Collected short fiction.., p.49
Collected Short Fiction of Greg Egan, page 49
By the time Angela and Bill were contemplating Cook’s proposal, the prevailing rhetoric was almost the reverse of that of a decade before. Modern eugenics was hailed by its practitioners as a force opposed to racist myths. Individual traits were what mattered, to be assessed ‘objectively’ on their merits, and the historical conjunctions of traits which had once been referred to as ‘racial characteristics’ were of no more interest to a modern eugenicist than national boundaries were to a geologist. Who could oppose reducing the incidence of crippling genetic diseases? Who could oppose decreasing the next generation’s susceptibility to arteriosclerosis, breast cancer, and stroke, and increasing their ability to tolerate UV radiation, pollution and stress? Not to mention nuclear fallout.
As for producing a child so brilliant as to cut a swathe through the world’s environmental, political and social problems … perhaps such high expectations would not be fulfilled, but what could be wrong about trying?
And yet. Angela and Bill remained wary—and even felt vaguely guilty at the prospect of accepting Cook’s proposal, without quite knowing why. Yes, eugenics was only for the rich, but that had been true of the leading edge of health care for centuries. Neither would have declined the latest surgical procedures or drugs simply because most people in the world could not afford them. Their patronage, they reasoned, could assist the long, slow process leading to extensive gene therapy for everyone’s children. Well … at least everyone in the wealthiest countries’ upper middle classes.
They returned to Human Potential. Cook gave them the VIP tour, he showed them his talking dolphins and his slice of prime cortex, and still they were unconvinced. So he gave them a questionnaire to fill out, a specification of the child they wanted; this might, he suggested, make it all a bit more tangible.
· · · · ·
Cook glanced over the form, and frowned. ‘You haven’t answered all the questions.’
Bill said, ‘W-w-we didn’t—’
Angela hushed him. ‘We want to leave some things to chance. Is that a problem?’
Cook shrugged. ‘Not technically. It just seems a pity. Some of the traits you’ve left blank could have a very real influence on the course of Eugene’s life.’
‘That’s exactly why we left them blank. We don’t want to dictate every tiny detail, we don’t want to leave him with no room at all—’
Cook shook his head. ‘Angela, Angela! You’re looking at this the wrong way. By refusing to make a decision, you’re not giving Eugene personal freedom—you’re taking it away! Abnegating responsibility won’t give him the power to choose any of these things for himself; it simply means he’ll be stuck with traits which may be less than ideal. Can we go through some of these unanswered questions?’
‘Sure.’
Bill said, ‘Maybe ch-ch-chance is p-part of freedom.’ Cook ignored him.
‘Height. Do you honestly not care at all about that? Both of you are well below average, so you must both be aware of the disadvantages. Don’t you want better for Eugene?
‘Build. Let’s be frank; you’re overweight, Bill is rather scrawny. We can give Eugene a head start towards a socially optimal body. Of course, a lot will depend on his lifestyle, but we can influence his dietary and exercise habits far more than you might think. He can be made to like and dislike certain foods, and we can arrange maximum susceptibility to endogenous opiates produced during exercise.
‘Penis length—’
Angela scowled. ‘Now that’s the most trivial—’
‘You think so? A recent survey of two thousand male graduates of Harvard Business School found that penis length and IQ were equally good predictors of annual income.
‘Facial bone structure. In the latest group-dynamic studies, it turned out that both the forehead and the cheekbones played significant roles in determining which individuals assumed dominant status. I’ll give you a copy of the results.
‘Sexual preference—’
‘Surely he can—’
‘Make up his own mind? That’s wishful thinking, I’m afraid. The evidence is quite unambiguous: it’s determined in the embryo by the interaction of several genes. Now, I have nothing at all against homosexuals, but the condition is hardly what you’d call a blessing. Oh, people can always reel off lists of famous homosexual geniuses, but that’s a biased sample; of course we’ve only heard of the successes.
