‘Unfortunately, our tests seem to indicate that in your case the third cause is effective. Vagrant cytogenes are operative within your tissues and ought to be getting on with their job. Unfortunately, they aren’t. Somehow – we don’t understand exactly how – your body is switching off one or more of the cytogenes, including the one which produces the vampire enzyme. We think that it may be a single mutant gene on one of your own chromosomes, which affects the mechanism determining whether other genes are active or inactive in particular specialised tissues. The mutation is seemingly irrelevant to the ordinary functioning of your body but it seems to be preventing the augmentation of nature which the Adamawaran complex usually provides. We have no way of countering this at present, though we hope that one day soon we might be able to identify rogue genes of this kind, and cancel out their effects. Until we know exactly what it is that the gene is doing, we’re impotent to intervene.’
As Chadwick finished speaking, he spread his arms a little, palms open, to express his helplessness. He did not need to add that although progress in biotechnology was very rapid, there was no way to estimate whether a breakthrough of the relevant kind could reasonably be anticipated within the next ten, twenty or fifty years.
In the meantime, Michael’s condition could only be expected to deteriorate. Now that his damaged tissues were producing cancers – cancers which the vagrant cytogenes in his cells should have been able to destroy — he was in a race against time. In that race, as in all others, he was handicapped … lame … crippled.
‘Do you understand all that?’ asked the consultant, anxiously. ‘It is complicated, I’m afraid, and one can’t get away from the jargon entirely.’
‘Yes,’ said Michael. ‘I can follow the argument. I do understand.’ ‘I’m very sorry.’
‘I know. Thanks.’
‘It’s important that you don’t give up hope. We still have all the resources of ordinary medicine at our disposal. We can control the pain, and check up regularly to see that the cancer doesn’t recur. Even if it does – caught early enough, there are effective treatments.’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Michael. But his weak blue eyes told him that the consultant was aware of the inadequacy of what he was offering. The doctor posed in his businesslike fashion, beneath his insouciant grey streak, knowing that he might live to see the year 3000, provided only that mankind could refrain from nuclear self-annihilation. With that certainty to arm him, he was trying with absurd earnestness to reassure his patient that he might, with luck, live to be sixty or seventy years old, lame and hurt, essentially outcast from the human community.
And what could Michael say, in the face of this miserly measure of reassurance, but: ‘Thank you. I know you can’t do more.’
‘There is hope,’ Chadwick insisted. ‘Improvements in gene-mapping may soon open the door to the complete analysis of the human genome. It’s a Herculean task, to be sure: vast quantities of DNA, hundreds of thousands of genes. But there are thousands of men working on it. Then again, we’re slowly finding out how the controlling mechanisms work: the ones which switch particular genes on and off in specialised cells. You must think of the progress we’ve made since you were born. Every year brings new discoveries. Your father … ’
It was as though the doctor expected some kind of gesture of forgiveness – something which would release him from the obligation of searching desperately for more hopeful phrases and incantations of encouragement. ‘Are the tablets working?’ he asked, switching to a different tack, in search of safer conversational ground.
‘Oh yes,’ said Michael. ‘I don’t have to take them all the time, now – only when the pain is bad. No side effects, unless you count the nightmares.’
‘That’s good,’ said the doctor.
Michael said nothing in reply, but stared with his pale eyes. The eyes which added one more item to the list of his stigmata. Only common men had eyes of blue, the colour of the sky-reflecting sea.
Chadwick waited, his hands still groping feebly in the air, as though hopeful of finding a series of healing passes which would work by occult power. There was nothing more that he cared to say.
‘Thank you, Dr. Chadwick,’ said Michael, again. He said it flatly, without warmth.
Thank you, he thought, as he rose with difficulty to his feet, and leaned again upon his stick.
Thank you, he thought, as he passed through the door which the doctor gratefully opened for him.
Thank you, he thought, when he glanced very briefly at the receptionist, who smiled to see him depart.
He did not know who or what it was to whom he owed these muttered, bitter, and sarcastic thanks, but he offered them anyhow, because they did not seem to be in short supply. And after all, everyone was quite sincere in feeling sorry for him, quite sincere in trying to help him, and he only had himself to blame if it was in fact too late for their feelings and their actions to do him any good.
TWO
When the twilight had faded Michael turned on the reading light beside his bed. He picked up a book which he had begun to read a week before, and had quickly laid aside: a history of the Second World War. His interest in it had been awakened by the celebrations commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the war’s end, but enthusiasm had quickly waned when he found that the book contained a great deal of political commentary and very little description of the more melodramatic phases of the conflict. He did not want to read about diplomatic niceties; he wanted descriptions of the major cities of Europe and Africa laid waste by the bombers which had deluged them with fire and poison gas.
Having taken up the book he read half a page, but the paragraphs only served to remind him why he had stopped, and he threw the book back on to the bedside table with a sigh.
There was a knock at his door, and he moved his legs reflexively as though to swing them from bed to floor, so that he could answer the knock. The shock of pain reminded him that such reflexes had become anachronistic, unsuited to his present state of being. He called out an invitation instead.
