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Rogue Terminator

Brian Stableford

Brian Stableford’s fiftieth novel (and seventy-fifth book), Year Zero, was

released last June by Sarob Press. It was followed in October by the

Warhammer novel, The Wine of Dreams, which was published by Games

Workshop’s “Black Library” under the pseudonym Brian Craig. His future

history series from Tor, so far consisting of Inherit the Earth (1998), Architects

of Emortality (1999), and The Fountains of Youth (2000), will continue in 2001

with The Cassandra Complex.

* * * *

Dorset pharmers are old-fashioned folk—as you can readily see by the fact

that we still spell the word “pharmer” rather than “pharma,” the way the trendies in

Berkshire do. Food-growers, of course, still spell the word with an f, but there

haven’t been many food-growers around Yetminster during the last twenty years.

Even the apple-growers in Somerset have given up the cider business in the interests

of packing their Coxes and Braeburns with plantigens. Up in Taunton they rub their

hands in glee every time one of the tabloids tells us that the first plague war is bound

to break out any day now.

It’s because we’re so attentive to tradition in these parts that we still do our

serious drinking on a Sunday. Pharming is just as much a seven-day-a-week job as

farming used to be, and no one hereabouts actually rested on the Sabbath even in the

days when there were still a few wives and pensioners addicted to religious

observance, but you have to make room for drinking somewhere in the calendar and

the best pub in Yetminster happens to be just across the road from the biggest

church. Pharmers, like farmers, aren’t the kind of folk to do their drinking willy-nilly;

it’s the kind of vocation that requires its followers to get together on a regular basis

to swap news and tips—especially tips. The science is still moving forward at

breakneck pace, you see, and nobody but a fool ever waits until the AgMin field

tests are complete before improving his stocks. It’s not enough to be up with the

Honest Joneses if you want to make real money—you have to be a step or two

ahead. We like to think of it as Dorset’s heroic contribution to the cutting edge of

progress.

The bravest—and, as it turned out, strangest—of all our contributions to the

cutting edge of progress began on a cold night in February 2034, when there were so

few townies about that we didn’t even have to wait for chucking-out time before

getting down to the meat of the conversation. Naturally enough, it was Jack Gridley

who had the tip. The Gridleys have always been fashion-leaders, ever since Jack’s

granddad, Old Freddy, came up with the wheeze of using a plank and a bit of string

to make mysterious circles in our cornfields so our folks could charge tourists and

scientists a pound a head to see them. Come to think of it, though, it was also Old

Freddy who couldn’t be content with circles, and got so carried away with more

complicated designs that he became obsessed with the idea that he was being

inspired and guided by beings from a higher dimension—which did rather undermine

the whole point of the exercise.

“You doing rape this season, Lukey?” Jack asked me, in a quasi-confidential

manner, as he stared contemplatively at the froth on his third pint of the night. That

furtive way of speaking was the signal for everyone else to prick up their ears, and

everyone did, although they continued to maintain the polite pretense that Jack and I

were having a private discussion.

“Course I am,” I told him. “The arse’s dropped right out of wheat and corn’s

way past hackneyed. Oilseed’s where it’s at. Everyone knows that. Fifty-seven new

varieties last year alone. I’m thinking of sowing the whole top field with morphine

precursors, the ones either side of the stream with hyped-up beta-two agonists and

cytochrome-P450 assistants, and maybe splitting the rest between dystrophin repair

agents, telomere extrapolators and transposon suppressants.”

“Good mix,” Jack said, approvingly. “Except maybe the dystrophin repairers

and the transposon blockers. That’s Fancy Dan stuff. My old granddad always used

to say stick to the basics and you won’t go far wrong.”

“Pity he could never follow his own advice,” I observed, refusing to allow

myself to be nettled.

“Well, that’s as it may be,” Jack conceded, “but I’m a Gridley through and

through, and I’m content to leave it to the big boys to muck about with so-called

orphans. I’m going for the new generation of coryza inhibitors myself.”

I’d had my fingers burned back in ‘31 dabbling in cold cures, and I wasn’t

prepared to bet that the new generation would be any more effective in the long term

than the last three, but I could tell that Jack had something else on his mind apart

from pick-and-mix pharm stocks, so I didn’t argue.

