The Race

by Nina Allan

“Was I a lost thing?”

  “A lost idiot, more like.” I snatched the pillow from beneath his head and began beating him with it. He grabbed both my wrists and rolled on top of me and a moment later we were making love again. This time we were both more confident and it was better.

  “Seriously though, Jen,” he said later. “You’re artistic – really talented, I reckon. You should give that some thought.”

  It’s strange. If a teacher told me that I’d have run a mile, not because I didn’t like what they said but because it would have scared me. The idea of someone thinking I had a gift for something then looking on while I cocked things up, I suppose. That. But having Em say it was different. I knew he meant what he said, that he was serious, but I also knew he didn’t expect me to perform for him, that we’d stay friends whether I turned out to be good at anything or not.

  If it hadn’t been for Em, I might have sailed on and on doing nothing. Doing nothing until the sun exploded and we were all toast.

  I owe Em everything, I reckon. He woke me up.

  Em and I became an item after that. We didn’t make a big thing of it – we were spending so much time together anyway that apart from us having sex our lives carried on pretty much as usual. Only instead of going off to college and becoming a rocket scientist like he wanted to, Em stayed in Sapphire and did accountancy training. He set himself up as a freelance, and was soon making a lot of money. Most people would have said he’d done very well for himself, but I knew it was not the life he had once dreamed of.

  He stayed for me, after all. And I could never bring myself to tell him to go.

  We lived together for a while, but it didn’t work out. I don’t know why, not fully, only that it was my fault, not his. I was afraid to risk my feelings, I guess – afraid to love someone so much that it would hurt me, hurt me badly, if it ended. I think now that one of the main reasons I started my affair with Ali Kuzman was so Em would feel he had to move out – it was the only way I could think of to tell him to go. I know that sounds ridiculous, but I think it’s so, even though I was in love with Ali, for a time anyway, far more than I wanted to be. Enough to think I was going to lose it when he went back to Pia.

  I don’t need to tell you who picked up the pieces from that shitty episode.

  When Em packed up his apartment and left town it was a total sideswipe. I thought it was me, that he’d finally got sick of being pissed about, but when I asked him what was going on, all he would say was that he’d had a disagreement with Del.

  “But you’re always rowing with Del, Em, what’s the big deal?”

  “There’s no deal. I need a change from this place, that’s all.”

  I sensed there was more to it, but Em wouldn’t spill and after a while I stopped pestering him. I knew he must have his reasons, but I didn’t like it. Em and I had never had secrets before, not even during the Ali episode, and all I could think was that Del was up to something, something dodgy that Em wanted out of. I wouldn’t have put anything past my brother.

  I still feel guilty sometimes. I tell myself that if only I’d tried harder to find out what going on I could have talked to Del, persuaded him, opened his eyes to the risks. That’s all bollocks though, isn’t it? Apart from anything else, since when has my brother Yellow ever listened to anyone?

  He wouldn’t have heard a word I said. He’d have told me to fuck off and mind my own business.

  Knowing that should make me feel better, but it doesn’t.

  ~*~

  To understand how Sapphire works, you have to understand the smartdogs, and to understand the smartdogs you have to understand the panic that was first caused by them.

  The engineered greyhounds now known as smartdogs were the product of illegal experiments in stem cell research. The experiments originally took place at what was then a large governmental agricultural centre called Romney Heights. The nearest town of any real size was of course Sapphire, which was why most of the support workers – the lab staff and cleaning staff and technicians – came from here. The security was pretty tight – anyone found to be in breach of the lab’s confidentiality agreement was fired on the spot – but the pay was good, and once you have a job like that you do your best to hang on to it. For the most part people were more than happy to stick to the rules.

  There’s a lot of hard science stuff I don’t understand fully, but what it comes down to is that the government boffins at Romney Heights took eggs from a canine ovary and replaced some of the canine genetic material with human DNA. They fertilized those doctored eggs with dog sperm, and let them go on to become living dog embryos. Those embryos were then implanted back into the wombs of female greyhounds.

  The scientists used greyhounds for their experiments because they are docile and easy to train. They are also naturally hardy and highly intelligent.

  The process took a lot longer than I’m making out here, but the puppies born to those greyhound mothers were actually part human. I don’t mean they were deformed, or monsters or anything – they looked no different from any normal puppies. But they were part human nonetheless, and their intelligence – what the scientists call their cognitive ability – was more highly advanced and adaptable than in ordinary dogs.

  And of course those scientists were very excited, because nothing remotely like this had been achieved before. They hailed it as a radical breakthrough in biotechnical engineering.

  It was Del who told me what the Romney Heights project was really about.

  “They wanted to create a new kind of weapon,” he said. “An animal primed with explosives that could be trained to penetrate a military or industrial stronghold and blow it up.”

  “But wouldn’t the dogs be blown up as well?” I said. The idea horrified me.

  “Of course they would, numbskull, sky high. Blown to bloody smithereens and fragments of gut. But dogs aren’t the same as people, are they? Even dogs with human DNA aren’t the same as people. You can always breed more, blow those up too if you want to. None of your conscientious objections about blowing up dogs. That was the entire point.”

