by Peter James
Standing over the pan, he concentrated for some moments on closing up the omelette. Normally he loved the smell of grilling mushrooms, but tonight his stomach was knotted with anxiety, and he had no appetite. ‘Part of it is that kids at that age think about things less, they intellectualize about them less, they just get on and do it.’
‘Maybe the same applies to chess? Nobody told Luke it was impossible to beat you, so he did, do you think? You told me you beat your grandfather when you were seven, and he was some kind of a chess master, wasn’t he?’
‘I beat him once,’ John said. ‘And that was after months of playing him. And—’ He shrugged. ‘Who knows? Maybe he deliberately let me win that one time.’
He cut the omelette in two with the spatula, scooped each of the halves onto plates, removed the pan from the heat, and pulled down the hob lid of the Aga. ‘All set.’
They carried their trays into the living room; John went to the kitchen and returned with two glasses of Shiraz, then they sat in silence in front of the TV while they ate. Antiques Roadshow was on, the volume low.
‘You do make the best omelettes ever,’ Naomi said, suddenly sounding cheerier. Then she added, ‘Maybe we should take the kids out more. Dr Michaelides might be right, that we’re confining them in too much of a childhood world. They enjoyed the zoo.’
‘Yep, they picked up a real love of animals from it, didn’t they?’ John retorted.
Naomi ate for some moments in silence.
‘I’m sorry, hon,’ John said. ‘I shouldn’t have said that.’
Naomi shrugged. They watched a meek, bearded man standing in front of a tray of Victorian surgical instruments.
‘Maybe we should take them to a post-mortem,’ John said. ‘I’m sure they’d find that lot more fun than Mr Pineapple Head. Or take them to a dissection room at a medical college department of anatomy.’
‘You’re being silly.’
‘I don’t think so – that’s the problem, they might really enjoy that. I think they want to see adult things.’
‘So, you work at one of the techiest places in Britain. Why don’t you take them on a tour of Morley Park? Show them the particle accelerator, show them the cold fusion lab.’
John put his tray on the floor.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘I’m not hungry. I can’t eat, I feel really – I don’t know – I just wonder how we’re going to cope; where we go from here.’
He stared at the television for some moments. A little old lady in a velvet hat was being told the value of a small marquetry box.
‘This is a most exquisite piece of Tunbridge Ware,’ the tweedy expert said. ‘What do you know of its history?’
‘Have you ever noticed,’ Naomi said, ‘on this programme they make a big deal about an object’s history – and its provenance? Imagine if we were on this show – what would we be able to say about Luke and Phoebe’s provenance?’
‘I think it’s more likely they’d be presenting us on the show as antiques,’ he said. ‘Relics of an extinct species. Early twenty-first-century Homo sapiens. One beautiful female, English, in mint condition. And one rather tired Swede, atrophied brain, in need of some restoration. But with a big dick.’
Naomi giggled. Then she turned and kissed him on the cheek. ‘We will cope, we’ll find a way. We’ll make good people of them, because we are good people. You’re a good man. This whole nature-nurture thing – we will have to find ways to steer and influence them.’
John smiled, but he looked sad, bewildered. ‘Luke frightened me this afternoon. I mean that seriously, he frightened me, it was like – I wasn’t playing against a child – or anything human. It was just like playing against a machine. It actually got to a stage where I felt there wasn’t any point in playing any more, because it was no fun.’
She sipped some wine. ‘Maybe we should consider putting him in a chess tournament, see what happens if he’s given a real challenge?’
‘And have him hit all the headlines? A three-year-old chess prodigy is going to be national news, hon. It would flag him loud and clear up to the Disciples. We can’t do that. What we are going to have to think very seriously about is special schooling.’
‘Do they have schools for machines?’ she said, only partly in jest.
John put an arm around her and squeezed her shoulder. ‘What are they going to be like in ten years’ time, do you think?’
‘Ten years? What about in another three years? They’re like miniature adults already. What do you think they’re doing up there now in their room? Just hanging around until we go to bed, so they can start surfing the net all night? Designing new rocket-propulsion systems? Re-drafting the British Constitution?’
She ate the last of her omelette. ‘Are you going to call Dr Michaelides in the morning? And tell her about the guinea pigs? I’d like to know her thoughts.’
He nodded and stood up. ‘Going to my den.’
‘Do you have to work tonight? You look tired.’
‘The book proofs – they have to be back in the States by the end of next week.’
*
Upstairs in his den, John opened up the web browser of his own computer. Then he began to look back at the history, starting with the day before the children had been given their own computer, then going back over the past months.
There were pages and pages of sites he had never visited himself. Again, as he had found on the children’s computer, scores of visits to maths, physics and other science sites. There were visits to history sites, anthropological sites, geological, geographical. It was endless.
Nothing frivolous. His little three-year-olds hadn’t used their internet surfing skills to do anything as dull as log on to kids’ websites or chatrooms. It was just as if they were on one continuous quest, or hunger, for knowledge.
Three months back he came across the chess sites. Luke, or Luke and Phoebe together, had visited dozens of sites, ranging from learning the basic game to advanced strategies.
