Something rotten (23 page)

“Right,” I said, clapping my hands, “I’ll be back at three. Don’t go out, and if anyone calls, get Hamlet or Emma to answer the door. Okay?”

“Certainly,” replied Melanie. “Don’t go out, don’t answer the door. Simple.”

“And no swinging on the curtains or lamp fixtures—they won’t stand it.”

“Are you saying I’m a bit large?”

“Not at all,” I replied hastily. “Things are just
different
in the real world. There is lots of fruit in the bowl and fresh bananas in the refrigerator. Okay?”

“No problemo. Have a nice day.”

I drove into town and, avoiding several newspapermen who were still eager to interview me, entered the SpecOps Building, which I noted had been freshly repainted since my last visit. It looked a bit more cheery in mauve, but not much.

“Agent Next?” said a young and extremely keen SO-14 agent in a well-starched black outfit, complete with Kevlar vest, combat boots, and highly visible weaponry.

“Yes?”

He saluted.

“My name is Major Drabb, SO-14. I understand you have been assigned to us to track down more of this pernicious Danish literature.”

He was so keen to fulfill his duties I felt chilled. To his credit he would be as enthusiastic helping flood victims; he was just following orders unquestioningly. Worse acts than destroying Danish literature had been perpetrated by men like this. Luckily, I was prepared.

“Good to see you, Major. I had a tip-off that this address might hold a few copies of the banned books.”

I passed him a scrap of paper and he read it eagerly.

“The Albert Schweitzer Memorial Library? We’ll be on it right away.”

And he saluted smartly once again, turned on his heel and was gone.

I made my way up to the LiteraTec office and found Bowden in the process of packing Karen Blixen’s various collections of stories into a cardboard box.

“Hi!” he said, tying up the box with string. “How are things with you?”

“Pretty good. I’m back at work.”

Bowden smiled, put down the scissors and string and shook my hand.

“That’s very good news indeed! Heard the latest? Daphne Farquitt has been added to the list of banned Danish writers.”

“But . . . Farquitt isn’t Danish!”

“Her father’s name was Farquittsen, so it’s Danish enough for Kaine and his idiots.”

It was an interesting development. Farquitt’s books were pretty dreadful but burning was still a step too far. Just.

“Have you found a way to get all these banned books out of England?” asked Bowden, running some tape across a box of
Out of Africa
s. “With Farquitt’s books and all the rest of the stuff that’s coming in, I think we’ll need closer to ten trucks.”

“It’s certainly on my mind,” I replied, having not done anything about it at all.

“Excellent! We’d like to take a convoy through as soon as you say the word. Now, what do you want me to brief you on first? The latest Capulet v. Montague drive-by shooting or which authors are next up for a random dope test?”

“Neither,” I replied. “Tell me
everything
you know about cloned Shakespeares.”

“We’ve had to put that on low priority. It’s intriguing to be sure, but ultimately pointless from a law-and-order point of view—anyone involved in their sequencing will be too dead or too old to go to trial.”

“It’s more of a BookWorld thing,” I replied, “but important, I promise.”

“Well, in
that
case,” began Bowden, who knew me too well to think I’d waste his time or my own, “we have three Shakespeares on the slab at the moment, all aged between fifty and sixty—put those Hans Christian Andersen books in that box, would you? If they
were
cloned, it was way back in the poorly regulated days of the thirties, when there was all sorts of nonsense going on, when people thought they could engineer Olympic runners with four legs, swimmers with real fins, that sort of thing. I’ve had a brief trawl through the records. The first confirmed WillClone surfaced in 1952 with the accidental shooting of a Mr. ‘Shakstpear’ in Ten-bury Wells. Then there’s the unexplained death of a Mr. ‘Shaxzpar’ in 1958, Mr. ‘Shagxtspar’ in 1962 and a Mr. ‘Shogtspore’ in 1969. There are others, too—”

“Any theories why?”