“Mind you,” he went on, when the pause had been pregnant long enough,

“it’s a real pain in the arse having to buy new seed every year. Gives us the scope to

experiment, of course, and it certainly wouldn’t do to keep on planting the same old

stuff in a rapidly evolving market, but how long is it now that you’ve been producing

those morphine precursors? And how much better are this year’s beta-two agonists

than last year’s?”

“No way around it,” I said, cautiously. The seed companies loved their

terminators, and the AgMin was behind them all the way. Nobody wanted to go back

to the old days, when there were townies coming out and trampling our business left,

right and center just in case we gave a butterfly a stomach ache. The only way the

civil serpents at the AgMin had been able to weasel the GeneMod legislation through

the New Lords was to promise faithfully that the only crops grown on English

pharms would be incapable of producing fertile seed, so that anything that went

wrong would be a once and once only affair.

“Well,” said Jack, “that’s what people think—but I’ve always been a Gilbert

and Sullivan fan, and I’ve always been exceeding fond of The Mikado, which makes

the very wise point that as long as the public at large believes that the executioner has

done his work, whether he actually has or not, the ends of justice are served.”

I wasn’t about to argue with Gilbert and Sullivan, even though I knew they’d

been dead far too long to have any meaningful opinions on the Genetic Revolution,

so I cut straight to the chase. “Are you saying that you can lay your hands on some

engineered rape stocks that haven’t been neutered?” I asked.

“Naw,” he said, disgustedly. “Anyone can do that—but what do you get out

of your crop except soap and cooking oil? What I’m saying is that I know where I

can lay my hands on a terminator decoupler. A way to turn the reproductive potential

of any GM seed back on.”

“And where did that come from?” I asked, skeptically.

“From a pharm, of course,” he told me. “A YAC pharm, as it happens.

Hasn’t yeast always been the agriculturist’s best friend, ever since the day that the

first beer was brewed?”

YAC production isn’t what I’d call proper pharming. Yeast Artificial

Chromosomes are just molecular machines used in genome sequencing, not real

Pharmaceuticals. I have to admit, though, that molecular artificers are clever buggers.

If anyone was going to come up with a terminator terminator, I figured, it was highly

likely to be some bored YAC pharmer stirring up his vats to see if anything

interesting floated up with the scum.

“I’d still have to buy this year’s seed,” I pointed out, “And every time I

wanted to try something new in future, I’d have to buy it in.”

“You’d have to keep buying new stock anyway, to avoid suspicion,” Jack

pointed out. “We wouldn’t want the Minispies to come poking their long noses in,

would we? But think how much you could save if you could plant, say, half your

fields with seed from the previous year’s crops? You’d have your choice, after all. If

the dystrophin repair business happens to go belly-up you can just chuck the seed

away, but telomere extrapolants might last as long as you do—and if they work the

way they’re supposed to, that could be a very long time.”

He had a point—and he’d finished his pint.

“Let me get you another,” I said. “Maybe we can do a bit of business.” I

wasn’t the only one, of course. By the time Jack left the pub at four in the morning

he’d sunk at least sixteen, and hadn’t had to pay for a single one. His walk was as

steady and forceful as ever, though, and I knew that his Land Rover wouldn’t hit

anything he hadn’t aimed it at during the five-mile drive back to his place. It’s

wonderful what a man can accomplish with a little ingenuity, a good stock of

home-grown rapes stuffed full of cytochrome-P450 assistants, and a contact in the

YAC business.

The best thing about the terminator decoupler was that it was so close to

being alive that it could reproduce itself almost as easily outside the infused seeds as

inside. As long as I kept the culture well-fed with enriched glucose substrate, Jack

assured me, I’d never run out. He wasn’t spreading the stuff around with the

intention of making a big profit, you see. He was doing it because we were mates, all

in the same business and all in the same boat. That was why we were happy to let the

little miracle-worker be known by one and all as Jack’s YAC, although it wasn’t,

strictly speaking, a YAC and he hadn’t actually invented it. Matiness has always

been the strength of English farming folk—except, of course, for those located east

of Salisbury, west of Chard and north of Wincanton. We stick together, and we

guard one another’s backs. We like to think of it as the spirit of the Cerne Abbas

giant.

