Designer Genes: Tales of the Biotech Revolution

by Brian Stableford

  Melanie and I got married in February ‘50, and Frankie was thoroughly convincing in the role of best man. By this time he was embarked upon a new and atypically healthy relationship of his own with Melanie’s cousin and fellow food technologist, Suzanne. The honeymoon was a sheer delight, and fate smiled on us long enough to let all but a day of it elapse before we were urgently called home.

  We were informed by the policeman who summoned us that Frankie had been waylaid while exiting Suzanne’s apartment by a vengeful and crazy Janis, who was drugged up to the eyeballs on seriously dodgy blood derived from pigs illegally imported from China. She had shot him four times.

  Fortunately, although Janis had aimed at Frankie’s heart, the weight of her unwieldy weapon had dragged the trajectories of the bullets downwards, and all four had ended up in his abdomen. The doctors told me that when he had been stretchered in, he had told them not to bother to patch up the holes this time, so that the next lot could just pass right on through.

  The bills were horrendous, but we could afford them—and we still had plenty of change to spare. When Frankie came out of the tank, he was still in a passably good mood.

  “You see, Jeff,” he said to me, as if he were proving a point, “it wasn’t my criminal tendencies that kept getting me into trouble after all. It’s just that I’m the kind of guy who gets shot up occasionally, whether he’s going straight or not.”

  Suzanne wasn’t impressed by this display of bravado. “Frank,” she said, with the air of a person who meant exactly what she said, “I forbid you to do this again—ever.”

  “Okay, Suze” he said, with surprising docility. “You’re the boss.”

  “No,” I reminded him, gently. “I’m the boss. But if you can possibly help it, I’d rather this was the last time. There are only so many times you can regrow a kidney and still produce workmanlike piss.”

  “No problem,” he said. “If the worst comes to the worst I’ll hire myself out as a bioreactor in order to get them re-enhanced.”

  “No you won’t,” said Suzanne. I realized then that Mum would have been proud of Suzanne, and proud of me for making Suzanne possible. The government had helped, of course, but the ultimate credit for Frankie’s reformation was down to me.

  Frankie, sensing that Suzanne had the measure of him, and that it was more accurate than he’d ever have liked to admit, switched to safer ground. “How’s business?” he asked.

  “Pretty good,” I assured him, gladly. “The vampire fad has begun to fade out, but the medical side of the blood business is steady enough. Melanie and Suzanne have some really hot ideas for a new set of hairlines and the techs at the supply company have decided that there might be something useful to be made out of those cute little curly tails pigs have, so there’s no danger of things becoming boring. There’ll be plenty to occupy your mind when you’re fit again, and plenty to do to get your muscles back in shape. You’d better recover quickly, though—we can’t get by without you for much longer.”

  “Thanks, bro,” he said, with enough genuine feeling to warm the cockles of a younger brother’s heart and allow a dutiful mother to rest easy in her eternal sleep. “It’s good to know that some things never change.”

  THE HOUSE OF MOURNING

  Anna stared at her thin face in the mirror, wondering where the substance had gone and why the color had vanished from the little that remained. Her eyes had so little blue left in them that they were as grey as her hair. She understood what had become of her well enough to know that a disruption of the chemistry of the brain was bound to affect the body as profoundly as the mind, but the sight of her image in a soul-stealing glass reawakened more atavistic notions. It was as if her dangerous madness had wrought a magical corruption of her flesh.

  Perhaps, she thought, it was hazardous for such as she to look into mirrors; the confrontation might be capable of precipitating a crisis of confidence and a subsequent relapse into delirium. Facing up to the phantoms of the past was, however, the order of the day. With infinite patience she began to apply her make-up, determined that she would look alive, whatever her natural condition.

  By the time she had finished, her hair was tinted gold, her cheeks delicately pink, and her lips fulsomely red—but her eyes still had the dubious transparency of raindrops on a window-pane.