‘Musical taste. As yet, we can only influence this crudely, but the social advantages should not be underestimated…’
· · · · ·
Angela and Bill sat in their living room with the TV on, although they weren’t paying much attention to it. An interminable ad for the Department of Defence was showing, all rousing music and jet fighters in appealingly symmetrical formations. The latest privatisation legislation meant that each taxpayer could specify the precise allocation of his or her income tax between government departments, who in turn were free to spend as much of their revenue as they wished on advertising aimed at attracting more funds. Defence was doing well. Social Security was laying off staff.
The latest meeting with Cook had done nothing to banish their sense of unease, but without solid reasons to back up their feelings, they felt obliged to ignore them. Cook had solid reasons for everything, all based on the very latest research; how could they go to him and call the whole thing off, without at least a dozen impeccable arguments, each supported by a reference to some recent report in Nature?
They couldn’t even pin down the source of their disquiet to their own satisfaction. Perhaps they were simply afraid of the fame that Eugene was destined to bring upon them. Perhaps they were jealous, already, of their son’s as yet unknowable—but inevitably spectacular—achievements. Bill had a vague suspicion that the whole endeavour was somehow pulling the rug out from under an important part of what it had meant to be human—but he didn’t know quite how to put it into words, not even to Angela. How could he confess that, personally, he didn’t want to know the extent to which genes determined the fate of an individual? How could he declare that he’d rather stick with comfortable myths—no, forget the euphemisms, that he’d rather have downright lies—than have his nose rubbed in the dreary truth that a human being could be made to order, like a hamburger?
Cook had assured them that they need have no worries about handling the young genius. He could arrange a queue-jumping enrolment in the best Californian baby university, where, amongst Noble × Noble TPGM prodigies, Eugene could do brain-stimulating baby gymnastics to the sound of Kant sung to Beethoven, and learn Grand Unified Field Theory subliminally during his afternoon naps. Eventually, of course, he would overtake both his genetically inferior peers and his merely brilliant instructors, but by then he ought to be able to direct his own education.
Bill put an arm around Angela, and wondered if Eugene really would do more for humanity than their millions could have achieved directly in Bangladesh or Ethiopia or Alice Springs. But could they face spending the rest of their lives wondering what miracles Eugene might have performed for their crippled planet? That would be unbearable. They’d pay the tax on hope.
Angela began loosening Bill’s clothing. He did the same for her. Tonight—as they both knew, without exchanging a word—was the most fertile point of Angela’s cycle; in spite of the antibodies, they hadn’t abandoned the habits they’d acquired in the years when they’d been hoping to conceive naturally.
The rousing music from the television stopped, abruptly. The scenes of military hardware deteriorated into static. A sad-eyed boy, perhaps eight years old, appeared on the screen and said quietly, ‘Mother. Father. I owe you an explanation.’
Behind the boy was nothing but an empty blue sky. Angela and Bill stared at the screen in silence, waiting in vain for a voice-over or title to put the image in context. Then the child’s eyes met Angela’s, and she knew that he could see her, and she knew who it must be. She gripped Bill’s arm and whispered, dizzy with shock, but euphoric too, ‘It’s Eugene.’
The boy nodded.
For a moment, Bill was overcome with panic and confusion, but then paternal pride swelled up and he managed to say, ‘You’ve invented t-t-t-time t-travel!’
Eugene shook his head. ‘No. Suppose you fed the genetic profile of an embryo into a computer, which then constructed a simulation of the appearance of the mature organism; no time travel is involved, and yet aspects of a possible future are revealed. In that example, all the machinery to perform the extrapolation exists in the present, but the same thing can happen if the right equipment—equipment of a far more sophisticated kind—exists in the potential future. It may be useful, as a mathematical formalism, to pretend that the potential future has a tangible reality and is influencing its past—just as in geometric optics, it’s often convenient to pretend that reflections are real objects that exist behind the mirrors that create them—but a formalism is all it would be.’
