through it and said, ‘Christ!’
I told him, ‘A lot of labour goes into virgin birth,’ but it didn’t get a
grin.
‘You’ve read all this?’
I certainly had.
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George Turner
He asked, ‘Can you reduce it to what I need to face the media?’
I could, and I started off with, ‘O f twenty clones —
‘Clones? All identical?’
‘Not quite. The selected prime ovum was subjected to multiple
cloning to create a control, a zero line for comparison of the induced
variations. Ten were left as females and ten given a Y chromosome to
develop them as males.’ I could talk like that, with the proper plum in
my mouth; still can, when it suits.
‘So,’ says he, ‘ten identical girls and ten identical boys.’
He had that way of beating the gun, trying to be on top of the discussion when really he was floundering. I explained that they were divided into five groups, two males and two females in each, with each
group given a different enhancing programme. ‘One entire group,’ I
told him, ‘ceased to develop after the fourth week and was discarded.’
‘Relegated,’he. said, remembering, and looked unhappy.
‘The other four groups reached term and were bom — or however
you describe emergence from total in vitro. Three groups survived and
are totally healthy.’
‘The fourth?’
‘Died on the seventh day.’
‘O f what?’
‘Some kind of hormone failure. Call it experimental error.’
‘Christ!’
You might have thought he knew the man. I said that the possible
genetic permutations ran into billions, that the calculation of side
effects was more art than science and that the teams did bloody well
to get a sixty per cent result.
What he said to that isn’t on record, but it can do no harm now. He
said, ‘And we’ll be doing bloody well if we can keep eight dead foetuses
out of the news.’
A PM in his second term knows the odds are rising against him and
every bad break looks like an electoral landslide, so I told him the good
news. ‘Group A shows superior spatial awareness and num ber
appreciation.’
‘M athematicians?’
‘Too early to say; maybe. Group B is body-conscious, colourconscious, emotional and self-expressive.’
‘Artists?’
‘Who knows? It could be transitional for something else. This is a
preliminary report.’
‘In seventeen hundred pages! And the third group?’
On the nursery floor
169
‘Group C is the interesting one. A and B are well advanced with
vocabularies of more than two thousand words but the C children
don’t talk at all.’
‘Retarded?’ He was becoming properly scared. ‘A clutch of mon-
goloid idiots is all we need.’
‘Not idiots. They understand speech but won’t talk, and they don’t
seem interested in anything except each other. They won’t play with
A and B groups. They are physically retarded, about a year backward,
completely healthy but taking longer to grow. They’re the most
promising.’
‘How?’
‘As a general rule in the animal kingdom the greater the adult
intelligence the slower the m aturing period. It may be a good sign.’
‘W hat games do they play?’
That was a more perceptive question than I had expected of him.
‘The same as ordinary kids; lots of running and shoving and shouting,
trying out the body and learning the controls — except that Group C
plays alone and doesn’t shout.’
He pushed the summary away and began to complain that the
thing was costing too much, so I had to tell him that soon it would cost
more. 'In a yearor two there’ll be a security problem. We’ll need more
guards and more technical gear. These kids are bright. If they decide
they want to get out . . .’
All he said was, ‘Christ!’Jesus was his worry blanket.
View of a dead Prime Minister with his mental pants down. Nothing I couldn’t
have deduced from public files.
2 Nurse Anne Blaikie, a dear old thing
The years in the Nursery weren’t the best in my life or the worst, either.
I was in my twenties and pretty lively and the high security was . . .
not so much a restriction as a bore; we were always aware of it —
guards concealed at the perimeter, satellite surveillance up there out
of sight, alarms and tell-tales everywhere . . .
But I loved those extraordinary children; they made up for a lot. If
only there had been a town nearby, but there wasn’t. There was a
farmhouse a couple of kilometres away but we couldn’t see it. All we
saw was hedging and beyond that pastures and on the horizon, hills.
It was so isolated . . .
Isolated! There’s a long nostalgic history in that word. If they wanted an isolated spot now, they might find it in the desert —
and have to post guards to
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keep the rubbernecks away. In this age of boiled-over population the idea of
isolation is romantic gibberish. But it’s an attractive gibberish,
I couldn’t stand it today. I’m a city girl at heart; the crowded life is
where I belong, but those kids were an experience nothing else could
match.
The exciting thing was that nobody knew what to do with them or
for them, except to feed them and keep them clean. The place was
spotted with microphones and spy eyes like — like currants in a pudding, and the psychologists watched us as much as the kids.
