Mammoth Book of Best New SF 14

by Gardner Dozois

  “Alice,” she informed me, stiffly.

  “As in Wonderland?” I quipped, hoping to help her relax.

  “As in Through the Looking Glass,” she retorted. It didn’t seem to be worthwhile asking her what the difference was.

  “I’m Stephen Hitchens,” I told her. “I’m not a policeman—I’m a geneticist, currently employed as an adviser to the Home Office.”

  “Bully for you,” she said dryly. I wondered whether she might be older than she looked—maybe sixteen or seventeen—but I concluded in the end that natural insolence, like puberty, probably arrived ahead of its time nowadays.

  “Why did the scientists set fire to the house, Alice?” I asked.

  “Why did armed police surround it?” she countered.

  “None of this is your fault, or mine,” I assured her. “I was just trying to recover the records of the experiments the scientists had done. They should have made sure that you were safe before they started the fire. They’re not your friends, Alice. Did your parents work for Dr Hemans?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” she told me, as if relishing a hidden irony.

  “What manner of speaking?” I demanded, although I could hardly help seeing the obvious implication. If she wasn’t the child of someone on the staff, she had to be one of the experimental subjects—or, I reminded myself, someone pretending to be one of the experimental subjects.

  “The kind of work you do in a sty,” she replied, casually confirming the inference she must have known I’d take. “The kind of work where your pay arrives in a trough.”

  If it was true, then she certainly had come from Wonderland — but was it true? Wasn’t it far more likely to be a lie, a carefully constructed bluff? Was it to hear this, I wondered, that I had been hauled out of the corridor and brought down here into near-darkness? Could the Animal Farmers be using me, trying to convince me that they had achieved far, far more than they had? If so, what should my policy be? Should I run with the bluff and let her make her pitch, or challenge her and refuse to believe that she was anything but what she appeared to be?

  “You’re telling me that you’re not human?” I said, just to make sure that she wasn’t just making a joke. I knew as soon as I’d said it that I’d framed the rhetorical question wrongly. What she’d actually told me was that her parents weren’t human.

  “Like hell I am,” she said. Like Snowball in hell, I couldn’t help thinking. Play along, I told myself. Find out what she has to say.

  “So you think you’re human,” I conceded. “You can certainly pass for it, probably in a far brighter light than this—but if your parents really were pigs, you must understand that other people might not see things the same way.” As I said that I realized that her creators or drama-coaches—must already have put it in much stronger terms. That was why Ed and Kath had been so paranoid about the possibility of being shot down—that and the fact that the ARU really had opened fire.

  “I know what I see when I look in a mirror,” Alice told me, perhaps to make sure that I’d understood how clever her reference to Through the Looking Glass was. “It’s not the image of itself that’s important, of course—it’s the fact that there’s an eye to see it. A human I—and I don’t mean e-y-e.”

  Cogito, ergo sum, she might have said, if she—or whoever had written her script—hadn’t been so anxious about the need to stay viewer-friendly. I hadn’t enough anger left to prevent me from wondering whether Special Branch might always have known exactly how human Animal Farmers’ experimental subjects looked, and whether their senior officers might have taken it upon themselves to decide that the ministry didn’t need to know until the shooting was well and truly over. If they had, and my captors knew it—or even if they hadn’t and my captors merely believed it—I might be in deeper trouble than I thought.

  “What about Ed and Kath?” I asked. “Are they like you?”

  “They’re human,” Alice assured me, in a tone that left little doubt as to what kind of human she was talking about. She was telling me, in her own perverse way, that they were the kind of humans who were made as well as born: the kind which started off as a fertilized ovum in a sow’s belly before the genetic engineers got to work.

  Dr Moreau had remade beasts in his own image by means of surgery, but modern scientists had much cleverer means at their disposal—and the degree of success they might be expected to achieve was far greater. I had to remind myself again that all of this could be a bluff run by a thoroughly human child, and that I was only playing along to see how the story would go.

  Alice had relaxed a little since she first started talking, but the way she held her shadowed head and the way she gripped the axe she’d been ordered to hit me with if I got out of line suggested that she wasn’t about to get careless. Now that she’d made her first impression, she was busy reminding herself that she was stuck in a cellar beneath a burning building with a man who might be dangerous. All in all, philosophical discussion seemed the safest way to build a modicum of trust.

  “You think you’re human because you have a human mind: because you’re self-aware?” I said earnestly—trying with all my might to sound like the dull and harmless scientist I actually was (and am).

  “All animals are self-aware,” Alice replied calmly. “I’m aware that I’m human. I love and respect my fellow men, no matter what the circumstances of their birth may have been.”

  “How do you feel about pigs?” I asked.

  “I love and respect them too,” she replied. “Even the ones which aren’t human. I don’t eat pork—or any other meat, come to that. How do you feel about pigs, Dr Hitchens?”

  I eat pork, I also eat bacon, and all kinds of other meat, but it didn’t seem diplomatic to talk about that. “I don’t think pigs are human, Alice,” I told her. “I don’t think they can become human, even with the aid of transplanted genes.”

