by Peter James
‘I’ll tell you what really worries me about this whole thing – and I know it worries John, too, because we’ve discussed this endlessly over the past months, since you accepted us, and it’s this’ – she shrugged – ‘this whole eugenics thing. It has a bad history, bad associations.’
Dettore perched on the edge of his desk and leaned towards Naomi. ‘If we human beings never try to improve the genes of our offspring because eighty years ago a madman called Mr Hitler tried to do it, then in my opinion we may have won the Second World War, but Mr Hitler will have won the peace that followed.’ He looked very solemn. ‘Edward Gibbon wrote, All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance. He was right. Any civilization, any generation that does not advance will eventually decline.’
‘And didn’t Einstein say that if he had known that the consequences of his work would have led to the atom bomb, he would have become a watchmaker instead?’ Naomi said.
‘Sure,’ Dettore said. ‘And if Einstein had become a watchmaker, we might today be living in a world where Hitler’s eugenics was our future.’
‘Instead of yours?’ Naomi said. Instantly she regretted the remark. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean—’
‘I think what she’s saying is that it’s one perspective against another,’ John butted in quickly.
‘It’s OK, it’s a valid point,’ Dettore said. ‘Plenty of people have made the comparison. I’ve been called the Antichrist, a Neo-Nazi, Dr Frankenstein, you name it. I just hope I have more humanity than Mr Hitler did. And maybe a little more humility, too.’
He gave such a meek, disarming smile that Naomi felt sorry for offending him. ‘I honestly didn’t mean to make such a crass—’
The geneticist jumped to his feet, walked over, took her hand gently. ‘Naomi, you must have been to hell and back losing Halley. Now you are going through another incredibly difficult time. These four weeks on this ship are going to be physically tough for you as well as mentally tough. It’s very important you always say what you feel, and for you to recognize if you reach the point where you’ve changed your mind and want out. We have to be honest with each other, OK?’
‘Thank you,’ she said.
He released her hand but continued to hold her gaze. ‘The world is changing, Naomi, that’s why you and John are here. Because you are smart enough to realize that.’
There was a long silence. Naomi looked through the window at the vast expanse of flat blue water and at the container ship still visible on the horizon. She looked at her husband, then at the geneticist, then down at the form, thinking about Halley, remembering why they were here.
Dreyens-Schlemmer disease affects the body’s immune system in a similar but far more aggressive way than lupus. It progressively induces a sustained innate immune response. It was as if it turned Halley’s own first line of defence into a corrosive acid, literally eating away his own internal organs. He had died, after screaming non-stop for two days for the pain to cease, no drug able to help him, haemorrhaging blood through his mouth, nose, ears and rectum.
Dreyens-Schlemmer disease was identified in 1978 by two scientists at Heidelberg University in Germany. Because it was so rare, affecting fewer than one hundred children in the world at any one time, their discovery was of largely academic value only. Pharmaceutical companies are not interested because the costs of their research could never be recouped. The only way to defeat Dreyens-Schlemmer disease would be through a long, slow process of eliminating it by breeding it out of the human species.
Most people who carried the relatively rare gene for it had perfectly healthy children without any problem at all. It was only in the extreme circumstance when two unwitting carriers of the recessive gene produced a baby together that the problem could arise.
Neither John nor Naomi had any previous family history of Dreyens-Schlemmer – so far as they knew. But after Halley’s birth – and by then too late – they had discovered they were both carriers of the gene. Which meant there was a one in four chance any child they had would be affected.
Naomi looked at Dettore again. ‘You’re wrong,’ she said. ‘The world might be changing, but I’m not smart enough to understand how. Maybe I don’t even want to understand. It scares me.’
8
In the deserted gymnasium, John’s shoes pounded on the treadmill of the running machine; it was ten to seven in the morning. Perspiration guttered down his face and down his body; beads of water streaked his glasses, making it hard to read the television monitor that was tuned to CNN business news and displaying lists of the previous day’s closing NASDAQ prices.
From as far back into childhood as John could remember, he had been driven by a hunger for knowledge. He loved collecting tadpoles in the spring, watching them sprout legs, lose their tails, change into tiny frogs. He badgered his mother each school holiday to drive him from their home town of Örebro, in central Sweden, to Stockholm, to the Natural History Museum and the National Museum of Science and Technology. When he was eighteen he’d gone to London to a summer school to improve his English, and had spent almost the entire three months inside the Science, Natural History and British Museums.
John particularly admired the great scientists of past eras. People like Archimedes, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Pasteur, whose work, he considered, had shaped our modern world. And just as much, he admired the big men of physics and mathematics of the twentieth century, such as Einstein, Fermi, Oppenheimer, von Neumann, Feynman, Schrödinger, Turing, whose work, he believed, would shape our futures. All of them were people who had taken huge risks with their time and their reputations.
