The Golden Fleece (17 page)

“I don’t think so,” Gerda said. “Mind you, there’s time yet—they’re both retired from the chamber now, so they must be desperate for something to fill in time.”

“Perhaps we should have invited them along—maybe fixed them up?” Kay said, obviously not meaning it. The fact that he now felt able to say something that he blatantly didn’t mean seemed to Gerda to be progress. He couldn’t meet her stare, though, even though an unbiased observer glancing at their table would have taken him for the stronger and younger of the two. They no longer looked uncannily alike, or even remotely similar.

“Perhaps we should have invited your ex-wife,” Gerda countered, “or your son, at least.”

“I haven’t even let on that we’re meeting,” Kay confessed. “Lothar would consider it to be consorting with the enemy, cherishing the blade that stabbed me in the back.”

“And Magda too?” Gerda queried.

“Oh no—she never considered you an enemy or a threat. She always understood our friendship ... at least until you started your great crusade. Like you, she always took the trouble to point out that I had made billions out of neo-cycads, even if I hadn’t fully understood what the cost of the profits would be. She was delighted to take her share—if she were here, she’d be gladly proposing toasts in your honor.”

“For her,” Gerda said, casually, “it was only a matter of love, not war. She must have had a markedly different notion of what was fair—even if her blonde hair was only cosmetic.”

“It’s red now,” Kay told her. “Hot colors are back in fashion, thanks to you. Mind you, silver doesn’t look too bad on you—although you might want to think of having some skin-work done.” Kay’s own face and forehead, needless to say, had not a wrinkle in sight.

“I’m young at heart,” Gerda assured him. “Just like the New New New New World. We are up to four now, aren’t we?”

“Alas, yes,” he said—and then paused, apparently for reflection. Eventually, he went on: “You know, setting all joking and resentment aside, I believe that you and I really might have made a difference, as individuals. If you had only sided with me instead of reacting against me, it really might have been the salvation of the Gaian cause instead of its damnation. If only I had been able to keep you with me, instead of somehow contriving, unknowingly and unwillingly, to turn you against me....”

Gerda didn’t bother to point out that his manner of framing the argument was outrageously egocentric. Instead, she said: “No, Kay, we couldn’t have made that sort of difference. We couldn’t have made much more of a difference even if you’d sided with me instead of relentlessly following the herd. Gaia was always gong to lose the war, no matter how many successful defensive actions her myrmidons completed. The neo-cycads were always bound to carry the day. The Heavy Metal brigade, the Siberian Oligarchs, and the Asian Developers were always bound to end up in bed together, running the show. The only difference I made, and the only difference I was ever capable of making, was to warm things up a little, and hurry them along.”

“You must have felt rather lonely doing it,” Kay observed, retreating into pensive reflection. “It’s still different for a woman, isn’t it? Your mother managed to have it all, though, at least until that stupid accident. Maybe you felt that no one could ever quite live up to the memory of your father.”

“He was dead before I learned to talk,” Gerda said. “I never knew him.”

“My mother’s still alive, but I’ve hardly ever exchanged two words with her. To me, she’s just a sequence of pictures—but that didn’t stop me marrying Magda.”

“No,” Gerda agreed. “It didn’t.” And it was then, oddly enough, rather than at any of the more weighty or awkward moments in the conversation, that Gerda suddenly realized that her love for Kay had cooled somewhat while she had thrown her heart and soul into her cause, and that its once-fiery passion had been transformed by time and tide into something mellower and more even-tempered. It was still most definitely there, and still unfulfilled, but it no longer felt like a dagger of glass rudely jammed into her beating heart. By the same token, she no longer hated Gaia the Snow Queen quite as much as she had before. Their conflict had, after all, merely been a difference of opinion.

“It says something for us, I suppose,” Kay observed, glumly, as he raised his wine-glass in a vaguely celebratory gesture, “that we can still be friends, in spite of everything. The fact that, no matter who’s won and who’s lost, and no matter what becomes of the world now it’s all turned upside-down, we can still hold on to something of what we had when we were six years old says something good and precious not just about us but about the world. I can still think of you as my twin sister, my inevitable counterpart.”

“The world was upside-down before, my love,” Gerda told him, softly. “From now on, it’ll be able to right itself, slowly but surely. The deadly CC is no longer deadly—or, as they say here in dear old England, all’s now well at the beloved Cricket Club.”

“The trouble with you, darling,” Kay replied, with a contrived sigh that was as insincere as it was insulting, “is that you never could take anything seriously.”

<>

~ * ~

ALFONSO THE WISE

Alfonso the Wise was king of Castile in the thirteenth century. He is now entirely forgotten but for one attributed remark. “Had I been present at the Creation,” he is reputed to have said, “I would have offered some useful advice as to the better arrangement of the universe.” It is, of course, mere coincidence that the man who discovered meta-DNA was also called Alfonso—and the coincidence is partly spoiled by the fact that it was his surname rather than his given name.

Professor Alfonso had always felt that life had made a slight mistake in selecting DNA as the carrier of its genetic code. DNA is, after all, highly unstable under physiological conditions. As long-chain molecules go, it lacks resilience; given half a chance it is apt to denature. He realized, of course, that there were advantages to this condition as well as disadvantages. The readiness of DNA to throw a chemical wobbly is, in essence, the root of all mutation, and hence of evolution by natural selection. Anyhow, the ability of DNA to form a double-helix and to serve as a mount for long strings of base-codons was what had selected it out to be the parent of all life as we know it; the more stable natural molecules whose names were legion had no such faculty, and had always been non-starters. All things considered. Creation had done what it could, and hadn’t made such a bad job of it.

