Designer Genes: Tales of the Biotech Revolution

by Brian Stableford

  “I’m afraid I can’t take you out this morning, Lovely,” Father said, while Mother punched out the order. “We have to wait in for the house-doctor. The waterworks still aren’t right.”

  “If you ask me,” Mother said, “the real problem’s the water table. The taproots are doing their best but they’re having to go down too far. The system’s fine just so long as we get some good old-fashioned rain once in a while, but every time there’s a dry spell the whole estate suffers. We ought to call a meeting and put some pressure on the landscape engineers. Fixing a water-table shouldn’t be too much trouble in this day and age.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with the water-table, dear,” Father said, patiently. “It’s just that the neighbors have the same indwelling systems that we have. There’s a congenital weakness in the root-system; in dry weather the cell-terminal conduits in the phloem tend to get gummed up. It ought to be easy enough to fix—a little elementary somatic engineering, probably no more than a single-gene augment in the phloem—but you know what doctors are like; they never want to go for the cheap and cheerful cure if they can sell you something more complicated.”

  “What’s phloem?” Wendy asked. She could ask as many questions as she liked, to a moderately high level of sophistication. That was a great blessing. She was glad she wasn’t an eight-year-old, reliant on passive observation and a restricted vocabulary. At least a thirteen-year-old had the right equipment for thinking all set up.

  “It’s a kind of plant-tissue,” Father informed her, ignoring the tight-lipped look Mother was giving him because he’d contradicted her. “It’s sort of equivalent to your veins, except of course that plants have sap instead of blood.”

  Wendy nodded, but contrived to look as if she hadn’t really understood the answer.

  “I’ll set the encyclopedia up on the system,” Father said. “You can read all about it while I’m talking to the house-doctor.”

  “She doesn’t want to spend the morning reading what the encyclopedia has to say about phloem,” Mother said, peevishly. “She needs to get out into the fresh air.” That wasn’t mere ritual, like asking whether she had slept well, but it wasn’t pretence either. When Mother started talking about Wendy’s supposed wants and needs, she was usually talking about her own wants and supposed needs. Wendy had come to realize that talking that way was Mother’s preferred method of criticizing Father; she was paying him back for disagreeing about the water-table.

  Wendy was fully conscious of the irony of the fact that she really did want to study the encyclopedia. There was so much to learn and so little time. Maybe she didn’t need to do it, given that it was unlikely to make any difference in the long run, but she wanted to understand as much as she could before all the pretence had to end and the nightmare of uncertainty had to begin.

  “It’s okay, Mummy,” she said. “Honest.” She smiled at them both, attempting to bring off the delicate trick of pleasing Father by taking his side while simultaneously pleasing Mother by pretending to be as heroically long-suffering as Mother liked to consider herself.

  They both smiled back. All was well, for now. Even though they listened to the news every night, they didn’t seem to have the least suspicion that it could all be happening in their own home, to their own daughter.

  * * * *

  It only took a few minutes for Wendy to work out a plausible path of icon selection that got her away from translocation in plants and deep into the heart of child physiology. Father had set that up for her by comparing phloem to her own circulatory system. There was a certain danger in getting into recent reportage regarding childhood diseases, but she figured that she could explain it well enough if anyone took the trouble to consult the log to see what she’d been doing. She didn’t think anyone was likely to, but she simply couldn’t help being anxious about the possibility—there were, it seemed, a lot of things one simply couldn’t help being anxious about, once it was possible to be anxious at all.

  “I wondered if I could get sick like the house’s roots,” she would say, if asked. “I wanted to know whether my blood could get clogged up in dry weather.” She figured that she would be okay as long as she pretended not to have understood what she’d read, and conscientiously avoided any mention of the word progeria. She already knew that progeria was what she’d got, and the last thing she wanted was to be taken to a child-engineer who’d be able to confirm the fact.

  She called up a lot of innocuous stuff about blood, and spent the bulk of her time pretending to study elementary material of no real significance. Every time she got hold of a document she really wanted to look at she was careful to move on quickly, so it would seem as if she hadn’t even bothered to look at it if anyone did consult the log to see what she’d been doing. She didn’t dare call up any extensive current affairs information on the progress of the plague or the fierce medical and political arguments concerning the treatment of its victims.

  It must be wonderful to be a parent, she thought, and not have to worry about being found out—or about anything at all, really.

  At first, Wendy had thought that Mother and Father really did have worries, because they talked as if they did, but in the last few weeks she had begun to see through the sham. In a way, they thought that they did have worries, but it was all just a matter of habit, a kind of innate restlessness left over from the olden days. Adults must have had authentic anxieties at one time, back in the days when everybody could expect to die young and a lot of people never even reached seventy, and she presumed that they hadn’t quite got used to the fact that they’d changed the world and changed themselves. They just hadn’t managed to lose the habit. They probably would, in the fullness of time. Would they still need children then, she wondered, or would they learn to do without? Were children just another habit, another manifestation of innate restlessness? Had the great plague come just in time to seal off the redundant umbilical cord that connected mankind to its evolutionary past?

