Snowball in Hell, page 1
Brian Stableford
Critically acclaimed British “hard-science” writer Brian Stableford is the author of more than thirty books, including Cradle of the Sun, The Blind Worm, Days of Glory, In the Kingdom of the Beasts, Day of Wrath, The Halcyon Drift, The Paradox of the Sets, The Realms of Tartarus, The Empire of Fear, The Angel of Pain and The Carnival of Destruction, Serpent’s Blood and Inherit the Earth. His short fiction has been collected in Sexual Chemistry: Sardonic Tales of the Genetic Revolution. His nonfiction books include The Sociology of Science Fiction and, with David Langford, The Third Millennium: A History of the World AD 2000-3000. His acclaimed novella “Les Fleurs du Mal” was a finalist for the Hugo Award in 1994. His most recent books are the novels The Fountains of Youth and Architects of Emortality. A biologist and sociologist by training, Stableford lives in Reading, England.
Stableford may have written more about how the ongoing revolutions in biological and genetic science will change the very nature of humanity itself than any other writer of the last decade.
Here he takes a penetrating look at what really makes us human—and comes to a few conclusions that may surprise you.
FROM THE VERY BEGINNING I had a niggling feeling that the operation was going to go wrong, but I put it down to nerves. Scientific advisers to the Home Office rarely get a chance to take part in Special Branch operations, and I always knew that it would be my first and last opportunity to be part of a real Boy’s Own adventure.
I calmed my anxieties by telling myself that the police must know what they were doing. The plan looked so neat and tidy when it was laid out on the map with coloured dots: blue for the lower ranks, red for the Armed Response Unit, green for the likes of yours truly and black for the senior Special Branch officers who were supervising and coordinating the whole thing. We deeply resented the fact that the reports from the surveillance team had been carefully censored, according to the sacred principle of NEED TO KNOW, but there seemed to be no obvious reason to suppose that the raid itself wouldn’t go like clockwork.
“But what are they actually supposed to have done, exactly?” one of my juniors was reckless enough to ask.
“If we knew exactly” came the inevitable withering reply, “we wouldn’t need to include you in the operation, would we?”
I could tell from the reports we had been allowed to see that the so-called investigation into the experiments at Hollinghurst Manor had been a committee product, and that no one had ever had a clear idea exactly what was going on.
Warrants for surveillance had been obtained on the grounds that the Branch’s GE-Crime Unit had “compelling reasons” to suspect that Drs Hemans, Rawlingford and Bradby were using “human genetic material” in the creation of “transgenic animals”, but it was mostly speculation. What they really had to go on was gossip and rumour, and the rumours in question seemed to me to be suspiciously akin to the urban legends that had sprung up everywhere since the tabloids’ yuck factor campaign had finally forced the government to pass stringent laws controlling the uses of genetic engineering and to set up the GE-Crime Unit to enforce them. Once it existed, the Unit had to do something to justify its budget, and its senior staff obviously reckoned that whatever was going on at Hollinghurst Manor had to be yucky enough to allow them to get that invaluable first goal on the great scoresheet.
It seemed to me that the whole affair had always had a faint air of surreal absurdity about it. The illegal experiments that Hemans and his fellows were alleged by rumour to be conducting were unfortunately conducive to silly jokes, ranging from lame references to flying pigs to covert references to the raid as the Boar War. Even the Home Office joined in the jokey name game; it was some idiot undersecretary who decided to code-name the “target” Animal Farm, borrowing the most popular of the derisory nicknames it had accumulated during the surveillance. It was, alas, my own people who took some delight in explaining to anyone who would listen why the people inside had allegedly taken to calling the project “Commoner’s Isle”. (It was because the place where the ambitious scientist had conducted his unsuccessful experiment in H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau had been called Noble’s Isle.) When the inspector in charge of the Armed Response Unit assured us at the final briefing that the people in the manor didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting past his men he couldn’t understand why the men from the ministry snickered. (In Animal Farm, Snowball is the idealist who gets purged by the ruthless Napoleon.)
