by Tom Holt
Mental stuff not too difficult, can program human brain like computer, even get it to do long division and pick nose simultaneously if you take care and use a UNIX shell. Physical aspect is longer term, very hands-on. I had to arrange for someone to be born who exactly resembled daughter’s late lamented popsicle in all material respects, down to shoe size and chin dimple.
Took me nine hundred years, during which time I introduced 870,328 men to their future wives, encouraged 269,416 happily married women to run off with dimple-chinned milkmen, spent multiple eternities (or. seemed like, at time) in low taverns and hairdressing salons having hearts poured out all over; invented science of genetics, natch; also invented science of mathematics, since back when all this started, limit of mathematical knowledge was eight-nine-ten-lots. Been busy bunny, all things considered, and gratitude? Should cocoa.
Anyhow, come end of sixteenth century, all done and dusted, perfect replica of dear-departed born in Cheshire, England. Mental programming now required. Largely piece of cake, since a twenty-year-old man is hardly a complex organism, hasn’t had time to develop much complexity, besides which, whole personality so thoroughly marinaded in hormones, hardly any room left for the angst. Should point out that at this stage, I’d been working non-stop for nine centuries while daughter had mostly contributed by way of helpful advice and other comments, so felt it was about time I handed over day-to-day management of project and had a rest. This, in retrospect, a bloody silly mistake, but what can you do?
Daughter proceeded to download relevant personality
data from boot-up disk, saw to it that subject enjoyed/suffered all relevant experiences, was duly attached to pet dog when child, had suitable crush on chambermaid when fourteen, not exactly difficult. Only problem was that, in order to reproduce exactly circumstances of original falling-in-love, necessary that she should become appropriate mortal. No problem being born — something any bloody fool can do — but somewhat careless about researching background and cover story, failed to notice salient points about prevailing culture of day — including rising tide of religious fervour. (Admittedly hard to deal with when you’ re immortal yourself; compare old Chinese proverb about fish not being aware of water. Actually, not proverb, made it up myself, regrettably before concept of copyright properly understood.)
So: daughter was born as daughter of minor nobility, eminently suitable match for subject, families were close neighbours and keen to do major real-estate deal with marriage as pretext. Daughter grew up; but, as mentioned, careless. Remember, age of ignorance and superstition; daughter’s scientific activities related to project mistaken by dumb psycho contemporaries for witchcraft. Situation not helped by daughter’s rather quick temper and residual supernatural abilities — can’t actually turn person into frog, but can make person think is frog, make everybody else in village think same, to all intents and purposes is frog, see above under duck principle. When first wave of witchfinder-general’s officers eventually found in pond trying to swallow flies, second wave altered strategy, struck in middle of night, sack over head, no messing.
Thing about immortality is: only ever been two immortals in history, namely her and me, so a rather limited pool from which to draw information. In early seventeenth century, no reason to suppose that being burned at stake in any way hazardous to health and wellbeing, as hadn’t previously happened. Database rapidly updated in light of findings but, by then, rather too late.
Once I’d got over my general feelings of annoyance and dissatisfaction at this turn of events, decided it wasn’t any good crying over spilled milk (another one of mine, by the way: had Berne Convention been around in thirteenth century, would now be richer than Stephen King) and set about finding a way to put things straight. Took a while, but had already gained wide knowledge of most sciences by inventing them, so knew that it was theoretically possible to reconstruct entire human being from small leftover piece, just needed time to figure out the details. Also fully aware that first thing reconstituted daughter would ask me about was whereabouts of heartthrob; wouldn’t do at all if I were to answer, terribly sorry but he died of old age in 1672; would inevitably lead to more tears and door-bangings, and after a while that kind of thing gets on your nerves. So, twofold problem to be addressed. Develop science to the point where cloning is possible, and see to it that another identical version of sweetheart is ready and waiting to roll as soon as she hops out of the tank...
‘Just a minute,’ David interrupted. ‘All this is really fascinating, and if any of it’s true that’d be really amazing, but what’s it got to do with me? And why am I being accused of murder? And who are all these brothers of yours?’
