by Allyson Bird
In the time following her stay with Aianat, Frieda thought about her own future. She decided not to return to the city of her birth—she was done with Salford for a time—but would alternate between staying with Aianat in the yurt above Tian Chi to learn more about her ways and also get occasional work in the museum at Urumchi. She hoped there would be a place for her there.
Some weeks later, in the museum, she was showing English tourists a mummy that was being carefully put back in its case after restoration work.
“Here we have Cherchen Man. You will note the Caucasian features, light brown hair, and his height. Even in death the body is in reasonable condition. Near where we found him in the burial site there were structures that the Chinese archaeologists find puzzling—standing stones, Celtic figures, and odd icons of unusual females. Also, one of the mummies was found wearing a pointed conical hat.”
As Frieda spoke she sensed Galyma struggling to wake. He could see little through dried up eyes. She stared down at him and smiled before the curators placed the glass cover over his body.
Galyma could just see out of the corner of his eye the mummified claw of his right hand. He tried to move his limbs, but they were frozen. There was nothing but an eternity of tortured memory ahead of him. Frieda knew this—she wondered how often he’d try to scream.
In A Pig’s Ear
“I have almost achieved perfection you see, of a divine creature that is pure, harmonious, absolutely incapable of any malice. And if in my tinkering I have fallen short of the human form by the snout, claw or hoof, it really is of no great importance. I am closer than you could possibly imagine sir.”From The Island of Dr Moreau by kind permission of A. P. Watt, Ltd., on behalf of The Literary Executors of the Estate of H. G. Wells.
Mack looked bad, really bad, but then he was dead. Whoever had done his make-up had never been make-up artist to the stars. Far from it; he didn’t suit that shade of lipstick. I had adored Mack but he had never let me get too close. It was odd that since his death the obsession that brought me to biology brought me now to him. I had my eye on Mack’s DNA. I was considering the possibilities at his funeral—irreverent or what?—I just couldn’t help myself. One minute I was remembering the second biggest wave we rode together and then the big one, that had traded-in his surfboard for a coffin lid.
I considered the second of my two projects. Mack’s DNA was too good to let go—far too good. He was much too beautiful, even in death, to go to waste.
There was no one there in front of me except the corpse; the funeral director had let me in for a private viewing. Perhaps he thought I was Mack’s girl. I had to get on with it before anyone else could see. I needed hair, fingernail or finger if I could get it. No—someone would notice that. His family was too sharp. DNA from inside his mouth. No—I would probably break his jaw. A few days since his death, surely something would be usable. He had long hair. I would need twenty strands with follicles still attached, or perhaps I could use the flesh from behind the ear lobe. I would have to hurry as someone might come in. I felt like a body snatcher but, after all, Mack wasn’t going to need any of himself—anymore.
I opened my white, snowdrop leather bag, took out a scalpel, yanked at a lock of hair to cut into the skin then rearranged his long hair a little. I was anxious about being discovered and in my carelessness I cut my own finger, and sucked at it whilst fumbling with the clasp of my bag. The skin, with hair attached, was in that same hand and I shivered when I realised what I was doing. Blood dripped onto the white leather.
Clutching my bag, which now contained a piece of Mack, I attended the service and sat behind his mother. I felt really bad about what I had done. His mother was crying and her face was puffy and pale. Mack’s father fared little better, for it looked as if he was trying to keep his emotions under control and the effort was killing him. I left before the end, before they sang All Things Bright and Beautiful. I had always hated that hymn. Christ! I was a scientist but funerals made my flesh crawl.
I was now working on three projects. My main line of research was concerned with residual DNA. I experimented with pig DNA and there was also my little fertility programme. It was old-hat to grow a pig’s ear. I was a little more adventurous and wanted to see if I could grow a wing from bone marrow stem cells onto bioabsorbable polymers. I never got tired of trying to grow them into different shapes and coming up with ever more complex designs. Last time they came out like bat’s wings and this time I was aiming for a structure of wing like the extinct, gliding reptile, the pterosaur. That would take more time. Some experts said that birds evolved from little feathered dinosaurs but I had always quite liked the hypothesis that birds diverged from reptiles before dinosaurs, and that mammals had evolved from reptiles with the propensity for genetic change that could lead to flight. A whole new take on pigs can fly—perhaps they could, given the right wings, hollow bones and a more developed muscle structure.
My name is Stella Kiefer, B.S.C., Biosciences at Edinburgh University. Alumnus of the year 2025. Commanding cellular structures and messing about with the genome, human and otherwise. Edinburgh. Famous for its medical school, the ghost of Dirty Mary, and the selling of bodies in Surgeon’s Square.
For the next two years I worked hard on all my projects and my obsession with Mack’s DNA grew. I never so much as looked at another man. I just wasn’t interested in anything but my work. Only on New Year’s Eve 2027 did I celebrate with my colleagues.
We went to La Mancha, the Spanish restaurant just off Fifth Avenue, not far from the Rockefeller Plaza and the beautiful statue of Prometheus I had always liked. Prometheus—who gave mankind fire and as a punishment was chained to a crag in the Caucasus Mountains. Every morning an eagle would devour his liver and every night it would grow back again to repeat the cycle the next day. I’m good at growing things too.
