Axiomatic (6 page)

Angela regarded the grey sliver sceptically. ‘How can you be sure it’s as simple as that?’

‘We’ve done
experiments,
of course. We located the gene that codes for a growth factor that determines the ratio of glial cells to neurons. We can control the extent to which this gene is switched on, and hence how much of the growth factor is synthesised, and hence what the ratio becomes. So far, we’ve tried reducing it by five per cent, and on average that causes a drop in IQ of twenty points. So, by simple linear extrapolation, if we
up
the ratio by two hundred per cent—’

Angela frowned. ‘You intentionally produced children with reduced intelligence?’

‘Relax.
Their parents wanted Olympic athletes. Those kids won’t miss twenty points — in fact, it will probably help them cope with the training. Besides, we like to be balanced. We give with one hand and take with the other. It’s only fair. And our bioethics Expert System said it was perfectly okay.’

‘What are you going to
take
from Eugene?’

Cook looked hurt. He did it well; his big brown eyes, as much as his professional success, had put his face on the glossy sleeves of a dozen magazines.
‘Angela.
Your case is special. For you, and Bill — and Eugene — I’m going to break
all
the rules.’

* * * *

When Bill Cooper was ten years old, he saved up his pocket money for a month, and bought a lottery ticket. The first prize was fifty thousand dollars. When his mother found out — whatever he did, she always found out — she said calmly, ‘Do you know what gambling is? Gambling is a kind of tax: a tax on stupidity. A tax on greed. Some money changes hands at random, but the net cash flow always goes one way — to the Government, to the casino operators, to the bookies, to the crime syndicates. If you ever
do
win, you won’t have won against
them.
They’ll still be getting their share. You’ll have won against all the penniless losers, that’s all.’

He hated her. She hadn’t taken away the ticket, she hadn’t punished him, she hadn’t even forbidden him to do it again — she had simply stated her opinion. The only trouble was, as an ordinary ten-year-old child, he didn’t understand half the phrases she’d used, and he didn’t have a hope of properly assessing her argument, let alone rebutting it. By talking over his head, she might just as well have proclaimed with the voice of authority:
you are stupid and greedy and wrong —
and it frustrated him almost to tears that she’d achieved this effect while remaining so calm and reasonable.

The ticket didn’t win him a cent, and he didn’t buy another. By the time he left home, eight years later, and found employment as a data-entry clerk in the Department of Social Security, the government lotteries had been all but superseded by a new scheme, in which participants marked numbers on a coupon in the hope that their choice would match the numbers on balls spat out by a machine.

Bill recognised the change as a cynical ploy, designed to suggest,
sotto voce,
to a statistically ignorant public that they now had the opportunity to use ‘skill’ and ‘strategy’ to improve their chances of winning. No longer would anyone be stuck with the immutable number on a lottery ticket; they were free to put crosses in boxes, any way they liked! This illusion of having
control
would bring in more players, and hence more revenue. And that sucked.

The TV ads for the game were the most crass and emetic things he’d ever seen, with grinning imbeciles going into fits of poorly acted euphoria as money cascaded down on them, cheerleaders waved pom-poms, and tacky special effects lit up the screen. Images of yachts, champagne, and chauffeur-driven limousines were intercut. It made him gag.

However. There was a third prong. The radio ads were less inane, offering appealing scenarios of revenge for the instantly wealthy: Evict Your Landlord. Retrench Your Boss. Buy the Nightclub Which Denied You Admission. The play on stupidity and the play on greed had failed, but this touched a raw nerve. Bill
knew
he was being manipulated, but he couldn’t deny that the prospect of spending the next forty-two years typing crap into a VDU (or doing whatever the changing technology demanded of shit-kickers — assuming he wasn’t made completely obsolete) and paying most of his wages in rent, without even an infinitesimal chance of escape, was too much to bear.

So, in spite of everything, he caved in. Each week, he filled in a coupon, and paid the tax. Not a tax on greed, he decided. A tax on hope.

