Mammoth Book of Best New SF 14

by Gardner Dozois

  The problem was, I knew, that they’d already been warned. They’d had far too many warnings for their own good.

  I recited the whole story, in as much detail as I could remember, into Headley’s tape-recorder. I watched his expression becoming more troubled as I spoke, and I gathered that Special Branch were just as confused as I was as to what might be real and what might be bluff.

  “This has turned into a real can of worms,” he told me, when he’d switched the recorder off. “We don’t know how many of the piglets might be missing. We’ve been waist-deep in lawyers ever since we got Hemans and his friends under lock and key, including lawyers claiming to represent your fugitive friend and her alleged litter-mates.”

  “How many died?” I asked.

  “Only seven,” he said, so weakly that it was obvious that seven was either far too many or far too few. “Three of them were real humans. Unfortunate, but it was their own fault. I think they wanted us to shoot, to put us in the wrong. I think Hemans told those kids to keep running no matter what because he knew that some of them would be killed. Cynical bastard.”

  I had already told him that Bradby had warned his experimental subjects that an attempt might be made to wipe them out, but I wasn’t convinced that the warning had been cynical. It seemed to me that he might have been honestly concerned, and rightly so. If Alice and the others had got away…

  “We might not find it easy to prove in court that the other four weren’t real humans,” I told Headley, although that news must already have been broken to him. “Did the DNA-tests throw up any evidence that they were transgenics?”

  Headley shook his head. He seemed to understand the implications of the question. Transplanting human genes into animals was clearly and manifestly illegal, but if Alice had told me the truth, that wasn’t what had been done to her. If Alice really was a pig through and through, genetically speaking, then there was a slim possibility that Hemans’ lawyers could argue that what he and his colleagues had done wasn’t illegal at all. And if Alice was as human as she seemed to be in every aspect except genetically, her lawyers might have a field day trying to establish exactly what the law might and ought to mean by “human”—assuming that the Unit ever caught up with her.

  Whatever had been intended, it was obvious that the raid had been a colossal cock-up. It would be up to the minister to pull everyone’s irons out of the fire, and to look at the broader implications of what we now knew. Men like me were the minister’s eyes and brains, so it would be up to us to figure out what the real implications of the Animal Farm fiasco might be. Governments had been brought down by matters of a far more trivial nature and it was too late to hope that the situation could be contained. The cat was already out of the bag—or the pig from the poke.

  Headley admitted, when I questioned him further, that without the records that had gone up in smoke, there was no way to know for sure how many experimental “piglets” there had been. They had always been kept inside, away from the prying eyes of the surveillance team, who wouldn’t have recognized them for what they were if and when they’d caught glimpses of them. Their creators and the piglets themselves knew the real number, but no one would ever know whether any figure they might offer was to be trusted. Now that we knew for sure that the piglets could pass for human, at least while they were still alive and kicking, we had to consider the possibility that some of them already were passing, in Brighton or in London, or anywhere at all.

  If my evidence could be taken at face value, at least three piglets had escaped. Headley told me that other debriefings had produced evidence that at least two more, both female, might have evaded their pursuers in the woods behind the manor house. He was enough of an intellectual to understand my observation that it added up to a better breeding population than God had placed in Eden or Lot had led from Sodom.

  As a scientist, of course, I wasn’t at all sure of that—engineered organisms hardly ever breed true, and it was perfectly possible that even if the ersatz girls could produce offspring, the offspring in question might have snouts and tails—but we had to consider the worst possible case. Bringing human-seeming babies out of a sow’s womb might sound no more likely than making silk purses out of sow’s ears, but we had moved into unknown territory, scientifically speaking. What did I know, given that I had never dabbled in illicit experimentation? What did any of us know, unless and until Hemans, Rawlingford and Bradby condescended to enlighten us?

  I suppose that I was lucky to be kept on the project, given that I’d ended up in hospital, but I was needed. I’d been brought in to analyze data, not to conduct interrogations, but the changed circumstances necessitated my taking a new role. My conversation with Alice had put me one up on my colleagues, so I was hustled out of the hospital with a bagful of pills as soon as the doctors could be persuaded to let me go.

  “We haven’t charged them yet,” Headley explained to me, while I was being taken to the police station where Hemans, Rawlingford and Bradby were to be questioned. “At the moment, they’re supposed to be cooperating voluntarily with our enquiries. We’re keeping in mind the possibility of charging them with arson, kidnapping and child molesting, but we want to see how they and their lawyers are going to play it before we go in hard. If they’re prepared to come clean and tell us where their backed-up data is—assuming they do have backups somewhere—we might still be able to tidy up the mess.”

  It seemed like a reasonable assumption to me, although I wasn’t sure how reasonable our mad scientists would prove to be.

  I went into the interview with Hemans thinking that I was the only one on our side who’d actually thought the matter through, and the only one to have grasped the full complexity of the issue. I thought that I might be approaching the high-point of my career—a taller peak than I had ever dreamed of scaling—if only I could keep my wits about me.

  The interview was being videotaped, of course, but the tape wouldn’t be admissible in court.

