Honk If You Are Jesus

by Peter Goldsworthy

  My own weekends were less easy to fill. Of course my work — my Work — still drew me each Saturday and Sunday morning; if anything I preferred my Department on weekends, with no one else in sight. But there were limits to the things I could do, singlehanded. I took long walks through the afternoons, circumnavigating the lake, wandering through the Rose Cathedral, and the Bible Museum — often ending the day in the Bible Theme Park, on the deck of the Ark. Those two impossible birds, shuffling clumsily about their enclosure, always had the power to move me, to lift me.

  2

  How far we have come, and how quickly. Too far, too quickly? The pace has always excited me: my own small part in it, yes, but also the larger scientific world. I avoid newspapers, but I always study the current periodicals; and not only in my own field. I love the broader, unspecialised journals: Nature, Science, Scientific American. Especially the American: a journal so glossy, so sensuous it’s almost … edible. Science for the gourmet.

  Or is it science for the voyeur? It comes wrapped in a kind of confidential brown paper envelope that I rip off each month with great joy. Science-porn, some might call it — in the sense that it never quite delivers what it promises. Science is not quite as beautiful and elegant as the illustrations in Scientific American suggest.

  Not quite, but very nearly. Artificial intelligence, moon landings, the neurology of the mind: we have travelled very far, in many directions. But who could have seen the dodo coming?

  Two years ago the bird was dead, had been dead and buried for four hundred years. The vast waddling flocks that once covered a handful of islands in the Indian Ocean had shrunk to a few scattered bits and pieces: a single head and foot somewhere in a museum in Oxford; a foot (from the same bird?) in the British Museum; another head (presumably not from the same birds floating in a jar of preserving spirits in Copenhagen.

  Plus a blizzard of feathers scattered through the tourist booths of Mauritius and Reunion, most of which looked suspiciously like chicken.

  All this is well-known, but worth repeating: the stuff of the headlines that arrived without warning, without faintest inkling, eighteen months ago. DODO WALKS AGAIN. BIG BIRD’S SECOND COMING. GENETIC MIRACLE. For a week or so — longer than a regional war, shorter than a Royal Wedding — there was talk of little else. A thickset, waddling bird, a kind of coarse-looking, big-billed turkey, could be viewed on every television screen on the planet, nightly. Even I, largely immune to news, and television, watched, and read. And waited eagerly for the scientific journals. I also heard the jokes; these were inescapable. Dodo jokes traversed the planet almost as quickly as those first satellite transmissions. The importance of the event, its hold on deeper parts of the mind, its dislocation of yet another small certainty, the celebration (or was it dread?) of technology — all these could be heard in the jokes. Why did the dodo cross the road? What do you get when you cross a chicken and a mother-in-law?

  1993. The date of Resurrection now seems as firmly lodged in my brain as others:1066, 1492, 1788, 1969. As is the recipe for preparing the bird. Anyone who glanced at a newspaper or a television screen that week could recite it backwards. The gourmet magazines — Scientific American chief among them — went into a little more detail, their photography was a little more mouth-watering. Take one dozen still-warm pigeon eggs. Lightly whisk a piece of mummified dodo foot, separate the broken filaments of DIVA from a hundred million dead, disintegrating cells. Zip together a single strand, multiply in a frothy yeast of PCR. Select the fittest-looking genes, mix with yolk, add a dash of cellcycle enzymes. Carefully, ever so carefully incubate …

  The dodo made — is no doubt still making — Stanford University millions. And put the face of the boy-genius responsible — William Scanlon, Californian Wunderkind — on the covers of magazines everywhere.

  Dodo clones came waddling out of their cuckoo-yolks: awkward, helpless cartoon birds marching off to Japan, to Germany, even back home to Mauritius, at many millions of dollars apiece. Not all the hatchlings were successful. Dodos emerged without feet, without wings, without heads. Gargoyle dodos died in ovo, or survived, bizarre genetic freaks, no more than a handful of minutes after hatching. But dozens of normal, healthy chicks were soon waddling about.

  Within months no zoo could respect itself without a dodo on display. One dodo, not two — there was no point in two, except, perhaps, to maintain gender appearances on a Noah’s Ark.