Then he knelt and switched on the children’s computer on the floor. It began booting up, then the password request came up. He entered the new password he had typed in this morning, to stop the kids having access to it while it was confiscated. The message came up:
PASSWORD NOT VALID – RETRY.
He had deliberately put in a hard password, one that would be impossible to crack by chance. Maybe he’d made a mistake typing it just now? He tried again.
b*223*&65&*
PASSWORD NOT VALID – RETRY.
He’d written it down on a slip of paper, which he had put in his back trouser pocket, and dug it out, to check. It was correct. He typed it in again.
PASSWORD NOT VALID – RETRY.
Shaking his head in disbelief, he tried one more time, with the same result. And now he was pretty sure what had happened.
The children, or one of them, at any rate, must have been in here and somehow cracked his password. Then changed it to a new one.
87
The room was small, the window panes so rotted and waterlogged that the paint barely still stuck to the wood, and the putty was crumbling. The glass shook in the wind. The sky was grey, flecked with rain, and the sea beyond the promenade railing a heaving, ominous slurry.
There was a single bed, a television he had never watched, a table, a washbasin, a mirror, a couple of chairs, and his Bible. His crucifix hung on the wall in place of a print of Constable’s Haywain, which he had taken down and placed on top of the wardrobe.
Every morning he rose in this small, cold room, in this foreign city, said his prayers, then opened his laptop and logged on to the internet in anticipation. But so far, he had been disappointed. Every day he watched the flow of data in disgust. Effluent pouring into his mailbox. Every morning he was presented with fresh opportunities to make his fortune, to make the acquaintance of ladies who wished to lure him to their pages. He noticed them, oh yes, and they made him angry, and they made him sad and they made him glad.
>
Glad that soon he would be going away from all this, abandoning it to its own putrefaction. Soon he would be in the arms of Lara, and they would make children, make them their own way, God’s way, not the Devil’s Spawn’s way.
Children, obey your parents in the Lord for this is right. Honour your father and mother – which is the first commandment – with a promise – that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth. Ephesians 6: 1–3.
He should not have this possession, for it was a sinful object, but he could not be without it. It was all he had of her. Lara had given it to him the morning they had parted. A small colour photograph of her standing in a simple summer dress, on the deck of the Californian ranch house where they had met. She was smiling, her long black hair tumbling over her bare shoulders, over her skin that was like silk. It was more than three years ago, but he could still remember the scents of her body, every smell, every touch, every word, promise, every caress of her breath against his face. I will wait for you, Timon, my darling angel, I will wait for you until the end of time.
Soon, Lara, God willing, soon!
Seated at the wooden table, beneath the miserly warmth of the single bar heater on the wall, he looked down the list of new emails, sifting through the filth, and suddenly, today, Monday morning, he felt a beat of excitement as he read the email that came with no signature and from an address he did not recognize.
He turned rivers into a desert, flowing springs into thirsty ground, and fruitful land into a salt waste, because of the wickedness of those who lived there. He turned the desert into pools of water and the parched ground into flowing springs; there he brought the hungry to live and they prepared the foundations of a city where they could settle. They sowed seeds and planted vineyards that yielded a beautiful harvest; he blessed them, and their numbers greatly increased, and he did not let their herds diminish. Psalm 107.
It was the message for which he had been waiting six lonely weeks. It was the call for him to do his duty and then, finally, to come home!
He logged off, his heart soaring. Thinking hard and quickly. There was a lot to be done, so much, but he was prepared, it would not take long.
He ate breakfast downstairs at a table on his own, saying a silent grace, avoiding eye contact and conversation with other guests. As he ate, he ran through his mental shopping list. Some of the items he had obtained already, by mail order, via the internet. He had been taught of the need to buy everything separately, in separate shops, in separate towns. Being a foreigner, he would be remembered more easily than a native English person. He would stick out. An American in Sussex, in January. A curiosity.
But he would be gone long before it mattered.
88
At midday on Tuesday morning, Dr Sheila Michaelides sat at her pine desk in her consulting room. She looked distinctly frosty.
Through the window behind the psychologist, Naomi watched rain falling on the lush green walled garden. She could see a thrush on the grass, digging with its beak, tugging out a reluctant worm.
‘Why didn’t either of you tell me the truth about your children?’ the psychologist said.
‘I’m sorry,’ Naomi said. ‘I’m not with you.’
‘Aren’t you? Dr Dettore? I think that name means something to you, doesn’t it?’ Her expression hardened to ice.
John and Naomi looked at each other, increasingly uncomfortable.
‘Yes, we went to him,’ John said.
‘But not for the reasons you might think,’ Naomi added.
‘What reasons might I think, Mrs Klaesson?’
Naomi twisted her hands together in silence. ‘That – that we – wanted—’ Her voice tailed.
‘Designer babies?’ the psychologist said.
‘No,’ Naomi said. ‘Not that at all.’
‘Oh?’
Naomi pointed at the photographs of the two small, laughing boys on her desk. ‘Are those your sons?’
‘Yes, they are.’
‘And they’re healthy, normal little boys?’
