Designer Genes: Tales of the Biotech Revolution

by Brian Stableford

  Part of Cliff’s problem, Gill thought, was that he hadn’t yet grown out of the habit of comparing the products of modern biotechnology to their “natural” counterparts. He hadn’t seen a steak from a wild salmon since he was five years old, and probably never would again now that the Lords rump had finally rubber-stamped the law that would ban fishing. Cliff simply couldn’t see that in today’s world aquaculture was natural, just like rabbits’ milk. He was stuck in the past, just like the genetic engineers who’d wasted so much time trying to produce transgenic sheep and cows whose milk contained all kinds of amplifications, simply because cows and sheep were what old-style farmers had always worked with. The trouble was that cows and sheep produced only one offspring at a time, at yearly intervals, and even when the engineers had been able to work on oocytes harvested from slaughterhouse with retroviral vectors, cloning the successful transformations, the whole process had been too slow. How much open-mindedness did it take to realize that although a doe rabbit couldn’t produce anything like as much milk as a cow or a sheep, that disadvantage was more than offset by the fact that rabbits bred like proverbial rabbits? A pharmer could fill a facility for milking rabbits by the thousand in a fraction of the time that it took to fill a barn with transgenic cows, so nine out of every ten amplified milks now came from rabbit pharms, and all the stupid tabloid jokes in the world couldn’t change that or make it any less reasonable than it was. Given that Monica was his mother, allowances had to be made for Cliff—but Gill was the woman in his life now, and it was time he adapted to that fact.

  The zigzagged meat lane wasn’t nearly as crowded as the fish counter, but that only meant that people whose trolley etiquette made Cliff look like a perfect saint felt free to indulge their worst habits. Cliff, of course, was more than willing to fight fire with fire if provoked, but the push-chair was a mere jeep among the tanks and Gill had to be content to be watchful while she compared the partridges to the quail and mentally weighed the venison against the sanglier. Sanglier was just pork, of course, and she knew that it really didn’t make that much difference whether the animals were factoried or “free range,” but Cliff always liked to think that the meat on his plate had once been running around enjoying life—and no matter how reluctant she was to believe crazy tabloid scare stories, she couldn’t help but wonder what was happening to all those pigs engineered for xenotransplantation now that the organ glut had wiped out the NHS waiting lists.

  Fortunately, she managed to steer the pushchair into wine-and-water without suffering any serious collisions, and Jem was still as good as gold. They didn’t need to linger once she’d loaded up the extra-distilled.

  “It’s either distilled or it bloody isn’t,” Cliff observed, presumably forgetting that he’d said it a dozen times before. “How the hell can you extra-distil it?” Gill knew that Cliff still felt nostalgic for Evian, although only luck had spared him from more painful participation in the Great Pesticide Panic of 2015.

  Visits to the bakery had been known to cause ructions in the past, but Cliff’s mind wasn’t on bread just now and they slid through smoothly enough.

  Cliff was thinking ahead again. He knew that he hadn’t yet unleashed a big enough broadside to blow the opposition out of the water. “Look, Gill,” he said, “I don’t pretend to understand all this crap about the sensitivity of the adrenal cortex, pituitary trigger-effects,and synergistic recoupling of the hormonal orchestra. Okay, so I know far more about fuse-boxes than homeoboxes, and maybe I still think of designer genes in terms of granddad’s Calvin Kleins, but you can’t pretend that you can figure out the metabolics any better than I can. Maybe the rabbit-pharmers mean exactly what they say when they rattle on about their new product making people less vulnerable to anger and aggression. Maybe it is about self-control, and not just another endogenous tranquilliser or built-in anti-depressant. Maybe. But you know full well that these things always have unforeseen side-effects. The cell and the body are jam-packed with feedback systems, so there’s no way you can alter the level of any enzyme or hormone without setting off chain reactions. Society has its feedback systems too, so it’s just as difficult to figure out the pattern of consequences that might spread from any change in people’s personalities. All this is whistling in the dark, Gill. Do you really want our boy—our child—to be one more guinea-pig in the line? Why can’t we leave him out of it, at least until we can see how this new thing is working out?”