And grow things I did, way beyond my guidelines, for I had been playing about with more than pig’s wings. I decided I wanted Mack’s child, and so combined my DNA with his. I followed an immaculate methodology and the whole process had been fairly easy. I called in a few favours (okay, I had worked outside the law once or twice but I couldn’t see the problem with that), and the embryo settled down nicely within my womb.
I had my own midwife for a home delivery. It was just fine. Everything ran according to plan. I had the latest pain blockers and thought how lucky I was to live in the decade I did.
The five-hour labour was easy and I caught up with one film I had been dying to watch for ages, a remake of The Island of Doctor Moreau. At the end of the film baby practically shot out of me into the midwife’s hands. Her face turned pale when she examined him and she quickly wrapped him in a pretty cerise blanket, handing him to me just before the afterbirth—spilled out.
I passed an hour holding the perfect, delicate pink baby in my arms, trying hard to think of a suitable name. It was then that it struck me that I should examine him myself. I laid him on his back in my lap, counted his fingers and toes and then examined his face closely to see if he had a harelip. No problems there. Carefully I turned him onto his front and then my stomach churned as the realisation hit me that my methodology had not been perfect after all. This beautiful boy, this sum total of my involvement with Mack, had a tail. It was so astonishingly assimilated into his lower back. It was then that the midwife pointed out that he had two tiny lumps, one under each shoulder blade.
Over the next few months my son seemed to grow at the same rate as any other baby. His piggy tail would be sorted out just after his first birthday. Helen, the midwife who delivered him, had become a good friend. In fact she had become his nanny, whilst I brought home the bacon—if you’ll forgive the pun. It was Helen who, on numerous occasions, had to be stopped from calling him Piglet and I was rather miffed with her when I found her reading him the story of “The Three Little Pigs”—six times in a row to his human squeals of delight. I let these small annoyances go by with little more than a look and a word aside.
&n
bsp; The first five years were great, and Ricky, as I called him, was having a very happy childhood. He had birthday parties and was friends with the other children of the staff at Mount Joy Research Laboratory where I worked. The New England air suited us all fine and we were very content there.
It was just after Ricky’s fifth birthday that things started to go wrong. The small lumps under each shoulder blade started to grow larger and all investigations into what they were resulted in a brick wall. There seemed to be some sort of shell just beneath his skin, impervious to X– ray, MRI, or any modern method of examination. I needed time to think and the pressure of everyday work was getting to me. Helen was devoted to Ricky and agreed to my plan. The search was on to find some place to go; I needed to keep my son away from prying eyes in case he began to show any other signs of genetic diversity.
I remembered the film, The Island of Dr Moreau and accepted a position as a researcher in a leper colony. Leprosy was one of the diseases that still had not been cured. In the last century breakthroughs in science had even cured the dapsone-resistant strain but the disease had mutated further and now a cure seemed as far away as ever. I applied and received a letter confirming my post on the research into the new strain of leprosy. The leper colony was on Saint Elver’s Island on the banks of the Amazon.
The next five years were not so happy; Ricky started asking me all sorts of questions that I could not answer. The humps on his back grew larger. The leper colony was now his home. He did not remember the cool wind of a New England fall where the leaves cascaded into a hundred different shades of red, russet and brown. The malaria-ridden Amazon was the only home he would remember.
A boy called Neme, who had leprosy, became Ricky’s sole playmate. It was hard not to feel sorry for him, a young boy who should have grown up to be very handsome. Even with treatment he would soon go into decline like all the rest. Neme clung on to some hope that a cure might yet be found in time for him. Ricky was ten, Neme sixteen. What sorrow they would face if they had to go into the outside world now.
I spent hours going over the methodology that had brought Ricky into the world. I chastised myself that my protocols had been flawed. Day after day, I experimented with the pig DNA, alongside the procedures on the leprosy virus to try to understand both. Endless experimentation and disappointment, until the day came when Helen came crying into the laboratory bringing the two boys with her.
Ricky was in terrible pain. He stumbled in—collapsed into a heap, grasped at his back and screamed in agony. I had to steady my hand. It was trembling so much as I cut away his clothes and tried to stop the bleeding. The skin began ripping away from his back and the shell—the shell was cracking.
I had been dreading this. As the casing cracked first at one side and then the other, a huge mass of pink skin began to unfold and rise far above his shoulders. In an instant another appeared. Ricky stopped sobbing and tried to see over his shoulder at what had caused him so much pain. His words still echo in my ears.
“Mother, what have you done?”
He knew it was my fault years before I had the courage to explain. He had his father’s good looks, my need for science and the wings of a—well, a pig. Or, what a pig’s wings would look like if they had any.
Over the next few months he began to forgive me. I even saw a smile on his face as he glided like a flying squirrel from tall tree to tall tree. He would never fly as a bird does because his bones were too heavy and his muscles too weak. I doubted if we would ever leave our remote hiding place.
