“You were the ones who never published,” I pointed out. “You were the ones who kept on working in secret.”
“It wasn’t finished” he told me. I was sure that he wasn’t trying to wriggle out of it.
“If you’re telling the truth,” I told him, “it never will be. But you still have to convince me of that.”
He was still looking at me with faint disgust, because of what he thought I’d become, but in the end he had to loosen up. Like me, he didn’t have any alternative.
Even when we’d reviewed the tape and gone through it step by step, the senior Special Branch men and most of the Home Office staff still didn’t get it.
“OK,” said the Unit’s top man, “so the one you talked to was smart and kind of cute—but she isn’t ever going to get to court, let alone to daytime TV. She’s a pig. An animal. We can send her to the slaughterhouse. We can get rid of them all, if we decide that’s the appropriate thing to do.”
“We wouldn’t necessarily have to go that far,” one of the junior ministers put in. “Once people know what she really is, that will colour everyone’s view of her. It doesn’t matter how cute or clever she is, nobody is going to make out a serious case for making any more like her. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater here.”
What he meant, of course, was “let’s not throw the bathwater out with the baby.” He figured that there might be useful purposes to which the technics might be put—secret purposes, of course, if the legal advisers decided that the whole area was legally out of bounds, but government-approvable purposes nevertheless. He was thinking about designing ultra-smart animals for use as spies and soldiers. He’d probably been a fan of the wrong kind of comic books in his youth. He wasn’t thinking Boy’s Own adventures; he was thinking Reality is What You Can Get Away With.
The permanent UnderSecretary knew better, of course. “She was right about the records,” he observed reflectively. “The fact that we failed to recover them makes it a mystery. As soon as the rumour spreads that you can turn animal embryos into passable human beings with standard equipment and a chicken-feed budget, everybody and his cousin will be curious to know how it’s done. We left it far too late to make our move and I’m talking years, not weeks. We should have applied the new laws as soon as we had reason to believe that they’d been broken.”
“Without the records,” I said quietly, “there’s no way to be sure that even the new laws have been broken. And that makes it an even better mystery.”
“She’s a pig, Hitchens,” the plain-speaking policeman pointed out. “She’s a pig that looks like a little girl. If that isn’t illegal genetic engineering, what is?”
“If Hemans is telling the truth,” I said, “Applied Homeotics isn’t genetic engineering in the legal sense at all. He had to make up most of the missing one point four per cent somehow, but if he’d simply tried to transplant or import it he’d probably have failed in exactly the same way that most other attempts to transplant whole blocks of genes have failed. Assuming that what he told me was true—and I’m inclined to believe him—his way is much better, and it’s not against the law. If this ever gets to court, we might have to hope that the backup records really have been destroyed—because if they haven’t, and Hemans, Rawlingford and Bradby can use them to mount a successful defence, we’re going to look really stupid.”
“That won’t happen,” the permanent UnderSecretary said. “If they want any kind of life after acquittal, they’ll make a deal. They’ll give us their secrets and they’ll sign a nondisclosure agreement. The real question is whether other people will be able to duplicate their work anyhow, guided by the knowledge—or even the rumour—that it’s possible.”
“Who but the wackos would want to?” asked the chief inspector. “Do you really think the world is full of people who want to turn out imitation human beings? Even the worst kinds of animal liberation lunatics aren’t about to start clamouring for every piglet’s right to walk on two legs and wear a dress. This is the real world. Some animals are a hell of a lot more equal than others, and we’re them, and that’s the way it’s going to stay.”
It was time to cut through the bullshit to the real heart of the matter. “You’re not taking Alice seriously enough,” I told them. “You haven’t listened properly to what she and Hemans said. Suppose she’s right. Suppose she isn’t a pig pretending to be a human. Suppose she really is a human.”
“She’s not,” the policeman said flatly. “Genetically, she’s a pig. End of story.”
“According to her,” I pointed out, “genetics doesn’t enter into it. Human is as human does — and her brothers and sisters were the ones who got gunned down because they didn’t believe that their fellow men would open fire on a bunch of unarmed children. Without her school records, and until she consents to be tested again, we can only guess at her IQ, but on the evidence of my conversation and Hemans’ assurances I’d be willing to bet that it’s a little bit higher than the average teenager’s. You haven’t yet begun to consider the implications of that fact.”
“If pigs in human form are smarter than real humans, that’s all the more reason for making sure that all the world’s pigs stay in their sties,” the man from Special Branch insisted. The minister was content to listen, for the time being.
“If Hemans is telling the truth,” I went on, disregarding the policeman’s interruption, “he and his colleagues didn’t need to transplant any genes to make her human. DNA analysis of the dead bodies supports that contention. The difference between a human being and a chimpanzee, as Alice pointed out, is very small. The most important differences are in the homeotic genes—the genes that control the expression of other genes, thus determining which cells in a developing embryo are going to specialize as liver cells or as neurons, and how the structures built out of specialized cells are going to be laid out within an anatomical frame. If you have an alternative control mechanism which can take over the work of those controlling genes, they become redundant—and as long as the embryo you’re working with has the stocks of genes required to make all the specialized kinds of cell you need, you can make any kind of an embryo grow into any form you required. You could make human beings out of pigs and cows, tigers and elephants, exactly as Alice said—and vice versa.”