“I think,” said Bowden slowly, “that perhaps someone was trying to synthesize the great man so they could have him write some more great plays. Illegal and morally reprehensible, of course, but potentially of huge benefit to Shakespearean scholars everywhere. The lack of any
young
Shakespeares turning up makes me think this was an experiment long since abandoned.”

There was a pause as I mulled this over. Genetic cloning of entire humans was
strictly
forbidden—no commercial bioengineering company would dare try it, and yet no one but a large bioengineering company would have the facilities to undertake it. But if these Shakespeare clones had survived, chances are there were more. And with the real one long dead, his reengineered other self was the only way we could unravel
The Merry Wives of Elsinore
.

“Doesn’t this come under the jurisdiction of SO-13?” I said at last.

“Officially, yes,” conceded Bowden, “but SO-13 is as underfunded as we are, and Agent Stiggins is far too busy dealing with mammoth migrations and chimeras to have anything to do with cloned Elizabethan playwrights.”

Stiggins was the neanderthal head of the cloning police. Legally reengineered by Goliath, he was the ideal person to run SO-13.

“Have you spoken to him?” I asked.

“He’s a neanderthal,” Bowden replied. “They don’t talk at all unless it’s absolutely necessary. I’ve tried a couple of times, but he just stares at me in a funny way and eats live beetles from a paper bag—yuck.”

“He’ll talk to me,” I said. He would, too. I still owed him a favor for when he got me out of a jam with Flanker. “Let’s see if he’s about.”

I picked up the phone, consulted the internal directory and dialed a number.

I watched as Bowden boxed up more banned books. If he was caught, he’d be finished. The irony of a LiteraTec’s being jailed for protecting Farquitt’s
Canon of Love
. I liked him all the more for it. No one in the Literary Detectives would knowingly harm a book. We’d all resign before torching a single copy of anything.

“Right,” I said, replacing the phone. “His office said there was a chimera alert in the Brunel Centre—we should be able to find him there.”

“Whereabouts in the Brunel Centre?”

“If it’s a chimera alert, we just follow the screams.”

20.

ChimerasandNeanderthals

The neanderthal experiment
was conceived in order to create the euphemistically entitled “medical test vessels,” living creatures that were as close as possible to humans without actually
being
human within the context of the law. The experiment was an unparalleled success—and failure. The neanderthal was everything that could be hoped for. A close cousin, but not human, physiologically almost identical—and legally with fewer rights than a dormouse. But, sadly for Goliath, even the hardiest of medical technicians balked at experiments conducted upon intelligent and speaking entities, so the first batch of neanderthals were trained instead as “expendable combat units,” a project that was shelved as soon as the lack of aggressive instincts in the neanderthal was noted. They were subsequently released into the community as cheap labor and became a celebrated tax write-off. It was
Homo sapien
at his least sapient.

Gerhard von Squid,
Neanderthals—Back After a Short Absence

T
he Brunel Centre was packed, as usual. Busy shoppers moved from chain store to chain store, trying to find bargains in places whose identical goods were price-fixed by the head office several months in advance. It didn’t stop them trying, though.

“So why the interest in photocopied bards?” asked Bowden as we crossed the canal.

“We’ve got a crisis in the BookWorld.”

I outlined what was happening within the play formerly known as
Hamlet,
and he opened his eyes wide.

“Whoa!” he said after a pause. “And I thought
our
work was unusual!”

We didn’t have to wait long to find Mr. Stiggins. Within a few moments, there was a bloodcurdling cry of terror from a startled shopper. A second scream followed, and all of a sudden there was a mad rush of people moving away from the junction of Canal Walk and Bridge Street. We moved against the flow, stepping over discarded shopping and the odd shoe. The cause of the panic was soon evident. Rifling through a rubbish bin for a tasty snack was a bizarre hybrid of a creature—in SO-13 slang a chimera. The genetic revolution that gave us unlimited replacement organs and the power to create dodos and other extinctees from home cloning kits had a downside: perverse pastiches of animals who were borne not on the shoulders of evolution but by hobby gene splicers who didn’t know any better than to try to play God in the comfort of their own potting sheds.