He was slightly disappointed when he saw his father come in; not because he did not want to see his father – quite the reverse – but because he was curiously hurt that his father had waited for the knock to be answered. That small politeness seemed to Michael to be a symbol of the distance which had grown so quickly between them since the elder Southerne had become emortal, two years before the accident.
Thomas Southerne was a tall man, who had always been strong and handsome. He was more handsome still now that his hair was black and sleek, and his skin pale and lustrous. In a way, though, a part of his former strength seemed to be gradually draining out of him, now that he did not need to preserve his fitness by trial and exercise.
Michael knew that he had once looked very like his father – very like, that is, the common man that his father had been – but the scars inflicted by the shattered windscreen distorted his face now, just as his lame leg distorted his gait.
The older man was carrying an open bottle of wine, and two glasses. He held them up to display them; and said: ‘Good claret. I brought it from Europe. I thought you might like to share it with me.’
‘I’m not supposed to drink,’ said Michael, then added quickly: ‘One glass can hardly hurt; it’s kind of you.’
Thomas set the glasses down on the bedside table. He pushed the discarded book aside, after the briefest of glances at the title, and poured from the bottle, carefully. Then he brought up the armchair from the comer of the room, and sat down.
This was not the first time they had talked since Thomas Southerne had returned from Europe, but the man and the boy were well aware of the fact that the most important things still remained to be said.
‘How do you feel?’ asked Thomas.
‘Better, I suppose. I’ve been worse, that’s for sure.’
‘No problems coming off the painkillers?’
‘I’m not addicted, if that’s what you mean. But it does hurt, still. Sometimes
a lot.’
‘Perhaps it’s too early to do so much walking. You mustn’t drive yourself too hard. ’
‘It’s not the walking. I can bear the pain when I walk. It’s when I’m sitting still or lying down that it seems likely to drive me mad. But it’s okay. It is okay.’
There was a pause, while Thomas Southerne nodded, pensively. His brown eyes, which had once been blue, met his son’s.
‘I talked to Chadwick on the phone, ’ he said. ‘He told me that he had explained the situation fully, and that you understood, but I wondered if you were only being polite. He does find difficulty in putting things in plain English. Did you follow what he told you about the mutated controller gene?’
‘Not entirely,’ said Michael. ‘But it doesn’t really matter, does it? Understanding the technical words which describe it won’t help – words in themselves have no magic power. The simple fact is that I’m going to die, and that until I do I’ll be lame, and always fighting against the pain. I can’t change that with understanding, can I?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps you can. Understanding is a form of power, a source of courage. If you are to be saved, it will be the growth of understanding which does the trick. We learn so much more with every year which passes. We’re beginning to learn how the vagrant cytogenes do their work, and once we’ve mastered it intellectually, the chance will be there for us to devise new biotechnologies. Understanding can change things, Michael, or open the way for things to be changed. It may not happen soon, but you’re still in your teens, and you’ll have the best of medical care. We may make an emortal of you yet, and all the pain won’t have been in vain.’
‘It’s not so hard for you to discount the pain, ’ said Michael. ‘It’s not so easy for me to bear it.’
‘That’s not fair, Michael.’
Michael gulped wine from his glass, feeling suddenly close to tears, and not liking himself for that weakness. ‘Oh no!’ he complained, in an irrepressible fit of ill-temper. ‘You understand, of course. You remember what it was like to be young. You’re not yet three hundred years old, as cold as stone. Who feels no pain can feel no pity – isn’t that what they say? You’re not there yet, are you? Not yet. You can still imagine how I feel.’
Thomas sipped from his own glass, parsimoniously. ‘It isn’t true, Michael,’ he said. ‘Emortals don’t become emotionless, unless they cultivate callousness. That saw is just one more old wives’ tale, like all the rest.
‘But that’s not the point at issue, is it? I do know that you’re hurt, in more ways than one, but it really is important that you don’t give up hope, because giving up is one way to make sure that all your fears come true. I don’t say that what has happened to you isn’t horribly bad, because it is. It seems so much worse because we live in a world, now, where everyone expects to become emortal. You must remember, though, that there are many parts of the world where one person in two dies before achieving emortality, and where two emortals in three die by violence before they reach that mean three score years and ten which even common men are promised. Be glad you were born today, when there is hope, and not a hundred years ago, when you’d have had two world wars to survive, and not the slightest hope of any cure for your condition. I know how difficult it is, Michael, but … ’
‘You don’t know!’ Michael fought, with only moderate success, to control his tears.
Thomas Southerne shook his head, in dismay but not in anger. ‘I’ve been in Africa, Michael. I’ve been in the rain forest and the deserts, as well as the cities. Do you think I haven’t seen suffering enough? Do you think I haven’t seen people less fortunate even than you?’
‘No,’ said Michael, softly. ‘I suppose you have. But the Africans have made their own mess. They had emortality long before the rest of. the world, and what did they make of it? They have no one to blame for their troubles but the stupid superstitions to which they clung too long. They might have created a whole society of emortals before Rome was built, if they had only used the gift more wisely, but instead they created Ogbone, and a race of castrated ancients, and set their faces against the very possibility of progress. What did I do, to deserve the loss of the chance to live forever?’