“That’s bullshit,” the policeman said. “You’ve said all along that they had to make up the difference. We have to have the extra genes that make us human.”
“That’s true,” I agreed, wondering how simple I could make it, and how simple I’d need to make it before he could understand. “And until today I’d assumed, just as you had, that the extra genes would have to be transplanted, or that they’d have to have synthesized from library DNA and imported—but that almost never works with whole sets of genes, because mere possession of a gene is only part of the story. You have to control its expression — and that’s what Applied Homeotics is all about. We’ve become so accustomed to genetic engineering by transplantation that we’ve lost sight of other approaches—but Hemans and his friends are lateral thinkers. We didn’t get to be human by having genes transplanted into us—we grew the new genes in situ. Only a few million of the three billion base pairs in the human genome are actually expressed, but it’s an insult to the rest to call it junk DNA, the way we used to. Most of it is satellite repeat sequences, but in between the satellites there are hundreds of thousands of truncated genes and pseudo genes, all of them in a constant state of crossgenerational flux because of transposition activity.
“Pigs may only have homologues of ninety-eight point six per cent of our genes, but they also have homologues of almost all the protogenes making up the difference. Those protogenes are not only present within the pig genome, they’re mostly in the right sites. Hemans, Rawlingford and Bradby didn’t need to transplant any human DNA—all they had to do was tweak the pig DNA that was already in place. And as Alice said when she had me trapped in Wonderland, if you can do it to a pig, you can do it to a cow—
and given that the common ancestor relating us to rats and bats seems to be more recent than the one relating us to pigs, you can probably do it to a hundred or a thousand other species.”
“It still sounds like bullshit to me,” the policeman repeated, as if he were some obstinate DNA satellite hopelessly intent on taking over an entire genome.
“You may not like its implications, Chief Inspector,” I said tiredly, “but that’s not enough to make it bullshit. I don’t know exactly how Hemans did it, because he isn’t going to tell us until he gets some guarantees, but I already know how I’d go about trying to copy the trick, now that I know that it can be done. Transforming and activating the protogenes is probably the easy part, given that every sequencer in the world is avid to learn how to write as well as read the language of the bases. I’m pretty sure I could figure out a way to do that. If I could also figure out a way to delay an embryo’s phylotypic stage—that’s the moment at which the control of an embryo’s development is transferred from the maternal environment to the embryo’s own genes—I might be able to stop the homeotic genes kicking in at all. Given that the onset of the phylotypic stage is much later in some species than others, that doesn’t seem to be any great hurdle to leap. A careful inspection of the research Hemans, Rawlingford and Bradby published before they got together at Hollinghurst Manor suggests that they were probably using human maternal tissue as a mediator in the embryonic induction process. That’s not genetic engineering, of course—there’s no law against interspecific transplantation of mature tissues or the use of human somatic cells in tissue cultures. Believe me, sir: Applied Homeotics is a whole new field of biotechnology. None of the existing rules apply.”
“So you’re telling me that every fucking farm animal in the realm—not to mention every household pet—is potentially human?” The Special Branch man was looking at me with as much contempt and distaste as Hemans had, but with even less justification.
“No,” I said patiently. “I’m telling you that the embryos they produce as parents are now potentially human. It still adds a whole new dimension to the ethics of animal usage, but we don’t yet know how far that dimension extends. We can be reasonably sure that birds and reptiles don’t have the required stocks of protein-template genes, and some of the smaller mammals probably don’t have them either, but the question of where the limits of potential metamorphosis actually lie is a minor one. The point is that unless we’re the victims of a monstrous hoax, humanity is determined almost entirely by the development of the embryo. If so, Hemans is right. Alice and all her kind are as human as you or I. An even more important question, of course, is what this kind of technology might allow us to make of human beings.”
I paused for effect, but nobody jumped in with an exclamation of astonishment. They were all waiting, guardedly, to see what came next.
“We, after all, are merely nature’s humans,” I told them. “We’re a product of the rough-and-ready process of natural selection, and control of the expression of our genes has been left to other genes. Homeotic genes were never an ideal solution to the problem of embryo-formation — they were just the best improvisation that DNA could come up with on its own. Alice’s humanity is the product of relatively unskilled artifice—and the evidence we’ve so far seen suggests that relatively unskilled artifice might already be the slightly better maker of men. If it isn’t, then it certainly will be, just as soon as we bring our ingenuity fully to bear on the problem.
