fine.
He looked back at the cheery young nurse and, in answer to her question, nodded uncertainly.
38
His head throbbing, John stared through the glass, watching Luke and Phoebe asleep on their backs, swathed in white bedding and intubated. They were even smaller than he’d imagined, more wrinkled, more pink, with tiny little hands like starfish.
More beautiful.
Utterly, utterly, incredible!
He was choked, close to tears with emotion as he watched these tiny people, these miniature copies of Naomi and himself, encased in clear Perspex, dwarfed by the high-tech equipment all around them.
Even in their scrunched-up faces he could see the likenesses. There were distinctive characteristics of Naomi in Luke. And he could see himself in Phoebe. Logically, it ought to be the other way around, he thought, but it didn’t matter; there was only one thing that was important, and it was plain to see it in their faces:
Absolute confirmation that their worst fears were unfounded. These were their children, his and Naomi’s, without question.
He closed his eyes in relief. For months this had been his biggest fear. Naomi’s, too, despite all he had said to try to reassure her.
Now they faced another worry – just what other mistakes might Dettore have made? Or what other deliberate alterations had he done to their genes that he had not told them about?
But at least they were healthy! Strong. Remarkably robust, the obstetrician had said.
His thoughts went back to Halley, to the awesome sense of responsibility he had felt when Halley had been born, and all the hopes he’d held for his son, long before he knew anything of the time bomb inside him. He felt even more responsibility for these two, now, bringing them into the world knowing the risks he and Naomi faced. Just hoping and praying Dettore hadn’t messed up with the one gene that mattered.
Phoebe, eyes shut, raised her starfish hand a little, opened out her fingers, then closed them again. Moments later, Luke did the same. Almost as if they were waving at him, acknowledging him.
Hi Dad! Hi Dad!
He smiled. ‘Welcome to the world, Luke and Phoebe, my little darlings. You’re our future, your mum’s and mine. We’re going to love you more than any parents ever loved any child,’ he whispered.
Once more, in their sleep, first Phoebe then Luke’s little hands raised a few inches, opened out their fingers and closed them again.
John went back to Naomi’s room, to sit with her until she was sufficiently awake to be wheeled up to see them herself.
39
Mountain air is different to any other kind of air that you can find on this planet. Mountain air doesn’t have all that shit that you have to breathe in.
Down below it is just one big sewer, my friend, and I’m not just talking about the air.
Hasn’t always been that way, of course. And one day it’s going to be all back to how it was. You’ll be able to walk the streets of cities and smell flowers.
Seriously, when was the last time you smelled flowers in a city?
Maybe in a park, but only if the park was big and the flowers had a strong enough scent. And to have a strong enough scent they’d probably been genetically modified.
We can’t keep our hands off anything, can we? I tell you something, you walk in one of those supermarket places, they’ve got berries the size of apples, apples the size of melons, and those tomatoes, you know the ones I mean, those like big, mutant things – they have pig genes in them, to give them their colour, to keep them riper longer, but you don’t see that on the label.
I tell you, my friend, you step down off this mountain and you walk in the sewers of the valleys and plains, you’re stepping into a world you think you might know, but you don’t, trust me, you do not know any of it. Like, get this – there’s a big burger chain, a national chain and they’re mixing polyester into the bread in their buns – to make them puff out. They’re making you eat polyester and all the time you are thinking, hey, bread that looks this good must be doing me good!
That’s how cynical scientists are, my friend.
You know what science is really about? Scientists pretend it is about knowledge, but the truth is that it is partially about power and about death, but mostly it is about vanity and greed. People don’t invent things for the greater good. They invent them to satisfy their egos.
Everyone is being seduced by science. All the world leaders. They’re hoping science will find a cure for AIDS, forgetting science caused it in the first place. Scientists cured bubonic plague and smallpox, but what did that do for the human race? Overpopulation.
The Lord has his own way of dealing with overpopulation. He had the balance of nature just fine, until scientists came along and messed it all up.
And think about this, my friend, next time you take a walk down there in the sewers and feel your lungs getting all choked up. Who is responsible? God or scientists?
Just remember the words of St Paul to Timothy. ‘Guard what has been entrusted to your care. Turn away from Godless chatter and the opposing ideas of what is falsely called knowledge, which some have professed and in so doing have wandered from the faith.’
Here endeth the 17th Tract of the 4th Level of the Law of the Disciples of the Third Millennium.
In a room in a house that was as spartan as a monk’s cell, high up on a mountain in the Rockies, thirty miles north of Denver, the young Disciple, working out his forty days of solitude, seated on a simple wooden stool in front of a computer, was learning each Tract by rote. He was repeating the words that had arrived in an email an hour ago, and that would shortly be erased, over and over in his head.
Everything had to be remembered. Nothing was ever to be retained in writing. Rule Four.
His name was Timon Cort. His hair was shaven to ginger stubble. He wore a fresh white T-shirt, grey chinos, sandals and oval glasses. Twice a day he ran the two-mile dirt track to the bottom of the private mountain and back up again without stopping. A further two hours a day he spent working out on the exercises he had been given to strengthen his body. The rest of the time he divided, as he had been instructed, between learning, reading the Bible, prayer and sleep.
He was blissfully happy.
For the first time in twenty-nine years, his life had meaning. He was needed. He had a purpose.
When he came down from the mountain at the end of his initiation, he would be entrusted with a Great Rite. If he carried this out successfully, he would then become a full Disciple. He would be married to Lara, a woman beyond his dreams, with her long dark hair and skin like warm silk, with whom he had spent one night before coming up this mountain, one night that in part sustained him throughout his solitude, and in part tormented him. Sometimes, instead of prayer, he counted the days to the next time he might see her. And always, afterwards, he prayed for forgiveness.
The Great Rite, then the eternal love of God expressed through Lara. You had to understand what it felt like to be wanted and loved, after a lifetime of people telling you that you were no good. A lifetime of being passed over by your father because your brother was so much smarter, so much better at baseball and football and life in general. By your mother, because you hadn’t taken any of the career paths she dreamed of for you. Because you got caught stealing some no-big-deal bits and pieces from a drugstore. Because you got six months suspended for dealing cannabis.
Passed over by your classmates, who thought you were weird, because you were too short, too physically