In a sense, the inspector was right. When the Animal Farmers found out that they were being raided and ran like hell they didn’t, have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting past his men. Unfortunately, that didn’t make them stop running and give up.
The part of the plan that included me involved uniformed policemen smashing their way through the main door and making as many arrests as possible while my people went for the computers and any paper files that were still around. We didn’t expect to get all the records out—we’d been told at the briefing that Hemans, Rawlingford and Bradby would probably start crunching diskettes and reformatting hard disks as soon as they were roused from sleep—but we figured that there’d be more than enough left to salvage. They were scientists, after all; keeping backup files ought to have been second nature to them.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t that simple. The Animal Farmers didn’t bother with shredding and reformatting; they just torched the place. Nobody had thought to give us gas-masks, and the fumes that met us in the corridors of the manor were so foul and instantly dizzying that we should have known that they were toxic and turned back immediately. Actually, that was what most of my colleagues did. I was the only thoroughly stupid one. I kept on going, determined to get to the office that was my designated objective. It was hopeless—but it was my one and only Boy’s Own adventure and I hadn’t been trained to an adequate sense of self-preservation. I was just on the point of blacking out when I heard shots fired in the woods, and realized just how badly awry the operation had gone.
*
I would certainly have died if I hadn’t been pulled out of the fume-filled corridor—and by the time my own team got around to noticing that I was missing it was far too late for them to do anything constructive. It was the Animal Farmers who saved me—not the scientists who had actually set up the illegal experiments, but a handful of lesser beings who’d turned back when the shooting started in the hope of finding a safer way out on the other side of the house.
I woke up with a terrible headache and stinging eyes, coughing weakly. It felt for a minute or two as though my lungs had been so badly scorched that I could no longer draw sufficient oxygen from the warm and musty air that I drew into them—but that, mercifully, was an illusion born of distress.
I managed to crack open my weeping eyes just long enough to perceive that it was too dark to see what was happening, then shut them tight and hoped that the pain would go away.
Somebody lifted my head and pressed a cup of water to my lips. I managed to take a few sips, and decided not to protest when a female voice said, “He’s OK.”
While I lay there collecting myself a different female voice said, “It’s no good.
There’s no way out up there. As the fire draws air upward our supply’s being renewed via the tunnel to the old icehouse, but there’s no way through the grilles.
They haven’t been opened in half a century and the locks are rusted solid. Hemans should have taken care of them years ago. He should have known that this would happen one day.”
“There’s a hacksaw in the toolbox,” a male voice put in. “If we get to work right away…”
“They were shooting, Ed,” the second female told him. “They’re trying to wipe us out, just like Bradby always said they would. They don’t even want to ask the questions, let alone hear the answers. They just want us dead. Even if we could get to the lakeside, they’re probably waiting for us. We wouldn’t stand a chance.”
“What chance have we got if we wait here, Ali?” Ed replied. “Even if the fire burns all day tomorrow, they’ll come to pick over the ruins as soon as they can. If they’re still in the woods by then, they’ll certainly be all around what’s left of the house. The tunnel’s our only chance. If we can just get to Brighton, to a crowd. Then London …
we can pass, Ali. I know we can. We can hide.”
I wanted to tell them that nobody wanted to shoot them, that they’d be fine if they sat tight until it was safe to go upstairs and then surren-dered, but I knew that they wouldn’t believe me. What on earth had made them so paranoid? And why had the ARU men opened fire?
“Ed’s right,” said the female who’d given me the water to drink. “If they have the icehouse covered, we’re dead—but all the exits upstairs will still be useless when the fire dies down. We have to start work on the grilles. Somebody ought to watch this one, though—he’s not badly hurt. If he doesn’t come at us, he’ll give us away.”
