Designer Genes: Tales of the Biotech Revolution

by Brian Stableford

  “Like I said before,” May opined, setting the Petri dish down again, “it’s Cloudcuckooland. You have to play this cutting-out and counting game every third day, you say? Are you crazy, or what? I mean, I know it doesn’t play havoc with your social life because I know you haven’t got a social life, but hasn’t it occurred to you that some day soon you’re going to want a little more than all this? Some day, Benjy, you’re going to have to get out there and start doing all the things that people do, like drinking and popping and gambling and seducing members of the opposite sex. Some day fairly soon—and I know it’s a hellish thought, but there it is—you’re going to have to begin the process of turning into something like your father.”

  Benjy knew that he had to refrain from making the obvious reply, so he refrained from saying anything at all. He just looked at her, reproachfully. He was surprised when she turned away, because she didn’t usually give way. Was it possible that she was blushing?

  “What is it?” he asked, reaching out to take her arm.

  She knocked his hand away. “Don’t touch me!” she hissed, meeting his eyes again, but with a very different expression, whose implication filled him with embarrassment.

  “I didn’t mean…,” he protested, but trailed off.

  “Not just like your father,” she said, in a malevolent whisper. “You might aim a little higher than that!”

  “I only…,” he began, but stopped again, because he knew in his heart of hearts that he did want to look at her, and to touch her, and that his dreams were not entirely innocent, and that the corollaries of his knowledge that she was not, after all, his real sister were, however natural, not at all comfortable.

  He had only wanted to help, to be reassuring, to be generous…but he couldn’t honestly claim that his motives were entirely pure.

  “It’s okay, May,” he said, when he was sure that he could finish a whole sentence. “It’ll all work out. Dad and Monica are just going through a bad patch. It’ll all settle down.” His hands were balled into fists, pressing into his thighs. She, meanwhile, had reached up to fondle her bruised cheeks again.

  “Crazy bitch has no right,” she said. “Next time, I’ll let her have it right back again. Why the fuck should I have to take the blame?”

  Three were tears in the corners of her eyes again. Benjy’s fists unwound, and he reached out with both arms—not insistently, but invitingly, stopping half way.

  “Please,” he said. “Don’t be.…”

  She wouldn’t accept the invitation. She wouldn’t let him hold her. She pulled away, retreating towards the door—but this time, she was apologetic.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I’ll be fine. Just…get back to your bugs. Do what you have to do. Don’t worry about me.” There was no bitterness left in her voice now. She had said what she had come to say, accomplished whatever it was she had set out to do. Benjy watched her until the door closed behind her.

  All was silence down below; peace had descended yet again upon the household.

  * * * *

  When he was done with the magnifier, Benjy swung it back into its resting-position. Then he picked up the three Petri dishes and carried them to the desk, where the assay kit sat beside the dead computer screen. He picked up the keyboard and deposited it on top of the VDU to give himself more room in which to work. Then he set about preparing the chromatograms, with practiced efficiency.

  While he worked he couldn’t help remembering what May had said way back at Christmas-time about the relevance of Gause’s Axiom to the ecoarena of marriage, and wondering how the added complexity of a second generation complicated the issue. Mutaclay motiles didn’t yet have that kind of problem; all the lines so far evolved reproduced by binary fission—multiplying by division, as the old joke had it—and hadn’t yet produced, anywhere in the world, a progressive mutant capable of anything resembling sexual intercourse.

  Someday, of course, it was bound to come, but even with the aid of the meddling attentions of hundreds of thousands of conscientious God-experimenters these things took time.

  When he was done with the preparations, he set the chromatograms up to develop. Then he took the Petri-dishes downstairs and put them in the freezer. An hour at low temperature was enough to remove the semblance of life from the mutaclay and reduce it to mere raw material: “soil” that could be “fed” to the primary producers in Tank One and thus recycled.

