and Caliban didn’t. They don’t remember one another’s actions at all, and they don’t remember anything of my mental life, but they do remember things I do repeatedly. I think it must be like remembering a repetitive dream, which overcomes the tendency to forget by sheer insistence. I didn’t want to insist, of course—far from it—but repetition is repetition. Caliban and Ariel both remembered Elise Gagne’s dancing, and how to access the tapes.

  They both used that knowledge—which must, I suppose, have seemed to them a strange intuition.

  They both liked Elise’s dancing, although they liked complementary aspects of it. Ariel liked its lightness and its pace, and the ability to lose herself in the flow. Ariel was a music lover, and for her dance was a liquid expression of music, flesh made sound. Caliban liked its physicality and sensuousness, and the sensation of the snake’s coils. Caliban was a brute of sorts, and for her dance was a celebration of brutality, flesh made self. They both thought that Elise Gagne’s dancing was sexy, but they had very different notions of sexiness.

  I remembered everything. In theory, I should have been able to fit their different experiences together, just as the brain combines the images transmitted to it by the two eyes, to make a more coherent, mentally three-dimensional whole. Perhaps I could have, if I’d wanted to. But I didn’t want to. It’s all very well being more than the sum of your parts, but you can’t choose the parts you’re more than the sum of, and when you start to dislike them....

  Dr. Prospero spent more and more time in the lab, locked up with his blueprints and his embryos. Elise Gagne had no desire to join him—I would have!—but she had even less desire to hang out with me. She didn’t go out, though, even when the sun peeped over the horizon and the white mammoths started foraging. She didn’t want to watch the mammoths on the move, or the zebroid tapirs following the ebb tide while the giant rats hunted them by stealth. She spent a lot of time in VE, a very long way from Dr. Prospero’s ice palace.

  I spent a lot of time in VE too, sometimes as far afield as Titan and the patient ships journeying between the stars, but I did go out to ride the mammoth bull and dig for shellfish with the tapirs—with my fingers, not my snout. I played with the rats, who are very amusing companions once you have persuaded them that you are not prey. And I visited Python, who is my favorite person in all the world, except for Dr. Prospero, in spite of the fact that he has no fingers and cannot talk to me in signs.

  Sometimes, I think it must be very frustrating to be Python, not just because he has all that cleverness in his brain and no easy way to communicate its findings, but because he sleeps for such long periods—not just months but years, spending most of that time in oblivion and the rest in dreams that he probably never remembers.

  He was asleep when I went down into the mountain to see him, but he woke up when I stroked his head. He looked at me, first with one eye and then with the other, his patient brain waiting to collate the two images. Then he yawned—an extremely impressive sight— and licked my face with his tongue.

  The walls in Python’s hideaway are just as thickly skinned as the walls insulating the rooms and corridors of Dr. Prospero’s palace from the ices of its fundamental architecture, but they are neither translucent nor luminous. They could have been patterned even more extravagantly than the tapirs if Dr. Prospero wished, but they were actually monochrome grey, so dull that the light-fittings seemed to blaze even more harshly white than they actually did. Compensation for that was supplied by Python’s iridescent scales, which gleamed like nothing else on Earth or in v-space.

  “Hello, Python,” I signed, touching my fingers to his skin rather than displaying them to one or other of his eyes. “Are you hungry today?”

  He didn’t understand sign language, but he always seemed to pick up something of my meaning. He yawned again and smacked his lips, as if to say that he could eat a tapir, let alone a few snack-rats.

  “No tapirs,” I said. “You’ll have to stay in the tunnels for a few months yet—but there are rats a-plenty down below. It’s going to be a very good year for rats, I think. Snakes too. Did you know that you were being to be a clone-father? Well, not a clone-father, to be perfectly honest, but a distant relative. A sort of great-uncle. Anyway, there’ll be something in you in Elise Gagne’s new partner: a chip off the old genetic block. Something to be proud of in your old age. You are old, you know, no matter how young you feel. You might live for another thousand years, I suppose, but you’re still old. Older than me, at any rate. Older and wiser.”

  He licked my face again. He could have swallowed me whole, alter squeezing me to death with the merest effort of his vast coils, but he knew that I wasn’t prey. To the rats, I was an honorary rat; to Python, I was an honorary snake; to Dr. Prospero, if not to Elise Gagne, I was an honorary human being.

