Axiomatic

by Greg Egan

  The latest meeting with Cook had done nothing to banish their sense of unease, but without solid reasons to back up their feelings, they felt obliged to ignore them. Cook had solid reasons for everything, all based on the very latest research; how could they go to him and call the whole thing off, without at least a dozen impeccable arguments, each supported by a reference to some recent report in Nature?

  They couldn’t even pin down the source of their disquiet to their own satisfaction. Perhaps they were simply afraid of the fame that Eugene was destined to bring upon them. Perhaps they were jealous, already, of their son’s as yet unknowable—but inevitably spectacular—achievements. Bill had a vague suspicion that the whole endeavour was somehow pulling the rug out from under an important part of what it had meant to be human—but he didn’t know quite how to put it into words, not even to Angela. How could he confess that, personally, he didn’t want to know the extent to which genes determined the fate of an individual? How could he declare that he’d rather stick with comfortable myths—no, forget the euphemisms, that he’d rather have downright lies—than have his nose rubbed in the dreary truth that a human being could be made to order, like a hamburger?

  Cook had assured them that they need have no worries about handling the young genius. He could arrange a queue-jumping enrolment in the best Californian baby university, where, amongst Noble X Noble TPGM prodigies, Eugene could do brain-stimulating baby gymnastics to the sound of Kant sung to Beethoven, and learn Grand Unified Field Theory subliminally during his afternoon naps. Eventually, of course, he would overtake both his genetically inferior peers and his merely brilliant instructors, but by then he ought to be able to direct his own education.

  Bill put an arm around Angela, and wondered if Eugene really would do more for humanity than their millions could have achieved directly in Bangladesh or Ethiopia or Alice Springs. But could they face spending the rest of their lives wondering what miracles Eugene might have performed for their crippled planet? That would be unbearable. They’d pay the tax on hope.

  Angela began loosening Bill’s clothing. He did the same for her. Tonight—as they both knew, without exchanging a word—was the most fertile point of Angela’s cycle; in spite of the antibodies, they hadn’t abandoned the habits they’d acquired in the years when they’d been hoping to conceive naturally.

  The rousing music from the television stopped, abruptly. The scenes of military hardware deteriorated into static. A sad-eyed boy, perhaps eight years old, appeared on the screen and said quietly, ‘Mother. Father. I owe you an explanation.’

  Behind the boy was nothing but an empty blue sky. Angela and Bill stared at the screen in silence, waiting in vain for a voice-over or title to put the image in context. Then the child’s eyes met Angela’s, and she knew that he could see her, and she knew who it must be. She gripped Bill’s arm and whispered, dizzy with shock, but euphoric too, ‘It’s Eugene.’

  The boy nodded.

  For a moment, Bill was overcome with panic and confusion, but then paternal pride swelled up and he managed to say, ‘You’ve invented t-t-t-time t-travel!’

  Eugene shook his head. ‘No. Suppose you fed the genetic profile of an embryo into a computer, which then constructed a simulation of the appearance of the mature organism; no time travel is involved, and yet aspects of a possible future are revealed. In that example, all the machinery to perform the extrapolation exists in the present, but the same thing can happen if the right equipment—equipment of a far more sophisticated kind—exists in the potential future. It may be useful, as a mathematical formalism, to pretend that the potential future has a tangible reality and is influencing its past—just as in geometric optics, it’s often convenient to pretend that reflections are real objects that exist behind the mirrors that create them—but a formalism is all it would be.’

  Angela said, ‘So because you might invent such a device, we can see you, and talk to you, as if you were speaking to us from the future?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The couple exchanged glances. Here was an end to their doubts! Now they could find out exactly what Eugene would do for the world!

  ‘If you were speaking to us from the future,’ Angela asked carefully, ‘what would you tell us? That you’ve reversed the Greenhouse Effect?’ Eugene shook his head sadly. ‘That you’ve made war obsolete?’ No. ‘That you’ve abolished hunger?’ No. ‘That you’ve found a cure for cancer?’ No. ‘What, then?’

