Converts

by Ian Watson

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Dystopian; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

He is a financial giant but the Sponsor wants more - he wants to become a super human, to be the modern-day Adam, father to a new generation of humans with heightened DNA. He had the viral injection to change himself, the will to do it, and now all he needs is an Eve to join him on his journey. He thinks he's found the perfect match in Jean Sandra Norwich, a woman convinced she is trapped between the genes of her mother and daughter. The Sponsor offers her freedom - and so much more, the chance to be the mother of all Superbeings. But she will get more than she bargained for. CONVERTS is a masterpiece of science fiction and Ian Watson has superbly reworked Ovid's METAMORPHOSES to create an extraordinary futuristic tale.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 192

Sample

‘Jean Sandwich?’

Frank Caldero struck a casual pose in front of the surveillance camera. Mounted over the elevator door, this was the only camera in the whole lobby. Nor was this the only shortcoming about the security system of Paradise Apartments. A big black mark must equally be awarded to the tangle of Swiss Cheese plants choking one wall. Doubtless, these plants helped to maintain the pretence of Paradise; but any human snake could lurk in ambush there.

These minor observations merely served to confirm what Frank already knew in some detail about the economic status of the woman he was visiting. She was on the borderline, between Eden and the jungle.

‘Jean Sandwich? Jean Sandra Norwich?’

‘Yes, who is that?’

The intercom box made the woman’s voice blurred and crackly: defect number three.

‘My name’s Frank Caldero, Miz Sandwich.’ He produced the bundle of money from his inside pocket and flourished the banknotes at the camera, fanning them. ‘As you can see, I don’t intend to burgle you. Far from it! I have a proposition of a rather private nature for you.’

Realizing the lewd possibilities of what he had just said, Frank burst out laughing.

‘Oh hell, that sounds completely wrong! What I want, Miz Sandwich, is to pay you—and handsomely, too: five thousand, to be exact—just to listen to me for half an hour, then neither to say nor write nor otherwise publicize nor even confide to a friend what I shall propose during the course of that half hour. The money’s yours, whether you say yes or no to my subsequent proposals.’

‘You sound like a walking legal contract, Mr Caldero … Hey, do my ears deceive me? Five thousand, just for listening?’

‘That’s the general idea. I’m approaching you on behalf of someone whom we shall refer to between us as the Sponsor. Though I’d better point out right away that he doesn’t sponsor chat shows or anything like that.’

‘Why didn’t you phone and tell me you were coming?’

‘Random phone-taps. Key word sampling by our friendly Government computers. This is a very private affair.’

‘Aren’t you just a little bit scared, standing there in a public place waving all that money about?’ She was playing him along now, studying him.

‘It is rather public, isn’t it? There are much more private places than this. Agree to my proposal, and you’ll have the run of the best of them. But I already checked those Swiss Cheeses for any worms hiding in the holes—and I left a couple of friends sitting outside in an armoured limo.’

Maccoby and McKinnon were … friends?

Actually, the security chief and his bodyguard buddy were very civil fellows, usually. It was just that Frank never felt particularly comfortable in their presence. Who knew what the Terrible Two had got up to before Bruno King hired them?

Frank corrected himself: before the Sponsor hired them …

‘Are you a plant lover, Mr Caldero?’

‘Oh, I’m quite versatile. I can recognize a Monstera Deliciosa when I see one.’

‘Speaking of private places, I hear the grave’s fine and private. You might want to murder me.’

‘A fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace.’

‘Hey, you’re a poetry freak, too! I think I like you.’

‘If I wanted to kill you, I’d just hide behind those leaves and wait.’

‘You might want to torture me a while, first. You can’t do that so easily in a lobby.’

‘And thus avenge the ungodly words you write? To redeem, by pain, from Hell’s pains? Per agony ad astra? That might be typical of some rabid God Nut. But frankly—and I’m always Frank—what I shall be proposing on the Sponsor’s behalf is distinctly blasphemous in the eyes of the God Nuts. Still, if you’re worried, I’ll lay a bet you have a gun tucked away up there. We all have to protect our Paradise, don’t we? So why don’t you just fetch your gun and keep it pointed at me all the time I’m up there talking to you? If my silver eloquence won’t sway you, I deserve no better than lead.’ Frank pulled what he hoped was a tragicomic face, recollecting too late that if the camera was equipped with a fish-eye lens this might well distort his expression into a horrid leer.

