Designer Genes: Tales of the Biotech Revolution

by Brian Stableford

  When Sybil’s mother finally spoke again, her tone was very different. “Mind you,” she said, with a deep sigh, “it’s going to be hell on earth arranging the funeral.”

  * * * *

  “Arranging funerals,” Sybil told Gwenan, while they sat beside the lake watching Gwenan’s great-great-great-great-grandfather swim, “is hell on earth.”

  “Do you think he misses her?” Gwenan asked, staring at he tiny head bobbing in the water. “He doesn’t seem to.”

  “Plenty of other pebbles on the beach,” Sybil observed, indulging her new-found delight in cynicism. “According to psychologists, they don’t form any personal attachments once they’re past three hundred, and they’re pretty fickle even before that, when adulthood is decaying into second childhood. According to the best estimates, even the most intense adult bonds rarely last more than twenty or twenty-five years. We’re only human, after all—not like swans, which mate for life.”

  “I’m not fickle,” Gwenan said.

  Only because you haven’t got the urge yet, Sybil, thought—but there were more important things than that to talk about. “Hell on earth,” she repeated, insistently.

  “Why?” Gwenan asked, obligingly. “You only have to dig a hole in the garden and put the casket in. It’s easy.”

  “That’s easy enough,” Sybil said, carefully duplicating one of her mother’s finest sighs. “The problems start with figuring out how to notify all the interested parties, and getting some response, and finding somewhere for them all to stay…it’s a matter of simple arithmetic, you see.”

  “No, I don’t,” Gwenan said.

  Gwenan’s great-great-great-great-grandfather attempted to climb up on a lily-pad that couldn’t possibly support his weight, and splashed back into the water in a most ungainly fashion, giggling all the while.

  “Look at it this way,” Sybil said, glad that all her scrupulous calculations weren’t going to go to waste. Everybody has two parents, even if they only live with one. Every parent has two parents, and every grandparent has two, and so on. That means, when you work it back, that everybody has sixty-four great-great-great-great-grandparents.”

  “Sixty-four’s not so many,” Gwenan objected. “Anyway, most of yours will be dead already, and whoever’s looking after the rest probably won’t even know that they’re distantly related to your great-great-great-great-grandmother.”

  “That’s not the point,” said Sybil, with a sigh. “The point is that it works the other way around too. Nowadays, of course, hardly anybody has more than one child, but back in great-great-great-great-grandmother’s day no one knew how overcrowded the world would eventually become, because it was much more common for people to die at a hundred or a hundred and fifty, even leaving wars and such out of account. People sometimes had four or five children, and two was utterly commonplace. The problem, you see, isn’t counting up my great-great-great-great-grandparents—it’s counting up great-great-great-great-grandmother’s six generations of descendants. Not easy. Then you have to try to find them all. Some of them are on the far side of the world, some on Mars, some in the Lagrange colonies.”

  “That’s no problem,” said Gwenan, scornfully. “They’re hardly likely to take an interplanetary trip just to go to a funeral.”

  “But they all have to be told,” Sybil said, impatiently. “And they all want to be there in electronic spirit if not in the flesh. It’s a difficult and time-consuming, believe me.”

  “You don’t have to do it,” Gwenan pointed out, determined not to pander to Sybil’s imaginary martyrdom.

  “We all have to pull together at a time like this,” Sybil said, darkly, quoting her mother word for word. “Everybody has to do their bit.”

  Gwenan’s great-great-great-great-grandpa was now trying to pluck one of the huge golden water-lilies, and failing miserably. He flopped and floundered amid the floating vegetation, scaring the moorhens, gabbling on and on whenever he could get his head above water. When he was an adult, Sybil thought, he must have been exceedingly fond of the sound of his own voice.

  Gwenan changed tack. “I suppose,” she said, ruminatively, “that you could get another one. If you have sixty-four great-great-great-great-grandparents, and even more great-great-great-grandparents, you could take in one of the others instead. You’ve got the attic all fixed up, haven’t you? Everything ready and waiting.”

