Designer Genes: Tales of the Biotech Revolution

by Brian Stableford

  The dormice were a trifle too sweet for my taste and the olives too oily, but I did like the little toroidal sausages—although I might have liked them even better if they hadn’t been wrapped around black figs. Tamara loved all of it, to the extent that she ate at least twice as much as me. I didn’t mind. It was her treat, and it’s not every day that a woman reaches her twenty-fifth birthday and receives her fourth proposal of marriage. I had wondered whether it was worth quipping that it was a lot better than receiving her twenty-fifth proposal on her fourth birthday, but I’d abandoned the plan because she would only have looked at me as if I were mad. “It’s a joke,” I would have said, the way I always did. “Is it?” she would have replied, implying that if there were such a thing as a joking test I would probably have failed it nearly as often as I’d failed my driving test.

  The possibility of being out-eaten didn’t arise again, of course, because the other courses were served in carefully measured individual portions on separate plates. The possibility of being out-drunk remained—the decanters containing the first white wine were brought out in advance of the second course—but Tamara was sufficiently old-fashioned to think that it was a gentleman’s duty to pour, so I was confident that I could share it out with as much exactitude as my slightly unsteady hand could contrive. I was so nervous that I would have liked an extra glass to settle me down, but I also wanted to make sure that Tamara was as mellow as possible by the time the big moment arrived, so scrupulous even-handedness seemed politic as well as polite.

  “Happy, darling?” I asked, as we paused with our glasses to savor the bouquet of the wine.

  “Ecstatic,” she assured me. She closed her eyes for a while, saying: “I’m trying to make the most of the pleasures of anticipation, so that they’ll be redoubled by those of satiation.”

  “Me too,” I assured her, although I was thinking about the ring in my pocket rather than the food.

  * * * *

  The second course was what I’d normally have thought of as a starter, although the hors d’oeuvres had been far too substantial to qualify as a mere tease. It looked like an unusually coherent terrine, but there was no trace of token green stuff except for a light sprinkle of chopped herbs. The central blob was surrounded by a ring of eggs smaller than a quail’s and the whole thing was bedded on what looked like unleavened bread.

  According to the directory the blob was compounded from the “vulva” and “sumen” of a virgin sow—some kind of fancy pork, I deduced. The herbal seasoning was allegedly laserpitium, although a dutiful footnote pointed out that because no one now knew what plant the laserpitium of the ancients had been, the name had been considered free for application to an entirely new herb devised by Jerome’s geneticists.

  All in all, it didn’t taste too bad. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I liked it, but it was on the sunny side of tolerable.

  “Brilliant,” Tamara said, as she finished. “Magical, even. I thought it would just be the taste, but it isn’t, is it? You can actually feel the food settling into your stomach, can’t you? It’s as if this is what our alimentary systems have been crying out for ever since the first cooking fires were lit.”

  Tamara had strong feelings about the folly of the anti-GM brigade. “Everything we now think of as human nature is the product of the primal biotechnologies,” she was fond of saying. “Anyone who thinks that biotechnology is an offence against nature is delusional as well as stupid.” The primal biotechnologies, in the jargon of her trade, were cooking and clothing. Both innovations, in Tamara’s firmly-held but not-quite-conventional view, had been introduced by women; according to her, the entire panoply of “masculine hardware”—including all the stone, ceramic, and metal tools in whose evolution old-fashioned male archaeologists were wont to trace the progress of preliterate societies—had been nothing more than a series of technical tricks developed to serve the imperatives of the primal biotechnologies.

  Tamara further contended—and how could a mere technical trickster like me disagree with an ace biotechnologist?—that the entire history of civilization had followed the same pattern. Everything men had ever made or done had been devised to serve the insatiable demands of the “feminine imperative”—a valiant but inadequate tribute to the twin maternal devices that had broken nature’s cruel yoke and set humankind on the road of intellect and artistry. My colleague and ex-friend Steve Semple had once opined that that was exactly the kind of thing a mad domineering bitch might be expected to say to a lovesick puppy, but he was just jealous.

  I had once—and only once—made the mistake of pointing out to Tamara that in the modern world the “primal biotechnologies” seemed to have been hijacked by men, who still supplied the great majority of the twenty-first century’s finest chefs and couturiers in spite of the victories of late twentieth-century feminism. “The greatest ambition of the male of the species has always been to cultivate as much effeminacy as testosterone will permit,” she informed me. “How many great chefs and couturiers are straight, do you think? The trouble is that those unlucky souls who can’t measure up to mature standards of effeminacy tend to express their defensive masculinity in a frank refusal to learn to cook or dress themselves properly.”

  There was none of that at Trimalchio’s, of course. By that time I knew exactly which topics of conversation were safe and comfortable, and I was able to steer the chat in all the right directions. Tamara was happy that night, and when she was happy she was breathtakingly beautiful. People like Steve were incapable of understanding a woman like her, and resentment transformed their lust into hostility. I, on the other hand, loved her as honestly and as absolutely as anyone could. If she were ever going to marry anyone, I thought as I gulped my first mouthful of the red wine, it would definitely be me—and for all her affectations of independence, she needed love and stability just as much as anyone else.

