The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “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 started. 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 percent 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.”

  “You were the ones who never published,” I pointed out. “You were the ones who kept on working in secret.”

  “It wasn’t finished,” he told me. I was sure that he wasn’t trying to wriggle out of it.

  “If you’re telling the truth,” I told him, “it never will be. But you still have to convince me of that.”

  He was still looking at me with faint disgust, because of what he thought I’d become, but in the end he had to loosen up. Like me, he didn’t have any alternative.

  Even when we’d reviewed the tape and gone through it step by step, the senior Special branch men and most of the Home Office staff still didn’t get it.

  “Okay,” said the Unit’s top man, “so the one you talked to was smart and kind of cute—but she isn’t ever going to get to court, let alone to daytime TV. She’s a pig. An animal. We can send her to the slaughterhouse. We can get rid of them all, if we decide that’s the appropriate thing to do.”

  “We wouldn’t necessarily have to go that far,” one of the junior ministers put in. “Once people know what she really is, that will color everyone’s view of her. It doesn’t matter
how cute or clever she is, nobody is going to make out a serious case for making anymore like her. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater here.”

  What he meant, of course, was “let’s not throw the bathwater out with the baby.” He figured that there might be useful purposes to which the technics might be put—secret purposes, of course, if the legal advisors decided that the whole area was legally out of bounds, but government-approvable purposes nevertheless. He was thinking about designing ultra-smart animals for use as spies and soldiers. He’d probably been a fan of the wrong kind of comic books in his youth. He wasn’t thinking Boy’s Own adventures; he was thinking Reality is What You Can Get Away With.

  The permanent under-secretary knew better, of course. “She was right about the records,” he observed, reflectively. “The fact that we failed to recover them makes it a mystery. As soon as the rumor spreads that you can turn animal embryos into passable human beings with standard equipment and a chicken-feed budget, everybody and his cousin will be curious to know how it’s done. We left it far too late to make our move—and I’m talking years, not weeks. We should have applied the new laws as soon as we had reason to believe that they’d been broken.”

  “Without the records,” I said, quietly, “there’s no way to be sure that even the new laws have been broken. And that makes it an even better mystery.”

  “She’s a pig, Hitchens,” the plain-speaking policeman pointed out. “She’s a pig that looks like a little girl. If that isn’t illegal genetic engineering, what is?”

  “If Hemans is telling the truth,” I said, “Applied Homeotics isn’t genetic engineering in the legal sense at all. He had to make up most of the missing one point four percent somehow, but if he’d simply tried to transplant or import it he’d probably have failed in exactly the same way that most other attempts to transplant whole blocks of genes have failed. Assuming that what he told me was true—and I’m inclined to believe him—his way is much better, and it’s not against the law. If this ever gets to court, we might have to hope that the backup records really have been destroyed—because if they haven’t, and Hemans, Rawlingford, and Bradby can use them to mount a successful defense, we’re going to look really stupid.”

  “That won’t happen,” the permanent under-secretary said. “If they want any kind of life after acquittal, they’ll make a deal. They’ll give us their secrets and they’ll sign a nondisclosure agreement. The real question is whether other people will be able to duplicate their work anyhow, guided by the knowledge—or even the rumor—that it’s possible.”

  “Who but the wackos would want to?” asked the chief inspector. “Do you really think the world is full of people who want to turn out imitation human beings? Even the worst kinds of animal liberation lunatics aren’t about to start clamoring for every piglet’s right to walk on two legs and wear a dress. This is the real world. Some animals are a hell of a lot more equal than others, and we’re them, and that’s the way it’s going to stay.”

  It was time to cut through the bullshit to the real heart of the matter. “You’re not taking Alice seriously enough,” I told them. “You haven’t listened properly to what she and Hemans said. Suppose she’s right. Suppose she isn’t a pig pretending to be a human. Suppose she really is a human.”

  “She’s not,” the policeman said, flatly. “Genetically, she’s a pig. End of story.”

  “According to her,” I pointed out, “genetics doesn’t enter into it. Human is as human does—and her brothers and sisters were the ones who got gunned down because they didn’t believe that their fellow men would open fire on a bunch of unarmed children. Without her school records, and until she consents to be tested again, we can only guess at her IQ, but on the evidence of my conversation and Hemans’ assurances I’d be willing to bet that it’s a little bit higher than the average teenager’s. You haven’t yet begun to consider the implications of that fact.”

  “If pigs in human form are smarter than real humans, that’s all the more reason for making sure that all the world’s pigs stay in their sties,” the man from Special Branch insisted. The minister was content to listen, for the time being.