“The genie’s out of the bottle, gentlemen. We can pass all the laws we like against the genetic engineering of human beings, and we can make sure if we care to that what Hemans, Rawlingford and Bradby have actually done to pig embryos will in future fall within the scope of those laws—but that won’t alter the fact that human beings and the world they have made are imperfect in more ways than any of us would care to count, and that Hemans, Rawlingford and Bradby have found a new way to allow us to set to work on those imperfections. If Alice is telling the truth, we’ve already passed through the looking-glass, and there’s no way back. You might be able to stop the animals walking and talking, but you won’t be able to stop the people. If a mere pig can be a better human than any of us, imagine what our own children might become, with the proper assistance!”
The minister and his junior nodded gravely, but that was just the legacy of good schooling by their image-consultants. The chief inspector looked dumbfounded. The permanent UnderSecretary was the only one who was keeping up, after his own crude fashion. “You’re talking about building a Master Race,” he said reflexively. If in doubt, hoist a scarecrow.
“I’m talking about D-I-Y supermen,” I told him frankly. “I’m talking about something that can be done with standard equipment on a chicken-feed budget, after a little bit of practice on the family pet. I’m talking anarchy, not mad dictators. If you intend to make a deal with the three Musketeers, you need to know what cards they’re holding. It’s still conceivable that they’re bluffing, and that Alice was just feeding us a line, but I can’t believe that—and if they’re not bluffing, the old world has already ended. The GE-Crime Unit will catch up with the runaways eventually, but it’s already too late. Their story has been told, and will be told, again and again and again.”
Nobody told me I was crazy. The policeman might have lacked imagination, but he wasn’t stupid enough to continue to argue that his reflexive prejudices were worth more than my educated judgment. “We could still shoot the lot,” he muttered—but he knew, deep down, that it wouldn’t do the trick, even if that option could be put back on the agenda.
“What can we do?” asked the permanent UnderSecretary, who had already moved reluctantly onto the next stage.
I knew that it wouldn’t be easy to persuade him, but nobody ever said that working for the Home Office was going to be easy. The instinct of government is to govern, to take control, to keep as tight a hold on the reins as humanly possible.
“Basically,” I said, “we have two options. We can be Napoleon, or we can be Snowball. Neither way will be easy—in fact, I suspect that all hell has already been let loose—so I figure that we might as well try to do the right thing. For once in our lives, let’s not even try to stand in the way of progress. I know you’re not going to be grateful for the advice, but my vote is that we simply let them all go and let them get on with it.”
“Let public opinion take care of them, you mean,” the junior minister said, still trying his damnedest to misunderstand. “Let the mob take care of them, the way they take care of child molesters.”
“No,” I said. “I mean, let artifice take its course. Let the pioneers of Applied Homeotics do what they have to, and what they can. Even the pigs.”
It wasn’t easy to persuade them, but Hemans and his collaborators had a battery of lawyers on their side as well as reason and stubbornness, and in the end, the situation simply wasn’t governable, even by the government. Eventually, I made them see that.
They weren’t grateful, of course, but I never expected them to be. Sometimes, you just have to settle for being right.
By the time I saw Alice again she was twenty-two and famous, although she never went anywhere without her bodyguards. She came to my lab to see what I was working on, and to thank me for the small part I had played in winning her precarious freedom.
“You did save my life,” I pointed out, when we’d done the tour and had time to reflect.
“That was Ed and Kath,” she admitted. “They were the ones who picked you up and dragged you down the stairs. All I did was hit you with the axe when you tried to grab it.”
“But you hit me with the flat bit, not the edge,” I said. “If you’d hit me with the edge, I’d be dead—and so, I suspect, would you.”
“They really wanted to kill us all,” she said, as if it were still very hard for her to comprehend.
“Only some of them—and only because they didn’t understand,” I told her, hoping that it was the truth. “None of us understood, not eve
n Hemans, Rawlingford and Bradby, although they’d had longer to think about it than anybody else. None of us really understood what it meant to be human, because we’d never had to explore the limits of the argument before—and none of us understood what scope there was for us to be more than human. We simply didn’t realize how easy it is to be creative, once you have the basic stock of protein-producing genes — and protogenes—to work with. Maybe we should have, given what we knew about the diversity of Earthly species and the unreliability of mutation as a means of change, but we didn’t. We needed a lesson to bring it home to us. How does it feel to be accepted as human just as the species is becoming obsolete?”
“My children will have the same chances as anyone else’s,” she pointed out. I wasn’t so sure about that. She was now as human as anyone else, in law as well as in fact, but there were an awful lot of people who hadn’t yet conceded the point. My children, on the other hand, really would have opportunities of which I had never dreamed ten years before; the people who wanted to reserve the privileges of creativity to imaginary gods wouldn’t be able to stop me making sure of that.
“I was sorry to hear about Hemans,” I said. Hemans had been taken out by a sniper eight months before. I had no reason to think that he and Alice were particularly close, but it seemed only polite to offer my condolences.
“Me too,” she said. “It always upsets me to hear about my friends being shot.”
“What happened at the manor really wasn’t a conspiracy,” I told her, although I’d never been entirely sure. “It was a genuine mistake. It’s in the nature of Armed Response Units that they sometimes make mistakes, especially when they’re working in the dark.”
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