“I care,” Benjy protested, feebly. “I don’t want your mom to be unhappy any more than you do. I don’t want you to be unhappy.”
“I’m not unhappy,” May retorted, as if he’d accused her of something disgusting. “You think I give a shit whether they break up? I’ve been through it all before. It’s easy when you know how.”
Benjy had been through it all before too, but he didn’t remember much about it. He’d been six years old, so meek and mild that he just went where he was taken, did what he was told to do, and just waited to see what would happen. He could hardly remember what his mother had looked like. He hadn’t seen her in ten years; she never wrote to him or called, not even at Christmas. Five years had passed before his father had married Monica, but Monica had been straight out of one marriage and into the other, so May had been eleven and twelve while the turbulent change-over was transacted, and she remembered everything. She still got Christmas presents from her father, too—better presents than she got from Monica and Benjy’s dad, except perhaps for that first terrarium and the supply of mutaclay. Even then, she’d probably preferred the cheaper gift she got from her real father on the grounds that it wasn’t “educational.” May wasn’t a big fan of education.
“They won’t break up,” said Benjy, without much conviction. “Monica will forgive him, just like you said, and he’ll be sorry. He’ll try to make it up to her. It’ll be okay.”
“Oh sure,” said May, here voice dripping venomous scorn. “She’ll forgive him and he’ll be sorry…only they’ll both be pretending. Maybe he’ll dump the girlfriend, because he’s sick of her anyway, and play happy families for at least a fortnight before he makes some new connection…but then the pretence will wear thin, until it’s threadbare…and it’ll all flare up again. What’s that big word you’re always using that means things going down the toilet double quick? Tachytelic, right?”
“That’s not really what it means,” said Benjy, unable to resist the provocation. “It refers to any situation that encourages rapid natural selection. It doesn’t necessarily lead to ecocatastrophe and extinction. It’s just that.…”
“It’s just that poor bloody mutaclay, even with the help of little godlings like you, can’t ever seem to keep things going when that kind of crunch comes. Good thing, hey? If it could keep right on going, getting better and better every day in every way, it’d soon end up smarter than you are.”
Benjy was tempted to carry on trying to explain, but he knew how futile it would be. May didn’t want to understand; she just wanted an excuse to mock. As she was so fond of telling him, she was growing up, becoming an adult. She was learning the skills of adult discourse. Anyhow, he thought, at the metaphorical level what she’d said was probably more intelligent than she realized. There was a sense in which their parents’ marriage had moved from a horotelic to a tachytelic phase. It had become more and more unstable, more and more vulnerable to wayward changes in the social environment. Its daily routines had begun to mutate more rapidly. Was it, Benjy wondered, doomed to extinction?
Benjy silently considered the further implications of the metaphor, conscientiously reminding himself that he shouldn’t be tempted to read too much into it. Even straightforward comparisons between mutaclay’s artificial genetic systems and DNA could be misleading.
Conventional wisdom, Benjy knew—and his own experience had given him no reason to doubt it—held that populations of mutaclay organisms were easy to maintain indefinitely in tanks where the conditions remained absolutely stable. Such easily-maintained populations, however, inevitably slipped into bradytelic mode, with each species maintaining an optimum genome. In such conditions the mutation rate tended to decline to negligibility. It wasn’t nearly so easy to maintain mutaclay species—especially motiles—in conditions that varied, even when the variations were slow or cyclic. Although the matter was fiercely disputed by rival claimants, the world record for maintaining a mutaclay ecosystem in tachytelic mode was little more than a year: about four hundred generations. Such processes of rapid evolution had so far thrown up nothing more “advanced” than oversized spirilli. No mutaclay organism had yet contrived to invent cell membranes.
