Siberia

by Ann Halam

  He was letting me know that he knew Mama’s secrets, to convince me that he was her friend: but something jarred. Something made me hold back.

  “I needed them.”

  I didn’t know what to believe, but I was still the guardian. Without looking at him I took out the lab case. I opened it, put on gloves and a mask; transferred Toothy’s remains to a fresh tube, and capped it. (Toothy’s color was green).

  “You know your job, I see,” said Yagin.

  The praise warmed me, in spite of everything. I’d been alone with this mystery for so long, with only a child’s knowledge of what it all meant: always afraid I was making terrible mistakes. Yagin reached into the knapsack again, and drew out the nutshell. It had filled out, and was turning from brown to red. I remembered with a shock that the kits were alive in there. He laughed at my expression, and turned the nut in his hand, running his finger along the seam. Nothing happened.

  “See? They are safe from me. Only you can open the incubator, my dear Sloe. You, or your mama. Now, shall we talk this over?”

  Without a word, I went and got my chair. We sat down, on either side of the table. Yagin reached inside his jacket, brought out a folded card, and handed it over. I found I was looking at colored pictures of animals. They were not very good pictures, not much better than what a child might draw, but . . .

  Yagin was watching me with a strange, intent, almost hungry look.

  “Have you seen any of these almost mythical creatures, Sloe?”

  I recognized Nosey, in her spiky form: with the word hedgehog printed next to her. Nivvy was called a weasel. Toothy, in her “many” form, was a lemming, but she had been a beaver when she chewed down the sick tree. The animal I had met on the plain, a true wild creature, not made by my mother’s magic, was a snow hare.

  My mother’s magic, the real wild animals.

  “Where did you get this card from?”

  “That? It’s the official guide issued to the Fitness Police, so they can tell the true wild animals from muties. Usually the recruits have never seen the creatures they are supposed to protect, not even in pictures. The guide is considered sufficient.”

  “But it isn’t! I mean, that’s got to be Nosey in her full-sized form.” I pointed to the hedgehog. “But you can hardly tell that she has spikes instead of fur. And the beaver looks the same size as a lemming, which is completely wrong.”

  Yagin drew in his breath, and his eyes shone.

  I felt caught out, and angry with myself. However much he knew, I’d just told him even more. I shoved the card back at him.

  “How did you get hold of that, if it’s issued to the police?”

  “I stole it. You’re in big trouble, little girl. The Fitness Police don’t know for sure what you’re carrying, but they’re on your trail. It’s only by keeping close to them that I’ve been able to protect you.” His eyes were still shining. “So,” he added, staring at me as if I was something magical myself. “They survived. And they are still viable.”

  “Why would the Fitness Police have a guide that’s no use?”

  “There’s a simple rule,” said Yagin, gravely. “If you don’t recognize the animal, it must be a mutie: kill it. If you think you recognize it, kill it anyway, because it may be tainted, who can tell?” He pointed his finger at me, and sighted along it. “Shoot them and burn them all! That’s the way to keep nature pure!”

  “But that doesn’t make sense!”

  “Ha! Your mama thought the same. That’s how she ended up a convict.” Yagin tucked the picture card away, and leaned forward, arms folded on the table.

  “Listen, little girl. The populations of wild animals have been in catastrophic decline for a hundred years or more. If you don’t know what that means, it means there are very, very few of them left. It was our pollution, our monster farms. It was loss of habitat caused by human numbers; and then the great cold. . . . The birds, the fishes, the flowers and trees and fungi are all in trouble too, but the wild mammals were maybe the worst off. So the government ordered that seed banks should be made, DNA storehouses for all the diversity that we were losing. The idea was that the animals—and plants, and birds and all—could be saved that way, so that one day, when the climate improves, we could repopulate the earth. Your mama and your dadda, who were scientists at the Biological Institute, were the leaders of the team who developed the wild mammal seed bank. They made these amazing, wondrous creations we call the Lindquist kits. Do you know this story? Did she tell you?”

