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

by Brian Stableford

  Tom nodded his head sympathetically. “But now we know,” he said, “we have to face up to it, don’t we? However challenging its effects might be, we can’t just forget that it ever existed, can we? Natural selection might have favored that solution, but we can’t. We have to be strong enough to face the truth, if we’re to count ourselves true human beings.”

  Asherson released Tom’s shoulder, and nodded assent. Then he pulled himself together, hoisting his shoulders like a military man on parade or a PE teacher leading a class, ready for anything and determined to fulfill his purpose.

  There was yet another gust of wind, this one carrying raindrops, which caused Tom to flinch as well as shiver. It made the ill-latched door vibrate, and the broken lock clicked three times in quick succession. After a slight pause, it did it again.

  Tick, tock, tick, it seemed to be saying, non-judgmentally. Tick, tick, tock.

  Tom suspected that William Asherson might not be hearing it in exactly the same way, but that didn’t trouble him. After all, this wasn’t about William Asherson, and never had been. This was about the trial—the petty trial that was already half way through, and the greater trial that was about to begin.

  <>

  * * * *

  the gift of the magi

  Later, Jim was to remember the blithe innocence with which Delia distributed her tokens of love on that fateful morning. Delia thought of herself as a victim of poverty, but she knew that she lived in a rich world. She only smiled when Jim opined—as he often did—that it was too rich for its own good.

  Jim had always taken a secret and slightly shameful delight in the fact that—unlike him—Delia was one of those happy lovers who see their good fortune reflected in the world around them. While she was in the grip of passion she was a sucker for the pathetic fallacy. She thought the sun was smiling when it shone, and that the rain, which fell with increasing rarity, was exercising generosity in lending fertility to the earth. She thought the late Anita Roddick had been a commercial saint and that Ben and Jerry still were, even though they seemed to be suing one another to death through every court in America. She thought the Magi were second-generation commercial saints, and she adored their slogans, especially GIVE THE GIFT OF NEW LIFE.

  Jim had always been cynical about the Magi, of course. Jim was cynical about everything, even when he was in love—and he was in love, no matter how hard Delia sometimes had to work to make him say so.

  “The only reason the stuff is so cheap,” Jim had told her, when she had finished planting a constellation of starbursts in the trunk of the tree whose crown had shaded their first kiss, “is because it costs next to nothing to produce. That’s the thing about biotech; once you have the process and the plant, the product makes itself. Because it caught on in such a big way, even their advertising costs are minimal. If they stick up a billboard in London saying YOU CAN’T PUT A PRICE ON NEW LIFE, it’s being quoted everywhere from Land’s End to John O’Groats within two days, even though it’s a flat lie. The price is fifty pence a packet—which breaks down as forty-nine per cent packaging and promotion and forty-nine per cent profit. They’re making a fortune.”

  “I want to do the bench next,” Delia had said, meaning the bench overlooking the lake where they used to meet when Delia was in her last year at school and Jim was doing the first year of his computer course at the tech.

  “You’re not supposed to do public property,” Jim had reminded her, half-heartedly. “The council reckon that NEW LIFE is just a kind of graffiti.”

  “The final indictment of the political mindset,” she had riposted, quoting from a TV program they’d watched at his insistence. He remembered that he’d grinned, but that behind the grin he’d reflected—not at all kindly—on the fact that NEW LIFE had almost sent graffiti the way of the dinosaurs, along with wallpaper, body-piercing and the Stone Age version of a girl’s best friend. It was, to quote another of the Magi’s catch-phrases, BRIGHT, BEAUTIFUL AND BIODEGRADABLE. The Church of England had not announced plans to change the wording of the nation’s favorite hymn again, but some people had reckoned that it was only a matter of time even though “All things bright, beautiful and biodegradable” would play merry hell with the scansion.

  That day, as on all days, Delia had been wearing NEW LIFE flowers in her hair. She also had NEW LIFE tattoos in places no one but Jim—not even her mother—had ever seen. Now she had decided to scatter NEW LIFE starbursts in every place that was romantically significant—although she naturally preferred “sacred” to “significant”—to Jim and herself.

  They were, of course, far from the first to indulge such a whim; the tree was already decorated with a dozen imaginatively-designed constellations, which collaborated in obscuring all the initials people had carved into the trunk in technologically-unsophisticated times.

  Even Jim the Callous Cynic—who naturally preferred to think of himself as Jim the Sensible Skeptic—had not been untouched by the fad. Although, in theory, he did not approve of epidermal embellishment, he had allowed Delia to buy him a rather elaborate “orchid” to cover up an unsightly birthmark on his neck. Delia didn’t mind his constant protests to any and all third parties that he only wore it to please her, partly because she didn’t believe it and partly because she did.

