Perfect People

46

A pitiful shriek pierced the silence of the night. Naomi shuddered at the sound as she lay awake, too damned awake, eyes wide open, brain racing, the room bathed in ethereal moonlight through the open curtains. With no neighbours, they never bothered to draw them.

‘A fox taking a rabbit,’ John said quietly. He slipped an arm around her, pulling her closer to him.

‘It’s the most horrible sound.’

‘Just nature at work.’

She rolled over and stared at him. There was one more outburst of shrieks, a long squeal, then silence.

‘You study nature in your work,’ she said. ‘You simulate it in computer programs. Do you have rabbits squealing in your computers?’

He smiled. ‘No.’

She kissed him. ‘You’re a kind man. I’m sure you wouldn’t want to hurt even a virtual rabbit. I don’t want you buying a gun. I don’t want us to live in an atmosphere of fear, like we’re under siege or something. We mustn’t lose sight of why we’ve done what we have, John. We haven’t done anything wrong or immoral, we haven’t done anything to be ashamed of – have we?’

‘No,’ he said quietly.

‘I am scared. There hasn’t been a day since – since the news about Dr Dettore – when I haven’t been afraid. I have dreadful dreams, I wake confused and exhausted and sometimes, when the sun is streaming in, or I hear birds singing, or just you breathing, I get a few precious moments when the dreams have faded, a few moments of private blue sky, of peace. And then it all comes back and I think – think – that maybe there’s a car down the end of the lane with a bunch of religious freaks in it, and they have guns and knives, and they don’t even have hatred in their hearts, they have some kind of deep inner peace because they know they’re doing the right thing, that they’re acting out God’s will. Does that scare you, John?’

‘I think about it all the time.’

‘You still believe man should take control of nature, don’t you?’

‘Yes; nothing’s happened to make me change my mind.’

There was a brief silence, then she said, ‘You do love Luke and Phoebe as much as…’ Her voice tailed off.

‘As?’

‘Doesn’t matter.’

He caressed her hair again. ‘Yes, of course. I love them – incredibly – I didn’t know I was capable such love. I-’

‘If you had to make a choice,’ she said, ‘between saving them or me, who would you save?’

‘It will never come to that.’

Her voice became a fraction more insistent. ‘Just supposing it did – just supposing you had to make a choice – who would you save? Luke and Phoebe or me?’

John thought carefully, unprepared for the question.

‘Who?’ she probed.

‘You,’ he said. ‘I would save you.’

‘Why?’

‘Because if anything ever happened to them we could have more children. But I could never replace you.’

She kissed him. ‘That’s a very beautiful thing to say – but do you mean it?’

‘Yes.’

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Let me ask you another question. If you had the choice of saving yourself or them, who would you save.’

His answer came out almost instantly. ‘Them.’

She sounded relieved. ‘So you do love them, don’t you.’ It was a statement, not a question.

‘Why do you have doubts?’

‘I wonder, sometimes. I wonder if you feel that if you could turn back the clock, that-’

‘Never.’ He shrugged. ‘OK, I wouldn’t have done that bloody interview. But-’

‘You’d still have gone to Dettore?’

‘Yes. And you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hon,’ he said, ‘throughout history, people who have tried to challenge established thinking have been persecuted. Not everyone has been right, but if nobody had tried – well – the human race wouldn’t have progressed very far. We might not even have survived this long. We’d certainly be living in some kind of dark age right now.’

‘And we aren’t?’ Naomi said. ‘These people – the Disciples of the Third Millennium – the fact that they can be out there, roaming around, believing they have the right to kill people for their own beliefs, and that no one can do a thing about it – that doesn’t signal to me what we think is civilization is anything more than a very thin veneer.’

‘That’s what we are trying to change. That is what going to Dettore was all about.’

‘Is it? I thought going to him was about having a child who wasn’t going to die at four years old from an inherited disease. Is it about something else? Something you haven’t told me?’

‘Absolutely not. I tell you everything.’

She was quiet for some moments, thinking, then she said, ‘You would have told me, wouldn’t you, if-’

‘If what?’

‘If you and Dettore had discussed anything else about – the babies.’

‘What do you mean by anything else?’

‘All the options he gave us. All those boxes we had to tick. I’d have no way of knowing if you and he had decided to – to go behind my back.’

‘No way,’ John said. ‘No way I would ever have done that, darling. Not in a million years. Don’t you trust me?’

‘Yes, I do, of course I do. It’s Dettore. I look at Luke and Phoebe all the time, and wonder – you know – I wonder what he’s done, what’s inside them, what surprises we have in store. It would be great, wouldn’t it, if we could get their entire genomes read. Then at least we’d know.’

‘And if you found out something you didn’t like, what would you do about it?’

She was silent. She had no answer.