Designer Genes: Tales of the Biotech Revolution Read online

  He got up and went into the kitchen, to salvage the bottle and the teat. It was a bit twenty-first century, but he figured that with luck it ought to work, now that Steven was hungry enough.

  It did. After spitting it out once, Steven compromised and started sucking. Silence fell.

  Rick stroked the baby’s head with the hand that the doctor had dressed and sealed with syntho-flesh. It felt very odd.

  “We really were in trouble down there, you know,” said Rick, levelly. “Not that anybody gives a damn one way or the other, now it’s all come out okay. I was trying to save our lives, because I had every reason to think they needed saving.”

  Steven didn’t even spare him a glance, but that didn’t matter.

  “You understand, don’t you?” Rick continued. “You were there, and you were yelling even louder than I was. You knew what we were going through. You know what I did, and why. It’s our secret, kid—just yours and mine. We understand.”

  He had started saying it simply in order to have something to say, but as he spoke the words aloud he realized that they were true—or, at any rate, nearly true.

  He had not been alone in the cellar; he had not panicked entirely on his own behalf. He had been scared for Steven too. He had been right to be scared for Steven, to panic for Steven, to go to the limit…for Steven. Whatever his co-parents thought of him, he’d done what he had to do, and he didn’t have to apologize to anyone.

  Steven spat out the teat, and gathered himself for a whimper, which would inevitably turn to a whine, which would turn to a.…

  Rick stood up, and took the baby and the bottle into the nursery, hoping that the sight of familiar surroundings would help to set Steven’s mind at rest. A dozen roses had been picked and taken away, but there were hundreds left; not one of them looked sick.

  “Look,” Rick murmured into the baby’s ear. “Look at all the beautiful roses. Everything’s okay.”

  He tried to push the teat back into the baby’s mouth, but Steven resisted. The baby was crying now—building up yet again towards that frightful note.

  “At the end of the day,” Rick went on, stubbornly, “Murgatroyd was right, wasn’t he? We just have to stop thinking about it as a disaster, and start thinking about it as a beginning, don’t we? A miracle happened here today, and you and I were here to see it. We should be grateful for that. We are grateful for that, aren’t we?”

  Again, he had said it just to have something to say, but again he realized that it was true. As Steven began to yell, and the pitch of his yelling cut through to the very heart of him, Rick suddenly realized that it would not and could not affect him the way it did unless there was some special bond between them, some indefinable but unique harmony. If one only looked at it sensibly it was not, after all, some malevolent worm gnawing at his soul, but an affirmation of the fact that they meant something to one another…that they had an understanding.

  Rick pressed the makeshift teat into the baby’s mouth, gently but insistently fighting the baby’s refusal to make it welcome.

  “Take your time, son,” said Rick, soothingly. “Take your time. There’s no hurry at all. We have all the time in the world, if we need it…all the time in the world.”

  And he looked around, at all the beautiful roses—all the bright pink roses, which, with tender loving care and a little luck, would live for centuries.

  THE AGE OF INNOCENCE

  Sybil and her best friend Gwenan got their first real sex education when they were eleven years old, watching their great-great-great-great-grandparents playing in the park.

  The park had several dense clumps of bushes whose principal raison d’etre was to provide cover for frolicking ancients. Most of the carers who took ancients out to play were adults, who almost invariably made a big show of staying out of the bushes while their charges got on with it, but Sybil and Gwenan were curious enough to take the first reasonable opportunity to slip into the bushes unobserved and find out what went on there.

  They were not entirely surprised, but the visible reality of sexual intercourse seemed much more absurd than the theory had implied.

  “Surely our parents don’t do things like that?” said Gwenan, in hushed tones, the first time they saw it happen.

