Designer Genes: Tales of the Biotech Revolution

by Brian Stableford

  “No, it isn’t,” he conceded. “I can understand your wanting to do that. It’s the rest I can’t fathom.”

  “You should have played back a few more tapes, reviewed a few more of the things you’d already taught us. Two ways of coping, you’d always said. Two strategies. Some twins choose to be overlapping—and some choose to be complementary. Another oversimplification, of course, tailored to the shallow minds of seven-year-olds.”

  “Do you mean,” he said, carefully, “that when you couldn’t make an overlapping twin, you.…”

  The care with which he was choosing his words told me that he was as conscious of the gawkers as I was, and of all their zoom lenses and their focused mikes. He knew that it was all being recorded, however ineptly—and he was playing to the gallery. This must have taken him all the way back to the old days, when he was under observation along with all his subjects, his every word and gesture preserved for posterity. I didn’t see why he should still get to write the script and direct the action, so I cut him off.

  “It’s not just a matter of switching things on and off, is it?” I snarled. “You can’t turn a whale into an ostrich, no matter how young you catch her—and you can’t design some other person out of your own cells. Maybe one day it will be possible to produce an embryo that really could develop into any of a dozen different functional forms—but we’ll have to build the cells a hell of a lot more cleverly than natural selection built ours. At present, and for a while yet, all we can contrive are mosaics, and even they’re not easy. Animal bodies are too complicated, and too delicately organized, to permit anything really adventurous. Plants are much more resilient—and they can also reproduce vegetatively. Even Humphrey Gerrard, the famous hairless judge, knows that. With plant-based mosaics, you don’t need two identically-transformed individuals to found a dynasty. Not in theory, anyhow. But nothing’s ever as simple as it seems, is it?”

  “Is that why you introduced clones of your own cells into the xylem of the tree? You were trying to set up an immortal cell-line—one that could keep on reproducing itself asexually forever.”

  “Something like that,” I agreed, stifling a sigh.

  “Why didn’t it work?”

  “Because it’s not as simple as that. It’s that age-old fallacy about the identicality of clones. Every time you take a cutting from a tree, the new tree that grows is subtly different from the old. The resilience of plants is limited; making a stable mosaic of the parent doesn’t guarantee that the cutting will carry forward the same stability. You have no idea, Doctor Burden, how difficult it was to produce this one viable tree—but I think you can understand well enough why it remains the only one.”

  He actually hesitated over the possibility of delivering a lecture, for the benefit of the amateur newshounds. I have no idea whether his decision to give it a miss was inspired by delicacy of feeling or an acute sensitivity to news-value.

  “It’s not you, Beth,” said the man who had loved me, when I was part of something greater. “It might have some of your cells in it, but it’s no more a part of you than a bandage into which you bled.”

  “No, she’s not,” I conceded. “Nor is she my sister, in any intelligible sense of the word. She’s just a tree.” My voice sank to a stage-whisper then, in the hope that it would seem to all the eavesdroppers that I intended the clincher for him and him alone. “But what am I, Doctor Burden?” I added, in a voice like gently-rustling leaves. “What am I?”

  The whole point, of course, was that the tree was just a tree—and a pretty lousy tree at that, as incapable of reproducing itself as I was. It was just a tree, but it was all I had: the only branch I had to sit on; the only flesh I had to defend.

  The tree was innocent, but I wasn’t. The tree had never done anything but follow the dictates of its own inbuilt nature, but I had no such excuse. I had been far more than that, once upon a time, and when I had become less than I had formerly been, I had tried to make more of myself, and had actually imagined that I could—but I had failed.

  I was still failing. Thanks to the cherry-picker, I couldn’t hold out long enough.

  I had tried, over and over and over, to become something more than I was, but I had never contrived to make anything, or to be anything. more than I had become when I had slipped on that patch of invisible ice and broken the person that Kathy and I had been, so comprehensively that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men and all the wonders of twenty-first century biotechnology had not been able to put it together again.