  I couldn’t measure the exact combination of emotions that mingled in Hemans’ expression as he looked at me, but there was at least a little contempt and at least a little distaste. I couldn’t understand that. When I’d first met Hemans, way back in ’06, he’d been working in the public sector himself, helping to tidy up the loose ends of the Human Genome Project—but even before the HGP had delivered its treasure, its workers were being sucked into private enterprise. Comparative genomics was supposed to be the next big thing. I didn’t hold it against Hemans that he had jumped ship, and I couldn’t see any reason why he’d hold it against me that I hadn’t.

  It was obvious by ’06 that the attempts that had been made to patent human gene sequences and develop diagnostic kits based on HGP sequencing data wouldn’t bear much commercial fruit in the immediate future, because they’d be tied up in the courts for years. The precedents for patenting animal genes had, however, been established by the Harvard oncomouse and all the disease-models that had followed in its wake. Given that all mammals had homologues for at least ninety-five per cent of human genes, the obvious thing for ambitious biotech companies to do was to steer around the moral minefield by concentrating their immediate efforts on what could be done with animals. Pigs were already contributing organs for xenotransplantation, so they were a natural target for sequencing and potential exploitation, and there was nothing surprising in the fact that Hemans and his coworkers had decided to concentrate their efforts in that direction. What was surprising, though—and disturbing—was that they’d decided to cross the line that the European Court had drawn regarding the uses to which human genes could be put. What was even more surprising, to me—and even more disturbing—was that the way Hemans looked at me when I sat down to question him; he showed not the slightest trace of guilt or shame. That made me wary, and wariness made me even more punctilious than usual.

  “First of all, Dr Hemans,” I said carefully, “I’ve been asked to apologize on behalf of His Majesty’s Government for the unfortunate deaths which
occurred during the course of the police raid on Hollinghurst Manor. The police had reason to believe that a serious breach of the law had taken place, and they were proceeding in full accordance with the law, but they deeply regret the fact that so many of those fleeing the building refused to stop when challenged, forcing the Armed Response Unit to open fire.”

  “Never mind the bullshit, Hitchens,” he countered, curling his lip disdainfully. “Are they going to charge us, and if so, what with?”

  “OK,” I said, easing my tone according to plan, in order to imply — falsely, and perhaps not very convincingly—that there would be no more bullshit. “They haven’t decided yet whether to charge you, or with what. There are several different schools of thought. As soon as they catch up with one of the escapers—and they will—the hawks will want to move. You have until then to make your offer, if you have one to make.”

  “Aren’t you the one who’s supposed to be making offers?” Hemans countered.

  “No,” I said. “I’m not. You’re the one who knows whether the experiments being carried out at Hollinghurst Manor were illegal, and to what extent. You’re the one who knows the identities of the children who were living in the house, and the extent of the irregularities surrounding the registration of their births, their schooling, and whatever else might turn up. If you want to offer explanations and excuses before the police draw their own conclusions, you’d best do it quickly.”

  He didn’t laugh, but he didn’t seem to be intimidated either. “You must have determined the identities of the ones you killed,” he said.

  “On the contrary,” I replied carefully. “The police haven’t been able to match the bodies with any public records or any missing persons. That is, in itself, cause for concern. There is no record of any application for the custody of any children having been made by you or any of your colleagues, so the police are completely at a loss to understand how they came to be resident in the house—or why, given that they were resident in the house, they don’t appear to have attended school or to be registered with a doctor, or… “

  “This is a waste of time,” Hemans interrupted. “If you’re just going to pretend that you don’t know anything, I think I’ll wait for the formal interrogation, when my lawyer can decide how little I ought to say.”

  “I spoke to one of the children in the aftermath of the fire,” I told him abruptly. “She seemed to believe that she wasn’t the product of a human womb. Did you tell her that?”

  “We told her the truth about her origins,” he answered.

  “And what was the truth?” I asked.

  “That she was the product of a scientific experiment.”

  “An illegal experiment?”

  “Certainly not. Neither I nor any of my colleagues has ever transplanted any human genes into any other animal. We have been exceedingly careful to work within the existing law.”

  “But you haven’t published any of your work,” I pointed out. “You haven’t applied for any patents. Even by private sector standards, that’s unusually secretive.”

  “We haven’t published because the work wasn’t complete,” Hemans retorted, “and now, thanks to your murderous interference, it never will be. We haven’t applied for any patents because we aren’t ready. Not that it’s any of your business—or anyone else’s. Rawley, Brad and I were able to finance this project ourselves.”

  “The police didn’t set fire to the house,” I pointed out. “It isn’t their fault that your equipment and records were destroyed. You did that yourselves.”

  “No, we didn’t,” Hemans lied. “The fire was an accident—the result of the confusion generated by the raid.”

  “Your work wasn’t merely self-funded,” I pointed out, not wishing to pursue that particular red herring. “It was clandestine. You’ve made every possible effort to keep it secret. You seem to have been using children as experimental subjects—children of whom there is no official record of any kind. Even if they were your own children, that would be illegal. If they aren’t… there’s a great deal that requires explanation.”

