“Well,” the officer and gentleman procrastinated, “that all depends on exactly what one might mean by
“Exactly what I thought,” Jenny said. “Fucked by friendly fire. It’s some kind of supersoldier, isn’t it? I’m carrying some kind of fast-growing, android, cannon fodder.”
“No, Miss Loomis. I promise that I’ll explain just as soon as I can, but…”
“I should never have let Jackie talk me into it,’ Jenny put in, not wanting to listen to a long explanation of why the Frankenstein Corps weren’t allowed to talk about their work to mere civilians.
Let’s sign on for an evening class at the university, I said. Imagine a kid with my head for figures and the instincts of a creative artist. Oh no, she said, your Junoesque body cries out for alliance with Hector or Lysander or the British bloody Grenadiers. Brains are for wimps. I can’t believe that I went along with it. It’s my baby, when all’s said and done. Or is it crown property, given that it must have extra genes cooked up in some secret lab in the wilds of South Oxfordshire? Do you need directions, by the way, or do you
“We have your address, Miss Loomis,” Dr. Gilfillan assured her, trying to sound reassuring.
“Our ETA’s eight or ten minutes. Please be patient.”
“Oh, stick your bedside manner up your jaxy,” Jenny said. “I’ve got to try to get to the loo before you get here, then back again. Wish me luck.” She rang off without waiting for a reply.
She did manage to get to the loo, and back again, before the doorbell rang, but it was a close run thing.
She even managed to get to the door without having to take a rest en route.
Dr. Gilfillan was very tall and distinguished, and exceedingly well dressed, considering that he might have turned up in a moon suit. In person, he oozed authority, almost to the extent that Jenny might have been inclined to trust him if she hadn’t known that he was a slimeball who had dedicated his career to the design and deployment of weapons more insidious than the human imagination had ever been able to dream up before. He had some uniformed chit in tow who didn’t look a day over nineteen. The ambulance parked outside her front gate was dark green. Jenny wondered whether it had a red cross on the roof, to warn off enemy aircraft, but she decided that it probably hadn’t; warfare had become so unsporting in the last twenty years that today’s guerillas used red crosses and red crescents for target practice.
Gilfillan introduced the chit as Sergeant Cray while he looked Jenny carefully up and down, as if trying to figure out how much trouble she might give him.
“Come in for a moment,” Jenny said, tiredly. “I think I need to sit down while you try to
persuade me that I ought to go with you—because you will have to persuade me.”
“I can do that, Miss Loomis,” Gilfillan told her, his confidence seemingly renewed now that he had seen her, and the neat little garden fronting her neat little suburban maisonette. “I’m sorry you’ve been alarmed by your wild guesses. Would it be possible for Sergeant Cray to make us a cup of tea while I try to set your mind at rest, do you think?”
“Kitchens a mess,” Jenny retorted. “Worse state than me. Shall I show you where everything is?”
“I’ll work it out,” the sergeant assured her.
Gilfillan waited politely for her to sit down when they hit the living room, but Jenny hadn’t the strength to make a contest out of it. She slumped down on the settee; he took the armchair. He reached into his jacket and produced a thick sheaf of papers. He peeled off the top half of the stack and held them out to her. “I’m afraid that I’ll have to ask you to sign these,” he added.
Jenny didn’t reach out to take them. “No consent forms,” she said, soberly.
“It’s not a consent form,” he countered. “It’s the Official Secrets Act.”
“And if I won’t?” she said, trying unsuccessfully to sound menacing.
Gilfillan shifted in the chair, arranging his limbs with more civilian fastidiousness than military precision. “Please don’t be afraid, Miss Loomis,” he said. “I doubt very much that you’ll want to publicize your situation, but I can’t tell you what your situation is if you don’t sign the document, and that’s not what either of us wants. Please sign.” He offered her a pen.
Jenny understood well enough that if she signed the Official Secrets Act and then blabbed, even to Jackie, she could kiss goodbye to her so-called career—but she believed Gilfillan when he said that if she didn’t sign he wouldn’t talk.
“And I suppose the others are my conscription papers?” she said, hoping that she might be joking.
“I don’t have the authority to conscript you,” the RAMC man told her. “You have to volunteer.”
He put all the papers together and placed them on the coffee table.
Jenny picked them up. She skipped the Official Secrets Act, and found that the other set really was an application form to join the RAMC in the capacity of “civilian aide.” Curiosity was burning up calories Jenny couldn’t spare, and she really did need to know what was what, for the baby’s sake. She signed the top set of papers and gave them back, but left the others where they were.
“I need to confirm the name of the father,” Gilfillan told her, now sounding confident that he not only had the upper hand but the full cooperation of his victim.
“He called himself Lieutenant Graham Lunsford,” Jenny told him, putting on her best brave face even though she knew that it couldn’t be very convincing. “Very tall, not very dark, and extremely handsome. Have I just got him into deep trouble or won him a medal?”
“That’s not for me to say. Was it just the fact that he was a soldier that triggered your anxieties, or was there something more?”
“Apart from your attachment to the RAMC and the fact that we haven’t had a good bioterrorism scare hereabouts since Wednesday last?” Jenny countered. “Actually, we did have a conversation—Jackie, me, the lieutenant and the lieutenant’s friend. Jackie’s my friend. She screwed the lieutenant’s friend, but she took precautions.”
Gilfillan had apparently been doing his homework too. “That would be Mrs. Jacqueline
Stephenson,” he said. “Lives at number thirty-two. Divorced five years ago, shortly after your mother died.” His tone was remarkably even, but what he was telling her was that he had access to all the information he could desire about Jackie—and about her. He probably knew about Jackie’s teenage chlamydia and present sterility, let alone the whole sorry saga of her own mother’s cancer. He had probably guessed about the biological clock, and the reasons why she’d gone fishing for unattached sperm rather than wait for the kind of miracle that might equip her with a committed partner and full-time father.
“You had a conversation, Miss Loomis?” the biologist prompted, still scrupulously polite.
“A conversation took place,” she said, remembering how little she’d contributed to it. “Jackie has theories. She spent a couple of hours telling them both that soldiers like them would be redundant soon, and would be already if our military strategists had any sense at all. She’s a great believer in biological warfare. Never mind shooting and bombing the poor buggers, she says—hit them where it
Gilfillan nodded his head, asif he agreed with every word. “And what did Lieutenant Lunsford and his friend have to say in their turn?”
“They said it wasn’t that easy, and that she was looking at the problem from the wrong angles—that the biggest problem with biological warfare was delivery, and after that self-defense. They said it’s hard to produce designer diseases that are more velvet glove than iron fist. For the time being, they said, the trick is to make the most of the genes that we already have. Expressionism is the way to go, your lieutenant said. His mate added that Abstract Expressionism is best of all—which was obviously some kind of joke. I didn’t get it at the time, but I think I do now. The soldier boy meant genetic expression, and it was a joke because the army was abstracting his sperm for in vitro experimentation.”
Jenny winced as the baby kicked, expressing himself the only way that was currently available to him.
“Actually,” Gilfillan told her, “the joke was a bit more convoluted than that. It’s an obscure item of rhyming slang.” He paused as Sergeant Cray brought in a tray bearing a pot of tea, two cups, a milk jug, a sugar bowl and