If John had been asked what his ambition was, he would have answered that he had no interest in becoming rich, but he would love to have his own name up there, one day, among the big men of science. Once, when he was ten, a few weeks after his father, a dreamer and failed businessman, had died in debt, he wrote down a list of what he wanted to achieve in life:
(a) To be a respected scientist.
(b) To leave the world a better place than when I was born.
(c) To extend human lifespan.
(d) To take care of Mamma.
(e) To stop pain in the world.
(f) To be a good father.
Whenever John felt low, he looked at the list. At some time during his teens he had transferred it from his little red notebook onto his computer, and subsequently from computer to computer. Reading it always made him smile; but it made him sad, too.
I’m thirty-six and haven’t yet achieved one damned thing on that list.
He felt particularly bad about his neglect of his mother. As an only child he felt very responsible for her. She’d married again when he was eighteen, shortly before he’d gone to Uppsala University, to a widower, a schools inspector who had visited the högsta-diet – senior school – where she taught mathematics. A quiet but decent man, he was the opposite of John’s own father in just about every way. Five years later he died of a heart attack, and his mother had been on her own ever since, fiercely independent, despite the fact that she was losing her eyesight through macular degeneration.
As a child, John had been an avid science-fiction reader, his head full of theories and questions. Theories about why we existed, about how certain animals and insects had acquired their characteristics. Questions about why some creatures, like the common ant and the cockroach, had seemingly ceased evolving a million years ago – yet others, such as human beings, continued. Why had some animal brains stopped growing hundreds of thousands of years ago? Was it because having too smart a brain was a hindrance to survival rather than an asset? Would humans eventually destroy themselves precisely because evolution was making them too smart for their own good?
Or, as he explored in his work, did humans risk destroying themselves because they were developing technology at a faster pace than their brains were developing? And were they in need of a major evolutionary leap forward to catch up?
The ship lurched
suddenly, unbalancing him, and he had to grab the handrail to stop himself falling sideways off the treadmill belt. Through the open door he could hear the water in the plunge pool sloshing. He hadn’t felt as sick as Naomi had, but he still wasn’t totally acclimatized yet to the motion.
Neither he nor Naomi had slept much again last night. The same questions were going through his mind now that they had discussed over and over. Yes, they both agreed that they wanted to give their son all the advantages they would have liked their own parents to have given them. But they didn’t want him being too different and finding himself unable to relate or connect to people.
And that was the real problem. Dettore was pushing them all the time to go for more options, to enhance their son in ways that even John hadn’t realized were already scientifically possible. And some of these options were tempting. My God, if they wanted, they could really make Luke into an incredible person!
But no thanks.
Luke wasn’t going to be some kind of laboratory rat that they could just terminate humanely with a needle if he came out different to how they were expecting.
He did not want to gamble with his son’s life. And yet what haunted him during the night was the knowledge that any child was just that, a gamble, a random throw of the genetic dice. What Dettore was offering was a way to reduce the odds, not increase them. In playing safe, would they be condemning their son to a life of mediocrity?
The machine beeped and the display flashed that another minute had passed. He was working out even harder on this ship than he did at home. Pushing himself into some kind of super-fit shape. Aware of his true reason for doing this, but having difficulty in admitting it to himself.
I want my kid to be proud of me. I want him to have a fit man for a dad, not some wheezing old fart.
It was totally deserted down here on G Deck, deep in the bowels of the ship.
His sole companion was his own reflection jigging up and down on all four mirrored walls, a reflection of a tall, slim man in a white T-shirt, blue running shorts, trainers. A tall, slim man with a tired, strained face and bags like black smudges beneath his eyes.
Young men see visions, old men dream dreams.
The damned line was going round and round in his head, in tune to the pounding of his feet, like a mantra. I may have come here as a man with a vision, he thought. But now I feel more like a priest who is starting to question his faith.
But if we do tone Luke right down, throwing away this chance to make him something really special, will I live to regret it? Will I end up as an old man dreaming of what might have been, if only I’d had the courage?
9
Naomi’s Diary
If you haven’t been through this you have no idea of the pain. This injection the nurse gives me every morning to boost my egg production feels like a spike being hammered into my thigh bone. I tried again to get Yvonne to talk about the other patients here, but she instantly clams up, as if she’s scared to open her mouth.
John is being wonderful, very loving and putting no pressure at all on me. In fact, in terms of the openness between us, this is the best it has ever been since before poor Halley came along. I hug him in the nights, desperately wanting to make love to him, but that’s forbidden – we were banned from making love for two weeks before we came here – and we’re not going to be able to for weeks after, either. That’s hard. We need that closeness.
I’m finding this place stranger by the day. The atmosphere on this ship is truly weird – we walk around, and there’s not a soul apart from the occasional cleaner polishing a handrail. Where the hell is everyone? Are all the other patients so shy? How many are here? I’d love to talk to someone else, to one other couple, compare notes.
Four hundred thousand dollars! I think about all that money. Are we being selfish spending it on our unborn child? Should we have given it away to help children in need, or people in need, or medical research, rather than squandering it on bringing one new person into the world?
