16

The history of cloning was remarkably short and uncomplicated, considering its moral and ethical considerations. Miles and miles of pages were written about “Should We Do It,” “Is It Wrong To Do It,” “Why God Doesn’t Want Us To Do It,” “Which Circle Of Hell Are We Going To Be In If We Do It,” “Will Our Families Ever Forgive Us If We Do It Or Will We End Up Sleeping On The Futon In The Guest Room For The Rest Of Our Lives,” plus multiple variations on the subject of whether it would even be possible. And meanwhile a couple of guys in a lab who never bothered reading that sort of thing just up and cloned somebody.

It all started with the sheep, of course. Everyone remembers Dolly. Named after Dolly Parton, who probably would have been the first human clone herself had the technology been available sooner (scientists being what they are), but when resources are scarce and you’re in Scotland… a sheep would have to do. Dolly was a bit of a disaster: very cute and got great press, but she died young from all sorts of medical problems and because of her huge public debut many laws were immediately passed worldwide to try to keep anyone from making any sort of further cloning attempts. Celebrity cloning executives said she was actually a victim of poor representation; that if she had only had a better agent she could have been licensed into immortality via plush toys and bed sheets, and there would be millions of children counting Dollys off to sleep today. Dying young is a windfall when it comes to fame, as anyone can tell you, and that Dolly’s developers didn’t exploit her celebrity when they had the chance was seen as one of the greater tragedies in children’s marketing history.

So the sheep led to cats, which led to other mammals, and the next thing you know (well, not the next thing but in a logical enough progression that all the doomsayers were able to pat themselves on the back gleefully for their foresight) there was a bouncing human baby clone. Her genetic material came from a rich woman who had lost a beloved daughter; her surrogate womb was, easily enough, the same woman’s. It made a lot of ethical questions easier, tied the inevitable upcoming nature-vs.-nurture arguments into a neat little mobius strip, and made for an incredibly easy workload for the lab’s legal department. Not to mention that it brought the lab a very cozy sum of money. Best of all, because of the risky nature involved, and the woman’s extremely personal reasons for wanting the experiment to succeed, she stipulated that there be no publicity for the girl’s first few years of life. Losing her child a second time would be heartbreaking enough, she reasoned; losing her in the glare of the media would be devastating. Only a tightly knit international group of scientists knew of her existence, and miraculously, knowing of her was enough for them to wait quietly. If she died, or worse, suffered horribly, they would all have lost together. So they hunkered down and made more mice and cats and horses (or rather one mouse or cat or horse, but a lot of them), and waited to see how little Miranda Grace developed.

And little Miranda Grace developed colic, and croup, and a perpetually runny nose, and dirty fingernails and a smartass tone and the ability to slam doors and scream “I HATE YOU!” at a moment’s notice, and was in every other way a perfectly obnoxious, perfectly normal child. And her mother loved her to pieces. And so eventually the press was alerted to the existence of Child X (no name, no city, just the fact of her), and human cloning was officially on.

After Miranda, genetic laboratories that had up till then been so patient and understanding and nicey-nicey with one another suddenly entered a state of warfare. Science for science’s sake was all very well and good while the kid might have died, but now there was money to be made. Finding the best way to exploit the blossoming field and corner the market was the new noble calling. So while a couple of altruistic research facilities really did devote their efforts to pursue partial stem-cell cloning for its lifesaving transplant potential, yadda yadda yadda, most of the big players threw their funding into focus groups: what did people want in cloning? Particularly the rich people, those with lots of expendable income? Well, they wanted their old pets back again, they had known that for years—why take a chance on a new kitten when Mr. Tiddlesworth was so good with the yarn thing and looked so cute on the Christmas cards?

And now they had proven that the same sentiment could be exploited in relatives. They also wanted celebrities, though that was soon taken over by professional licensing firms and movie studios until even the best-connected laboratories couldn’t get a taste of that action. People also wanted copies of themselves. Children so often didn’t get their father’s smarts, or looked like the ugly aunt on their mother’s side, or just plain let everyone down—why take the chance on ordinary genetics when you could have a carbon copy of what you already knew and eliminate all the unknowns? It was astonishing how literally selfish some people were when they decided to breed. In their minds, having a clone of themselves for a baby took away all the guesswork about what their child would be like—and while a more ethically sensitive scientist would have taken some time to explain to these potential parents that having the same DNA would by no means make the child an identical person, these first pioneers were, as before stated, only in it for the cash. The burgeoning fields of clone counselors and precloning ethicists and the entire clone family-therapy industry (and related self-self-help books) arose as a direct result of this initial oversight. They didn’t do all that much good, because the sort of parents who would be grounded enough to realize in time that they were damaging their child with their impossible expectations were far too smart to do anything so narrow-minded as to clone a baby in the first place.

At the overlapping point between hard science and psychology, the field of Clonology came into being. Clonologists were scientists who could understand the genetic nature of a clone’s physiology, analyze his or her psyche, and who could also master the life history of the alpha parent so as to best understand the conflicts a cloned individual was facing at every turn. Clonologists were like dramaturges in the theatrical world. They were uniquely capable of understanding how clones thought, and drawing conclusions about why the ones who turned out most like their genetic parents were able to do so, and why so many others were so self-destructive. From a pure research perspective, clonology provided fascinating insights but little information that could be empirically proven—clones, after all, were people, and people refused to behave like lab rats, no matter how frequently you offered them cheese.

But even beyond most parents’ refusal to allow their children to be handed over to Science for study from infancy, there was another obstacle. Like most branches of highly advanced science that required multiple degrees, clonology had a fatal flaw: pure research was profoundly expensive, and there was no money in it. On the other hand, if you were a clone, having a clonologist was like having your own personal Sherpa. An ordinary therapist could only guess that you made certain mistakes because of lingering pain from how your mother raised you. But if you had a clonologist, you could know for a fact that one of your chromosomes made you do it. In other words, a clonologist with very little shame who could put enough conviction in his voice could make a lot of money indeed.

Harold had been a very good clonologist.