“We should have left him where he was,” Ed opined bitterly. “He’s not going to be any use as a hostage, is he?”
“He wouldn’t be any use as a corpse,” the unnamed female retorted. “He’d just be an excuse for branding us as murderers, justifying the ethnic cleansing.”
Ethnic cleansing! What on earth had Bradby been telling them? And who the hell were they, anyway? I couldn’t help jumping to the obvious conclusion, but I refused to entertain it. I was supposed to be a scientist, not some sucker who’d swallow any urban legend that happened along.
“We don’t know th at the others who came in with him all got out,” Ali pointed out.
“No, we don’t,” the other female admitted, “but we did know that he hadn’t. If we’d left him where he went down, it would have been murder.”
“It would have been suicide,” said Ed. “But Kath’s right, Ali. They’d have called it murder. They’ll have to justify the shooting somehow.”
I coughed again, partly because I needed to and partly because I wanted to remind them that I had a voice too, even if I hadn’t yet obtained sufficient control of it to formulate meaningful utterances.
“You’d better stay with him, Ali,” the male voice said. “If he gets aggressive, hit him with this.”
At that stage, I could only guess what “this” might be—some time passed before I was able to make out that it was an axe—but I wasn’t about to make any trouble. I was still trying to convince myself that I hadn’t breathed in enough poison to be mortally hurt, and that I hadn’t done sufficient damage to my lungs to prejudice my long-term ability to breathe. I heard two sets of feet moving away across a stone floor, and I forced myself to relax, collecting myself together by slow degrees.
Eventually, I felt well enough to begin to feel angry. I stopped being grateful for being alive and started resenting the fact that I had come so close to dying. Setting the fire had been an act of pure spite on the part of the mad scientists. People like me—law-abiding geneticists, that is—had collaborated with the Home Office in drawing up the careful legislation which presumably defined whatever the Animal Farmers were doing as unacceptable, but they had simply been too arrogant to comply with the law. On top of that, it seemed, they had taken the view that if we wouldn’t countenance the research then we couldn’t have the results. They had obviously decided that if they had to go to jail, they’d take all their hard-won understanding with them—and woe betide anyone who got in their way.
Once I began to get angry, I didn’t stop. If Hemans and Co. really had been transplanting human genes into the embryos of pigs in order to turn out simulacra of human beings, it was unforgivable, and the murderous fire was piling injury on insult.
I’d never been convinced that the Animal Farmers had done what Special Branch said they’d done—I’d gone through the doors of Commoner’s Isle still wondering whether it was all going to turn out to be a big mistake, exaggerated out of all proportion—but the fact that the place had been torched with such alacrity suggested that they must have done something that they were desperate to conceal.
Unless, of course, that was what we were supposed to think. There was still a possibility that we were all being taken for a ride—that it was all a game, intended to discredit the GE-Crime Unit and the Home Office advisers before they began to get their act together.
While I lay there being angry, it occurred to me that I might be in a uniquely good position to find out exactly what the Animal Farmers were really up to.
*
When I was finally confident that I could hold a conversation, I had already formulated my plan of campaign.
“Is Ali short for Alison?” I asked. I was able to open my eyes by then, and they had accustomed themselves to the near-darkness sufficiently to let me see that the person standing guard over me was a blond teenager, perhaps fourteen or fifteen years of age. She was too young to be a lab assistant, so I seized upon the hypothesis that she was probably someone’s daughter. We had been warned that some of the live-in staff at the manor had children, but we hadn’t expected them to be abandoned when the shit hit the fan.
“Alice,” she informed me, stiffly.
“As in Wonderland?” I quipped, hoping to help her relax.
“As in Through the Looking Glass,” she retorted. It didn’t seem to be worthwhile asking her what the difference was.
“I’m Stephen Hitchens,” I told her. “I’m not a policeman—I’m a geneticist, currently employed as an adviser to the Home Office.”