  Benjy was careful never to waste any of the artificial organic substance, but he knew how necessary it was to build death into the eternal process, because he understood well enough how vital it was to the business of change and progress. He knew from the literature and from experience that if you tried to keep everything in a tank alive, the growing strain on the ultimate limiting factor—living space—would eventually precipitate disaster. The key to long-term stability was control, and one of the most significant modes of control was induced mortality.

  “But human nature isn’t like that,” he told himself, as he crept back up the stairs. “Human nature is better than that; it doesn’t need to break things in order to sustain them.”

  It was such a neat turn of phrase that he wanted to preserve it, and to share it, but he knew better than to knock on May’s door—or his father’s—without a much better excuse than that, and there was no way he could sneak it into the e-mail report updating his data. If you wanted to stay on the official register you had to be very careful to stick to the facts.

  Sticking to the facts was the hallmark of the true scientist, the modus operandi of the scrupulous engineer of artificial life. Benjy wanted to be reckoned a true scientist. He was determined to stick to the facts, just as hard as he could.

  3. August 2021

  Benjy stared at the graph displayed on the computer screen, wondering whether it meant failure or an altogether unexpected form of success. The assistant professor from the university who’d come over in July to check his experimental set-up had not been very forthcoming on the subject, but the data hadn’t been anywhere near as clear at that point in time.

  “Wait and see how it develops,” she’d said. “It could be just statistical scatter.”

  It wasn’t statistical scatter. The latest paragene assay was quite unambiguous; one of his two original populations was undergoing a speciation split. But if he now had three species with the same ecological requirements in the same ecoarena, how did that relate to Gause’s Axiom? If one of them became extinct, would that count as a confirmation, or would two have to die out to sustain the rule? Or did the fact that speciation was happening mean that the two descendant species didn’t have the same ecological requirements? How was speciation happening, given that there were no strong boundaries between the different thermal regimes in the tank?

  He didn’t know the answers to any of those questions. He didn’t even know how to go about trying to find answers. Nor were those the only questions relevant to the progress of the experiment. Given that the mutation rates of both motile species had been hovering close to the upper limit of horotelic mode for some little while, the speciation event could easily throw the whole system into tachytelic mode. On the other hand, it might actually bring about a relative stabilization: a relaxation towards the norm. Which would actually happen, and what would the implications be, in either case?

  Benjy knew that if he called the Mutaclay Helpline they’d only tell him to carry on filing his results. This wasn’t the kind of problem the program was set up to deal with. The assistant professor, Doctor Shane, might be able to come up with a few reassuring noises, if she were in the mood, but when she’d visited she’d made it abundantly clear that checking up on amateurs working from home was only one step up from grading freshman papers, just something she had to do as part of her departmental workload. She’d given him a number where he could reach her, but she hadn’t looked as if she expected him to use it.

  “Well, hell,” he murmured, finally, “science would be a dull business if nothing unexpected eve
r happened. Things come right out of the blue sometimes. That’s life.” All the same, he thought, it would be a bit of a bummer if his first major enterprise came apart after two hundred and twenty days. Two hundred and twenty days was a big slice out of the life of someone who was only pushing sixteen. He couldn’t relish the thought of having to start all over again.

  * * * *

  Benjy was startled out of his long reverie by a polite knock on his door.

  “Yeah?” he called, expecting that it would be May summoning him downstairs to join the others and make his all-too-modest contribution to the pretence that all was well in Happyfamilyland—but it wasn’t May. When the door opened it was Monica who came in. That was highly unusual; ever since he’d begged her to stop coming in to “tidy up,” she’d hardly set foot in the room.

  Considering that it was after seven in the evening she seemed surprisingly sober.

  “Hello Benjy,” she said, demurely. “May I sit down?”

  “Sure,” he said, getting up to offer her his one and only chair. She ignored the gesture and sat down on the bed, so he turned the chair to face her and sat down on it again.

  “I think we need to have a serious talk,” she said, ominously.

  “I’ve nearly finished,” he told her. “I’ve just got to file the results of today’s count and I’ll be down. I didn’t think we’d be eating so early. I’m not exactly late.”