Angela operated a supermarket checkout, telling customers where to put their EFTPOS cards, and adjusting the orientation of cans and cartons if the scanner failed to locate their bar code (Hitachi made a device which could do this, but the US Department of Defence was covertly buying them all, in the hope of keeping anyone else from getting hold of the machine’s pattern-recognition software). Bill always took his groceries to her checkout, however long the queue, and one day managed to overcome his pathological shyness long enough to ask her out.

Angela didn’t mind his stutter, or any of his other problems. Sure, he was an emotional cripple, but he was passably handsome, superficially kind, and far too withdrawn to be either violent or demanding. Soon they were meeting regularly, to engage in messy but mildly pleasant acts, designed to be unlikely to transfer either human or viral genetic material between them.

However, no amount of latex could prevent their sexual intimacy from planting hooks deep in other parts of their brains. Neither had begun the relationship expecting it to endure, but as the months passed and nothing drove them apart, not only did their desire for each other fail to wane, but they grew accustomed to —
even fond of—
ever broader aspects of each other’s appearance and behaviour.

Whether this bonding effect was purely random, or could be traced to formative experiences, or ultimately reflected a past advantage in the conjunction of some of their visibly expressed genes, is difficult to determine. Perhaps all three factors contributed to some degree. In any case, the knot of their interdependencies grew, until marriage began to seem far simpler than disentanglement, and, once accepted, almost as natural as puberty or death. But if the offspring of previous Bill-and-Angela lookalikes
had
lived long and bred well, the issue now seemed purely theoretical; the couple’s combined income hovered above the poverty line, and children were out of the question.

As the years passed, and the information revolution continued, their original jobs all but vanished, but they both somehow managed to cling to employment. Bill was replaced by an optical character reader, but was promoted to computer operator, which meant changing the toner on laser printers and coping with jammed stationery. Angela became a supervisor, which meant store detective; shoplifting as such was impossible (supermarkets were now filled with card-operated vending machines) but her presence was meant to discourage vandalism and muggings (a real security guard would have cost more), and she assisted any customers unable to work out which buttons to push.

In contrast, their first contact with the biotechnology revolution was both voluntary and beneficial. Born pink — and more often made pinker than browner by sunlight — they both acquired deep black, slightly purplish skin; an artificial retrovirus inserted genes into their melanocytes which boosted the rate of melanin synthesis and transfer. This treatment, although fashionable, was of far more than cosmetic value; since the south polar ozone hole had expanded to cover most of the continent, Australia’s skin cancer rates, already the world’s highest, had quadrupled. Chemical sunscreens were messy and inefficient, and regular use had undesirable long-term side-effects. Nobody wanted to clothe themselves from wrist to ankle all year in a climate that was hot and growing hotter, and in any case it would have been culturally unacceptable to return to near-Victorian dress codes after two generations of maximal baring of skin. The small aesthetic shift, from valuing the deepest possible tan to accepting that people born fair-skinned could become black, was by far the easiest solution.

Of course, there was some controversy. Paranoid right-wing groups (who for decades had claimed that their racism was ‘logically’ founded on cultural xenophobia rather than anything so trivial as skin colour) ranted about conspiracies and called the (non-communicable) virus ‘The Black Plague’. A few politicians and journalists tried to find a way to exploit people’s unease without appearing completely stupid — but failed, and eventually shut up. Neo-blacks started appearing on magazine sleeves, in soap operas, in advertisements (a source of bitter amusement for the Aboriginal people, who remained all but invisible in such places), and the trend accelerated. Those who lobbied for a ban didn’t have a rational leg to stand on: nobody was being forced to be black — there was even a virus available which snipped out the genes, for people who changed their mind — and the country was being saved a fortune in health-care costs.

One day, Bill turned up at the supermarket in the middle of the morning. He looked so shaken that Angela was certain that he’d been sacked, or one of his parents had died, or he’d just been told that he had a fatal disease.

He had chosen his words in advance, and reeled them off almost without hesitation. ‘We forgot to watch the draw last night,’ he said. ‘We’ve won forty-seven m-m-m . . .’

Angela clocked out.

