47

Dr Isadore Holly beamed his goodwill towards the four Queens but they weren’t having any of it. Interesting.

‘Life,’ said Dr Holly piously, ‘is the only wealth, and I gave you life.’

‘You did not,’ snapped Cups.

‘You just fiddled around in a test tube,’ scorned Wands.

‘Who do you think you are?’ sneered Pentacles.

‘God?’ jeered Swords.

They had rapidly acquired the habit, now they were together, of dividing up a sentence amongst them and handing it out, with fourfold emphasis. So long, that is, as their emotions coincided, which fortunately was not always the case. They produced, or so thought Dr Holly, a kind of wave motion of feeling and thought, a trough in one giving way to a surge in the next. Alice had the sharpest peaks, the lowest troughs; Jane and Gina flowed more moderately in between: Julie was the smoothest, the most languid. He thought she was the most successful, or was this merely a sexist reaction in himself, what the man liked in the woman, a kind of acquiescence? More research, more research! But how could research into personality ever avoid the bias, the conditioning, of the observer? Interesting.

So God must have thought when the first sea creature grew a fin sufficiently strong to be called a leg and put his weight upon it – how much it hurt but how interesting!

Dr Holly sat on a swivel chair, and moved it gently to and fro in time with his thoughts; his short legs did not quite reach the ground; he had to use the muscles of his buttocks to provide the impetus for movement. He wished the women would go away and leave him alone with his thoughts, but they wouldn’t. They came to ask questions, and stayed to nag. How much easier theory was than practice: how much more convenient the idea than the reality. And where was May, Carl May, whose theory, whose idea these women were, this multiplication of perfection out of technical ingenuity? He had thought to breed passivity and had manufactured its opposite. May should be here to witness this turn up for the books.

How they tapped their feet, how they drummed their fingers, these four handsome creatures, the clones of Joanna May; each one amounting to more than the original, by virtue – by virtue of what? What was it that gave the illusion that there was somehow more room in them than in their original, some sort of inner space not altogether taken up by flesh and bone, nerve, muscle, brain, blood; which gave them an energy, a freedom, a distinctiveness which Joanna May had never had? The life force skipped about in their bodies, toeing no particular line, if only because that line had opened out, widened, become fuzzy. These women were less the sum of their genes than was Joanna May, that was what it was, by virtue of being born into a later decade – as if time itself was a factor in the making of a personality, and ought to be included along with diet and education, and social expectation as a complementary building block. Each year its special character, as with wine, and due to something more than weather: rather some complex, so far undefined, pattern at work. Interesting. Except that it smacked of that insult to the civilized and rational mind, astrology.

‘We’re waiting,’ said Alice.

‘We’ve come a long way,’ said Jane.

‘We won’t be put off,’ said Gina.

‘We have a right to know,’ said Julie.

‘Who our parents are.’

‘What our relationship is.’

‘Why this has been kept secret.’

‘And are there more of us?’ asked Julie, and a little breath of air stirred the air of the perfectly air-conditioned, even-temperatured room, as the other three drew their breath in surprise and alarm. More? It was intolerable.

‘There is one more of you,’ said Dr Holly, consolingly. ‘But only one.’

Five of us!

They would not sit down. They moved about the room, their energy focused upon him. He had the feeling their energy bisected him. He expected their gratitude, but they had none to offer. Well, this was the fate of the prophet, the searcher after knowledge, the reformer, the artist, the innovator: he should not be surprised.

The room was acoustic-tiled, palest green: the light came from gently humming fluorescent tubes, the carpet was neutral oatmeal, the furniture pale ersatz oak veneer, the files a dingy yellow, computers, VDUs and faxes creamy white. No money had been spared: equally, none wasted. The room was male, male; straight-lined, hard-edged: he saw now what was wrong with it. No pot plants, no family photographs, no cushions – not an ashtray, not a coffee cup – nothing to bear witness to human frailty, everything to further unimpassioned thought, that divine inspiration, that necessary trigger if Utopia was ever to be achieved. And how else but by logical means, since all other ways had been tried, and had failed? Poet priests, and painter kings, all failed; empires crumbling as art and nonsense prevails: aspiration and practicalities always so little in accord: no, this was the way forward, through the digital clicking of information, the intricate matching of fact with fact, through memory forever retained, patching together the parts of wisdom to get at the wider vision: as DNA is logged and booked and coded and patched. Working up from minutiae rather than in from the macrocosm, for that could never be grasped in its entirety, only guessed at intuitively, and how much time and money you would waste if you got it wrong. Obviously, you had to start with the little bits and make them up into the whole. No wonder computers wrote such bad poetry.