  Or was I?

  My fingers faltered as I stroked Python’s mighty head. I had been having a lot of anxious thoughts like that lately, although there was really no need. Dr. Prospero might be distracted now, but Elise Gagne would be gone soon enough, having completed her satanic bargain. Afterwards, Dr. Prospero would be all mine again, and the palace would be closed to everyone—including the island’s uninvited visitors—for hundreds of years.

  * * * *

  Elise Gagne had been in residence at the palace for nine days when Dr. Prospero called me into his study.

  “How is the work going?” I asked him, politely.

  “Very well,” he said. “I’ve completed the DNA assembly and renucleated thirty totipote
ncy-restored cells stripped from Python’s mouth. I anticipate a higher failure rate than usual because of the number of mammoth genes involved, but I should have six to ten embryos ready for implanting in four days time.”

  “Is Elise going to be here throughout the gestation.”

  “No. She’ll be leaving tomorrow, but she’ll return when the snakes are about a metre long. The advanced training phase will be the most difficult of all; it will take her a week or two to figure out which one is the most promising. After that, it’s up to her. I’ll be involved, of course, but only virtually. Are you happy, Miranda?”

  The abrupt change of subject startled me, all the more so because it wasn’t the kind of question Dr. Prospero usually asked.

  “Yes,” I said. It wasn’t entirely true, but I expected to be a lot happier in two days time.

  “Elise says that you seem unhappy to her.”

  Elise says! I thought. The effrontery of it was appalling, and not just because she’d scarcely looked in my direction for a week. And why, in any case, was Dr. Prospero interested in her judgment, when he was in a far better position to form one of his own?

  Dr. Prospero didn’t wait long enough for me to frame a reply. “Elise has suggested that you might be lonely,” he said. “She thinks I ought to make you a mate.”

  That seemed far worse than effrontery to me. It seemed like something I had not yet discovered in the dictionary: something esoteric, that even a garrulous human with a functional larynx might only have occasion to pronounce once or twice in a lifetime.

  “No,” I signaled. “No. No. No.” Unlike a voice-box, gestures aren’t restrained by artificial politeness.

  Dr. Prospero seemed quite amazed. “I thought you’d like the idea,” he said.

  “No,” I signaled. “No.”

  “What about Ariel?” he signed. “What about Caliban?”

  I was immediately seized by the awful idea that he might actually put it to a vote—and that I might be overruled by the separate hemispheres of my own brain. But they were only half a person each, at best, and I was more than the sum of my parts. Surely my opinion ought to outweigh both of theirs.

  “No,” I signaled. “No. No.” My hand seemed to have got stuck, possessed by a kind of nervous tic. It must have seemed like that to Dr. Prospero too. I was hoping that he wouldn’t tell Elise, because I could guess the interpretation Elise would put on my actions, even though such a thought would never enter Dr. Prospero’s head. It would never have entered mine, except that I had bad dreams: dreams of Ariel and dreams of Caliban, their urges, their whims and their poor excuses for thought.

  “It wouldn’t be a matter of breeding, Miranda,” Dr. Prospero said, proving that his mind wasn’t entirely isolated from the kinds of thought that Elise Gagne might put into it. “You have too many mammoth genes to be an effective mother. Like me, you’ll never have offspring while you’re alive—and in your case, it’ll require a very clever Human Creationist to ensure that you have them thereafter. It’s a matter of companionship—a matter of having someone to do things with, to talk to, to love.”

  Until Elise Gagne had come, it would never have crossed Dr. Prosperous mind to add that last word—and why should it now, given that she’d be leaving in two days time and would only return once more to collect her precious dancing partner?

  “No need,” I said. “I have Python, the rats, the tapirs, you.” I tried to make him into an afterthought, something tacked on and dispensable. I wanted to sting him, like a serpent’s tooth—although, not having seen the blueprints, I didn’t know whether Elise Gagne’s new partner was destined to have teeth or not. Sometimes she danced with cobras, sometimes with anacondas—all recreates, of course; nothing of that sort had made it through the ecocatastrophe, in spite of the fact that there never been any shortage of rats and cockroaches to eat.

  “They’re not your own kind,” he pointed out.