  Cliff always put on that kind of reasonable tone in order to plumb the ultimate depths of unreasonableness. He knew full well that if they kept Jem out of it now he wouldn’t be able to opt back in at a later date. If he didn’t get the supplement in his milk before he was a year old, there would be no way to fine tune the sensitivity of his adrenal cortex or adjust the synergistic complicity of his hormones. The child was father to the man, now as in any other era of history, and Gill knew that if you wanted to make the right sort of man you had to get the business of parenting as right as you possibly could. Would Jem ever forgive them if he grew up lacking self-control in a world where slaves to emotion were automatically relegated to the bottom of the social heap? Would he be prepared to accept the excuse that they were being cautious, that they didn’t want to take a gamble even though the best calculations available put the odds ten to one in his favor?

  “If not us, who?” Gill quoted, mildly. “If not now, when?”

  “That revolution’s over and done,” Cliff informed her, scornfully. “This one’s an entirely different kettle of giant salmon. I won’t stand for it, Gill. You’re not going to start feeding this stuff to Jem just because it’s the new fashion. He has to keep his edge if he’s going to get by. You might think that it isn’t a dog-eat-dog world any more, but you work at home, in front of a screen. You don’t know what it’s like out there. You certainly don’t know what it’s going to take to get by when Jem reaches our age. We can only guess whether it’ll be a world of fifteen billion people or a world wrecked by plague war—but either way, it won’t be a world in which nice guys finish first. Even ours isn’t that. no matter how hard you want to pretend. You have to let the kid hang on to his guts, Gill. You can’t castrate him before his balls drop—okay, okay, bad sexist metaphor. You can’t take away his passion before he’s even had a chance to spend it. You have to listen to me, Gill. This stuff might be the biggest scam the people at the top have ever tried to put over on us. We have to say no—but that’s all we have to do. It’s as easy as that.”

  “It’s not,” Gill murmured, as she led the way through frozen foods towards their appointment with destiny in dairy produce. “Things are changing too fast. It’s not enough any more just to say no to everything. You and I don’t live in that kind of world, and Jem certainly won’t.” But she didn’t say it loudly enough. She knew that Cliff couldn’t hear her as he trudged in her wake with the three-quarters-laden trolley. He wasn’t even trying to hear her—quite the reverse, in fact.

  The battle was lost and Gill knew it. She marched forward in military style regardless. Where frozen items were concerned, it really did make more sense to order over the Internet—in fact, if you were the kind of person who was into frozen food, there was no point in coming to the market at all, but the market still kept the lanes open for all the people who were stuck in the past. At least Cliff wasn’t stuck that far back. He and Gill were serious food-shoppers, and specialist food-shoppers too—although Gill figured that when Jem was a little bit older it would be a nice treat for him to take the occasional tour of the toy maze. Children didn’t usually take to virtual play until they were seven or eight, sometimes older. The work that adults did in supplying visual images with tactile connotations had to be learned, and it had to be learned in the real world, so the toy maze was more than just a money-trap.

  Cliff was very tense by the time they got to the first of the milk lanes, from which they could already see the crowd huddled around the new line. His fingers were blanched again—but he always had difficult
y keeping up with the plot.

  Gill observed the crowd with clinical detachment. People didn’t usually talk to one another in the hypermarket—even if you bumped trolleys with somebody you recognized, convention demanded that you exchanged a hasty greeting and got on with business—but the milk lanes were governed by a subtly different set of norms. The milk lanes were always full of mothers anxious to be sure that they were doing right by their kids. If the market managers could bottle reassurance and stick it on the shelves at a suitably exorbitant price, the end-bays between milk lanes was where they’d put it.

  “I mean it, Gill,” said Cliff, in the low voice he always reserved for last ditch defenses. “I’m serious about this.”

