THE CARESS

By Greg Egan

Two smells hit me when I kicked down the door: death, and the scent of an animal.

A man who passed the house each day had phoned us, anonymously; worried by the sight of a broken window left unrepaired, he’d knocked on the front door with no results. On his way to the back door, he’d glimpsed blood on the kitchen wall through a gap in the curtains. The place had been ransacked; all that remained downstairs were the drag marks on the carpet from the heaviest furniture. The woman in the kitchen, mid fifties, throat slit, had been dead for at least a week. My helmet was filing sound and vision, but it couldn’t record the animal smell. The correct procedure was to make a verbal comment, but I didn’t say a word. Why? Call it a vestigial need for independence. Soon they’ll be logging our brain waves, our heartbeats, who knows what, and all of it subpoenable. ‘Detective Segel, the evidence shows that you experienced a penile erection when the defendant opened fire. Would you describe that as an appropriate response?’

Upstairs was a mess. Clothes scattered in the bedroom. Books, CDs, papers, upturned drawers, spread across the floor of the study. Medical texts. In one corner, piles of CD periodicals stood out from the jumble by their jackets’ uniformity: The New England Journal of Medicine, Nature, Clinical Biochemistry and Laboratory Embryology. A framed scroll hung on the wall, awarding the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to Freda Anne Macklenburg in the year two thousand and twenty-three. The desktop had dust-free spaces shaped like a monitor and a keyboard. I noticed a wall outlet with a pilot light; the switch was down but the light was dead. The room light wasn’t working; ditto elsewhere. Back on the ground floor, I found a door behind the stairs, presumably leading to a basement. Locked. I hesitated. Entering the house I’d had no choice but to force my way in; here, though, I was on shakier legal ground. I hadn’t searched thoroughly for keys, and I had no clear reason to believe it was urgent to get into the basement.

But what would one more broken door change? Cops have been sued for failing to wipe their boots clean on the doormat. If a citizen wants to screw you, they’ll find a reason, even if you came in on your knees, waving a handful of warrants, and saved their whole family from torture and death. No room to kick, so I punched out the lock. The smell had me gagging, but it was the excess, the concentration, that was overwhelming; the scent in itself wasn’t foul. Upstairs, seeing medical books, I’d thought of guinea pigs, rats and mice, but this was no stink of caged rodents. I switched on the torch in my helmet and moved quickly down the narrow concrete steps. Over my head was a thick, square pipe. An air-conditioning duct? That made sense; the house couldn’t normally smell the way it did, but with the power cut off to a basement air-conditioner—

The torch beam showed a shelving unit, decorated with trinkets and potted plants. A TV set. Landscape paintings on the wall. A pile of straw on the concrete floor. Curled on the straw, the powerful body of a leopard, lungs visibly labouring, but otherwise still.

When the beam fell upon a tangle of auburn hair, I thought, it’s chewing on a severed human head. I continued to approach, expecting, hoping, that by disturbing the feeding animal I could provoke it into attacking me. I was carrying a weapon that could have spattered it into a fine mist of blood and gristle, an outcome which would have involved me in a great deal less tedium and bureaucracy than dealing with it alive. I directed the light towards its head again, and realised that I’d been mistaken; it wasn’t chewing anything, its head was hidden, tucked away, and the human head was simply—

Wrong again. The human head was simply joined to the leopard’s body. Its human neck took on fur and spots and merged with the leopard’s shoulders. I squatted down beside it, thinking, above all else, what those claws could do to me if my attention lapsed. The head was a woman’s. Frowning. Apparently asleep. I placed one hand below her nostrils, and felt the air blast out in time with the heavings of the leopard’s great chest. That, more than the smooth transition of the skin, made the union real for me. I explored the rest of the room. There was a pit in one corner that turned out to be a toilet bowl sunk into the floor. I put my foot on a nearby pedal, and the bowl flushed from a hidden cistern. There was an upright freezer, standing in a puddle of water. I opened it to find a rack containing thirty-five small plastic vials. Every one of them bore smeared red letters, spelling out the word spoiled. Temperature-sensitive dye. I returned to the leopard woman. Asleep? Feigning sleep? Sick? Comatose?

I patted her on the cheek, and not gently. The skin seemed hot, but I had no idea what her temperature ought to be. I shook her by one shoulder, this time with a little more respect, as if waking her by touching the leopard part might somehow be more dangerous. No effect. Then I stood up, fought back a sigh of irritation (Psych latch on to all your little noises; I’ve been grilled for hours over such things as an injudicious whoop of triumph), and called for an ambulance.

* * * *

I should have known better than to hope that that would be the end of my problems. I had to physically obstruct the stairway to stop the ambulancemen from retreating. One of them puked. They then refused to put her on the stretcher unless I promised to ride with her to the hospital. She was only about two metres long, excluding the tail, but must have weighed a hundred and fifty kilos, and it took the three of us to get her up the awkward stairs.

We covered her completely with a sheet before leaving the house, and I took the trouble to arrange it to keep it from revealing the shape beneath. A small crowd had gathered outside, the usual motley collection of voyeurs. The forensic team arrived just then, but I’d already told them everything by radio.

At the casualty department of St Dominic’s, doctor after doctor took one look under the sheet and then fled, some muttering half-baked excuses, most not bothering. I was about to lose my temper when the fifth one I cornered, a young woman, turned pale but kept her ground. After poking and pinching and shining a torch into the leopard woman’s forced-opened eyes, Dr Muriel Beatty (from her name badge) announced, ‘She’s in a coma,’

and started extracting details from me. When I’d told her everything, I squeezed in some questions of my own.

‘How would someone do this? Gene splicing? Transplant surgery?’

‘I doubt it was either. More likely she’s a chimera.’

