I passed him a scrap of paper and he read it eagerly.
'The Albert Schweitzer Memorial Library? We'll be on to it right away.'
And he saluted smartly once again, turned on his heel and was gone.
I made my way up to the LiteraTecs' office and found Bowden in the process of packing Karen Blixen's various collections of stories into a cardboard box.
'Hi!' he said, tying up the box with string. 'How are things with you?'
'Pretty good. I'm back at work.'
Bowden smiled, put down the scissors and string and shook my hand.
'That's very good news indeed! Heard the latest? Daphne Farquitt has been added to the list of banned Danish writers.'
'But . . . Farquitt isn't Danish!'
'Her father's name was Farquittsen, so it's Danish enough for Kaine and his idiots.'
It was an interesting development. Farquitt's books were pretty dreadful but burning was still a step too far. Just.
'Have you found a way to get all these banned books out of England?' asked Bowden, running some tape across a box of Out of Africas. 'With Farquitt's books and all the rest of the stuff that's coming in, I think we'll need closer to ten trucks.'
'It's certainly on my mind,' I replied, having not done anything about it at all.
'Excellent! We'd like to take a convoy through as soon as you give the word. Now, what do you want me to brief you on first? The latest Capulet versus Montague drive-by shooting or which authors are next up for a random dope test?'
'Neither,' I replied. 'Tell me everything you know about cloned Shakespeares.'
'We've had to put that on "low priority". It's intriguing, to be sure, but ultimately pointless from a law-and-order point of view — anyone involved in their sequencing will be too dead or too old to go for trial.'
'It's more of a BookWorld thing,' I responded, 'but important, I promise.'
'Well, in that case,' began Bowden, who knew me too well to think I'd waste his time or my own, 'we have three Shakespeares on the slab at the moment, all aged between fifty and sixty — put those Hans Christian Andersen books in that box, would you? If they were cloned it was way back in the poorly regulated days of the thirties, when there was all sorts of nonsense going on, when people thought they could engineer Olympic runners with four legs, swimmers with real fins, that sort of thing. I've had a brief trawl through the records. The first confirmed WillClone surfaced in 1952 with the accidental shooting of a Mr Shakstpear in Tenbury Wells. Then there's the unexplained death of a Mr Shaxzpar in 1958, Mr Shagxtspar in 1962 and a Mr Shogtspore in 1969. There are others, too—'
'Any theories as to why?'
'I think,' said Bowden slowly, 'that perhaps someone was trying to synthesise the great man so they could have him write some more great plays. Illegal and morally reprehensible, of course, but potentially of huge benefit to Shakespearean scholars everywhere. The lack of any young Shakespeares turning up makes me think this was an experiment long since abandoned.'
There was a pause as I mulled this over. Genetic cloning of entire humans was strictly forbidden — no commercial bioengineering company would dare try it, and yet no one but a large bioengineering company would have the facilities to undertake it. But if these Shakespeare clones had survived, chances were there were more. And with the real one long dead, his re-engineered other self was the only way we could unravel The Merry Wives of Elsinore.
'Doesn't this come under the jurisdiction of SO-13?' I said at last.
'Officially, yes,' conceded Bowden, 'but SO-13 is as underfunded as we are and Agent Stiggins is far too busy dealing with mammoth migrations and chimeras to have anything to do with cloned Elizabethan playwrights.'
Stiggins was the Neanderthal head of the cloning police. Legally re-engineered by Goliath, he was the ideal person to run SO-13.
'Have you spoken to him?' I asked.
'He's a Neanderthal,' he replied, 'they don't talk at all unless it's absolutely necessary. I've tried a couple of times but he just stares at me in a funny way and eats live beetles from a paper bag — yuk.'
'He'll talk to me,' I said. He would, too. I still owed him a favour for when he got me out of a jam with Flanker. 'Let's see if he's about.'
I picked up the phone, consulted the internal directory and dialled a number.
I watched as Bowden boxed up more banned books. If he was caught he'd be finished. The irony of a LiteraTec being jailed for protecting Farquitt's Canon of Love — I liked him all the more for it. No one in the Literary Detectives would knowingly harm a book. We'd all resign before torching a single copy of anything.
'Right,' I said, replacing the receiver, 'his office said there was a chimera alert in the Brunei Centre — we should be able to find him there.'
'Whereabouts in the centre?'
'If it's a chimera alert, we just follow the screams.'
20
Chimeras and Neanderthals
'The Neanderthal experiment was conceived in order to create the euphemistically entitled "medical test vessels", living creatures that were as close as possible to humans without actually being human within the context of the law. The experiment was an unparalleled success — and failure. The Neanderthal was everything that could be hoped for. A close cousin but not human, physiologically almost identical — and legally with less rights than a dormouse. But sadly for Goliath, even the hardiest of medical technicians balked at experiments conducted upon intelligent and speaking entities, so the first batch of Neanderthals were trained instead as "expendable combat units", a project that was shelved as soon as the lack of aggressive instincts in the Neanderthals was noted. They were subsequently released into the community as cheap labour and became a celebrated tax write-off. It was Homo sapiens at his least sapient.'
The Brunei Centre was packed, as usual. Busy shoppers moved from chain store to chain store, trying to find bargains in places whose identical goods were price fixed by head office several months in advance. It didn't stop them trying, though.
'So why the interest in Xeroxed bards?' asked Bowden as we crossed the canal.
'We've got a crisis in the BookWorld.'
I outlined what was happening within the play previously known as Hamlet and he opened his eyes wide.
'Whoa!' he said after a pause. 'And I thought our work was unusual!'
We didn't have to wait long to find Mr Stiggins. Within a few moments there was a blood-curdling cry of terror from a startled shopper. A second scream followed, and all of a sudden there was a mad rush of people moving away from the junction of Canal Walk and Bridge Street. We moved against the flow, stepping over discarded shopping and the odd shoe. The cause of the panic was soon evident. Rifling through a rubbish bin for a tasty snack was a bizarre hybrid of a creature — in SO-13 slang, a chimera. The genetic revolution that gave us unlimited replacement organs and the power to create dodos and other extinctees from home cloning kits had a downside: perverse pastiches of animals who were not borne on the shoulders of evolution, but by hobby gene splicers who didn't know any better than to try to play God in the comfort of their own potting sheds.
As the crowds rapidly departed. Bowden and I stared at the strange creature that lurched and slavered as it rooted through the waste bin. It was about the size of a goat and had the rear legs of one. but not much else. The tail and the forelegs were lizard, the head almost feline. It had several tentacles, and it sucked noisily on a chip-soaked newspaper, the saliva from its toothless mouth dribbling copiously on to the pavement. In general, hybrid birds were the most common product of illegal gene splicing, as birds were closely enough related to come out pretty well no matter how ham-fisted the amateur splicer. You could even create a passable dogfoxwolf or a domestic catleopard with no greater knowledge than a biology GCSE. No. it was the cross-class abominations which led to the total ban on home cloning, the lizard/mammal switcheroos that really pushed the limits on what was socially acceptable. It didn't stop the sport; just pushed it underground.