“Bully for you,” she said dryly. I wondered whether she might be older than she looked—maybe sixteen or seventeen—but I concluded in the end that natural insolence, like puberty, probably arrived ahead of its time nowadays.
“Why did the scientists set fire to the house, Alice?” I asked.
“Why did armed police surround it?” she countered.
“None of this is your fault, or mine,” I assured her. “I was just trying to recover the records of the experiments the scientists had done. They should have made sure that you were safe before they started the fire. They’re not your friends, Alice. Did your parents work for Dr Hemans?”
“In a manner of speaking,” she told me, as if relishing a hidden irony.
“What manner of speaking?” I demanded, although I could hardly help seeing the obvious implication. If she wasn’t the child of someone on the staff, she had to be one of the experimental subjects—or, I reminded myself, someone pretending to be one of the experimental subjects.
“The kind of work you do in a sty,” she replied, casually confirming the inference she must have known I’d take. “The kind of work where your pay arrives in a trough.”
If it was true, then she certainly had come from Wonderland — but was it true?
Wasn’t it far more likely to be a lie, a carefully constructed bluff? Was it to hear this, I wondered, that I had been hauled out of the corridor and brought down here into near-darkness? Could the Animal Farmers be using me, trying to convince me that they had achieved far, far more than they had? If so, what should my policy be?
Should I run with the bluff and let her make her pitch, or challenge her and refuse to believe that she was anything but what she appeared to be?
“You’re telling me that you’re not human?” I said, just to make sure that she wasn’t just making a joke. I knew as soon as I’d said it that I’d framed the rhetorical question wrongly. What she’d actually told me was that her parents weren’t human.
“Like hell I am,” she said. Like Snowball in hell, I couldn’t help thinking. Play along, I told myself. Find out what she has to say.
“So you think you’re human,” I conceded. “You can certainly pass for it, probably in a far brighter light than this—but if your parents really were pigs, you must understand that other people might not see things the same way.” As I said that I realized that her creators or drama-coaches—must already have put it in much stronger terms. That was why Ed and Kath had been so paranoid about the possibility of being shot down—that and the fact that the ARU really had opened fire.
“I know what I see when I look in a mirror,” Alice told me, perhaps to make sure that I’d understood how clever her reference to Through the Looking Glass was.
“It’s not the image of itself that’s important, of course—it’s the fact that there’s an eye to see it. A human I—and I don’t mean e-y-e.”
Cogito, ergo sum, she might have said, if she—or whoever had written her script—hadn’t been so anxious about the need to stay viewer-friendly. I hadn’t enough anger left to prevent me from wondering whether Special Branch might always have known exactly how human Animal Farmers’ experimental subjects looked, and whether their senior officers might have taken it upon themselves to decide that the ministry didn’t need to know until the shooting was well and truly over. If they had, and my captors knew it—or even if they hadn’t and my captors merely believed it—I might be in deeper trouble than I thought.
“What about Ed and Kath?” I asked. “Are they like you?”
“They’re human,” Alice assured me, in a tone that left little doubt as to what kind of human she was talking about. She was telling me, in her own perverse way, that they were the kind of humans who were made as well as born: the kind which started off as a fertilized ovum in a sow’s belly before the genetic engineers got to work.
Dr Moreau had remade beasts in his own image by means of surgery, but modern scientists had much cleverer means at their disposal—and the degree of success they might be expected to achieve was far greater. I had to remind myself again that all of this could be a bluff run by a thoroughly human child, and that I was only playing along to see how the story would go.
Alice had relaxed a little since she first started talking, but the way she held her shadowed head and the way she gripped the axe she’d been ordered to hit me with if I got out of line suggested that she wasn’t about to get careless. Now that she’d made her first impression, she was busy reminding herself that she was stuck in a cellar beneath a burning building with a man who might be dangerous. All in all, philosophical discussion seemed the safest way to build a modicum of trust.