The Chief Inspector closed his eyes, making an effort not to give in to irritation. ‘I bet the first thing you do when you buy a detective story is read the ending. Am I right?’
‘I don’t read detective stories.’
The Chief Inspector shrugged. ‘I forgive you,’ he said. ‘That’s one of the perks of being a supreme being, you can forgive people and they actually feel a whole lot better afterwards. Where was I, before you started this red-herringfest?’
‘Answer the question.’
This time, the Chief Inspector smiled broadly and benignly, putting David in mind of a pope who, kneeling down to kiss the airport tarmac, finds a ten-pound note. ‘You have come on in the last day or so, haven’t you?’ he said. ‘When I met you in that pub after the auction—’
‘You?’
‘—You wouldn’t have said boo to the proverbial goose. Now, though—’ a faint flush of pride tinged the edges of his smile ‘—now you’d probably say boo to several geese, if only by e-mail. Of course, you have me to thank for that, but I won’t be holding my breath. I try, I really do, and what thanks do I get?’
David frowned. ‘Carry on with the story,’ he said.
‘Maybe you could give me some sort of signal when you get to the mostly true part; lift a finger or waggle your ears, something like that.’
Sticks and stones (said the Chief Inspector). Another one of mine, as you may have guessed, though as it happens I was misquoted. What I really said was, ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but I have three psychotic brothers who know where you live.’ Ah, well.
There I was, with this problem. Daughter to clone, daughter’s honey-muffin to genetically engineer; and to make matters just that tiny bit worse, I’d somehow managed to attract the attention of the Ethics Committee.
Now, I know about you young people. To you, Ethics is a part of East Anglia where the men wear white socks with business suits. To me, as a Supreme Being, it’s a painfully real fact of life. It may also have struck you as odd that a being as supreme as I’m cracking on to be should waste time and energy on this incredibly subtle genetic manipulation stuff, when surely all I have to do is stretch forth my hand and say the word. Ain’t like that. Got the Ethics Committee to think of.
Of course, there isn’t really a committee, in the sense of a dozen old farts sitting round a table criticising the chairman. It’s more a sort of tendency. Give you an example. You know that if you’re packing for a holiday in the sun, you can bet your life that a suitcase full of nothing but shorts and sleeveless shirts will get you a fortnight of monsoons, whereas throwing in woolly jumpers and a mac guarantees that you’ll be frying eggs on your forehead. That’s a tendency. Here’s a better one: everybody else can park on a double yellow all week and get away with it; you leave a square inch of tyre pressing on yellow paint while you dart across the road for a pint of milk, it’s a stone-cold certainty that when you get back, you’ll be just in time to see your car getting towed away to the pound.
That’s my kind of tendency. There are things I’m allowed to do and things I’m not. Oh sure, I can do the things I’m not allowed to, but the tendency always gets me. Like, if I were to raise someone from the dead, it’s better than evens that as soon as he’s out of the ground he’ll trip over his own headston
e and break his neck. If
I stop a famine, nine months later the people I saved will bring in a record harvest and die of cholesterol poisoning. It’s just tendencies, but everybody needs somebody to hate very much indeed, so I personify them as the Ethics Committee. Simple things, simple minds. I have no illusions about myself.
Anyway, back to story. Realised that trying to put right daughter’s love life was ethical no-no, otherwise wouldn’t have gone down pan with such sardonic precision. Therefore, figured out that couldn’t act directly to get daughter back; could invent cloning technology, yes, but actual initiative to put bit of hair in tank of green glop couldn’t come from me, had to come from someone else. Had to come from you.
‘Course, going back four hundred years, no such thing as you then. But since did not exist, was necessary to invent. So did.
‘Are you telling me you programmed me?’ David yelled.
