The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [522]
“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