  “I know,” Gill said, bringing Jem to a halt six feet short of the debating society. “It’s okay. If you feel that strongly about it, we’ll stick to the usual formula. But when the day comes that Jem demands an explanation, you’re the one who can deal with it. Any tantrums he throws once he turns twelve are your tantrums. okay? He wants to test his competitive edge on people, he tests it on you.”

  “Okay,” Cliff said. “I can do that. No problem. Any time the kid wants to try his competitive edge, I’ll be glad to take him on.”

  Gill knew that she’d had to put it like that if Cliff were to be convinced that she’d made a long-term commitment. She knew that she had to give in with an ill grace, or Cliff would never believe that she had really given in—but she wasn’t angry, or petulant, or resentful, because she had no intention of losing the war. Losing the battle was good strategy, because it would allow Cliff to remember that the matter had been aired, and a decision made. He knew how seriously she took the matter of collective decision-making, so he would trust her to stick to it. But Jem was her child, and she had a strong enough sense of social responsibility to make sure that he would be her only child—unless, God forbid, Plague War One really did break out—and it was up to her to make sure that he got all the benefits of the biotech revolution as and when they became available.

  It was as easy to arrange for back-door deliveries as it was to arrange for the front-door kind. All she had to do was pour the new milk into the usual cartons as she opened them, and make sure that Cliff never took stock of the amount of unmarked packaging that was going into the recycler along with all the smartnaps and babygros. All milk was creamy white and it all tasted sweet; nobody could tell any of the thousand kinds from any of the others by sight or taste.

  Once the trolley was safely loaded with the kinds of milk that people who were only slightly stuck in the past preferred, Gill headed for the check-out, with Cliff trailing in her wake.

  Jem was whimpering again, and this time Gill could tell that he wouldn’t stop. He was getting hungry, and he was becoming resentful of the straps that confined him. This time, the whimper would grow and grow—but they would be back at the car soon enough, if only they could get through the check-out in good time.

  If only.

  If the meat lane’s chicane was the severest test of customers’ trolley etiquette, the check-out’s queues were the severest test of their patience, and for every family man who couldn’t meet the trolley challenge with adequate equanimity there were five who couldn’t handle the pressure of merely waiting in line. Not that it was a sex-limited thing, of course—there were plenty of women, especially mothers, whose nerves were equally fraught.

  They’d all be better off, Gill thought, if they could only take things a little easier. It wasn’t really a matter of self-control, although that was part of it. It was mostly a matter of thinking ahead and taking other people into consideration.

  It was a really matter of being just that little bit kinder to yourself and everybody else.

  As Jem’s whimpers turned to cries, so Cliff’s muttering and shuffling increased. Gill looked along the line of tills, at thirty-some queues where exactly the same small rituals of impatience and stress were repeated in a potentially-infinite series of carbon copies—except, Gill had to remind herself, that carbon copies had long been extinct in a world of Xeroxes and backup discs. One more metaphor from the graveyard.

  The simple fact was, she thought, as she bent down to tickle Jem’s chin, that the world went right on changing, no matter how insistent people were on protecting their little foibles and failings. Progress went forward, gathering pace all the while, no matter how uncomfortable people felt about it. There was nothing to be gained by refusing to go with the flow, and nothing to be lost except that which couldn’t be kept.

  In the end, Gill had to leave it to Cliff to reload the trolley after the scanner had done its work, although she knew that he always made a pig’s ear of the stacking. She couldn’t help him because she had to pick Jem out of the push-chair and jolly him in her arms, shushing him as his cries became inexorably louder.

  “It’ll be all right,” she told him, over and over again. “We’ll soon be out of here, and you can have a bottle in the car while we’re going home. Everything will be all right. Mummy will see to it. Just leave everything to Mummy, and it’ll all be all right.”

  THE PIPES OF PAN

  In her dream Wendy was a pretty little girl living wild in a magical wood where it never rained and never got cold. She lived on sweet berries of many colors, which always tasted wonderful, and all she wanted or needed was to be happy.