I frowned. ‘That’s some kind of mythical—’

‘Yes, but it’s also a bioengineering term. You can physically mix the cells of two genetically distinct early embryos, and obtain a blastocyst that will develop into a single organism. If they’re both of the same species, there’s a very high success rate; for different species it’s trickier. People made crude sheep/goat chimeras as far back as the nineteen sixties, but I’ve read nothing new on the subject for five or ten years. I would have said it was no longer being seriously pursued. Let alone pursued with humans.’ She stared down at her patient with unease and fascination. ‘I wouldn’t know how they guaranteed such a sharp distinction between the head and the body; a thousand times more effort has gone into this than just stirring two clumps of cells together. I guess you could say it was something halfway between foetal transplant surgery and chimerisation. And there must have been genetic manipulation as well, to smooth out the biochemical differences.’ She laughed drily. ‘So both your suggestions I dismissed just then were probably partly right. Of course!’

‘What?’

‘No wonder she’s in a coma! That freezer full of vials you mentioned — she probably needs an external supply for half a dozen hormones that are insufficiently active across species. Can I arrange for someone to go to the house and look through the dead woman’s papers? We need to know exactly what those vials contained. Even if she made it up herself from off-the-shelf sources, we might be able to find the recipe — but chances are she had a contract with a biotechnology company for a regular, pre-mixed supply. So if we can find, say, an invoice with a product reference number, that would be the quickest, surest way to get this patient what she needs to stay alive.’

I agreed, and accompanied a lab technician back to the house, but he found nothing of use in the study, or the basement. After talking it over with Muriel Beatty on the phone, I started ringing local biotech companies, quoting the deceased woman’s name and address. Several people said they’d heard of Dr Macklenburg, but not as a customer. The fifteenth call produced results — deliveries from a company called Applied Veterinary Research had been sent to Macklenburg’s address — and with a combination of threats and smooth talking (such as inventing an order number they could quote on their invoice), I managed to extract a promise that a batch of the ‘Applied Veterinary Research’ preparation would be made up at once and rushed to St Dominic’s. Burglars do switch off the power sometimes, in the hope of disabling those (very rare) security devices that don’t have battery back-up, but the house hadn’t been broken into; the scattered glass from the window fell, in an undisturbed pattern, on to carpet where a sofa had left clear indentations. The fools had forgotten to break a window until after they’d taken the furniture. People do throw out invoices, but Macklenburg had kept all her videophone, water, gas and electricity bills for the last five years. So, it looked like somebody had known about the chimera and wanted it dead, without wishing to be totally obvious, yet without being professional enough to manage anything subtler, or more certain. I arranged for the chimera to be guarded. Probably a good idea anyway, to keep the media at bay when they found out about her. Back in my office, I did a search of medical literature by Macklenburg, and found her name on only half a dozen papers. All were more than twenty years old. All were concerned with embryology, though (to the extent that I could understand the jargon-laden abstracts, full of ‘zonae pellucidae’ and

‘polar bodies’) none was explicitly about chimeras. The papers were all from one place; the Early Human Development Laboratory at St Andrew’s Hospital. After some standard brush-offs from secretaries and assistants, I managed to get myself put through to one of Macklenburg’s one-time co-authors, a Dr Henry Feingold, who looked rather old and frail. News of Macklenburg’s death produced a wistful sigh, but no visible shock or distress.

‘Freda left us back in thirty-two or thirty-three. I’ve hardly set eyes on her since, except at the occasional conference.’

‘Where did she go to from St Andrew’s?’

‘Something in industry. She was rather vague about it. I’m not sure that she had a definite appointment lined up.’

‘Why did she resign’

He shrugged. ‘Sick of the conditions here. Low pay, limited resources, bureaucratic restrictions, ethics committees. Some people learn to live with all that, some don’t.’

‘Would you know anything about her work, her particular research interests, after she left?’

‘I don’t know that she did much research. She seemed to have stopped publishing, so I really couldn’t say what she was up to.’

Shortly after that (with unusual speed), clearance came through to access her taxation records. Since ‘35 she had been self-employed as a ‘freelance biotechnology consultant’; whatever that meant, it had provided her with a seven-figure income for the past fifteen years. There were at least a hundred different company names listed by her as sources of revenue. I rang the first one and found myself talking to an answering machine. It was after seven. I rang St Dominic’s, and learnt that the chimera was still unconscious, but doing fine; the hormone mixture had arrived, and Muriel Beatty had located a veterinarian at the university with some relevant experience. So I swallowed my deprimers and went home.

* * * *

The surest sign that I’m not fully down is the frustration I feel when opening my own front door. It’s too bland, too easy: inserting three keys and touching my thumb to the scanner. Nothing inside is going to be dangerous or challenging. The deprimers are meant to work in five minutes. Some nights it’s more like five hours.

Marion was watching TV, and called out, ‘Hi, Dan.’

I stood in the living room doorway. ‘Hi. How was your day?’ She works in a child-care centre, which is my idea of a high-stress occupation. She shrugged. ‘Ordinary. How was yours?’

Something on the TV screen caught my eye. I swore for about a minute, mostly cursing a certain communications officer who I knew was responsible, though I couldn’t have proved it. ‘How was my day? You’re looking at it.’ The TV was showing part of my helmet log; the basement, my discovery of the chimera.

Marion said, ‘Ah. I was going to ask if you knew who the cop was.’

‘And you know what I’ll be doing tomorrow? Trying to make sense of a few thousand phone calls from people who’ve seen this and decided they have something useful to say about it.’

‘That poor girl. Is she going to be OK?’

‘I think so.’

They played Muriel Beatty’s speculations, again from my point of view, then cut to a couple of pocket experts who debated the fine points of chimerism while an interviewer did his best to drag in spurious references to everything from Greek mythology to The Island of Doctor Moreau. I said, ‘I’m starving. Let’s eat.’

* * * *

I woke at half past one, shaking and whimpering. Marion was already awake, trying to calm me down. Lately I’d been suffering a lot from delayed reactions like this. A few months earlier, two nights after a particularly brutal assault case, I’d been distraught and incoherent for hours. On duty, we are what’s called ‘primed’. A mixture of drugs heightens various physiological and emotional responses, and suppresses others. Sharpens our reflexes. Keeps us calm and rational. Supposedly improves our judgement. (The media like to say that the drugs make us more aggressive, but that’s garbage; why would the force intentionally create trigger-happy cops? Swift decisions and swift actions are the opposite of dumb brutality.) Off duty, we are ‘deprimed’. That’s meant to make us the way we would be if we’d never taken the priming drugs. (A hazy concept, I have to admit. As if we’d never taken the priming drugs, and never spent the day at work? Or, as if we’d seen and done the very same things, without the primers to help us cope?)