  “Not now,” Sybil informed her, airily, taking her customary pride in the narrow margin of her greater wisdom. “People lose the urge when they get to be a hundred or so. That’s why the second century is supposed to be the prime of life—all their creativity can be concentrated in useful channels. It only comes back again when the higher brain functions begin to disappear, and by the time they get to three hundred or three-fifty they’re slaves to it. I heard Mother say so, when she was talking on the phone to Aunt Genista.”

  Gwenan became embarrassed then, and turned away, but Sybil didn’t. It wasn’t that she didn’t feel awkward spying on them, just that her curiosity was stronger than her guilty unease. All sorts of questions ran through her head. Were ancients capable of loving one another, after their fashion, or did love vanish along with self-consciousness—and if it did, could they even be said to love their descendants? Would ancients have sex with anybody—anybody, that is, who was small enough—or did they prefer particular partners? Why did ancients like sex so much, given that they were quite incapable of procreation? Did they actually like it, or was it just a kind of compulsion?

  She studied the grimaces on the great-great-great-great-grandparents’ little faces, trying to fathom the meaning of the expressions. Her mother had often warned her not to read too much into great-great-great-great-grandmother’s expressions, but Sybil couldn’t help trying to figure them out. Great-great-great-great-grandmother was still human, after all, still capable of joy and sadness, irritation and contentment, if not of actual thought.

  When it was all over, Gwenan’s great-great-great-great-grandfather rolled away, looking contented but not particularly joyful. His tiny eyes were dark and bird-bright, and he was whispering to himself rapidly and incoherently. Sybil’s great-great-great-great-grandmother, on the other hand, looked joyful without being particularly contented. Her blue eyes were misty, and she was gravely silent. Sybil’s great-great-great-great-grandmother was a very quiet ancient, as ancients went. Mother said it was because she hadn’t been overfond of talking even in the days when she had an active mind.

  Sybil thought that her great-great-great-great-grandmother was still rather pretty, after her own ancient fashion. If she had been filmed against a miniaturized background of some kind, Sybil thought, it wouldn’t have been immediately obvious that she was an ancient. She still hadn’t lost the last lingering echoes of adult presence and adult poise, in spite of the fact that every time she came to the park she made straight for the bushes.

  * * * *

  By the time they had watched the ancients indulging their sexual appetites three or four more times, even Gwenan became appropriately blasé about it. That didn’t stop her becoming fearfully embarrassed about watching if there were any other people around, but the event itself no longer caused her to blush crimson—and it was usually possible to slip in and out of the bushes without being observed. For Sybil, the fundamental mystery of it persisted. It somehow seemed to be the key to what being an ancient was all about—and she couldn’t help wondering, crazy as it might seem, whether ancienthood rather than adulthood might somehow be what being human was all about. Even though adulthood generally lasted at least twice as long as ancienthood, ancienthood was where everyone ended up: it was life’s culmination, life’s denouement.

  As it happened, the day of the accident was one of the days that Sybil and Gwenan watched, perhaps more closely than they ever had before, studying the details of the process and—in Sybil’s case—wondering what refinements and nuances had to be added in order to transform it into adult sex, and hence into authentic love-making. It was the seventh occasion on which she had been able to give such matters patient and serious consideration; she had not the slightest reason to su
spect that it might be the last.

  “I don’t understand where the urge could possibly come from in the first place,” Gwenan said, as she peeped out of the bushes to make sure there were no adults around before emerging into the warm sunlight. “All things considered, I think I’d rather do without.”

  “You won’t have the option,” Sybil told her, with a world-weary sigh. “We change according to an inbuilt cycle. Innocence, childhood, adulthood, second childhood, and back to innocence again. It’s called the wheel of existence. It carries you round whether you like it or not. The urges come when their time is due, and go when their time is done.”

  “You got that from a holovid tape,” Gwenan said, accusatively.

  “Of course I did,” Sybil said, meticulously dusting herself down. “How else are we supposed to learn what’s what—or understand what’s what when we see it?”

  “Well I think it’s disgusting,” Gwenan countered, defiantly. “It’s not right. People their age ought to have more…more dignity.”