  Her answer to that certainly wasn’t the kind of answer I’d have expected from an ordinary teenager, or even an extraordinary one. “How did humans become humans, Dr Hitchens?” she asked me. “A handful of extra genes, obligingly delivered up by mutation, do you suppose? Perhaps—but perhaps not. Just because a human and a chimpanzee only share ninety-nine per cent of their genes, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the variant one per cent are solely responsible for the differences. Even if they are, it’s not a matter of different protein-making stocks. It’s a matter of control. The one per cent is almost entirely homeotic.” She might have been parroting something Hemans or one of his coworkers had said, but I didn’t think so. She seemed confident that she was making sense, and that she understood that import of her argument—but she hesitated, just in case I didn’t.

  “Go on,” I said interestedly. The invitation was enough to set her off with the bit between her pearly, neatly aligned teeth.

  “Most of what it took to turn apes into men,” she told me, as if it were a matter of absolute certainty, “was a handful of modifications to the ways in which genes were switched on and off as the cells of the developing embryo became specialized. You don’t need dozens of extra genes to grow a bigger brain. All you need is for a few more unspecialized cells to become brain cells. You don’t need dozens of extra genes to make a clever hand or to stand upright, either. What you need is for the cells that differentiate into bone and muscle to distribute themselves in slightly different ways within the developing embryo. Becoming human isn’t so very difficult, once you get the hang of it. Cows could do it. Sheep too. Lions and tigers, horses and elephants, dolphins and seals. Dogs, probably; cats, maybe; rats, perhaps; birds, probably not. You have to get right down to snakes and sharks before you can say that there’s no chance at all. We all start out as eggs, Dr Hitchens, and every egg that can make a pig or a donkey or a goat can probably make a human, if it only invests enough effort in shaping the brain and the hand and the backbone. That may be an unsettling thought, but it’s true.”

  It was an unsettling thought. I had already thought it, a
nd it had already unsettled me—but the fact that Alice was prepared to confront me with it, perhaps on behalf of Hemans, Rawlingford and Bradby, but more probably on her own initiative, was even more unsettling.

  I reminded myself again that it might be a lie, a careful hoax intended to persuade me, falsely, that the men from Commoner’s Isle had mastered godlike powers—but if it was, it was beginning to work.

  “Would you like to live as other humans do, Alice?” I asked, ostentatiously leading with my chin. “Would you like to go to school, to university, to get a job, to get married one day and have children of your own?”

  “I do live as other humans do,” she replied, blandly refusing to see what I was getting at. “I’ve been to school. I expect that I’ll do all the other things when the time comes.” Her tone said that she didn’t expect any such thing—that she expected to be pursued and captured, shot at worst and imprisoned at best. Her tone told me that she expected to have to fight for her life, let alone her entitlements as a human being, and that she wasn’t about to take any bullshit from me while she had an axe in her hands.

  “I’m not sure that you’ll be allowed to do anything that other teenagers routinely do, Alice,” I admitted, figuring that it was best to pose as the honest man I really am. “The scientists who shaped your brain, hand and backbone were breaking the law. That’s not your fault, of course, but the fact remains that you’re the product of illegal genetic engineering. The law doesn’t consider you to be a human being — nor do the vast majority of human beings. All the things you hope you’ll be able to do depend on the willingness of human society to admit you as a member, and that willingness simply isn’t there. There’s a sense, you see, in which it isn’t enough just to define yourself as human—it’s for human society as a whole to decide who belongs to it and who doesn’t.”

  “No, it isn’t,” she replied promptly. “White people once refused to define black people as human, and German gentiles once refused to define Jews as human, but that didn’t make the black people or the Jews any less human than they were. The only people who became less human because of those refusals were the people who tried to deny humanity to others. They were the ones who were refusing to love and respect their fellow men, the ones who weren’t acting morally.”

  She was carrying the argument better than any fourteen-year-old should have been able to, and she wasn’t trying to conceal the fact. I couldn’t help wondering whether that might be a mistake, if she ever got the chance to plead her case before a wider audience. Nobody loves a smart arse, especially if the smart arse is a jumped-up pig. If you want to pass for human, you can’t afford to be too good at it—and, as Alice had stubbornly insisted on pointing out, real humans frequently aren’t very good at it at all.

  “Do you think the scientists who made you were acting morally?” I asked. “They knew what kind of a world they were bringing you into. They knew what would happen—to you as well as to them—when they were found out, and they must have known that they’d eventually be found out.”

  “I could understand a slave who was reluctant to bear children who would also be slaves,” Alice replied, “but I can also understand those who didn’t refuse. They knew that they were human, and that their children were human too, and they had to hope that the fact would one day be recognized. To have refused to bear children would have been giving in to evil, consenting to its effects.”

  “Why do you think the men who made you destroyed their records, Alice?” I asked. “Why do you think they were so eager to burn them that they endangered your life—not to mention mine?” Because they didn’t want anyone to know the true extent of their success, I told myself. Because they wanted to be able to run this bluff.