  ‘I would say that I have found a way to Nirvana.’

  ‘What do you mean? Immortality? Infinite bliss? Heaven on Earth?’

  ‘No. Nirvana. The absence of all longing.’

  Bill was horrified. ‘Y-y-you d-don’t mean g-g-genocide? You’re n-not going to w-w-w-wipe—’

  ‘No, Father. That would be easy, but I would never do such a thing. Each must find their own way—and in any case, death is an incomplete solution, it cannot erase what has already been. Nirvana is to never have been. ’

  Angela said, ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘My potential existence influences more than this television set. When you check your bank accounts, you will find that the money you might have used to create me has been disbursed; don’t look so distressed—it’s all gone to charitable organisations of which you both approve. The computer records are precisely as if you had authorised the payments yourselves, so don’t bother trying to challenge their authenticity.’

  Angela was distraught. ‘But… why would you waste your talents on destroying yourself, when you could have lived a happy, productive life, and done great things for the whole human race?’

  'Why?’ Eugene frowned. ‘Don’t ask me to account for my actions; you’re the ones who would have made me what I would have been. If you want my subjective opinion: personally, I can’t see any point in existence when I can achieve so much without it—but I wouldn’t call that an “explanation”; it’s merely a rationalisation of processes best described at a neural level.’ He shrugged apologetically. ‘The question really has no meaning. Why anything? The laws of physics, and the boundary conditions of space-time. What more can I say?’

  He vanished from the screen. A soap opera appeared.

  They contacted their bank’s computer. The experience had been no shared hallucination; their accounts were empty.

  They sold the house, which was far too large for just the two of them, but it cost them most of the proceeds to buy something much smaller. Angela found work as a tour guide. Bill got a job on a garbage truck.

  Cook’s research continued without them, of course. He succeeded in creating four chimpanzees able to sing, and understand, country and western, for which he received both the Nobel Prize and a Grammy award. He made it into the Guinness Book of Records, for implanting and delivering the world’s first third-generation IVF quins. But his super-baby project, and those of other eugenicists around the world, seemed jinxed; sponsors backed out for no apparent reason, equipment malfunctioned, labs caught fire.

  Cook died without ever understanding how completely successful he’d been.

  The Caress

  Two smells hit me when I kicked down the door: death, and the scent of an animal.

  A man who passed the house each day had phoned us, anonymously; worried by the sight of a broken window left unrepaired, he’d knocked on the front door with no results. On his way to the back door, he’d glimpsed blood on the kitchen wall through a gap in the curtains.

  The place had been ransacked; all that remained downstairs were the drag marks on the carpet from the heaviest furniture. The woman in the kitchen, mid fifties, throat slit, had been dead for at least a week.

  My helmet was filing sound and vision, but it couldn’t record the animal smell. The correct procedure was to make a verbal comment, but I didn’t say a word. Why? Call it a vestigial need for independence. Soon they’ll be logging our brain waves, our heartbeats, who knows what, and all of it subpoenable.

  ‘Detective Segel, the evidence shows
that you experienced a penile erection when the defendant opened fire. Would you describe that as an appropriate response?’

  Upstairs was a mess. Clothes scattered in the bedroom. Books, CDs, papers, upturned drawers, spread across the floor of the study. Medical texts. In one corner, piles of CD periodicals stood out from the jumble by their jackets’ uniformity: The New England Journal of Medicine, Nature, Clinical Biochemistry and Laboratory Embryology. A framed scroll hung on the wall, awarding the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to Freda Anne Macklenburg in the year two thousand and twenty-three. The desktop had dust-free spaces shaped like a monitor and a keyboard. I noticed a wall outlet with a pilot light; the switch was down but the light was dead. The room light wasn’t working; ditto elsewhere.