  “Elise isn’t your kind,” I signed back. “Nobody is. Python’s one of a kind too. We all are.”

  I new before his fingers moved what he was going to say. “What about Ariel?” he signed. “What about Caliban?”

  They didn’t matter. They were only fragments, figments cast out by the dreams that could only take possession of half of me at a time. They didn’t really exist. They didn’t have needs of their own, desires of their own, votes of their own.

  Except that they did—have needs and desires, that is. Not votes, while I had any say in the matter.

  “What about me?” I signed back to Dr. Prospero. “What about me?”

  * * * *

  The tempo of life on most Creationist islands is rapid; the days and nights are more or less equal all year round, and the sun is always hot. The vegetation is avid, the animal life frenzied. Here in the cold north, where summer days and winter nights are all but endless, things move more slowly. The evergreen forests have leaves like needles, which fix the sunlight with the utmost patience, and are grazed in like fashion. The mammoths are vast and majestic, like great drifts of dirty snow, far too self-possessed ever to turn avalanche. The omnivorous tapirs and rats are similarly unhurried, never condescending to anything as vulgar as pursuit.

  I, too, am a creature of the island. By the time humans “discovered” them, orangutans were tropic-dwellers, like tigers and elephants, but they had first been shaped—like tigers and elephants— by the rigors of oft-repeated ice ages, bulked up for insulation against the cold. Only the vagaries of chance, and the competition provided by humankind’s remoter ancestors, drove them from the habitat that had shaped them into warmer climes, where the ever-avid vegetation gave them greater margins of survival.

  Even if I had been a faithful copy of my immediate great-uncles, therefore, I would not have been out of place on Dr. Prospero’s island. It was not my mammoth genes that made me fit company for actual recreated mammoths, nor was it my dolphinesque brain. I belong here—far more so, in a way, than Dr. Prospero himself, who is a stranger here, genetically speaking, for all that his own great-uncles wiped out their Neanderthal cousins, which natural selection shaped to endure the iterative advents of the ice.

  As for Ariel and Caliban—well, quite frankly, who cares? If I do not, who should?

  Can they really care about themselves, given that they only have half a brain apiece, and that each one only has that when the other is dreaming. No matter how intimately related we are, they are not my companions. I do not love them.

  But I digress. The point is that the next two days dragged, even though they were a mere two days. They did not pass as swiftly as I desired, or needed—and on the eve of her departure, Elise Gagne danced.

  She danced with a cobra, but the idea of biting her never crossed its mind, any more than squeezing me to death and swallowing me with a single gulp would ever cross Python’s.

  I was allowed to watch, even though the occasion might have been thought preciously intimate by Dr. Prospero. Indeed, my presence was required, for Elise was a performer and needed all the audience she could get—even recreated orangutans too stupid to know where their best interests lay.

  Perhaps she knew that I had been watching her tapes, and taking her place in them as best I could. Perhaps she didn’t know that Ariel’s and Caliban’s similar actions weren’t mine in any true sense of the word. At any rate, I was there. I watched her dance, in the flesh. I would have gone to sleep if I could, but I couldn’t.

  The cobra was less impressive than one of her anacondas, although it was a full two metres from nose to tail and had a fine hood decorated with the eyes of an owl. We have owls on the island occasionally—not natural ones, but not ones of Dr. Prospero’s making: summer strays from Greenland and Spitzbergen, which come via the pole.

  Were I signing this instead of writing it I could probably give a more convincing account of the dance, but even dexterous fingers could not give more than the faintest impression of Elise’s dancing. She and the cobra were fused into a single soul, as carefree and ec
static as Ariel but so much more indulgent of their bliss; they flowed around one another with all the grace of a DNA-helix, but with so much more versatility, so much more freedom of expression. They looked at one another with such naked predatory lust, such brazen physicality, that it was impossible to judge which might be more likely to poison and consume the other, were they enemies instead of lovers. They were as brutal as Caliban, and as monstrous, but there was an art in their mutual caresses that transfigured brutality into sublimity, and monstrousness into...well, something far more sinister than beauty, but far less sinister than love.

  It was magnificent, in its way, but far short of perfection. She knew that, even though she had reached the peak of her own achievement.

  When she finished, she looked directly to me, and held my gaze for longer than she had ever been able to before.