Sometimes this seesaw works smoothly. Sometimes it fucks up. I wanted to describe to Marion how I felt about the chimera. I wanted to talk about my fear and revulsion and pity and anger. All I could do was make unhappy noises. No words. She didn’t say anything, she just held me, her long fingers cool on the burning skin of my face and chest. When I finally exhausted myself into something approaching peace, I managed to speak. I whispered, ‘Why do you stay with me? Why do you put up with this?’

She turned away from me and said, ‘I’m tired. Go to sleep.’

* * * *

I enrolled for the force at the age of twelve. I continued my normal education, but that’s when you have to start the course of growth-factor injections, and weekend and vacation training, if you want to qualify for active duty. (It wasn’t an irreversible obligation; I could have chosen a different career later, and paid off what had been invested in me at a hundred dollars or so a week over the next thirty years. Or, I could have failed the psychological tests, and been dropped without owing a cent. But the tests before you even begin tend to weed out anyone who’s likely to do either.) It makes sense; rather than limiting recruitment to men and women meeting certain physical criteria, candidates are chosen according to intelligence and attitude, and then the secondary, but useful, characteristics of size, strength and agility are provided artificially. So we’re freaks, constructed and conditioned to meet the demands of the job. Less so than soldiers or professional athletes. Far less so than the average street gang member, who thinks nothing of using illegal growth promoters that lower his life expectancy to around thirty years. Who, unarmed but on a mixture of Berserker and Timewarp (oblivious to pain and most physical trauma and with a twenty-fold decrease in reaction times), can kill a hundred people in a crowd in five minutes, then vanish to a safe house before the high ends and the fortnight of side effects begins. (A certain politician, a very popular man, advocates undercover operations to sell supplies of these drugs laced with fatal impurities, but he’s not yet succeeded in making that legal.)

Yes, we’re freaks; but if we have a problem, it’s that we’re still far too human.

* * * *

When over a hundred thousand people phone in about an investigation, there’s only one way to deal with their calls. It’s called ARIA: Automated Remote Informant Analysis.

An initial filtering process identifies the blatantly obvious pranksters and lunatics. It’s always possible that someone who phones in and spends ninety per cent of his time ranting about UFOs, or communist conspiracies, or slicing up our genitals with razor blades, has something relevant and truthful to mention in passing, but it seems reasonable to give his evidence less weight than that of someone who sticks to the point. More sophisticated analysis of gestures (about thirty per cent of callers don’t switch off the vision), and speech patterns, supposedly picks up anyone who is, although superficially rational and apposite, actually suffering from psychotic delusions or fixations. Ultimately, each caller is given a ‘reliability factor’ between zero and one, with the benefit of the doubt going to anyone who betrays no recognisable signs of dishonesty or mental illness. Some days I’m impressed with the sophistication of the software that makes these assessments. Other days I curse it as a heap of useless voodoo. The relevant assertions (broadly defined) of each caller are extracted, and a frequency table is created, giving a count of the number of callers making each assertion, and their average reliability factor. Unfortunately, there are no simple rules to determine which assertions are most likely to be true. One thousand people might earnestly repeat a widespread but totally baseless rumour. A single honest witness might be distraught, or chemically screwed up, and be given an unfairly poor rating. Basically, you have to read all the assertions — which is tedious, but still several thousand times faster than viewing every call. (If desperate, I could view, one by one, the seventeen hundred and thirty-three calls of items 14 and 15. Not yet, though; I still had plenty of better ways to spend my time.)

That was hardly surprising, considering the number of paintings there must be of fantastic and mythical creatures. But on the next page: Curious, I displayed some of the calls. The first few told me little more than the print-out’s summary line. Then, one man held up an open book to the lens. The glare of a light blub reflected off the glossy paper rendered parts of it almost invisible, and the whole thing was slightly out of focus, but what I could see was intriguing.

A leopard with a woman’s head was crouched near the edge of a raised, flat surface. A slender young man, bare to the waist, stood on the lower ground, leaning sideways on to the raised surface, cheek to cheek with the leopard woman, who pressed one forepaw against his abdomen in an awkward embrace. The man coolly gazed straight ahead, his mouth set primly, giving an impression of effete detachment. The woman’s eyes were closed, or nearly so, and her expression seemed less certain the longer I stared — it might have been placid, dreamy contentment, it might have been erotic bliss. Both had auburn hair.

I selected a rectangle around the woman’s face, enlarged it to fill the screen, then applied a smoothing option to make the blown-up pixels less distracting. With the glare, the poor focus, and limited resolution, the image was a mess. The best I could say was that the face in the painting was not wildly dissimilar to that of the woman I’d found in the basement. A few dozen calls later, though, no doubt remained. One caller had even taken the trouble to capture a frame from the news broadcast and patch it into her call, side by side with a well-lit close-up of her copy of the painting. One view of a single expression does not define a human face, but the resemblance was far too close to be coincidental. Since — as many people told me, and I later checked for myself — The Caress had been painted in 1896 by the Belgian Symbolist artist Fernand Khnopff, the painting could not possibly have been based on the living chimera. So, it had to be the other way around.

I played all ninety-four calls. Most contained nothing but the same handful of simple facts about the painting. One went a little further. A middle-aged man introduced himself as John Aldrich, art dealer and amateur art historian. After pointing out the resemblance, and talking briefly about Khnopff and The Caress, he added:

‘Given that this poor woman looks exactly like Khnopff s sphinx, I wonder if you’ve considered the possibility that proponents of Lindhquistism are involved?’ He blushed slightly. ‘Perhaps that’s farfetched, but I thought I should mention it.’

So I called an on-line Britannica, and said, ‘Lindhquistism.’