It had, after all, produced Professor Alfonso.

Alfonso reasoned, however, that now that humans had invented genetic engineering, Creation no longer needed a source of random mutations. That job could be taken over by careful planners who could produce useful innovations deliberately, without bothering to go through all the messy cut and thrust of natural selection. By the same token, he figured, it ought to be possible to design a molecule of which Creation had never dreamed, which would combine DNA’s codon-carrying ability with a bit more backbone.

As soon as organic molecule design program became sufficiently sophisticated, Alfonso and his desktop supercomputer were on the job—and such was the brilliance of their partnership that they came up with a brand new super-tough coding-molecule in a matter of months.

Out of respect for the excellent job that the old model had done during the previous four billion years, Alfonso called his new coding-molecule meta-DNA, although it wasn’t a particularly close relative, chemically speaking. Its greatest asset was that its simplest version retained the same ACGT genetic code that was already built into DNA, which meant that it could actually copy all the codes already in existence in order to build on them further. It was rather like designing an update for a word-processing program, so that it could process all existing documents but also incorporated lots of extra features that could be exploited in further edits.

Professor Alfonso hoped that he might be able to sell his new product as a longevity serum. He reasoned that the one intractable and untreatable aspect of the aging process was the accumulation of somatic mutations and copying errors in DNA. Meta-DNA was much more resilient, and it had the useful ability to colonize the cells of a mature organism one by one, replacing the obsolete programming without any loss of routine function. Because meta-DNA was self-replicating, a single injection would suffice to set in train the rebuilding of any existing organism as a souped-up meta-DNA version of its former self.

As things turned out, of course, Professor Alfonso didn’t make any money out of his immortality serum, because it was far too good at its job. Meta-DNA didn’t stop with single individuals; it transformed all their passenger bacteria too, and thus became highly infectious. It only required the transformation of a single individual to ensure the eventual transformation of every living organism on Earth.

As soon as Professor Alfonso put his brainchild to the test on a single laboratory rat, the die was cast. DNA was on the way out and meta-DNA was on the way in, permanently.

Alfonso was right about meta-DNA ensuring longevity; it succeeded in doing that without any problem at all. Unfortunately, he had not given overmuch attention to the question of what it might do to the physiological apparatus of reproduction— specifically, to the process of meiosis, by means of which fusing gametes produced whole new genomes. Meta-DNA was far too stable to go in for that kind of molecular balletics, so every organism that took it aboard became irredeemably sterile.

In a way, the sterility was convenient, for the long-lived organisms that were inheriting the world would soon have become exceedingly crowded had they continued to reproduce at anything like the old rates. This convenience was, however, limited to those organisms that specialized in sexual reproduction; organisms that went in for vegetative reproduction had no such check on their proliferation.

Fortunately, bacteria reproducing by binary fission were soon cut back by ferocious new meta-DNA bacteriophages, and plants suffered similar plagues, while the meta-DNA-reinforced immune systems of higher animals prevented their suffering similar catastrophes. Even so, the Earth’s ecology went pretty wild for a decade or two before a new generation of meta-DNA genetic engineers got to grips with the problems of ecospheric control. After that, change was pretty much a thing of the past. Chaos was gone and order had triumphed.
Homo sapiens
had been replaced by
Homo alfonsiensis
: an ultra-rational species no longer troubled by emotions, dreams or other disturbances of flesh and spirit.

Asked whether his fellow men might, if given a choice, have selected some alternative destiny, the new Alfonso the Wise said: “Had God been present when I injected that first rat, he would doubtless have regretted that I had not been available for consultation when the Big Bang was but a twinkle in His eye.”

And no one could any longer be found to disagree with him.

<>

~ * ~

NEXT TO GODLINESS

As the cab drove away Adam looked down, checking his clothing carefully from the bottom up. The black moccasins, charcoal-grey slacks and chocolate-brown sweater looked supremely casual—which was exactly how they were supposed to look. They seemed slightly loose, but that was a carefully-contrived surface effect; like all smart clothes, they clung fast to his own skin. He took out a pocket mirror in order to make sure that his hairpiece was on its best behavior, spruced up the petals of the scarlet roses he was carrying and finished up by taking one last look at the label on the bottle of wine expertly clutched in the same hand, to reassure himself yet again that it was the ‘98 and not the ‘99.

The gate didn’t creak and the path to the Millers’ front door was entirely free of weeds. The smart WELCOME mat was spotless. The stained glass panels in the front door depicted characters from Greek mythology: Tantalus and Sisyphus to the left and the right, Ixion upraised in the centre. The door chime was as mellow as a concert grand.

“Adam!” said Nick, responding to the signal with wonderful alacrity. “It’s great to see you again. Come into the kitchen for a moment and say hello to Eve.”

Adam was ushered through the hallway and into the kitchen, where he presented Eve with the roses and Nick with the wine, swiftly fulfilling the true purpose of his abrupt summons to Eve’s inner sanctum by admiring the astonishing cleanliness of the cooking area.