I decided to be careful, and not to expose the entirety of my newly bought

seed-stocks to the terminator decoupler. I knew full well that the first law of genetic

engineering is that you can never do one thing. Every alteration of the metabolic flux

inside a cell has consequences, and the feedback mechanisms regulating that flux are

so complicated that some of the consequences are always unforeseeable. So I

carefully split each parcel of seeds into two, exposing one to Jack’s YACs and

leaving the other uninfected. I also divided the stocks between different fields

wherever it was practicable, or different halves of the same field where it wasn’t.

Never let it be said that mere pharmers are too stupid to understand the underlying

logic of the experimental method.

We had a very good spring, even by comparison with the early Greenhouse

years before the UN Forestry Commission got its plant-a-billion-a-year program off

the ground. My fields turned green, then vivid yellow, in a very satisfactory manner.

There wasn’t any obvious difference between the crops that had been treated with

Jack’s terminator terminator and the ones that hadn’t—but I hadn’t expected any, so

that was all right. The morphine precursor producers seemed to be having a

particularly good year, but the plants whose oils were engineered to be full of

transposon suppressants were slow starters. I thought for a while that we might have

a problem in the boggier ground with some kind of facultative pest that had made the

jump, but once the flowers were out the plants came on well enough, much to my

relief. The Biodiversity Lobby had become so strong that the Ministry wouldn’t let

us use any but the most specific biopesticides in case we took out a few innocent

bystanders along with the rapemunchers, but every five years or so natural selection

would throw up a new subspecies that was ready, willing, and able to take our pride

and joy apart, and the AgMin troubleshooters never found a fix in time, no matter

how quickly the bug was reported.

All in all, though, things were going very smoothly by midsummer’s day,

when family tradition dictated that I take a few hours off to drive Shelley and the kids

up to the top of the downs for a good old-fashioned picnic. We always sat on the

edge of one of the Ministry’s woodland sanctuaries, where we could listen to the

birds that still knew how to sing while looking out over the vast ocean of yellow that

extended all the way to Sherborne in the north and all the way to Dorchester in the

south.

The rapesea was dotted everywhere with islands, some of them green, some

of them red-tiled, and not a few of them grey, but it had no obvious boundaries

except the railway and the Frome. About half the green islands were wildlife

minisanctuaries; the rest included a few relict oakwoods, a couple of dozen test

crops—mostly strawberries, but some potatoes, and even a few beets—and a few

fugitive fields of barley.

“It’s all very impressive,” Shelley admitted, when I called her attention to the

stately calm of the lovely yellow expanse, “but I can never quite get over the fact that

it’s called rape. Remember all those old jokes about the rape of the English

countryside?”

“It’s oilseed rape,” I reminded her, not for the first time. “If it makes you feel

better, pretend it’s mustard. And if you think this is impressive, imagine what it must

be like in India.” South-East Asia was so oil-poor that the second generation of

oilseeds adapted for tropical and sub-tropical habitats had been taken up by native

farmers almost as enthusiastically as the rubber trees and bananas that secreted

vaccines against hepatitis-C, malaria, and every other pestilence endemic to the

region had been taken up in Indonesia and Malaysia.

I tried to explain to the kids that the climatologists loved the Indian rapeseas

even more extravagantly than the politicians because of the contribution they were

making to rainfall distribution, but they weren’t in a mood to be lectured. Shelley told

me that they weren’t old enough to grasp the significance of the fact that the age-old

tyranny of the monsoon was finally giving way to an era of environmental fraternity,

but she was just trying to let the brats off the hook. Liz probably wasn’t old enough

to take it all aboard, but Joe could have taken an intelligent interest if only he’d been

that way inclined.

“It’s all so boring” Joe complained, just to make certain that I knew that he’d

far rather have stayed at home to play VR-games. “It’s all the same.”

“No it’s not,” I assured him. “There are more than thirteen thousand variants

of oilseed rape in Dorset. Shall I explain why we can’t simply grow all the different

drugs in the same plant?”

“Anything but that , Dad,” he complained. “Anyway, I know already—I’m not

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