Something Rotten

20 Chimeras and Neanderthals

The Brunei 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 head office several months in advance. It didn't stop them trying, though.

'So why the interest in Xeroxed bards?' asked Bowden as we crossed the canal.

'We've got a crisis in the BookWorld.'

I outlined what was happening within the play previously 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 blood-curdling 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 not borne 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 on to the pavement. In general, hybrid birds were the most common product of illegal gene splicing, as birds were closely enough related 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 GCSE. No. it was the cross-class abominations which 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 sllthering, 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 recognisable human

in them that chimeras were most repellent — a failed attempt to replace a deceased loved one, or a hobby gene splicer 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 and 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 almost imperceptibly as a blue SO-13 Land Rover pulled up with a squeal 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 crisp 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 it found something and then it clung on tight.

'Gives it an age,' said Stiiggins, 'perhaps five years.'

'Do you want to take it alive, sir?' asked the SO-13 agent, breeching 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 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, which had fallen silent as the creature's breathing grew slower. 'Dennis, Daddy's worried! Where are you?'

The whole sad, sorry scene had just got a lot worse. A man in a beard and sleeveless white shirt had run into the empty circle around the rapidly dying creature and stared at us with a look of numb horror on his face.

'Dennis?'

He dropped to his knees next to his creation, which was now breathing in short gasps. The man opened his mouth and emitted such a wail of heartbroken grief that it made me feel quite odd inside. Such an outpouring cannot be feigned; it comes from the soul, one's very being.

'You didn't have to kill him,' he wailed, wrapping his arms around the dying beast, 'you didn't have to kill him . . . !'

The uniformed agent moved to pull Dennis's creator away but the Neanderthal stopped him.

'No,' he said gravely, 'leave him for a moment.'

The agent shrugged and walked to the Land Rover to fetch a bodybag.

'Every time we do this it's like killing one of our own,' said Stiggins softly. 'Where have you been, Miss Next? In prison?'

'Why does everyone think I've been in prison?'

'Because you were heading towards death or prison when we last met — and you are not dead.'

Dennis's maker was rocking backwards and forwards, bemoaning the loss of his creation.

The agent returned with a bodybag and a female colleague, who gently prised the man from the creature and told his unhearing ears his rights.

'Only one signature on a piece of paper keeps Neanderthals from being destroyed, the same as him,' said Stiggins, indicating the creature. 'We can be added to the list of banned creatures and designated a chimera without even an Act of Parliament.'

We turned from the scene as the other two agents laid out the bodybag and then rolled the corpse of the chimera on to it.

'You remember Bowden Cable?' 1 asked. 'My partner at the LiteraTecs.'

'Of course,' replied Stiggins, 'we met at your reception.'

'How have you been?' asked Bowden.

Stiggins stared back at him. It was a pointless human pleasantry that Neanderthals never troubled themselves with.

'We have been fine,' replied Stig, forcing the standard answer from his lips. Bowden didn't know it but he was only rubbing Stiggins's nose deeper in sapien-dominated society.

'He means nothing by it,' I said matter-of-factly, which is how Neanderthals like all their speech. 'We need your help, Stig.'

'Then we will be happy to give it, Miss Next.'

'Mean nothing by what?' asked Bowden as we walked across to a bench.

'Tell you later.'

Stig sat down and watched as another SO-13 Land Rover turned up, followed by two police cars to disperse the now curious crowd. He pulled out a carefully wrapped package of grease-proof paper and unfolded it to reveal his lunch — two windfall apples, a small bag of live bugs and a chunk of raw meat.

'Bug?'

'No thanks.'

'So what can we do for the Literary Detectives?' he asked, attempting to eat a beetle that didn't really want him to and was chased twice around Stig's hand until caught and devoured.

'What do you make of this?' I asked as Bowden handed him a picture of the Shaxtper cadaver.

'It is a dead human,' replied Stig. 'Are you sure you won't have a beetle? They're very crunchy.'

'No thanks. What about this?'

Bowden handed him a picture of one of the other dead clones, and then a third.

'The same dead human from a different viewpoint?'

'They're all different corpses, Stig.'

He stopped chewing the uncooked lamb chop and stared at me, then wiped his hands on a large handkerchief and looked more carefully at the photographs.

'How many?'

'Eighteen that we know of

'Cloning entire humans has always been illegal,' murmured Stig. 'Can we see the real thing?'

The Swindon morgue was a short walk from the SpecOps office. It was an old Victorian building which in a more enlightened age would have been condemned. It smelt of formaldehyde and damp and the morgue technicians all looked unhappy and probably had odd hobbies that I would be happier not knowing about.

