himself. Sweat ran into his eyes, his skin felt hot and cold, his lungs
burnt from the energy of his flight.
Twigs lashed at his face. Was this the park? Flares lit up the night
sky, casting shadows across the world. He ran across the close-cut
grass, saw the bloody tree.
Trudi was on his mind. Why had she not told him? Why had she
not loved him as he had her?
The wolfhounds were closer now. He shivered and tried to ignore
the sounds of their pursuit, and the laughter of the remote crowd.
The wrath of Woden was upon him.
He approached the tree, and reached it, the Wild H unt still behind him. Its surface was coated with a glistening red. Why had Trudi rejected him, kept him apart from her? As he had been prepared, the SS officer had told him, with a sneer, that she had been three months pregnant when she died.
He had not killed her.
A dog appeared ten metres away, abruptly illuminated by the
flares. It was hot tonight, his Slavic peasant’s garb doubly
burdensome.
He gibbered but did not falter. W hen he had killed his parents,
he had killed them all, he had accepted Death.
He turned away from the trunk.
He was childless, lacking even the proof of love.
He broke off a branch, brandished it. His knees shook as the dog
approached; illusion and reality separated. He could not be what
he had done, nor was he what he had claimed to be.
He swung and missed.
The dog leapt.
On the nursery floor
©
GEORGE TURNER
We knew it would not take long for someone, somewhere, to see where
my innocent interviews were leading. From that moment on, of
course, I would never be out of danger. So The Mob (my private joke
name for them) armed me as best they could against surprise and tight
corners, and sent me off to play cat among the pigeons — though I felt
more like a domestic tabby stalking vultures.
1 An Ex-Ministerfor Science and Development
You journalists always look for someone to blame, but the facts in this
case are too public for muckrakers. After Crick and Watson the thing
was inevitable, no m atter how. The intimate touch? Is that what you
want? Laddie, you won’t print a word my legal staff hasn’t vetted.
None of your ‘insightful’ reporting! My memory is exact. I may be
ninety-five but I was known for quoting verbatim —
You ancient, useless bastard. On a crowded planet yesterday’s dinosaurs
persist because a life-greedy parliament once decreed that ex-MPs were entitled to Life Extension and anti-geriatric care as part of their grateful country's thanks —
while people who matter to the world can’t buy Extension because
the Balance Law makes even Grade One couples fight and bribe for permission to breed . . .
You might say that Barry Jones made it possible. He was Science
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On the nursery floor
165
Minister with some Labor government seventy years back. His wasn’t
a senior portfolio but he was vocal at a time when science was making
itself felt in a population brought up on video, booze and football. The
job became more and more important until, when my time came in
twenty-oh-three, the portfolio was junior only to the Deputy PM. So
I was able to swing a lot of power. 1 was a numbers man — you know
that if you’ve done your homework — and I don’t mind saying I had
my eye on long term benefits and that Project IQ looked like being the
little monster that would help me along.
I’d had this pack of biologists and gene-topologists snapping at my
heels for months, claiming that they had all the variations of the helix
calculated, that they’d sorted out the inert sections of the chain and
mapped the most promising points of interlocation and even picked
the microsurgeons for the job — and the public was in the right mood
for some sort of great leap forward, bless its idiot heart.
So was the scientific community, excepting the astronomers. Did
you know that there’s a high percentage of religious believers among
them, overwhelmed by the majesty of the universe? They published
an open letter quoting ‘vaulting ambition which o’erleaps itself, but
my secretary knew his Macbeth and so I could answer that biology
had come a long way since the witches brewed. That got me a big
response from the cartoonists. Good publicity.
I
tried for publicity through the science fiction clubs, too, and found
out they didn’t like science. Intrusive, obscure, boring and unimaginative! In politics you learn something new and silly every day; some of it makes you wonder how we ever climbed out of the caves.
How did this vulgarian careerist ever earn his seat? He helps explain the
condition of the world.
However, I got the Prime Minister behind me, though he was never
wholly happy about it, and the Project went ahead. He felt we were
going off less than fully cocked and I’ll admit some areas of doubt. For
one thing, the operational teams had precise techniques but no precise
aim. A precise aim was not really possible. Think of it this way: They
knew what combinations controlled intelligence and where m anipulation should be applied to produce a super-intelligent mind — but how super and in what direction? They had no agreed definition of
intelligence; they still haven’t.
The psychologists said there might turn out to be several kinds
of intelligence, not all necessarily welcome, or that a divergent
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George Turner
intelligence might go unrecognised for lack of anything to compare
it with. They were more or less right.