The great majority of DNA organisms, by contrast, had been forced to exist in tachytelic mode for hundreds of millions of years, and some of them had done very well out of it indeed. On the other hand, DNA species were said to be going extinct at the rate of several thousand a day, and the world was full of prophets who did not hesitate to declare that the turn of Homo sapiens would come within a few generations, long before that of the brown rat or the German cockroach. In the end, even DNA might be reduced all the way to the bacterial level…maybe even to the point that wild mutaclay might be able to give it a fight. Surely, Benny thought, human relationships behaved more like DNA than mutaclay—but what exactly did that imply about their resilience and mortality?
“It’ll be okay,” Benjy said, eventually, when May didn’t bother to supplement her acid observations with anything more substantial. “People can get along, if they only put their minds to it. They don’t really mean to hurt one another—Dad and Monica, I mean.”
“You really are wrapped up in cotton wool up here, aren’t you?” said May. “You really haven’t a clue what it’s all about. Why do you think they invented Christmas, hey? One lousy day out of three hundred and sixty-five when we’re supposed to try our level best to be nice to one another—and fail miserably every fucking time! Do you think we’d have to try so hard, if we didn’t really mean to hurt one another?”
Benjy winced. “I don’t…,” he began.
“No,” she countered, without even waiting for him to finish. “You’re too busy trying to prove Gause’s fucking axiom false to notice that other people even exist. Unfortunately, whatever mutaclay worms can do if you treat them right, men and women can’t co-exist for long in the kind of tank they call a marriage… and the sooner you figure out that those are the facts of real life the better. Not that I’ll be sorry to see the back of you, Benjy—next time, maybe I’ll get a brother with balls.”
As she delivered the last sentence, she turned on her heel and walked out. He didn’t know why; it certainly wasn’t fear of his being able to frame an adequately nasty reply. Maybe, he thought, she was trying to preventing his noticing that she had tears in the corners of her eyes. He felt an unexpected pang of affection for her, and wished that he could help.
Calmly and carefully, Benjy lifted the lid on to the new terrarium. Then he checked the electrical leads carrying the current that would warm the substrata from which the primary producers drew their energy-supply. Finally, he switched on the tiny pinpoint lamp that would keep one half of the mountain-slopes perpetually flooded with warm white light, while the other side was in shadow.
* * * *
When Benjy retired to his bed that night—by which time Jim Stephens had returned, the prophesied reconciliation had been effected according to schedule, and all seemed calm again—the little daystar set in the new terrarium seemed to shine uncannily bright in the near-darkness as it presided over the newborn world. It seemed to Benjy to be as full of promise as the star of Bethlehem.
“It’ll be okay,” he told himself, as he laid his head contentedly upon his pillow. “It’s all going to work.”
2. April 2021
Benjy drew the blade of the scalpel along the fourth side of the last of the squares that were scheduled for replacement, then laid the instrument aside. He used two sets of tweezers to worry the square loose from the underlying plastic. He lifted it very carefully, trying to keep the mat of mutaclay “vegetation” as flat as possible. The motiles tended to cling hard if disturbed, but he wanted to avoid the possibility of any falling back into the tank. The odd one or two wouldn’t make any real difference, but he took a perfectionist pride in his ability to manage the experimental procedure with maximum efficiency.
He laid the square in a Petri dish, and put the lid on before taking up the virgi
n square of primary producers that he’d taken from Tank One. He set the replacement patch in the bare space, matching the edges minutely so that they’d eventually knit together with the minimum of difficulty.
He had replaced the lid of the tank, and was just swinging the magnifying glass into place so that he could begin the preliminary eye-count of the motiles on the first of his samples, when the door of his room burst open. As it slammed shut again, the whole house seemed to vibrate with the impact.
“Don’t do that!” he complained, turning wrathfully around—but when he saw May’s face he bit his lip. It wasn’t just the tears—he was used to those. This time there was more: a split lip, angry red marks on the cheek, and a bluish bulge beneath the left eye that would surely turn black with time. He calculated that it must have taken at least three blows, one of them more solid than an open hand could readily have delivered. He felt ashamed of his own clinicality, and rose from his seat in order to go to her.
