Rogue Terminator, page 3
The second-generation plants I’d sown included the full range of variants I’d planted in ‘34, but I’d eliminated cytochrome-P450 assistants and the dystrophin repair agents from the new stocks, doubled my order of transposon suppressants and added a brand new line of novel anti-depressants. It turned out that all the products were more-or-less okay except the transposon suppressants, which had done a backflip and turned into transposon enhancers. That made them completely useless for medical purposes, because in the context of higher animal genomes, they had become dangerously mutagenic—but as the tallyman had pointed out to me the previous autumn, plants don’t go in much for Fancy Dan stuff like mammoth genes, protogenes, and humungous satellite-repeat sequences. Nor do insects. Their DNA is exon-rich, and what the energized transposons were doing, not merely to their host plants but to the insects that fed on their nectar, and to anything that fed on the insects, was multiplying the number of functional genes. Polyploidy in plants and invertebrate animals often leads to giantism, and the partial polyploidy promoted by the rogue transposons was encouraging all the local wildlife in that direction, as well as promoting other local superabundances.
If all else had been equal, the work of the rogue transposons would have been strictly short-term, because the augmented chromosomes of the affected plants wouldn’t have been able to pair up in the next round of cross-fertilization. In effect, the accidentally created transposon-enhancers would have functioned as a natural one-step-removed terminator technology—but Jack’s YACs had taken care of that by drastically reducing the fussiness of the chromosomes during meiosis.
All of which, as Joe might say, is boring, buggering boring—except in sum.
What it added up to in the summer of ‘35, though, was a spectacular boost to the local pace of evolution whose like had not been seen since the last supervolcano went off seventy-four thousand years before and scoured all the continents clean, ushering in a new phase of fabulous adaptive radiation.
Fortunately, the main consequence of the fact that the new ecoboom was limited, at least in the beginning, to a triple handful of farms in north Dorset, Somerset, and Devon was a dramatic increase in tourism. Townies love singing birds and pretty butterflies, and above all else they love novelty. Even if the crops hadn’t come in as well as they did, we’d all have grown richer. As it was, we grew much richer.
If the Minispies had known what to look for, they might just have been able to figure out that all three of the affected communities had a key member who knew somebody who knew somebody who worked on a YAC pharm, but they didn’t. By the time they got involved, the ecosituation had become very complicated indeed, and it would have taken Sherlock Holmes and a Cray supercomputer to work out how it had all started—but just in case, Jack Gridley and I started taking surreptitious trips to Hampshire and Berkshire armed with buckets full of YAC soup, surreptitiously depositing the stuff here, there and everywhere, for all the world as if it had fallen from Heaven. Maybe there is a third rule of genetic engineering, identical to the eleventh commandment: whatever else you do, cover your arse.
We were as discreet as we were generous, though, in more ways than one. As soon as the townies started flocking westward in droves, inspired by the reports in the Sun and the Mirror, we had to make bloody sure that our farms were the ones that every tour-guide considered unmissable. They had to be the best of the bunch, so that we could bill them as the English Edens and the twin focal points of the New Genesis. We worked as hard toward that goal as any pharmer ever had, since the day when it all began.
The way it all turned out was very gratifying, even if the Ministry did put an end to it when they bred a bug to chase down all Jack’s YACs and made sure that normal service was resumed, evolutionwise. It was great while it lasted, and I did my utmost to make the most of it. I think I succeeded.
I was pleased for myself, of course, but what really made me proud that August was the way Joe took to it all like a duck to water. The little bugger had always liked showing off, and suddenly he was in his element. There was no more skulking in his bedroom once the gawkers began to arrive in their hundreds, including teenage girls by the dozen. He was out in the fields like a true pharmer’s son, giving them a proper education in the intricacies of genomics, the mysteries of the transposon, and the perennially wayward ways of Nature.
He never meant a single bloody word of it, but it was birdsong to my ears.
Jack Gridley, alas, went the other way. His son was never a talker—the bullshit always seemed to skip a generation in his family—so Jack became the carnival barker himself. If he’d been as canny a scriptwriter as my Joe turned out to be, he’d have pleased a more various crowd, but he went all mystical and started talking about the supernatural gifts of providence and the mysterious ways of the divine intelligence.
It wouldn’t have been so bad if it had all been insincere, but Jack started going on in exactly the same way after hours on Sundays, lecturing us all on the subject of how he’d obviously been chosen by God Himself to bring the miracle of spiritual renewal to the primal wilderness of Wessex. Some people just don’t know when to stop.
Sid Phillips nudged me one night when Jack was holding forth and said that it was the spiritual renewal of the Cerne Abbas Giant all over again, but Jack had always been my best friend and it didn’t seem right to laugh at him, even if he was going off half-cocked. If we’re going to survive and make progress, we pharmers have to stick together, and mind one another’s business as carefully as we can.
After all, if we don’t, who will?
Brian Stableford, Rogue Terminator