More or less! This one is still in the caves!
I recall a cartoon suggesting that a really intelligent product might
find nothing better to do than laugh his head off at his creators, and
a stupid biologist replying that undesirable laboratory animals could
be relegated. His team mates tried to pretend he had been joking, but
it was bad PR. Then some fool of a journalist trying for sensation —
one of your kind, boy — asked what if the super-brain turned out
telepathic, and the same noisy biologist saved the day by saying,
‘T h at’s my point about relegation. Would you want him prying?’
That put relegation in a new light. You can count on public opinion
for two things, somersaults and self-regard. In any case, by then
Project I Q was off and running.
Then the PM started digging into the forecasts and what he saw
made him unhappy. He was a Basic Christian, Australian Orthodox,
and at the back of his mind was the still small voice niggling about
usurping the prerogative of God. But he was committed. Still he kept
asking questions and seeming surprised at the answers. After all, he
was an economist, not a scientist.
He was worried sick when I told him there couldn’t be a definitive
report for three years, which meant there would be an election in the
meantime — and there was more than a hundred million of public
money sunk in the Project. As it happened, we survived that one. I
explained to him that observations before the age of two
would be little
more than indicative and that the psychologists were preparing IQ
tests based on new approaches to the problem of measurement.
I told him, ‘They can’t measure what only another superintelligence could devise tests for. They propose to measure specific abilities, physical as well as mental, plot them against statistical norms
and form a montage picture of the child’s ability to use his capacities.
T hat way they can devise a descriptive term, a sort of plus-value, to
describe qualities that can’t be measured against known standards. If
it comes off we’ll have the immense prestige of a world first.’
‘And if it doesn’t,’ he complained, ‘we’ll have a bad row on our hands.
The public in moral outrage!’ Then he said, ‘Reassure me.’
That was his token of nerves, the sign that he was afraid enthusiasm
had persuaded him into an activity he didn’t understand as well as he
should.
On the nursery floor
167
I asked, ‘How can I? The teams can’t guarantee success in something done for the first time. They know what and how but they can’t predict side effects or Acts of God. Succeed or fail, there will be a huge
advance in useful knowledge.’
I could see his thought. Sops for eggheads, he was saying to himself,
a success with blood on its hands and mud in its eye. But all he said was, ‘Side
effects?’
I said, ‘The surgeons know their work — which is done with chemicals and lasers, not micro-scalpels — but some of them suspect that the mere fact of interference, the redirection of a functioning mechanism, may itself cause unpredictable results,’
He saw possible disaster, but he asked, ‘Do you understand that?’
I told him, ‘Not really. It’s something like the idea that the fact of
observation affects the outcome of an experiment. There’s always the
unexpected.’
He said harshly, ‘A dollar each way on that.’ It’s surprising how
many religious men are also betting men, and you never know which
side you’ll encounter. It was the betting man who said, ‘The u n expected could be a benefit.’
I had to tell him that in biology the odds are stacked hundreds to
one against successful accidents, and right away he showed that he was
preparing to shed the blame if things went badly wrong; he asked, ‘Are
you confident?’
‘I am!’ Steady as a rock! I had to be; I had cased the odds in mathematical, biological and political terms and staked my career. But I can tell you now what I couldn’t tell anyone then: I sweated in my sleep.
Fancy a slob like this being struck with the sort of dream you associate with
a da Vinci, and risking his career on bringing it to life. Do we underestimate the
slob dreamers? The great traitors to country and humanity have all been self-
justifying intellectuals.
We weathered the election and settled in for a second term. In
twenty-oh-six, at the end of three years, came the first major report,
three huge volumes of gene-topology charts, tables, graphs, microphotographs and the language of creation, mostly impenetrable. But there was a summary in something like English. The PM leafed
through it and said, ‘Christ!’
I told him, ‘A lot of labour goes into virgin birth,’ but it didn’t get a
grin.
‘You’ve read all this?’
I certainly had.
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George Turner
He asked, ‘Can you reduce it to what I need to face the media?’
I could, and I started off with, ‘O f twenty clones —
‘Clones? All identical?’
‘Not quite. The selected prime ovum was subjected to multiple
cloning to create a control, a zero line for comparison of the induced
variations. Ten were left as females and ten given a Y chromosome to
develop them as males.’ I could talk like that, with the proper plum in
my mouth; still can, when it suits.
‘So,’ says he, ‘ten identical girls and ten identical boys.’