  Back on the ground floor, I found a door behind the stairs, presumably leading to a basement. Locked. I hesitated. Entering the house I’d had no choice but to force my way in; here, though, I was on shakier legal ground. I hadn’t searched thoroughly for keys, and I had no clear reason to believe it was urgent to get into the basement.

  But what would one more broken door change? Cops have been sued for failing to wipe their boots clean on the doormat. If a citizen wants to screw you, they’ll find a reason, even if you came in on your knees, waving a handful of warrants, and saved their whole family from torture and death.

  No room to kick, so I punched out the lock. The smell had me gagging, but it was the excess, the concentration, that was overwhelming; the scent in itself wasn’t foul. Upstairs, seeing medical books, I’d thought of guinea pigs, rats and mice, but this was no stink of caged rodents.

  I switched on the torch in my helmet and moved quickly down the narrow concrete steps. Over my head was a thick, square pipe. An air-conditioning duct? That made sense; the house couldn’t normally smell the way it did, but with the power cut off to a basement air-conditioner—

  The torch beam showed a shelving unit, decorated with trinkets and potted plants. A TV set. Landscape paintings on the wall. A pile of straw on the concrete floor. Curled on the straw, the powerful body of a leopard, lungs visibly labouring, but otherwise still.

  When the beam fell upon a tangle of auburn hair, I thought, it’s chewing on a severed human head. I continued to approach, expecting, hoping, that by disturbing the feeding animal I could provoke it into attacking me. I was carrying a weapon that could have spattered it into a fine mist of blood and gristle, an outcome which would have involved me in a great deal less tedium and bureaucracy than dealing with it alive. I directed the light towards its head again, and realised that I’d been mistaken; it wasn’t chewing anything, its head was hidden, tucked away, and the human head was simply—

  Wrong again. The human head was simply joined to the leopard’s body. Its human neck took on fur and spots and merged with the leopard’s shoulders.

  I squatted down beside it, thinking, above all else, what those claws could do to me if my attention lapsed. The head was a woman’s. Frowning. Apparently asleep. I placed one hand below her nostrils, and felt the air blast out in time with the heavings of the leopard’s great chest. That, more than the smooth transition of the skin, made the union real for me.

  I explored the rest of the room. There was a pit in one corner that turned out to be a toilet bowl sunk into the floor. I put my foot on a nearby pedal, and the bowl flushed from a hidden cistern. There was an upright freezer, standing in a puddle of water. I opened it to find a rack containing thirty-five small plastic vials. Every one of them bore smeared red letters, spelling out the word spoiled. Temperature-sensitive dye.

  I returned to the leopard woman. Asleep? Feigning sleep? Sick? Comatose? I patted her on the cheek, and not gently. The skin seemed hot, but I had no idea what her temperature ought to be. I shook her by one shoulder, this time with a little more respect, as if waking her by touching the leopard part might somehow be more dangerous. No effect.

  Then I stood up, fought back a sigh of irritation (Psych latch on to all your little noises; I’ve been grilled for hours over such things as an injudicious whoop of triumph), and called for an ambulance.

  * * *

  I should have known better than to hope that that would be the end of my problems. I had to physically obstruct the stairway to stop the ambulancemen from retreating. One of them puked. They then refused to put her on the stretcher unless I promised to ride with her to the hospital. She was only about two metres long, excluding the tail, but must have weighed a hundred and fifty kilos, and it took the three of us to get her up the awkward stairs.

  We covered her completely with a sheet before leaving the house, and I took the trouble to arrange it to keep it from revealing the shape beneath. A small crowd had gathered outside, the usual motley collection of voyeurs. The forensic team arrived just then, but I’d already told them everything by radio.

  At the casualty department of St Dominic’s, doctor after doctor took one look under the sheet and then fled, some muttering half-baked excuses, most not bothering. I was about to lose my temper when the fifth one I cornered, a young woman, turned pale but kept her ground. After poking and pinching and shining a torch into the leopard woman’s forced-opened eyes, Dr Muriel Beatty (from her name badge) announced, ‘She’s in a coma,’ and started extracting details from me. When I’d told her everything, I squeezed in some questions of my own.