Andreas Lindhquist, 1961-2030, was a Swiss performance artist, with the distinct financial advantage of being heir to a massive pharmaceuticals empire. Up until 2011, he engaged in a wide variety of activities of a bioartistic nature, progressing from generating sounds and images by computer processing of physiological signals (ECG, EEG, skin conductivity, hormonal levels continuously monitored by immunoelectric probes), to subjecting himself to surgery in a sterile, transparent cocoon in the middle of a packed auditorium, once to have his corneas gratuitously exchanged, left for right, and a second time to have them swapped back (he publicised a more ambitious version, in which he claimed every organ in his torso would be removed and reinserted facing backwards, but was unable to find a team of surgeons who considered this anatomically plausible). In 2011, he developed a new obsession. He projected slides of classical paintings in which the figures had been blacked out, and had models in appropriate costumes and make-up strike poses in front of the screen, filling in the gaps.

Why? In his own words (or perhaps a translation): The great artists are afforded glimpses into a separate, transcendental, timeless world. Does that world exist? Can we travel to it? No! We must force it into being around us! We must take these fragmentary glimpses and make them solid and tangible, make them live and breathe and walk amongst us, we must import art into reality, and by doing so transform our world into the world of the artists’ vision. I wondered what ARIA would have made of that. Over the next ten years, he moved away from projected slides. He began hiring movie set designers and landscape architects to recreate in three dimensions the backgrounds of the paintings he chose. He discarded the use of make-up to alter the appearance of models, and, when he found it impossible to obtain perfect lookalikes, he employed only those who, for sufficient payment, were willing to undergo cosmetic surgery. His interest in biology hadn’t entirely vanished; in 2021, on his sixtieth birthday, he had two tubes implanted in his skull, allowing him to constantly monitor, and alter, the precise neurochemical content of his brain ventricular fluid. After this, his requirements became even more stringent. The ‘cheating’ techniques of movie sets were forbidden — a house, or a church, or a lake, or a mountain, glimpsed in the corner of the painting being ‘realised’, had to be there, full-scale and complete in every detail. Houses, churches and small lakes were created; mountains he had to seek out — though he did transplant or destroy thousands of hectares of vegetation to alter their colour and texture. His models were required to spend months before and after the ‘realisation’, scrupulously ‘living their roles’, following complex rules and scenarios that Lindhquist devised, based on his interpretation of the painting’s ‘characters’. This aspect grew increasingly important to him:

The precise realisation of the appearance — the surface, I call it, however three-dimensional — is only the most rudimentary beginning. It is the network of relationships between the subjects, and between the subjects and their setting, that constitutes the challenge for the generation that follows me.

At first, it struck me as astonishing that I’d never even heard of this maniac; his sheer extravagance must have earned him a certain notoriety. But there are millions of eccentrics in the world, and thousands of extremely wealthy ones — and I was only five when Lindhquist died of a heart attack in 2030, leaving his fortune to a nine-year-old son. As for disciples, Britannica listed half a dozen scattered around Eastern Europe, where apparently he’d found the most respect. All seemed to have completely abandoned his excesses, offering volumes of aesthetic theories in support of the use of painted plywood and mime artists in stylised masks. In fact, most did just that — offered the volumes, and didn’t even bother with the plywood and the mime artists. I couldn’t imagine any of them having either the money or the inclination to sponsor embryological research thousands of kilometres away.

For obscure reasons of copyright law, works of visual art are rarely present in publicly accessible databases, so in my lunch hour I went out and bought a book on Symbolist painters which included a colour plate of The Caress. I made a dozen (illegal) copies, blow-ups of various sizes. Curiously, in each one the expression of the sphinx (as Aldrich had called her) struck me as subtly different. Her mouth and her eyes (one fully closed, one infinitesimally open) could not be said to portray a definite smile, but the shading of the cheeks hinted at one — in certain enlargements, viewed from certain angles. The young man’s face also changed, from vaguely troubled to slightly bored, from resolved to dissipated, from noble to effeminate. The features of both seemed to lie on complicated and uncertain borders between regions of definite mood, and the slightest shift in viewing conditions was enough to force a complete reinterpretation. If that had been Khnopff s intention it was a masterful achievement, but I also found it extremely frustrating. The book’s brief commentary was no help, praising the painting’s ‘perfectly balanced composition and delightful thematic ambiguity’, and suggesting that the leopard’s head was

‘perversely modelled on the artist’s sister, with whose beauty he was constantly obsessed’.

Unsure for the moment just how, if at all, I ought to pursue this strand of the investigation, I sat at my desk for several minutes, wondering (but not inclined to check) if every one of the leopard’s spots shown in the painting had been reproduced faithfully in vivo. I wanted to do something tangible, set something in motion, before I put The Caress aside and returned to more routine lines of inquiry.

So I made one more blow-up of the painting, this time using the copier’s editing facilities to surround the man’s head and shoulders with a uniform dark background. I took it down to communications, and handed it to Steve Birbeck (the man I knew had leaked my helmet log to the media). I said, ‘Put out an alert on this guy. Wanted for questioning in connection with the Macklenburg murder.’

* * * *

I found nothing else of interest in the ARIA print-out, so I picked up where I’d left off the night before, phoning companies that had made use of Freda Macklenburg’s services.

The work she had done had no specific connection with embryology. Her advice and assistance seemed to have been sought for a wide range of unconnected problems in a dozen fields — tissue culture work, the use of retroviruses as gene-therapy vectors, cell membrane electrochemistry, protein purification, and still other areas where the vocabulary meant nothing to me at all.

‘And did Dr Macklenburg solve this problem?’

‘Absolutely. She knew a perfect way around the stumbling block that had been holding us up for months.’

‘How did you find out about her?’

‘There’s a register of consultants, indexed by speciality.’

There was indeed. She was in it in fifty-nine places. Either she somehow knew the detailed specifics of all these areas, better than many people who were actually working in them full-time, or she had access to world-class experts who could put the right words into her mouth. Her sponsor’s method of funding her work? Paying her not in money, but in expertise she could then sell as her own? Who would have so many biological scientists on tap?

The Lindhquist empire?

