In the Flesh and Other Tales of The Biotech Revolution [SSC]

by Brian Stableford

  Like all Geoff s pauses, though, this one only led to an anticlimax. There was nowhere else it could lead, in a household as civilized as this one. “Indeed,” he said, in a tone so falsely polite that you could have cut it with a paring-knife. “In that case, perhaps you’d like to explain it to me.”

  Martha realized that Geoff thought that he could deal with Carl Ulick as he might have dealt with any common-or-garden fourteen-year-old boy. He thought that his acid request for an explanation would only bring forth bluster and confusion. He thought that he had the upper hand within the ordered sanctum of his own home. Martha already knew that he was wrong on every count, and couldn’t tear herself away even though she knew full well that her presence would make his humiliation worse.

  “You said that Jennifer’s a very sick girl,” the boy said, by way of preamble.

  “She is,” Geoff confirmed, feeling that he was on safe ground. “Very sick indeed.”

  “In fact,” Carl Ulick said, “you think she’s dying.”

  Martha winced. Even Geoff winced. Neither of them wanted to make the obvious reply.

  “Well, she isn’t,” the boy told them, with all apparent sincerity. “She used to be. She told me once that she used to think that there was nothing to life except dying, and that she was just saving time. Now, she knows that she’s living.”

  Martha could see that the boy was taking care not to go for the jugular. He was taking care not to say aloud what Jennifer must actually have said—that she was the only one in the house who had turned the corner, had given up dying and taken to living. But Jennifer had never said that to Martha. She had never said anything to Martha about any of this. She had turned for help to someone who had ears lo hear and eyes to see—someone lucky enough to be born deaf and blind; someone lucky enough to take full advantage of the wonders of modern technology.

  “I’m glad....” Geoff began—but Carl Ulick hadn’t finished. His pauses were honest pauses.

  “Jennifer knows that she’s in a race,” the boy said, “but she honestly thinks she has a fair chance of winning it. She’s keeping a close eye on every team involved in relevant research. She thinks that they’ll find a way to control the regeneration of neural tissue accurately enough to begin stitching her back together again—her phrase, not mine—before the degeneration kills her. She thinks they’ll be able to hold her together long enough and well enough for what she calls serious cyborgization. I think she’s right. She can’t see half the things I can see, because her visual cortex can’t produce the illusion of deep immersion in virtual reality, but she can read and she can hear. I wish there were better words to describe it, but there aren’t. I suppose the only way you can imagine what she’s experiencing is to think of her new eyes as little videophones planted in her skull—glorified versions of the mobile in your car—but the sight they offer is so much richer than that....she’s not dying, Mr. Mortimore, She was, but she isn’t any more. I wish she could have explained that to you herself, but I can understand how difficult it is for her.”

  This time, Geoff didn’t bother to pause. “Is that why she told you to come?” he wanted to know. “To lecture us?”

  Of course it is, you bloody idiot, Martha thought. And how else could she do it, when it’s so hard for her to speak to us, and so much harder for us to listen?

  “Of course not,” Carl Ulick said, as generously as he could. “I wanted to come, and she said I could. I wanted to give her a birthday present.” He was still clutching the square package sealed in wine-colored wrapping. I bet it’s a good present, Martha thought. I bet he knows what you ought to give to a girl who has everything— everything, at least, that we could think of.

  “She should have told us,” Geoff insisted, doggedly. “This isn’t right.” But he knew he’d lost the battle, and the war. He didn’t have any answer to the boy’s charges.

  “It’s just a present, Geoff,” Martha said, as soothingly as she could—and she’d had a lot of practice. “It can’t do any harm to let him give it to Jenny himself. She’d never forgive us if we didn’t.” And she’d be right, she added, silently. What can I have been thinking of, to be so scared?

  Geoff wilted. He could have shot Martha a venomous glance, but he didn’t. He just wilted. Those blue, unshaded eyes had knocked the stuffing out of him—as if, like Superman’s eyes, they had looked right into his heart and shriveled it with heat. “All right,’’ he whispered. “If that’s what you want.”

