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

by Brian Stableford

  “Well,” she said, softly, “it wasn’t rape, and it wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t even loneliness or desperation. All those years looking after mum while she went through the chemo three times over, and all the transfusions and transplants, took a big bite out of my life, but I was nowhere near the end of my tether. It was a choice. Go for a soldier, Jackie said. Guaranteed A-one condition, and no complications. And I get the joke now, by the way: abstract expressionism, a load of Jackson Pollocks. Would you like another cup of tea while I make a couple of phone calls?”

  Gilfillan’s hesitation was only momentary. “No thanks,” he said. “Feel free.” He didn’t utter any objection when she hauled herself to her feet and staggered to the bathroom, locking the door behind her.

  Jackie’s phone was still switched off. “Now I’ve joined the bloody army, thanks to you,” she said. “I’m in the bloody secret service, and I can’t ever pour my heart out to you again, even if I want to. I hope you’re pleased with yourself. Call me when you can—it looks as if things aren’t quite as bad as I feared.”

  Then she called Steve. “I won’t say its panic over,” she told his answerphone, “but it looks as if I’ll probably be able to call and let you know I’m okay. They’ll have to whip the baby out a bit prematurely, it seems, but that’ll probably make me feel a lot more comfortable. Hold tight—I’ll get back to you when I can.”

  * * * *

  She insisted on having lunch before they left, although she had to be content with a couple of microwaved pizzas, a microwaved chocolate sponge pudding, two bananas, an apple, half a bottle of Lucozade and three cups of coffee.

  She knew that the ambulance wouldn’t have gone unobserved, and that her uncomfortable journey to its interior would probably end up on a couple of DIY DVDs. The neighbours had got out of the habit of talking to one another, except in emergencies, but they filmed everything out of the ordinary just in case. Someone would be sure to show it to Jackie, in the hope of getting an explanation. The exact nature of her relationship with Jackie had probably been a topic of speculation for some time, even though the dull reality was that they were just friends who’d found one another to lean on when Jackie’s divorce had matured in parallel with the final phase of Jenny’s mothers losing battle against the Evil Empire of Lymphoma.

  “Would you like a sedative, Miss Loomis?” Gilfillan inquired. “It shouldn’t be a bumpy ride, but if you suffer from travel sickness...”

  “No way,” Jenny retorted. “I’m keeping my wits about me as long as I can. I need to think about this situation— the upside, not the downside.”

  Gilfillan looked at her quizzically. Jenny felt a perverse need to prove to him that she really was capable of understanding anything he might care to tell her, in spite of being a mere accountant.

  “The way I’m trying to see it,” she said, “is that the military application was just a way of getting the funding. With any luck, Junior’s utility as a strike force will be obsolete by the time he’s in secondary school. Selective contagion is no bloody use at all if everyone has defenses—the city walls will hold off the cannon every time; it’s the long sieges that do the damage. The spinoff from better disease carriers will be better immune systems. By the time my boy starts sowing his own seed, we’ll be looking forward to a generation fully-armored against all disease, accidental or deliberate.”

  The doctor hesitated before rising to the bait, but he rose. “I wish it were that easy,” he said. “If I were in charge of the biowar to end all biowars I’d be a happy man. The peace dividend isn’t to be sneezed at—the probes we’re using as targeting aids will be a key phase in the pharmacogenomic revolution, but the trouble with biological engineering—even when it’s only tinkering with expression—is that you can never do just one thing. There’s always spinoff.”

  Jenny knew that he was testing her, to find out how much she understood, and hoped that she was equal to the task. Genetic probes were what the NHS doctors used to do the routine Genetic Profile tests to which her baby had recently been subject. Searching out weaknesses with a view to treatment was only a short step away from searching out weaknesses with a view to convenient murder, which was presumably what he meant by “targeting.” As long as there were variations in the individual DNA of human beings—and how could the human race be reckoned healthy if there weren’t?—then sufficiently clever probes would always be able to identify ways of attacking some people while leaving others untouched, if not with hostile viruses then with tailored cancers and other innate catastrophes. Her boy, she supposed, was destined to carry an armory of probes as well as the strike forces that would pick out the targets whose vulnerabilities the probes had identified: individual targets, in some instances, but more often families, and whole related populations.

  All wars, Jenny knew, were matters of economics—and ever since the oil supply had peaked, moving history into an era of permanently dwindling resources, economics had become an anything-but-dismal science. She understood that, because she was a tax accountant. She knew, too, that since her son had no choice but to be born into such a world, he would be better off as a weapon than he would as a mere target. The world was still a thoroughly civilized place, in spite of all the seemingly random biological attacks that always spread far more anxiety than the actual casualty figures warranted; the price of maintaining as much of that civilization as possible for as long as possible was a price worth paying, even if it included the child she’d set out to procure in a race against the biological clock. She had no problem with that.

  But Gilfillan had mentioned spinoff...

  “Where did it go wrong?” Jenny asked, as the ambulance sped towards its unknown destination. “Why do you only have a platoon and not a battalion? It’s because the fetuses are so big, isn’t it? There’s a nasty side effect you hadn’t thought of.”