  “If Hemans is telling the truth,” I went on, disregarding the policeman’s interruption, “he and his colleagues didn’t need to transplant any genes to make her human. DNA analysis of the dead bodies supports that contention. The difference between a human being and a chimpanzee, as Alice pointed out, is very small. The most important differences are in the homeotic genes—the genes that control the expression of other genes, thus determining which cells in a developing embryo are going to specialize as liver cells or as neurons, and how the structures built out of specialized cells are going to be laid out within an anatomical frame. If you have an alternative control mechanism which can take over the work of those controlling genes, they become redundant—and as long as the embryo you’re working with has the stocks of genes required to make all the specialized kinds of cell you need, you can make any kind of an embryo grow into any form you required. You could make human beings out of pigs and cows, tigers and elephants, exactly as Alice said—and vice versa.”

  “That’s bullshit,” the policeman said. “You’ve said all along that they had to make up the difference. We have to have the extra genes that make us human.”

  “That’s true,” I agreed, wondering how simple I could make it, and how simple I’d need to make it before he could understand. “And until today I’d assumed, just as you had, that the extra genes would have to be transplanted, or that they’d have to synthesized from library DNA and imported—but that almost never works with whole sets of genes, because mere possession of a gene is only part of the story. You have to control its expression—and that’s what Applied Homeotics is all about. We’ve become so accustomed to genetic engineering by transplantation that we’ve lost sight of other approaches—but Hemans and his friends are lateral thinkers. We didn’t get to be human by having genes transplanted into us—we grew the new genes in situ. Only a few million of the three billion base pairs in the human genome are actually expressed, but it’s an insult to the rest to call it junk DNA, the way we used to. Most of it is satellite repeat sequences, but in between the satellites there are hundreds of thousands of truncated genes and pseudogenes, all of them in a constant state of crossgenerational flux because of transposon activity.

  “Pigs may only have homologues of ninety-eight point six percent of our genes, but they also have homologues of almost all the protogenes making up the difference. Those protogenes are not only present within the pig genome, they’re mostly in the right sites. Hemans, Rawlingford, and Bradby didn’t need to transplant any human DNA—all they had to do was tweak the pig DNA that was already in place. And as Alice said when she had me trapped in Wonderland, if you can do it to a pig, you can do it to a cow—and given that the common ancestor relating us to rats and bats seems to be more recent than the one relating us to pigs, you can probably do it to a hundred or a thousand other species.”

  “It still sounds like bullshit to me,” the policeman repeated, as if he were some obstinate DNA satellite hopelessly intent on taking over an entire genome.

  “You may not like its implications, Chief Inspector,” I said, tiredly, “but that’s not enough to make it bullshit. I don’t know exactly how Hemans did it, because he isn’t going to tell us until he gets some guarantees, but I already know how I’d go about trying to copy the trick, now that I know that it can be done. Transforming and activating the protogenes is probably the easy part, given that every sequencer in the world is avid to learn how to write as well as read the language of the bases. I’m pretty sure I could figure out a way to do that. If I could also figure out a way to delay an embryo’s phylotypic stage—that’s the moment at which the control of an embryo’s development is transferred from the maternal environment to the embryo’s own genes—I might be able to stop the homeotic genes kicking in at all. Given that the onset of the phylotypic stage is much l
ater in some species than others, that doesn’t seem be any great hurdle to leap. A careful inspection of the research Hemans, Rawlingford, and Bradby published before they got together at Hollinghurst Manor suggests that they were probably using human maternal tissue as a mediator in the embryonic induction process. That’s not genetic engineering, of course—there’s no law against interspecific transplantation of mature tissues or the use of human somatic cells in tissue cultures. Believe me, sir: Applied Homeotics is a whole new field of biotechnology. None of the existing rules apply.”

  “So you’re telling me that every fucking farm animal in the realm—not to mention every household pet—is potentially human?” The Special Branch man was looking at me with as much contempt and distaste as Hemans had, but with even less justification.

  “No,” I said, patiently. “I’m telling you that the embryos they produce as parents are now potentially human. It still adds a whole new dimension to the ethics of animal usage, but we don’t yet know how far that dimension extends. We can be reasonably sure that birds and reptiles don’t have the required stocks of protein-template genes, and some of the smaller mammals probably don’t have them either, but the question of where the limits of potential metamorphosis actually lie is a minor one. The point is that unless we’re the victims of a monstrous hoax, humanity is determined almost entirely by the development of the embryo. If so, Hemans is right. Alice and all her kind are as human as you or I. An even more important question, of course, is what this kind of technology might allow us to make of human beings.”

  I paused for effect, but nobody jumped in with an exclamation of astonishment. They were all waiting, guardedly, to see what came next.