‘ ’Spose you’ll have to be a lone genius, then,’ said Irie cheerfully, turning from the picture and sitting down on a Swedish backless chair.
‘Ah, but I have a mentor, you see.’ He pointed to a poster-sized black and white photograph on the other wall. ‘And mentors are a whole other kettle of fish.’
It was an extreme close-up of an extremely old man, the contours of his face clearly defined by line and shade, hachures on a topographic map.
‘Grand old Frenchman, a gentleman and a scholar. Taught me practically everything I know. Seventy-odd and sharp as a whip. But you see, with a mentor you needn’t credit them directly. That’s the great thing about them. Now where’s this bloody photo…’
While Marcus scrabbled about in a filing cabinet, Irie studied a small slice of the Chalfen family tree, an elaborate illustrated oak that stretched back into the 1600s and forward into the present day. The differences between the Chalfens and the Jones/Bowdens were immediately plain. For starters, in the Chalfen family everybody seemed to have a normal number of children. More to the point, everybody knew whose children were whose. The men lived longer than the women. The marriages were singular and long lasting. Dates of birth and death were concrete. And the Chalfens actually knew who they were in 1675. Archie Jones could give no longer record of his family than his father’s own haphazard appearance on the planet in the back-room of a Bromley public house circa 1895 or 1896 or quite possibly 1897, depending on which nonagenarian ex-barmaid you spoke to. Clara Bowden knew a little about her grandmother, and half believed the story that her famed and prolific Uncle P. had thirty-four children, but could only state definitively that her own mother was born at 2.45 p.m. 14 January 1907, in a Catholic church in the middle of the Kingston earthquake. The rest was rumour, folk-tale and myth:
‘You guys go so far back,’ said Irie, as Marcus came up behind her to see what was of interest. ‘It’s incredible. I can’t imagine what that must feel like.’
‘Nonsensical statement. We all go back as far as each other. It’s just that the Chalfens have always written things down,’ said Marcus thoughtfully, stuffing his pipe with fresh tobacco. ‘It helps if you want to be remembered.’
‘I guess my family’s more of an oral tradition,’ said Irie with a shrug. ‘But, man, you should ask Millat about his. He’s the descendant of-’
‘A great revolutionary. So I’ve heard. I wouldn’t take any of that seriously, if I were you. One part truth to three parts fiction in that family, I fancy. Any historical figure of note in your lot?’ asked Marcus, and then, immediately uninterested in his own question, returned to his search of filing cabinet number two.
‘No… no one… significant. But my grandmother was born in January 1907, during the Kingston-’
‘Here we are!’
Marcus emerged triumphant from a steel drawer, brandishing a thin plastic folder with a few pieces of paper in it.
‘Photographs. Especially for you. If the animal-rights lot saw these, I’d have a contract out on my life. One by one now. Don’t grab.’
Marcus passed Irie the first photo. It was of a mouse on its back. Its stomach was littered with little mushroom-like growths, brown and puffy. Its mouth was unnaturally extended, by the prostrate position, into a cry of agony. But not genuine agony, Irie thought, more like theatrical agony. More like a mouse who was making a big show of something. A ham-mouse. A luvvie-mouse. There was something sarcastic about it.
‘You see, embryo cells are all very well, they help us understand the genetic elements that may contribute to cancer, but what you really want to know is how a tumour progresses in living tissue. I mean, you can’t approximate that in a culture, not really. So then you move on to introducing chemical carcinogens in a target organ but…’
Irie was half listening, half engrossed in the pictures passed to her. The next one was of the same mouse, as far as she could tell, this time on its front, where the tumours were bigger. There was one on its neck that appeared practically the same size as its ear. But the mouse looked quite pleased about it. Almost as if it had purposefully grown new apparatus to hear what Marcus was saying about him. Irie was aware this was a stupid thing to think about a lab mouse. But, once again, the mouse-face had a mouse-cunning about it. There was a mouse-sarcasm in its mouse-eyes. A mouse-smirk played about its mouse-lips. Terminal disease? (the mouse said to Irie) What terminal disease?
‘… slow and imprecise. But if you re-engineer the actual genome, so that specific cancers are expressed in specific tissues at predetermined times in the mouse’s development, then you’re no longer dealing with the random. You’re eliminating the random actions of a mutagen. Now you’re talking the genetic program of the mouse, a force activating oncogenes within cells. Now you see, this particular mouse is a young male…’
Now FutureMouse© was being held by his front paws by two pink giant fingers and made to stand vertical like a cartoon mouse, thus forcing his head up. He seemed to be sticking out his little pink mouse-tongue, at the cameraman initially and now at Irie. On his chin the tumours hung like big droplets of dirty rain.
‘… and he expresses the H-ras oncogene in certain of his skin cells, so he develops multiple benign skin papillomas. Now what’s interesting, of course, is young females don’t develop it, which is…’
One eye was closed, the other open. Like a wink. A crafty mouse-wink.
‘… and why? Because of inter-male rivalry – the fights lead to abrasion. Not a biological imperative but a social one. Genetic result: the same. You see? And it’s only with transgenic mice, by adding experimentally to the genome, that you can understand those kind of differences. And this mouse, the one you’re looking at, is a unique mouse, Irie. I plant a cancer and a cancer turns up precisely when I expect it. Fifteen weeks into the development. Its genetic code is new. New breed. No better argument for a patent, if you ask me. Or at least some kind of royalties deaclass="underline" 80 per cent God, 20 per cent me. Or the other way round, depending on how good my lawyer is. Those poor bastards in Harvard are still fighting the point. I’m not interested in the patent, personally. I’m interested in the science.’
‘Wow,’ said Irie, passing back the pictures reluctantly. ‘It’s pretty hard to take in. I half get it and I half don’t get it at all. It’s just amazing.’
‘Well,’ said Marcus, mock humble. ‘It fills the time.’
‘Being able to eliminate the random…’
‘You eliminate the random, you rule the world,’ said Marcus simply. ‘Why stick to oncogenes? One could program every step in the development of an organism: reproduction, food habits, life expectancy’ – automaton voice, arms out like a zombie, rolling eyeballs – ‘WORLD DOM-IN-A-SHUN.’