  Isabel was late, as usual. Anna was forced to pace up and down in the hallway, under the watchful eyes of the receptionist and the ward-sister. Fortunately, she was in the habit of dressing in black for everyday purposes, so her outfit attracted no particular attention.

  The ward-sister was there because there was a ritual to be observed. Anna couldn’t just walk out of the hospital, even though she was classed as a voluntary patient. She had to be handed over in a formal fashion, to signify that responsibility was being officially transferred from one sister to another. Not that Isabel really was her sister in a biological sense, any more than the ward-sister was; she and Anna had simply been parts of the same arbitrarily-constructed foster-family. They were not alike in any way at all.

  When Isabel finally arrived, in a rush, with all her generous flesh and hectic color, the ceremony began.

  “You must remember that this is Anna’s first day out,” the ward-sister said to Isabel. “We don’t anticipate any problems, but you must make sure that she takes her medication at the appointed times. If she shows signs of distress, you should bring her back here as soon as possible. This emergency number will connect you with a doctor immediately.”

  Isabel stared at the number scrawled on the card as though it were the track of some mysterious bird of ill-omen.

  To Anna, the sister said only: “Be good.” Not “Have a nice time” or even “Take it easy,” but simply “Be good.” It’s better to be beautiful than to be good, Anna thought, but it’s better to be good than to be ugly. She had been beautiful once, and more than beautiful—so much more as to be far beyond the reach of Saint Oscar’s ancient wisdom, but now there was nothing left to her except to be good, because her more-than-beauty had gone very, very bad.

  Isabel, of course, had no idea that Anna was on her way to a funeral, and that her role was merely to provide a convenient avenue of escape. Anna waited until the car was a good two miles away from the hospital before she broached the subject. “Can you drop me at the nearest tube station,” she said, lightly, “and can you let me have some money?”

  “Don’t be silly,” Isabel said. “We’re going home.”

  Isabel meant her own home, where she lived with a husband and two children, paying solemn lip-service to the social ideal. Anna had seen Isabel’s husband three or four times, but only in the distance. He was probably one of those visitors’ partners whose supportive resolution failed at the threshold of Bedlam—many in-laws preferred to wait in the grounds while their better halves attended to the moral duty of comforting their afflicted kin—but it was possible that Isabel had forbidden him to come in and be properly introduced. Few women relished the prospect of introducing their husbands to whores, even whores who happened to be their sisters—legalistically speaking—and whose sexual charms had been obliterated in no uncertain terms.

  “No we’re not,” Anna said. “That’s just something I had to tell the doctors, so they’d let me out. If I’d told them the truth, they’d have stopped me, one way or another.”

  “What truth?” Isabel wanted to know. “What on earth are you talking about? I’ll have you know that I’ve gone to a lot of trouble over this. You heard what the nurse said. I’m responsible for you.”

  “You won’t be doing anything illegal,” Anna told her. “I’ll get back on time, and nobody will be any the wiser. Even if I didn’t go back, nobody would blame you. I’m the crazy one, remember. How much cash can you let me have?”

  “I don’t have any cash,” Isabel told her, as she drove resolutely past Clapham South tube station without even hesitating. “I don’t carry cash. Nobody does. It’s not necessary any more.”

  That
was a half-truth, at best. At the Licensed House where Anna had worked, the clients had used their smartcards, and the transactions had been electronically laundered so that no dirty linen would be exposed to prying wives or the Inland Revenue. The streetwalkers who haunted the Euroterminal and the Bull Ring had smartcard processors too, but their laundering facilities were as dodgy as their augmentations, and most of their clients paid in cash. It was all a matter of safety play.

  “You can still get cash, can’t you?” Anna said, innocently. “Walls still have holes, just like spoiled whores. Don’t worry about missing Clapham South. Vauxhall will be fine.”