‘I’m offering you five G, just to listen. And if you go through with what I’ll propose, whether it’s successful or not, there’s one million for you, to be banked in Zürich in your own name or whichever name you like. I can’t say any more down here.’

‘Did I just hear you—?’

‘One million.’

This Sponsor of yours …’

‘Must be rich. He is.’

‘It sounds crazy.’

‘No, he just happens to want something very special from you.’

‘How can a lady refuse? I’ll send the elevator down.’

Within the elevator there was no surveillance camera: defect number four. Had there been a camera, it would have spied a chunky man of middle height with short crinkly black hair, like lamb’s wool. He wore horn-rimmed glasses to correct a mild myopia.

Frank sometimes liked to imagine himself as Superman in Clark Kent guise—admittedly a reduced version. For though he lacked the necessary height and physique, even of Clark Kent, he did dispense some of the power of Superman, courtesy of the Sponsor. (Whilst Bruno King looked even less like either Superman or Clark Kent; but he meant to do something about this. Soon, too.)

However, Frank knew perfectly well that he would never launch himself into the sky, and fly. At heart he was too earth-bound. As solidly rooted as a tree.

Frank’s nose twitched in a rabbity fashion as he reseated his glasses. As the elevator rose laboriously up the shaft, he dismissed his own fantasies and concentrated on Jean instead.

Jean Sandwich wasn’t her real name. Before she married Mike Hoffman—now firmly divorced—her name had been Jean Sandra Norwich. In bitter humour at her situation, she had run her last two names together.

She might have made the point even plainer by altering the spelling of her first name to ‘Gene’: Gene Sandwich. But that would have introduced a note of sexual ambiguity. Whereas Jean wasn’t in the least ambiguous about her sex—or about the fact that Sex, in the broadest definition of the term, had done her in. Sex had hogtied her. Sex had condemned her to a ludicrous fate.

No ordinary annoyance at sexual role-typing inspired her change of name, however. It was something far more biologically basic than that. A scientist once declared: ‘A human being is merely a means used by a gene, to manufacture another gene.’ And like a comic-book heroine whirling around to strip off her everyday disguise and reveal her secret powers—or, in this case, secret curse—Jean Sandra Norwich became a gene sandwich. She was the slice of meat imprisoned between the genes of her mother Josie and the genes of her daughter Alison.

It was a life sentence.

Jean went where she pleased, and did what she chose, and showed all the signs of leading a uniquely special, precious existence, full of free will. But she knew in her heart that this was all an illusion.

For she was sandwiched. Those devil genes had laid down the law in daughter Alison, exactly as they had in mother Josie.

Jean had been fiercely sure that she was a huge improvement upon mother Josie—until Alison began to grow up. Jean had been certain that she had pulled herself up successfully by her own bootstraps—until her own stupid mother was recreated, out of Jean’s own womb.

The genes cared not a sparrow’s fart for the person of beauty and wit whom Jean had made of herself. They spat on her sensitivity and creativity. They pissed on the pottery she crafted to prove her talents: delicate fantasy landscapes full of castles and dragons and giant fungi. The genes preferred the sow’s ear to the silk purse any day.

Jean had dreamed that Alison would outshine her by as much again as Jean outshone Josie.

‘Foolish machine,’ said the genes. And out of Jean there squirmed another animal as lacking in finer feelings as Josie had been. Clearly Alison was destined to run through her whole life as obliviously as her grandmother, like a chicken with its head chopped off.

Maybe the genes sensed how overcrowded the world was getting. Maybe they had decided that sensitivity was out of place. Or perhaps they had foreseen a new ice age or a nuclear war, whereby life would be a matter of grubbing around in the dirt for the next few thousand years. Whatever the truth of this, Jean might be best lean meat, but from now on, plain bread seemed to be the staple.