  We’re just betwixts and betweens, Wendy thought, as she rapidly scanned a second-hand summary of a paper in the latest issue of Nature, which dealt with the pathology of progeria. There’ll soon be no place for us, whether we grow older or not. They’ll get rid of us all.

  The article that contained the summary claimed that the development of an immunoserum was just a matter of time, although it wasn’t yet clear whether anything much might be done to reverse the aging process in children who’d already come down with it. She didn’t dare access the paper itself, or even an abstract—that would have been a dead giveaway, like leaving a bloody thumbprint at the scene of a murder.

  Wendy wished that she had a clearer idea of whether the latest news was good or bad, or whether the long-term prospects had any possible relevance to her now that she had started to show physical symptoms as well as mental ones. She didn’t know what would happen to her once Mother and Father found out and notified the authorities; there was no clear pattern in the stories she glimpsed in the general news-broadcasts, but whether this meant that there was as yet no coherent social policy for dealing with the rapidly-escalating problem she wasn’t sure.

  For the thousandth time she wondered whether she ought simply to tell her parents what was happening, and for the thousandth time, she felt the terror growing within her at the thought that everything she had might be placed in jeopardy, that she might be sent back to the factory or handed over to the researchers or simply cut adrift to look after herself. There was no way of knowing, after all, what really lay behind the rituals that her parents used in dealing with her, no way of knowing what would happen when their thirteen-year-old daughter was no longer thirteen.

  Not yet, her fear said. Not yet. Hang on. Lie low…because once you can’t hide, you’ll have to run and run and run and there’ll be nowhere to go. Nowhere at all.

  She left the workstation and went to watch the house-doctor messing about in the cellar. Father didn’t seem very glad to see her, perhaps because he was trying to talk the house
-doctor round to his way of thinking and didn’t like the way the house-doctor immediately started talking to her instead of him, so she went away again, and played with her toys for a while. She still enjoyed playing with her toys—which was perhaps as well, all things considered.

  * * * *

  “We can go out for a while now,” Father said, when the house-doctor had finally gone. “Would you like to play ball on the back lawn?”

  “Yes please,” she said.

  Father liked playing ball, and Wendy didn’t mind. It was better than the sedentary pursuits that Mother preferred. Father had more energy to spare than Mother, probably because Mother had a job that was more taxing physically. Father only played with software; his clever fingers did all his work. Mother actually had to get her hands inside her remote-gloves and her feet inside her big red boots and get things moving. “Being a ghost in a machine,” she would often complain, when she thought Wendy couldn’t hear, “can be bloody hard work.” She never swore in front of Wendy, of course.

  Out on the back lawn, Wendy and Father threw the ball back and forth for half an hour, making the catches more difficult as time went by, so that they could leap about and dive on the bone-dry carpet-grass and get thoroughly dusty.

  To begin with, Wendy was distracted by the ceaseless stream of her insistent thoughts, but as she got more involved in the game she was able to let herself go a little. She couldn’t quite get back to being thirteen, but she could get to a state of mind that wasn’t quite so fearful. By the time her heart was pounding and she’d grazed both her knees and one of her elbows she was enjoying herself thoroughly, all the more so because Father was evidently having a good time. He was in a good mood anyhow, because the house-doctor had obligingly confirmed everything he’d said about the normality of the water-table, and had then backed down gracefully when he saw that he couldn’t persuade Father that the house needed a whole new root-system.

  “Those somatic transformations don’t always take,” the house-doctor had said, darkly but half-heartedly, as he left. “You might have trouble again, three months down the line.”

  “I’ll take the chance,” Father had replied, breezily. “Thanks for your time.”

  Given that the doctor was charging for his time, Wendy had thought, it should have been the doctor thanking father, but she hadn’t said anything. She already understood that kind of thing well enough not to have to ask questions about it. She had other matters she wanted to raise once Father collapsed on the baked earth, felled by healthy exhaustion, and demanded that they take a rest.

  “I’m not as young as you are,” he told her, jokingly. “When you get past a hundred and fifty, you just can’t take it the way you used to.” He had no idea how it affected her to hear him say you in that careless fashion, when he really meant we: a we that didn’t include her, and never would.

  “I’m bleeding,” she said, pointing to a slight scratch on her elbow.

  “Oh dear,” he said. “Does it hurt?”

  “Not much,” she said, truthfully. “If too much leaks out, will I need injections, like the house’s roots?”

  “It won’t come to that,” he assured her, lifting up her arm so that he could put on a show of inspecting the wound. “It’s just a drop. I’ll kiss it better.” He put his lips to the wound for a few seconds, then said: “It’ll be as good as new in the morning.”

  “Good,” she said. “I expect it’d be very expensive to have to get a whole new girl.”

  He looked at her a little strangely, but it seemed to Wendy that he was in such a light mood that he was in no danger of taking it too seriously.

  “Fearfully expensive,” he agreed, cheerfully, as he lifted her up in his arms and carried her back to the house. “We’ll just have to take very good care of you, won’t we?”

  “Or do a somatic whatever,” she said, as innocently as she possibly could. “Is that what you’d have to do if you wanted a boy for a while?”