  “Just where the hell do you think you’re going, Anna?” Isabel demanded, hotly. “Just what the hell do you think you’re going to do?” That was Isabel all over: repetition and resentment, with plenty of hell thrown in.

  “There’s something I need to do,” Anna said, unhelpfully. She had no intention of spelling it out. Isabel would protest violently just as surely as the doctors would have done. Unlike the doctors, though, Isabel was easy to manipulate. Isabel had always been scared of Anna, even though she had always been two years older, two inches taller, and two stones heavier. Now that Anna was a shadow of her former self, of course, it was more like four stones—but that only increased Anna’s advantage.

  “I won’t do it,” Isabel said, although the hopelessness of her insistence was already evident.

  “I can do anything I like,” Anna said, reflectively. “It’s one of the perks of being mad and bad—you can do anything you like, and nobody’s surprised. I can’t be punished, because there’s nothing they can take away that I haven’t already lost. I could do with a hundred pounds, but fifty might do in a pinch. I have to have cash, you see, because people with scrambled brain chemistry aren’t allowed smartcards. Fortunately, there’ll always be cash.”

  She knew that there always would be cash, despite the fact that it was technically redundant. As long as there were outposts of the black economy that weren’t geared up for laundering, there’d be cash—and everybody in the world was engaged in the black economy in some fashion, even if it was only token tax-dodging.

  “I don’t like being used,” Isabel said, frostily. “I agreed to take you out for the day because you asked me to, and because the doctors thought it would be a good idea—a significant step on the way to rehabilitation. I won’t stand for it, Anna. It’s not fair.”

  Since she was six years old, Isabel had been complaining that “it” wasn’t fair. She had never quite grasped the fact that there was no earthly reason for expecting that anything should be.

  “There’s bound to be a cash-dispenser at Vauxhall,” Anna said. “Fifty would probably do it, if that’s all you can spare. I’ve lost track of inflation since they put me in the loony bin, but money can’t have lost that much value in three years.”

  Isabel braked and pulled in to the side of the road. She was the kind of person who couldn’t drive and have a fit at the same time. Anna could tell that her sister was upset because she’d stopped on a double yellow line; normally, she’d have looked for a proper parking-place.

  “What the hell is this about, Anna?” Isabel demanded. “Exactly what have you got me into? If you’re using me as an alibi while you abscond from the hospital, I’ve a right to know.”

  “I’ll be back on time,” Anna assured her. “No one will ever know, except your husband and children. They’ll probably be disappointed that they aren’t going to meet your mad, bad, and dangerous-to-know foster-sister, but they’ll get over it. You can bring them in one day next week, to make up for it. I’ll be as nice as pie, psychochemistry permitting.”

  “What is this all about?” Isabel repeated, pronouncing each word with leaden emphasis, as if to imply that Anna was only ignoring her because she was too stupid to know what the question was.

  “There’s something I have to do,” Anna said, nobly refraining from adopting the same tone. “It won’t take long. If you won’t give me the fifty pounds, can you at least let me have enough for a Travelcard. I have to go all the way across town to zone four.”

  Anna knew as soon as she’d said it that it was a mistake. It gave Isabel a way out. She should have hammered on and on about the fifty until she got it. In the old days, she’d never have settled for a penny less than she’d actually wanted, whatever kind of client she was dealing with.

  Isabel reached into her purse and pull a handful of coins out of its dusty depths. “Here,” she said, as if to say, It’s all you’re worth, you stupid, fouled-up slut. “If you want to go, go—to hell if you want to—but if this goes wrong, just don’t try to blame me. And take your medication.” Long before she arrived at the last sentence, she had reached across Anna to open the passenger door, so that she could mark her final full stop with one of those dismissive pushes that Anna remembered all too well.

  Anna submitted to the push and got out of the car, even though she was only vaguely aware of where she was. She waited until Isabel had driven off before she asked for directions to Clapham Common. It was a long way, but not too far to walk, even for someone in her debilitated condition. The value of the coins was just adequate to buy a Travelcard—which was perhaps as well, given that she’d have to make her own way back into town after the funeral.

