us to rats and bats seems to be more recent than the one relating us to pigs, you can probably do it to a hundred or a thousand other species.”
“It still sounds like bullshit to me,” the policeman repeated, as if he were some obstinate DNA satellite hopelessly intent on taking over an entire genome.
“You may not like its implications, Chief Inspector,” I said, tiredly, “but that’s not enough to make it bullshit. I don’t knowexactly how Hemans did it, because he isn’t going to tell us until he gets some guarantees, but I already know how I’d go about trying to copy the trick, now that I know that it can be done. Transforming and activating the protogenes is probably the easy part, given that every sequencer in the world is avid to learn how to write as well as read the language of the bases. I’m pretty sure I could figure out a way to do that. If I could also figure out a way to delay an embryo’s phylotypic stage-that’s the moment at which the control of an embryo’s development is transferred from the maternal environment to the embryo’s own genes-I might be able to stop the homeotic genes kicking in at all.
Given that the onset of the phylotypic stage is much later in some species than others, that doesn’t seem be any great hurdle to leap. A careful inspection of the research Hemans, Rawlingford, and Bradby published before they got together at Hollinghurst Manor suggests that they were probably using human maternal tissue as a mediator in the embryonic induction process. That’s not genetic engineering, of course-there’s no law against interspecific transplantation of mature tissues or the use of human somatic cells in tissue cultures. Believe me, sir: Applied Homeotics is a whole new field of biotechnology. None of the existing rules apply.”
“So you’re telling me that every fucking farm animal in the realm-not to mention every household pet-is potentially human?” The Special Branch man was looking at me with as much contempt and distaste as Hemans had, but with even less justification.
“No,” I said, patiently. “I’m telling you that the embryos they produce as parents are now potentially human. It still adds a whole new dimension to the ethics of animal usage, but we don’t yet know how far that dimension extends. We can be reasonably sure that birds and reptiles don’t have the required stocks of protein-template genes, and some of the smaller mammals probably don’t have them either, but the question of where the limits of potential metamorphosis actually lie is a minor one. The point is that unless we’re the victims of a monstrous hoax, humanity is determined almost entirely by the development of the embryo. If so, Hemans is right. Alice and all her kind are as human as you or I. An even more important question, of course, is what this kind of technology might allow us to make of human beings.”
I paused for effect, but nobody jumped in with an exclamation of astonishment. They were all waiting, guardedly, to see what came next.
“We, after all, are merelynature’s humans,” I told them. “We’re a product of the rough-and-ready process of natural selection, and control of the expression ofour genes has been left to other genes.
Homeotic genes were never an ideal solution to the problem of embryo-formation-they were just the best improvisation that DNA could come up with on its own. Alice’s humanity is the product of relatively unskilled artifice-and the evidence we’ve so far seen suggests that relatively unskilled artifice might already be the slightly better maker of men. If it isn’t, then it certainly will be, just as soon as we bring our ingenuity fully to bear on the problem.
“The genie’s out of the bottle, gentlemen. We can pass all the laws we like against the genetic engineering of human beings, and we can make sure if we care to that what Hemans, Rawlingford, and Bradby have actually done to pig embryos will in future fall within the scope of those laws-but that won’t alter the fact that human beings and the world they have made are imperfect in more ways than any of us would care to count, and that Hemans, Rawlingford, and Bradby have found a new way to allow us to set to work on those imperfections. If Alice is telling the truth, we’ve already passed through the looking-glass, and there’s no way back. You might be able to stop the animals walking and talking, but you won’t be able to stop the people. If a mere pig can be a better human than any of us,imagine what our own children might become, with the proper assistance! ”
The minister and his junior nodded gravely, but that was just the legacy of good schooling by their image- consultants. The chief inspector looked dumbfounded. The permanent under-secretary was the only one who was keeping up, after his own crude fashion. “You’re talking about building a Master Race,” he said reflexively. If in doubt, hoist a scarecrow.
“I’m talking about D-I-Y supermen,” I told him, frankly. “I’m talking about something that can be done with standard equipment on a chicken-feed budget, after a little bit of practice on the family pet. I’m talking anarchy, not mad dictators. If you intend to make a deal with the Three Musketeers, you need to know what cards they’re holding. It’s still conceivable that they’re bluffing, and that Alice was just feeding us a line, but I can’t believe that- and if they’renot bluffing, the old world has already ended. The GE-Crime Unit will catch up with the runaways eventually, but it’s already too late. Their story has been told, andwill be told, again and again and again.”
Nobody told me I was crazy. The policeman might have lacked imagination, but he wasn’t stupid enough to continue to argue that his reflexive prejudices were worth more than my educated judgment. “We could still shoot the lot,” he muttered-but he knew, deep down, that it wouldn’t do the trick, even if that option could be put back on the agenda.
“Whatcan we do?” asked the permanent under-secretary, who had already moved reluctantly onto the next stage.
I knew that it wouldn’t be easy to persuade him, but nobody ever said that working for the Home Office was going to be easy. The instinct of government is to govern, to take control, to keep as tight a hold on the reins as humanly possible.
“Basically,” I said, “we have two options. We can be Napoleon, or we can be Snowball. Neither way will be easy-in fact, I suspect that all hell has already been let loose-so I figure that we might as well try to do the right thing. For once in our lives, let’s not even try to stand in the way of progress. I know you’re not going to be grateful for the advice, but my vote is that we simply let them all go and let them get on with it.”
“Let public opinion take care of them, you mean,” the junior minister said, still trying his damnedest to misunderstand. “Let the mob take care of them, the way they take care of child molesters.”
“No,” I said. “I mean, let artifice take its course. Let the pioneers of Applied Homeotics do what they have to, and what they can. Even the pigs.”
Itwasn’t easy to persuade them, but Hemans and his collaborators had a battery of lawyers on their side as well as reason and stubbornness, and in the end, the situation simply wasn’t governable, even by the government. Eventually, I made them see that.
They weren’t grateful, of course, but I never expected them to be. Sometimes, you just have to settle for being right.
By the time I saw Alice again she was twenty-two and famous, although she never went anywhere without her bodyguards. She came to my lab to see what I was working on, and to thank me for the small part I had played in winning her precarious freedom.
“You did save my life,” I pointed out, when we’d done the tour and had time to reflect.
“That was Ed and Kath,” she admitted. “They were the ones who picked you up and dragged you down the stairs. All I did was hit you with the axe when you tried to grab it.”
“But you hit me with the flat bit, not the edge,” I said. “If you’d hit me with the edge, I’d be dead-and so, I suspect, would you.”
“They really wanted to kill us all,” she said, as if it were still very hard for her to comprehend.
“Only some of them-and only because they didn’t understand,” I told her, hoping that it was the truth.
“None of us understood, not even Hemans, Rawling-ford, and Bradby, although they’d had longer to think about it than anybody else. None of us really understood what it meant to be human, because we’d never had to explore the limits of the argument before-and none of us understood what scope there was for us to be more than human. We simply didn’t realize how easy it is to be creative, once you have the basic stock of protein-producing genes-and protogenes-to work with. Maybe we should have, given what we knew about the diversity of Earthly species and the unreliability of mutation as a means of change, but we didn’t. We needed a lesson to bring it home to us. How does it feel to be accepted as human just as the species is becoming obsolete?”
“My children will have the same chances as anyone else’s,” she pointed out. I wasn’t so sure about that.
She was now as human as anyone else, in law as well as in fact, but there were an awful lot of people who hadn’t yet conceded the point.My children, on the other hand, really would have opportunities of which I had never dreamed ten years before; the people who wanted to reserve the privileges of creativity to imaginary gods wouldn’t