He had that way of beating the gun, trying to be on top of the discussion when really he was floundering. I explained that they were divided into five groups, two males and two females in each, with each
group given a different enhancing programme. ‘One entire group,’ I
told him, ‘ceased to develop after the fourth week and was discarded.’
‘Relegated,’he. said, remembering, and looked unhappy.
‘The other four groups reached term and were bom — or however
you describe emergence from total in vitro. Three groups survived and
are totally healthy.’
‘The fourth?’
‘Died on the seventh day.’
‘O f what?’
‘Some kind of hormone failure. Call it experimental error.’
‘Christ!’
You might have thought he knew the man. I said that the possible
genetic permutations ran into billions, that the calculation of side
effects was more art than science and that the teams did bloody well
to get a sixty per cent result.
What he said to that isn’t on record, but it can do no harm now. He
said, ‘And we’ll be doing bloody well if we can keep eight dead foetuses
out of the news.’
A PM in his second term knows the odds are rising against him and
every bad break looks like an electoral landslide, so I told him the good
news. ‘Group A shows superior spatial awareness and num ber
appreciation.’
‘M athematicians?’
‘Too early to say; maybe. Group B is body-conscious, colourconscious, emotional and self-expressive.’
‘Artists?’
‘Who knows? It could be transitional for something else. This is a
preliminary report.’
‘In seventeen hundred pages! And the third group?’
On the nursery floor
169
‘Group C is the interesting one. A and B are well advanced with
vocabularies of more than two thousand words but the C children
don’t talk at all.’
‘Retarded?’ He was becoming properly scared. ‘A clutch of mon-
goloid idiots is all we need.’
‘Not idiots. They understand speech but won’t talk, and they don’t
seem interested in anything except each other. They won’t play with
A and B groups. They are physically retarded, about a year backward,
completely healthy but taking longer to grow. They’re the most
promising.’
‘How?’
‘As a general rule in the animal kingdom the greater the adult
intelligence the slower the m aturing period. It may be a good sign.’
‘W hat games do they play?’
That was a more perceptive question than I had expected of him.
‘The same as ordinary kids; lots of running and shoving and shouting,
trying out the body and learning the controls — except that Group C
plays alone and doesn’t shout.’
He pushed the summary away and began to complain that the
thing was costing too much, so I had to tell him that soon it would cost
more. 'In a yearor two there’ll be a security problem. We’ll need more
guards and more technical gear. These kids are bright. If they decide
they want to get out . . .’
All he said was, ‘Christ!’Jesus was his worry blanket.
View of a dead Prime Minister with his mental pants down.
Nothing I couldn’t
have deduced from public files.
2 Nurse Anne Blaikie, a dear old thing
The years in the Nursery weren’t the best in my life or the worst, either.
I was in my twenties and pretty lively and the high security was . . .
not so much a restriction as a bore; we were always aware of it —
guards concealed at the perimeter, satellite surveillance up there out
of sight, alarms and tell-tales everywhere . . .
But I loved those extraordinary children; they made up for a lot. If
only there had been a town nearby, but there wasn’t. There was a
farmhouse a couple of kilometres away but we couldn’t see it. All we
saw was hedging and beyond that pastures and on the horizon, hills.
It was so isolated . . .
Isolated! There’s a long nostalgic history in that word. If they wanted an isolated spot now, they might find it in the desert —
and have to post guards to
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George Turner
keep the rubbernecks away. In this age of boiled-over population the idea of
isolation is romantic gibberish. But it’s an attractive gibberish,
I couldn’t stand it today. I’m a city girl at heart; the crowded life is
where I belong, but those kids were an experience nothing else could
match.
The exciting thing was that nobody knew what to do with them or
for them, except to feed them and keep them clean. The place was
spotted with microphones and spy eyes like — like currants in a pudding, and the psychologists watched us as much as the kids. We had to understand that the kids belonged to an alien culture, one that
didn’t exist yet and whose direction couldn’t be guessed; we weren’t
allowed to teach them anything at all; the poor little things had to find
out their own rules of growing up. It wasn’t possible; how can you
guard your reactions when a baby hurts itself through not knowing
any better? I lasted five years; some girls didn’t see out their first
month but I had a sedate sort of personality, I suppose, and just looked
after them and kept my mouth shut.
My babies loved me. At least I think they did. It was hard to tell, but
I like to think I was loved. I had C Group.
And that is why I am interviewing you instead of some other, but that'sedate
Strange Attractors (1985) Page 23