Authors: Kate Thompson
7
LOKI CHOSE THAT
moment to wake up and start crying. I had forgotten about her, and now I was worried that Maggie would be angry. But when I took the pup out of my pocket, she just smiled.
‘Planning to take her with you?’ she said.
‘She’s my dog,’ I said, holding Loki up to my face. She wagged her tail and licked me, but she was clearly anxious as well.
‘Ma, Ma, Ma,’ she said.
We all laughed, and I hugged her tight.
‘There you are,’ said Maggie. ‘She’s the result of Bernard’s research.’
‘Really?’ I said. Now it was getting interesting.
‘I wrote to him and he sent me the paper that no one would publish. It described the work he had done on genetic analysis of early man and the apes that preceded him on the evolutionary ladder.’
Loki whimpered softly. I nestled her in the crook of my arm and stroked her little ears as Maggie continued.
‘Bernard had isolated a specific gene that he believed was responsible for the big leap forward in evolution. He believed that this gene was responsible for reason and the capacity for
language
. Early man had this gene, but the apes didn’t.’
‘Wow,’ said Tina.
‘To be honest,’ said Maggie, ‘I was as sceptical about the work as the rest of the scientific community. But it didn’t matter. Bernard’s needs and mine fitted together perfectly. He needed facilities, I needed help with Fourth World and my own genetic work. I wrote to him with a proposal. It was risky, but it was worth it. He accepted.’
Maggie yawned and stretched. ‘I need a coffee,’ she said, and led the way into the last of the rooms that opened off the corridor; the one that Claus and I hadn’t got round to exploring. It turned out to be a neat little kitchenette, with a tiny fridge, cooker and sink. Maggie put the kettle on, and while we waited for it to boil she became thoughtful and looked from Tina to me and back again.
‘I’m giving you a lot of power over me,’ she said. ‘Letting you in on all this. My work here is . . . let’s say . . . a little beyond medical convention. You could cause a lot of trouble for me if you wanted to.’
I had already worked that out, but I said nothing.
‘I don’t think you will, though,’ she went on. ‘I think that when you understand what I’m doing, you’ll know why it has to be secret.’
She put coffee powder and sugar into three mugs and then, too impatient to wait for the kettle to boil, she poured warm water over them.
‘Bernard helped me with my work to begin with,’ she said. ‘That was the deal. We . . . well . . . we engineered Sandy and Colin, among other things.’
‘Engineered?’ I said.
Maggie hesitated. ‘I really do hope I can trust you,’ she said. ‘You wanted to know how Sandy learnt to kick so powerfully, and how she got to the top of that tree so fast, didn’t you?’
I nodded, eagerly.
Maggie gulped down her cup of tepid coffee before she answered. ‘Sandy jumped to the top of that tree. Everything about her is human, except for one thing. She has the muscle tissue of a frog.’
8
I WAS DUMBSTRUCK,
but Tina just laughed. ‘That’s why the animals call her Sprog,’ she said. ‘That’s why she looks so skinny and . . .’ She stopped, aware that she might offend. But Maggie finished for her.
‘Weird, yes. But she was a spectacular success, all the same. Wouldn’t you agree?’
‘I suppose so,’ I said. ‘Although I wouldn’t much fancy having to stay hidden all my life.’
Maggie’s expression darkened, and I hurriedly went on. ‘But how did you do it?’
‘I can show you the technical details some other time,’ said Maggie. ‘For the moment all you need to know is that if you incorporate genetic material into the nucleus of a cell, it will join with the DNA that’s already there. That’s how genetic modification happens.’
‘You can do that here? In the lab?’
‘That’s right. We isolate specific genes. Introduce them into host cells.’
‘But what about the animals?’ said Tina. ‘I want to know how come my babies can talk.’
‘That was Bernard’s bit,’ said Maggie. ‘After what we had already done it was relatively simple to apply my technique to his requirements.’ She
gave
a wry smile. ‘Do you know, I only did it to keep my side of the bargain? I never believed for a minute that it would work.’
‘But it did,’ said Tina.
‘We had our share of mistakes, but that’s only to be expected. And as you can see, we eventually succeeded in isolating exactly the strand of DNA that we wanted. Now we have an eighty to ninety per cent success rate.’