  Again he hesitated, but eventually he nodded.

  “We couldn’t do it by transplanting genes,” he said. “Transforming sperm isn’t that hard, but the new genes have to pair up within the zygote if they’re to stand a reasonable chance of expression, and transforming ova is a very different matter. We had to work with the genes that were already in place, working on the expression process itself. Natural carriers aren’t so very rare, and they’re not exotic mutants. It’s just that their genes work differently—I would say better, but there are costs. Any tinkering with the expression process reduces the probability that a sperm will implant, so we expected the in vitro program to fail, and that a lot of the embryos conceived in the ordinary way would fail within the first trimester, but we hadn’t expected the kind of problems that developed thereafter. Your chances of carrying Graham Lunsford’s child to this point in the pregnancy were probably more remote than winning the jackpot on the National Lottery.”

  Jenny was ashamed that first thought was regret that she hadn’t miscarried and saved herself the bother. She tried to concentrate on the intellectual labor and the search for the fugitive upside, but she needed help. “Why?” she asked, trying to sound forceful. “Why do they grow so big? Why are they so bloody demanding?”

  “It’s a matter of imprinting,” he said, having set aside his hesitations. “Do you know what that is?”

  She had to shake her head.

  “Some genes,” he told her, “are only expressed in a developing fetus if they come from the father’s sperm, whereas others are expressed only if they’re already present in the egg. Every pregnant woman is engaged in a struggle for resources with her own offspring. Every pregnancy is a battlefield, in which the best interests of the child are served by ruthless parasitism, and those of the mother by the preservation of reserves to serve the potential needs of future children. So, paternally imprinted genes work to assist the fetus in seizing more resources, while maternally-imprinted ones work to make the fetus’s demands more discreet. Over the course of our evolution, natural selection has produced a balanced situation, but we had to unbalance it to get the result we
needed. Producing the perfect carrier necessitated favoring certain paternally imprinted genes—but we couldn’t just favor the ones we wanted. We had to tip the whole balance…with the results you’ve been experiencing. Fortunately, medical science has given us the means to deliver the baby successfully, so we can get a result that natural selection could never have favored.”

  Jenny had to be quiet then, not only because she needed time to mull over what she’d been told, but also because she was too exhausted to talk—and because the soldier boy in her belly was already practicing his drill.

  * * * *

  When the orderlies brought her out of the ambulance on a stretcher Jenny craned her neck to see where she was, and was glad to observe that it seem to be a perfectly ordinary hospital, not a barbed-wire-surrounded camp. The conditions inside were far from Spartan; there was a TV in her tastefully furnished room. When she asked, Gilfillan told her where she was. He advised her against visitors, but assured her that it was perfectly okay for her to use her phone in spite of the equipment.

  For once, Jackie answered before the “Ride of the Valkyries” had progressed through half a dozen bars. When Jenny told her where she was, Jackie seemed impressed. “I nearly went there to have my face lifted,” she said. “You could get yours done while you’re in. Two birds one stone, and all that rot.”

  “I’m probably in a special wing,” Jenny said. “Only under observation, for now. They’ll leave it as long as possible to do the Caesarean, but I’m guessing tomorrow, if not tonight. I’ve told them you’re my official birthing partner, and they said that was okay, but you’ll probably have to sign the Official Secrets Act. If I start babbling uncontrollably, you might have to join up yourself.”

  Jackie thought she was joking, and managed to fake a polite laugh. “I can be there in thirty minutes if it’s the middle of the night,” she said. “Forty-five if it’s rush hour. You want me there now?”

  “Not yet,” Jenny said. “Got to go—it’s just coming up to dinner time.”

  Dinner was roast lamb and mint sauce with new potatoes, green beans and broccoli, followed by lemon sorbet, but the nurse had obviously dealt with cases like hers before, because she was also permitted to order a packet of Garibaldi biscuits, a five-hundred-gram bar of Cadbury’s fruit and nut and three bananas, all presumably paid for by the army. She only had mineral water to drink, because the bathroom was down the hall and she didn’t want to subject herself to the indignity of calling for bottles at regular intervals.

  She refused the sleeping pills she was offered, but began to regret it when she realized that she couldn’t find a comfortable position in which to lie for more than three minutes at a time, let alone go to sleep. She tried to tell herself that it didn’t matter, because she still had to come to terms with her new situation, and its prospects.

  She was still thinking about it three hours later, when the door of her room quietly swung open. There was a nightlight beside the bed, so it wasn’t dark, but the glow was too dim to show her anything but the blurred silhouette of the man who came in. For a moment, Jenny couldn’t suppress the fear that this was someone come to steal her baby, even though her baby hadn’t been born yet and there was no reason in the world why the army would want to steal him, given that it would work out so much cheaper and so much less trouble to let her bring him up. The absurd panic died when she took note of the fact that the man was exceptionally tall, and realized who it must be.

