“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 to trial.”

  “It’s more of a BookWorld thing,” I replied, “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 Ten-bury 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 why?”

  “I think,” said Bowden slowly, “that perhaps someone was trying to synthesize 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 are there were more. And with the real one long dead, his reengineered 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 reengineered by Goliath, he was the ideal person to run SO-13.

  “Have you spoken to him?” I asked.

  “He’s a neanderthal,” Bowden 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—yuck.”

  “He’ll talk to me,” I said. He would, too. I still owed him a favor 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 dialed a number.

  I watched as Bowden boxed up more banned books. If he was caught, he’d be finished. The irony of a LiteraTec’s 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 phone. “His office said there was a chimera alert in the Brunel Centre—we should be able to find him there.”

  “Whereabouts in the Brunel Centre?”

  “If it’s a chimera alert, we just follow the screams.”

  20.

  ChimerasandNeanderthals

  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 fewer 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 neanderthal was noted. They were subsequently released into the community as cheap labor and became a celebrated tax write-off. It was Homo sapien at his least sapient.

  Gerhard von Squid, Neanderthals—Back After a Short Absence

  The Brunel 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 the head office several months in advance. It didn’t stop them trying, though.

  “So why the interest in photocopied bards?” asked Bowden as we crossed the canal.

  “We’ve got a crisis in the BookWorld.”

  I outlined what was happening within the play formerly 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 bloodcurdling 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 borne not 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 onto the pavement. In general, hybrid birds were the most common product of illegal gene splicing, as birds were closely enough related to one another 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 O level. No, it was the cross-class abominations that had 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.

  The creature rummaged with its one good arm in the bin, found the remains of a SmileyBurger, stared at it with its five eyes, then pushed it into its mouth. It then flopped to the ground and moved, half shuffling and half slithering to the next bin, all the while hissing like a cat and slapping its tentacles together.

  “Oh, my God,” said Bowden, “it’s got a human arm!”

  And so it had. It was when there were bits of recognizable human in them that chimeras were most repellant—a failed attempt to replace a deceased loved one, or hobby gene splicers trying to make themselves a son.

  “Repulsive?” said a voice close at hand. “The creature . . . or the creator?” I turned to find myself looking at a squat, beetle-browed neanderthal in a pale suit with a homburg hat perched high on his domed head. I had met him several times before. This was Bartholomew Stiggins, head of SO-13 here in Wessex.

  “Both,” I replied.

  Stiggins nodded imperceptibly as a blue SO-13 Land Rover pulled up with a squealing of brakes. A uniformed officer jumped out and started to try to push us back.

  Stiggins said, “We are together.”

  The neanderthal took a few steps forward, and we joined him at the creature, which was close enough to touch.

  “Reptile, goat, cat, human,” murmured the neanderthal, crouching down and staring intently at the creature as it ran a thin, pink, forked tongue across a crisps packet.

  “The eyes look insectoid,” observed the SO-13 agent, dart gun in the crook of his arm.

  “Too big. More like the eyes we found on the chimera up at the bandstand. You remember, the one that looked like a giant hamster?”

  “Same splicer?”

  The neanderthal shrugged. “Same eyes. You know how they like to trade.”

  “We’ll take a sample and compare. Might lead us to them. That looks like a human arm, doesn’t it?”

  The creature’s arm was red and mottled and no bigger than a child’s. To grasp anything, the fingers grabbed and twisted randomly until they found something and then clung on tight.

  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.

  “Gives it an age,” said Stiggins. “Perhaps five years.”

  “Do you want to take it alive, sir?” asked the SO-13 agent, breaking the barrel of his gun and pausing. The neanderthal shook his head.

  “No. Send him home.”

  The agent inserted a dart and snapped the breech shut. He took careful aim and fired it into the creature. The chimera didn’t flinch—a fully functioning nervous system is a complicated piece of design and well beyond the capabilities of even the most gifted of amateur splicers—but it stopped trying to chew the bark off a tree and twitched several times before lying down and breathing more slowly. The neanderthal moved closer and held the creature’s grubby hand as its life ebbed away.

  “Sometimes,” said the neanderthal softly, “sometimes the innocent must suffer.”

  “Dennis!” came a panicked voice from the gathering crowd, who had fallen silent as the creature’s breathing grew slower. “Dennis, Daddy’s worried! Where are you?”

  The whole sad, sorry scene had just got a lot worse. A man with a beard and in a sleeveless white shirt had run into the empty circle around the rapidly dying creature and stared at us with a look of numb horror on his face.

  “Dennis?”

  He dropped to his knees next to his creation, which was now breathing in short gasps. The man opened his mouth and made such a wail of heartbroken grief that it made me feel quite odd inside. Such an outpouring cannot be feigned; it comes from the soul, one’s very being.

  “You didn’t have to kill him!” he wailed, wrapping his arms around the dying beast. “You didn’t have to kill him . . . !”

  The uniformed agent moved to pull Dennis’s creator away, but the neanderthal stopped him. “No,” he said gravely. “Leave him for a moment.”

  The agent shrugged and walked to the Land Rover to fetch a body bag.

  “Every time we do this, it’s like killing one of our own,” said Stiggins softly. “Where have you been, Miss Next? In prison?”

  “Why does everyone think I’ve been in prison?”

  “Because you were heading towards either death or prison when we last met—and you are not dead.”

  Dennis’s maker was rocking backwards and forwards, bemoaning the loss of his creation.

  The agent returned with a body bag and a female colleague, who gently pried the man from the creature and told his unhearing ears his rights.

  “Only one signature on a piece of paper keeps neanderthals from being destroyed, the same as him,” said Stiggins, indicating the creature. “We can be added to the list of banned creatures and designated a chimera without even an act of parliament.”

