Designer Genes: Tales of the Biotech Revolution

by Brian Stableford

  In the meantime, Mister Manderley marched right up to my wrought-iron gates, shoved them open, and strode right in. For a moment I thought he might come all the way up to the tree, but he stopped by the sign I’d posted saying, DANGER: MINEFIELD. He was close enough to make himself heard. I moved a little further along the branch, clearing the foliage away so that he could get a clear sight of me—and, of course, the twin barrels of the shotgun.

  “Can’t we settle this between the two of us, Beth?” he said, posing as a reasonable man. “Do we really need this bloody circus?”

  I couldn’t remember whether he’d ever called me “Beth” before. Perhaps when he was young—but for the last thirty or forty years it had been “Miss Galton” on the rare occasions when he had had cause to address me at all.

  “It’s your circus,” I reminded him. “Your court order, your bailiff. You can get rid of it any time you want to.”

  “You must know that you can’t win,” he said. “You can’t sit up that tree forever, no matter how much food you’ve got stashed away up there. You have to sleep some time. Even if you really had sown landmines around the tree, you couldn’t save the bloody thing. Now that the destruction order’s been confirmed, the law will take it course regardless. Why not save everybody a great deal of trouble and come down?”

  “There really are mines,” I assured him. “They’re the kind that send the force of the explosion upwards, so they’ll blow the balls off anyone who comes too close, without hurting the roots of the tree at all. You’re right about my having to sleep, of course—but while I’m hidden in the crown no one will know whether I’m awake or not, will they? If anyone treads on a mine, it’ll wake me up soon enough.”

  “You do realize, I suppose,” he said, the hurt in his voice suggesting that he was somehow the injured party, “that by threatening the bailiff with that gun you’ve placed yourself in a very dangerous situation? The police are now legally entitled to shoot youwhich they could do very easily, at no risk to themselves, with a high-powered rifle that has five times the range of that antique you’re holding. If you so much as threaten to fire that thing, that’s what they’ll do.”

  “That’s what it will take,” I told him. “Until then, nobody touches the tree. Nobody.”

  He attempted, and failed, to contrive an expression of infinite sadness and compassion. “We’ve known one another a long time, Beth,” he said. “I can remember the day you first moved in—what was it, fifty-eight, fifty-nine years ago? I would have been friends with you, if you’d let me. We all felt for you, you know, when we were told about what happened. We would have given you all the help we could, if you’d only let us. We could have been friends, you and I—and even though we weren’t, we’ve always been good neighbors, haven’t we? We’ve never quarreled before. I always thought we understood one another. We’ve got things in common, when all’s said and done. I might not have understood the workings of grief when you first came to live here, but I came to understand them, didn’t I? You know that.”

  I knew why Andrew Manderley had wanted to be friends when I first came to live with Uncle Michael and Aunty Steph. He’d been sixteen then, and I’d always been pretty enough. We had nothing in common then, and hadn’t now. He wasn’t a twin, and never had been. What he meant by things in common was that he’d suffered losses of his own, albeit much later. The Manderleys were a military family; he’d lost his younger son in the Middle East, in the so-called Second Armageddon, and the older—young Andrew—in Siberia, in the one and only Ragnarok. People still called him Old Mister Manderley, not so much because he seemed old, even to the old and attitude-hardened, but because they remembered young Mister Manderley, Andrew Junior—and his brother Peter, too.

  “You don’t understand anything,” I told him. “We don’t have anything in common. You’d kill a tree to protect bricks and mortar; I’d die before I let that happen.”

  “Nobody wants you to die!” he said, with a hint of screech in his voice. “I don’t even want to kill the tree! I asked my expert whether there was any way we could shield the wall—dig a ditch on my side of the fence, amputate the roots that were causing the problem and put some kind of barrier in, but he said it would be a horrendous expense for no gain. He said the tree would die anyway—will die anyway—because it simply can’t get the water it needs to keep on growing. Even if we let it alone, it’ll be dead within fifteen or twenty years—the only difference will be that it’ll take my house with it. That house was built two hundred years ago. It’s three times as old as your precious tree. It’s my home. It was my father’s home before me and his father’s before him.”