  “Hi,” said Lieutenant Graham Lunsford, uncomfortably. It was obvious that he hadn’t volunteered for this mission.

  “You utter bastard,” she said. “You knew you were shooting killer sperm, and you just went right ahead. Considering that you must have been trying to get soldier girls pregnant week in and week out, I’m surprised you even wanted to.”

  “You told me you were on the pill,” he pointed out, as he came to stand beside the bed. Standing so close wasn’t as heroic as it seemed; he knew perfectly well that she had about as much mobility as a beached whale. “And sex isn’t as much fun when you’re doing it under orders. You have no idea how much I needed one just for me”

  “So I lied,” she said. “It was Jackie’s idea. No, it wasn’t—it was mine. Jenny Loomis, walking cliché. Alarm on the biological clock about to go off, no reason to saddle oneself with a bloody husband, no reason why a bloody accountant can’t work from home, etcetera. Turned out not to be just for you after all, didn’t it? It’s the medal rather than the court martial, I suppose?”

  “What the treatment was supposed to do,” he told her— and perhaps his naivety was genuine—“was to make sure that any kids I fathered would be better equipped to live in the future we’re heading for. Isn’t that what you want too?”

  “Sure I do,” she said. “You and your mate must have had a fine time listening to Jackie ramble on about the tactics of biological warfare. Abstract expressionism—a load of Jackson Pollocks. If you’re here because they’ve ordered you to be a good father, I’d rather you didn’t bother. I’d rather stick to plan A, warts and all.”

  She watched his face carefully, but couldn’t judge the exact extent of his relief. The fact that he changed the subject was a bit of a giveaway, though.

  “How much did Gilfillan tell you?” he asked, warily.

  “Just enough,” she replied, confidently. “He told me about imprinting. I’d never heard of that, but it’s a neat idea. The womb as an eternal battleground, where every mother and her child are locked into a struggle for resources. Makes all that old kin selection stuff seem quaintly sentimental, doesn’t it? At the end of the day, it’s all warfare—even motherhood. We all get caught by friendly fire if our defenses get leaky. There’s a certain irony in the fact that a perfect carrier is so hard to carry to term…but I can see the upside now. You’re absolutely right about my kid being better equipped than most to live in the future we’re designing. And I can see the next step in the argument, too—the side effects side effect. I can see the real weapons potential.”

  Lieutenant Lunsford hesitated a lot longer than Dr. Gilfillan had, and when he did speak, all he said was: “Ah.”

  “Jackie was right, wasn’t she?” Jenny said. “Okay, maybe it’s not that easy to design, manufacture or spread viruses that will sterilize women or feminize men—but that’s not the name of the game, is it? Expressionism is the way to go. You don’t have to invent bioweapons when they’re already built in, when all you have to do is upset the balance of power. You don’t have to sterilize women if you have a means of doing to them what you’ve done to me ... or the opposite. It really doesn’t matter, weaponwise, whether it’s the mother or the fetus that gets the upper hand in the eternal struggle—just so long as natural selection’s carefully negotiated balance is upset. Either the kids become too difficult to carry, or they’re starved of resources before birth. A lose-lose situation—unless, of course, you’re the enemy. Which we will be. After all, we’re the ones with the fancy hospitals and the hi-tech medicine. As usual, it’ll be the rich that get the pleasure, and the poor that pay the price.”

  “You’re a tax accountant,” the lieutenant said, brutally. “Would you want it any other way?”

  “Speaking as an early casualty in this particular war,” Jenny said, “no. But I still think you’re an utter bastard, whether I lied about the pill or not. You can’t excuse the casualties of friendly fire by saying that you thought they were wearing flak jackets.”

  “You’re right,” he said, although his heart wasn’t in it. “But if you need me, I’m around. All you have to do is ask. Your son is my only child, so far, and the way things are going, he might have to wait quite a while for a little brother or sister—so I’m not sorry about what happened, all things considered.”

  Jenny opened her to mouth to say “I am,” but she couldn’t shape the words. She was exhausted, she was being kicked black and blue from inside, she was paranoid, and she was probably even a little delirious, but she couldn’t quite manage to
be sorry. She was a victim of friendly fire, and she was carrying the spawn of Satan, and she was a complete idiot, and she was extremely hungry, but she couldn’t quite manage to be sorry. After all, her perfect, healthy, glorious baby boy might still grow up to be an actor, or a lawyer, or a brain surgeon, even if he did have to do his national service as a secret weapon... and if progress moved on, he had twenty years to become redundant in that capacity.

  “You can go now,” she said to him, eventually. “I think I might be able to go to sleep now.

  * * * *

  For breakfast Jenny had a big bowl of cornflakes sprinkled with sultanas, followed by three croissants with butter and strawberry jam, a bowl of mixed fruits, including slices of melon, pineapple, oranges and kiwifruit, washed down with half a liter of apple and mango juice and a single cup of black coffee without sugar. Then she had a couple of rounds of toast with butter and lime marmalade. She’d never felt so virtuous in all her life, but she would have killed for half a dozen rashers of crispy bacon.