As the crowds rapidly departed, Bowden and I stared at the strange creature that lurched and slavered as it rooted through the waste bin. It was about the size of a goat and had the rear legs of one, but not much else. The tail and the forelegs were lizard, the head almost feline. It had several tentacles, and it sucked noisily on a chip-soaked newspaper, the saliva from its toothless mouth dribbling copiously onto the pavement. In general, hybrid birds were the most common product of illegal gene splicing, as birds were closely enough related to one another to come out pretty well no matter how ham-fisted the amateur splicer. You could even create a passable dogfoxwolf or a domestic catleopard with no greater knowledge than a biology O level. No, it was the cross-class abominations that had led to the total ban on home cloning, the lizard-mammal switcheroos that really pushed the limits on what was socially acceptable. It didn’t stop the sport, just pushed it underground.

The creature rummaged with its one good arm in the bin, found the remains of a SmileyBurger, stared at it with its five eyes, then pushed it into its mouth. It then flopped to the ground and moved, half shuffling and half slithering to the next bin, all the while hissing like a cat and slapping its tentacles together.

“Oh, my God,” said Bowden, “it’s got a human arm!”

And so it had. It was when there were bits of recognizable human in them that chimeras were most repellant—a failed attempt to replace a deceased loved one, or hobby gene splicers trying to make themselves a son.

“Repulsive?” said a voice close at hand. “The creature . . . or the creator?” I turned to find myself looking at a squat, beetle-browed neanderthal in a pale suit with a homburg hat perched high on his domed head. I had met him several times before. This was Bartholomew Stiggins, head of SO-13 here in Wessex.

“Both,” I replied.

Stiggins nodded imperceptibly as a blue SO-13 Land Rover pulled up with a squealing of brakes. A uniformed officer jumped out and started to try to push us back.

Stiggins said, “We are together.”

The neanderthal took a few steps forward, and we joined him at the creature, which was close enough to touch.

“Reptile, goat, cat, human,” murmured the neanderthal, crouching down and staring intently at the creature as it ran a thin, pink, forked tongue across a crisps packet.

“The eyes look insectoid,” observed the SO-13 agent, dart gun in the crook of his arm.

“Too big. More like the eyes we found on the chimera up at the bandstand. You remember, the one that looked like a giant hamster?”

“Same splicer?”

The neanderthal shrugged. “Same eyes. You know how they like to trade.”

“We’ll take a sample and compare. Might lead us to them. That looks like a human arm, doesn’t it?”

The creature’s arm was red and mottled and no bigger than a child’s. To grasp anything, the fingers grabbed and twisted randomly until they found something and then clung on tight.

The cause of the panic was soon evident. Rifling through a rubbish bin for a tasty snack was a bizarre hybrid of a creature—in SO-13 slang a chimera.

“Gives it an age,” said Stiggins. “Perhaps five years.”

“Do you want to take it alive, sir?” asked the SO-13 agent, breaking the barrel of his gun and pausing. The neanderthal shook his head.

“No. Send him home.”

The agent inserted a dart and snapped the breech shut. He took careful aim and fired it into the creature. The chimera didn’t flinch—a fully functioning nervous system is a complicated piece of design and well beyond the capabilities of even the most gifted of amateur splicers—but it stopped trying to chew the bark off a tree and twitched several times before lying down and breathing more slowly. The neanderthal moved closer and held the creature’s grubby hand as its life ebbed away.

“Sometimes,” said the neanderthal softly, “sometimes the innocent must suffer.”

“Dennis!”
came a panicked voice from the gathering crowd, who had fallen silent as the creature’s breathing grew slower. “Dennis, Daddy’s worried! Where are you?”