  “It’s about your father, Benjy,” she said, very earnestly. “He’s not home yet—but he’s not at work, and the dispatcher says that he didn’t go out on any jobs this afternoon. I think you’re old enough now to know what that implies, Benjy.”

  Benjy felt that his jaw was hanging loose, and shut his mouth rather too abruptly. His stepmother crossed and uncrossed her legs uneasily, and put on an ingratiating smile. It looked slightly grotesque, but it was not ineffective. Was it normal, Benjy wondered, to be so hyped up by testosterone that even your own stepmother came to seem provocative?

  “I’ve been a good mother to you, Benjy,” Monica said, still speaking in that strange ultra-careful way, “haven’t I?”

  “Yeah, sure,” he said, hoping he didn’t sound as dubious as he felt.

  “You’ve been happy here, haven’t you? You and May get along so well. I mean, this has always been a real family, hasn’t it? This is everything you could want in a home.”

  “Sure,” he said, again, hoping his tone didn’t sound too lukewarm.

  “I want you to know that we’re all proud of you,” she went on, her voice now showing just the faintest trace of an alcoholic slur. “We’re all real pleased about the way you’ve applied yourself to this clay stuff. It’s not like it’s a career or anything, but it shows you have real sticking power, and that’s an important thing to have. If you’re to succeed in life, Benjy, you have to have sticking power. I only wish Jim knew that as well as you do. I only wish you could make him see it as well as you do. Because if your father had sticking power, everything would be all right Benjy. Everything.”

  Benjy had the uncomfortable feeling that he knew exactly what response his father would make to the news that Monica wished he had more sticking power. Everything would be all right, Monica, he’d say, if only you had a little less sticking power—if only you didn’t stick so fucking hard to your booze and your pills and your obsessions. If only you could loosen up, Monica, and give me a bit of space, everything would be A-fucking-one. Benjy was all too well aware that a very different response was required from him.

  “Maybe something unexpected came up,” Benjy said, unenthusiastically. “Dad does odd jobs for friends sometimes—he even does jobs for cash without telling the boss. The dispatcher wouldn’t know about that—but maybe he has his suspicions, and maybe that’s why he tried to give you a wrong.…”

  “That’s very loyal of you, Benjy,” said Monica, punctiliously, “but it isn’t true. He’s got another woman, Benjy. He’s screwing around. And I think you ought to be aware, Benjy, that it’s eating me up inside. It’s chewing us all up…the whole family. It’s destroying us: our life, our home, our future. I’ve tried everything I know to get him to stop, to make him see sense, but he just won’t see sense. And I’ve got May to think of, Benjy.… I’ve got her life, and her future to think of.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Benjy, because he didn’t know what else to say. Did she actually expect him to volunteer to take his father to one side and have a man-to-man chat with him? Did she really expect Benjy to be able to put Jim Stephens straight on matters of duty and obligation? Could she possibly expect that his father would take the least little bit of notice of him, even if he tried?

  Alas, life just wasn’t that simple.

  “That stuff’s very delicate, isn’t it?” she said, nodding her head in the direction of the four terraria. “It’s wonderful, really, they way it runs off the household electricity supply, just like all the appliances.”

  “It doesn’t use the current directly,” he said, uneasily. “The electricity just heats up the elements inside the blocks. Mutaclay primary producers are thermosynthetic, you see, not photosynthetic the way plants are. They can use the radiant heat from the pinlamps, but they grow much better on a heated substrate—the ceramic blocks making up the mountain in Tank Four function just like the hob on the stove, really.”

  “You couldn’t just load them into a truck and move them someplace else, could you?” she said, pretending—but not very hard—to be making innocent conversation. “They’d all die, wouldn’t they?”

  He realized, a little belatedly, what she was getting at. “I don’t think Dad wants to move out,” he said, warily. “He hasn’t said anything to me about it. I don’t think you need to worry about that.”