  3

  ‘Someone else is joining us?’

  ‘The new Professor of Genetics. I thought the two of you should meet.’

  Pfitzner watched me, smugly. Three places had been set for lunch in the Blue Room. The invitation had arrived only the day before — I had been tempted to refuse.

  ‘Do I know her?’

  He smiled, indulging me: ‘Him.’

  ‘Do I know him?’

  ‘I imagine you know his work.’

  He was teasing me. I kept my mouth shut, refusing to play along.

  ‘William Scanlon,’ he announced.

  He allowed me a little comprehension time — it wasn’t easy.

  ‘Scanlon?’ I said. ‘The William Scanlon?’

  ‘Are there any others?’

  Belief was difficult: ‘In this place?’

  He chose to ignore the slur: ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been able to brief you before. Negotiations have been … protracted.’

  ‘What are his plans here?’

  Pfitzner seemed a little cagey: ‘A few ideas are being tossed around, I understand. Think-tank stuff. Still very much at the drawing-board stage … Stealing the Great Man from Stanford was quite a feather in our cap. Shall we eat?’

  ‘Shouldn’t we wait?’

  He glanced at his watch and shook his head: ‘William is always late. One of your species — head in the clouds. Why don’t you tell me what you’ve been up to. I want to hear everything.’

  The threat proved groundless; I was required to tell exactly nothing. Pfitzner did the telling. The more food and drink went into that mouth, the more words seemed to come out. In direct proportion. As if one displaced the other. I remembered the first time we had eaten together in the Blue Room some months before. Once again, the man-woman mode of communicating proved impossible, but he soon found another: the reunion of old friends, veterans who had served in the same ‘combat zone’ — his phrase — and on the same ‘front line’ together. This was absurd, of course. We had never been remotely familiar, but I found it oddly pleasant; not being treated as a woman so much as a mate.

  I even sipped a glass of wine: one only, but I was feeling more mellow when the door opened some minutes later, and Scanlon appeared.

  ‘Christ! Am I late?’

  I knew the face, of course. Or more especially the ill-kempt beard. I hadn’t realised from the magazine covers how short he was: five-foot-nothing. He looked more like a zoologist than a geneticist — like someone who worked a lot in the field: bearded, tanned, wiry. And young — much younger than me, certainly; a genuine Wunderkind. He was dressed to match, dressed like a backpacker: khaki military shirt, tough jeans. Perhaps the heels of his elastic-sided boots were a little higher than functionally necessary: a short man’s high heels.

  Pfitzner rose, and gestured to the empty chair: ‘Professor Scanlon, Professor Fox.’

  ‘Mara,’ I insisted, immediately.

  ‘Just a coffee,’ Scanlon told the waiter, and eased into a chair across the table. Sweat stained the armpits of the shirt; what might have been old food-stains were spattered here and there down its front. His accent was American, but a quick, matter-of-fact American: the vowels undrawled, the consonants crisp and unblurred.

  ‘I know your work,’ he said.

  This was probably the first genuine praise I had heard since arriving at Schultz.

  ‘You must read widely. It’s hardly your field.’

  He shrugged: ‘There are always areas of overlap.’

  A coffee was set before him. He measured out six spoonfuls of
sugar, and stirred vigorously, swirling a little liquid over the lip of the cup. His fingernails were dirty; clearly he wasn’t someone who took pains with his appearance.

  ‘I know your work,’ I said. ‘Of course.’

  He was watching me; his gaze was clear and open. I pushed on: ‘I must say, I find it hard to believe …’

  He interrupted: ‘Why Australia?’

  ‘You must be tired of hearing the question.’

  He shrugged: ‘It has a simple answer. I wanted a free hand. Funding without strings.’

  Pfitzner, smiling smugly, seemed about to intervene. I shifted in my chair, half-turning towards Scanlon, subtly excluding him: ‘A free hand to do what?’

  ‘This and that.’

  He was teasing me, but pleasantly. I tried to pin him down: ‘I read somewhere that the woolly mammoth was on the agenda at Stanford.’

  He laughed: ‘The mammoth is hard.’