  He laughed, and there appeared to be no more than the merest trace of unease in his laugh. “We love you just the way you are, Lovely,” he assured her. “We wouldn’t want you to be any other way.”

  She knew that it was true. That was the problem.

  She had ham and cheese manna for lunch, with real greens home-grown in the warm cellar-annex under soft red lights. She would have eaten heartily had she not been so desperately anxious about her weight, but as things were she felt it better to peck and pretend, and she surreptitiously discarded the food she hadn’t consumed as soon as Father’s back was turned.

  * * * *

  After lunch, judging it to be safe enough, she picked up the thread of the conversation again. “Why did you want a girl and not a boy?” she asked. “The Johnsons wanted a boy.” The Johnsons had a ten-year-old named Peter. He was the only other child Wendy saw regularly, and he had not as yet exhibited the slightest sign of disease to her eager eye.

  “We didn’t want a girl,” Father told her, tolerantly. “We wanted you.”

  “Why?” she asked, trying to look as if she were just fishing for compliments, but hoping to trigger something a trifle more revealing. This, after all, was the great mystery. Why her? Why anyone? Why did adults think they needed children?

  “Because you’re beautiful,” Father said. “And because you’re Wendy. Some people are Peter people, so they have Peters. Some people are Wendy people, so they have Wendys. Your Mummy and I are definitely Wendy people—probably the Wendiest people in the world. It’s a matter of taste.”

  It was all baby-talk, all gobbledygook, but she felt that she had to keep trying. Some day, surely, one of them would let a little truth show through their empty explanations.

  “But you have different kinds of manna for breakfast, lunch and dinner,” Wendy said, “and sometimes you go right off one kind for weeks on end. Maybe some day you’ll go off me, and want a different one.”

  “No we won’t, darling,” he answered, gently. “There are matters of taste and matters of taste. Manna is fuel for the body. Variety of taste just helps to make the routine of eating that little bit more interesting. Relationships are something else. It’s a different kind of need. We love you, Beauty, more than anything else in the world. Nothing could ever replace you.”

  She thought about asking about what would happen if Father and Mother ever got divorced, but decided that it would be safer to leave the matter alone for now. Even though time was pressing, she had to be careful.

  * * * *

  They watched TV for a while before Mother came home. Father had a particular fondness for archive film of extinct animals—not the ones that the engineers had re-created but smaller and odder ones: weirdly-shaped sea-dwelling creatures. He could never have seen such creatures even if they had still existed when he was young, not even in an aquarium; they had only ever been known to people as things on film. Even so, the whole tone of the tapes that documented their one-time existence was nostalgic, and Father seemed genuinely affected by a sense of personal loss at the thought of the sterilization of the seas during the last ecocatastrophe but one.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” he said, of an excessively-tentacled sea anemone, which sheltered three vivid clown-fish while ungainly shrimps passed by. “Isn’t it just extraordinary?”

  “Yes,” she said, dutifully, trying to inject an appropriate reverence into her tone. “It’s lovely.” The music on the sound-track was plaintive; it was being played on some fluty wind-instrument, possibly by a human player. Wendy had never heard music like it except on TV sound-tracks; it was as if the sound were the breath of the long-lost world of nature, teeming with undesigned life.

  “Next summer,” Father said, “I want us to go out in one of those glass-bottomed boats that take sight-seers out to the new barrier reef. It’s not the same as the original one, of course, and they’re deliberately setting out to create something modern, something new, but they’re stocking it with some truly weird and wonderful creatures.”

  “M
other wants to go up the Nile,” Wendy said. “She wants to see the sphinx, and the tombs.”

  “We’ll do that the year after,” Father said. “They’re just ruins. They can wait. Living things.…” He stopped. “Look at those!” he said, pointing at the screen. She looked at a host of jellyfish swimming close to the silvery surface, their bodies pulsing like great translucent hearts.

  It doesn’t matter, Wendy thought. I won’t be there. I won’t see the new barrier reef or the sphinx and the tombs. Even if they find a cure, and even if you both want me cured, I won’t be there. Not the real me. The real me will have died, one way or another, and there’ll be nothing left except a girl who’ll be thirteen forever, and a randomizing factor that will make it seem that she has a lively mind.

  Father put his arm around her shoulder, and hugged her fondly.

  Father must really love her very dearly, she thought. After all, he had loved her for thirty years, and might love her for thirty years more, if only she could stay the way she was…if only she could be returned to what she had been before.…

  * * * *

  The evening TV schedules advertised a documentary on progeria, scheduled for late at night, long after the nation’s children had been put to bed. Wendy wondered if her parents would watch it, and whether she could sneak downstairs to listen to the sound-track through the closed door. In a way, she hoped that they wouldn’t watch it. It might put ideas into their heads. It was better that they thought of the plague as a distant problem: something that could only affect other people; something with which they didn’t need to concern themselves.

  She stayed awake, just in case, and when the luminous dial of her bedside clock told her it was time she silently got up, and crept down the stairs until she could hear what was going on in the living-room. It was risky, because the randomizing factor wasn’t really supposed to stretch to things like that, but she’d done it before without being found out.