  I could see more or less at once what he was getting at. By using smartdogs you could get into places and take risks you couldn’t consider with a human strike force. And the smartdogs, like all dogs, would be happy to do exactly what they were told.

  They did more experiments, experiments that involved both a smartdog and a human trainer having a bio-computer chip implanted into their brain. The chip was programmed with code from the dog’s DNA, and facilitated a mental or empathic link between the dog and the human. Del says it’s impossible to describe in layman’s terms what it does, exactly, but basically it’s as if the smartdog and its human trainer can hear each other’s thoughts.

  The scientists believed that the implants would change everything, which they did, only not in the way the scientists were expecting. The more the implant technology developed, the stronger the symbiosis between the dog and its runner. In symbiosis they formed a kind of mutual self-dependency – the dogs cared about their runners, sometimes enough to die for them, and vice versa. That wasn’t what the Romney Heights scientists had been looking for at all.

  Some of the scientists refused to continue with the use of smartdogs in the weapons programme. They insisted that the dogs’ enhanced intelligence made it immoral for humans to exploit them in any manner that would bring them to harm. One of the scientists, Klara Hoogstraaten, even argued that all smartdogs should be granted rights under the Hague Convention.

  When the lab management tried to have Klara Hoogstraaten sacked, she leaked the entire story to the tabloid press.

  There was a public outcry. Some people were just concerned about the dogs being mistreated, others went one stage further and claimed that this was science run riot, that the smartdogs were the first step in a master plan to replace human manual workers with a slave race of engineered animals.

  Most didn’t give a damn either way. But the general shit-stirring made a lot of
stink and in the end Romney Heights was forced to close down.

  After that, implant surgery for smartdog runners became a legal grey area. Officially it was banned, in practice it just went underground. They closed down Romney Heights because they had to – after the Hoogstraaten business kicked off they had to be seen to do something. But it wasn’t long before bootleg clinics started springing up, and when they did the politicos just sat back and pretended not to notice. The government were desperate to have the gene-splicing research continue, and here was a way of doing that, but with no risk to themselves – foolproof. They didn’t have to commit any money to the project, because the clinics were making money, and if anything went wrong they could always scapegoat the greedy doctors.

  They still had to be careful, though. Any adverse publicity surrounding one of the clinics and their whole cosy little system might implode, which is why a surgery that is theoretically outlawed is now probably the most rigidly controlled procedure in the country.

  They can’t afford to have anyone die on them, and that’s why they turned down Del for his operation.

  ~*~

  There was something wrong with his brain, some congenital defect. A tiny flaw the doctors felt certain would make no difference to his normal lifespan but that could make his brain go phut if he had the implant.

  The doctors said that even then it would be unlikely, but as the surgery wasn’t essential they were unwilling to take the risk.

  Non-essential to whom, though? It’s true I’m no medic, but I understood my brother well enough to know that the doctors might have killed him anyway, through disappointment.

  All his initial check-ups were fine. The MRI was the final hurdle, just a formality really. No one expected to find anything. Del came back from that appointment in a black rage, not swearing and yelling the way he did when he was drunk or had got into a fight with someone, but clenched with anger, rigid with it, as if he were carrying the force of a bomb blast locked inside him.

  He couldn’t talk, or wouldn’t. It was scary. Not even Limlasker would go near him, and I think that was what finally brought him out of it, having Lim avoid him like that. In the end the anger seeped away like floodwater down a storm drain and there was just this kid, lying face down on the bed with his dog beside him.

  The next morning he seemed more together.

  “Stupid cut-price morons,” he said. “There are other places.”

  I didn’t see what good it would do. I didn’t dare say anything, but I was worried that if he went to another clinic the results would come back the same. As it turned out he didn’t even get as far as being tested. The clinics all share their records via a central database, so the new docs knew what the old docs had found the second they punched Del’s name into their computer.

  ~*~

  Del set his heart on becoming a runner from the age of eight. It was the only thing he ever wanted, the one ideal he found to be beautiful and set his store by. When the doctors turned him down, he felt as if his life was over. He was a half-thing, a cripple, a drone.

  There was also the question of Limlasker. Limlasker was an expensive dog. You could argue that he wasn’t a dog at all, but a financial investment. Gra Rayner only let Del pick out a puppy in the first place because everyone took it for granted that Del and Lim would go on to compete in major races. For Gra Rayner, not running Lim would be like chucking thousands of shillings straight in the bin. If Del couldn’t run Limlasker, he should find someone who could, and the sooner the better.

  Gra came good, though. I suppose in many respects Del was just as much a son in his eyes as Em was. He offered Del a job straight away as his trainee business manager, and said that Del could keep Limlasker, that he should consider the dog as a down-payment on his starting salary, and that he wouldn’t be looking for anyone to take him over.

  “I know you’ll do me proud, you always have. And you and Lim, you’re a team. That’s not up for grabs.”

  I think it saved Del’s sanity, that reassurance that Limlasker would not be taken away from him. He accepted Gra’s job offer, and a year later he moved out of the house and into the leaky old barn that came with the building lot Gra had sold him just down the road from the yard.

