Sergei Lukyanenko - The Genome

“Does Kim know?” asked Alex bluntly.

“Do I look like an idiot to you?” snarled Edgar. “No. She doesn’t even suspect anything. It will be a huge shock for her when she finds out. She’s used to considering herself a fighter-spesh, after all… well, at least some kind of fighter, something like a bodyguard or an assassin.”

“What would happen, if she found out?”

“I don’t know.” Edgar shrugged. “Most probably, she’ll be really shocked at first… and then she’ll want to take her place in life. People like her work for the Imperial Secret Service, or for planetary administrations… or perhaps for some massive and powerful corporation.”

“Why haven’t you told her the truth, Edgar?”

The boy looked up at him sadly. Then asked with a sneering tone:

“What would she need me for, then?”

Alex nodded. “Okay, I get it. Forgive me. But if you’re right…”

“I am right!”

“Then Kim has to find out who she is. A spesh’s whole life is about fulfilling her purpose. Working as an ordinary fighter, Kim will always remain unhappy.”

Edgar said nothing, and Alex felt a sharp sting of shame. The boy’s every hope was tied to Kim. All his plans to gain a real body, to break free of his monstrous captivity…

“I see what you mean…”

That is, if he wasn’t lying, of course!

“But we must come up with something for Kim’s sake, right?”

The boy looked at him in surprise.

“We?”

“Of course. You’re her best friend. You’re the genetic engineer. And I am the man Kim’s in love with.”

“So why do anything else?” Edgar shrugged his shoulders. “She’s got a job now, and she’s okay with it so far. When Kim does discover her own abilities, that will be the time to worry about it. But I hope to have a real body by then.”

“Anything is possible. But what’s to be done about the problem of her crush on me?”

“It’s not a crush, it’s love,” Edgar corrected him. He was silent for a moment, then dryly added:

“I have nothing against your encounters. It’s a natural need, so…”

“She doesn’t need sex. Or, rather, not only sex. By the way, why was that done? Sure, an agent has to be able to make others fall in love with her. But to fall in love herself?”

“Love is such a strange thing, Alex…” The boy got up, paced to and fro, his hands behind his back. “There have been many attempts to create geishas who would make others love them while staying cold and indifferent themselves, just doing their work without involving emotions. A seductive appearance, acting talents, smarts, pheromones… All to no avail, Alex. For a guaranteed seduction, the hetaera’s love must also be real. As soon as her goal is accomplished, a geisha gets to fall out of love with the object… to regain her freedom, even if it’s a difficult process, with lots of heartache and sadness. But first, a geisha must be in love herself. No matter for how long—fifteen minutes for a quickie or several years in the role of a lady-escort—but a geisha’s love is genuine.”

Edgar talked on, utterly immersed in his own words. As if mesmerized, Alex watched the skinny boy pace around the caricature throne, readjusting his glasses, dissecting the “greatest of all human emotions.”

“Love! Ah! Alex, you can’t even fully grasp what it is, true love! Madness—joyful and voluntary. And an all-engulfing flame, whose heat is delight and torture at the same time. The love of a mother for her children, of a patriot for his motherland, or of a naturalist for truth, all of them pale in comparison with real, genuine, all-engulfing love! Poets have composed verses that live on for millennia. Conquerors have shed rivers of blood. Ordinary and unremarkable people have suddenly caught ablaze like supernovas, burning away a whole life in one blinding flash, raging, and inexorable. Love… love. Thousands of definitions, an endless search for the right words… as though mere sounds could ever encompass this ancient magic. Love is when your beloved is happy… love is when the whole world is concentrated in that one person… love is the feeling that makes us equal to God… There’s no approaching it! No expressing it in words. And it’s not even necessary to express—everyone understands, everyone has experienced this sweet intoxication. Even all the alien races are capable of love, Alex! Theirs may not be human love, but something very, very similar. The Tai’i don’t have any notion of what humor is. The Bronins are incapable of friendship. The Fenhuan can’t fathom vengefulness. A vast number of emotions are unique to humans, though we can’t ever grasp… um… well, for example, the Zzygou sense of sunrise. But every race has love!”

“Not anymore,” said Alex simply.

Edgar stopped short. Sighed.

“Yes, of course. We’ve moved farther than the other races, Alex. We’ve learned to alter our own bodies, and our own souls, as well. To cut something out, and stitch on something else.”

“Stitch on?”

“That’s an ancient term. Back then, thin threads were used to attach both cloth and living tissues…”

“I got it, thanks! But are we right, Edgar? You know that Janet played a joke on our Zzygou guests?”

“How would I know? You’ve switched me off from the ship’s internal cameras.”

“She slipped some anise cocktail to the Others. And the alkaloids of anise affect the Zzygou like a potent truth drug.”

Edgar let out a ringing laugh.

“You don’t say! What happened then?”

“One of the Zzygou declared that the human race was doomed. That we’ve gone too far down the road of genetic changes. That humankind is losing its unity and falling apart to become many disconnected, weak civilizations.”

“Bull!” said Edgar bluntly. “Dream on, stinkers… Humans always were different, you know? In prehistoric times, and in the Middle Ages, and in the blessed twentieth century… always! Some were rulers, some were peasants, some were poets, and some were sewer workers…”

“But back then we were genetically unified.”

Edgar shrugged.

“Do you know what kind of person would be born, for instance, from your sperm and Kim’s egg? If you don’t order any specialization, of course?”

“A baby-natural with sharp vision.”

The boy nodded, slightly surprised. “Yes… Exactly. It’s your only shared characteristic. Then you can easily get the rest! And the point, Alex, is that if necessary, humanity can easily and painlessly return to a unified genotype. Every spesh’s gametes contain a double set of genes. The altered one—the one your parents had the geneticists specify. And the regular set—the one you’d have had if you had been born the natural way. This regular set is compressed in the S-organelle and gets activated only during the fusion of sex cells. After that, the process can go all kinds of different ways!”

Edgar’s face was flushed. This was obviously a beloved topic that filled him with inspiration.

“And that was the hardest part, you see, Alex! Back in the beginning of the twenty-first century, when the active genotype alteration work began, we were facing an unsolvable problem. It was easy to alter the body completely. But how do you keep the human genotype intact in the process? How do you get a mermaid, who herds schools of fish, and a steeplejack, who has no fear of heights and can spend a whole work shift hanging by two fingers, to have a normal, healthy baby, and not some monstrous freak? It was then that this way was suggested, a complicated one, but safe—and fascinating! A spare copy of genes. Clean and untouched by alteration. Suppose our little mermaid swam out to the shore and met the young steeplejack. A moonlit night… the gentle lapping of waves. Two happy, self-satisfied young people meet. Our little mermaid is sitting on a tree branch, which gently slopes toward the water, and our steeplejack is walking along the shore and humming a tune, say, the one that goes: ‘We aren’t firemen or carpenters, our work takes us to the sky, we send you greetings from on high!’”