The lugubrious head pathologist, Mr Rumplunkett, looked avariciously at Mr Stiggins. Since killing a Neanderthal wasn't technically a crime no autopsy was ever performed on one — and Mr Rumplunkett was by nature a curious man. He said nothing but Stiggins knew precisely what he was thinking.

'We're pretty much the same inside as you, Mr Rumplunkett. That was, after all, the reason we were brought into being in the first place.'

'I'm sorry—' began the embarrassed chief pathologist.

'No, you're not,' responded Stig, 'your interest is purely professional and in the pursuit of knowledge. We take no offence.'

'We're here to look at Mr Shaxtper,' said Bowden.

We were led to the main autopsy room, where several bodies were lying under sheets with tags on their toes.

'Overcrowding,' said Mr Rumplunkett, 'but they don't seem to complain too much. This the one?'

He threw back a sheet. The cadaver had a high-domed head, deep-set eyes, a small moustache and goatee. It looked a lot like William Shakespeare from the Droeshout engraving on the title page of the first folio.

'What do you think?'

'Okay,' I said slowly, 'he looks like Shakespeare, but if Victor wore his hair like that, so would he.'

Bowden nodded. It was a fair point.

'And this one wrote the Basil Brush sonnet?'

'No; that particular sonnet was written by this one.'

With a flourish Bowden pulled back the sheet from another cadaver to reveal a corpse identical to the first, only a year or two younger. I stared at them both as Bowden revealed yet another.

'So how many Shakespeares did you say you had?'

'Officially, none. We've got a Shaxtper, a Shakespoor and a Shagsper. Only two of them had any writing on them, all have ink-stained fingers, all are genetically identical, and all died of disease or hypothermia brought on by self-neglect.'

'Down-and-outs?'

'Hermits is probably nearer the mark.'

'Aside from the fact that they all have left eyes and one size of toe,' said Stig, who had been examining the cadavers at length, 'they are very good indeed. We haven't seen this sort of craftsmanship for years.'

'They're copies of a playwright named William Shakes—'

'We know of Shakespeare, Mr Cable,' interrupted Stig. 'We are particularly fond of Caliban from The Tempest. This is a deep recovery job. Brought back from a piece of dried skin or a hair in a death mask or something.'

'When and where, Stig?'

He thought for a moment.

'They were probably built in the mid-thirties,' he announced. 'At the time there were perhaps only ten biolabs in the world that could have done this. We think we can safely say we are looking at one of the three biggest genetic engineering labs in England.'

'Not possible,' said Bowden. 'The manufacturing records of York, Bognor Regis and Scunthorpe are in the public domain; it would be inconceivable that a project of this magnitude could have been kept secret.'

'And yet they exist,' replied Stig, pointing to the corpses and bringing Bowden's argument to a rapid close. 'Do you have the genome logs and trace element spectroscopic evaluations?' he added. 'More careful study might reveal something.'

'That's not standard autopsy procedure,' replied Rumplunkett. 'I have my budget to think of'

'If you do a molar cross-section as well we will donate our body to this department when we die.'

'I'll do them for you while you wait,' said Mr Rumplunkett.

Stig turned back to us.

'We'll need forty-eight hours to have a look at them — shall we meet again at my house? We would be honoured by your presence.'

He looked me in the eye. He would know if I lied.

'I'd like that very much.'

'We, too. Wednesday at midday?'

'I'll be there.'

The Neanderthal raised his hat, gave a small grunt and moved off.

'Well,' said Bowden as soon as Stig was out of earshot, 'I hope you like eating beetles and dock leaves.'

'You and me both, Bowden — you're coming too. If he wanted me and me alone, he would have asked me in private — but I'm sure he'll make something more palatable for us.'

I frowned as we walked blinking back out into the sunlight.

'Bowden?'

'Yup?'

'Did Stig say anything that seemed unusual to you?'

'Not really. Do you want to hear my plans for infil—'

Bowden stopped talking in mid-sentence as the world ground to a halt. Time had ceased to exist. I was trapped between one moment and the next. It could only be my father.

'Hello, Sweetpea,' he said cheerfully, giving me a hug, 'how did the Superhoop turn out?'

'That's next Saturday.'

'Oh!' he said, looking at his watch and frowning. 'You won't let me down, will you?'

'How will I not let you down? What's the connection between the Superhoop and Kaine?'

'I can't tell you. Events must unfold naturally or there'll be hell to pay. You'll just have to trust me.'

'Did you come all this way just to not tell me anything?'

'Not at all. It's a Trafalgar thing. I've been trying all sorts of plans but Nelson stubbornly resists surviving. I think I've figured it out, but I need your help.'

'Will this take long?' I asked. 'I've got a lot to do and I have to get home before my mother finds I've left a gorilla in charge of Friday.'

'I think I am right in saying,' replied my father with a smile, 'that this will take no time at all — if you'd prefer, even less!'