(So much for escaping The Caress.)

Her phone bills showed no long-distance calls, but that meant nothing; the local Lindhquist branch would have had its own private international network.

I looked up Lindhquist’s son Gustave in Who’s Who. It was a very sketchy entry. Born to a surrogate mother. Donor ovum anonymous. Educated by tutors. As yet unmarried at twenty-nine. Reclusive. Apparently immersed in his business concerns. Not a word about artistic pretentions, but nobody tells everything to Who’s Who.

The preliminary forensic report arrived, with nothing very useful. No evidence of a protracted struggle — no bruising, no skin or blood found under Macklenburg’s fingernails. Apparently she’d been taken entirely by surprise. The throat wound had been made by a thin, straight, razor-sharp blade, with a single powerful stroke.

There were five genotypes, besides Macklenburg’s and the chimera’s, present in hairs and flakes of dead skin found in the house. Precise dating isn’t possible, but all showed a broad range in the age of shedding, which meant regular visitors, friends, not strangers. All five had been in the kitchen at one time or another. Only Macklenburg and the chimera showed up in the basement in amounts that could not be accounted for by drift and second-party transport, while the chimera seemed to have rarely left her special room. One prevalent male had been in most of the rest of the house, including the bedroom, but not the bed — or at least not since the sheets had last been changed. All of this was unlikely to have a direct bearing on the murder; the best assassins either leave no biological detritus at all, or plant material belonging to someone else. The interviewers’ report came in soon after, and that was even less helpful. Macklenburg’s next of kin was a cousin, with whom she had not been in touch, and who knew even less about the dead woman than I did. Her neighbours were all much too respectful of privacy to have known or cared who her friends had been, and none would admit to having noticed anything unusual on the day of the murder.

I sat and stared at The Caress.

Some lunatic with a great deal of money — perhaps connected to Lindhquist, perhaps not — had commissioned Freda Macklenburg to create the chimera to match the sphinx in the painting. But who would want to fake a burglary, murder Macklenburg, and endanger the chimera’s life, without making the effort to actually kill it?

The phone rang. It was Muriel. The chimera was awake.

* * * *

The two officers outside had had a busy shift so far; one psycho with a knife, two photographers disguised as doctors, and a religious fanatic with a mail-order exorcism kit. The news reports hadn’t mentioned the name of the hospital, but there were only a dozen plausible candidates, and the staff could not be sworn to secrecy or immunised against the effect of bribes. In a day or two, the chimera’s location would be common knowledge. If things didn’t quieten down, I’d have to consider trying to arrange for a room in a prison infirmary, or a military hospital.

‘You saved my life.’

The chimera’s voice was deep and quiet and calm, and she looked right at me as she spoke. I’d expected her to be painfully shy, amongst strangers for perhaps the first time ever. She lay curled on her side on the bed, not covered by a sheet but with her head resting on a clean, white pillow. The smell was noticeable, but not unpleasant. Her tail, as thick as my wrist and longer than my arm, hung over the edge of the bed, restlessly swinging.

‘Dr Beatty saved your life.’ Muriel stood at the foot of the bed, glancing regularly at a blank sheet of paper on a clipboard. ‘I’d like to ask you some questions.’ The chimera said nothing to that, but her eyes stayed on me.

‘Could you tell me your name, please?’

‘Catherine.’

‘Do you have another name? A surname?’

‘No.’

‘How old are you, Catherine?’ Primed or not, I couldn’t help feeling a slight giddiness, a sense of surreal inanity to be asking routine questions of a sphinx plucked from a nineteenth-century oil painting.

‘Seventeen.’

‘You know that Freda Macklenburg is dead?’

‘Yes.’ Quieter, but still calm.

‘What was your relationship with her?’

She frowned slightly, then gave an answer which sounded rehearsed but sincere, as if she had long expected to be asked this. ‘She was everything. She was my mother and my teacher and my friend.’ Misery and loss came and went on her face, a flicker, a twitch.

‘Tell me what you heard, the day the power went off.’

‘Someone came to visit Freda. I heard the car, and the doorbell. It was a man. I couldn’t hear what he said, but I could hear the sound of his voice.’

‘Was it a voice you’d heard before?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘How did they sound? Were they shouting? Arguing?’

‘No. They sounded friendly. Then they stopped, it was quiet. A little while after that, the power went off. Then I heard a truck pull up, and a whole lot of noise — footsteps, things being shifted about. But no more talking. There were two or three people moving all around the house for about half an hour. Then the truck and the car drove away. I kept waiting for Freda to come down and tell me what it had all been about.’

I’d been thinking a while how to phrase the next question, but finally gave up trying to make it polite.

‘Did Freda ever discuss with you why you’re different from other people?’

‘Yes.’ Not a hint of pain, or embarrassment. Instead, her face glowed with pride, and for a moment she looked so much like the painting that the giddiness hit me again. ‘She made me this way. She made me special. She made me beautiful.’

‘Why?’

That seemed to baffle her, as if I had to be teasing. She was special. She was beautiful. No further explanation was required. I heard a faint grunt from just outside the door, followed by a tiny thud against the wall. I signalled to Muriel to drop to the floor, and to Catherine to keep silent, then — quietly as I could, but with an unavoidable squeaking of metal — I climbed on to the top of a wardrobe that stood in the corner to the left of the door.

We were lucky. What came through the door when it opened a crack was not a grenade of any kind, but a hand bearing a fan laser. A spinning mirror sweeps the beam across a wide arc — this one was set to one hundred and eighty degrees, horizontally. Held at shoulder height, it filled the room with a lethal plane about a metre above the bed. I was tempted to simply kick the door shut on the hand the moment it appeared, but that would have been too risky; the gun might have tilted down before the beam cut off. For the same reason, I couldn’t simply burn a hole in the man’s head as he stepped into the room, or even aim at the gun itself — it was shielded, and would have borne several seconds’ fire before suffering any internal damage. Paint on the walls was scorched and the curtains had split into two burning halves; in an instant he would lower the beam on to Catherine. I kicked him hard in the face, knocking him backwards and tipping the fan of laser light up towards the ceiling. Then I jumped down and put my gun to his temple. He switched off the beam and let me take the weapon from him. He was dressed in an orderly’s uniform, but the fabric was implausibly stiff, probably containing a shielding layer of aluminium-coated asbestos (with the potential for reflections, it’s unwise to operate a fan laser with any less protection).