‘You must not despise the Africans,’ said Thomas. ‘Not even the Ogbone. We owe our own emortality to what you call their stupid superstitions. If the organic material which rode to Earth inside the Adamawaran meteor had fallen among other men, what would it have brought but a series of plagues? Not just the silver death – the seed of emortality itself would only have killed men, because they would never have known what else it was they needed in order to live. It was because some Africans offered sacrifices to their gods, because certain of their holy men drank human blood, that they found the secret of eternal life. Without that, the gift was worthless, and might have destroyed mankind instead of securing such salvation from death as we enjoy.’
‘Securing salvation? Has it secured salvation? Is that the lesson we learn by understanding history, do you think? I’ve heard it said that eternal life has only been a challenge, to make us devise better ways of destroying one another. I’ve heard it said that were it not for emortality, we’d have been well content with clubs and spears, instead of devising such means of slaughter as we used in the two world wars – and the nuclear weapons we’ll use in World War Three, in the face of which all men are truly equal.’
‘If that’s true,’ Thomas pointed out, gently. ‘Then you’ve not lost so much, after all.’
‘Perhaps I haven’t. Perhaps that’s what I ought to tell myself, to keep my spirits up. Beneath the shadow of the hydrogen bomb, everyone is mortal, and no one’s pain counts for much.’
‘You can tell yourself that if you wish,’ his father said. ‘But I don’t think it’s the right way to go about it. As a means of avoiding despair, it hasn’t much to recommend it, has it? It’s just a matter of trying to see your own misfortune mirrored in the condition of the world. You’ve been brought face to face with the possibility of your own death, but that shouldn’t let you to take comfort in contemplating the holocaust. If you want to find lessons in history, I wouldn’t have thought it was hard to discover the moral that nobody ever quite knows what will happen next, and that it’s never out of order to hope. ’ Michael drained his glass, and held it out for more, though Thomas had not yet finished his own. The older man took the bottle from the table, and filled up his son’s glass.
‘I suppose you’re right,’ conceded the boy. ‘But I can’t help feeling, sometimes, that there’s a certain irony in this world crisis which we hear so much about. You’ve found, thanks to your excavations in Adamawara, that emortality was indeed a gift from outside the Earth – a kind of miracle, brought to a species which had not yet come near to the spontaneous evolution of any such privilege. But how have we always used that gift? How, for that matter, have we used all those other privileges that we have, which we presumably did evolve for ourselves – our clever brains and our keen eyes and our skilful hands? Why, we’ve used them to bring ourselves cleverly and skilfully to the point of annihilation. If the gift had a giver, how he must weep to see what has become of it!’
‘We have not yet destroyed ourselves,’ said Thomas Southerne, evenly. ‘And we have accomplished a great deal with our clever brains, our keen eyes, and our skilful hands.’
‘Of course,’ Michael mused, ‘there are those who argue that the gift was sent to us – that the Adamawaran meteor was a missile hurled, if not by God, or some idol of the Africans, then by friendly aliens whose only wish was to help us become just a little more godly ourselves. No doubt you’ve heard such speculations?’
‘I’ve heard them,’ his father agreed. ‘Put like that, they sound a little silly. But if there was no giver, still there was a gift. If there was no God, still there was a kind of miracle. Some of my colleagues still don’t believe that the Adamawaran DNA is of extraterrestrial origin – they still want to argue that there is far too much of coincidence in t
he hypothesis that DNA might independently evolve on more than one world, and too much imagination in the hypothesis that it first came to earth from elsewhere in the universe. They propose that the meteor sparked off a chain of mutations, by radiation or chemical pollution. They suggest that it stretches credulity far less to believe that it was some spontaneous doubling or recomplication of the Y chromosome itself which produced the Adamawaran chromosomids, than to believe that the DNA is alien but that it was nevertheless capable of fertile combination with human DNA.’
‘It sometimes seems to me,’ said Michael, ‘that all such explanations stretch credulity. Not just the ones which aspire to tell us how men became emortal, but those which aspire to tell us how men became men, or how that hot primeval soup gave rise to life at all. I’d rather trust a monkey with a typewriter to produce the works of Shakespeare than a single world to produce a biochemistry as complicated as ours in a few billion years.’
‘You’re not alone in that. The elder Darwin has said to me that it is clear proof of design and the hand of God; and even Charles, who worked so damnably hard to expel the deity from the scheme of things, finds the circumstance of the fusion of the alien DNA with the human Y chromosome so remarkable as to give him pause for wonder. He has exchanged letters with Svante Arrhenius, and they are now involved in earnest debate with astronomers and cosmologists about the possible extraterrestrial origin of life on Earth.’
‘But I can’t believe in paternal aliens either, ’ Michael added, contemplatively. ‘The monkey Shakespeare is a likely chap by comparison with the alien philanthropist who made us a present of emortality, wrapping it ever so carefully in an interstellar missile. He would be a convenient man to have around, of course – he might earlier have sent us the genes which gave us clever brains, too, and those which are our helpful hands. Those things were also born in Africa, if the palaeontologists are to be believed, so Africa must be the bull’s-eye which this alien artilleryman never misses.’
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