  ‘Getting the material?’

  ‘There’s enough material. Plenty of material. The permafrost is full of the stuff. Frozen loin of mammoth. Fifty thousand years in the freezer. They dig it up and feed it to sled-dogs in Alaska. No, the dodo was special. A one-off. The mammoth is too … predictable. Besides, the Japanese are working on it.’

  He reached across the table, selected a bread roll from a plate, bit a chunk, chewed once or twice, then spoke with his mouth still full: ‘I thought about the mammoth — I’ll admit that. Problem is where to grow the embryo. Birds looked easier — people have been growing chicken feathers in dishes for years. You need a pretty big womb for a mammoth.’

  ‘Elephant?’ Pfitzner stated the obvious, somewhere to my left.

  ‘Probably too small. Now there’s an obstetrics problem for you, Mara — extracting a baby mammoth through an elephant pelvis.’

  ‘Blue whale?’ I suggested.

  I laughed to show I wasn’t serious — but Scanlon looked intrigued.

  ‘I think I’m going to like you,’ he said. ‘Just one small problem: floating the newborn calves back to shore.’

  Pfitzner laughed, obsequiously.

  ‘The beauty of the tiger,’ Scanlon went on, ‘is that it’s a marsupial. We won’t even need a womb after a few weeks. Just poke it in the nearest kangaroo pouch.’

  Pfitzner leant forward between us, into our fields of view: ‘Uh, William, that information is not for public consumption.’

  He was too late; the news was out.

  ‘The Tasmanian Tiger?’ I said.

  Pfitzner leant even further forward: ‘Ah, Professor Fox. I must ask that this discussion goes no further than this room.’

  ‘Of course.’

  I still had questions to ask; questions to which I thought I knew the answers, but wanted to confirm.

  ‘Why the dodo?’ I asked. ‘Why did you start with the dodo?’

  He leaned back, and clasped two hands behind his head. He reeked of sweat; I could have counted the sweat-rings in the armpits of his shirt.

  ‘We thought long and hard. Bringing back a mammal looked difficult first-up. Not just the mammoth — any mammal. Eggs seemed the best way to go — you can always find a big enough yolk. T. rex would have been nice.’

  I laughed, a little surprised at myself. I couldn’t remember when I had warmed to someone so quickly. Or warmed to a mind so quickly — a mind that seemed to roam where it liked, unfettered.

  ‘Don’t laugh. Tyrannosaurus is not that crazy. But there’s not a lot of material to work with. Bits of eggshell. A few petrified bones.’

  ‘Nothing organic?’

  He nodded: ‘Finding DNA fingerprints in fifty-million-year-old bones looked like a real headache. And probably not even possible. In the end the dodo was … symbolic more than anything.’

  ‘Dead as?’

  He nodded again. A shorthand had crept into our exchanges, implications did not need to be spelt out. Ours was already the abbreviated conversation of old friends. We had left Pfitzner far behind.

  ‘What about humans?’

  He glanced at me with special interest: ‘What about them?’

  ‘Applying the same principles.’

  ‘It’s being done all the time,’ he said. ‘But you know that. The organ farms. The big transplant conglomerates.’

  ‘No — I mean … extinct humans. You could bring them back.’

  His expression didn’t appear to change, but there was a difference I couldn’t put my finger on: as if invisible lids, lizard lids, had closed over those clear, open eyes.

  ‘The mummies,’ I explained. ‘Rameses. Tutankhamen.’

  ‘Nefertiti,’ Pfitzner got in. ‘Cleopatra!’

  Scanlon glanced at him: ‘You wish!’

  Pfitzner drew a sheaf of papers from a briefcase; I was a little startled to spot a reprint of a paper I had once written — ‘Prospects for Artificial Meiosis’ — for one of the American Journals: Fertility and Sterility. A memo was paper-clipped to the title-page: Attention Dick, re our previous, and the initials W.S.

  He passed the reprint over; I glanced through it.

  ‘Science-fiction,’ I pronounced. ‘Pure speculation. I’m surprised to see it again. I thought it was dead and buried.’