I turned him over and cuffed him in the standard way — wrists and ankles all brought together behind the back, in bracelets with a sharpened inner edge that discourages (some) attempts to burst the chains. I sprayed sedative on his face for a few seconds, and he acted like it had worked, but then I pulled open one eye and knew it hadn’t. Every cop uses a sedative with a slightly different tracer effect; my usual turns the whites of the eyes pale blue. He must have had a barrier layer on his skin. While I was preparing an IV jab, he turned his head towards me and opened his mouth. A blade flew out from under his tongue and nicked my ear as it whistled past. That was something I’d never seen before. I forced his jaw open and had a look; the launching mechanism was anchored to his teeth with wires and pins. There was a second blade in there; I put my gun to his head again and advised him to eject it on to the floor. Then I punched him in the face and started searching for an easy vein. He gave a short cry, and began vomiting steaming-hot blood. Possibly his own choice, but more likely his employers had decided to cut their losses. The body started smoking, so I dragged it out into the corridor. The officers who’d been on guard were unconscious, not dead. A matter of pragmatism; chemically knocking someone senseless is usually quieter, less messy and less risky to the assailant than killing them. Also, dead cops have been known to trigger an extra impetus in many investigations, so it’s worthwhile taking the trouble to avoid them. I phoned someone I knew in Toxicology to come and take a look at them, then radioed for replacements. Organising the move to somewhere more secure would take twenty-four hours at least.

Catherine was hysterical, and Muriel, pretty shaken herself, insisted on sedating her and ending the interview.

Muriel said, ‘I’ve read about it, but I’ve never seen it with my own eyes before. What does it feel like?’

‘What?’

She emitted a burst of nervous laughter. She was shivering. I held on to her shoulders until she calmed down a little. ‘Being like that.’ Her teeth chattered. ‘Someone just tried to kill us all, and you’re carrying on like nothing special happened. Like someone out of a comic book. What does it feel like?’

I laughed myself. We have a standard answer.

‘It doesn’t feel like anything at all.’

* * * *

Marion lay with her head on my chest. Her eyes were closed, but she wasn’t asleep. I knew she was still listening to me. She always tenses up a certain way when I’m raving.

‘How could anyone do that? How could anyone sit down and coldbloodedly plan to create a deformed human being with no chance of living a normal life? All for some insane “artist” somewhere who’s keeping alive a dead billionaire’s crazy theories. Shit, what do they think people are? Sculptures?

Things they can mess around with any way they like?’

I wanted to sleep, it was late, but I couldn’t shut up. I hadn’t even realised how angry I was until I’d started on the topic, but then my disgust had grown more intense with every word I’d uttered. An hour before, trying to make love, I’d found myself impotent. I’d resorted to using my tongue, and Marion had come, but it still depressed me. Was it psychological? The case I was on? Or a side effect of the priming drugs? So suddenly, after all these years? There were rumours and jokes about the drugs causing almost everything imaginable: sterility, malformed babies, cancer, psychoses; but I’d never believed any of that. The union would have found out and raised hell, the department would never have been allowed to get away with it. It was the chimera case that was screwing me up, it had to be. So I talked about it.

‘And the worst thing is, she doesn’t even understand what’s been done to her. She’s been lied to from birth. Macklenburg told her she was beautiful, and she believes that crap, because she doesn’t know any better.’

Marion shifted slightly, and sighed. ‘What’s going to happen to her? How’s she going to live when she’s out of hospital?’

‘I don’t know. I guess she could sell her story for quite a packet. Enough to hire someone to look after her for the rest of her life.’ I closed my eyes.

‘I’m sorry. It’s not fair, keeping you awake half the night with this.’

I heard a faint hissing sound, and Marion suddenly relaxed. For what seemed like several seconds, but can’t have been, I wondered what was wrong with me, why I hadn’t leapt to my feet, why I hadn’t even raised my head to look across the dark room to find out who or what was there. Then I realised the spray had hit me, too, and I was paralysed. It was such a relief to be powerless that I slipped into unconsciousness feeling, absurdly, more peaceful than I had felt for a very long time.

* * * *

I woke with a mixture of panic and lethargy, and no idea where I was or what had happened. I opened my eyes and saw nothing. I flailed about trying to touch my eyes, and felt myself drifting slightly, but my arms and legs were restrained. I forced myself to relax for a moment and interpret my sensations. I was blindfolded or bandaged, floating in a warm, buoyant liquid, my mouth and nose covered with a mask. My feeble thrashing movements had exhausted me, and for a long time I lay still, unable to concentrate sufficiently to even start guessing about my circumstances. I felt as if every bone in my body had been broken — not through any pain, but through a subtler discomfort arising from an unfamiliar sense of my body’s configuration; it was awkward, it was wrong. It occurred to me that I might have been in an accident. A fire? That would explain why I was floating; I was in a burns treatment unit. I said, ‘Hello? I’m awake.’ The words came out as painful, hoarse whispers. A blandly cheerful voice, almost genderless but borderline male, replied. I was wearing headphones; I hadn’t noticed them until I felt them vibrate.

‘Mr Segel. How do you feel?’

‘Uncomfortable. Weak. Where am I?’

‘A long way from home, I’m afraid. But your wife is here too.’

It was only then that I remembered: lying in bed, unable to move. That seemed impossibly long ago, but I had no more recent memories to fill in the gap.

‘How long have I been here? Where’s Marion?’

‘Your wife is nearby. She’s safe and comfortable. You’ve been here a number of weeks, but you are healing rapidly. Soon you’ll be ready for physiotherapy. So please, relax, be patient.’

‘Healing from what?’

‘Mr Segel, I’m afraid it was necessary to perform a great deal of surgery to adjust your appearance to suit my requirements. Your eyes, your face, your bone structure, your build, your skin tones; all needed substantial alteration.’