‘But why does it all have to be so secret?’ I said. ‘I mean, if I was Bernard, I couldn’t wait to prove that I was right. Show all those stuffy old professors where to get off.’
Maggie nodded. ‘We discussed it for hours. Days and nights, sometimes. But in the end we both agreed that we wouldn’t go public. For one thing, it would have been the end of our secrecy, and we weren’t at all sure that we had come to the end of our work together.’
‘And the other reason?’ asked Tina.
‘The animals themselves,’ said Maggie.
Tina must already have thought of that. Sometimes I wondered how I could be so slow. ‘People would exploit them, wouldn’t they?’ she said. ‘Make them perform, or do all kinds of dirty work that no one else wants to do.’
‘That was our thinking, yes,’ said Maggie. ‘Even worse things, perhaps. I shudder to think about what the military might use them for if they knew.’
‘Spies,’ said Tina. ‘Messengers.’
But I had been raised on computer games. ‘Kamikaze grenades,’ I said. ‘Walking mines.’
Maggie nodded. ‘You see?’ she said.
I stroked Loki’s back. I had no problem with that. How could I? The talking animals were a joy, and anything that protected them from exploitation was all right by me. But the things in the jars still haunted me.
‘What about
your
side of the work?’ I asked. ‘Are you still making . . .’ I wanted to say ‘freaks’, or ‘mutants’, but neither word seemed fair to Danny or Sandy.
Maggie shook her head.
‘After Colin was born I thought we could create anything we wanted to. I was ambitious, and I was wrong.’ She paused, and an uncharacteristic sadness dragged at her features. ‘You probably saw, Christie,’ she said. ‘My little bird.’
I knew what she was talking about. The feathered baby. At the same moment I understood what she had intended. She had been trying to create a winged child. An angel on the face of the earth.
But she had failed, and the grisly spectre returned to my mind.
‘Why do you keep them?’ I cried out, surprised at the strength of my emotion. ‘All those terrible mistakes, lined up in there like . . . like gruesome trophies!’
Maggie shook her head, her face still slack with sorrow.
‘It’s not like that, Christie. It’s just the opposite. I keep them there to watch over my work. My little twisted gods. In case I should ever be tempted to make the same mistakes again.’
PART ELEVEN
1
MAGGIE PROVED AS
good as her word. The very next morning, as soon as the chores were out of the way, she brought me into the lab again and gave me a tour of the equipment. I saw the genetic material for myself in the electron microscope, and she showed me how, using an array of enzymes, small segments of it could be separated off, to be added later to the primary cell of the host embryo.
‘But I don’t understand why the cell accepts it,’ I said. ‘Normally cells fight off foreign bodies.’
‘No one knows, really,’ said Maggie. ‘Apparently the DNA isn’t recognised as foreign. All we know is that it works.’
‘It’s creepy,’ I said. ‘It’s like playing God.’
Maggie looked at me closely for a moment, then led the way into the operating theatre. I was careful not to look at the sinister reminders of her failures.
‘This is where we remove the eggs from the mother animal,’ she said. ‘They’re fertilised and modified in the lab, then replaced in the mother’s womb.’
I had a hundred questions about that part of
the
process, but I realised just in time that Maggie had herself been one of those mothers, not just once, but on several occasions. I was fairly sure that she would have no problem in talking about it, but those details would be a bit too intimate for my liking.
I must have blushed again, because she gave a roar of laughter.
‘Good old Christie,’ she said, and scruffed up my hair.
I shrugged her off, even though I was secretly pleased.
‘Why didn’t you want to show me before?’ I asked. ‘Why all the secrecy?’
‘You forced my arm,’ she said. ‘If you hadn’t, I would never have shown you. This place is my life. It could all be blown apart so easily.’
She led the way out of the theatre and closed the door behind us. Then she looked at me, searchingly. ‘Can I trust you, Christie?’ she said. ‘I know that Tina will never say a word, but I’m not so sure about you.’
I wasn’t so sure about me, either. I could have said anything; made her any kind of an empty promise, but I knew it wasn’t what she wanted. She was looking for something more fundamental in me; some core of integrity that she could rely upon. But I couldn’t find it within me, and I couldn’t lie, either.
