taken for a ride-that it was all a game, intended to discredit the GE-Crime Unit and the Home Office advisors before they began to get their act together.
While I lay there being angry, it occurred to me that I might be in a uniquely good position to find out exactly what the Animal Farmers werereally up to.
When I was finally confident that I could hold a conversation, I had already formulated my plan of campaign.
“Is Ali short for Alison?” I asked. I was able to open my eyes by then, and they had accustomed themselves to the near-darkness sufficiently to let me see that the person standing guard over me was a blond teenager, perhaps fourteen or fifteen years of age. She was too young to be a lab assistant, so I seized upon the hypothesis that she was probably someone’s daughter. We had been warned that some of the live-in staff at the manor had children, but we hadn’t expected them to be abandoned when the shit hit the fan.
“Alice,” she informed me, stiffly.
“As in Wonderland?” I quipped, hoping to help her relax.
“As inThrough the Looking Glass,” she retorted. It didn’t seem to be worthwhile asking her what the difference was.
“I’m Stephen Hitchens,” I told her. “I’m not a policeman-I’m a geneticist, currently employed as an advisor to the Home Office.”
“Bully for you,” she said, dryly. I wondered whether she might be older than she looked-maybe sixteen or seventeen-but I concluded in the end that natural insolence, like puberty, probably arrived ahead of its time nowadays.
“Why did the scientists set fire to the house, Alice?” I asked.
“Why did armed police surround it?” she countered.
“None of this is your fault, or mine,” I assured her. “I was just trying to recover the records of the experiments the scientists had done. They should have made sure that you were safe before they started the fire. They’re not your friends, Alice. Did your parents work for Dr. Hemans?”
“In a manner of speaking,” she told me, as if relishing a hidden irony.
“What manner of speaking?” I demanded, although I could hardly help seeing the obvious implication. If she wasn’t the child of someone on the staff, she had to be one of the experimental subjects-or, I reminded myself, someonepretending to be one of the experimental subjects.
“The kind of work you do in a sty,” she replied, casually confirming the inference she must have known I’d take. “The kind of work where your pay arrives in a trough.”
If it was true, then she certainly had come from Wonderland-but was it true? Wasn’t it far more likely to be a lie, a carefully constructed bluff? Was it to hear this, I wondered, that I had been hauled out of the corridor and brought down here into near-darkness? Could the Animal Farmers be using me, trying to convince me that they had achieved far, far more than they had? If so, what should my policy be?
Should I run with the bluff and let her make her pitch, or challenge her and refuse to believe that she was anything but what she appeared to be? “You’re telling me that you’re not human?” I said, just to make sure that she wasn’t just making a joke. I knew as soon as I’d said it that I’d framed the rhetorical question wrongly. What she’d actually told me was that her parents weren’t human.
“Like hell I am,” she said. Like Snowball in hell, I couldn’t help thinking. Play along, I told myself. Find out what she has to say.
“So you think you’re human,” I conceded. “You can certainly pass for it, probably in a far brighter light than this-but if your parents really were pigs, you must understand that other people might not see things the same way.” As I saidthat I realized that her creators or drama-coaches-must already have put it in much stronger terms. That was why Ed and Kath had been so paranoid about the possibility of being shot down-that and the fact that the ARU really had opened fire.
“I know what I see when I look in a mirror,” Alice told me, perhaps to make sure that I’d understood how clever her reference toThrough the Looking Glass was. “It’s not the image of itself that’s important, of course-it’s the fact that there’s an eye to see it. A human I-and I don’t mean e-y-e.”
Cogito, ergo sum, she might have said, if she-or whoever had written her script-hadn’t been so anxious about the need to stay viewer-friendly. I hadn’t enough anger left to prevent me from wondering whether Special Branch might always have known exactly how human Animal Farmers’ experimental subjects looked, and whether their senior officers might have taken it upon themselves to decide that the ministry didn’t need to know until the shooting was well and truly over. If they had, and my captors knew it-or even if they hadn’t and my captors merely believed it-I might be in deeper trouble than I thought.
“What about Ed and Kath?” I asked. “Are they like you?”
They’re human,” Alice assured me, in a tone that left little doubt as to what kind of human she was talking about. She was telling me, in her own perverse way, that they were the kind of humans who were made as well as born: the kind which started off as a fertilized ovum in a sow’s belly before the genetic engineers got to work.
Dr. Moreau had remade beasts in his own image by means of surgery, but modern scientists had much cleverer means at their disposal-and the degree of success they might be expected to achieve was far greater. I had to remind myself again that all of this could be a bluff run by a thoroughly human child, and that I was only playing along to see how the story would go.
Alice had relaxed a little since she first started talking, but the way she held her shadowed head and the way she gripped the axe she’d been ordered to hit me with if I got out of line suggested that she wasn’t about to get careless. Now that she’d made her first impression, she was busy reminding herself that she was stuck in a cellar beneath a burning building with a man who might be dangerous. All in all, philosophical discussion seemed the safest way to build a modicum of trust.
“You think you’re human because you have a human mind: because you’re self-aware?” I said, earnestly-trying with all my might to sound like the dull and harmless scientist I actually was (and am).
“All animals are self-aware,” Alice replied, calmly. “I’m aware that I’m human. I love and respect my fellow men, no matter what the circumstances of their birth may have been.”
“How do you feel about pigs?” I asked.
“I love and respect them too,” she replied. “Even the ones which aren’t human. I don’t eat pork-or any other meat, come to that. How do you feel about pigs, Dr. Hitchens?”
I eat pork, I also eat bacon, and all kinds of other meat, but it didn’t seem diplomatic to talk about that.
“I don’t think pigs are human, Alice,” I told her. “I don’t think they can become human, even with the aid of transplanted genes.”
Her answer to that certainly wasn’t the kind of answer I’d have expected from an ordinary teenager, or even an extraordinary one. “How did humans become humans, Dr. Hitchens?” she asked me. “A handful of extra genes, obligingly delivered up by mutation, do you suppose? Perhaps-but perhaps not. Just because a human and a chimpanzee only share ninety-nine per cent of their genes, it doesn’t neccessarily follow that the variant one per cent are solely responsible for the differences. Even if they are, it’s not a matter of different protein-making stocks. It’s a matter ofcontrol. The one per cent is almost entirely homeotic.” She might have been parroting something Hemans or one of his coworkers had said, but I didn’t think so. She seemed confident that she was making sense, and that she understood that import of her argument-but she hesitated, just in case I didn’t.
“Go on,” I said, interestedly. The invitation was enough to set her off with the bit between her pearly, neatly aligned teeth.
“Most of what it took to turn apes into men,” she told me, as if it were a matter of absolute certainty, “was a handful of modifications to the ways in which genes were switched on and off as the cells of the developing embryo became specialized. You don’t need dozens of extra genes to grow a bigger brain.
All you need is for a few more unspecialized cells to become brain cells. You don’t need dozens of extra genes to make a clever hand or to stand upright, either. What you need is for the cells that differentiate into bone and muscle to distribute themselves in slightly different ways within the developing embryo.
Becoming human isn’t so very difficult, once you get the hang of it. Cows could do it. Sheep too. Lions and tigers, horses and elephants, dolphins and seals. Dogs, probably; cats, maybe; rats perhaps; birds probably not. You have to get right down to snakes and sharks before you can say that there’s no chance at all. We all start out as eggs, Dr. Hitchens, and every egg that can make a pig or a donkey or a goat can probably make a human, if it only invests enough effort in shaping the brain and the hand and the backbone. That may be an unsettling thought,
