Bull Running For Girlsl (24 page)

Frieda’s eyes began to grow heavy; she felt dizzy and struggled to make sense of what was happening
—
suddenly she found herself seated outside the yurt. It was daylight and the grass was fresh and damp. In the distance Frieda could see someone on horseback riding towards her at great speed. A short distance from her a woman pulled the horse up abruptly by its gilt harness and swung out of the saddle. Her soft boots scraped the wet grass. She was a tall woman and wore a deep red dress that touched the ground. Frieda noted that she had reddish-brown hair, blue eyes, and wore a tall, woollen headdress, her bare arms covered in strange tattoos of animals and insects. As she turned, Frieda saw that on the woman’s left shoulder was the design of an animal whose horns tapered into flowers. She seemed to be in her early thirties, of European appearance and held her head high with an air of importance.

The strange woman smiled. “I am the shamaness, the storyteller of the Loulan.”

Frieda was there
—
with the Loulan woman who had been dead for four thousand years. The shamaness spoke again to Frieda, but this time no sound came from her mouth. As darkness descended around them Frieda could hear two men shouting. She saw the two brothers and then one fell with the other standing over him. Frieda bent over the man on the ground and looked into the eyes of Erken. He then, to her surprise, disappeared. She looked to the shamaness and then at the clay pot at her own feet. Hesitant at first, Frieda lifted the pot lid. She saw the blond hair, covered with dark matted blood and recoiled. Attempting to get to her feet she knocked the pot over and the head spilled out, a dark red sludge following it. It was the head of Erken.

Frieda screamed and placed her hands over her face. The shamaness knelt down beside her, put the head back inside the pot, picked it up and took Frieda gently by the hand to lead her back inside the yurt. As the mother took the pot from the shamaness, Frieda saw the great sadness in Aianat’s eyes and a strange look passed between the two.

In the time following her stay with Aianat, Frieda thought about her own future. She decided not to return to the city of her birth
—
she was done with Salford for a time
—
but would alternate between staying with Aianat in the yurt above Tian Chi to learn more about her ways and also get occasional work in the museum at Urumchi. She hoped there would be a place for her there.

Some weeks later, in the museum, she was showing English tourists a mummy that was being carefully put back in its case after restoration work.

“Here we have Cherchen Man. You will note the Caucasian features, light brown hair, and his height. Even in death the body is in reasonable condition. Near where we found him in the burial site there were structures that the Chinese archaeologists find puzzling
—
standing stones, Celtic figures, and odd icons of unusual females. Also, one of the mummies was found wearing a pointed conical hat.”

As Frieda spoke she sensed Galyma struggling to wake. He could see little through dried up eyes. She stared down at him and smiled before the curators placed the glass cover over his body.

Galyma could just see out of the corner of his eye the mummified claw of his right hand. He tried to move his limbs, but they were frozen. There was nothing but an eternity of tortured memory ahead of him. Frieda knew this
—
she wondered how often he’d try to scream.

“I have almost achieved perfection you see, of a divine creature that is pure, harmonious, absolutely incapable of any malice. And if in my tinkering I have fallen short of the human form by the snout, claw or hoof, it really is of no great importance. I am closer than you could possibly imagine sir.”
From
The Island of Dr Moreau
by kind permission of A. P. Watt, Ltd., on behalf of The Literary Executors of the Estate of H. G. Wells.

Mack looked bad, really bad, but then he was dead. Whoever had done his make-up had never been make-up artist to the stars. Far from it; he didn’t suit that shade of lipstick. I had adored Mack but he had never let me get too close. It was odd that since his death the obsession that brought me to biology brought me now to him. I had my eye on Mack’s DNA. I was considering the possibilities at his funeral—irreverent or what?—I just couldn’t help myself. One minute I was remembering the second biggest wave we rode together and then the big one, that had traded-in his surfboard for a coffin lid.