‘Hole in one,’ the Chief Inspector replied. ‘Same way as daughter’s replacement sugar-pop. Fourteen generations of your family, lovingly hand-picked and hand-nurtured, shepherded through the maze of history, to produce a young man who’d fall in love with a painting and have the means, the will and the all-enveloping dopiness to clone a copy of the girl in the picture and bring my daughter back to life. You have no idea how difficult it was; no offence, but idiots like you are so complex, so rare, so unique in their multifaceted inscrutability that only a total genius like myself could possibly have managed to pull it off — and there were times when it was touch and go, even then. Your great-great-grandmother, for instance. And your great-uncle Bill’s friend Wesley. Nearly brought the whole magnificent venture crashing to the ground.
‘But I did it, just me, sure as God made little green apples (and that was a dirty trick; but no matter). Once again, I can feel the staggering force generated by the vacuum where your gratitude ought to be, but I won’t say anything. Not a word about serpents’ teeth or anything like that. We’ll just let the subject drop and say no more about it.
‘Oh, I suppose I’d better clear up the loose ends. For the record, I’m an only child; the various people you’ve met who look a bit like me aren’t my brothers, except in a very general sense. Mostly they’re toenail-clippings; Honest John was an accident, when I sneezed into the goo-boiler. Well, had to test cloning process, make sure debugged and up to speed. There’s another thirty-two of us you haven’t met yet, and of course still have scissors and full set of toenails. Expect tendency will find way to dispose of them all sooner or later, but what hell.’
David tried to get up, but it was one of those really deep, expensive chairs that won’t let go of you until it’s good and ready. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘but what about the police, and this murder business? Come to that, what about that spaceship?’
‘Ah yes,’ said the Chief Inspector, looking away. ‘Obvious problem with you is, what to do with you after you’ve done your job? Lesson learned from previous debacle, importance of security and discretion. Can’t really have you running about all over the place saying you’ve been cloning girls; probably nobody would believe you, but can’t take risk, not since Dolly the Sheep. Could kill you, of course, but don’t really want to, somewhat churlish way of carrying on, and some of us understand the meaning of gratitude, even if others don’t. So, plan B, make sure that nobody in their right minds will ever believe anything you say ever again. Turn you into Most Wanted, then have you abducted by aliens. You tell anybody about that, your credibility rating zapped for good, scarcely better than Jeffrey Archer’s. Elegant solution, yes?’
‘Bastard.’
‘You see?’ the Chief Inspector sighed. ‘Just like I said. To you, grateful is just a unit for measuring coal. Just think: if it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t even exist. Oh, there might conceivably be some guy running around calling himself David Perkins, who just happened to have the same parents as you do. But he wouldn’t be you; he wouldn’t have your lucrative talent for computers, your gentle and compassionate soul, your magnificent collection of personality defects and social disabilities. And of course, he’d never have experienced the pure, unsullied, perfect love you feel for my daughter. As I said a while back and never saw a penny in royalties for, it’s better to have loved and lost—’
‘Bullshit,’ David replied. ‘What you’ve done is—’ He made himself calm down. ‘What you’ve said you’ve done,’ he went on, ‘is obviously not the mostly true part of the story, because for one thing I don’t believe it’s possible, and for another, nobody could be that evil. You’re just some nutcase who’s latched on to me and decided to play mind games.’
‘Perfect,’ said the Chief Inspector. ‘Much better. Now even you don’t believe it, which reduces the security risk to nil. I think we can safely say job done and move on. Thanks so much for your help, have a nice life. I’ll miss you, of course, but that’s all part of being a genetic manipulator. One day you know they’ll fly the nest, and—’
‘Shut up,’ David said. ‘Just suppose I did believe it, not that I do. The one thing I can’t put down to you playing silly buggers with my mind is, how does my cousin Alex fit into all this? He’s a real person — all right, I can’t stand the smug little jerk, but I’ve known him all my life, so you can’t have made him up; but she—’ he pointed without looking round ‘—she had lunch with him at my flat, and then they went swanning off together. So how does—?’
