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 sllthering, 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 recognisable human
in them that chimeras were most repellent — a failed attempt to replace a deceased loved one, or a hobby gene splicer 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 and 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 almost imperceptibly as a blue SO-13 Land Rover pulled up with a squeal 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 crisp 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 it found something and then it clung on tight.
'Gives it an age,' said Stiiggins, 'perhaps five years.'
'Do you want to take it alive, sir?' asked the SO-13 agent, breeching 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 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, which 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 in a beard and 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 emitted 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 bodybag.
'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 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 bodybag and a female colleague, who gently prised 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 bodybag and then rolled the corpse of the chimera on to it.
'You remember Bowden Cable?' 1 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 troubled 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 grease-proof 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 a 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 the morgue technicians all looked unhappy and probably had odd hobbies that I would be happier not knowing about.