  ‘I can’t say I understand it all,’ Pfitzner said. ‘My embryology is a bit rusty.’

  I didn’t argue; I doubted he understood a word.

  ‘Correct me if I’m wrong,’ he said. ‘What you are saying is that you could take cells from the skin of sterile men, split the genetic complement, and use each half-cell as a surrogate sperm cell?’

  Pfitzner was moving his lips, the words were coming out — but there was something rote about it all. I had the sense of talking to a ventriloquist’s puppet. I addressed my answer to Scanlon.

  ‘It’s not exactly spelt out.’

  ‘But that’s the implication?’

  ‘One implication.’

  ‘Can it be done?’ Pfitzner said somewhere off to my left.

  ‘Perhaps,’ I told Scanlon, the puppetmaster, directly. ‘No: probably. Anything can be done — given enough time and enough money.’

  Pfitzner was still talking: ‘The money is not a problem. There are a lot of men out there with more dollars than sperm.’

  My eyes were still fixed on Scanlon: ‘Is this why I’m here? On the strength of one wild idea?’

  ‘What would you need?’ Pfitzner said.

  ‘A few other crazy people. But I get the feeling some of them may already be here.’

  Scanlon smiled; his teeth were yellow, with bits of bread roll stuck between them: ‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

  Pfitzner spoke again: ‘It would be your project, Mara. But you’ll have some of the best molecular people in the business working upstairs — William’s department. We can work out a little power-sharing.’

  ‘It would be a privilege,’ Scanlon said, ‘to work with you.’

  He was watching me, closely. I shifted in my seat, and glanced away. I found myself liking him too much, too quickly; I wasn’t comfortable with this rush of feeling.

  ‘You’d be working with Tad,’ I said. ‘My embryologist. He does most of the hands-on stuff.’

  ‘You do the thinking?’

  I shrugged, trying to keep my distance: ‘If you like.’

  He filled two wine-glasses; passed one to me, and raised the other into the space between us.

  ‘Here’s to thinking.’

  Somewhere Pfitzner was hastily pouring out his own wine, trying, vainly, to join the toast.

  4

  I couldn’t locate Tad when I returned from lunch; he had disappeared from the laboratory. I arrived home that night to find him preparing dinner — something fishy, and Japanese. He already knew everything I had wanted to tell him on the subject of William Scanlon, and more.

  ‘I like him,’ he pronounced.

  ‘You’ve met him?’

  ‘It was in the morning papers. You should keep in touch with the mass media, Frau Professor. I caugh
t a lift up to the Genetics Department and invited myself to afternoon tea.’

  He tweezered various small pieces of food on to two square plates with a pair of chopsticks.

  ‘You should visit. Some of the hardware on the sixth floor hasn’t even been invented yet. Technology that you or I would kill for.’

  He sat there bulging from his clothes, an overfed westerner picking fastidiously at tiny, civilised portions of food — an incongruity that never failed to intrigue me.

  ‘Of course they are all mad,’ he purred across a bowl of scented tea. ‘The entire sixth floor.’

  ‘Scanlon?’

  ‘He’s the worst. But some of his team aren’t far behind — as if they’re all in competition. A prize for the most hare-brained notion of the week. The computer freak, Greaves, is positively certifiable. Some sort of idiot-savant. Twenty-five going on twelve. The man thinks he’s going to Mars.’

  I smiled along, entertained, but didn’t believe a word: Tad never let the truth spoil a good story, to quote the man himself.

  ‘Can we work with them?’

  ‘We can have a lot of fun trying.’

  In fact I had little interest in the joint-project. Spermalchemy seemed a dead-end: an idea that was a little too original, too far ahead of its time. But here, especially, there was money to be spent, and Pfitzner — who authorised the cheques — to be kept posted.

  In the weeks that followed I gave Tad his head. The idea had been mine, but the initial work, the fine needlework, would be his. On paper it seemed simple: each human egg contains half of the genetic code, each tadpole of sperm another half: twenty-three lonely singles. Twenty-three halves of the spiral staircase. The aim was to persuade, to dupe, cells from other regions — skin, mucous membrane, anywhere handy — into splitting, artificially, into similar halves.