Designer Genes. Brian Stableford
was wearing her sky-blue raincoat with the belt. She’d got it dirty before, and Mummy hadn’t seemed to mind overmuch. Even so, when the red-faced man reached out to take the piglet back, Chloe wasn’t sorry to be rid of it.
“That’s the piglet that’s going to save your life,” her father said, as she released it. “The one you just held in your hands.”
“Mike!” wailed Mummy, in her most exasperated voice. “Do you have to?”
“Yes,” said Daddy, firmly. “It’s important. She ought to understand what’s happening, as best she can.” But he didn’t try to explain it to her—not then.
* * * *
The next time Chloe’s father brought her to visit the piglet, Mummy stayed at home. That was better, because it meant that Daddy wasn’t always talking over her head; except for what he said to the men in white coats, everything he said was meant for her. She preferred that.
The piglet was no longer in the pen with the sow. It had its own pen now, not in the shed any more but in the big house, in a place where there were all kinds of machines and everything was clean. The piglet was running back and forth now, and taking notice of things, and it didn’t squeal at all. When Chloe and her father knelt down outside the pen it came towards them, looking at them from its pretty dark eyes. Chloe wondered if it recognized her.
“Is it safe to reach through?” Daddy asked the man in the white coat, and when the man in the white coat said that it was, Daddy took her little hand in his and put it between the bars. The piglet didn’t mind being stroked this time, and Chloe didn’t mind stroking it.
“They’re looking after her very carefully,” Daddy said, “because she’s a very special piglet. All the piglets in here are special. They all have human hearts.”
“Why?” Chloe asked—not because she particularly wanted to know, but because Daddy was wearing an expression that told her that he expected to be asked.
“They’re growing hearts for people whose hearts don’t work very well. Your heart doesn’t work very well—that’s why you’re ill so often, and not as strong as other children at school. You need a new heart, but hearts aren’t easy to come by. Sometimes, the doctors can take a heart out of a little boy or girl who’s been killed in an accident, but not all hearts are alike. Sometimes, when a boy or a girl gets someone else’s heart, their body reacts against it. They can take medicine that stops the reaction, but that makes the body much more vulnerable to all sorts of illnesses. The best replacement heart for someone like you is a heart made by your own genes—genes are the things inside you that make you you and not somebody else—and the only way to make one of those is to put some of your genes into a baby pig, long before it’s born. Then the pig grows a heart exactly like your heart, only healthy. This is the piglet that has your heart, Chloe.”
Chloe took her hand away, and looked at the piglet that had her heart. The piglet looked back. She knew that Daddy wanted her to ask another question, so that he could tell her more, but she didn’t know what to ask. This was the piglet that had her heart. What more was there to say? But there was more, and Daddy obviously wanted to make certain that she heard it all.
“The piglet has to take medicine to make it grow very quickly,” Daddy said, patiently. “All piglets take that sort of medicine anyway, because farmers want them to grow as quickly as possible so as to produce more meat, but your piglet has to take extra-special medicine, because it has your heart, and it has to be a strong heart. In not much more than a year the piglet has to grow a heart as big and strong as the hearts that boys and girls take eight or nine years to grow. It’s clever of the scientists to be able to do that—though not as clever as being able to make a pig with a human heart.”
“When will they do the operation?” Chloe asked. She hoped it would be a long time in the future. She didn’t like being in hospital.
“Next year,” Daddy told her. Chloe was relieved. Next year was a long way away.
“Will they put my heart into the piglet?” Chloe asked. She knew that the answer was no, but she asked anyway, anxious to reassure her father that she was taking an interest. He liked her to ask questions, even dumb ones—especially dumb ones, it sometimes seemed.
Daddy put a protective arm around her shoulder. “That wouldn’t be any use, Lovely,” he said. “They have to let the piglet die. But that’s what happens to pigs anyway; they’re killed for their meat as soon as they’re big enough. I want you to understand that, Chloe.”
She did understand. Pigs were meat or providers of human hearts; one way or another, some of their flesh became human flesh. What she didn’t understand was why Mummy got so tight-lipped about Daddy bringing her to see the piglet that had her heart—or, for that matter, everything else she got tight-lipped about. There was no point asking; it was the sort of question that simply wasn’t dumb enough to get an answer.
* * * *
Chloe told her best friend Alice about visiting the piglet that had her heart, and within a matter of hours it was all around the school. At home time some of the children chanted, “Chloe has a pig’s heart! Chloe has a pig’s heart!” It wasn’t that they didn’t understand which way round things were, it was just that they didn’t care enough about accuracy to let it spoil a good chant. A teacher who heard them got annoyed, the way teachers always did when the other children were nasty to Chloe, and reported the matter to her mother, who blamed it on her father.
“The next thing you know,” Mummy complained, “we’ll have animal rights nuts slashing the car tires.”
“I want her to understand,” her father said, obstinately. “I want her to know what’s happened to her. This won’t be the last time she has to face that kind of stupid knee-jerk reaction. I want her to be able to confront other people’s superstitious fears and idiotic jokes without getting upset. I want her to be secure in her own mind.”
“I know all about what you want,” Mummy retorted. “What does Chloe want? That’s what I care about.”
The one thing Chloe wanted, at that particular moment, was not to be asked what she wanted. She hated it when one or other of her parents asked her what she wanted when she knew that one of them wanted her to say one thing and the other wanted her to say something else. She hated to be forced into picking one of them and disappointing the other. Mostly, she kept quiet, even if that meant they got mad at her instead.
“She’s an intelligent girl,” Daddy said. “She’s capable of taking it all aboard. She needs to know what’s going on.”
“She doesn’t need to visit the damn piglet once a fortnight. She doesn’t need to be dragged along and forced to look it in the eye. She doesn’t have to be taken on tours of factory farms and abattoirs to understand where her dinner comes from, so why does she have to be taken to that horrible lab to watch the damn piglet doing its exercises?”
The damn piglet really did do exercises. Daddy had explained to her that it wasn’t like the sows out in the shed, which would have heart attacks if they over-exerted themselves. Her piglet had to keep fit. Her piglet had to be in tip-top condition, because it had her heart, and had to look after it for her, to make sure that it was a strong and healthy heart when they transplanted it.
“She’s interested,” Daddy insisted. “Aren’t you, darling? You like going to see the piglet, don’t you?”
“Like hell she does,” said Mummy. “You’d rather stay home, wouldn’t you? You’d far rather play with your Nintendo, wouldn’t you?”
Chloe didn’t answer. She concentrated hard on the TV screen, which was displaying a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Tom had just been squashed flat by a steamroller and was struggling to regain his shape.
“You see, Lovely,” Daddy said, putting his hand on her shoulder and trying to turn her away from the TV, “you’re part of something very important. A lot of people are like those silly kids at school—they let their gut-reactions get the better of