  She seemed to be fighting a temptation to grin wolfishly. “That’s not the relevant issue,” she said. “The relevant issue is that his screwing around is making things intolerable for May and for me, and if it doesn’t stop…well, the option of remaining here might cease to be open to him. How long has that precious experiment of yours been running now? Ever since Christmas, right? It really means something to you, doesn’t it?” She was still trying to speak conversationally, but not succeeding. So it’s blackmail and not plaintive persuasion after all, he thought.

  Paradoxically, blackmail seemed easier to take aboard than cajoling and wheedling. He no longer felt that he was being invited to betray some essential loyalty. He tried to put on his best expression of child-like innocence, intending to retaliate in kind.

  “Dad always said that the house was half ours and half yours,” he said, wonderingly. “Could you really just throw us out?” He was assuming, of course, that the answer was no.

  “Nobody wants to throw anybody out, Benjy,” she said. “That’s not what we want at all. What we want—what we all want, Benjy—is for life to be pleasant and harmonious. We want to be a family, Benjy, pulling together the way families do. And we all have to do our bit to help, don’t we? Nobody can just sit on the sidelines, staying out of it. Everybody has to join in. That’s what life is all about: pulling together, joining in, helping out. That’s what families are for.”

  The door opened again, and Benjy’s father walked in. He barely glanced at Benjy before turning to stare at Monica. “What the hell is going on here?” he asked.

  “Benjy and I were talking,” said Monica. “Is there something wrong with that?”

  “What about?” His tone was aggressive, but not quite angry.

  “About his experiment. You ought to take more interest in his experiment, Jim. That Shane woman from the university who came out last month was very impressed with it, wasn’t she, Benjy?”

  “I know all about his experiment,” Benjy’s father lied. “Who was it bought him the mutaclay and all those goddam tanks? I’ve given him every encouragement, haven’t I?”

  “All right,” said Monica, standing up and moving past him to the door. “There’s no need to get upset. We were only talking. I am the boy’s
mother, after all.”

  Benjy could see that it was on the tip of his father’s tongue to issue a denial of the last point, and was strangely grateful to see the impulse strangled.

  It was not until the door had closed and the sound of Monica’s footsteps had receded that Benjy’s father turned around to face him.

  “So,” he said, with an evident effort. “How’s the experiment coming along?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Benjy, glad not to have been asked a more difficult question. “Something kind of unexpected cropped up, but in a way that might be good. It confuses the original plan, but it might make the whole thing more interesting. You see, one of the two motile species is becoming two species—maybe because the distribution of the competitor has somehow divided its members into two almost-distinct groups.…” He trailed off as it became obvious that his father wasn’t really listening.

  “You know,” said Jim Stephens, “that woman is really letting herself go. Do you remember how pretty she used to be. It’s not just the tranks and the booze…hell, it’s an attitude of mind. I’m afraid she’s not much of a mother to you, Ben—not any more.” His father had taken to calling him “Ben” lately, or even “Benboy,” as if to emphasize the fact that he was growing up. According to his father’s way of thinking, although he had never actually said so, “Benjy” was evidently not a name befitting a grown man.

  “She’s okay,” Benjy said, defensively.

  “And that daughter of hers is growing into a real bitch. Monica ought to set a better example, she really ought.”

  “May’s okay,” said Benjy. “She’s just.…”

  “A prick-teasing bitch is what she is,” his father said, firmly, “And there ain’t no justice in that.” He grinned at his own feeble play on words, and looked hard at Benjy, expecting an echo. Benjy managed a faint smile.

  “Don’t get any ideas, though,” his father went on. “She’s too much for a little guy like you. She’d eat you up and spit you out. Find something easier for practice. Got to get out there, though—won’t find nothing sitting on your butt in here. It’s high summer, for Christ’s sake. Forget the sludge-tanks for a while—run around a little; play some ball. Too many kids sit home looking at those goddam screens and playing with those goddam keyboards all day long. You gotta get out there.”