The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [520]
“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