  It was for telling me about her science that my mama had been taken away.

  I shrugged, and kept my face as blank as I could.

  Yagin laughed. “Well, I’ll tell you again anyway. Your mama and your dadda made the Lindquists. Then they discovered that the government had no intention of repopulating the world with wild things. The Fitness Police are exterminators. The junior officers don’t know it, but the senior officers know: the real plan is to get rid of the last of the wild mammals. Then human beings will have no competition for the scarce resources of our winter world. Nothing will live except for man, and his vermin, and the monster things we breed for use.”

  “But then why did the government want the Lindquists?”

  “Oh, the seeds are useful. The wild mammal genes have many properties that could be valuable in factory animals. The Lindquist kits were meant to be kept as insurance, or money in the bank, purely for industrial use. When your mama and dadda found out, they decided to smuggle the kits out of the Institute. They destroyed their records, destroyed everything but one set of kits . . . which your dadda was to take to another city, a more enlightened place. This was ten years ago, when things seemed to be changing. He believed he was doing what the good side of our government wanted, and that everyone would soon know he was right. But that was not the view of the police. He was arrested.”

  I was still trying to keep my face blank, but maybe Yagin saw something there that made him pause. He began again, in a gentler tone.

  “Your dadda was caught, but he managed to destroy the kits before they could be taken from him. Your mama was sent to the Settlements, with you, for the crime of being married to him. But no one suspected how closely she had been involved, and no one knew there was a duplicate set. I was their friend, and I always suspected the truth. I knew your mama: how gentle she seems, how bold she is in her soul. But I didn’t know where she had been taken, and I didn’t dare try to find out, in case I drew suspicion onto her. The wilderness is a vast place, and there are many, many prison Settlements. . . . So the years passed, your mama patiently waiting, I suppose, for the chance to take the Lindquists to safety. Until one day a little girl was sent to New Dawn, and a new episode of the story began.”

  I didn’t want to talk about New Dawn.

  “So, what happens now?” I asked.

  “You’ve given me a great deal of trouble,” said Yagin sternly. “But I forgive you. What happens now is that we wait until the storm is over, and then I take you, with the kits, north to the frozen sea: avoiding our pursuers. We make the crossing, and deliver them, as your mama intended, to the city where the sun always shines.”

  “All right.”

  He looked at me suspiciously. I risked a timid smile, and he grinned.

  “Good! That’s agreed, then. The incubator is live,” he added, in a strangely wistful tone. “I can tell by the color. Will you let me see them, eh?”

  I thought of the principal’s office, at New Dawn. I knew his whole story could be another cruel trick. But I needed him to believe I trusted him: so I opened the shell. The kits had grown. They were about the size of the top joint of my thumb. Five little pointed faces peeped over the parapet of their nest: five pairs of tiny berry black eyes lit up, when they knew I was there. Yagin said nothing, he just watched: riveted and fascinated, as the kits gained confidence, and scrambled out, one by one. They came trundling over to me, on their little stripey bowlegged limbs.

  “Why are they called Lindquis
ts? Mama never told me that.”

  “It’s the name of a great scientist of long ago,” said Yagin, softly, his eyes fixed on the kits. “She was the one who worked out that mutations—the natural, tiny changes whereby animals evolve—can be stored in the genome, and then revealed all at once, at the flick of a genetic switch, which can be attuned to stress. . . . You know that every animal holds a tiny instruction set, written in the DNA of each of its cells? Each of your Lindquists holds several different instruction kits: the DNA instruction sets for a whole order of wild mammals.”

  I nodded, hearing my mother’s voice in my mind, my mama telling little Rosita the magic words: Insectivora, Lagomorpha, Rodentia, Artiodactyla, Chiroptera, Carnivora.

  “The marine mammals were lost.”

