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Authors: Kevin Guilfoile

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BOOK: Cast of Shadows - v4
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“Correct. Sperm donation is much more common than egg donation, and there are still very few people who donate cells specifically for the purpose of having them cloned. For most donors, it’s an afterthought, a way to make a few extra bucks just for rolling up your sleeve and signing your name on one more line. Some people do it for ego: the thrill of knowing their DNA will live on, something like a quest for immortality, although that’s a lot of nonsense, of course. A lot of people, particularly women, still find the idea of their genetic duplicate to be a little unsettling. An old classmate of mine wrote an article in the
New England Journal of Medicine
last year claiming some relationship between this phenomenon and female self-image. I don’t know if I believe that, but who knows? There are control issues, too. Regulations. We don’t want people being cloned without their permission. Laws and ethics say we can’t just take nail clippings out of a wastepaper basket and clone a person without his knowledge. And as you’re aware, there have been multiple privacy laws enacted by Congress over the last five years. It’s illegal even to keep a record of someone’s DNA unless they’ve been charged with a serious crime.”

“How does implantation work?” Martha asked. Husbands are never worried about implantation, Davis thought, only extraction.

“When we’re ready to move ahead, we will take one of your eggs and remove the nucleus, leaving us with just a shell. Then we add a cell nucleus from the donor — usually DNA from a white blood cell — and stimulate it to behave as if it were an egg fertilized naturally. After that, the implantation is identical to in vitro.”

“I understand there are more applicants than donors.” For some reason, Martha tried to hide the tiny piece of fringed notebook paper on which she’d written her questions. “If we decide to put our name on the waiting list, how long should we expect before DNA becomes available?”

“Some people will wait three or four years, but it’s not just first come, first served. Martha, you said in your pre-interview that Huntington’s disease runs in your family?”

An impolite question from anyone but a physician. “Yes,” she said. “I had myself tested. I’m a carrier.”

“That makes you a priority candidate. You’d go to the top of the list. Any child you would have through natural conception or through a conventional insemination or in vitro process — that is, a technique that uses your own genetic material — would be at high risk for Huntington’s. The cloned embryo you would receive will be screened for any known hereditary disease, so you could still carry the child without passing on any propensity for illness. In essence, with cloning, you’re adopting a child in the embryonic stage. And while he is not, technically, your natural child, neither is he somebody else’s. From that perspective, I think in vitro cloning is superior to other techniques. There are few gray areas in cloning law. You never have to worry about the natural mother or father showing up one day, demanding their rights to your child.”

“What about the parents of the donor?” Terry asked.

A good question, but a telling one, Davis thought. He’s more interested in potential liability than in the procedure itself. “Well, if they’re still alive, the clone is not their offspring, legally or ethically. He’ll be a different person, with different likes and dislikes. He will have a personality all his own. A soul of his own, if you believe in that sort of thing, which, as I’ve said, I do.”

“You said ‘he.’ ” Martha squinted, like she was preparing for a gust of bad news. “So there’s no chance it might be a girl?”

Davis sucked in a chestful of air. Three times in the last year his answer to this question had been countered with indignant and uninformed lectures on eugenics from angry would-be parents. He was pretty sure at least one of those was a setup, though. The couple showed up on the local news that very same night to register their “shock” about what they learned during their visit to a “clone clinic.”

He said, “As much as we’d like the odds to be roughly the same as they are in nature, about fifty-one percent in favor of girls, the present reality of our donor profiles means you’re more likely to have a boy. Within that framework, Congress says gender selection must be random. We do have some choices, however. While I am limited in what I can tell you about the donor, we do try to match some superficial physical characteristics with the parents. You’re both fair, so we’ll try to find a rough match for hair color. Many people who go through this process don’t want to raise a lot of eyebrows among their friends and neighbors over the provenance of their child.”

The Finns appeared neither surprised nor upset. Terry said, “That’s another question I had. How much of this information is public?”