‘Not so little. Louis is twenty and Philip is twenty-two.’
‘But they are healthy, normal?’ Naomi said.
‘Let’s concentrate on your children, Mrs Klaesson, if you don’t mind, that’s what you’ve come to me about.’
‘Actually, I do mind,’ said Naomi angrily.
‘Hon,’ John said, cautioning.
‘Don’t hon me,’ she snapped. Then, turning her focus back on the psychologist, she said, ‘We went to Dr Dettore because he offered us hope, he was the only doctor in the world at the time capable of offering us hope, OK?’
‘What kind of hope did he offer you?’
‘A normal child. One that would be free of the bloody awful gene that John and I were both carrying. That’s all we went to him for. So that he could give us a child free of this gene.’
‘He talked you into having twins?’
‘No,’ John said. ‘We wanted a son, that was all. We never asked for twins.’
There was a long silence, then the psychologist said, ‘Are you aware of any of the other children who have been born to parents who went to see him?’
‘Some,’ John said.
‘Three sets of twins, all born to parents who went to him, have been murdered in the past couple of years,’ Naomi told her. ‘There’s a link to some freaky religious group – a bunch of fanatics.’
‘That’s why we don’t talk about it,’ John added. ‘We’ve been advised to keep quiet.’
‘A little hard when it’s out on the internet,’ Sheila Michaelides said.
‘That’s why we keep a low profile,’ John said.
‘What difference does it make to you?’ Naomi demanded. ‘Are Luke and Phoebe second-class citizens because they were conceived in a different way? Is that what you are telling us?’
‘Not at all. But if you remember, I asked you both if there was anything you could tell me that might have some bearing on your children’s behaviour; you never mentioned that you had designed their genetic make-up – I think that might have been helpful for me to know from the start. Don’t you?’
‘No, I—’ Naomi stopped in mid-sentence as John raised a calming hand.
‘Hon, she’s right. We should have told her.’
Naomi stared down at the carpet, wretchedly. She felt like she was back at school, being scolded by a teacher. ‘Dr Michaelides,’ she said. ‘This is not how it might seem to you at the moment. We just wanted Dr Dettore to make sure those bad genes were taken out.’
‘That was all?’
‘More or less,’ Naomi said.
‘More or less?’ the psychologist echoed.
There was an awkward silence. Finally John said, ‘We agreed to make a few positive changes – just to help enhance our baby’s abilities in some areas.’
Dr Michaelides looked at him sceptically. ‘What areas, exactly?’
John suddenly felt very defensive, as if he, too, were being carpeted by a schoolteacher. ‘Resistance to illness – we boosted their immune system.’
Naomi butted in. ‘When we say their – that – that’s not strictly true. We actually went to Dr Dettore wanting to have one child—’
‘A boy,’ John said. ‘Another son.’
‘And yet he persuaded you to have twins?’
‘He said nothing about us having twins,’ John repeated. ‘It wasn’t until Naomi was advanced in pregnancy that we discovered she was carrying twins. All the modifications we selected were of a very minor nature. We wanted to ensure our son would be reasonably tall. That he would have good eyesight, good hearing. We accepted an option that would enable him to get by on less sleep when he was older. Another that would give him more energy from less nutrition.’
‘And we agreed also to allow some enhancement to his learning abilities,’ Naomi said.
‘Less sleep,’ the psychologist said. ‘Enhancements to the children’s learning abilities. And now you are concerned because they
seem to be up during the night, trying to learn more? What did you expect was going to happen?’
‘Not this,’ Naomi said. ‘We just wanted to give them a good start in life. We never intended turning them into—’
The psychologist waited patiently as Naomi bit her tongue.
‘Freaks,’ John said. ‘I think that’s the word my wife doesn’t want to say.’
‘That’s how you are beginning to view your children, Dr Klaesson? As freaks?’
‘Not freaks in – I guess – in a circus sense of the word. I mean in the sense that they are different to other kids. Almost – like – wired differently.’
‘I think they are wired differently,’ the psychologist said.
There was a long silence, then the psychologist continued. ‘If I’m going to be able to help you, you are going to have to be totally honest with me from this point on.’ She fixed her eyes on each of them in turn. ‘I want you to tell me – when you went to Dr Dettore – was he offering you some kind of a standard package?’
‘In what sense?’ Naomi replied.
‘In the sense that he had some kind of a deal that he offered to his patients – clients?’ She raised her hand and ticked her fingers in turn. ‘A certain IQ, a guaranteed height, specific sporting skills – did you get the feeling there were certain things that he could do that all went together?’
‘No,’ John said. ‘We had a huge amount of choice.’
‘Too much choice,’ Naomi added. ‘It was overwhelming.’
They took it in turns to go through as much of the list of options as they could remember. When they had finished, the psychologist turned to her computer screen for some moments. Then she leaned back in her chair and looked thoughtfully at John and Naomi.
‘I’ve been doing some research. Since I saw you at the end of last week, I’ve heard by phone or email from twenty-six child psychologists – all of whom are seeing children who were conceived at Dr Dettore’s offshore clinic.’