  “Because they wanted to be able to use their knowledge as a bargaining chip,” Alice said. “For our benefit as well as their own. If you’d got the records, you’d have put a stop to everything. Because you didn’t, we still have something up our sleeves.” She seemed to think that it was a reasonably good argument—which implied that in spite of all her hard-won sophistication she really was the mere child she appeared to be.

  Theoretically, I thought, an animal embryo modified to replicate human form ought to develop as neotenously as a human embryo, and an animal brain modified to accommodate all that a human brain could accommodate ought not to be educated any more rapidly. If so, Alice shouldn’t be any cleverer than a fully human child reared in similarly exceptional circumstances—but without access to her school records, I knew that it would be dangerous to take too much for granted, or too little.

  “No one will bargain with them, Alice,” I lied. “They broke the law, and they’ll be punished. Perhaps it’s best if their discoveries are lost. That way, no one will be able to repeat their error.”

  “That’s silly, Dr Hitchens,” Alice said calmly. “If it’s a mystery, that will just make more people interested in solving it. And if it’s not so very difficult to solve… “

  She left it there, as if it were some kind of threat. She was still trying to convince me, in her own subtle fashion, that my world had just ended and that another had just begun, and that if she and all her fugitive kind were slaughtered by the ARU’s guns they would be martyrs to a great and unstoppable cause.

  “Have you read The Island of Dr Moreau, Alice?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “What do you think of it?”

  “It’s a parable. It tells us that it takes more than a little cosmetic surgery and a few memorized laws to make people—any people — human. That’s true. Whether humans are born or made, the test of their humanity is their behaviour, their love and respect for their fellow humans.”

  “How many naturally born humans would pass that test, do you think?” I asked.

  “I have no idea,” she replied. “Lots, I hope.”

  “Would I pass it?” I asked.

  “I have to hope so,” she said casually, “don’t I, Dr Hitchens? But I don’t actually know. What do you think?”

  “There wasn’t supposed to be any shooting,” I told her. “The police were supposed to put everyone under arrest. If your makers hadn’t set fire to the house and told everyone to scatter and run, no one would have been hurt. Then, the matter of your humanity could have been decided in a proper and reasonable manner.” I hoped that I was telling the truth, hut I had a niggling feeling that the plan to which I’d been admitted wasn’t the whole one. The GE-Crime Unit had called up the Armed Response Unit.

  “Well,” said Alice, “that isn’t the way things worked out, is it? It seems to me that the matter of our humanity, as you put it, has already been decided. You’ll never be sure, of course, that you’ve got us all. Even if Ed and Kath can’t get to the old icehouse, and even if they run into the police when they do, you’ll never be sure how many of us got out under the noses of your surveillance unit before they figured out that the apparently obvious wasn’t necessarily true.”

  She was definitely feeding me a line there, but I couldn’t tell whether she was feeding it to me because it was false, or because it was true. I thought the time had come for me to make a grab for the axe and take control of the situation. I was probably right—or would have been, if I’d actually succeeded.

  I suppose, on reflection, that I was lucky she only swiped me with the flat of the blade. If she’d hit me that hard with the edge, she could easily have fractured my skull.

  When I woke up again I was in a hospital bed. My head wasn’t aching any more and my eyes weren’t stinging, but I felt spaced-out and bleary. It took a few minutes for me to remember where I might have been, if things had worked out differently.

  I learned, in due course, that the fire brigade had found me while searching the cellars for survivors and had handed me over to the paramedics before midnight. Unfortunately, the medication they’d fed me ensured that I didn’t wake up again until thirty-six hours later, so I’d missed all of the official postmortems as well as the remainder of the
action—but the urgency with which the Unit moved to debrief me reassured me that the adventure still had a long way to run.

  “There were three of them,” I told Inspector Headley. “I only saw one of them, and it was too dark to see her features clearly. She had blond hair, cut to shoulder length, and very even teeth that caught what little light there was when she smiled. I couldn’t swear that I’d be able to recognize her again, dead or alive. Her name was Alice. She called the others Ed and Kath. They were trying to reach an old icehouse on the edge of the lake, but the tunnel had been blocked off. Did you get them?”

  “What else did they tell you?” Inspector Headley countered jesuitically.

  That wasn’t a game I intended to play. “Did you get them?” I repeated.

  “No,” he conceded reluctantly. “But the tunnel was still blocked off—had been for the best part of a century. Nobody got out that way.”

  “But you didn’t pick up three stragglers in the house?”

  “No,” he admitted, “but if you’ll pardon my pointing it out, Dr Hitchens, I’m the one who’s supposed to be debriefing you. Yes, they could have been piglets—and no, we wouldn’t have believed that if we hadn’t had the autopsy reports your colleagues carried out on the ones we shot. Personally, I’d have passed everyone of the corpses as human, and I wasn’t the only one who wouldn’t believe otherwise until your colleagues came back to us with the results of the DNA-tests—but we didn’t capture any of the piglets alive. Now, would you mind telling me exactly what happened to you?”

  “Not at all,” I said, “but there’s one thing I need to know. Was the shooting always part of the plan? Did you always intend to kill the children?”

  He seemed genuinely shocked. “Of course not,” he said. “They wouldn’t stop. They just kept on running. They were warned.”