Rogue Terminator

  Brian Stableford

  Brian Stableford’s fiftieth novel (and seventy-fifth book), Year Zero, was released last June by Sarob Press. It was followed in October by the Warhammer novel, The Wine of Dreams, which was published by Games Workshop’s “Black Library” under the pseudonym Brian Craig. His future history series from Tor, so far consisting of Inherit the Earth (1998), Architects of Emortality (1999), and The Fountains of Youth (2000), will continue in 2001

  with The Cassandra Complex.

  Dorset pharmers are old-fashioned folk—as you can readily see by the fact that we still spell the word “pharmer” rather than “pharma,” the way the trendies in Berkshire do. Food-growers, of course, still spell the word with an f, but there haven’t been many food-growers around Yetminster during the last twenty years.

  Even the apple-growers in Somerset have given up the cider business in the interests of packing their Coxes and Braeburns with plantigens. Up in Taunton they rub their hands in glee every time one of the tabloids tells us that the first plague war is bound to break out any day now.

  It’s because we’re so attentive to tradition in these parts that we still do our serious drinking on a Sunday. Pharming is just as much a seven-day-a-week job as farming used to be, and no one hereabouts actually rested on the Sabbath even in the days when there were still a few wives and pensioners addicted to religious observance, but you have to make room for drinking somewhere in the calendar and the best pub in Yetminster happens to be just across the road from the biggest church. Pharmers, like farmers, aren’t the kind of folk to do their drinking willy-nilly; it’s the kind of vocation that requires its followers to get together on a regular basis to swap news and tips—especially tips. The science is still moving forward at breakneck pace, you see, and nobody but a fool ever waits until the AgMin field tests are complete before improving his stocks. It’s not enough to be up with the Honest Joneses if you want to make real money—you have to be a step or two ahead. We like to think of it as Dorset’s heroic contribution to the cutting edge of progress.

  The bravest—and, as it turned out, strangest—of all our contributions to the cutting edge of progress began on a cold night in February 2034, when there were so few townies about that we didn’t even have to wait for chucking-out time before getting down to the meat of the conversation. Naturally enough, it was Jack Gridley who had the tip. The Gridleys have always been fashion-leaders, ever since Jack’s granddad, Old Freddy, came up with the wheeze of using a plank and a bit of string to make mysterious circles in our cornfields so our folks could charge tourists and scientists a pound a head to see them. Come to think of it, though, it was also Old Freddy who couldn’t be content with circles, and got so carried away with more complicated designs that he became obsessed with the idea that he was being inspired and guided by beings from a higher dimension—which did rather undermine the whole point of the exercise.

  “You doing rape this season, Lukey?” Jack asked me, in a quasi-confidential manner, as he stared contemplatively at the froth on his third pint of the night. That furtive way of speaking was the signal for everyone else to prick up their ears, and everyone did, although they continued to maintain the polite pretense that Jack and I were having a private discussion.

  “Course I am,” I told him. “The arse’s dropped right out of wheat and corn’s way past hackneyed. Oilseed’s where it’s at. Everyone knows that. Fifty-seven new varieties last year alone. I’m thinking of sowing the whole top field with morphine precursors, the ones either side of the stream with hyped-up beta-two agonists and cytochrome-P450 assistants, and maybe splitting the rest between dystrophin repair agents, telomere extrapolators and transposon suppressants.”

  “Good mix,” Jack said, approvingly. “Except maybe the dystrophin repairers and the transposon blockers. That’s Fancy Dan stuff. My old granddad always used to say stick to the basics and you won’t go far wrong.”

  “Pity he could never follow his own advice,” I observed, refusing to allow myself to be nettled.

  “Well, that’s as it may be,” Jack conceded, “but I’m a Gridley through and through, and I’m content to leave it to the big boys to muck about with so-called orphans. I’m going for the new generation of coryza inhibitors myself.” I’d had my fingers burned back in ‘31 dabbling in cold cures, and I wasn’t prepared to bet that the new generation would be any more effective in the long term than the last three, but I could tell that Jack had something else on his mind apart from pick-and-mix pharm stocks, so I didn’t argue.