I floated in silence. The face of the diffident youth in The Caress drifted across the darkness. I was horrified, but my disorientation cushioned the blow; floating in darkness, listening to a disembodied voice, nothing was yet quite real.

‘Why pick me?’

‘You saved Catherine’s life. On two occasions. That’s precisely the relationship I wanted.’

‘Two set-ups. She was never in any real danger, was she? Why didn’t you find someone who already looked the part, to go through the motions?’ I almost added ‘Gustave’, but stopped myself in time. I was certain he intended killing me anyway, eventually, but betraying my suspicions about his identity would have been suicidal. The voice was synthetic, of course.

‘You genuinely saved her life, Mr Segel. If she’d stayed in the basement without replacement hormones, she would have died. And the assassin we sent to the hospital was seriously intent on killing her.’

I snorted feebly. ‘What if he’d succeeded? Twenty years’ work and millions of dollars, down the drain. What would you have done then?’

‘Mr Segel, you have a very parochial view of the world. Your little town isn’t the only one on the planet. Your little police force isn’t unique either, except in being the only one who couldn’t keep the story from the media. We began with twelve chimeras. Three died in childhood. Three were not discovered in time after their keepers were killed. Four were assassinated after discovery. The other surviving chimera’s life was saved by different people on the two occasions — and also she was not quite up to the standard of morphology that Freda Macklenburg achieved with Catherine. So, imperfect as you are, Mr Segel, you are what I am required to work with.’

* * * *

Shortly after that, I was shifted to a normal bed, and the bandages were removed from my face and body. At first the room was kept dark, but each morning the lights were turned up slightly. Twice a day, a masked physiotherapist with a filtered voice came and helped me learn to move again. There were six armed, masked guards in the windowless room at all times; ludicrous overkill unless they were there in case of an unlikely, external attempt to rescue me. I could barely walk; one stern grandmother could have kept me from escaping.

They showed me Marion, once, on closed-circuit TV. She sat in an elegantly furnished room, watching a news disk. Every few seconds, she glanced around nervously. They wouldn’t let us meet. I was glad. I didn’t want to see her reaction to my new appearance; that was an emotional complication I could do without.

As I slowly became functional, I began to feel a deep sense of panic that I’d yet to think of a plan for keeping us alive. I tried striking up conversations with the guards, in the hope of eventually persuading one of them to help us, either out of compassion or on the promise of a bribe, but they all stuck to monosyllables, and ignored me when I spoke of anything more abstract than requests for food. Refusing to cooperate in the

‘realisation’ was the only strategy I could think of, but for how long would that work? I had no doubt that my captor would resort to torturing Marion, and if that failed he would simply hypnotise or drug me to ensure that I complied. And then he would kill us all: Marion, myself, and Catherine. I had no idea how much time we had; neither the guards, nor the physiotherapist, nor the cosmetic surgeons who occasionally came to check their handiwork, would even acknowledge my questions about the schedule being followed. I longed for Lindhquist to speak with me again; however insane he was, at least he’d engaged in a two-way conversation. I demanded an audience with him, I screamed and ranted; the guards remained as unresponsive as their masks.

Accustomed to the aid of the priming drugs in focusing my thoughts, I found myself constantly distracted by all kinds of unproductive concerns, from a simple fear of death, to pointless worries about my chances of continued employment, and continued marriage, if Marion and I did somehow survive. Weeks went by in which I felt nothing but hopelessness and self-pity. Everything that defined me had been taken away: my face, my body, my job, my usual modes of thought. And although I missed my former physical strength (as a source of self-respect rather than something that would have been useful in itself), it was the mental clarity that had been so much a part of my primed state of mind that, I was certain, would have made all the difference if only I could have regained it. I eventually began to indulge in a bizarre, romantic fantasy: the loss of everything I had once relied on — the stripping away of the biochemical props that had held my unnatural life together — would reveal an inner core of sheer moral courage and desperate resourcefulness which would see me through this hour of need. My identity had been demolished, but the naked spark of humanity remained, soon to burst into a searing flame that no prison walls could contain. That which had not killed me would (soon, real soon) make me strong.

A moment’s introspection each morning showed that this mystical transformation had not yet taken place. I went on a hunger strike, hoping to hasten my victorious emergence from the crucible of suffering by turning up the heat. I wasn’t force-fed, or even given intravenous protein. I was too stupid to make the obvious deduction: the day of realisation was imminent.

One morning, I was handed a costume which I recognised at once from the painting. I was terrified to the point of nausea, but I put it on and went with the guards, making no trouble. The painting was set outdoors. This would be my only chance to escape.

I’d hoped we would have to travel, with all the opportunities that might have entailed, but the landscape had been prepared just a few hundred metres from the building I’d been kept in. I blinked at the glare from the thin grey clouds that covered most of the sky (had Lindhquist been waiting for them, or had he ordered their presence?), weary, frightened, weaker than ever thanks to not having eaten for three days. Desolate fields stretched to the horizon in all directions. There was nowhere to run to, nobody to signal to for help.

I saw Catherine, already sitting in place on the edge of a raised stretch of ground. A short man — well, shorter than the guards, whose height I’d grown accustomed to — stood by her, stroking her neck. She flicked her tail with pleasure, her eyes half closed. The man wore a loose white suit, and a white mask, rather like a fencing mask. When he saw me approaching, he raised his arms in an extravagant gesture of greeting. For an instant a wild idea possessed me: Catherine could save us! With her speed, her strength, her claws.

There were a dozen armed men around us, and Catherine was clearly as docile as a kitten.

‘Mr Segel! You look so glum! Cheer up, please! This is a wonderful day!’

I stopped walking. The guards on either side of me stopped too, and did nothing to force me on.

I said, ‘I won’t do it.’

The man in white was indulgent. ‘Why ever not?’

I stared at him, trembling. I felt like a child. Not since childhood had I confronted anyone this way, without the priming drugs to calm me, without a weapon within easy reach, without absolute confidence in my strength and agility. ‘When we’ve done what you want, you’re going to kill us all. The longer I refuse, the longer I stay alive.’

