Taylor Five (2 page)

“It was as big as a tank!” said Donny, laughing. “It nearly broke his ribs!”

“It was three meters long, at least. Probably
five
—”

(The lizard had grown bigger every time Dad told the tale.)

They went over to the river wharf, bought a green coconut from the coconut man’s stall and sat dangling their legs and passing it between them, sipping the cool, refreshing coconut milk through a straw. Yellow butterflies fluttered among the drifts of blue water hyacinth; someone was mending a boat, with pop music on the radio. Everything in the familiar scene was as it should be: the hot, bright modern towers and the little peasant food stalls clustering at their feet, the big brown swirling river with its old warehouses and new hotels; the rafts and motorboats plying to and fro. . . . But though Donny hadn’t even mentioned the secret, Tay felt strange. She felt like a painted cardboard figure, like a package made to look like a girl, with something hardly human inside it.

Like someone who didn’t belong in this quiet world; or any other place.

About five o’ clock the Land Rover turned up. Tay and Donny climbed in and they drove away, through the straggle of shantytown around the tropic city and into the thrilling dusk of the forest, just as the fruit bats came out for their evening prowl: flapping up out of the sunset like an army of vampires.

The place that Tay and Donny called home was a broad forest clearing, surrounded by the orangutan reserve, where no human settlement was allowed. Donny and Tay and their Mum and Dad lived in the main buildings, which were set around an open square. Their house was built like a Dyak longhouse, raised on wooden pillars above the ground, with a high-ridged roof and a shady verandah running along the front. The labs, the refuge offices and the telecoms suite were on the square too. The other staff had cottages of their own, scattered among flower beds, stands of bamboo and blossoming shade trees. In the open space in the middle of the square there were canopied swinging chairs, a table and benches; a skittle run and a telescope. People gathered there in the cool evenings to eat together, to play games or talk; or to watch a movie (projected onto a whitewashed wall of the office block).

There were twelve or fifteen baby apes and “children” at any time, besides the “adolescents,” who were nearly independent but still coming to the feeding stations. Every one of the young orphans had an individual human carer. There were also a research team, a veterinary team, technicians and support staff; and there were usually a couple of visiting scientists, who came from all over the world to work here at the Lifeforce Refuge and observe the great red apes. Most of the carers were also students. Lucia was one of these: she was a zoology graduate from the Philippines. It was a close-knit little international village of about thirty or forty people in which Donny and Tay were the only human children.

When the Land Rover reached home around ten o’ clock at night, Dad was at the gates in the perimeter fence to greet them. Mum was back from Halfway Camp, and the central square was ablaze with lights. Everyone seemed to be there, from Minah the cook to the very shy visiting German zoologist who hardly spoke (he got on better with animals than with humans). Donny put on his sunglasses, struck a celebrity pose and said, “Please, please, no autographs.” The grown-ups laughed and said they weren’t interested in
him,
they were here for the mail drop! When you live in the wilds, no matter how good your communication system is, books and letters and papers are like gold dust. The big parcel of newspapers and journals and disks was pulled out of its bag, with cheers and whoops, and tumbled on the communal table—

There on the front of the Singapore
Straits Times
was the story, in banner headlines.

BIOTECH GIANT LIFEFORCE ANNOUNCES HUMAN CLONES!

THEY’RE TEENAGERS ALREADY!
THEY ARE LIVING AMONG US!

Tay froze. She tried to stop her face from showing anything, but she couldn’t help it.

Donny took off his sunglasses and said, “Oh, sorry, Tay. I didn’t think.”

“What’s the problem?” said Tay. “I’m famous, that’s all. Aren’t I lucky.”

She blundered out of the lighted square, hurried along the dark verandah and shut herself in her room.

Mum came along later, and so did someone else who knocked and went away—probably Donny. But she pretended she was asleep, and wouldn’t answer them.

Morning came early to the clearing. Before six
A.M.
the gibbons in the bamboo stand outside Tay’s bedroom window began hooting and singing to greet the new day. She lay listening to them, the way she did every morning: remembering that Donny was home, and wondering why she didn’t feel happy. Then it came back to her.

She got up, showered and went along to the Walkers’ family kitchen, feeling ashamed of her behavior last night. Donny was eating breakfast with Mum and Dad. They all looked at her uneasily and said “Hello, Tay,” “Good morning Tay,” in subdued voices. Tay fetched herself a glass of juice and a sweet roll from the fridge (all perishable food had to be kept in the fridge, to protect it from the ants).

“How is Harimau?” she said casually. “I forgot to ask.”

“He’s fine,” said Mum. “Just a touch of diarrhea. No sign of worms, but he might have an amebic parasite. I have a sample to analyze—”

“
Mum
,” protested Donny. “Do you mind. I’m eating.”

“You’d better get used to it,” said Dad. “City slicker. Diarrhea and worms is all we talk about here, except for tropical ulcers—” He grinned at Tay, who didn’t grin back.

“What are you two going to do today?” Mum asked hopefully. “First day of the holidays, I bet you have something planned for him, Tay, don’t you?”

“No. I have homework to finish,” said Tay. “Even famous freaks have homework.”

She rinsed her glass and plate, and walked out.

She went to the schoolroom. Until Donny started at his boarding school, they’d both done their lessons here, in this airy, high-ceilinged room with the polished wooden floor and the tall cupboards full of books, art materials and science equipment. No expense spared, she thought bitterly, looking at all the wealth. It’s as if I was dying.

She sat down at her computer, chin on her hands.