“Yes. Good. That’s important,” Davis said. “As the parents of a cloned child, you’ll be required to have him checked every six months by a pediatrician, at least until his sixteenth birthday. We have a doctor on staff here, Dr. Burton, and she is excellent, but you won’t be required to use her if you’re more comfortable with someone else. Whomever you choose, however, you will need to notify your child’s pediatrician that he is treating a clone, and that doctor will file regular reports to this office. It’s all for the sake of ongoing research, as well as to safeguard the integrity of the procedure, and it’s all protected by the doctor-patient privilege. By the way, we perform many different kinds of procedures here, and Dr. Burton sees other patients, not just cloned children, so no one will be suspicious if they spot you in her waiting room.”

“What about the child?” Martha asked. “Would we tell him?” She added hopefully, “Him or her.”

“That’s up to you, of course. I think most therapists agree you should wait until they’re in their teens, at least. It’s a lot for a kid to handle, existentially speaking. Of course, in fifteen years, it’s not going to seem as strange or new as it does now.” After a silent moment Davis looked at the clock, but patiently, the way they’d taught him seventeen years ago at the University of Minnesota. “I have another appointment waiting, but do you have any other questions? We can stay here until they’re answered.”

They didn’t. Not at this point. Cloning was still so new. Just to be talking about it in a comfortable, old-fashioned room like this, surrounded by wood paneling and books and maps on the wall — it was weird, like something out of H. G. Wells. Davis intended it that way. Get them accustomed to the idea over time, and over time weed out the ones who aren’t ready. The initial meeting, he always said, was the first of many trials.

He walked them to his office door and then returned to his desk and made notes in a newly created file on his computer.
Martha and Terry Finn. High
-
priority candidates. Wife wants child more than husband does. Will probably return for another consultation, or seek second opinion. Don’t expect to schedule this quarter.

In their Acura, suffering the stop-and-go traffic along the circumferences of look-alike suburban malls, Martha read aloud random half sentences from the New Tech Fertility Clinic brochure as Terry tried to keep both her and sotto voce sports radio playing on separate channels inside his head.

Terry wanted a child, he supposed. He knew Martha wanted a child, and they had discussed the many options and consequences before deciding to go this route. Before deciding to enter a DNA lottery. Reproduction the historical way, the God-conceived and Darwin-endorsed way that begins with prodigious or precisely timed coupling, results in children of a certain kind. Before birth you didn’t know anything about them, of course, except maybe the gender, but the things you learned as they grew up were not so much surprises as they were the winnowing of potentialities. He thought of the Sunday after he and Martha returned from their honeymoon. They had opened their wedding presents in front of a small gathering of family. Each wrapped parcel was a mystery of sorts, but contained a gift checked off from their registry. Unwrapped, the appliances and silver and china were pleasing and familiar. Your own child must be a little like that. A gift to you from yourself.

But a clone. A clone is not the same. A clone is a gift from a stranger. A clone could be loved as much as your own flesh and blood, he was sure, but the light and darkness inside a clone child is not the light and darkness inside your own soul. Unlike a natural child, evolution has not sorted through the genes of two people and made something new and better. In a clone, the mistakes of the last generation’s DNA are repeated. Their child would be an old model, and who knows what kind of glitches he’d suffer?

But Terry could tell by Martha’s tone that the prospect excited her. According to the literature and the videos they’d explored, it would be a long year or more of testing and counseling and schooling, harder on her than it would be on him. Over the last ten months, as they’d seesawed back and forth over the idea of being parents, he found himself just as happy when she was leaning toward yes as when she was leaning toward no. A little boy, a stranger, would start his life by profoundly changing theirs. He knew it was the right thing.

He reached over to touch her left knee, but the seat belt and windshield glare had positioned her body so that he couldn’t reach it with his hand, and so he rubbed his knuckles against the blue cotton covering her hip and with his thumb made cuneiform shapes on the top of her thigh that he hoped would translate as affection.