I considered the second of my two projects. Mack’s DNA was too good to let go—far too good. He was much too beautiful, even in death, to go to waste.

There was no one there in front of me except the corpse; the funeral director had let me in for a private viewing. Perhaps he thought I was Mack’s girl. I had to get on with it before anyone else could see. I needed hair, fingernail or finger if I could get it. No—someone would notice that. His family was too sharp. DNA from inside his mouth. No—I would probably break his jaw. A few days since his death, surely something would be usable. He had long hair. I would need twenty strands with follicles still attached, or perhaps I could use the flesh from behind the ear lobe. I would have to hurry as someone might come in. I felt like a body snatcher but, after all, Mack wasn’t going to need any of himself—anymore.

I opened my white, snowdrop leather bag, took out a scalpel, yanked at a lock of hair to cut into the skin then rearranged his long hair a little. I was anxious about being discovered and in my carelessness I cut my own finger, and sucked at it whilst fumbling with the clasp of my bag. The skin, with hair attached, was in that same hand and I shivered when I realised what I was doing. Blood dripped onto the white leather.

Clutching my bag, which now contained a piece of Mack, I attended the service and sat behind his mother. I felt really bad about what I had done. His mother was crying and her face was puffy and pale. Mack’s father fared little better, for it looked as if he was trying to keep his emotions under control and the effort was killing him. I left before the end, before they sang
All Things Bright and Beautiful
. I had always hated that hymn. Christ! I was a scientist but funerals made my flesh crawl.

I was now working on three projects. My main line of research was concerned with residual DNA. I experimented with pig DNA and there was also my little fertility programme. It was old-hat to grow a pig’s ear. I was a little more adventurous and wanted to see if I could grow a wing from bone marrow stem cells onto bioabsorbable polymers. I never got tired of trying to grow them into different shapes and coming up with ever more complex designs. Last time they came out like bat’s wings and this time I was aiming for a structure of wing like the extinct, gliding reptile, the pterosaur. That would take more time. Some experts said that birds evolved from little feathered dinosaurs but I had always quite liked the hypothesis that birds diverged from reptiles before dinosaurs, and that mammals had evolved from reptiles with the propensity for genetic change that could lead to flight. A whole new take on pigs can fly—perhaps they could, given the right wings, hollow bones and a more developed muscle structure.

My name is Stella Kiefer, B.S.C., Biosciences at Edinburgh University. Alumnus of the year 2025. Commanding cellular structures and messing about with the genome, human and otherwise. Edinburgh. Famous for its medical school, the ghost of Dirty Mary, and the selling of bodies in Surgeon’s Square.

For the next two years I worked hard on all my projects and my obsession with Mack’s DNA grew. I never so much as looked at another man. I just wasn’t interested in anything but my work. Only on New Year’s Eve 2027 did I celebrate with my colleagues.

We went to La Mancha, the Spanish restaurant just off Fifth Avenue, not far from the Rockefeller Plaza and the beautiful statue of Prometheus I had always liked. Prometheus—who gave mankind fire and as a punishment was chained to a crag in the Caucasus Mountains. Every morning an eagle would devour his liver and every night it would grow back again to repeat the cycle the next day. I’m good at growing things too.

And grow things I did, way beyond my guidelines, for I had been playing about with more than pig’s wings. I decided I wanted Mack’s child, and so combined my DNA with his. I followed an immaculate methodology and the whole process had been fairly easy. I called in a few favours (okay, I had worked outside the law once or twice but I couldn’t see the problem with that), and the embryo settled down nicely within my womb.

I had my own midwife for a home delivery. It was just fine. Everything ran according to plan. I had the latest pain blockers and thought how lucky I was to live in the decade I did.

The five-hour labour was easy and I caught up with one film I had been dying to watch for ages, a remake of
The Island of Doctor Moreau
. At the end of the film baby practically shot out of me into the midwife’s hands. Her face turned pale when she examined him and she quickly wrapped him in a pretty cerise blanket, handing him to me just before the afterbirth—spilled out.