It’s moments like this when I want to pray for guidance. But I gave up on God when he took Halley, and told him so.
How are you, Halley, darling? Are you OK? You’re the one who should really give us the guidance, you were such a smart kid. The smartest kid I ever knew.
It’s thinking about you that keeps me here. I’m thinking about your face when that needle goes in and I’m biting my handkerchief. All that suffering you went through. We want to have a son again now, one who will be smart enough, maybe, to do some real good in this world.
Luke.
We hope Luke’s going to make great new scientific discoveries, we hope he will be smart enough to make some kind of a real difference. So that in the future, no child is ever going to have to die the way you died.
Today we dealt with the Housekeeping genes. Funny description! The Housekeeping group relate to things like the efficiency of each cell to replicate its DNA or synthesize proteins. Nothing too much to worry about there. Luke should heal faster and better from any injuries, which has to be a good thing.
But the cleverest work Dr Dettore is doing in this group is with adrenaline responses. He pointed out just how badly evolution has kept pace with modern life: adrenaline kicks in when we get nervous, giving us a boost of energy to help us run from an assailant. Fine in the days when a sabre-toothed tiger would appear in the mouth of your cave, he explained. But you definitely do not want to be breaking out in a sweat and shaking in a confrontation with the tax collector, or with anyone else in our modern world – you want to remain calm, feel relaxed, keeping your brain as clear as possible.
In other words, stay cool. That is an option I’m tempted by, because it makes so much sense. But we haven’t agreed to it, not yet anyhow, because we’re both worried about tinkering with such an important part of Luke’s body’s defence mechanism.
I’m already thinking of him as Luke now. At least that’s one thing we’re both agreed on. But now there’s another issue – something that’s really disturbing.
10
‘Compassion,’ John said.
Naomi, deep in thought, seated on a bench on the Promenade Deck writing her daily diary entry by hand into her iPhone, remained silent.
‘Compassion,’ John repeated, as if thinking out loud. ‘Compassion. How do you define it – how does anyone?’
They’d discussed the genes relating to compassion for over an hour in this morning’s session with Dr Dettore and now, during their free time until the afternoon session, John and Naomi continued toying with the subject.
As the ship headed south the weather was improving noticeably. The air felt gloriously warm to Naomi, and the sea was the flattest she had seen so far. They would be alongside the quay in Havana, Cuba, at seven this evening, but Dettore did not want them to go ashore. It was a fuelling and provisioning stop only. It was crucial over the next month for Naomi to be as healthy as possible; there was no sense risking picking up a bug in a cab or a shop or a bar, he had already told them.
John stood up. ‘Let’s walk a little, darling, stretch our legs. The nurse said exercise would help ease the pain for you.’
‘I’ll try.’ She slipped her phone into her handbag and stood up. ‘What do you think Dettore meant that our child would grow up faster than ordinary children?’
‘I guess he’s implying because of the extra intelligence he’ll have.’
‘I don’t think we should guess anything, John. We need to be sure about everything. He talked about accelerated growth and maturity. We don’t want him being so different to other kids that he doesn’t have friends.’
‘We’ll review everything before we finalize anything.’
‘I’m going through those documents with a fine-tooth comb.’
With the breeze on their faces. they walked along the teak decking, past a muster station and an orange lifebelt printed with the ship’s name. Naomi was limping, her leg aching badly from this morning’s injection. She felt low today, and very vulnera
ble. Slipping her hand into John’s, into his strong, reassuring grip, made her feel a little better. She squeezed and felt him squeeze back.
They walked past a row of portholes and she peered at each of them in turn, trying to see in. But the glass was mirrored like every other porthole on the ship, and all she could see was her own reflection, her pale face, her hair tangled by the wind.
‘This secrecy thing is really getting to me,’ she said.
‘I guess if we were in any clinic on land, there’d be a lot of privacy. Also – it just feels as if it ought to be different because it’s a ship.’
‘I suppose. I just think it would be interesting to meet one or two of the other couples and compare notes.’
‘It’s a very private thing. Maybe other people don’t want to talk – perhaps we’d find it difficult to talk, too, if we did meet anyone.’
So far the only people they’d met on the ship, other than Dettore, were a doctor called Tom Leu, a pleasant, good-looking Chinese-American in his mid-thirties, whom Dettore had introduced as his senior medical assistant; the nurse, Yvonne; their chambermaid; and a handful of Filipino staff.
There had been no sign of the captain or any of the other officers, other than a voice through the tannoy system at nine this morning giving advanced notice of a crew safety drill. All access doors and gates to the bridge and crew stations and quarters were permanently locked off. Apart from their fleeting sight of the handsome couple they had jokingly called George and Angelina, there had been no sign of any other clients.
Taking a stroll late afternoon yesterday they’d seen the helicopter come in, then leave a short while later. It had hovered for some moments after take-off and John had just been able to make out a woman’s face through the darkened glass window. Taking a couple away who had changed their minds, they speculated.