  “So what?” I said, brutally. “It won’t be your son’s after you, will it?”

  He wasn’t lying about what his so-called expert had told him, but his so-called expert was full of crap. I knew that the tree could go on for decades, maybe even centuries, if only she were allowed to extend her roots as far as was necessary.

  “That’s cruel, Beth,” he said. I had to give him full marks for perspicacity—and patience too, given that he didn’t lose his temper. “You inherited that house from your aunt—and Michael bought it when first he moved here, from someone else who’d bought it second-hand, or maybe fifth- or tenth-hand. You don’t understand what it means to have a family home. Nobody does, these days—but I do, and that’s mine. I would have built that underground barrier fifty years ago, if I’d known then what your bloody tree was going to do. Your tree’s the invader, you know, not my house. My house is where it’s always been—it never sent out special forces to conduct an undeclared war on a friendly neighbor. Your tree is a creature of the era of plague wars and ecological attrition, but my house is a product of honest and honorable times, and if one of them has to go it will not be my house—even if I have to shoot you down from that branch myself.”

  “You won’t have to do that,” I assured him. “You’re the son of a brigadier, grandson of a colonel-in-chief. People like you can always order others to do their dirty work. Even chief inspectors of police do what you say.”

  “You can’t win, Beth,” he said, as if repeating the magic spell might eventually make it work. “One thing a military man knows is that when you can’t win, you might as well give in gracefully.” Either he’d never studied military history or he took me for a perfect fool.

  “If you want to kill the tree,” I told him, “You have to kill me first.”

  For a moment, I thought that he was going to step past the warning notice, intent on marching all the way to the trunk and climbing up to pull me down, but he didn’t. He knew the value of a tactical retreat. Maybe that was why he was the last of his line, having outlasted both his potential heirs.

  I was glad to see him go, not just because he was gone but because I really didn’t want to see him blown to Hell and back by one of the illegal mines that I really had planted all around the tree.

  * * * *

  In the beginning, nobody was sure whether Kathy and I were identical twins or merely fraternal twins. The merely is mine, of course—Mother and Father wouldn’t have minded one way or the other. Mother told us, when we were old enough to listen, that we hadn’t been perfectly alike when we were born.

  Later, Doctor Burden explained to us that its quite common for genetically-identical twins to diversify while still in the womb. Once fertilized ovum has separated, its two daughters are subject to all manner of random factors, which can assure one twin a larger share of the womb’s resources. It often happens, in fact, that one twin outstrips the other so quickly and so extremely that she grows around her sister, who stops developing altogether. Sometimes, the twin enclosed in her sister’s body can start to grow again, many years later, becoming a fetus in fetu. Fortunately, Kathy and I weren’t as ill-matched as that.

  Of the two of us, it was Kathy who was born the larger, the stronger, the fitter—but I had caught up fairly rapidly. Even when things had evened out, though, it wasn’t obvious that we were
n’t mere fraternals. There were other differences—differences of what Dr. Burden called “conformation.”

  It wasn’t until the avid researchers had examined our DNA that they got what they wanted: the final confirmation that we were, indeed, genetically identical. Identicals are rarer than fraternals; it’s the availability of identicals that determines experimental sample size. Fraternals get tested, of course, examined just as relentlessly as identicals, but only identicals fascinate and delight the world. Doctor Burden and his more careful fellows could not have loved us half so well—or even a tenth—had we been mere fraternals.

  Kathy and I, of course, were slightly disappointed to find that we weren’t quite as identical as our genetic make-up entitled us to be. Given that we had elected to be overlapping twins, always ready and willing to trade names and places, the fact that very observant people might be able to tell us apart seemed to us to be a handicap, and a betrayal of all that our genetic identicality had promised. We complained about it, to our one and only confidante.