  “Mind you,” he went on, when the pause had been pregnant long enough,

  “it’s a real pain in the arse having to buy new seed every year. Gives us the scope to experiment, of course, and it certainly wouldn’t do to keep on planting the same old stuff in a rapidly evolving market, but how long is it now that you’ve been producing those morphine precursors? And how much better are this year’s beta-two agonists than last year’s?”

  “No way around it,” I said, cautiously. The seed companies loved their terminators, and the AgMin was behind them all the way. Nobody wanted to go back to the old days, when there were townies coming out and trampling our business left, right and center just in case we gave a butterfly a stomach ache. The only way the civil serpents at the AgMin had been able to weasel the GeneMod legislation through the New Lords was to promise faithfully that the only crops grown on English pharms would be incapable of producing fertile seed, so that anything that went wrong would be a once and once only affair.

  “Well,” said Jack, “that’s what people think—but I’ve always been a Gilbert and Sullivan fan, and I’ve always been exceeding fond of The Mikado, which makes the very wise point that as long as the public at large believes that the executioner has done his work, whether he actually has or not, the ends of justice are served.” I wasn’t about to argue with Gilbert and Sullivan, even though I knew they’d been dead far too long to have any meaningful opinions on the Genetic Revolution, so I cut straight to the chase. “Are you saying that you can lay your hands on some engineered rape stocks that haven’t been neutered?” I asked.

  “Naw,” he said, disgustedly. “Anyone can do that—but what do you get out of your crop except soap and cooking oil? What I’m saying is that I know where I can lay my hands on a terminator decoupler. A way to turn the reproductive potential of any GM seed back on.”

  “And where did that come from?” I asked, skeptically.

  “From a pharm, of course,” he told me. “A YAC pharm, as it happens.

  Hasn’t yeast always been the agriculturist’s best friend, ever since the day that the first beer was brewed?”

  YAC production isn’t what I’d call proper pharming. Yeast Artificial Chromosomes are just molecular machines used in genome sequencing, not real Pharmaceuticals. I have to admit, though, that molecular artificers are clever buggers.

  If anyone was going to come up with a terminator terminator, I figured, it was highly likely to be some bored YAC pharmer stirring up his vats to see if anything interesting floated up with the scum.

  “I’d still have to buy this year’s seed,” I pointed out, “And every time I wanted to try something new in future, I’d have to buy it in.”

  “You’d have to keep buying new stock anyway, to avoid suspicion,” Jack pointed out. “We wouldn’t want the Minispies to come poking their long noses in, would we? But think how much you could save if you could plant, say, half your fields with seed from the previous year’s crops? You’d have your choice, after all. If the dystrophin repair business happens to go belly-up you can just chuck the seed away, but telomere extrapolants might last as long as you do—and if they work the way they’re supposed to, that could be a very long time.” He had a point—and he’d finished his pint.

  “Let me get you another,” I said. “Maybe we can do a bit of business.” I wasn’t the only one, of course. By the time Jack left the pub at four in the morning he’d sunk at least sixteen, and hadn’t had to pay for a single one. His walk was as steady and forceful as ever, though, and I knew that his Land Rover wouldn’t hit anything he hadn’t aimed it at during the five-mile drive back to his place. It’s wonderful what a man can accomplish with a little ingenuity, a good stock of home-grown rapes stuffed full of cytochrome-P450 assistants, and a contact in the YAC business.

  The best thing about the terminator decoupler was that it was so close to being alive that it could reproduce itself almost as easily outside the infused seeds as inside. As long as I kept the culture well-fed with enriched glucose substrate, Jack assured me, I’d never run out. He wasn’t spreading the stuff around with the intention of making a big profit, you see. He was doing it because we were mates, all in the same business and all in the same boat. That was why we were happy to let the little miracle-worker be known by one and all as Jack’s YAC, although it wasn’t, strictly speaking, a YAC and he hadn’t actually invented it. Matiness has always been the strength of English farming folk—except, of course, for those located east of Salisbury, west of Chard and north of Wincanton. We stick together, and we guard one another’s backs. We like to think of it as the spirit of the Cerne Abbas giant.