‘We’re waiting,’ or rather ‘w–we–we’r–we’re wait, waiti, waitin, waiting.’ Odd, that; the ripple effect when they all said the same thing at much the same time, just fractions of a second apart. Did it follow the same sequence as the initial cell division? Well, he would never know. He longed to know. How uppity they were, how irritating, these grown children of his invention. ‘Which of our mothers had quins, then,’ they demanded, ‘was it a fertility drug, and who was our father? You?’

‘Good God no,’ said Dr Holly, shocked. ‘You seem to be labouring under considerable misapprehensions.’

And Dr Holly explained to them the detail of their birth. (‘Not birth,’ snapped Alice, ‘say genesis.’) Afterwards they were silent for a little. He was glad he had shaken them.

‘It isn’t nice to be so unusual,’ said Julie presently. ‘To be implanted, not conceived.’

‘We were so conceived,’ said Gina. ‘We were conceived in Harley Street sixty years ago. We are orphans. Our parents are dead.’

‘Well if they’re not,’ said Alice, ‘they needn’t think I’m visiting them.’

Jane said, ‘We were postponed for thirty years. We should sue.’

‘I gave you life,’ repeated Dr Holly. ‘You should be grateful.’

They were not. Why only four, they demanded. Why not a hundred?

‘We couldn’t get more than four, in those days,’ he apologized. ‘We weren’t in the business of swapping nuclei, shuffling genes, just parthenogenesis, and ex-utero conception.’

Then they despised him for a failure in ambition. He felt bad about it. He wished them out of existence, but they failed to dematerialize.

The clones turned their mind to Joanna May. They needed someone more exotic than Dr Holly to blame. She should never have let it happen. What sort of person could she be? How could you be cloned and simply not notice? Jane wanted to know.

‘Easily enough,’ said Gina, sadly, who had more experience of hospitals and doctors than her sisters.

‘I don’t want to meet her,’ said Alice. ‘She’s so old we’d have nothing in common.’

But Julie said, ‘You might learn something from yourself grown old,’ and they pondered that.

Dr Holly rashly said sixty was not old, it was positively young, and they turned the energy of their attention back to him. They jeered.

‘You have made orphans of us,’ they said. ‘Snatched away the ground from beneath our feet. We are unnatural, and all you can do is talk about yourself.’

Gina began to snivel at the notion of being unnatural. Alice slapped Gina: Julie comforted Gina; Jane restrained Alice’s hand. They swirled around a little, touching, hugging, patting, settled down again.

‘And now,’ said Alice to Dr Holly, ‘I suppose you think you’re God and we should worship you. Well, we don’t. We are much more likely to sue you.’

‘The general opinion is,’ said Dr Holly, kicking his feet against the central pillar of his chair, as if he were a little boy, ‘that God is dead.’

He felt himself grow tall: his legs extended to the floor and below; his head to the ceiling and beyond. He floated. He felt himself swell, he thought he would burst. It was a most unpleasant feeling. Still his mind worked, computer racing, information pitted against wisdom. Interesting! The Gods were dead, starved to death by lack of belief, and when the Gods died the Titans returned, and he was a Titan untrammelled. Dr Isadore Titan Holly, suffering from gigantism of the head: outside the laboratory windows were the chimneys, the puffers, the suckers, the spitters and nibblers of Martins Worldwide Pharmacopoeia, patents taken throughout the universe, through all eternity, nothing too small, nothing too short, just everything, everything buzzing and whirring and blinding, swifter, faster, cleaner, neater, smarter, richer, glossier exploding markets, expanding universe, stretching time, smash, crack, ecstasy, smack, the cocaine culture, a faster mile, bigger muscles, sweeter smiles, shorter skirts, up their own arse and out again, he was part of it, feet through mud and head through clouds – and splat, he’d fallen flat on his face. The breath was knocked out of him. He was having a fit: a bad one: perhaps this was the one which would carry him off?