  “Get another one!” Sybil echoed, distastefully. “We’re not talking about pets you know. Ancients are people. Our attic was great-great-great-great-grandma’s home.”

  “I bet whoever’s got the others would be only too pleased to let you have one,” Gwenan said, sarcastically. “My Mum’s always trying to get rid of him, but everyone who might be able to take him keeps right on telling her how good it is for a little girl my age to have an ancient for company. Company! I’d rather have my great-great-great-grandma from Birmingham—at least she can still talk a bit of sense, even if she doesn’t say much—and at least she’s three-quarters my size. I’m twice as tall as he is, and he never says anything meaningful, even though he hardly ever shuts up for more than five minutes at a time.”

  “Size isn’t important,” Sybil said, mechanically. “Anyway, he won’t get any smaller now.”

  “He might,” Gwenan objected.

  “No, he won’t,” Sybil insisted. “People can’t keep on shrinking forever. After a certain point the organs won’t work any more because they don’t have enough cells to do all the different jobs that cells have to do to keep the organs working.” Sybil felt that she might have phrased this explanation a little better, but she hadn’t quite understood the educational holovid from which she’d plucked the pearl of wisdom. She figured, though, that Gwenan—who was at least three stages behind in her schoolwork, because she got bored too easily when she was alone with a keyboard and screen—wouldn’t be able to challenge her.

  “He might not get any smaller,” Gwenan said, “but I’m still getting bigger. Either way, we grow apart. What they say about second childhood and the last age of innocence is all rubbish. Children don’t have anything in common with ancients—not really. It’s all just an excuse, to make us look after them.”

  Gwenan’s great-great-great-great-grandfather was climbing out of the water now, rubbing himself dry before putting his clothes back on. He looked completely done in.

  It’s a wonder more of them don’t drown, Sybil thought. “I suppose you’d rather be living in the bad old days,” she said aloud, in a mock-adult tone, “when nobody lived past a hundred and everybody got diseases and cancers and things.”

  “Yes I would,” said Gwenan, unequivocally. “What’s the point of living to be four hundred if you end up like that?”

  Gwenan’s great-great-great-great-grandpa was having trouble putting his pants on. Although he remembered well enough what he had to do, his fingers had lost so much of their dexterity that it wasn’t easy for him to go through the motions, especially when he was cold and tired.

  “There’s no point complaining about it,” Sybil told her friend, dutifully suppressing the pang of sympathy she felt, out of respect for great-great-great-great-grandmother’s memory. “It’s just the way things are. No matter how clever the doctors are at clearing cells that don’t work out of the body, so they don’t get in the way, they can’t put a stop to all the ways in which we get older. It’s something to do with the stuff in our genes having to be copied over and over again. No matter what the doctors do, mistakes still happen and always will. I read somewhere that we begin to die before we’re even born, and that there’s no way round it, even though the genetic engineers have finally stretched the length of our lives to the true limit.”

  “That’s silly,” Gwenan complained. “You must have got it wrong. It’s no use pretending to be so clever. You might have a good memory, but you don’t have a clue what most of it means.”

  “I’m beginning to understand,” Sybil countered, defensively.

  She realiz
ed, as she said it, that it was true. She was beginning to understand the mysteries of life and death. The tragedy of great-great-great-great-grandma’s death had served to hasten the onset of that understanding.

  While Gwenan went to help her great-great-great-great-grandfather finish dressing, and to do what she could to soothe his irritable frustration, Sybil murmured, “Hell on earth” yet again—but she didn’t really mean it.

  * * * *

  In the event, the funeral went very smoothly. It was so interesting that Sybil would have said that she’d enjoyed it, except that funerals weren’t the kind of thing you were supposed to enjoy.