  Anyhow, they had done the bench. Then they had done the bus shelter, although there was no way that their constellation of celebratory nanonovae was ever going to be visible against the galactic background that had turned the shelter into a passable imitation of an ice-cave. They had already done the back seat of Jim’s secondhand Citroen, but not in starbursts. Starbursts weren’t so sharply-faceted that they were uncomfortable to sit on if you had your clothes on, but for seats that were supposed to be more welcoming than park benches there were more delicate kinds of NEW LIFE called silksheen and vivelours—appellations which the Magi had contrived to trademark, thus making up for their failure to persuade the relevant authorities that from now on they and they alone were entitled to be architects and masters of “new life”.

  “We really ought to do the town-hall clock,” Delia had told Jim, as the hands of the offending entity moved inexorably towards two o’clock—which meant that Delia had to return helter-skelter to the offices of Scarfe and Sallis, Solicitors, where she had recently begun working, while Jim had to sprint to the class that everybody referred to as “Advanced BASIC” although the soulless college authorities insisted on labeling it “Programming Languages III”.

  “It rules the life of everyone in town, not just ours,” Jim had pointed out—although he hadn’t been so scrupulous about the bus shelter. “Anyway, it’s rather nice to have something that rises above the fad, don’t you think? All the more appropriate that it should be a clock-tower that’s seen out three or four generations of our ancestors. NEW LIFE may be everywhere you look today and tomorrow, but by the time our kids are kissing their girlfriends and boyfriends goodbye it’ll all be....”

  He would probably have said “ancient history”, but they were late enough already and Delia didn’t want their own goodbye kiss to be reduced to a token peck on the cheek. When she had finally let him go she had run off along the street and he had watched her footfalls, half-expecting magical flowers to blossom on every spot that was blessed by her clicking heels.

  By five o’clock, of course, Jim’s poetic judgment of the town hall’s clock’s ability to sail serenely through the storms of fashion had acquired an irony of which, on any other occasion, he would have been fiercely proud. The news must have broken around hall past three, and such was the efficiency of the college rumor-mill that it took wing through the corridors as soon as the three o’clock lectures and seminars staggered to their end.

  Jim was supposed to spend the last hour of the day on one of the terminals in Room 31 but he spent the time watching the TV instead, along with everyone else. The TVs were usually locked up, except when the Media Studies people were doing their thing, but someone had fetched all the
keys and switched every single set to Sky News. The staff didn’t bother to offer portentous comments about the chance to see history in the making; they just gawked along with everybody else.

  At first there was a more-or-less even split between those who thought that it was Son of McLibel, or an infoterrorism spectacular visited upon the Magi by Greenpeace’s psyops division, and those who thought that the matter could never have got as far as actual arrests without there being some truth in the allegations. The arguments that sprang up among the flabbergasted watchers were conducted in the usual hectic spirit—but from the very first moment of awful revelation, Jim knew that the real test of faith would be measured in actions rather than arguments.

  Had he not been in love, Jim would probably have been one of those most determined to stand fast against hysteria, proclaiming that if damage had been done at all then it had been done already. He might have continued wearing his only item of NEW LIFE adornment, not just for a day or a week but for a lifetime—but he was in love, and he peeled the orchid off his neck as soon as the import of the newscasters’ feverish message had sunk in.

  It didn’t hurt a bit as it parted company with his own flesh. He dropped it on the floor and methodically ground it beneath his heel against the implacable surface of the tech’s polished plastic tiling, until it was nothing but a pulpy smear.

  He was not alone. By the time the town hall clock actually struck five, nine out of every ten students—male and female alike— had torn off every last item of “jewelry”, every last “tattoo”, and every last spangle from their clothing. The news was still coming in, and the men from rent-a-don had only just begun to piece their tentative scientific explanations together, but Jim couldn’t wait. He knew that he had to get to Delia.

  Delia didn’t officially finish work until half-past, and one or other of the partners always had an extra ten or fifteen minutes’ work for her to do before she actually left, so the customary calculus of time would have ruled that there was no need to hurry—but the customary calculus of time had been suspended, and seemed as if it might never be restored.

  Jim ran, not to their usual meeting-place but all the way to the offices of Scarfe and Sallis. He ran through a world transformed by the fad-to-end-all-fads that NEW LIFE had become, because its public manifestations were so much more beautiful than graffiti. He knew, though, that the public manifestations were superficial by comparison with its private ones. NEW LIFE had insinuated itself into everyone’s home, everyone’s person and everyone’s life. In the struggle for existence that was the arena of modern commerce, it had proved itself the fittest product ever; natural selection had sent it surging into dozens of different niches, supplementing, if not actually displacing, all other forms of decoration and adornment. NEW LIFE was fragrant as well as lovely; it had out-competed perfumes and deodorants as easily as it had outcompeted jewelry and gloss paint. People even stuck it down their toilet bowls to cover the acridity of the stuff that was guaranteed to kill all known germs and ninety-nine per cent of those as-yet-unknown.

  When he reached his destination Jim found Delia in tears— which saddened him, although not as much as he would have been saddened by the prospect of having to break the news to her himself.

  She was crying, but she hadn’t begun the work of removing her own adornments. He wondered whether she would save that awful task for later, perhaps for the privacy of her bathroom or bedroom.