Angela said, ‘So because you might invent such a device, we can see you, and talk to you, as if you were speaking to us from the future?’
‘Yes.’
The couple exchanged glances. Here was an end to their doubts! Now they could find out exactly what Eugene would do for the world!
‘If you were speaking to us from the future,’ Angela asked carefully, ‘what would you tell us? That you’ve reversed the Greenhouse Effect?’ Eugene shook his head sadly. ‘That you’ve made war obsolete?’ No. ‘That you’ve abolished hunger?’ No. ‘That you’ve found a cure for cancer?’ No. ‘What, then?’
‘I would say that I have found a way to Nirvana.’
‘What do you mean? Immortality? Infinite bliss? Heaven on Earth?’
‘No. Nirvana. The absence of all longing.’
Bill was horrified. ‘Y-y-you d-don’t mean g-g-genocide? You’re n-not going to w-w-w-wipe—’
‘No, Father. That would be easy, but I would never do such a thing. Each must find their own way—and in any case, death is an incomplete solution, it cannot erase what has already been. Nirvana is to never have been.’
Angela said, ‘I don’t understand.’
‘My potential existence influences more than this television set. When you check your bank accounts, you will find that the money you might have used to create me has been disbursed; don’t look so distressed—it’s all gone to charitable organisations of which you both approve. The computer records are precisely as if you had authorised the payments yourselves, so don’t bother trying to challenge their authenticity.’
Angela was distraught. ‘But … why would you waste your talents on destroying yourself, when you could have lived a happy, productive life, and done great things for the whole human race?’
‘Why?’ Eugene frowned. ‘Don’t ask me to account for my actions; you’re the ones who would have made me what I would have been. If you want my subjective opinion: personally, I can’t see any point in existence when I can achieve so much without it—but I wouldn’t call that an “explanation”; it’s merely a rationalisation of processes best described at a neural level.’ He shrugged apologetically. ‘The question really has no meaning. Why anything? The laws of physics, and the boundary conditions of spacetime. What more can I say?’
He vanished from the screen. A soap opera appeared.
They contacted their bank’s computer. The experience had been no shared hallucination; their accounts were empty.
They sold the house, which was far too large for just the two of them, but it cost them most of the proceeds to buy something much smaller. Angela found work as a tour guide. Bill got a job on a garbage truck.
Cook’s research continued without them, of course. He succeeded in creating four chimpanzees able to sing, and understand, country and western, for which he received both the Nobel Prize and a Grammy award. He made it into the Guinness Book of Records, for implanting and delivering the world’s first third-generation IVF quins. But his super-baby project, and those of other eugenicists around the world, seemed jinxed; sponsors backed out for no apparent reason, equipment malfunctioned, labs caught fire.
Cook died without ever understanding how completely successful he’d been.
The Extra
From the online version at Eidolon: SF Online — http://eidolon.net/?story=The%20Extra&pagetitle=The+Extra§ion=fiction — First published in Eidolon #2, Winter 1990.
* * * * *
Daniel Gray didn’t merely arrange for his Extras to live in a building within the grounds of his main residence—although that in itself would have been shocking enough. At the height of his midsummer garden party, he had their trainer march them along a winding path which took them within metres of virtually every one of his wealthy and powerful guests.
There were five batches, each batch a decade younger than the preceding one, each comprising twenty-five Extras (less one or two here and there; naturally, some depletion had occurred, and Gray made no effort to hide the fact). Batch A were forty-four years old, the same age as Gray himself. Batch E, the four-year-olds, could not have kept up with the others on foot, so they followed behind, riding an electric float.
The Extras were as clean as they’d ever been in their lives, and their hair—and beards in the case of the older ones—had been laboriously trimmed, in styles that amusingly parodied the latest fashions. Gray had almost gone so far as to have them clothed—but after much experimentation he’d decided against it; even the slightest scrap of clothing made them look too human, and he was acutely aware of the boundary between impressing his guests with his daring, and causing them real discomfort. Of course, naked, the Extras looked exactly like naked humans, but in Gray’s cultural milieu, stark naked humans en masse were not a common sight, and so the paradoxical effect of revealing the creatures’ totally human appearance was to make it easier to think of them as less than human.