  With a little help from Sybil, her mother had managed to locate sixty-five of the seventy-two living descendants her great-great-great-great-grandmother had turned out to have. Seventeen were ancients themselves, too old to make any kind of response on their own account, and six were children—but five of the ancients and two of the children were brought to the funeral by their guardians. Twenty-one of the other forty-nine were off-planet and a further thirteen thought that it was too far to come, so there were only fifteen real family guests, plus seven extras. A dozen neighbors, plus assorted ancients and Gwenan, made up the company.

  Aunt Genista was a great help with the organization of the meal, where almost everybody ate too much, and accepted all the credit fulsomely, but Sybil knew that her mother had done all the really difficult work, doggedly and methodically. It wasn’t just that she had pulled a representative sample of great-great-great-great-grandmother’s descendants together for the day, but that she had taken the trouble to make sure that all her family knew what had happened. It was only at times like these, Sybil realized, that the widely-scattered individuals descended from a particular ancient could have any sense of connection, of relatedness, and of the true working of the great mechanical wheel of existence.

  One of the children was a boy in his twenties who thought of himself as an almost-adult and was far too grand to talk to an eleven-year-old like Sybil, but the other was a nine-year-old boy named Jacob who thought it quite pleasant to have a distant cousin. Sybil knew that she and Jacob would probably never meet again as children, and might be entirely different people by the time another funeral brought them together, but she also knew that they would remember one another then, and in the meantime would be in some small sense part of one another.

  While the messages of condolence from non-attenders were being played on the holovid, Sybil, Gwenan, and Jacob huddled together in a corner so that they could exchange unobtrusive whispers.

  “When I’m thirty,” Jacob told them, “I’m going to join the space service. I’m going out to the moons of Saturn.”

  “Why Saturn?” Gwenan asked.

  “Because it’s got better rings,” he explained. “There aren’t any ancients out there, you know. It’s an adult’s world.”

  “Actually,” Sybil told him, “it’s an AI’s world. People are a tiny minority—even fabers. You’ll have to be somatically modified, you know, if you want to be a real spaceman. You need four arms to work in low gravity.”

  “Titan’s got gravity,” Jacob informed her. “It’s okay to have legs on Titan. What are you going to be?”

  “Lots of things,” Sybil told him, loftily. “Lots of different things. To start with, though, I want to be an engineer. A human engineer, I think.”

  “Making fabers?” Jacob asked, exposing the limitations of his imagination.

  “Making new people,” Sybil replied, haughtily. “Better people.”

  “I don’t know what I want to do,” Gwenan confessed. “It’s difficult to think that far ahead, when there’s so much to learn. But I don’t want to work at a screen. I want to use my arms and legs as well as my eyes and fingers.”

  When the messages had all been displayed, everybody went out into the garden, to the side of the grave. There were no other graves in the garden; Sybil’s mother hadn’t been living in the house very long before Sybil was born, and great-great-great-great-grandmother was the only ancient who’d ever lived in it.

  Sybil’s mother made quite a long speech, going through the various phases of great-great-great-great-grandmother’s life—all the things she’d done and places she’d been—but the task of saying the final few words had been delegated to Sybil. Sybil had worked hard on her speech, knowing that it was an unparalleled opportunity to impress a whole company of adults with her intelligence and maturity. She knew that she could be the star of the ceremony if she were clever enough, and that she might thus be able to erase the lurking suspicion that it had been her fault that great-great-great-great-grandmother had been killed.

  “I’m sorry that great-great-great-great-grandmother died while I’m only eleven,” she said, doing her level best to sound sincere. “It would have been nice to look after her for a little bit longer. I’ll miss her, because she was such a happy person. I know people say it’s easy to be happy when you’re an ancient, because people shed their worries along with their defective cells, but I don’t think it’s as simple as that. I think being happy is a habit like all the other habits that keep people going when they’re very old, and I think it’s difficult to be happy, even if you’re an ancient, if you didn’t get the habit while you were an adult. I don’t know for sure, but I think maybe it’s not so easy to be happy when you’re an adult, if you haven’t been able to learn it when you’re a child, and maybe it’s not so easy to learn it when you’re a child, if you don’t have a happy ancient to show you how. I’m glad I had a happy ancient to show me how, just for a little while.”