She sat down on his bed, drawing her legs up and huddling sideways against the wall. She glared at him as he came towards her, and he faltered. Within the last few months she seemed to have developed an aversion to his touch—an aversion that he found rather wounding, although they had never really been close in a physical sense. In the end, the hesitation stopped him in his tracks. He stepped backwards again and sat down on the chair, half-turning it so that it faced the bed instead of the desk. He felt even more ashamed of the warm glow of lust that lurked somewhere inside him than he had of his clinical analysis of the situation. Surely the sight of her injuries should make him feel protective, not sexy? What kind of person was he?
“Crazy bitch!” May spat the words out between half-strangled sobs. “Crazy fucking bitch!”
“What happened?” asked Benjy, only just stopping himself from adding the fateful words this time.
“As if it’s my fault!” The sense of injustice in her voice was so evidently real that Benjy had little doubt that for once it really hadn’t been May’s fault—whatever it was.
May rubbed her eyes, as if to squeeze the tear-ducts shut. Her knuckles came away stained with purple, leaving ugly streaks and blotches behind. She tested the tender swelling beneath her eye with the tips of her fingers, and they too came away stained. She cleaned them in perfunctory fashion by using the hem of her short black skirt as if it were a handkerchief. Benjy averted his eyes from the additional expanse of thigh exposed by the gesture. May was wearing tights patterned with a hologram design that made it look as if colored flowers were growing in her pale flesh.
“I’ll get a cloth or something from the bathroom,” Benjy said, leaping to his feet again.
“I don’t need…,” she said—but he was already moving to the door, and he had no intention of stopping. He wanted to do something, and if she wouldn’t let him cuddle her, he could at least help her clean up. Anyway, he thought, it would give her a chance to calm down, to pull herself together, to become slightly less troublesome to his eye and his restless mind.
* * * *
By the time Benjy came back into his room, carrying a hand towel whose corner he had carefully wetted with lukewarm water, May was sitting a little more comfortably. He handed the towel to her, and she used it with reasonable efficiency to clean up the mess around her eyes. When he reached out to take it back, intending to finish the job neatly, she wouldn’t let go of it. He went back to the chair again.
“It’s not my fault,” she said, in a low voice, which was almost steady. “Why does it always have to be my fault. He’s your father.”
“What did he do?” Benjy asked, innocently.
“Do? He didn’t do anything. D’you think I’d let him touch me? I’d take a fucking knife to him before I’d let him touch me. It’s not my fault. It’s nothing to do with how I dress or how I walk or how I smile. How can I help the way he looks at me, for Christ’s sake? Anyway, it’s not the way he looks at me that pisses her off—it’s the way he looks at her. Is that my fault? Is it?”
“No,” said Benjy, grateful that he wasn’t called upon to be anything but honest. “It’s not.” He was glad to be entirely on May’s side. Monica shouldn’t hit her, especially not for a reason like that.
It was true, he knew, that his father had begun to take more notice of May, and to look at her in a different way—he had made remarks to Benjy, sometimes accompanied by a coarse chuckle that Benjy found utterly distasteful—but that wasn’t May’s fault. As May said, it had nothing to do with the way she dressed or acted. It was just nature; human nature, his father would have said, though his father had an odd notion of “humanity.”
Benjy understood the situation well enough, in terms of evolutionary logic. When the females of a species reached childbearing age, they naturally became attractive to the males, who naturally found newly nubile individuals more attractive than those nearing the end of their reproductive usefulness. Humanity had nothing to do with it. If anything, humanity—meaning sentience and intelligence and the ability to place oneself imaginatively in the shoes of others—ought to be able to override such crude and basic impulses, elevating the demands of social obligation over the raw force of instinct. So Benjy thought, at any rate. On the other hand, though.…
“It’s not you she’s mad at,” Benjy told May, scrupulously. “It’s not even my father, really. She’s angry with herself.”