As though she was reading my thoughts, Maggie went on, ‘I meant what I said yesterday. You’re free to come and go as you like. No one will stop you. You have no reason to fear me.’
I believed her. I thought she was going to ask me again for some kind of assurance, but she didn’t. She just led the way out of the lab, up the stairs, and into the welcome light of the soft, spring day.
2
AND NOW I
couldn’t put it off any longer. As soon as lunch was over, I went up to my room and collected the letters for Bettyhill, the phonecard and the money. But I didn’t take the rest of my things and I didn’t take Loki. This time, at least, I intended to come back.
Oggy came with me to show me the way. As we crossed the boundary of Fourth World, Darling dropped out of the trees and joined us. She hadn’t been around much, lately, and I was happy to see her. As we walked along the side of the glen it was almost like the old days, with Oggy scouting ahead and Darling mocking the skylarks as they sang in the heights, just inches beneath the low, white clouds.
There were still patches of snow, but it was melting fast, and little streams ran everywhere down the hillsides. Some of them were deep, and before long I gave up trying to keep my feet dry. Oggy splashed and slobbered, and Darling dive-bombed him, and I thought about what would happen if people knew about them. For their sakes, and for Loki and Tony and Iggy’s new brood, I could never blow the whistle on Fourth World, whatever I thought about the
other
stuff. It made me feel anxious, though, about phoning home. I knew that Maurice didn’t feel the same way.
As we neared the first of the village houses, Darling banked away and went off about some other business. Oggy stayed with me, following at my heels like an obedient pet.
There was no one in the first house, or the second, and they both looked forlorn, as though they had been deserted through no fault of their own. At the next house I could hear the sound of a television, and my knock was soon answered by a middle-aged woman in rolled-up sleeves and an apron. She looked extremely suspicious until I showed her the letters, and then she ushered me ahead of her into the sitting-room, where an open fire and the television competed for attention.
‘Let me get my glasses, now,’ she said. I watched the screen as she searched for them. There were pictures of the Prime Minister heading off to Brussels in an army jet to discuss the energy crisis with other European leaders. There were pictures that reminded me of the streets of Inverness; more civil unrest; more soldiers. After that there were scenes of policemen managing queues outside supermarkets, of empty shelves, of army food convoys travelling along deserted motorways.
The woman had found her glasses. She examined the battered letters carefully. ‘This one’s for my cousin,’ she said. ‘And this one’s for my sister-in-law. Nothing for me.’
The television was showing tractors busy throughout the land, ploughing up set-aside to grow more food for the population.
‘These people are gone,’ the woman went on. ‘And Dome lives three miles along the coast. You won’t want to be walking out there, I’m sure.’
She began squirrelling around among the clutter on the mantelpiece. ‘I’m sure to see Donie in the village. And I may as well take care of the others, as well. Save you the trouble.’
She had two pound coins in her hand. She was about to give them to me and I was about to refuse. But she hesitated. ‘Where is it you’re staying, now?’
‘Along the Glen,’ I said. ‘With Maggie Taylor.’
The pound coins went into the woman’s apron pocket, and the friendly smile slid off her face.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘You’d better be getting back there, then.’
I followed Oggy along the road, wishing that people could understand that, whatever Maggie might be doing, it posed no threat to them. It made Fourth World into a kind of island, surrounded by hostility. I wondered how Maggie stuck it; how Sandy survived without friends; whether there might be real danger of raids by local people if the food situation didn’t improve. And then I saw something which drove all other thoughts out of my mind.
Oggy had led me to the phone box.
3
I DISCOVERED WHAT
cold feet meant, and nearly turned back. It was only the thought that the phones might be down that gave me the courage to step forward.
But they weren’t. The connection went through first time. The answer-phone was on again, and Mom’s voice explained that they had gone to stay with her sister on the family farm. She repeated the number. I breathed on the window and wrote it on the glass with my finger.
I dialled again, and doodled nervously on the glass as it rang. I expected my aunt or my uncle to answer, but they didn’t. Mom did. When she heard my voice, she said, ‘Christie!’ It was like a sigh, a cry, and a laugh all rolled into one. ‘Where are you?’