  ‘How would someone do this? Gene splicing? Transplant surgery?’

  ‘I doubt it was either. More likely she’s a chimera.’

  I frowned. ‘That’s some kind of mythical—’

  ‘Yes, but it’s also a bioengineering term. You can physically mix the cells of two genetically distinct early embryos, and obtain a blastocyst that will develop into a single organism. If they’re both of the same species, there’s a very high success rate; for different species it’s trickier. People made crude sheep/goat chimeras as far back as the nineteen sixties, but I’ve read nothing new on the subject for five or ten years. I would have said it was no longer being seriously pursued. Let alone pursued with humans.’ She stared down at her patient with unease and fascination. ‘I wouldn’t know how they guaranteed such a sharp distinction between the head and the body; a thousand times more effort has gone into this than just stirring two clumps of cells together. I guess you could say it was something halfway between foetal transplant surgery and chimerisation. And there must have been genetic manipulation as well, to smooth out the biochemical differences.’ She laughed drily. ‘So both your suggestions I dismissed just then were probably partly right. Of course!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘No wonder she’s in a coma! That freezer full of vials you mentioned—she probably needs an external supply for half a dozen hormones that are insufficiently active across species. Can I arrange for someone to go to the house and look through the dead woman’s papers? We need to know exactly what those vials contained. Even if she made it up herself from off-the-shelf sources, we might be able to find the recipe—but chances are she had a contract with a biotechnology company for a regular, pre-mixed supply. So if we can find, say, an invoice with a product reference number, that would be the quickest, surest way to get this patient what she needs to stay alive.’

  I agreed, and accompanied a lab technician back to the house, but he found nothing of use in the study, or the basement. After talking it over with Muriel Beatty on the phone, I started ringing local biotech companies, quoting the deceased woman’s name and address. Several people said they’d heard of Dr Macklenburg, but not as a customer. The fifteenth call produced results—deliveries from a company called Applied Veterinary Research had been sent to Macklenburg’s address—and with a combination of threats and smooth talking (such as inventing an order number they could quote on their invoice), I managed to extract a promise that a batch of the ‘Applied Veterinary Research’ preparation would be made up at once and rushed to St Dominic’s.

  Burglars do switch off the power sometimes, in the hope of disabling those (very rare) securit
y devices that don’t have battery back-up, but the house hadn’t been broken into; the scattered glass from the window fell, in an undisturbed pattern, on to carpet where a sofa had left clear indentations. The fools had forgotten to break a window until after they’d taken the furniture. People do throw out invoices, but Macklenburg had kept all her videophone, water, gas and electricity bills for the last five years. So, it looked like somebody had known about the chimera and wanted it dead, without wishing to be totally obvious, yet without being professional enough to manage anything subtler, or more certain.

  I arranged for the chimera to be guarded. Probably a good idea anyway, to keep the media at bay when they found out about her.

  Back in my office, I did a search of medical literature by Macklenburg, and found her name on only half a dozen papers. All were more than twenty years old. All were concerned with embryology, though (to the extent that I could understand the jargon-laden abstracts, full of ‘zonae pellucidae’ and ‘polar bodies’) none was explicitly about chimeras.

  The papers were all from one place; the Early Human Development Laboratory at St Andrew’s Hospital. After some standard brush-offs from secretaries and assistants, I managed to get myself put through to one of Macklenburg’s one-time co-authors, a Dr Henry Feingold, who looked rather old and frail. News of Macklenburg’s death produced a wistful sigh, but no visible shock or distress.

  ‘Freda left us back in thirty-two or thirty-three. I’ve hardly set eyes on her since, except at the occasional conference.’

  ‘Where did she go to from St Andrew’s?’

  ‘Something in industry. She was rather vague about it. I’m not sure that she had a definite appointment lined up.’

  ‘Why did she resign?’