  I decided to be careful, and not to expose the entirety of my newly bought seed-stocks to the terminator decoupler. I knew full well that the first law of genetic engineering is that you can never do one thing. Every alteration of the metabolic flux inside a cell has consequences, and the feedback mechanisms regulating that flux are so complicated t hat some of the consequences are always unforeseeable. So I carefully split each parcel of seeds into two, exposing one to Jack’s YACs and leaving the other uninfected. I also divided the stocks between different fields wherever it was practicable, or different halves of the same field where it wasn’t.

  Never let it be said that mere pharmers are too stupid to understand the underlying logic of the experimental method.

  We had a very good spring, even by comparison with the early Greenhouse years before the UN Forestry Commission got its plant-a-billion-a-year program off the ground. My fields turned green, then vivid yellow, in a very satisfactory manner.

  There wasn’t any obvious difference between the crops that had been treated with Jack’s terminator terminator and the ones that hadn’t—but I hadn’t expected any, so that was all right. The morphine precursor producers seemed to be having a particularly good year, but the plants whose oils were engineered to be full of transposon suppressants were slow starters. I thought for a while that we might have a problem in the boggier ground with some kind of facultative pest that had made the jump, but once the flowers were out the plants came on well enough, much to my relief. The Biodiversity Lobby had become so strong that the Ministry wouldn’t let us use any but the most specific biopesticides in case we took out a few innocent bystanders along with the rapemunchers, but every five years or so natural selection would throw up a new subspecies that was ready, willing, and able to take our pride and joy apart, and the AgMin troubleshooters never found a fix in time, no matter how quickly the bug was reported.

  All in all, though, things were going very smoothly by midsummer’s day, when family tradition dictated that I take a few hours off to drive Shelley and the kids up to the top of the downs for a good old-fashioned picnic. We always sat on the edge of one of the Ministry’s woodland sanctuaries, where we could listen to the birds that still knew how to sing while looking out over the vast ocean of yellow that extended all the way to Sherborne in the north and all the way to Dorchester in the south.

  The rapesea was dotted everywhere with islands, some of them green, some of them red-tiled, and not a few of them grey, but it had no obvious boundaries except the railway and the Frome. About half the green islands were wildlife minisanctuaries; the rest included a few relict oakwoods, a couple of dozen test crops—mostly strawberries, but some potatoes, and even a few beets—and a few fugitive fields of barley.

  “It’s all very impressive,” Shelley admitted, when I called her attention to the stately calm of the lovely yellow expanse, “but I can never quite get over the fact that it’s called rape. Remember all those old jokes about the rape of the English countryside?”

  “It’s oilseed rape,” I reminded her, not for the first time. “If it makes you feel better, pretend it’s mustard. And if you think this is impressive, imagine what it must be like in India.” South-East Asia was so oil-poor that the second generation of oilseeds adapted for tropical and sub-tropical habitats had been taken up by native farmers almost as enthusiastically as the rubber trees and bananas that secreted vaccines against hepatitis-C, malaria, and every other pestilence endemic to the region had been taken up in Indonesia and Malaysia.

  I tried to explain to the kids that the climatologists loved the Indian rapeseas even more extravagantly than the politicians because of the contribution they were making to rainfall distribution, but they weren’t in a mood to be lectured. Shelley told me that they weren’t old enough to grasp the significance of the fact that the age-old tyranny of the monsoon was finally giving way to an era of environmental fraternity, but she was just trying to let the brats off the hook. Liz probably wasn’t old enough to take it all aboard, but Joe could have taken an intelligent interest if only he’d been that way inclined.

  “It’s all so boring” Joe complained, just to make certain that I knew that he’d far rather have stayed at home to play VR-games. “It’s all the same.”

  “No it’s not,” I assured him. “There are more than thirteen thousand variants of oilseed rape in Dorset. Shall I explain why we can’t simply grow all the different drugs in the same plant?”

  “Anything but that, Dad,” he complained. “Anyway, I know already—I’m not stupid, you know.”