  He was talking to Martha, trying to shift the blame—but it was the boy who said: “It is.”

  “If you can hang on for two minutes,” Martha said, “I’ll finish icing the cake. We can all go up together.” She wasn’t ashamed of the cake any more. She knew that Carl Ulick wasn’t going to look down on her because she couldn’t ice a decent curve. She knew, too, that he wasn’t going to flinch when he saw Jennifer in the flesh.

  * * * *

  While they went up the stairs Martha wondered what was in the box. In times past she and Geoff had had all kinds of options when Jennifer’s birthday came round. They had bought her pictures to decorate the walls of her room, music to play on her stereo, textpaks to slot into her king-sized bookplate. Ever since she’d had her new eyes fitted, though, she’d been tuned into the Net.

  Now, Jennifer could summon any piece of music she wanted, and she could replace the walls of her room with any of a million virtual rooms—and even if she couldn’t see them very well, that was far, far better than the prison-cell in which she’d lived for more than twelve years. Now, the king-sized bookplate always faced away from the bed, displaying nothing but the things Jennifer said, when she took the trouble to use her blinking eyes to say anything at all.

  Geoff had to open the door of Jennifer’s room because Martha was holding the cake in both hands. She’d put a single lighted candle on it in the hope of making amends for the lousy icing. She intended to invite Carl Ulick to blow it out.

  Jennifer wasn’t asleep. She couldn’t actually look around when the door opened, but her eyes shifted in their sockets. Like Carl Ulick’s, Jennifer’s eyes were blue, but they were a brighter blue than his. Her hair was bright too, and the time Martha had put into grooming it earlier that afternoon hadn’t gone to waste. Jennifer wasn’t pretty, and the wasting of her nerves had taken all the life out of her flat cheeks and slack mouth, but she did have nice hair.

  Geoff should have introduced the visitor but he didn’t. He just stood aside, unwilling or unable to rouse himself from his sulk. It wasn’t that he was ashamed of the way his daughter was—he just couldn’t avoid being infected, in spirit if not in body, by the fact of her slow decline. What the boy had told him hadn’t made any difference; when he looked at Jennifer now he still saw a hopeless case. He didn’t dare to hope.

  Do I? Martha asked herself.

  The lack of an introduction didn’t matter.

  “Hello Jennifer,” Carl Ulick said, shuffling nervously towards the bedside. “I’m Carl. I’m sorry I’m a little late.”

  HELLO CARL. GOOD TO SEE YOU AT LAST. The words appeared on the out-turned bookplate with marvelous alacrity, red letters against a black background. Martha realized that Jennifer must have had them set up in advance, ready to flash at the least twitch of her eyelid.

  “Your mother’s brought your cake,” Carl told her, dutifully, “and I’ve brought you a present.”

  But the cake’s useless, Martha thought. Now that you can only take liquids, cake’s just as useless as all the other things we used to give you. We can think of you while we eat it, but all you can do is look at it and weigh its worth as a measure of our love. She knew that she was being stupidly maudlin, but she couldn’t help it. She blinked away the threat of a tear and concentrated hard on Carl Ulick’s slender fingers as they tore the sellotape away, peeled back the burgundy wrapping-paper and lifted the lid of the white plastic box within.

  Jennifer was watching too. For the moment, her eyes were turned away from the great wide wo
rld of the Net, bringing the ordinary world into focus—the world where her poor half-blind parents were condemned to spend their relentlessly ordinary lives.

  The thing that lay in the five-inch box was less than four inches across. It was round and lenticular, like an oversized magnifying glass. Martha could see that it wasn’t glass, though—it had a texture like jelly, or one of those silicone implants they used to implant in women’s breasts in the days before cosmetic somatic engineering. It seemed to be some kind of fluid-filled sac but the fluid wasn’t clear; it had clouds in it: ominously dark clouds, as grey as thunderheads.