  “People read too much into the notion of identical twins,” Doctor Burden told us, sadly—knowing, I now presume, how guilty he was of exactly that sin. “They pay far more attention to the similarities than the differences, but identical twins always have differences, and not just because of the differing effects of their environment.”

  “According to the Pope,” we told him, “clones have only one soul. We’re identical twins, so we’re a clone. We only have one soul, so we ought to be identical in every way.”

  “The Pope’s not a geneticist,” Doctor Burden informed us, although we already understood that. “The idea that all members of a clone are bound to be absolutely identical is rather silly. Think of it this way: every human body is a clone, every cell of which has exactly the same genes as every other—but a liver cell isn’t like a nerve-cell, and a skin-cell isn’t like a blood-cell. There are thousands of different kinds of cells, and what makes them different isn’t having different sets of genes—it’s having different subsets of genes switched on and switched off. You’re twins and I’m not related to you, but your liver cells and my liver cells are much more similar to one another than your liver cells and your brain cells.”

  “But we both have liver cells and brain cells in exactly the same places,” we pointed out. “We could still look exactly alike, and we should. Everything should switch on and off in exactly the same way—we’re twins, after all.”

  “But they don’t,” he told us, cruelly. “Your genes do control the underlying switching process, but all kinds of other factors can get in the way—just like the factors which determined that Kathy was born slightly bigger than Beth. That difference diminished with time, but others increase. Your brains and livers aren’t exactly alike, and nor are your faces. They could be a lot more different than they are—and I mean a lot more. The reason that humans look so very different from whales and ostriches has far less to do with the sets of genes we possess than with the way those genes are switched on and off as the embryos of humans, whales, and ostriches grow. It’s theoretically possible—conceivable, at any rate—that two embryos could have exactly the same DNA in their cells, and thus be identical twins, and yet one might develop into a whale and the other into an ostrich, just because of different switching sequences. So it’s not entirely surprising that you don’t look exactly alike. The differences will probably become more noticeable as you get older. At present, only your mother and father and a few of us here at the Institute can tell you apart, but by the time you’re my age, anyone who knows you well will probably be able to do it—if they can be bothered to stop looking for the similarities instead of the differences.”

  He was right, of course. We became very adept at playing to people’s expectations—at cultivating identical mannerisms, adopting identical speech-patterns—but we always knew that the extent to which we shared the same soul was limited. Everyone preferred to see the similarities, but we knew how much difference there was between us, and we were sensitive to every tiny increase in every dimension of difference. By the time we were thirty or forty, had Kathy lived, anybody and everybody would have been able to tell us apart, if they’d taken the trouble to pay proper attention.

  We overlapped, but we were not one.

  When Kathy’s heart stopped, mine carried on beating. no matter how hard I willed it to cease—and it took me no longer to give up willing it than it took poor Kathy to die.

  By the time I moved into the house next door to Andrew Manderley’s precious family home, to live with Uncle Michael and Aunty Steph—who were Galtons, just as I was—I no longer wanted to die. I didn’t want to be friends, with Andrew Manderley or anyone else, but I accepted that I would live, at least for a while. I even cherished the hope that I could repair the situation, if only I were clever enough. I thought that what had been done to me might yet be undone, that what had been taken away from me might yet be won back.

  Even the cleverest of children can be a fool.

  * * * *

  Unfortunately, I hadn’t anticipated the cherry-picker. Somehow, fool that I was, I had forgotten to figure that particular possibility into my half-baked plans. I had stupidly assumed that the mines would make it impossible for anyone to extract me from the crown of the tree, even though I couldn’t stay awake forever, without going to an enormous amount of trouble. Once the cherry-picker had been maneuvered into position by the big yellow lorry, however, I had to reconstruct the likely scenarios in my imagination.

  It didn’t take me long to figure that the cherry-picker was likely to blow my plan sky-high. I was still trying to work my way around that thought when the plot moved on—their plot, not mine.