  * * * *

  Ever since I had first glanced at Jerome’s directory of courses I had known that the third would be the most substantial challenge to my constitution. There is not a dessert in the world that can intimidate me, but when it comes to entrées I candidly admit that I am what Tamara was wont to call “a Stone Age meat and two veg man.” I love the roast beef, potatoes, and carrots my mother used to make, with or without the Yorkshire pudding, and I see no need to apologize for the fact.

  I had been hoping all week that I might strike lucky and catch Jerome in a traditional mood, taking what comfort I could from the knowledge that my wishes were likely to be at least partially granted. Jerome was well-known as a great fan of the potato. He’d been waxing lyrical on its virtues for ten years, and had presumably been doing so even before he got heavily into GM cuisine. The so-called “degradation of the potato” had always been the favorite object of his particular version of the fiery anger that is every great chef’s prerogative and duty. When Columbus first reached the Americas, he told the world, there were six hundred different species of potato distributed from the heights of the Andes to the plains of Patagonia, and all but a handful had been driven to extinction by chip-addicted dullards. One of the key projects he had set his scientific collaborators was to recover and then to surpass the natural variability of the potato—so it’s hardly surprising that the main course on that epoch-making evening was accompanied by no less than three different kinds of potato, one served mashed, one boiled, and one sautéed.

  Having been granted that, how could I then complain about the fact that they were accompanying tentacles of young giant squid stuffed with mutton-brains?

  I found, once I’d steeled myself to try it, that the flesh of young giant squid wasn’t nearly as rubbery as the kind of calamari my mother used to foist on me when she wasn’t in a roast beef mood. The engineers modifying squid species were still engaged in a headlong dash to produce the biggest living organism ever, so the culinary possibilities of the species had been virtually relegated to the economically-important but crudely utilitarian realms of pet food production. J
erome was one of the first people to figure out that the tender meat of very young individuals had possibilities undreamed of by geneticists fixated on issues of size, and I had to admit that he had a point.

  As it turned out, I had slightly more difficulty with the stuffing. My maternal grandmother had an aunt who’d died of the same strain of CJD that was implicated in the infamous beef ban of the 1990s and Gran was always insistent—in spite of all the scientific evidence that later came to light proving that the cattle had caught it from us, not the other way around—that it had been scrapie-infected sheep that had been the source of the trouble. According to her, mutton-brains were just about the most dangerous foodstuff in the world. “No good will come of it!” she’d cried, when the proven effectiveness of GM-mutton-brains as an intelligence-enhancer in infants had delivered the first effective left hook to the jutting chin of anti-GM prejudice. Alas, her protests hadn’t prevented Mum from feeding it to me throughout my teens, as if quantity might somehow make up for the fact that she’d missed the window of real opportunity by a good ten years.

  At the end of the day, though, the stuffing was something I could eat, and I tucked the lot away without bothering to enquire too carefully as to the contents of the sauce, which were conveniently disguised by esoteric French and Latin in the directory. When I washed the last mouthful down with the last of the red wine I felt positively triumphant—as if my success in dealing with the food were an infallible omen of success in the evening’s greater enterprise.

  “Wasn’t that simply extraordinary?” I said to Tamara.

  “Marvelous,” she confirmed.

  “I suppose we ought to feel slightly guilty about snatching good mutton-brain out of the mouths of the tinies who derive such benefit from it,” I said, “but I can’t. I can feel it doing me good, even though I’m way too old.”

  “You’re right,” she said. It wasn’t a phrase that passed her lovely lips very often, so I was delighted to hear it. “The wine sets it off perfectly, don’t you think? To think that our parents used to value wine for its age! Do you think there’ll ever come a time again when this year’s vintage isn’t the finest ever?”

  “My Mum and Dad used to drink that Beaujolais nouveau stuff,” I remembered.

  “Vile red ink!” she retorted. “It might have helped in some small way to pioneer the change of attitude necessary to introduce GM wine, but no true connoisseur would have touched it. This is entirely different. Entirely!”

  “Oh, absolutely,” I said, as the third decanter was deposited in the middle of the table. “Who knew what true intoxication was in those days? Who understood the real subtleties of psychotropic artistry?”

  “We owe Jerome and his disciples a tremendous debt,” she confirmed. “When I think about those demonstrators outside—the antis, I mean, not his supporters—it makes me want to cry. They’re dogmatists of the worst stripe, incapable of seeing sense—the stuff of which witch-hunters and inquisitors are made. Did you see that item on last night’s ‘Sky News’ about the chef in New York who was shot?”

  “Yes I did,” I confirmed. “Yet another martyr to the cause of progress. There’s always a mindless mob, isn’t there? It’s as if the lunatics just moved two doors down the road on the day the last abortion clinic closed. It’s not as if there isn’t an effective system of monitoring and control, is it?”

  That was a slight mistake. I should have known better than to use the word “effective.”

  “Well, yes it is, actually,” Tamara snapped. “We got saddled with far too many bad laws in the first decade of the new millennium, and far to many of them are still on the statute book. There’s far too much insistence on formulaic testing. That obsolete monitoring system has become a millstone around the neck of the nation’s scientists—bioscientists, I mean. You specialists in inorganic nanotech don’t know how lucky you are not to have to deal with all that shit.”