A puzzled frown crossed the Chief Inspector’s face. ‘You mean to say you haven’t figured that out? Sorry, I assumed you’d have tumbled to that one straight away. He’s him, or at least Him Mark 2 — I’d done all the groundwork back in the 1 580s, so all I had to do was arrange for a throwback four hundred years later. Don’t you get it? He’s Philippa’s boyfriend.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
It’ll be fine, they’d told him. We’ll look after you, don’t you worry; everything’s been taken care of. Just hang on here for an hour or so, and someone’ll be along to pick you up.
It was starting to get dark. David was still sitting where they’d left him, in the carnivorous armchair. As far as he could tell he was alone in the house: there was nobody to stop him getting up or leaving or doing whatever the hell he wanted to do. But what he wanted to do was sit in the chair, so that’s what he did.
We’ve arranged a whole new life for you, they said, in British Columbia. New name, nice house, in the middle of nowhere so nobody’ll even know you’re there; nice flash computers for you to play with — that’s the joy of your line of work, you can do it anywhere. Soon as you’ve settled in, you’ll be as happy as a pig in muck. And it’s not as if you had a life here to speak of. In a year or so, you’ll be thanking us.
David was no geographer, and wasn’t really sure where British Columbia was, though the conflicting resonances within the name itself intrigued him. (British Columbia: stronghold of bowler-hatted tea-drinking cocaine barons?) Of course, where it was didn’t matter at all, because one place is very much like another once you edit out background trivia such as weather and scenery and which side of the road they drive on. A place is a landscape dotted with people, and all the people he’d met so far in thirty-odd years had sooner or later kicked him in the teeth.
On the wall opposite the chair was a bookshelf, and on the bookshelf was a copy of The Times Atlas, and in it was everything there was to know about British Columbia: its mountains and rivers and valleys and cities and principal exports. All he had to do was stand up, walk two yards and pull the book down off the shelf.
Couldn’t be bothered.
Instead, he closed his eyes and dropped back into his own mind. The consensus of opinion there was that he should have known, the same way that a rabbit standing in the fast lane of a motorway at night ought to realise that the massive steel object with eyes of fire hurtling towards him isn’t an amorous lady rabbit or a self-propelled giant carrot. Damn it, he should have figured it out from the start, because all his life, ever since he’d bee
n old enough to have his own watch, Destiny had been grooming him for the role of servant, straight man and foil to his far-more-interesting-and-talented cousin, why-can’t-you-be-more-like-Alex. Therefore it was inevitable, so glaringly obvious that a blindfolded bat in an electric storm would’ve seen it, that if he were ever to fall in love, it could only possibly be so that Alex’s girlfriend could get cloned back into existence. The thought that his own aspirations towards happiness might have something to do with it was so dumb as to be laughable.
Once he’d realised that, everything else slotted into place as neatly as a well-designed modem card into a motherboard — and, of course, it was just plain stupid to resent it. The match doesn’t resent the gas ring just because its purpose in life is to have its head ground against an abrasive surface and burnt to a crisp; and the match ends up in the ashtray or the trash, not in a snug little studio apartment in British Columbia. Like the man had said, really he should be grateful.
So: he snuggled his head against the back of the chair and synthesised gratitude. It was all exactly as the nice man had said; there was nothing for him here in England except the small, circumscribed place he’d fenced in for himself, and the prospect of fifty more annual colds. Furthermore, he’d done his job now, served his purpose; the rest of his life was his own. Either his family would believe he was a murderer and turn his picture to the wall, or else Alex would explain it all to them and they’d nod their heads and say that they’d been sure there must have been a good reason for having him, just as well they’d finally found out what it was. Most people don’t get to step off the hamster-wheel of responsibilities until they’re grey and wrinkly, but he was being turned loose in the prime of life, while he was still young enough to enjoy himself. Nothing more would ever be expected of him, he’d never be a disappointment or a trial to anybody ever again; he could spend the rest of his days unshaven and unironed, eating pizza out of the box, wearing odd socks and watching Star Trek videos without causing a moment’s pain to another living creature. Anybody else would have to spend thirty years sitting cross-legged in an ashram to get where he was going, so what in God’s name was he whining about?