  The boy set the box down on the bed and used two hands to lift the jelly up. His attitude was reverent and his hands didn’t shake at all. Martha glanced down at her own burden, and the awkward way she bore it, but she soon returned her attention to the bed, the boy and the blinking bookplate.

  WHAT IS IT?

  This time, Jennifer had to blink each letter individually but the message appeared by swift and sure degrees.

  “It’s a closed ecosystem,” Carl said, glancing sideways at Martha to include her in the explanation. “You can get them in glass globes, with photosynthetic algae to import the energy required to keep them going, but this is different. These are all artificial microorganisms, cooked up in a lab. The primary producers are thermo-synthetic. Instead of soaking up photons they absorb heat from the environment. The soft shell’s a wonderfully efficient conductor. If I put it on your chest, just below the neck, it will absorb heat from your skin. Your body-heat will become the motor of a little universe. There’s nothing in there bigger than a single cell, but the organisms at the top of the food-chain are bioluminescent. When it’s stabilized you can see them glinting in the dark, like tiny flashes of lightning.”

  As he spoke the boy placed the lump of jelly exactly where he’d said he would. He didn’t have to move anything out of the way; the intelligent mattress and coverlet that kept Jennifer’s unmoving body free of bedsores required her to be naked, and the coverlet only came up far enough to hide her nipples, for modesty’s sake.

  Jennifer didn’t have to look down to see it. There was a mirror set above her bed, so that she could look at herself. She had insisted, and Geoff hadn’t been able to talk her out of it. Jennifer looked into the mirror now with her bright blue eyes, studying the circle that lay on her sternum like an enameled pendant, grey clouds set against the background of her uncannily pale skin.

  “You don’t have to keep it on all the time, of course,” the boy told her. “If you put it somewhere cool the whole system goes into suspended animation—a kind of hibernation.” He turned to Martha, adding: “You don’t need to put it in the fridge. A drawer will do.

  LEAVE IT, Jennifer said, as if she feared that Martha might whip it away instantly.

  I knew it would be good, Martha thought. Even though we racked our brains and couldn’t think of anything, I knew there had to be an answer. Her eyes already give her access to everything there is to be seen, and her flesh is so frail that she can’t lift a finger or even use her tongue to proper effect, but she still has blood in her veins and heat in her heart—heat enough to sustain a world in miniature.

  “The truth is in the flesh,” she murmured. She was talking to herself, but everyone could hear her.

  NO. The word appeared angrily red on said Jennifer’s bookplate. The device added, letter by letter: NOT TRUTH. NOT ME.

  Martha knew that her acute embarrassment must be showing. The candle-flame flickered as her hands shook.

  “What Jennifer means,” Carl Ulick said, softly, “is that truth is in the senses. Truth is in what you see and hear, and how you interpret it. Warmth is in the flesh.”

  It was Geoff who asked: “Do you like the present, Jenny?”

  YES, the bookplate flashed. WEAR IT ALWAYS. WANT TO SEE THE LIGHT.

  “Me too,” said Geoff.

  “You’ll have to wait a while,” Carl Ulick advised. “Give it a couple of hours, then switch off the lights. When your eyes have adjusted to the dark, you’ll see the sparks. It’s beautiful.”

  “I baked you a cake,” Martha said, as she came forward to join the boy. “I’m sorry about the icing. I just can’t seem to steady my hands any more. I’ll put some icing in the blender later, so that you can taste it. Would you like Carl to blow out the candle?”

  YES.

  Carl blew out the candle. He opened his mouth to say something else but he stopped when he saw the bookplate’s screen flicker into life again.

  I LOVE YOU, Jennifer spelt out, one red letter at a time.