  “Dignity doesn’t come into it,” Sybil reminded her. “They outgrew that long ago. Anyhow, it’s natural, so it doesn’t matter whether you like it or not—it’s just the way things are.”

  Gwenan could be so slow that it was sometimes hard to believe that Sybil was only five months the elder of the pair, especially in view of the fact that Gwenan looked older. Sybil realized, though, that these things were relative. Five months might be hardly anything in the context of an entire human lifespan, but it was a yawning gap between two eleven-year-olds.

  When her own great-great-great-great-grandmother had been eleven, Sybil calculated, Gwenan’s great-great-great-great-grandfather must have been thirty-one, possessed of a vastly different wealth of experience—but now they were both pushing four hundred, twenty years didn’t mean a thing. They didn’t have an atom of self-consciousness between them, and the patterns of ingrained habit that were the legacy of their separate lifetimes were virtually identical.

  “Do you realize,” said Gwenan, slowly, while the temporarily-sated great-great-great-great-grandparents were dressing themselves again, “that we’ll be like that one day?” It was as if the thought had only just occurred to her, although Sybil couldn’t imagine that anyone might be capable of avoiding consciousness of that particular fact even for half an hour.

  “It’ll be okay,” Sybil assured her. “We’ve already had practice being tiny and mindless—we’ll be able to do it again easily enough when the time comes.”

  The two ancients had stretched themselves out in the sun, tiredly, but Sybil knew that it wouldn’t be long before they were raring to go again. Their energy came in short bursts, but they always made the most of their time outdoors. They really weren’t very much like babies, in appearance or behavior. The proportions of their bodies were quite different, retaining adult ratios in spite of the loss of mass, and their behavior was equally distinct. In spite of what holovid pomposity termed the wheel of existence, there was a world of difference between progressive innocence and decadent innocence.

  “It’s not the same,” Gwenan insisted, revealing that even she understood that much, in her own rough and ready fashion. After a pause she went on: “I don’t think it’s fair that we should have to do this, you know. Why should we be the ones who have to take the family ancients out for their walks, and chop up their food for them, and clean out their attics? That’s not natural. In most families, adults look after the ancients. That’s normal.”

  Looking after the family ancients was the first serious responsibility that Sybil and Gwenan had ever had to undertake. At first they had agreed that it was a vile imposition and an awful nuisance having all the work of cleaning and food-preparation to do, but it hadn’t taken long for Sybil to figure out what their parents meant when they said that kids could learn a lot from their great-great-great-great-grandparents. Ancients might have grown out of self-consciousness, but the habits they retained had a lot of fascinating humanity in them. Looking after an ancient was supposed to be good for a child—an invaluable part of preparation for adult life. Sybil no longer thought that she had adequate grounds to disagree with that—but she couldn’t help thinking that Gwenan did have a point. Children had so much to learn while they grew, and so little time, whereas adults were already finished, and had all the time in the world to be what they were and do whatever they had to do.

  “Most families don’t have children,” Sybil pointed out, pensively. “Adults have to do most of the work of caring for ancients—that’s just simple arithmetic. Ancients are ancient for a hundred years but children are only children for a little while.” She had only just begun to carry out calculations like that, and found such matters of proportion oddly but endlessly fascinating.

  When the great-great-great-great-grandparents were up and ready again, Sybil and Gwenan took their respective charges by the hand and led them over the brow of the hill and down to the lake. Sybil liked the lake far better than the bushes at this time of year because the water lilies were in full bloom and the water-birds had downy chicks trailing after them in tight formation.

  The ancients agitated for permission to take their clothes off all over again and go swimming. Sybil and Gwenan were only too glad to let them get on with it.

  If there was one thing ancients liked better than sex it was swimming—and that, to Sybil, was a far less understandable urge. But swimming was a much more satisfactory activity from her point of view, because it lasted much longer and exhausted the ancients more fully, and gave Gwenan and herself the chance to have a really good chat about things that actually mattered, like clothes and holovid shows and all the horrid iniquities of programd schoolwork and parental control.