  Yagin gave me a sharp look, and cleared his throat. “Hrrmph, indeed. Well, I was saying: these little primitives”—he gestured at the kits: they darted away from the shadow of his hand—“are recreated from an early stage of mammal evolution. Their name is Haramiya. The real creatures lived in the Mesozoic era, about two hundred fifty million years ago. We sow the DNA spores in a little very special nutrient gel—”

  New-treat, I thought.

  “—which produces these little things. To develop to the second stage, a different type animal for each order, they need to eat normally, and to have contact with their surrogate mother. All the other species can be induced to express in the laboratory, or they may be revealed by stress.”

  “They can change very strangely,” I said, thinking of Toothy.

  “So I believe,” said Yagin, giving me that hungry look again, “though I have never seen it. The compressed genomes are full of tricks. Nobody but your mama knows how it was done, but there’s a little something from the fungi and slime-molds, for astonishing speed of growth. Something from the insects, for the metamorphosis—the shape-changing. Oh, a lot of clever tricks! The Rodentia”—he tapped Toothy’s green-capped tube—“as I remember, has something from the aphids. This type animal, which is a lemming, is actually born pregnant, so she can quickly establish numbers: that’s going to be necessary, for the ecology of predator and prey. That must be something to see!” He raised his eyebrow, looking at me: but I wasn’t going to tell him anything I didn’t have to.

  “But then they aren’t really the same as the wild animals.”

  Yagin shrugged. “Of course, the foreign additions would be snipped out of their genes before the breeding populations were reared, for release into the wild. That was the plan. To your mama and dadda, the clever tricks were not important. Just a means to an end, that they meant to throw away.”

  The groove between his brows was suddenly sharper and deeper. The kits shot into a huddle, and I hoped Yagin didn’t guess that this meant I was scared.

  “If you want them,” I said, “why don’t you just take them?”

  “Because they are yours!” The scary tension went out of him, and he laughed. “Didn’t she tell you? Then watch this. This is very entertaining, it’s a party trick.”

  He reached for the lab case. I was shocked to the core when he actually touched my mama’s magic case, but I didn’t protest. Briskly, he covered his mouth and nose with a mask, slicked gloves onto his hands, and made up a dish of Toothy starter, his big hands very neat with the tiny glassware. Then he took my wrist, used the sharp lip of a dropper to scrape my skin and put the skin scraping in another tiny dish, with a dab of nutrient. He shook the dishes gently.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Oooh, just watch, little girl.”

  When he was satisfied that something was happening he used his gloved fingertips to push the two dishes around the tabletop, chuckling through his mask. I saw how the mixture in one dish moved, trying to get near to the mixture in the other. Wherever Yagin put the kit dish, the starter climbed the side of the glass, as if it was alive: trying to get near to . . . to the dish with me in it.

  “It’s imprinting,” said Yagin. “Imprinting at the level of the genes. The chemical bases themselves, they think you are their mother. Or Life itself! Every cell of every Lindquist would die for you, as the cells of your own body would gladly die to save your life.” He stripped off his gloves and mask, and began to clean the dishes. “On your side, well, human emotions are more complex. But you are fond of them?”

  The kits were still in a frightened huddle. I set my hand down beside them, and let them scramble into my palm: put them back in the nutshell and sealed it.

  “I think you know a lot,” I said, “but you don’t understand much.”

  “Now I’ve offended you. She will have taught you to see spiritual beauty in the way the Lindquists love you, and you love them. I’m sure she did. Manya always had to drag in something spiritual. The cold fact is, this bond between the kits and their keeper was engineered, it is just a chemical trick, for their protection.”

  My mother’s name was Maria. I had never heard anyone call her Manya that I remembered, but the nickname stirred something in me. Lost memories.

  “I like Mama’s way of seeing things better.”

  He roared with laughter. “Of course you do! But you’re going to trust me anyway? You won’t try to run away again?”

  I suddenly thought that he’d probably been drinking. When I looked around I saw the bottle, a tall thin bottle standing on the floor by his chair, uncorked, half full of clear liquid. I would bet there were others somewhere. I glanced at the door of the hut, and then wished I’d controlled my eyes. Yagin wasn’t as drunk as all that. He was smiling as if he could read my mind.