  Doctor Burden was still a clever man. He was even older than I was, with attitudes even harder than mine or Judge Humphrey Gerrard’s. He looked at me, as I looked at myself, without being able to see someone who still had fifty or sixty years to live, someone who still had strength left in her. He looked at me, and saw someone old, someone finished, someone unnaturally attached to a perfectly useless and perfectly meaningless tree. I could see myself in his eyes, without even bothering to close my own.

  “They won’t do it, you know,” the man on the cherry-picker said, as kindly as he could. “They won’t shoot you—unless, of course you can bring yourself to shoot me. It’ll have to be me, because no one else is stupid enough to come close enough, now that your neighbor’s had his say. You won’t shoot me, will you?”

  He was pretty stupid himself, to say that while he was still within range—but he was right, for all the wrong reasons. I couldn’t shoot him, and they wouldn’t shoot me. That wasn’t what I wanted.

  Old Mister Manderley was right too, unfortunately; I couldn’t stay awake forever, and the mines were no protection at all once they had the cherry-picker in place.

  “You stupid idiot,” I said, so softly this time that the mikes might not have been able to pick it up, although there was really no point in worrying about it. “Do you really think I’m trying to get myself killed? If that were all I wanted, all I’d need to do is put this gun to my head, or step down from the tree.”

  He looked genuinely surprised. Old attitudes die hardest among the old. He remembered me in my golden days, but all he saw now was a batty old woman. He still had his own wits about him, though. He was probably pushing ninety, but he knew what an opportunity this was to play to the gallery, to recover a tiny echo of his former fame, his erstwhile authority, and his long-lost lovability.

  “Did you really think you could manufacture a nine-day wonder?” he said—and the uncertainty in his voice testified that he thought that perhaps I might have done so, if it hadn’t been for the cherry-picker. The real question wasn’t whether I could have attracted the eyes of the world, had I only got the story to run and run and run, but whether the eyes of the world were capable, even with all the help I could haven given them, of weeping for the fate of a tree.

  * * * *

  In the end, they plucked me from my coign of vantage like an overripe cherry, quite unharmed. They blew up the mines, and then they killed the tree. From their point of view, it had all been for nothing—nothing but a waste of everybody’s precious time.

  Maybe I should have shot Doctor Burden, or Andrew Manderley—but what would have been the point? What would that have made of me that I’m not already? And what am I, now, but exactly what I’ve been for the last fifty-nine years?

  It has always been my fate to be the one left behind, the diminished survivor.

  It’s certainly not for lack of trying to be something else, and it’s certainly not because the Pope was right about Kathy and I having only one soul between the two of us, but the fact remains and always will: I’m not quite myself, and never shall be.

  I often wish I were a tree, all questing roots and innocence—but I had my chance, and blew it. I’m only a branch of a broken and blasted family tree—but I’m not withered yet and I’ve fifty years of progress ahead of me, with which to become something more.

  THE MILK OF HUMAN KINDNESS

  The argument was still going strong when the car pulled into the multi-storey behind the
hypermarket. Gill could see the tension in Cliff’s hands as they jiggled the wheel to steer the car neatly into the last slot on level five.

  Her own fingers felt unusually fluttery as she tried to release the straps holding Jem in the baby-seat. She wished, not for the first time, that they had gone for the quick-release model, but Cliff wouldn’t trust the manufacturer’s guarantee that the mechanism couldn’t possibly be triggered by the shock of a shunt or the pressure of a baby’s wandering fingers. “That’s just advertising,” he’d said.

  To Cliff, Gill knew, everything was “just advertising” except the things he wanted to believe.