It was Catherine who answered first. She shook her head, not quite laughing. ‘No, Dan! Andreas won’t hurt us! He loves us both!’

The man came towards me. Had Andreas Lindhquist faked his death? His gait was not an old man’s gait.

‘Mr Segel, please calm yourself. Would I harm my own creations? Would I waste all those years of hard work, by myself and so many others?’

I sputtered, confused, ‘You’ve killed people. You’ve kidnapped us. You’ve broken a hundred different laws.’ I almost shouted at Catherine. ‘He arranged Freda’s death!’, but I had a feeling that would have done me a lot more harm than good.

The computer that disguised his voice laughed blandly. ‘Yes, I’ve broken laws. Whatever happens to you, Mr Segel, I’ve already broken them. Do you think I’m afraid of what you’ll do when I release you? You will be as powerless then to harm me as you are now. You have no proof as to my identity. Oh, I’ve examined a record of your inquiries. I know you suspected me—’

‘I suspected your son.’

‘Ah. A moot point. I prefer to be called Andreas by intimate acquaintances, but to business associates, I am Gustave Lindhquist. You see, this body is that of my son — if son is the right word to use for a clone — but since his birth I took regular samples of my brain tissue, and had the appropriate components extracted from them and injected into his skull. The brain can’t be transplanted, Mr Segel, but with care, a great deal of memory and personality can be imposed upon a young child. When my first body died, I had the brain frozen, and I continued the injections until all the tissue was used up. Whether or not I “am” Andreas is a matter for philosophers and theologians. I clearly recall sitting in a crowded classroom watching a black and white television, the day Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon, fifty-two years before this body was born. So call me Andreas. Humour an old man.’

He shrugged. ‘The masks, the voice filters — I like a little theatre. And the less you see and hear, the fewer your avenues for causing me minor annoyance. But please, don’t flatter yourself; you can never be a threat to me. I could buy every member of your entire force with half the amount I’ve earnt while we’ve been speaking.

‘So forget these delusions of martyrdom. You are going to live, and for the rest of your life you will be, not only my creation, but my instrument. You are going to carry this moment away inside you, out into the world for me, like a seed, like a strange, beautiful virus, infecting and transforming everyone and everything you touch.’

He took me by the arm and led me towards Catherine. I didn’t resist. Someone placed a winged staff in my right hand. I was prodded, arranged, adjusted, fussed over. I hardly noticed Catherine’s cheek against mine, her paw resting against my belly. I stared ahead, in a daze, trying to decide whether or not to believe I was going to live, overcome by this first real chance of hope, but too terrified of disappointment to trust it. There was no one but Lindhquist and his guards and assistants. I don’t know what I’d expected; an audience in evening dress? He stood a dozen metres away, glancing down at a copy of the painting (or perhaps it was the original) mounted on an easel, then calling out instructions for microscopic changes to our posture and expression. My eyes began to water, from keeping my gaze fixed; someone ran forward and dried them, then sprayed something into them which prevented a recurrence. Then, for several minutes, Lindhquist was silent. When he finally spoke, he said, very softly, ‘All we’re waiting for now is the movement of the sun, the correct positioning of your shadows. Be patient for just a little longer.’

I don’t remember clearly what I felt in those last seconds. I was so tired, so confused, so uncertain. I do remember thinking: How will I know when the moment has passed? When Lindhquist pulls out a weapon and incinerates us, perfectly preserving the moment? Or when he pulls out a camera? Which would it be?

Suddenly he said, ‘Thank you,’ and turned and walked away, alone. Catherine shifted, stretched, kissed me on the cheek, and said, ‘Wasn’t that fun?’ One of the guards took my elbow, and I realised I’d staggered. He hadn’t even taken a photograph. I giggled hysterically, certain now that I was going to live after all. And he hadn’t even taken a photograph. I couldn’t decide if that made him twice as insane, or if it totally redeemed his sanity.

* * * *

I never discovered what became of Catherine. Perhaps she stayed with Lindhquist, shielded from the world by his wealth and seclusion, living a life effectively identical to that she’d lived before, in Freda Macklenburg’s basement. Give or take a few servants and luxurious villas. Marion and I were returned to our home, unconscious for the duration of the voyage, waking on the bed we’d left six months before. There was a lot of dust about. She took my hand and said, ‘Well. Here we are.’ We lay there in silence for hours, then went out in search of food. The next day I went to the station. I proved my identity with fingerprints and DNA, and gave a full report of all that had happened. I had not been assumed dead. My salary had continued to be paid into my bank account, and mortgage payments deducted automatically. The department settled my claim for compensation out of court, paying me three-quarters of a million dollars, and I underwent surgery to restore as much of my former appearance as possible.

It took more than two years of rehabilitation, but now I am back on active duty. The Macklenburg case has been shelved for lack of evidence. The investigation of the kidnapping of the three of us, and Catherine’s present fate, is on the verge of going the same way; nobody doubts my account of the events, but all the evidence against Gustave Lindhquist is circumstantial. I accept that. I’m glad. I want to erase everything that Lindhquist has done to me, and an obsession with bringing him to justice is the exact opposite of the state of mind I aim to achieve. I don’t pretend to understand what he thought he was achieving by letting me live, what his insane notion of my supposed effect on the world actually entailed, but I am determined to be, in every way, the same person as I was before the experience, and thus to defeat his intentions. Marion is doing fine. For a while she suffered from recurring nightmares, but after seeing a therapist who specialises in de-traumatising hostages and kidnap victims, she is now every bit as relaxed and carefree as she used to be.

I have nightmares, now and then. I wake in the early hours of the morning, shivering and sweating and crying out, unable to recall what horror I’m escaping. Andreas Lindhquist injecting samples of brain tissue into his son?

Catherine blissfully closing her eyes, and thanking me for saving her life while her claws rake ray body into bloody strips? Myself, trapped in The Caress; the moment of the realisation infinitely, unmercifully prolonged?

Perhaps; or perhaps I simply dream about my latest case — that seems much more likely.

Everything is back to normal.