  “Well, well, no hurry. I have been waiting for this since you and your mama were sent to Siberia. I can wait a little longer for your trust.”

  “‘Siberia’? We were sent to a Wilderness Settlement.”

  He leaned over and picked up his bottle, and offered it to me. I shook my head. “Siberia? Once it was a cold place far away, where people who offended the government were sent to freeze and starve. Now it’s Siberia everywhere. The whole world has been sent to Siberia, we’re all in Siberia.”

  He knocked back a large gulp of what I thought was vodka, and heaved a sigh. “No hurry. We’re stuck here for a while. You can’t go anywhere until the storm has blown itself out, and before then I will persuade you that I’m your friend.”

  I didn’t want to go on talking to him. I got up and went to the window, and pushed the curtain aside. It was double glass, proving that this hut had once belonged to someone rich. I could hear the storm, buffeting the log walls: all I could see was a whirling blank. I watched the snow, while Yagin stared at the stove, nursing his vodka bottle. There was something he hadn’t told me, but it was obvious. The Lindquists were valuable, extremely valuable, like gold and jewels. Maybe the Fitness Police would destroy them, but other people would want to get hold of them and use those clever tricks my mama and dadda had invented—to make new factory animals, to do all sorts of things. If Yagin had saved my life, if he had been following me to protect me all this time, wasn’t it just because I was valuable too? He’d just shown me how important I was, to anyone who wanted to develop the kits.

  But I longed to trust him.

  There was only one room in the cabin, and one bed. It had a mattress that rustled, and smelled of something dusty and sweet. I slept there: Yagin slept on the floor, on blankets spread over a heap of brushwood that he’d brought in from the wood store. He had a stack of canned food, and a supply of vodka. He wouldn’t let me go outside at all. He fetched fuel from a wood store, and filled the cooking pan with packed snow, to melt for fresh water. There was a privy bucket in a closet he called the bathroom: Yagin would go out into the blizzard to empty it. Whenever he went outside he would lock the door behind him, and lock it and bar it again when he came back. He kept the key on a string around his neck. I spent my time reading—he had some books with him, in his big pack. I put the nail box away in my knapsack, and he seemed to accept that he wasn’t going to see the kits again.
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  He started sewing me a jacket and a cap, out of doubled blanket and some thick oilcloth stuff he’d found in the cabin. He was very handy at sewing.

  On the day we first saw a gleam of daylight through our window, he went out to fill the snow pan and was gone a long time. He came back saying the wind had dropped and the barometer on his sledge was set fair. We might leave, tomorrow or the next day. I said, “That’s good!” But Yagin didn’t look happy. The crease between his brows looked as if it had been gouged with a chisel.

  I was looking at the Fitness Police guide, which Yagin liked to leave around, in the hope of getting me to talk about the Lindquists again. His hand came down over my shoulder, and touched the page.

  “Artiodactyla,” he said. “The even-number toe-walkers.”

  I remembered my mama trying to teach me that difficult word.

  “Digitigrade is another name for those families,” said Yagin, sitting down. “Finger-walkers, but toes or fingers, it’s all the same. The five-fingered limb, it’s something all of us mammals share. A shrew, a mole, a monkey; an ape, a beaver, a man: we all have paws of the same design. The cattle families adopted mutations that made them lose some of their fingers and toes, because that proved useful for running. Look at the bones. You can see the underlying pattern and how the pattern has shifted. They are walking on their toenails, which we call their hooves.”

  He picked up my hand and folded down the thumb, and then the two outer fingers, against my palm.

  “Artiodactyla means even-toed, it could be two or four. In the more developed species it’s usually two toes, though you can often see the other two, tucked away. Imagine a great hippopotamus on tiptoe, in a ballet skirt.”

  I didn’t know what a hippopotamus was.