They took the obligatory world tour while a modest house was built. After disbursing a few hundred thousand to friends and relatives — Bill’s parents refused to take a cent, but his siblings, and Angela’s family, had no such qualms — they were still left with more than forty-five million. Buying all the consumer goods they honestly wanted couldn’t begin to dent this sum, and neither had much interest in gold-plated Rolls Royces, private jets, Van Goghs, or diamonds. They could have lived in luxury on the earnings of ten million in the safest of investments, and it was indecision more than greed that kept them from promptly donating the difference to a worthy cause.

There was so much to be done in a world ravaged by political, ecological and climatic disasters. Which project most deserved their assistance? The proposed Himalayan hydroelectric scheme, which might keep Bangladesh from drowning in the floodplains of its Greenhouse-swollen rivers? Research on engineering hardier crops for poor soils in northern Africa? Buying back a small part of Brazil from multinational agribusiness, so food could be grown, not imported, and foreign debt curtailed? Fighting the still abysmal infant mortality rate amongst their own country’s original inhabitants? Thirty-five million would have helped substantially with any of these endeavours, but Angela and Bill were so worried about making the right choice that they put it off, month after month, year after year.

Meanwhile, free of financial restraints, they began trying to have a child. After two years without success, they finally sought medical advice, and were told that Angela was producing antibodies to Bill’s sperm. This was no great problem; neither of them was intrinsically infertile, they could still both provide gametes for IVF, and Angela could bear the child. The only question was, who would carry out the procedure?

The only possible answer was, the best reproductive specialist money could buy.

Sam Cook was the best, or at least the best known. For the past twenty years, he’d been enabling women in infertile relationships to give birth to as many as seven children at a time, long after multiple embryo implants had ceased being necessary to ensure success (the media wouldn’t bid for exclusive rights to anything less than quintuplets). He also had a reputation for quality control unequalled by any of his colleagues; after a stint in Tokyo on the Human Genome Project, he was as familiar with molecular biology as he was with gynecology, obstetrics and embryology.

It was quality control that complicated the couple’s plans. For their marriage licence, their blood had been sent to a run-of-the-mill pathologist, who had only screened them for such extreme conditions as muscular dystrophy, cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s disease, and so on. Human Potential, equipped with all the latest probes, was a thousand times more thorough. It turned out that Bill carried genes which could make their child susceptible to clinical depression, and Angela carried genes which might make it hyperactive.

Cook spelt out the options for them.

One solution would be to use what was now referred to as TPGM: third-party genetic material. No need to make do with any old dross, either; Human Potential had Nobel prizewinners’ sperm by the bucketful, and although they had no equivalent ova — collection being so much harder, and most prizewinners being well into their sixties — they had blood samples instead, from which chromosomes could be extracted, artificially converted from diploid to haploid, and inserted into an ovum provided by Angela.

Alternatively — albeit at a somewhat higher cost — they could stick with their own gametes, and use gene therapy to correct the problems.

They talked it over for a couple of weeks, but the choice wasn’t difficult. The legal status of children produced from TPGM was still a mess — and a slightly different mess in every state of Australia, not to mention from country to country — and of course they both wanted, if possible, a child who was biologically their own.

At their next appointment, while explaining these reasons, Angela also disclosed the magnitude of their wealth, so that Cook would feel no need to cut corners for the sake of economy. They had kept their win from becoming public knowledge, but it hardly seemed right to have any secrets from the man who was going to work this miracle for them.

Cook seemed to take the revelation in his stride, and congratulated them on their wise decision. But he added, apologetically, that in his ignorance of the size of their financial resources, he had probably misled them into a limited view of what he had to offer.

Since they’d chosen gene therapy, why be half-hearted about it? Why rescue their child from maladjustment, only to curse it with mediocrity — when so much
more
was possible? With their money, and Human Potential’s facilities and expertise, a truly
extraordinary
child could be created: intelligent, creative, charismatic; the relevant genes had all been more or less pinned down, and a timely injection of research funds — say, twenty or thirty million — would see the loose ends sorted out very rapidly.