God flew off in three stages, if you ask me, Joanna May, the childless and the cloned, and none of them anything, I have now decided, to do with nuclear bombs or Logie Baird.
God the Father flew off on the day mankind first interfered with his plans for the procreation of the species: that was the day the first woman made a connection between semen and pregnancy and took pains to stop the passage by shoving some pounded, mud-steeped, leaf up inside her. He flew off in a pet. ‘But this is contraception,’ he cried, ‘this is not what I meant. How can I work out my plan for your perfection and ultimate union with me if you start doing this kind of thing?’
God the Son flew off the day the first pregnant woman made the next connection and shoved a sharpened stick up inside her to put an end to morning sickness and whatever else was happening inside. ‘But this is abortion,’ he cried, ‘it’s revolting, and no place for a pro-lifer like me to be.’
And God the Holy Ghost flew off the day Dr Holly of the Bulstrode Clinic, back in the fifties, took one of my ripe eggs out and warmed it, and jiggled it, and irritated it in an amniotic brew until the nucleus split, and split again, and split again, and then started growing, each with matching chromosomes, with identical DNA, that is to say faults and propensities, physical and social, all included, blueprint for four more individuals, and only one soul between them.
Call me egocentric if you like, but that’s when the Holy Ghost flew off, muttering, ‘Christ, where is this going to end?’ for it’s been trouble ever since, hasn’t it, all downhill; war, and riots, and crime, and drugs, and decadence, and dereliction, and delinquency, because there’s no God. Well, there’s no bringing him back; it’s up to man to step in and take over. (I say ‘man’ advisedly; I don’t think women will have the heart, the courage.) He gave us minds, didn’t he, and the aspiration to do things right, as well as the tendency to do them wrong.
Carl may be wicked, but Carl’s right. Takes a wicked man to be prepared to think like Carl, that’s the trouble. I know how Carl May thinks: though not always what he thinks. I know what he was doing; I know why his teeth did not draw blood. Carl is not interested in my blood: blood cells do not contain DNA. A good place for obtaining DNA, from the tissue at the back of the neck. What Carl does with it depends upon what he feels like. So many things are possible. He could take a fertilized egg from, say, Bethany, give it the blueprint for my growth, put it back inside her, and she’d give birth to a little me. Would she like that? Perhaps she would. Perhaps mothering a man’s first wife might make you feel altogether better about her. All these relationships are about incorporation, if you ask me, everyone in one big bed together – me, Carl, Oliver, Bethany, Isaac – all rolling around, warm and safe and companionable: we only get upset when we’re left out in the cold. If I had a cell from Isaac I would ask Bethany to re-create him, in penance for taking Carl from me. And death would not divide us any more. If he were dug up from his grave, there’d still be enough residual DNA there, even now, to do it. But I won’t do that: it seems forbidden, as forbidden as abortion ever was. I don’t think Carl will do it: to impersonate God is a terrifying thing. Even for Carl, who as a child bayed at the moon. Microbiologists get so far, then lay down their tools, put aside their electron microscopes: take up gardening instead: they frighten even themselves. These days scientists talk a great deal more about God than does the rest of the world: they acknowledge magic – though they call it ‘propensity’, or ‘something intervenes’. ‘Something intervenes,’ they say – as they break matter down to its smallest definable particles, the merest flicker in and out of existence of the most fragmented electric charge – ‘or else our observation alters it.’ What is that but obeisance to the shadow of the God who ran off, the God they drove off, when bold and young and frightened of nothing!
What Carl could do, what Carl might well do, for Carl controls the scientists, since Carl has the money, is mix up some of my chromosomes with those of some other creature and set it growing, and know more or less what would get born, forget a fingernail or two. He could snip out the section that decrees I will have long and elegant legs, and snip in a section from someone else’s DNA, someone with short piano legs, the kind without ankles. He could give me a dog’s back legs. If he wanted, he could do horrible things. He could do good things: sometimes he wants to do good things. Just as man can use nuclear weapons to make war or keep peace, to destroy or build, Carl could make me live with arthritis for ever or keep me disease free, never to catch cold again. He could interfere with my mind: make me nicer, more gregarious, kinder, happier, more socially conscious: he couldn’t control the environment I grew up in, not in the short term, but if everyone was kinder, happier, loved their children better, didn’t shut them in kennels – why then presently the environment of the growing child would indeed change, improve, step by step, little by little. Look at it this way, Carl would say, every time a woman uses contraception or has an abortion, she interferes with natural selection. Not this baby, the next baby, says the mother, bold as brass, standing in nature’s way. Let’s go for a better father, or a better environment: let’s hang on a bit. That’s what it’s about: that’s what’s important. Not the first baby that comes along but the best baby, the one that’ll have a decent chance in life. And let’s do better by the ones we have, stop at two, not six. Quality, not quantity. Choice, not randomness, and there being no God, why not? That’s what Carl thinks.
In the meantime, being unreconstructed himself, and cured of the notion that death is final – for it isn’t, not if he can keep the genetic line running – Carl May has killed Oliver, and now he means to kill the clones. He has told me so, by way of the cards. He thinks this will hurt me. He offered me a family: now he snatches it away again. But I’m not at all sure that I recognize their right to life, these thefts from me, these depletings of my ‘I’, these early symptoms of the way the world is going. I might myself be rather in favour of termination. I must think about it.
Time to consult the Maverick Agency once again. I like the Maverick Agency. They make me feel the world is real, that the boats on the river, the cars on the road, are truly there. That a debt could affect you, a bullet kill you. Everything in this house is so still and quiet. The weather is warm. The windows are open. The watered-silk curtains, palest green, stir just a little. In the garden the weeds are growing, that’s all, with no Oliver to clear them. And the caesium falls, and the strontium, and God knows what, silent, minute, invisible, as Carl makes his deadening presence felt.