I passed an hour holding the perfect, delicate pink baby in my arms, trying hard to think of a suitable name. It was then that it struck me that I should examine him myself. I laid him on his back in my lap, counted his fingers and toes and then examined his face closely to see if he had a harelip. No problems there. Carefully I turned him onto his front and then my stomach churned as the realisation hit me that my methodology had not been perfect after all. This beautiful boy, this sum total of my involvement with Mack, had a tail. It was so astonishingly assimilated into his lower back. It was then that the midwife pointed out that he had two tiny lumps, one under each shoulder blade.

Over the next few months my son seemed to grow at the same rate as any other baby. His piggy tail would be sorted out just after his first birthday. Helen, the midwife who delivered him, had become a good friend. In fact she had become his nanny, whilst I brought home the bacon—if you’ll forgive the pun. It was Helen who, on numerous occasions, had to be stopped from calling him Piglet and I was rather miffed with her when I found her reading him the story of “The Three Little Pigs”—six times in a row to his human squeals of delight. I let these small annoyances go by with little more than a look and a word aside.

The first five years were great, and Ricky, as I called him, was having a very happy childhood. He had birthday parties and was friends with the other children of the staff at Mount Joy Research Laboratory where I worked. The New England air suited us all fine and we were very content there.

It was just after Ricky’s fifth birthday that things started to go wrong. The small lumps under each shoulder blade started to grow larger and all investigations into what they were resulted in a brick wall. There seemed to be some sort of shell just beneath his skin, impervious to X– ray, MRI, or any modern method of examination. I needed time to think and the pressure of everyday work was getting to me. Helen was devoted to Ricky and agreed to my plan. The search was on to find some place to go; I needed to keep my son away from prying eyes in case he began to show any other signs of genetic diversity.

I remembered the film,
The Island of Dr Moreau
and accepted a position as a researcher in a leper colony. Leprosy was one of the diseases that still had not been cured. In the last century breakthroughs in science had even cured the dapsone-resistant strain but the disease had mutated further and now a cure seemed as far away as ever. I applied and received a letter confirming my post on the research into the new strain of leprosy. The leper colony was on Saint Elver’s Island on the banks of the Amazon.

The next five years were not so happy; Ricky started asking me all sorts of questions that I could not answer. The humps on his back grew larger. The leper colony was now his home. He did not remember the cool wind of a New England fall where the leaves cascaded into a hundred different shades of red, russet and brown. The malaria-ridden Amazon was the only home he would remember.

A boy called Neme, who had leprosy, became Ricky’s sole playmate. It was hard not to feel sorry for him, a young boy who should have grown up to be very handsome. Even with treatment he would soon go into decline like all the rest. Neme clung on to some hope that a cure might yet be found in time for him. Ricky was ten, Neme sixteen. What sorrow they would face if they had to go into the outside world now.

I spent hours going over the methodology that had brought Ricky into the world. I chastised myself that my protocols had been flawed. Day after day, I experimented with the pig DNA, alongside the procedures on the leprosy virus to try to understand both. Endless experimentation and disappointment, until the day came when Helen came crying into the laboratory bringing the two boys with her.

Ricky was in terrible pain. He stumbled in—collapsed into a heap, grasped at his back and screamed in agony. I had to steady my hand. It was trembling so much as I cut away his clothes and tried to stop the bleeding. The skin began ripping away from his back and the shell—the shell was cracking.

I had been dreading this. As the casing cracked first at one side and then the other, a huge mass of pink skin began to unfold and rise far above his shoulders. In an instant another appeared. Ricky stopped sobbing and tried to see over his shoulder at what had caused him so much pain. His words still echo in my ears.

“Mother, what have you done?”

He knew it was my fault years before I had the courage to explain. He had his father’s good looks, my need for science and the wings of a—well, a pig. Or, what a pig’s wings would look like if they had any.