  We turned from the scene as the other two agents laid out the body bag and then rolled the corpse of the chimera onto it.

  “You remember Bowden Cable?” I asked. “My partner at the LiteraTecs.”

  “Of course,” replied Stiggins, “we met at your reception.”

  “How have you been?” asked Bowden.

  Stiggins stared back at him. It was a pointless human pleasantry that neanderthals never trouble themselves with.

  “We have been fine,” replied Stig, forcing the standard answer from his lips. Bowden didn’t know it, but he was only rubbing Stiggins’s nose deeper in sapien-dominated society.

  “He means nothing by it,” I said matter-of-factly, which is how neanderthals like all their speech. “We need your help, Stig.”

  “Then we will be happy to give it, Miss Next.”

  “Mean nothing by what?” asked Bowden as we walked across to a bench.

  “Tell you later.”

  Stig sat down and watched as another SO-13 Land Rover turned up, followed by two police cars to disperse the now curious crowd. He pulled out a carefully wrapped package of greaseproof paper and unfolded it to reveal his lunch—two windfall apples, a small bag of live bugs and a chunk of raw meat.

  “Bug?”

  “No thanks.”

  “So what can we do for the Literary Detectives?” he asked, attempting to eat a beetle that didn’t really want him to and was chased twice around Stig’s hand until caught and devoured.

  “What do you make of this?” I asked as Bowden handed him a picture of the Shaxtper cadaver.

  “It is a dead human,” replied Stig. “Are you sure you won’t have a beetle? They’re very crunchy.”

  “No thanks. What about this?”

  Bowden handed him another picture of one of the other dead clones, and then a third.

  “The same dead human from a different viewpoint?”

  “They’re all different corpses, Stig.”

  He stopped chewing the uncooked lamb chop and stared at me, then wiped his hands on a large handkerchief and looked more carefully at the photographs. “How many?”

  “Eighteen that we know of.”

  “Cloning entire humans has always been illegal,” murmured Stig. “Can we see the real thing?”

  The Swindon morgue was a short walk from the SpecOps office. It was an old Victorian building, which in a more enlightened age would have been condemned. It smelt of formaldehyde and damp, and all the morgue technicians looked unhappy and probably had odd hobbies that I would be happier not knowing about.

  The lugubrious head pathologist, Mr. Rumplunkett, looked avariciously at Mr. Stiggins. Since killing a neanderthal wasn’t technically a crime, no autopsy was ever performed on one—and Mr. Rumplunkett was by nature a curious man. He said nothing, but Stiggins knew precisely what he was thinking.

  “We’re pretty much the same inside as you, Mr. Rumplunkett. That was, after all, the reason we were brought into being in the first place.”

  “I’m sorry—” began the embarrassed chief pathologist.

  “No, you’re not,” replied Stig. “Your interest is purely professional and in the pursuit of knowledge. We take no offense.”

  “We’re here to look at Mr. Shaxtper,” said Bowden.

  We were led to the main autopsy room, where several bodies were lying under sheets with tags on their toes.

  “Overcrowding,” said Mr. Rumplunkett, “but they don’t seem to complain too much. This the one?”

  He threw back a sheet. The cadaver had a high-domed head, deep-set eyes, a small mustache and goatee. It looked a lot like William Shakespeare from the Droeshout engraving on the title page of the First Folio.

  “What do you think?”

  “Okay,” I said slowly, “he looks like Shakespeare, but if Victor wore his hair like that, so would he.”

  Bowden nodded. It was a fair point.

  “And this one wrote the Howdy Doody sonnet?”

  “No, that particular sonnet was written by this one.”

  With a flourish, Bowden pulled back the sheet from another cadaver to reveal an identical corpse to the first, only a year or two younger. I stared at them both as Bowden revealed yet another.

  “So how many Shakespeares did you say you had?”

  “Officially, none. We’ve got a Shaxtper, a Shakespoor and a Shagsper. Only two of them had any writing on them, all have ink-stained fingers, all are genetically identical, and all died of disease or hypothermia brought on by self-neglect.”

  “Down-and-outs?”

  “Hermits is probably nearer the mark.”

  “Aside from the fact they all have two left eyes and one size of toe,” said Stig, who had been examining the cadavers at length, “they are very good indeed. We haven’t seen this sort of craftsmanship for years.”

  “They’re copies of a playwright named William Shakes—”

  “We know of Shakespeare, Mr. Cable,” interupted Stig. “We are particularly fond of Caliban from The Tempest. This is a deep recovery job. Brought back from a piece of dried skin or a hair in a death mask or something.”

  “When and where, Stig?”

  He thought for a moment.

  “They were probably built in the mid-thirties,” he announced. “At the time there were perhaps only ten biolabs in the world who could have done this. We think we can safely say we are looking at one of the three biggest genetic-engineering labs in England.”

  “Not possible,” said Bowden. “The manufacturing logs of York, Bognor Regis and Scunthorpe are a matter of public record; it would be inconceivable that a project of this magnitude could have been kept secret.”

  “And yet they exist,” replied Stig, pointing to the corpses and bringing Bowden’s argument to a rapid close. “Do you have the genome logs and trace-element spectroscopic evaluations?” he added. “More careful study might reveal something.”

  “That’s not standard autopsy procedure,” replied Rumplunkett. “I have my budget to think of.”

  “If you do a molar cross-section as well, we will donate our body to this department when we die.”

  “I’ll do them for you while you wait,” said Mr. Rumplunkett.

  Stig turned back to us. “We’ll need forty-eight hours to have a look at them. Shall we meet again at my house? We would be honored by your presence.” He looked me in the eye and would know if I lied.