  The more time passed, the more Del gradually came to accept the life he had. The job at the yard helped. He liked the power, definitely. He liked moving money around and organizing schedules and bossing the runners. He was good at what he did, and he enjoyed that, too. When Del cared about something he liked to be best at it, and I reckon Gra knew that. I think that was he was counting on.

  The biggest shock was Del’s decision to give up Limlasker. It happened about a year after he started managing the yard for real, and shortly after he got together with Claudia.

  “He should run,” Del said to Gra. “The dog’s in his prime. It’s what he was born for.”

  Limlasker was almost four years old then. Smartdogs tend to have a longer racing life than most ordinary greyhounds, because the psychological component of their ability runs at a higher percentage than in non-engineered dogs. Gra was unsure at first. He was concerned that the natural bond between Del and Lim might interfere with the dog’s ability to form a connection with an implanted runner, but Del brushed his objections aside.

  “It’s what he wants,” Del said. “He’ll win for you, big time. Trust me.”

  Del was right, as he usually was when it came to the dogs. He even found a runner for Lim himself, an unsmiling, rather taciturn girl he found at the track called Tash Oni. Tash was Nigerian, as tall as Del and just as skinny. For a while I felt convinced that Del was involved with Tash, that he was shagging her on the quiet or at least thinking about it, but it turned out that Tash was already living with someone, a news journalist called Brit Engstrom.

  When Tash went in to have her operation, Del was there to collect her five hours later. He saw her home, and when after two weeks the doctors pronounced her fit, he took Limlasker to her himself, to live with her permanently.

  Not many people could have done that. My brother has many faults but nobody could complain that he lacks courage.

  ~*~

  When Del told me he was going to be a father I could barely believe it. What surprised me even more was that he seemed to be pleased. Del’s always been a loner at heart. I never thought he’d settle down with anyone, least of all Claudia Day, with her soft voice and shy smile and fragile nerves. She wasn’t even interested in the dogs, not particularly. I didn’t think their relationship would last five minutes, to be honest. When Del insisted I go down the pub with him and then announced that Claudia was pregnant I almost choked on my beer.

  He turned out to be good at it, too – being a dad, I mean. He didn’t just care about Lumey, he cared for her too, changing her nappies and bathing her, schlepping her off to the yard as if he couldn’t bear to be parted from her. Having a child seemed to reveal those aspects of Del’s nature that had been kept secret from the world until then, buried beneath his anger like grass under snow.

  It sounds corny to say this, but for me Del’s love for Lumey was proof that such a thing as love truly existed and was not just some fable.

  Del even chose her name – Luz, which means light. Claudia chose her middle name, Maree.

  When Lumey was first born she seemed perfectly normal. It was true that she was slightly underweight, but the hospital said she would soon catch up and was fine otherwise.

  They put Claudia in a side room for a couple of hours so they could monitor her blood pressure and then sent her home.

  “They’re afraid someone might steal my baby,” Claudia whispered when I went in to visit. “That’s why they’re sending me home early. They think it’s safer.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Cee,” Del said. “They want the bed, that’s all.”

  He looked at me like: should I be worried? and I shook my head. New mums get all kinds of weird ideas, or at least that’s what I’d heard, and Claudia was hardly the most l
ogical person at the best of times. She seemed much better once she was out of the hospital, calmer than when she was pregnant actually, at least for a while. Then, just after Lumey turned one, she started coming out with a lot of stuff about how there was something not right, that her daughter was not developing as she should.

  “She never speaks,” she said. “I know it’s too early for her to be using actual words yet – I’m not stupid. But you must have noticed how silent she is – she hardly ever cries, even. You can’t tell me that’s supposed to be normal for a one-year-old child.”

  “She seems perfectly all right to me,” I said. “I’m sure she’s fine. All children are different, aren’t they?” I told her Del hadn’t spoken a word until he was three, which was true, actually, I knew because Mum told me. Del was born surly, I reckon. Anyway, Claudia seemed reassured, then a week later she was off again. I hadn’t a clue what Del thought, until he turned up at my place one evening and started interrogating me about Claudia.

  “Has Cee been saying anything to you about Lumey?”

  “Just that she’s a bit quiet,” I said. “I told her it was nothing to worry about.”

  “She’s driving me crazy with this shit. Cee, I mean, not Lumey.” He sat down on the floor, leaning back against the wall and closing his eyes. He looked so young, doing that, so much like Del the way he was before our mother left.

  “Tell me the truth, Jen,” he said. “Do you honestly think that Lumey is okay?”

  “Yes,” I said. I looked him in the eye as I said it, which was my way of telling him I was saying what I really believed, straight up and no bullshit. When the chips are down he’s still my brother. “She’s different from other kids, that’s all. Lumey’s special.”

  “Special? That’s what doctors say when they’re trying to tell you your kid’s a retard.” His hands tensed themselves into fists. I could see he was trying not to lose his temper, but I could also see it was not me he was angry with but himself – for asking me in the first place, for making him voice the fears that were in his mind.