  Everyone applauded. Sybil knew that the applause was a ritual, just like her speech—she had said what she was supposed to say, the way the turning wheel of life demanded; it was all performance, all programming—but that didn’t mean that the applause was fake, or that what she’d said wasn’t true. She thought that she’d done a good job, and given great-great-great-great-grandma a proper send-off, and that was only right, given that she had been looking after great-great-great-great-grandma when the robotruck killed her.

  * * * *

  Afterwards, when she thought everyone else had gone inside, Sybil went back to the grave, and looked down at the little mound of earth.

  “Three hundred and seventy-six years,” she whispered to herself. “Three hundred and seventy-six years.” It was a lot. The day before, she had counted all the way from one, just so that she’d really know how many it was. “It’s a big wheel that takes so long to turn.”

  She turned around abruptly as she heard a noise behind her, wondering if she’d been overheard, but it was all right. It was only Gwenan’s great-great-great-great-grandfather, all by himself for once. He barely glanced at Sybil as he walked past her, and went to stand at the edge of the grave, looking down. The expression on his tiny face—far tinier than a baby’s—was quite unreadable, but he wasn’t muttering away the way he usually did, and his silence seemed appropriately solemn.

  Sybil knew that the old man couldn’t possibly understand what had happened. He couldn’t even begin to understand the idea of death, and probably had no memory at all of her great-great-great-great-grandmother—but something had brought him here anyway, and something made him pause where he was, uncertainly staring infinity in the face.

  Within the slowly-dying pattern of his habits, Sybil thought, the vestiges of a fuller and better humanity must still be lurking. Was the sadness of his unaccustomed silence the ghost of love, or grief, or just that particular and peculiar helplessness in the face of the inevitable that people never quite overcame?

  After a minute had passed, Sybil reached out and took him by the hand. He didn’t resist.

  “Come on,” she said, solicitously. “We’d better go back inside, before you catch a chill.”

  SNOWBALL IN HELL

  From the very beginning I had a niggling feeling that the operation was going to go wrong, but I put it down to nerves. Scientific advisors to the Home Office rarely get a chance t
o take part in Special Branch operations, and I always knew that it would be my first and last opportunity to be part of a real Boy’s Own Adventure.

  I calmed my anxieties by telling myself that the police must know what they were doing. The plan looked so neat and tidy when it was laid out on the map with colored dots: blue for the lower ranks, red for the Armed Response Unit, green for the likes of yours truly, and black for the senior Special Branch officers who were supervising and coordinating the whole thing. We deeply resented the fact that the reports from the surveillance team had been carefully censored, according to the sacred principle of NEED TO KNOW, but there seemed to be no obvious reason to suppose that the raid itself wouldn’t go like clockwork.

  “But what are they actually supposed to have done, exactly?” one of my juniors was reckless enough to ask.

  “If we knew exactly,” came the inevitable withering reply, “we wouldn’t need to include you in the operation, would we?”

  I could tell from the reports we had been allowed to see that the so-called investigation into the experiments at Hollinghurst Manor had been a committee product, and that no one had ever had a clear idea exactly what was going on. Warrants for surveillance had been obtained on the grounds that the Branch’s GE-Crime Unit had “compelling reasons” to suspect that Doctors Hemans, Rawlingford, and Bradby were using “human genetic material” in the creation of “transgenic animals,” but it was mostly speculation. What they really had to go on was gossip and rumor, and the rumors in question seemed to me to be suspiciously akin to the urban legends that had sprung up everywhere since the tabloids’ yuck factor campaign had finally forced the government to pass stringent laws controlling the uses of genetic engineering and to set up the GE-Crime Unit to enforce them. Once it existed, the Unit had to do something to justify its budget, and its senior staff obviously reckoned that whatever was going on at Hollinghurst Manor had to be yucky enough to allow them to get that invaluable first goal on the great score sheet.