So it was that the four clones, Jane, Julie, Gina and Alice, produced by the irritation of a single egg, were successfully implanted in waiting wombs. Beyond confirming that growth was normal and the infants were successfully born, Holly and May made no attempt to follow the fortunes of the children, or to do the personality studies that would, both agreed, be interesting, if only to make some contribution to the nature/nurture debate. But the complications of setting up such studies would be immense; their research would come under an ethical and legal scrutiny it could not for the time being afford; and it would, they told themselves, be difficult for the four little girls to live normal lives under scrutiny. Nor did they see any good reason to tell Joanna May herself what they had done. Joanna May, the calm, normal, healthy, beautiful and apparently well-balanced woman whom they had, out of love, respect and admiration so successfully reproduced, was still a woman, and therefore liable to extreme, hysterical and unhelpful reaction: she was a creature of the emotions, rather than reason. That was the female lot. And look at it this way: if the population of, say, Egypt increased by a million every nine months, why then, were four more Joannas dropped into the pool – rather than one each of a female Madge/Jeremy, Harold/Katie, Douglas/Annette, Honeybell/Patrick (unlikely in any case to come into existence because of nature’s own inefficiency) – to be in any way abhorred? Holly and May had done no harm to anyone, so far as they could see, or anything: though Holly sometimes, when reviewing the past, did wonder a little about Carl May’s motives: could a man brought up in a kennel, barking in his heart, baying at the moon, really ever know himself? Did anyone?
The Bulstrode Clinic experiments in parthenogenesis had long since ceased, becoming irrelevant as the whole field of genetic engineering and microbiology opened up. Dr Holly had moved on to run an enterprising and well-funded Research and Development unit at Martins Pharmaceuticals, an international conglomerate of which Carl May presently became a director. Here his field was at first the decoding of DNA; at which time the visits and special requests of Carl May became less frequent, rather to Dr Holly’s relief. But later Holly moved on to the development of dehydration techniques in relation to egg-cell nuclei; there was much excitement and talk of Nobel Prizes – and all of a sudden Carl May was back again, having met up with Isaac King, requiring that Holly drop everything and search the gut of an ancient Egyptian body, dehydrated rather than mummified, which he just so happened to have in his possession, for cells with sufficient intact and living DNA for nuclei transference to be possible. Holly hinted, rather than protested, that he had better things to do than bring the past to life, since the present was surely difficult enough to cope with. He tried to keep the matter light in the interest of his funding, and in the attempt made matters worse than he had thought possible.
‘If our motives are impure,’ said Dr Holly blithely, ‘we will suffer for it: we will be caught like birds in a trap.’ The Curse of the Pharaohs was in his mind: Tutankhamen’s curse which, according to Isaac King, pursued leading Egyptologists all over the world – tumours and heart attacks killing at an unusually early age, cancers and road accidents striking others down – so that the quality, forget the number, of professors in the subject fell as the best and brightest of them were removed from the human race. Dr Holly half-believed it, half did not, could joke about it.
Carl May did not consider it a joking matter. Carl May dismissed the matter of the Curse of the Pharaohs as the merest, most vulgar of superstitions; how could any scientist even half-believe such junk? Handling a lot of dusty, ancient, possibly carcinogenic material could well result in early death. Road accidents? Well, Egyptologists were by their nature impractical and vague. The myth of the absent-minded professor had its roots in truth. They just didn’t look where they were going. They got killed. Dr Holly, rashly, disagreed. He was a professor himself, he reminded Carl May. He was not absent-minded, not in the least.
The Curse of the Pharaohs, Carl May then pointed out, was no more than a warning, albeit engraved in stringent stone and in a prominent position. It was the Ancient Egyptian equivalent of a burglar alarm: ‘If anyone enters my tomb with unworthy intentions, be warned. I will catch him like a bird in a trap and stand witness against him by the throne of the Lord of Eternity.’ The Ancient Egyptians, Isaac King had explained to Carl May, who now took the trouble – and he was a busy man – to explain it to Dr Holly, caught their birds in clapnets, the two wooden sides of a net coming smartly and suddenly together, and that for the bird was that: kept trapped until it was time to be killed and eaten, or killed and embalmed by some patron who would gain credit in the afterlife for so doing. Absurd!
‘You never know,’ laughed Dr Holly, ‘just when the past will catch up with you! You should always be prepared. Embalm a bird or two!’
Carl May did not laugh. Carl May took irrational offence. ‘Gobbledygook!’ he cried, and Dr Holly found his department’s grant cut presently by many millions. For once too piqued to apologize or oblige, Dr Holly allowed his department to limp on as best it could, left the pursuit of Nobel Prizes to others, and diversified into the safe, cheap and interesting study of brain-cell activity in identical twins. Carl May did not take this side-stepping sitting down: no, he fretted, threatened and fumed – but shortly afterwards came the unfortunate matter of Isaac King’s death, and the divorce of his wife, and he was quiet. Something seemed to have knocked the spirit out of him, at least for a time.