While Alison was still an infant, and hope abounding filled Jean’s breast, Jean threw her energies into inscribing love and humour, excellence and artistry upon the slate of her daughter.

Alas, Alison wasn’t a slate at all. She was a palimpsest: a twice-used parchment, an economy model. As she grew up, the old writing showed through ever more clearly: the dumb, vandalistic scrawl which denied that there was any special merit to Jean’s existence.

In her chagrin, Jean Sandra Hoffman—née Norwich—divorced her husband and became Jean Sandwich.

Yet Jean was far from silent in her disappointment. In a series of virulent magazine articles, which both caught the public’s fancy and provoked a counterblast of wrath, she explained in detail why she had walked out on her husband and child, and why uniquely she had sued for non-custody and non-visiting rights.

Unfortunately, her ex-husband Mike tended to agree with her. So there ensued the newsworthy spectacle of the two divorcees fighting in public to off-load responsibility for the product of their love on to the other party. Perhaps because Jean made more commotion, she had won the day. She was more conspicuously unsuited to be a mother, than Mike to be a father.

Yet she had never blamed Mike personally for her horrid spawn and the ruin of her illusions. How could she, when it was her own genes that proved dominant? It was against Nature’s deceits that she railed—and how she did rail! She would do anything at all to pay Nature back for the dirty trick played on her.

Consequently one of her articles dealt with the controversial topic of human DNA research. In the very same week that a laboratory believed to be meddling in this field was fire-bombed by a God Nut mob, Jean wrote approving whole-heartedly of anybody who monkeyed around with ‘God’s blueprints’. (A few days later the magazine office had its windows stoned by a crowd wearing tee-shirts emblazoned with the motto: ’I’m nuts on God’)

Yet, as Jean pointed out angrily in her article, even if an egg—which she would be glad to donate—were taken from her ovaries to be retailored in a test tube to produce something closer to her heart’s desire, all the remaining horde of eggs in her sex organs would still carry the same treacherous message written in them. Not to mention every damn cell in her whole body. Whatever miracles the DNA sculptors worked in their admirable laboratories in China and Japan, she would still remain Jean Sandwich.

The magazine thrived on the wrath. And so did Jean, for a while. Yet the sad truth was that she was already becoming last season’s sensation. She was rumoured to be writing a book, but perhaps this was a counsel of desperation.

It was Jean’s DNA article which had first caught the Sponsor’s eye. Whereupon Frank Caldero had begun checking out Jean’s affairs in detail.

It would be an exaggeration to say that the Sponsor had fallen in love with Jean. He was really in love with an idea, with a vision. Jean had simply interposed herself between his eye and that vision.

And now her public profile was fading fast. Which was fine, just fine.

Needless to say, Jean’s actual profile—as illustrating her articles—was ample reason for anyone to fall in love with her, thought Frank …

The elevator decanted Frank into another lobby unwatched by any camera eye. Stout apartment doors led off this lobby, with peepholes plugged through them at eye level. Bolted to the door frames were intercom boxes.

Frank pressed the buzzer of apartment 804.

Nothing happened. After waiting for a whole two minutes he banged on the door with his fist.

A chain rattled, and the door swung open.

‘Sorry. I forgot. The squawk box up here’s bust.’ Jean backed away, holding a small pistol, though it was not pointing directly at him. She smiled in apology for the gun and the broken intercom; and her smile devastated him.

Jean had glossy brown eyes, short auburn hair cut in a pageboy trim, and a perfect creamy skin. Her nose was Grecian, her chin firm, and her figure as lovely as ever it had been before her terrible child had swollen it. Her body had never despaired, as other women’s bodies might have done. The tragedy was, that lurking in this wonderful body was the genetic government—temporarily in exile—which had swept back to power in her offspring. This splendid Jean was only a sport of Nature: a once-only Romeo and Juliet tossed off by the genetic monkey typing pool, which tapped out dumb pulp books all the rest of the time.