  “Is it true?” she said, although she must have known that it was. “Mr. Sallis says it must be.”

  Jim could imagine Mr. Sallis salivating in the expectation of his share of the business that the fall of the Magi would generate—but when Mr. Sallis actually came out of the inner office he looked as bleak as anyone else, and he didn’t tell Jim to go away.

  “You’d better come in and listen to this,” Mr. Sallis said to Delia, in a way that didn’t exclude Jim. “One of my esteemed colleagues has been instructed to issue a statement to the press on behalf of the arrested men.”

  Delia followed the solicitor and Jim followed Delia. Mr. Sallis only had a portable TV with a nine-inch screen, but it was big enough to display teletext share prices and it was big enough to record the end of civilization-as-generations-past-had-known-it.

  The lawyer had already started. His clients, it seemed, wanted to put an end to the confusion that many people must be feeling. They intended to plead guilty to any and all charges that were brought against them, and they freely admitted that, although the NEW LIFE had passed every safety test which the law required before it could be marketed, its genetic make-up had been cunningly designed in such a way that its properties would undergo a profound change in response to infection by a second artificial organism: a crystalline virus. The inventors of NEW LIFE further admitted that they had recently released the trigger-virus into the environment, in frank defiance of the law governing such releases. The effect of the trigger-virus was to cause the plant-like cells of NEW LIFE organisms to become independent pseudobacterial cells capable of infecting human beings. The resultant infections were not intended to do mortal harm to anyone, but they would so affect the endometrial tissues in the great majority of female victims as to make it impossible for fertilized egg-cells to implant in their wombs.

  “In brief,” murmured Mr. Sallis, just in case Delia and Jim hadn’t quite taken it in, “the so-called Magi have just attempted to sterilize the entire female population of the Western World, and may even have succeeded. The day before yesterday, they got the Queen’s Award for Industry for their services to the balance of trade; the day after tomorrow, they’ll be up in the European Court of Human Rights, charged with the extremest violation of Article 12.”

  Delia still hadn’t begun to pluck the offending objects off her face, let alone her more intimate coverts and cavities.

  “At first,” Jim murmured, feeling that some kind of reply was necessary, “people at college thought that it might be some ecofreak slander—but it’s the people at NEW LIFE who were the ecofreaks all along. This is the first real ecoterrorist bomb.”

  “Not so much a bomb as an antibomb,” Mr. Sallis said, anxious to prove that a solicitor could always upstage a mere student. “If it works, the population explosion just turned into a damp squib.”

  Delia was running her hands over her abdomen, reflexively measuring her waistline. Jim had seen her do it before, just as absentmindedly, but not for the same reason she was doing it now.

  The solicitor on the screen was coming to the end of his statement now. He looked like a man who had been force-fed a lemon, although he was probably trying as hard as he could to think of all the work that would inevitably flow from his new-found celebrity. “My clients have instructed me to say that their purpose is not to harm individuals, but to save the world from impending ecocatastrophe,” he declared, using his manner to distance himself from the contents of his speech. “They have instructed me to say that those who have sacrificed what they considered to be their greatest treasure have done so for the sake of a greater good. Of all the gifts which my clients have given to the world—that is their description, not mine—they consider the last to be the best and the wisest. That is why they named themselves the Magi.”

  “Gold, frankincense, and myrrh,” muttered Mr. Sallis.

  “Actually, I don’t think so,” Jim said, less glad than he might have been about the opportunity to upstage the upstager. “I think it’s the O. Henry story they have in mind, about the girl and the boy who were very much in love, and sold their best possessions to buy one another gifts which they could no longer use—gifts Henry judges to be the best and wisest of all, by virtue of their relative cost.”

  “They weren’t allowed to have NEW LIFE all to themselves,” said Delia, softly—Jim presumed that she was referring to the manufacturers’ unsuccessful attempt to register the term as a trademark— “but they took it anyway.”

  “It always belonged to them,” Jim told her, not meaning the Magi in particular but
all the inventors in history, all the makers of human civilization and human life, “and we always had to pay for it. The problem was that they always set the price too low.”

  He knew even as he said it—and remembered, later, with profound feeling—that her tears wouldn’t last forever. She had always thought of herself as a victim of poverty in a rich world: a world that was, as he had always argued, too rich for its own good.

  <>

  * * * *

  THE INCREDIBLE WHELK

  Professor Charles Oysterdrill stared out of his laboratory window, thinking about the future of mankind. He had chosen the site of his laboratory because it overlooked the best mollusk-grounds in the south of England, but he now wondered about the wisdom of this move. In recent months he had been finding life rather depressing, and he was anxious for the fate of a world which seemed to him to be trembling on the brink of disaster.

  Oysterdrill was a sensitive soul, and he worried about the millions of people starving in Africa, the threat of a new world war fought with nuclear weapons and manufactured plagues, the destruction of the rain forests by loggers, the degradation of the environment by pesticides, the effect of aerosols on the ozone layer, and the possibility that AIDS, BSE and/or Lyme’s disease might become as contagious as the common cold.