  By the time they both had to go to their separate homes, Gwenan was in a thoroughly good mood, and Sybil felt positively happy. They fixed a time to meet on the next day before they parted at the park gates.

  Unfortunately, while Sybil and her great-great-great-great-grandmother were making their way along the main road to the pedestrian crossing, the ancient suddenly spotted something bright lying on the central reservation, and took it into her stupid, empty little head to run to get it.

  * * * *

  “It wasn’t my fault!” Sybil wailed, hysterically. “It really wasn’t. There wasn’t anything I could do.”

  “I know, darling,” her mother said, hugging Sybil to her bosom and patting the back of her head. “Even the robotruck couldn’t do anything, and artificial reflexes are much faster than yours. You really mustn’t blame yourself.”

  “She never did anything like it before!” Sybil continued, protesting at the injustice of it all. “I’d have held her hand if I thought she might. How was I to know that her road-safety habits had worn off?”

  “You couldn’t, darling,” her mother assured her. “It’s not so bad. She was very old, you know, and she can’t have felt a thing. When the time comes to die, it’s best to go like that—like switching off a light. She had a good life…a very good life. It’s a miracle she survived so long, considering the times she lived through when she was my age. I always find it hard to believe that the world has so many more ancients in it than children, when I remember how many of great-great-great-great-grandma’s generation didn’t make it to a hundred. All lives have to end eventually, though—it was just bad luck that it had to happen so soon after you started looking after her.”

  Sybil wasn’t so young that she couldn’t see a certain irony in the fact that her great-great-great-great-grandmother had survived the third and fourth plague wars and the second nuclear war, had travelled extensively in the sub-Saharan swamps of Africa and the rugged hills of Antarctica, and had flown to the moon and back twice, only to be run down by a robotruck two hundred metres from her front door. Nor was she unable to extrapolate that pattern of irony to an appreciation of the fact that great-great-great-great-grandma had survived being looked after for thirty years and more by her own parents, well over two hundred years o
f looking after herself, and eighty-some years of being looked after by various other descendants before a mere six weeks of Sybil’s tender care had seen the end of her.

  “I’m so sorry,” Sybil said, packing all the meaning she could into the simple phrase. “It wasn’t that I didn’t want to look after her. It really wasn’t. I didn’t mind. I would have looked after her till I was sixty or seventy if I’d had to, honestly.”

  “Hush now, darling,” her mother said. “There’s no need for you to be so upset. It was just an accident. It would have happened just the same if I’d been with her, or anyone else. She wouldn’t want you to be upset. It’s just one of those things. People do die, darling. In the end, everybody dies. It’s perfectly natural. It doesn’t matter whether they die in their sleep, or in an accident, or just drop dead…it happens. People get old, and when they get old they forget things. Given time, they forget everything, even the things they need to do to stay alive. That’s just the way things are, darling.”

  Sybil had run out of sobs and painful declarations, so silence fell for a minute or two. All she could think of, though, was the way her tiny, pretty great-great-great-great-grandmother had looked while she lay on the road, shattered and bleeding, while the life just ebbed out of her. Her blue eyes had been wide open, frightened and uncomprehending. Although Sybil understood only too well how deceptive the expressions of ancients could be, she couldn’t help reading far too much into that last desperate stare: a sense of utter loss, not of life as such but of life’s happiness, life’s color, life’s stubbornness.

  Sybil didn’t doubt for a moment that everything her mother had said about the goodness of great-great-great-great-grandmother’s life was perfectly true, but that didn’t mean that there was any vestige of goodness about her death. It didn’t matter how ancient an ancient might be, death was still a tragedy, a travesty, and a trauma. And all the stuff about the inexorable turning of the wheel of existence was just a bad joke, or an ineffectual attempt to hide from the awful reality.