Everyone adored Ricky and in his late teens he fell in love with a girl called Annais whose leprosy was in remission, then Susie a nurse who did not object when he was attracted to Oli. Ricky rutted on a regular basis and took great pleasure in his conquests. However, I did not oppose the unions. Who was I to stand in the way of such youthful optimism when I had messed about with all that DNA? All the women were content, not a jealous one amongst the first six. Ricky had a natural talent for keeping them all happy. When the babies came along (usually within the first three months of conception), they were born with ready-made brothers and sisters—in litters of six, eight, and more, and all had the lumps that would develop into wings.
Even as I grew older, it never failed to amaze me how resistant to disease my grandchildren were. A snake had gotten into one litter and had bitten three of the babies before a cherubic sibling choked the snake in its chubby little fist. All three babies had a mild fever for a day or two but shrugged off the poison.
The Amazon canopy was Heaven-like, filled with these tiny winged angels that looked like Sistine Chapel cherubs, with their ruddy complexions and winning ways. I adored them all. They were perfect. Each generation developed their wings earlier, and the wing structure became stronger as they glided from branch to branch. It was not me that gave them the name Homo angelus—but it stuck.
In a few years we will be discovered and face extreme prejudice from the rest of the world. I have no doubts that gene dominance can ensure their place at the head of the evolutionary chain, and anyway, the romantic imagery of angels is embedded too firmly into the human psyche to resist. In generations to come—Homo sapiens will have been bred out and the prophetic imagery of the Italian artists will become a reality.
A Poison Tree
“I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end,
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.”
From A Poison Tree in The Poetical Works
of William Blake, edited by John Sampson.
1913 Oxford edition.
It was only for a weekend. A short, one hour trip into London, a taxi to the studio, an afternoon of listening to other people getting a little comfort and connection with their loved ones—dead although they were—and then back to a hotel overnight. What was wrong with that?
“But, I don’t believe in all that talk about the dead returning. I don’t believe in an afterlife. I don’t believe it one bit.” Jean fidgeted with her blonde hair, stared in the hall mirror and wondered why she looked so pale and thin. She was pleased to see that she had lost a lot of weight. Perhaps too much, she mused.
“Do it for me, Jean. I never ask you to do anything for me. I just don’t want to go alone. I really want to try and get in touch with Stephen.”
“Can’t you just go? If you want to so much just get on with it and go.”
Jean hadn’t liked Brenda’s husband, Stephen. She hadn’t liked him so much that she stole him away from Brenda and married him. Jean thought him an insipid man and uninspiring. But, it wasn’t so long ago that he had died, and amazingly enough, Brenda and Jean remained friends for all those years.
“I helped you when you needed help with your mother, couldn’t you just do this one thing?” Brenda implored.
It was true, Brenda had helped her that awful time when her mother died in the nursing home. Jean’s mother been left unattended in the day room and wanted to go to the toilet. As she made her way through the fire door she had leant against it. The safety lock released. The door sprang shut and trapped her fingers, almost severing one of them.
Even though Jean’s mother had been old and frail she had been given a general anaesthetic in an attempt to save her finger, it had not been amputated. The doctor felt he should try to preserve the old lady as she had lived to her ninety-second year. After the operation, Brenda helped Jean bring her mother back to the nursing home in a taxi. It was a cold day; Jean’s mother had only a thin jacket on. Brenda had taken off her own jumper, draped it over the frail old lady’s head and wrapped the arms around her neck. It looked like some handless, flat entity was pulling her away to some far off distant place. Of course, it had all been too much for Jean’s poor mother and she died a few weeks later after a series of debilitating strokes. Brenda had supported Jean and helped her through those difficult months.
Now Brenda wanted something in return.
Jean’s conscience was
awakened, just a little. After all, they had been friends for over twenty years. Brenda was a very forgiving but needy person and when Jean lashed out Brenda was always the first to make up, even though Jean had taken her husband away from her. Brenda was always the first to telephone and always the first to put disputes behind her—which meant she usually had to apologise for something that didn’t need an apology.
“All right, I’ll go but you can pay for the trip,” Jean relented.
Jean knew her friend didn’t have much money but it pleased her that Brenda should pay as she wanted to go to London so much. It is only fair, Jean thought; someone, other than she, always had to pay.
The studio where Calvin Caldwell played to packed audiences was full of widows and widowers. Like the offspring of a spider, there were dozens of them, mourners of the dead, wearing fixed, pained smiles and hints of jewellery here and there to distinguish them from one another.
Jean was uncharacteristically nervous there. She wore a grey skirt, which seemed a size bigger than when she had dressed that morning, and a low-cut red blouse. For a second, she wished that she hadn’t worn the red, for that colour’s symbolism wasn’t lost on her. Jean had always found it easy to move on and when her mother died she had moved on quickly enough. This audience hadn’t. Even before the recording some of them had their little initialled handkerchiefs out and were staring her down because she didn’t look right. She didn’t care too much about that.
“I’d like to come over to the people on this side…somewhere in the middle, about half way up.” Calvin waved his right hand in Jean’s direction and for a second his glance fell upon her. She quickly looked down at her hands clasped in her lap. She looked up again, and he fixed his puzzled gaze on hers. She was caught before she knew it and she found it easier to let him hold her than to break away.
