Designer Genes. Brian Stableford
allowed to show their knees, who couldn’t look at a pig—any pig—and think: there might be a little bit of me in that pig.
What would happen, she wondered, if one of the girls in the headscarves who weren’t allowed to eat any kind of pig-meat got born with a bad heart? They’d probably have to grow her heart inside a lamb—which was a pity, in a way, given that lambs were so cute. Pigs were more human: smarter, less woolly, not in nursery rhymes.
Chloe was a little pig, she thought. It had a human heart. But when she ran through the readily-available rhymes for “heart” it seemed better not to carry on.
Do I really want to be a miracle of modern science? she wondered, and answered, Why the hell not, for Christ’s sake? She liked swearing, although she never did it aloud. She was a good girl, even if she did have a pig’s heart.
She wondered if Mummy and Daddy were going to get divorced, and if so who would get custody of her. She decided, eventually, that she didn’t really mind, as long as they didn’t make her decide.
Afterwards, she threw her doll out of the bed, because she was too old for dolls now that she had a new heart. Then she decided that it might be better to play for Millwall than Queen’s Park Rangers, if it would make men in white coats sit up and take notice. Then she thought about the pig again: the other Chloe; the creature who had died for her sake, like some kind of hero in a TV show; the animal who had grown up far too quickly so that it could make her a new heart.
When I grow up, she thought, before she went to sleep, I’m going to be a genetic engineer. I’ll keep headless chickens and grow potatoes the size of bungalows, and I’ll have trees that grow hearts and brains instead of apples and pears, and I’ll make my husband have the children and I’ll never never never ask them what they want, unless I want to know.
THE INVISIBLE WORM
Rick first noticed the sick rose when he went to lift Steven for his morning feed, but he didn’t pay any particular attention to it because his mind was on other things—mainly Steven’s voice. For one so young, Steven had a lusty pair of lungs, and when he exercised them Rick wasted no time in responding. The sound went through him like a knife.
Rick sometimes wondered whether everyone might have some built-in, unique and secret sensory key, which, when turned, would plunge him into a private Hell of unparalleled excruciation. If so, he thought, some horribly unkind whim of chance had surely given Steven the uncanny knack of hitting it spot on.
The silence that fell once he had established the baby in the feeding-nook was a blessed relief, but the relief was—as usual—tinged with guilt. Now, when Rick looked down at the baby, sucking vigorously away at the teat, he was able to feel conventionally loving. It was only when Steven cried.…
He had not expected that having a baby in the house would be so disturbing, so frequently painful. He knew perfectly well how lucky and how privileged the household was—he and his five co-parents had waited nearly ten years to come through the waiting-list after first submitting their application for a license—and he was sure that he loved Steven as much as any co-father could, but he had never imagined that being carer-of-the-week could be so stressful, so exhausting, and so nerve-wracking.
The problem, he supposed, was that he had never been around babies much. Nobody had, these days. Even as a baby you didn’t get to be around babies much, no matter how much effort your co-parents put into the awkward business of arranging playtimes.
Rick did not dare to admit the extent of his confusion and difficulty to his five co-parents—not because they would not understand, but rather because they would insist on understanding, at great and wearisome length. They would schedule a fortnight of evening meetings so that they could all discuss the psychological roots of existential unease and the hazards of bonding failure, and spend hours lamenting the fact that the emotional underside of human nature had been shaped in the long-gone days when it was usual for people to be biologically related to the children they reared. He preferred to suffer their unthinking impatience; one could only take so much five-handed moral support.
It was in order to subvert his vague annoyance with himself that Rick went back to inspect the imperfect rose. He had to make an effort to pull himself together before he could examine it properly. He couldn’t remember which of his co-parents had pressed so hard for pink decor in the nursery, but it certainly hadn’t been him; he didn’t like wallflowers and he thought that pink roses were terminally cute.
The rose didn’t look well at all; its pink petals were extensively mottled with ochreous yellow. Rick was tempted to pluck the flower immediately and hurl it into the cloaca to which all the rest of the nursery’s wastes were consigned. Another would grow to take its place, in time. He reached out to do it, but then he hesitated. He realized belatedly that the sickening of the rose might conceivably be a symptom of something serious. The nursery was supposed to be free of all non-functional biota, even kinds that were harmless to everything except wallflowers.
Rick studied the petals again, more carefully. Then he scanned the neighboring corollas. They too were beginning to show early signs of discoloration.
“Oh pollution,” he murmured. “Why me?” Carer-of-the-week was nominally in charge of the house as well as the baby, but that was usually a sinecure because nothing ever went wrong with the house.
There was a screen set into the rosewood half a meter to the left of the yellowing rose, and Rick punched in the code for the house’s cellular troubleshooting program. He entered the location codes, and watched the screen, hoping fervently that no human action would be necessary in facilitating treatment of the trouble-spot.
But the screen flashed up: ALL CLEAR.
“How can it be all clear, moron?” he asked, out loud. “It’s supposed to be an eternal bloom, immortal unless picked.”
Unfortunately, the cellular troubleshooter was a low-grade system. As artificial intelligences went, it really was a moron. Rick pressed RETRY, but he knew it wouldn’t get him anywhere. The message stubbornly held its centre-screen ground.
Across the room, Steven let go of the teat and began to exercise his lungs again. He was a light but frequent feeder, and he tended to mop up a lot of air when he ate. The feeding-nook was a clever piece of design, but it wasn’t versatile enough to take care of every need.
Rick hurried over to pick Steven up, and hoisted the naked baby high on to his left shoulder. Then he began walking round and round the cradle, rubbing Steven’s back gently and rhythmically. Inevitably, Steven could not be content with a delicate burp. He brought a few milliliters of milk back with the air, and dribbled it down the back of Rick’s shirt. Rick stripped off the shirt and dropped it into the laundry-port, trying hard not to curse the child.
The next item on Steven’s schedule was his morning bath. He was, of course, clean already—the cradle was fully-equipped for waste-disposal—but the co-parents knew from their assiduous studies how vital it was to maintain a child’s water-familiarity. The household soviet had designed the carer’s routines with that in mind. The baby-bath, like the cradle, was an outgrowth of the nursery wallwood, but it normally stood empty for hygiene’s sake. Rick activated the tear-ducts, and stood cuddling Steven while he waited for it to fill up. Steven was no longer wailing, and there was nothing to distract Rick’s attention from the gentle trickle of water.
Because the bath was dark brown, Rick did not immediately observe that anything was amiss. It wasn’t until there were eight or ten centimeters of liquid in the shallow bowl that he realized that the water was discolored. He dipped his hand in and brought out a little of the liquid, cupped in the palm. It was faintly straw-colored, and it had an odd feel.
He knew then that the problem was serious. A sickly wallflower was one thing, but an unidentified substance in the baby-bath was something else: it was a naked threat to the well-being of the household’s most precious member.
The household had no in-living biotechnician. Three of the co-parents worked in construction and deconstruction, and therefore knew something about house-systems, but Don and Nicola were away on-site somewhere in South