but it’s true.”

Itwas an unsettling thought. I had already thought it, and it had already unsettled me-but the fact that Alice was prepared to confront me with it, perhaps on behalf of Hemans, Rawlingford, and Bradby, but more probably on her own initiative, was even more unsettling.

I reminded myself again that it might be a lie, a careful hoax intended to persuade me, falsely, that the men from Commoner’s Isle had mastered godlike powers-but if it was, it was beginning to work.

“Would you like to live as other humans do, Alice?” I asked, ostentatiously leading with my chin. “Would you like to go to school, to university, to get a job, to get married one day and have children of your own?”

“I do live as other humans do,” she replied, blandly refusing to see what I was getting at. “I’ve been to school. I expect that I’ll do all the other things when the time comes.” Her tone said that she didn’t expect any such thing- that she expected to be pursued and captured, shot at worst and imprisoned at best. Her tone told me that she expected to have to fight for her life, let alone her entitlements as a human being, and that she wasn’t about to take any bullshit from me while she had an axe in her hands.

“I’m not sure that you’ll be allowed to do anything that other teenagers routinely do, Alice,” I admitted, figuring that it was best to pose as the honest man I really am. “The scientists who shaped your brain, hand and backbone were breaking the law. That’s not your fault, of course, but the fact remains that you’re the product of illegal genetic engineering. The law doesn’t consider you to be a human being-nor do the vast majority of human beings. All the things you hope you’ll be able to do depend on the willingness of human society to admit you as a member, and that willingness simply isn’t there. There’s a sense, you see, in which it isn’t enough just to define yourself as human-it’s for human society as a whole to decide who belongs to it and who doesn’t.”

“No, it isn’t,” she replied, promptly. “White people once refused to define black people as human, and German gentiles once refused to define Jews as human, but that didn’t make the black people or the Jews any less human than they were. The only people who became less human because of those refusals were the people who tried to deny humanity to others. They were the ones who were refusing to love and respect their fellow men, the ones who weren’t acting morally.”

She was carrying the argument better than any fourteen-year-old should have been able to, and she wasn’t trying to conceal the fact. I couldn’t help wondering whether that might be a mistake, if she ever got the chance to plead her case before a wider audience. Nobody loves a smartarse, especially if the smartarse is a jumped-up pig. If you want to pass for human, you can’t afford to be too good at it-and, as Alice had stubbornly insisted on pointing out, real humans frequently aren’t very good at it at all.

“Do you think the scientists who made you were acting morally?” I asked. “They knew what kind of a world they were bringing you into. They knew what would happen-to you as well as to them-when they were found out, and they must have known that they’d eventually be found out.”

“I could understand a slave who was reluctant to bear children who would also be slaves,” Alice replied, “but I can also understand those who didn’t refuse. They knew that they were human, and that their children were human too, and they had to hope that the fact would one day be recognized. To have refused to bear children would have been giving in to evil, consenting to its effects.”

“Why do you think the men who made you destroyed their records, Alice?” I asked. “Why do you think they were so eager to burn them that they endangered your life-not to mention mine?” Because they didn’t want anyone to know the true extent of their success, I told myself. Because they wanted to be able to run this bluff.

“Because they wanted to be able to use their knowledge as a bargaining chip,” Alice said. “For our benefit as well as their own. If you’d got the records, you’d have put a stop to everything. Because you didn’t, we still have something up our sleeves.” She seemed to think that it was a reasonably good argument-which implied that in spite of all her hard-won sophistication she really was the mere child she appeared to be.

Theoretically, I thought, an animal embryo modified to replicate human form ought to develop as neotenously as a human embryo, and an animal brain modified to accommodate all that a human brain could accommodate ought not to be educated anymore rapidly. If so, Alice shouldn’t be any cleverer than a fully human child reared in similarly exceptional circumstances-but without access to her school records, I knew that it would be dangerous to take too much for granted, or too little.

“No one will bargain with them, Alice,” I lied. “They broke the law, and they’ll be punished. Perhaps it’s best if their discoveries are lost. That way, no one will be able to repeat their error.”

“That’s silly, Dr. Hitchens,” Alice said, calmly. “If it’s a mystery, that will just make more people interested in solving it. And if it’s not so very difficult to solve…”

She left it there, as if it were some kind of threat. She was still trying to convince me, in her own subtle fashion, that my world had just ended and that another had just begun, and that if she and all her fugitive kind were slaughtered by the ARU’s guns they would be martyrs to a great and unstoppable cause.

“Have you readThe Island of Dr. Moreau, Alice?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“What do you think of it?”

“It’s a parable. It tells us that it takes more than a little cosmetic surgery and a few memorized laws to make people-any people-human. That’s true. Whether humans are born or made, the test of their humanity is their behavior, their love and respect for their fellow humans.”

“How many naturally born humans would pass that test, do you think?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” she replied. “Lots, I hope.”

“Would I pass it?” I asked.

“I have to hope so,” she said, casually, “don’t I, Dr. Hitchens? But I don’t actually know. What do you think?”

“There wasn’t supposed to be any shooting,” I told her. “The police were supposed to put everyone under arrest. If your makers hadn’t set fire to the house and told everyone to scatter and run, no one would have been hurt. Then, the matter of your humanity could have been decided in a proper and reasonable manner.” I hoped that I was telling the truth, but I had a niggling feeling that the plan to which I’d been admitted wasn’t the whole one. The GE-Crime Unithad called up the Armed Response Unit.

“Well,” said Alice, “that isn’t the way things worked out, is it? It seems to me that the matter of our humanity, as you put it, has already been decided. You’ll never be sure, of course, that you’ve got us all.

Even if Ed and Kath can’t get to the old icehouse, and even if they run into the police when they do, you’ll never be sure how many of us got out under the noses of your surveillance unit before they figured out that the apparently obvious wasn’t necessarily true.”

She was definitely feeding me a line there, but I couldn’t tell whether she was feeding it to me because it was false, or because it was true. I thought the time had come for me to make a grab for the axe and take control of the situation. I was probably right-or would have been, if I’d actually succeeded.

I suppose, on reflection, that I was lucky she only swiped me with the flat of the blade. If she’d hit me that hard with the edge, she could easily have fractured my skull.

When I woke up again I was in a hospital bed. My head wasn’t aching anymore and my eyes weren’t stinging, but I felt spaced-out and bleary. It took a few minutes for me to remember where I might have been, if things had worked out differently.

I learned, in due course, that the fire brigade had found me while searching the cellars for survivors and had handed me over to the paramedics before midnight. Unfortunately, the medication they’d fed me ensured that I didn’t wake up again until thirty-six hours later, so I’d missed all of the official postmortems as well as the remainder of the action-but the urgency with which the Unit moved to debrief me reassured me that the adventure still had a long way to run.

“There were three of them,” I told Inspector Headley. “I only saw one of them, and it was too dark to see her features clearly. She had blond hair, cut to shoulder length, and very even teeth that caught what little light there was when she smiled. I couldn’t swear that I’d be able to recognize her again, dead or alive. Her name was Alice. She called the others Ed and Kath. They were trying to reach an old icehouse on the edge of the lake, but the tunnel had been blocked off. Did you get them?”

“What else did they tell you?” Inspector Headley countered, jesuitically.

That wasn’t a game I intended to play. “Did you get them?” I repeated.

“No,” he conceded, reluctantly. “But the tunnel was still blocked off-had been for the best part of a century. Nobody got out that way.”

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