The parade was a great success. Everyone applauded demurely as it passed by—in the context, an extravagant gesture of approval. They weren’t applauding the Extras themselves, however impressive they were to behold; they were applauding Daniel Gray for his audacity in breaking the taboo.
Gray could only guess how many people in the world had Extras; perhaps the wealthiest ten thousand, perhaps the wealthiest hundred thousand. Most owners chose to be discreet. Keeping a stock of congenitally brain-damaged clones of oneself—in the short term, as organ donors; in the long term (once the techniques were perfected), as the recipients of brain transplants—was not illegal, but nor was it widely accepted. Any owner who went public could expect a barrage of anonymous hate mail, intense media scrutiny, property damage, threats of violence—all the usual behaviour associated with the public debate of a subtle point of ethics. There had been legal challenges, of course, but time and again the highest courts had ruled that Extras were not human beings. Too much cortex was missing; if Extras deserved human rights, so did half the mammalian species on the planet. With a patient, skilled trainer, Extras could learn to run in circles, and to perform the simple, repetitive exercises that kept their muscles in good tone, but that was about the limit. A dog or a cat would have needed brain tissue removed to persuade it to live such a boring life.
Even those few owners who braved the wrath of the fanatics, and bragged about their Extras, generally had them kept in commercial stables—in the same city, of course, so as not to undermine their usefulness in a medical emergency, but certainly not within the electrified boundaries of their own homes. What ageing, dissipated man or woman would wish to be surrounded by reminders of how healthy and vigorous they might have been, if only they’d lived their lives differently?
Daniel Gray, however, found the contrasting appearance of his Extras entirely pleasing to behold, given that he, and not they, would be the ultimate beneficiary of their good health. In fact, his athletic, clean-living brothers had already supplied him with two livers, one kidney, one lung, and quantities of coronary artery and mucous membrane. In each case, he’d had the donor put down, whether or not it had remained strictly viable; the idea of having imperfect Extras in his collection offended his aesthetic sensibilities.
After the appearance of the Extras, nobody at the party could talk about anything else. Perhaps, one stereovision luminary suggested, now that their host had shown such courage, it would at last became fashionable to flaunt one’s Extras, allowing full value to be extracted from them; after all, considering the cost, it was a crime to make use of them only in emergencies, when their pretty bodies went beneath the surgeon’s knife.
Gray wandered from group to group, listening contentedly, pausing now and then to pluck and eat a delicate spice-rose or a juicy claret-apple (the entire garden had been designed specifically to provide the refreshments for this annual occasion, so everything was edible, and everything was in season). The early afternoon sky was a dazzling, uplifting blue, and he stood for a moment with his face raised to the warmth of the sun. The party was a complete success. Everyone was talking about him. He hadn’t felt so happy in years.
“I wonder if you’re smiling for the same reason I am.”
He turned. Sarah Brash, the owner of Continental Bio-Logic, and a recent former lover, stood beside him, beaming in a faintly unnatural way. She wore one of the patterned scarfs which Gray had made available to his guests; a variety of gene-tailored insects roamed the garden, and her particular choice of scarf attracted a bee whose painless sting contained a combination of a mild stimulant and an aphrodisiac.
He shrugged. “I doubt it.”
She laughed and took his arm, then came still closer and whispered, “I’ve been thinking a very wicked thought.”
He made no reply. He’d lost interest in Sarah a month ago, and the sight of her in this state did nothing to rekindle his desire. He had just broken off with her successor, but he had no wish to repeat himself. He was trying to think of something to say that would be offensive enough to drive her away, when she reached out and tenderly cupped his face in her small, warm hands.