  As she loaded Jem into the push-chair, Gill wondered briefly whether it might have been better to delay raising the issue until the time actually came to take the cartons of milk off the shelf, but she dismissed the thought immediately. Whatever the result of the discussion, it would have been bad tactics. She could hardly have hoped that Cliff wouldn’t notice which of the myriad brands she was picking up, even though he didn’t really take a serious interest in her selections. From his point of view, doing “his share” in the food-shopping was just a weekly ritual, to demonstrate the kind of man he was: a family man. It would have been bad tactics because it would have looked as if she’d planned to buy the new product without consulting him, and that would have been breaking their agreement to take all the important decisions regarding Jem’s upbringing together. Gill still wanted to be seen to be taking that agreement seriously, even though Cliff’s idea of honoring it was to harass her with every argument he could think of, good or bad, whenever she put forward any proposition with which he didn’t agree, until the sheer force of the torrent wore her down.

  She could tell, as they walked towards the lift, that Cliff was preparing just such an onslaught, and she knew that it would be launched long before they reached their destination.

  “It’s not right,” he said, as they paused behind another couple, whose two squabbling toddlers were obviously way past the bottle-feeding stage. “Extra amino acids is one thing, and plantigens are a sensible precaution, but this new thing is behavioral engineering. It’s not right.”

  “All parenting is behavioral engineering,” Gill pointed out, trying to keep Jem’s push-chair well out of reach of the combative toddlers’ flailing arms. “All education too.”

  “Parenting is guidance,” Cliff told her, as the aluminum doors slid apart with a serpentine hiss and the toddlers fell over one another trying to be first across the threshold. “Education is education. Priming a kid’s milk with hormonal regulators is insidious. If there’d been any advantage in packing that kind of punch into a newborn’s milk, natural selection would have taken care to load your tits a hell of a lot better than it did.”

  That criticism had a double edge, and the unfair one was aimed at Gill rather than evolution. She had had problems breast-feeding from day one. Jem had been on rabbits’ milk from the very start, and he’d made his preference abundantly clear before he was a week old. Gill had never been able to understand why Cliff had taken that personally, or why he thought it mattered, given that everybody knew that even the most basic pharmed milk was more nutritious than the natural product. It wasn’t as if Cliff had been breast-fed when he was a baby. On one of the occasions when she wasn’t playing the mother-in-law from Hell, Monica had told her that she’d had similar problems and knew exactly how Gill felt. Gill, on the other hand, hadn’t been introduced to the commercial product until she was three months old. Not that such distant precedents had any relevance to the present case; in those days, bottle-milk had come from cows.

  “Anyway,” Cliff went on, as the lift moved smoothly downwards, “even if we were prepared to accept the principle of the thing, we’d still have to decide whether we wanted to afflict poor Jem with this kind of handicap. Let’s face it, Gill, the only way the meek are ever going to inherit the Earth is if nobody else wants it. I’m all in favor of other people feeding this crap to their kids if they want to, but I want Jem to keep his competitive edge.”

  The doors opened to reveal the vast array of the check-out counters, every number lit and every till blinking furiously. The toddlers were as enthusiastic to exit the lift as they had been to get aboard, and they didn’t care who was in their way. There didn’t seem to be any danger that they would ever lose their competitive edge, given that they were already too old to benefit from the pharmers’ latest triumph. Their mother muttered an apology as she hurried after them, but her partner was busy lifting his long-suffering eyes to Heaven. Jem whimpered a little as they walked towards the light, but fascination soon overrode fear. He’d been sleepy in the car but he was wide awake now. To him, Gill thought, the hypermarket must be a light-and-sound show, an American-style carnival complete with freaks.

  Gill managed to get a few words in edgeways while Cliff was feeding a five-euro coin into the slot and jiggling the catch to spring the trolley from the rack. “All that stuff about a generation of milksops is just tabloid talk, Cliff. They always go for the cheap headline, even if they have to pull their puns from the graveyard of obsolete metaphors. It isn’t so long ago that their pharming coverage was all crazy scare stories, and it’s no saner now it’s all rabbit jokes and milk jokes. This isn’t about turning kids into wimps, it’s about giving them adequate control over their feelings—and their lives.”