  Mercifully, the arrival of the dessert cut the lecture short.

  * * * *

  I had been looking forward to what I still insisted, if only privately, of thinking of as “pudding.” The dessert on offer on that fateful night at Trimalchio’s was one of those ingenious dishes that take advantage of the fact that ice-crystals are poor absorbers of microwave radiation and poor conductors of heat. This allows ingenious ice-cream sculptures to contain nested compotes of fruit heated to a temperature that can easily burn the mouth of an unwary diner. Needless to say, there were no such fools present at Trimalchio’s that evening. We all knew that the art of eating such concoctions was all in the timing. Even Tamara knew how to manage the various components of the dessert as she dissected its complex architecture, savoring its gradual dissolution as well as its medley of tastes.

  It is, I suppose, one of the great ironies of GM cuisine that it remains subject to the basic elements of the sense of taste. Although the gastronomic employment of saltiness and bitterness has always been relatively subtle, there is a certain inevitable crudity about sweetness. The only natural substance on which genetic engineers have not yet managed to improve is sucrose, and there is thus a sense in which the dessert is the most “primitive” part of any modern meal. In my personal opinion, however, the miracles that the engineers have wrought in cultured animal-flesh are outweighed by those applied to soft fruits. I would gladly have swallowed a few garlic-laden snails or risked the effects of a few deep-fried locusts in order to have the privilege of having Jerome’s raspberries and blaeberries melt on my tongue.

  The dessert wine was equally fine. Even Tamara said so, although if it had been something I’d brought home from the hypermarket the merest glance would have been enough to convince her that it was too syrupy. It’s slightly absurd, now that slimness is a straightforward matter of somatic management, that so many willowy women still profess to dislike the taste of sugar, but in Tamara’s case the idiosyncrasy was authentic. She was never one to follow fashion blindly.

  “The perfect end to a perfect meal,” was Tamara’s judgment, as she laid her spoon aside for the final time.

  “The evening’s not over yet,” I told her—but she seemed to have no suspicion of my intended meaning. She might even have made some remark about not having forgotten the coffee had it not been for the fact that Jerome chose that moment to make his entrance into the dining-room.

  I had no inkling at first that anything was wrong. Reports I had read in the newspapers had said that the great man often came into the dining-room when his own work was concluded, in order to receive the grateful thanks of his clients. Routine or not, though, every eye in the place was upon him from the moment he stepped into view. When he raised his arms slightly to ask for silence, all conversation was instantly hushed.

  “My friends,” he said, in a tone whose evenness can only have been maintained with the utmost effort and dignity, “I fear that I have some bad news for you. It seems that Trimalchio’s will be closing its doors tonight, never to reopen.”

  This statement was greeted with a collective gasp of astonished horror, but no one said a word. We simply waited for Jerome to continue.

  “I have been informed that officers from New Scotland Yard are on their way to arrest me even as we speak,” he told us. “It seems that a man I trusted—a sous-chef who has long been one of my most trusted confidants—has provided the police with an extensive dossier on my recent activities, including an itemized list of ingredients that I have used in my kitchens despite their lack of a certification of safety from the Ministry of Food Technology. I must confess that I have never made more than tenuous efforts to conceal the fact that I have used technically-illicit materials whenever I felt that my recipes required them. Those of you who know my methods well will know that I have never served anything to my customers—my guests, as I have always thought of them—whose effects I have not tested to the full on my own digestive system. I am, and always will be, perfectly confident that my judgment of a foodstuff’s value and safety is worth infinitely more than any MFT
certificate, but the fact remains that I have broken the law and that the evidence my former disciple has given to New Scotland Yard will ensure that I am held to account for my transgressions.”

  A few cries of “Shame!” were heard at this point, but Jerome raised his hand again to silence them.

  “It is, of course, highly unlikely that I shall be required to serve a prison sentence,” he continued, “and I have more than enough money to pay any reasonable fine, but you will all understand that the matter of my punishment is not so simple. The law, as it presently stands, will require that I be banned for life from owning or working in a restaurant, or from any significant involvement in commercial catering. In short, ladies and gentleman, the result of my inevitable conviction will be a virtual death sentence. This body will continue to live, but its soul and vocation will be extinguished. After tonight, Jerome will be no more. The meal you have just eaten is the last masterpiece I shall ever create.

  “In a few minutes I will pass among you, as has often been my pleasure, to shake you all by the hand and thank you for coming here tonight. I know that each and every one of you, whether you are numbered among my dearest friends and most loyal customers or whether you are visiting Trimalchio’s for the very first time, will be as sorry to hear this news as I am, but I beg you to be brave, and not to make a sad occasion sadder by weeping. I would like to be able to treasure the memory of these last few moments of my life as Jerome, and I hope that you can help me to do that. I hope, too, that you will take away memories of your own that you will always treasure; we are, after all, true collaborators in the great enterprise—may I say the great crusade?—that has been Trimalchio’s. If you will indulge me, I should like to say a few final words about my mission before the police arrive.”