  There were other girls living wild in the dream-wood but they all avoided one another, because they had no need of company. They had lived there, untroubled, for a long time—far longer than Wendy could remember.

  Then, in the dream, the others came: the shadow-men with horns on their brows and shaggy legs. They played strange music on sets of pipes that looked as if they had been made from reeds—but Wendy knew, without knowing how she knew or what sense there was in it, that those pipes had been fashioned out of the blood and bones of something just like her, and that the music they played was the breath of her soul.

  After the shadow-men came, the dream became steadily more nightmarish, and living wild ceased to be innocently joyful. After the shadow-men came, life was all hiding with a fearful, fluttering heart, knowing that if ever she were found she would have to run and run and run, without any hope of escape—but wherever she hid, she could always hear the music of the pipes.

  When she woke up in a cold sweat, she wondered whether the dreams her parents had were as terrible, or as easy to understand. Somehow, she doubted it.

  * * * *

  There was a sharp rat-a-tat on her bedroom door.

  “Time to get up, Beauty.” Mother didn’t bother coming in to check that Wendy responded. Wendy always responded. She was a good girl.

  She climbed out of bed, took off her night-dress, and went to sit at the dressing-table, to look at herself in the mirror. It had become part of her morning ritual, now that her awakenings were indeed awakenings. She blinked to clear the sleep from her eyes, shivering slightly as an image left over from the dream flashed briefly and threateningly in the depths of her emergent consciousness.

  Wendy didn’t know how long she had been dreaming. The dreams had begun before she developed the sense of time that would have allowed her to make the calculation. Perhaps she had always dreamed, just as she had always got up in the morning in response to the summoning rat-a-tat, but she had only recently come by the ability to remember her dreams. On the other hand, perhaps the beginning of her dreams had been the end of her innocence.

  She often wondered how she had managed not to give herself away in the first few months, after she first began to remember her dreams but before she attained her present level of waking self-control, but any anomalies in her behavior must have been written off to the randomizing factor. Her parents were always telling her how lucky she was to be thirteen, and now she was in a position to agree with them. At thirteen, it was entirely appropriate to be a little bit inquisitive and more than a little bit odd. It was even possible to get away with being too clever by half, as long as she didn’t overdo it.r />
  It was difficult to be sure, because she didn’t dare interrogate the house’s systems too explicitly, but she had figured out that she must have been thirteen for about thirty years, in mind and body alike. She was thirteen in her blood and her bones, but not in the privacy of her head.

  Inside, where it counted, she had now been unthirteen for at least four months.

  If it would only stay inside, she thought, I might keep it a secret forever. But it won’t. It isn’t. It’s coming out. Every day that passes is one day closer to the moment of truth.

  She stared into the mirror, searching the lines of her face for signs of maturity. She was sure that her face looked thinner, her eyes more serious, her hair less blonde. All of that might be mostly imagination, she knew, but there was no doubt about the other things. She was half an inch taller, and her breasts were getting larger. It was only a matter of time before that sort of thing attracted attention, and as soon as it was noticed the truth would be manifest. Measurements couldn’t lie. As soon as they were moved to measure her, her parents would know the horrid truth.

  Their baby was growing up.

  * * * *

  “Did you sleep well, dear?” Mother said, as Wendy took her seat at the breakfast-table. It wasn’t a trick question; it was just part of the routine. It wasn’t even a matter of pretending, although her parents certainly did their fair share of that. It was just a way of starting the day off. Such rituals were part and parcel of what they thought of as everyday life. Parents had their innate programming too.

  “Yes, thank you,” she replied, meekly.

  “What flavor manna would you like today?”

  “Coconut and strawberry please.” Wendy smiled as she spoke, and Mother smiled back. Mother was smiling because Wendy was smiling. Wendy was supposed to be smiling because she was a smiley child, but in fact she was smiling because saying “strawberry and coconut” was an authentic and honest choice, an exercise of freedom that would pass for an expected manifestation of the randomizing factor.