  “That’s just advertising,” Cliff retorted, whirling the trolley around and taking aim at the WAY IN sign as if he were lining up the car to switch lanes before exiting the motorway. “There’s many a true word spoken in jest, Gill, and the rabbit jokes are just a smokescreen that helps prevent us from thinking about what’s really going on. If this is about control, it’s about government control. Who gains from the elimination of stroppiness from the population? Whose interests does it serve to have an up-and-coming generation of well-behaved androids who’ll always think at least twice before stepping out of line? You can see why the CEOs of the pharming companies and their tame MPs love the new formula—but why should we, hey? Why should we want our boy turned into an ideal consumer?”

  Gill was busy by now because the fresh fruit and veg were just inside the entrance, and she always selected her own rather than picking up the pre-packed bags. That was the whole point of real-time shopping—at least, that was its rational basis. Cliff always said that virtual shopping was just a way of inviting the hypermarket to ship you all its shoddiest goods, and he wasn’t always wrong. Why else would she have picked him to father her child?

  She checked the bananas carefully, because new oral vaccines didn’t attract the same intensity of press attention nowadays as new kinds of milk, but there was nothing in the bay that she and Cliff hadn’t taken in adequate measure, and you had to be careful about eating too many of the plantigen-rich varieties once you’d actually formed the antibodies, just in case you got a reaction. When the time came for Jem to be weaned, of course, she’d be cramming mashed bananas into him at a rate of knots, but for now she could afford to concentrate on items modified for taste and nutrition.

  The price of potatoes was up yet again, but tototomatoes were down and melons were on special offer. Even better, soft fruits were coming into season and strawberries were this week’s loss leader. It was always worth selecting your own strawberries.

  “I suppose you wouldn’t make so much fuss,” Gill said, softly, as she stocked the trolley with broccoli, stripey peppers, and narrow beans, “if Jem were a girl.”

  “Like hell I wouldn’t,” Cliff retorted, hotly. “This isn’t just some atavistic sexist fit. Okay, so I said our boy instead of our child—but that doesn’t make a damn of difference to the argument. If Jem were Jemima instead of Jeremy, that would be all the more reason to make sure that she didn’t get turned into a good little girl who wouldn’t say boo to a goose. I can’t believe you’d stoop to a cheap shot like that. Don’t I take my turns getting up in the night? Don’t I stick my share of his smartnaps into the recycler? Don’t I suff
er just as much earache when he cries as you do? Don’t you think I’ve wished that he could be a little bit less restless, a little more controlled? But he won’t always be a baby, Gill. One day, he’ll be a mperson.”

  The honest answer to at least two of Cliff’s questions would have been no, but Gill knew that it would be too difficult to make the case, and it wasn’t worth complaining about the belated reflex that had substituted “person” for “man,” so she let them go while she picked out the most appealing items from the fresh pasta display and concentrated on the real heart of the dispute.

  “I don’t want to give him the new milk because I think it will make him easier to manage now,” she said, soberly. “It’s the long-term benefits I’m thinking about.”

  “But that’s exactly what I’m trying to explain to you,” Cliff said, lowering his voice slightly as they eased their way into the crush at the fish-counter. “It’s not a benefit—not to him. They might advertise it as self-control, but control is control is control, and anything that’ll make him more controllable will ultimately work to the advantage of others, not to him. Jesus, will you look at the size of those salmon steaks! Is that ten times natural, do you think, or fifteen?”

  Gill had managed to thread the pushchair through the crowd without bumping a single ankle, but her good work was undone when Cliff skewered the trolley into the gap she’d made. Fortunately, the sharp glances were all directed at him. Jem whimpered again—surrounding crowds of adults were presumably even more intimidating than flashing lights—but he wasn’t scared enough to amplify the whimper into a screech.