  She wondered if things might have been different if she’d had a real sister, but she decided that they probably wouldn’t have been.

  * * * *

  It wasn’t difficult to find the church from Pinner tube station. It was larger than she had expected. She was glad that the funeral announcement in the Guardian had given both time and place; so many didn’t, because the people who placed them were afraid of being burgled while they were at the ceremony. She waited until everyone else was inside before she sidled in, but she didn’t escape notice. Several people turned around, and whispers were exchanged.

  When the service was over and the pall-bearers carried the coffin out, Anna moved behind a pillar, but the people who filed out behind the dead man knew perfectly well that she was there. She didn’t go to the graveside; she stayed in the shadow of an old horse chestnut tree, watching from thirty yards away. She couldn’t hear what the vicar was saying, but that didn’t matter. She could have improvised her own service if she’d wanted to, complete with appropriate psalms. Every bedside locker on the ward had a Bible in the top drawer, and boredom had made her dip into hers more frequently than she liked to think. She knew that according to the book of Ecclesiastes it was better to go to the House of Mourning than the House of Feasting, but she wasn’t sure that Ecclesiastes had been in a position to make a scrupulous comparison, and he hadn’t mentioned the House of the Rising Sun at all, although it would have made a better play on words if he had. Ecclesiastes had also offered the judgment that a good name was better than precious ointment, but Alan certainly wouldn’t have agreed with him on that point.

  Anna had no difficulty picking out Alan’s wife, although she’d never seen a photograph. She was a good-looking woman, in a middle-class Home Counties sort of way. Her name was Christine, but Alan had usually referred to her as Kitty. Anna was mildly surprised that Kitty wasn’t wearing a veil. Weren’t widows supposed to wear veils, to hide their tears? Not that the woman was weeping; grim forbearance seemed to be more her style. Anna judged her—on the basis of an admittedly superficial inspection—to be a kind of upmarket Isabel, who probably did believe, with all her heart, that a good name was infinitely to be preferred to any kind of balm that cunning cosmetic engineers could devise.

  In the grip of a sudden surge of anguish, Anna wished that Isabel hadn’t been so tight-fisted. If Isabel had given her a hundred pounds, or even fifty, she’d have been able to bring a wreath to add to the memorials heaped about the grave. So far as she could judge at this distance, most of the mourners had gone for natural blooms, but she would have selected the most exotic products of genetic engineering she could afford, to symbolize herself and the crucial contribution she
had made to Alan’s life—and, presumably, his death.

  Anna had no doubt that the accident hadn’t been entirely accidental; even if it hadn’t been a straightforward deceptive suicide, it must have been a case of gross and calculated negligence.

  When the ceremony was over and done with, the crowd around the grave broke up, its members drifting away in all directions as though the emotion of the occasion had temporarily suppressed their sense of purpose. When the widow turned towards her, and shook off someone’s restraining hand, Anna knew that the confrontation she had half-feared and half-craved was about to take place. She wasn’t in the least tempted to turn and run, and she knew before the woman paused to look her up and down that this was what she had come for, and that all the sentimental rubbish about wanting to say goodbye was just an excuse.

  “I know who you are,” the widow said, in a cut-glass voice, which suggested that she took no pride in her perspicacity.

  “I know who you are, too,” Anna replied. The two of them were being watched, and Anna was conscious of the fact that the dissipating crowd had been reunited by a common urge to observe, even though no evident ripple of communication had passed through it.

  “I thought you were in hospital, out of your mind.” The widow’s voice was carefully neutral, but had an edge to it that suggested that it might break out of confinement at any moment.

  “I am,” Anna told her. “But the doctors are beginning to figure things out, and they can keep me stable, most of the time. They’re learning a lot about brain chemistry thanks to people like me.” She didn’t add, and people like Alan.