She’d been seven when Mum and Dad told her the truth about herself. Not the whole truth, of course: she wouldn’t have been able to understand. . . . They’d told her that she was a test-tube baby, and explained what that meant. Though she’d come out of Mummy’s tummy, the little egg that had turned into Tay had come from somebody else—and that somebody else was Mummy and Daddy’s best friend, Pam Taylor. Pam couldn’t have babies of her own, and neither could Mummy (that was what they’d thought at the time). So they’d decided to have Tay, each of them doing the part of having-a-baby that they could do. . . . Tay hadn’t been too upset. She liked Pam very much. As long as she was still Mummy and Daddy’s little girl, and Donny was still her brother, she didn’t mind if Pam was sort of her second mum. But that had been seven years ago, half her lifetime—

Tay and Donny Walker were Lifeforce kids. Their parents were wildlife wardens now, but they’d worked for the biotech company as scientists before that. Tay had never been frightened by the idea that she had “come out of a test tube.” It had never struck her as odd that she didn’t go to school either. She much preferred working at home and sharing Mum and Dad’s adventures. Before Borneo there’d been a post in Geneva. Before Geneva there’d been Canada: she’d never known any other way of life. Her classmates in the online International School were dead impressed that she had Pam for a godmother (they didn’t know about the test-tube baby part: it was none of their business), because Dr. Pam Taylor was the head of Lifeforce’s Conservation Projects and a famous scientist: sometimes you saw her on TV. But to Tay, having Pam for a grown-up friend was just normal life. It wasn’t normal that she had to give blood and tissue samples every month, to be sent off to the biotech labs: but it was something Tay’d always had to do. They’d told her it was nothing bad, it was because she was a “special sort of test-tube baby” and Lifeforce wanted to monitor her development. It didn’t hurt much (although a few times a year the tissue sampling was quite painful); and she’d just accepted it.

By the time she was twelve, she had known exactly what a test-tube baby was, what it meant to say someone was your biological mother and someone else was your genetic mother; and what
surrogacy
meant. . . . Sometimes she’d lain awake at night, wondering about those blood and tissue samples and wishing Mum and Dad would
tell
her if she had cancer or something. Sometimes she’d brooded about being Pam’s “sort of” baby. A woman’s egg cell has to be fertilized by a man’s sperm. Who had her father been? Was it her own dad who had provided the sperm? Or someone else, some stranger? And why did Pam decide to have a test-tube baby and then let the surrogate mother keep the child? Had she decided a child would cramp her famous-scientist lifestyle? But Tay, unlike Donny, tended to keep quiet about things that upset her or frightened her. She wanted to be a wildlife scientist like her mum and dad and work somewhere like the refuge; or maybe do marine conservation biology like Pam. That was her ambition, and that was what was important. When Mum and Dad had tried to talk to her about where she had come from, she had always said she thought she knew enough.

Maybe she’d guessed, deep down, that the things they wanted to say would destroy her peace of mind.

Then Mum and Dad had decided that Donny had to go away to school. He hadn’t been doing very well. Tay was in top sets for everything in the online International School, in which they were both enrolled, but Donny was struggling. He needed a different kind of education. Tay had felt very sorry for him, having to leave the forest and go and live with strangers.

But it was Tay who was the stranger.

A year and a half ago, soon after Donny had left for his first term at the new school, Pam Taylor had come to the refuge, and Pam and Mum and Dad had told Tay the real truth. She was a very special kind of test-tube baby. She had no biological father.

In vitro fertilization means that eggs are gathered from the woman’s ovaries and mixed with the man’s sperm in a dish in the laboratory.
In vitro
is a Latin term meaning “in glass.” The process usually happens in a dish, but people say “test-tube baby,” maybe because they feel that sounds more scientific. Then the embryo is implanted in the mother’s womb and grows there. But a normal in vitro baby has two parents. Tay was different. Lifeforce scientists had taken one of Mary Walker’s egg cells and replaced the nucleus (the package where the cell’s DNA is stored) with the nucleus from one of Pam Taylor’s ordinary body cells (a bone marrow cell, in fact). Then they’d treated this egg cell so it would behave as if it had been fertilized. Tay was not just Pam’s daughter. She was genetically
the same person
as Pam Taylor.

Lifeforce had created human clones years before anyone had believed it was possible.

There were four other teenagers like Tay, with four different gene parents, all of them created at the same time. All of them were Lifeforce kids. Their gene parents and their surrogate families were part of the Lifeforce company, like everyone else involved with the clone project. The existence of the clones had been kept secret. Now that they were healthy teenagers and the success of the experiment was beyond doubt, the company thought it was time to break the silence.

Tay’s identity would be protected. The company would prove their amazing claim by scientific means: by letting other scientists examine tissue samples from clones and gene parents. Tay’s picture wouldn’t be in the papers, and she wouldn’t have to appear on TV. She might never even know the names of the other four clones. But Mum and Dad and Pam had thought she ought to know the truth—before the rest of the world found out.

Tay had been stunned, and bewildered, but she’d been determined not to get upset. She felt like the same person she’d always been: except now she had an explanation for the blood tests and tissue samples, so she didn’t have to worry about having cancer. Mum and Dad and Pam had been puzzled but relieved because Tay was so calm. She’d been secretly very proud that she’d been able to take this strange bombshell so well. She’d been a Lifeforce kid all her life, she
knew
about the miracles of modern biotech. She’d refused to feel sorry for herself, or weirded out. She’d convinced Mum and Dad, and everyone, that she was fine.