  Carl was, after all, a fourteen-year-old boy. He couldn’t take that kind of declaration with equanimity. Like a perfect fool—a gloriously perfect fool—he turned to Martha and said: “She means you.” He meant I told you so—and so he had. Not that Martha had ever doubted that her daughter would love her parents, if she could. All that Martha had doubted was that her daughter was still capable of love, now that her frail flesh had become so pale, so nearly dead.

  Jennifer had set the message to repeat.

  I LOVE YOU, the screen said. I LOVE YOU. I LOVE YOU. I LOVE YOU.

  Martha wasn’t about to object to Cark Ulick’s heroic attempt to include them in Jennifer’s fulsome thanks, and neither was Geoff. Geoff wasn’t quite magnanimous enough to suggest aloud that the message might have meant to include all of them, but that was only because he was too busy pausing. He knew well enough what Jennifer meant.

  Carl Ulick’s face was as crimson as the letters. His confusion was a joy to behold—but he was pleased. He was certain that he’d done the right thing, delighted that he’d had the guts to follow through. Martha knew that even Geoff must be relieved, by now, that he hadn’t managed to deflect the boy from his purpose.

  Martha also knew, and was very glad she knew, that it didn’t matter in the least who Jennifer’s words were intended for.

  The important thing—the only important thing—was that she was able to mean what she said.

  <>

  * * * *

  A CHIP OFF THE OLD BLOCK

  Stevie didn’t want to go to the doctor’s in the first place, even if it meant missing a whole Friday’s school. He didn’t feel ill, and when he took a quick look at himself in the bathroom mirror he couldn’t see why his Mum thought that he looked ill, but she was determined to get an expert opinion, so off they went.

  When he listened to Mum telling Dr. Greenlea about his symptoms, though, Stevie began to wonder whether he might have made a mistake. He was “off his food”, apparently, and he was “having trouble sleeping” and he was “becoming withdrawn”. He was quite worried for a minute or two, until he realized what she meant.

  One: he’d refused to eat the disgusting curried marrow she’d cooked as an “experiment” on Tuesday, and he’d been careful not to let her see him sneaking the manna-shake and the tropical fruit bar out of the kitchen cupboard afterwards, because she’d begun to get so stroppy about “the quality of his diet” now that his Dad was taking him to Pizza Supreme or Burger Bonanza every weekend, when he went to stay in Dad’s new so-called loft.

  Two: on Wednesday he’d gone on playing Ultimate Labyrinth for an hour and a half after he’d been sent to bed, with the sound-effects turned off so Mum wouldn’t hear him, and he hadn’t quite had time to get the headset off and get back under the covers when she looked in on him after going to the loo after the end of the National Lottery Midweek Extravaganza, even though he’d had plenty of practice.

  Three: at school on Thursday he’d fallen out with Pete over Suzie and sulked all lunchtime, which wouldn’t have mattered if he hadn’t tried to take it out on Simon by punching him in the mouth for calling him Pinky in a scornful way just before the bell went, which had caused Mr. Winthrop to give the pair of them the third degree. They’d both clammed up, of course, but that had only made Mr. Winthrop mad—which also wouldn’t have mattered if he hadn’t happened to catch Mum’s eye when she came to p
ick him up in the Skoda. It would all have been different if the BMW hadn’t been Dad’s company car and Mum had got custody of it; teachers never seemed to get their knickers in a twist about kids who were picked up by quality motors.

  All in all, it was just a run of bad luck.

  Stevie nearly managed to interrupt Mum’s account of his symptoms to explain that they weren’t actually symptoms at all, but he hesitated a couple of seconds too long, and by the time he started to protest Dr. Greenlea had already mentioned the fatal words “blood test”, so Mum and the doctor both assumed that he was just trying to wriggle out of having a needle stuck in his arm—which, of course, he would have said anything to avoid.

  He tried not to cry, because he knew he was far too big for that sort of nonsense even without his Mum reminding him of the fact, but he couldn’t. He felt so wretched about crying—all the more so after Mum’s complaint that he had “shown her up”—that by the time he got home he really did feel quite ill.