Her small lounge was sparsely furnished, though a table in front of the window was buried in house plants. Their foliage completely hid the city outside, silent this Sunday morning. (Nobody was being shot or robbed in the street. No one was rioting. Nothing was burning.) The plants were prisms of Paradise, breaking the white and grey of concrete into green light.

Here were Wandering Jews and ferns and ivies. And fleshy succulents, and bromeliads with pools of water cupped in them. There was a Japanese fan palm. And, lest Jean forget, here were the twisted, yellow-bladed swords of a Mother-in-Law’s Tongue. Presumably, whenever Jean thought of this hideous plant, she omitted the ‘in-Law’. It was, he noticed, Sansevieria trifasciata ‘De fer’—the new, super-rigid variety whose touch and texture almost lived up to its appearance.

Frank placed the money on the table beneath the striped blades of the Sansevieria: an offering on the altar of chagrin. Then he carried a plastic chair some way off and swung astride it so that she would be sure he couldn’t easily make any sudden movements.

Without bothering to check the money, Jean perched on the edge of a small settee. And smiled again, smiting him more deeply than any of those sword blades could have done. Nearby stood a smaller table with some of her pottery craft gathering dust; she had given up on art.

‘May I call you Jean? And please call me Frank.’

‘Though that isn’t your real name.’

‘Oh, but it is. Frank by name, frank by—well, let’s not mention Nature. I’ll come straight to the point: we’d like to invite you to participate in an illegal DNA experiment—a highly illegal one, though it’s one of which I’m sure you’ll approve.’

She laughed.

‘Illegal, by whose law? The genes are the only law, Frank. Look what their law has done to me.’

With her free hand she fumbled a cigarette from a packet; then hesitated.

‘Go ahead, light it,’ he reassured her. ‘We aren’t worried about you breaking any chromosomes by evil habits. We’re way beyond all that sort of small change. I was, of course, referring to illegal in the public sense the prohibition on playing roulette with the sacred image of God. Not that God doesn’t play roulette with the universe, but apparently that’s His business.’

‘So you want an egg from me? Why, permission granted!’ Jean exhaled smoke. ‘No, that’s crazy. I’ve heard of the goose that laid the golden egg—but worth a million? You must have some women on your team already. I hope you do!’

‘Rest assured.’

‘In that case, you must want me to play host mother … No, that’s mad, too. You could easily hire some poor cow for a tenth of that money—unless you’re wanting her to give birth to a chimpanzee or a baby gorilla …’

That’s quite close, Jean. But you’re looking in the wrong direction.’

‘Let me guess.’

‘You could guess till you’re blue in the face. Besides, it’s me who’s paying for the guessing time. So listen: the Sponsor is a financial superman. But he wants to become an actual superman. He wants to become Homo Superior in his own life-time. He wants to sire supermen. Superwomen, too. He wants to give rise to the next race. And he’ll be the first of them: the founder, Adam.

‘Now, don’t you grin! We aren’t just playing a fool along for his money. Technically, it’s all possible. Now it is. Though for obvious reasons we’ve kept quiet about it. Hence,’ and Frank nodded in the direction of the plants, ‘your generous retainer.’

‘You’re still taking a risk, telling me.’

‘I think not. You’re highly motivated, on our side of the fence. Besides which …’

‘It’s exactly the sort of thing I’d invent myself? To boost Jean Sandwich back into orbit? The mysterious visitor, the vast bribe, the anonymous super-rich Sponsor … Alas, you’re so right! So: your Sponsor wants to be the new Adam, and I’m to be—?’

‘This time round, Eve will be created first. You see, we aren’t absolutely positive we can pull it off with a human being. Though that’s simply because we haven’t tried yet. The method definitely works with rats and chimps—which is why I said that you were quite close. The chimps are, well, super-chimps now.’

‘And what happened to the super-rats?’

‘We couldn’t risk the super-rats escaping into the wild. We had to destroy them. Not,’ Frank hastened to add, ‘that we have any intention of destroying the superchimps. That would be like killing your own cousin. And the Sponsor is a very scrupulous man.’

‘Has he set up a trust fund for them, or somethi. . .