  When the rusty platform first swung over the garden wall and moved horizontally towards my lofty position I withdrew into the crown of the tree, hiding myself as best I could within its recently-renewed foliage. If only Old Mister Manderley had waited until May or June, I would have been much better able to conceal myself. On the other hand, if global warming hadn’t made such a mess of the seasons, I might have seemed perfectly ridiculous amid branches that were virtually bare.

  I assumed at first that the flak-jacketed man standing on the platform, clinging tight to the guard-rail, was a policeman or a soldier. Seeing that he had no gun—although there was no shortage of high-powered rifles behind Andrew Manderley’s garden wall—I took him for a trained negotiator, come to make a final plea followed by a final threat. Even when I saw his face, and saw how old he seemed to be—even by today’s elastic standards—I didn’t recognize him. After all, I hadn’t seen him for nearly sixty years.

  When Kathy died, of course, all the testing had stopped. Once I was alone, I ceased to be of any real value as an experimental subject. No longer part of a fascinating pair, I lost the power to fascinate and delight the world. I lost my coterie of devoted admirers: the men whose loving interest had illuminated my closely-shared life.

  “Hello, Beth,” he said, while I still didn’t know him. “They asked me to talk to you. They think that you’re less likely to shoot me than any of your neighbors. I hope they’re right. They also think that I might be able to figure out why you’re doing this. I hope they’re right about that too.”

  In the end, I guessed. His face, no longer handsome or loving, had become so unfamiliar that he might have been anyone at all, but I guessed.

  “Hello, Doctor Burden,” I said. “How’s life among the clones? Still testing away?” I knew that he wasn’t. The bottom had fallen out of that kind of research twenty-five or thirty years before. He knew that I knew, so he didn’t bother to answer.

  “Mister Manderley’s root man showed me the samples he dug out of the house’s foundations,” he said, instead. “He never knew what to look for, of course, so he never had the slightest idea what he was looking at. He wasn’t coincidence-spotting. I never forgot you, you know—either of you. I’ve always followed your career.”

  “Didn’t you follow the careers o
f all your ex-subjects?” I asked him. “Professional curiosity would demand no less, I would imagine.”

  “Not all of them,” he said. “In fact, you could say that you were the only one.”

  He didn’t mean that I was the only person; he meant that I was the only one who was no longer half of a pair. He hadn’t entirely lost his talent to amuse.

  “If you know,” I said, “then you can explain to them that I won’t give up.”

  “I’ve told them what I know,” he told me. “They don’t understand. Nor do I. I think I understand the significance of the tree, but it still doesn’t make sense to me. I kept good records you know—even of the casual conversations we had. You were always under observation, Beth. We were interested in everything. I’ve still got the tape of my little lecture on the potential differentiation of clones—the one about the way that merely switching different genes on and off could make the difference between a whale and an ostrich.”

  “It was absolute balls, and you knew it,” I said, resentfully. “If we’d been any older than twelve, you’d never have used such a lunatic oversimplification. I hadn’t been in the cloning business for six months before I figured out the world of difference there was between growing tissue-cultures the size of houses and redesigning whole organisms.”

  “I was trying to make a point,” he said, apologetically. “I was trying to tell you that you didn’t have to regard yourselves as two parts of a single individual. I was trying to show you the way to free yourselves from everybody’s expectations, including mine. Especially mine.”

  “Well, it wasn’t necessary,” I informed him, not making the slightest attempt to shield my bitterness. “Some of us find freedom, others have freedom thrust upon us. At first, I thought that the real problem was the other way around—not how to make things more different but how to make them more the same. Your little homily about factors intruding on the switching process seemed to be identifying an enemy, then—a hurdle to be overcome. By the time the guys with the lucrative patents had figured out how to clone spare organs for transplantation and cosmetic rejuvenation, I’d already counted all the reasons why I couldn’t clone myself a new twin a thousand times over. If I could have done it, I would have done it properly. If I could have produced another Kathy, I would have done exactly that, age-difference or no age-difference—but it’s not as simple as that, is it?”