  “It’s not just because it’s a good idea to keep your products separate, although it certainly is,” I soldiered on, regardless. “The real problem is that if you carry out multiple transformations on a single set of chromosomes, the risk of buggering up the developmental process increases exponentially.” Shelley frowned, because she didn’t like me saying “buggering” in front of the kids, but she didn’t say anything. She left that to Joe, whose response was: “Boring, buggering boring!”

  It was true that he wasn’t stupid, even though he was easily bored. He was smart enough, in his own way, but I’d begun to worry that he’d never make a pharmer. That, I supposed, was down to Shelley’s genes. I’d countered their influence as best I could, but there’s only so much DNA a man can provide. It wasn’t her fault, of course—she hadn’t designed the mechanics of inheritance. I’d often wondered what kind of parent would foist a name like Shelley on a Yetminster girl, but her mum and dad had died the year before I met her, killed on the M3 north of Winchester by a lorry driver busy arguing on his mobile phone. That was one problem the pharmacogenomicists would never get to grips with—infinitely more intractable than souping up the liver to provide instant sobriety on demand. We’d agreed readily enough to call our own girl Elizabeth.

  “The birds are pretty, aren’t they, Mummy?” was Liz’s contribution to the cause of family harmony.

  “Yes, they are,” Shelley assured her. “Every year we come there are more and more. One day, they’ll learn to sing again the way they used to. They have the voices. They just have to learn to use them musically.” She was being sentimental, but it was okay by me. I missed the birdsong too, and lots of other things besides—but I was a pharmer through and through, and pharmers have to think of the future. The pharmacogenomicists may be the ones who are designing the future, but pharmers are the ones who actually have to make it. If ever the plague war does come, we’ll be the poor buggers digging for victory.

  I kept a careful eye on the YAC-infected plants as they continued to grow, of course, but the terminator decoupler didn’t seem to have had any visible effect on the flowers—in fact, I began to wonder if it had had any effect at all. It occurred to me that I was going to look like a prize fool if I sowed half my fields the following year with seed that turned out not to be fertile at all. The insects buzzing and fluttering benignly around the flowers seemed happy enough, but I wasn’t sure whether to take that as a good sign or not. The birds that came chasing the local insects seemed happy enough too, but that didn’t seem relevant.

  As Shelley had observed during our trip to the downs, the birds still seemed to be increasing their numbers year by year. It was difficult to believe that even chaffinches, tree sparrows, and lapwings had been brought to the brink of extinction as recently as ‘21—the year Joe had been born. All but a handful of familiar species had eventually come through the great depletion pretty well, but they’d had to change their habits considerably. By 2034, the larks, swallows, sparrows, and thrushes had been on the way back for a full decade, but the abandonment of their old territorial habits had caused many of them to fall silent, because their singing had always been so closely associated with the marking of those territories. Some people saw that as a disaster, or an accusing commentary on our management of history, but I wasn’t so sure.

  Like pharmers, I figured, the pioneers of new avian culture had been merely forced by the ecological revolution to abandon their outdated territorial assumptions and adapt to a more flexible way of life. In so doing, if you cared to look at it like that, they were providing a shining example of the awesome versatility of Nature.

  Maybe it was a pity that they’d given up on their traditional ditties—but I’d lived on the land all my life, and I’d always thought that their songs were crude and primitive.

  I’d actually written to the Guardian to say so in ‘25, when the letter column had been besieged by ridiculous proposals to set up educational tannoy systems throughout the south of England to “teach the world to sing again” by using digital technology to “restore the lost heritage of the skylarks and the thrushes.” Personally, I approved of the gutsy way in which the newly discreet birds had got used to flying considerable distances in mixed flocks to feed themselves, returning to their roosting-areas at nights. I liked the way they sometimes darkened the sky at dusk while they traded places with the bats. The bats had been having a particularly good time since the last anti-extinction crusade, and there was hardly a loft in Yetminster and Crewkerne in ‘34 that didn’t have a purpose-built batroost as well as a soffit-set of nesting-boxes. My place was an exception, of course, but if any passing townie asked, I always said I’d had the chimneys on the house and the roof-space of the barn converted. Who was ever going to know the difference without climbing up to take a look?

 

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