  “And you already know what the explanation is, so we’d make better progress if you cut to the chase.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I don’t know any such thing. I don’t know that the story the girl gave me was anything but a pack of lies, cooked up to make your work seem much more successful than it was. We can’t interrogate the dead, so we have no way to know whether the individuals identified by genetic fingerprinting as pigs in human form were capable of speech, let alone rational thought. I’m certain in my own mind that the scene in the cellar was staged—how else would the three of them have been able to disappear, given that the exit they were ostensibly aiming for was blocked?”

  “Maybe they found another,” Hemans said. “Who did you talk to?”

  “She called herself Alice.”

  “We all called her Alice,” he assured me. “She’s not among the dead, then? And she did get away from the gunmen?”

  “They will find her,” I told him. “Whoever and whatever she is, she can’t hide. Wherever she went, there’ll be a trail. This is the twenty-first century. Nobody can hide for long.”

  “That includes the people chasing her,” he pointed out. “It’s one thing to surround a house in the middle of a wood for one night only, and quite another to conduct a nationwide manhunt for weeks on end. How many are you looking for?”

  “How many were there?”

  He still didn’t smile, but he knew that that was one of the best cards he held up his sleeve. If we’d been fooled into thinking there were at least seven, when there were really only four, we might keep searching for a long time—and he was right about the difficulty of hiding a nationwide manhunt, whether that was the right word for it or not.

  “Why did you do it?” I asked him abruptly. “It’s such a strange thing to attempt. Why did you even try?”

  “You’re a geneticist yourself, Dr Hitchens,” he replied. “You, of all people, should understand.”

  I thought I did. I thought that now was the time to show him that I did. “If you really did do it,” I said, “I can only conclude that it was by accident. I can’t imagine that you had the least idea when you started out just how successful your experiment in Applied Homeotics would be. I can only suppose that you started out trying to figure out what the limits of embryonic plasticity were, and that you wouldn’t have dared to superimpose a human anatomical template on the pig embryos if you had realized that it would work so spectacularly. Once you found out what the babies were actually capable of, you must have been thrown into a quandary, unable to decide what to do next—so you simply carried on, monitoring their development in secret, not knowing when or how to stop. You must have been grateful when the police finally made their move, taking the matter out of your hands.”

  He looked at me with what seemed to me to be a new respect. “You keep saying if” he pointed out, “but you don’t really believe there’s an if, do you? You know perfectly well that Alice is the real thing.”

  “I don’t know it,” I told him truthfully. “You’re the one that knows. How clever is she, do you think?”

  “Not so very clever,” he told me feigning slight reluctance. “Precocious, but not so very far from the norm. Only human. But her parents were pigs, Dr Hitchens. We did do it—and we’re prepared to defend ourselves in any court you care to haul us into. We’re prepared to defend it all the way. I like your label, by the way. Applied Homeotics sounds so much more dignified than Brad’s homeoboxing. If you know that that’s what it is, you must also know that it isn’t going to go away. Not now.”

  Hemans didn’t just mean that he and his colleagues were prepared to defend the legality of their experiment and the merits of their new biotechnology. He meant that they were prepared to defend the humanity of its first products. Maybe he was just a little bit grateful to have his hand forced, but he had decided long ago exactly how he would play it when the forcing st
arted. He might have fallen into a godlike role by accident, but he had accepted the responsibility that went with it. Our side hadn’t, yet. Our side had gone in blind and trigger-happy. That wasn’t my fault, but I’d have to carry the can along with everyone else if things continued to get more and more screwed-up.

  “I also know that it can’t be merely a matter of tweaking development times,” I said. “Pigs may have homologues of ninety-eight point six per cent of human genes, but that still isn’t enough. Whatever you told Alice, you had to make up a substantial fraction of the remainder. Maybe you copied the sequences from a contig library, used YACs to multiply them and then delivered them into the embryo by retrovirus, but that doesn’t make it legal. Human sequences are human sequences, even if you build them base by base, and when you transplanted them into pig embryos you broke the law.”

  “We didn’t transplant anything,” Hemans insisted. “We didn’t break any laws. Put us in the dock and we’ll prove it. But you don’t want to do that, do you?”

  “That depends,” I hedged—but his lip curled again, and I knew that I had to play the game more openly than that. “You have to give me more,” I went on. “You have to give me some idea of what you actually did, if you didn’t transplant the human sequences.”

  “Why should I?” he countered bluntly.

  I wasn’t speaking for myself, but I had to make the offer. “Because we might still be able to put this thing away,” I told him. “We might not be able to unmake the discovery, but we might be able to save ourselves from its consequences, at least for a while.”

  “No,” he said wearily as well as firmly. “We can’t. We thought about it—Rawley, Brad and I—but we decided that we couldn’t. We’re not policemen, Dr Hitchens, we’re not politicians and we’re not lawyers, we couldn’t put it away, and we still can’t. Not because it wouldn’t do any good, although it wouldn’t, but because it simply wouldn’t be right. We’re not going to cooperate, Dr Hitchens. We’re not going to take it to the bitter end. They’re human, and every ovum produced by every animal on our farms and in our zoos is potentially human. That’s the way it is, and we can’t just ignore the fact. We can’t make any deal that doesn’t make the whole matter public.”