Martha smiled and closed her eyes, leaning back against the headrest. She set the brochure on her lap and with her own thumb tickled her flat belly and imagined herself as host to a new life for a man now dead. She knew it wasn’t like that exactly, but she believed in people, loved all people, loved even their mistakes, and believed that every person, even saintly ones, wanted and deserved a second chance.

 

— 2 —

 

From the passenger seat of his twenty-year-old Cutlass Supreme, Mickey Fanning watched the door of the New Tech Fertility Clinic for most of three days. Each morning he arrived at 7 a.m. and claimed the best of spot of all, on the opposite side of the street and just south. This morning he shifted into park, freed himself from the fraying shoulder harness, and scooted across the bench seat. It had occurred to him the night before that he would be less conspicuous if he weren’t behind the wheel.

At eleven, exactly eleven according to his old watch, which he checked and adjusted whenever time and traffic were given on talk radio, he slid back to the driver’s side and pulled out, circling the block until he could find a less good but still adequate surveillance position. At 3 p.m. he did it again, settling even farther down the street. He left for his motel only after the last doctor locked up, noting the exact times of the physicians’ arrivals and departures in a perfect-bound pocket notebook, the cover of which he had decorated with blue ballpoint crosses and the letters
JESUS
across the top and
JUSTICE
down the left margin, with each word sharing the adorned initial
j
.

His cleverest friends called him Mickey the Gerund back in the days when he had clever friends. Since he was nineteen or so, Mickey had been suspicious of clever people. Clever people were very nearly intellectuals, and intellectuals were the reason — one reason, anyway — that the world was going to hell soon, starting with the Arab nations, followed shortly thereafter by atheist China, pagan India, and then, probably, the United States, from the coasts inland (although the heartland was rotten with sin, too, a fact to which he was about to testify). Intellectuals, in his experience, didn’t believe in right and wrong. Mickey the Gerund believed in nothing but. Not just the practical right and wrong of deeds as revealed to the apostles by the example of Jesus Christ (although that, too), but right and wrong as it has existed from the beginning (and ever shall be, world without end. Amen). God did not arbitrarily decide what was right and what was wrong; God was right and wrong incarnate. What else did Jesus mean when he said, “No one is good but God alone”? The Lord did not invent righteousness, but instead was made up of it. If Mickey were ever called to account by the laws of man for what he had done and what he was about to do, he would calmly produce his four-hundred-page typed manifesto, in which he explained this and other truths. Few would understand it, but those few would have a chance, just a chance, of passing through the needle-eyed gates of His Kingdom.

He watched a couple exit through the tinted doors. The man was older than the woman and they were holding hands. She was young and fit and wholesomely pretty. He watched her, was aroused by her. He prayed in a distracted whisper, but the words spilled out in an unexamined, rote chain. Mickey the Gerund did not believe that sex was evil in itself (and procreation was, of course, preferable to the reproductive perversions that took place in jars inside the clinic), but he was certain that his sudden covetous lust for this woman was proof she was trapped in the clutches of a demon. Would it not distort the bigger picture, disrupt the master plan, he could extract some measure of justice through her. He wasn’t going to fall for such wicked temptation, however. The devil would no doubt sacrifice a common siren to maintain control over the hell soldiers still inside the building. Mickey had sworn off many sins on the day he decided to give himself to Jesus, women being one of them, and women had been the hardest of all to give up. In many ways celibacy had been the most rewarding, however. He saw things clearly. So long as a man thinks he might again know woman, his mind will always be fogged with desire, and Mickey was reminded of this by every unclean thought and every painful erection.

Mickey pointed his first and second fingers at the couple as they paused beside their parked Acura down the street, cocked his thumb hammer, and let it fire, first at her, and then at him.

 

— 3 —

 

“Here. I got you a present.”

Anna Kat placed in front of Davis a thin, square package, about as long on a side as one of her slender fingers. Then she reached back and found a chair with her hand and pulled it forward so she could sit opposite him, across his desk.

BOOK: Cast of Shadows - v4
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