“Well I wish she’d hit herself, then! I wish she’d take a fucking overdose of those stupid pills she lives on, and let us all off the hook.”
May stood up and looked around. Having failed to find what she was looking for—a mirror, he guessed—she came over to the desk and leaned over, squinting at her reflection in the glass wall of Tank One. “Shit!” she murmured, prodding her swollen lip with a slender forefinger.
Benjy refrained from pointing out that Monica’s tranquilisers were genetically-engineered metaendorphin derivatives, so easily degradable that she could swallow a truckload without doing any serious damage to her liver or her kidneys. Their only unfortunate side-effects were reduced sensitivity to the body’s own inbuilt endorphins and a tendency to abrupt let-down effects, which—as in Monica’s case—could result in exaggerated mood-swings.
“I really don’t think he is having an affair, you know,” Benjy said. “I think he’s telling the truth when he says it’s over.”
She rounded on him. “Did you emigrate to Cloudcuckooland or were you drafted?” she asked, snidely. Her hand had fallen on one of the Petri dishes, and she picked it up, peering at the square section of mutaclay inside. Then she looked at the carefully-drawn map of Tank Four’s terrain that was presently spread out on the lid of Tank Three, and studied the intricate map of squares that he’d inscribed upon it. “What’re you doing now?” she asked, contemptuously. “Playing war games with your little worms?”
“Not exactly,” he said, gravely. “I’m testing Gause’s Axiom. If I’d simply dropped two populations of motiles into the tank and left them to it, one or other would be bound to drive the other to extinction when the overall population pressure became too great.
“Because there aren’t any mutaclay predators yet, there’s nothing to keep the motile populations in check unless the experimenter intervenes by imposing an external death-rate—but the death-rate has to be in some sense arbitrary, because it mustn’t be done in such a way as to produce the desired result by design. So, every seventy-two hours I remove three randomly-selected squares of motile-infested primary producers and replace them with squares taken from the breeder tank. Sometimes it takes out more of one of the competing species, sometimes the other, but in the long term the harvesting regime should allow both populations to equilibrate, more-or-less. If I’m right about the likely outcome, that is. It’ll be interesting to see, though, what happens to the mutation rates—in the pps as well as the motiles. I think it’s a horotely-type situation, so they should stay pretty close to normal; if they go tachytelic, of course, the whole operation could crash.”
/> “And what do you do with these?” she asked, holding up the Petri dish.
“I do a population count on each one. By eye initially, although that’s rather crude and inaccurate even though the motile species I’m using are distinctive enough to permit it. To check the data I use the assay kit to compare the paragene clusters of the various species. That way I can track the mutation rates as well as the raw numbers. I file all the data with Mutaclay, Inc. and the State University—it’s an officially registered experiment.”
“Since when?”
“Since just after Christmas—I sent the details by e-mail a few days after I first set it up. They passed the design at the end of January and I started filing the results as soon as the motiles went in.”
“Benjy, you’re fifteen years old. How the hell do you get to run an officially registered experiment?”
“Anybody can register their work,” he told her, proudly. “There aren’t any age limits. As long as the design is properly vetted and the data gets filed regularly, the experiment stays on the register. They can send people round to check up, of course—I guess they do that whenever an experiment begins to produce interesting results, although they probably have routine inspections too. The monthly bulletins often have pictures of kids younger than me who’ve generated significant new strains or whatever. I haven’t had any official reaction since I started sending stuff in, but it’s a long-term experiment and it’s early days yet. If it’s still going strong in June or July, it might attract some attention.”
“I see,” said May, sceptically. “Mutaclay, Inc. markets their gunk as an educational toy, and all of a sudden they have a huge coast-to-coast r-and-d division. Very clever. Do they pay these cute kids who develop significant new strains?”
“Of course not. This isn’t technology, May, it’s life. It’s not a business, it’s creation: the ultimate art.”
Designer Genes: Tales of the Biotech Revolution Page 14