Not one of them helped him up, these, the women of his creation. Not one of them loosened his collar or made his tongue safe. They stared down at him, watching him froth and twitch, waiting for him to die, or not, as the case might be.

‘He can’t die now,’ said Alice eventually, brutally. ‘There’s more we need to know.’

He felt better, as if having been given permission to survive. He tried to speak. He couldn’t. But his limbs moved now of his own volition, not of his brain’s convulsion. That was something. Perhaps he should crawl out to Sarah? But they closed in on him. He thought they might kick him, even to death. Supposing they felt as entitled to end him as he had been to begin them? What would happen to his research? Had he remembered to put away his own dehydrated DNA? Yes, of course he had. A loss to humanity, otherwise. A multiplicity of ingenuity was what he had, and others had not. So much to be done, so very much it had frightened him off: nothing to do with Carl May. He had wanted the grant cut: he had wasted time unforgivably. Brain transplants: memory transfer: personality shuffling: all waiting for his attention. He of all people needed to be cloned, properly. Effective genetic engineering; not a hopeless dream: just a great deal of money and international cooperation. Another fifty years would do it. It would not be personal immortality for him, even so. It couldn’t be. Just look at these four to know; to know what? Not one soul to go round, but a soul apiece and more to spare, and man, woman, was more than the animals, and God was there, and to find out that was enough for a lifetime.

But had he told Sarah where his DNA was? Where he’d put himself? Would she remember? Oh fallible, fallible! So much industrial security in a scientific arena; records always so secret: things got lost. Death was something you never expected. Four straight noses bending down. Perfect noses. Beautiful eyes. It couldn’t be bad to have achieved this. He was proud of them. At least he was down to proper size. Little size, almost child size. Four short upper lips, four rather thin lower lips. Better breed clones than rely on finding twins: why had he doubted it! He would do what Carl May wanted: it was what he wanted. He was decided. He would take all the money and get going again. If they let him live. They did.

‘What did you say?’ asked Alice.

‘Interesting,’ managed Dr Holly, and they fetched Sarah.

‘He had some kind of fit,’ said Jane.

‘Epileptic,’ said Sarah. ‘He must have forgotten his tablets. He’ll be OK now. I expect you exhausted him. He’s not as young as he was.’

The clones left, still angry: they blamed the bearer of bad news for the news: and the bad news was they were not who they thought they were, and that is always difficult to accept, no matter how little you may like being who you thought you were. Dr Holly had given them life and they’d drained the life out of him to the point of death, exhausted him, to punish him for every unpleasantness received and recorded during that life. Children do it to parents every day of their lives, to pay them out for not providing a perfect world to live in. They felt their own unreasonableness and it made them irritable rather than guilty. They felt the inherent guilt of the female, but not powerfully; being four that guilt was quartered. The soul was multiplied, the guilt divided. That was a great advance.

The realization cheered them up. They thought they should celebrate. The clones went back to Julie’s house as soon as they could because Ben couldn’t be left alone with the little ones for too long. A mild obligation, when divided by four. Alice said, at first, she wouldn’t come, she wasn’t interested, but in fact she did, she was. The others understood quickly that though Alice needed persuading, she was not difficult to persuade.

Julie and Gina went in Julie’s small automatic Volvo, Jane followed in her Citroen Deux Chevaux, Alice in her Porsche. They were glad not to have chosen the same car.

‘Alec likes Volvos,’ said Julie.

‘Tom only believes in Citroens,’ said Jane.

‘Mine’s just more expensive than my brothers’ cars,’ said Alice, cheering up. ‘At least they’re not really my brothers. Thank God, it wasn’t incest, that on top of everything.’

‘I never had time to learn to drive,’ said Gina.