Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #223 by TTA Press Authors Read Free Book Online

afterthought of a tail, she had ‘nature's cruel mistake’ written all over her. The rainbow coat of scales that covered her seemed hardly to belong, as if she'd stolen it off a far more attractive animal. But from the beginning, Mullen was convinced she had star quality.
    She was intensely interested in everything Mullen did, whether it had been setting up the projector screen, the counting blocks, or the box of rewards. Inside her metre-high cage, she pulsed gold and russet as her turreted chameleon eyes swivelled independently to follow Mullen's every movement.
    "Her blood sugar has probably got too big,” explained the huge, thuggish, technically female veterinary nurse. “She needs regular injections of the insulin. She is diabetic.” She approached the cage; 2308 gaped, hissed, and retreated, flashing red and black like a roulette wheel. “She doesn't like it when I test her blood; she is a baby, she can't stand the prick of a pin."
    "She's diabetic too?"
    "Was deliberate,” said the nurse, reaching into a drawer for a blood sugar tester. “The Doctors, they make her diabetic deliberately, genetically, when they make her."
    "What was the thinking behind that?” said Mullen. “No, don't tell me—diabetes is a survival characteristic among famine populations, right? It was done so the food animal they wanted to produce would need less food itself."
    "Yes. She is a girl, of course, so they can get the eggs for the cloning. They are mostly making girls for that reason."
    "So all the inmates in here are female."
    An image of a snake poised to strike flashed up on the projection screen; 2308 hissed and grew green as grass. Despite 2308's impressive gat-toothed gape, the nurse reached into her cage, got 2308's head under one bingo-winged arm and blooded her with the sugar tester.
    "Is high,” the nurse said victoriously. 2308 shrank cowed into the opposite corner of her cage.
    Mullen cycled through the unique sound fragments the lexical analyzer had picked up in an hour of flashing sound and vision at 2308. A gigantic image of a tarantula appeared on the wall. 2308 hissed and throbbed red and black in response.
    "PRETTY POLLY,” commented Polymath from his newly erected travel perch. One of 2308's eye turrets rotated round to watch him, whether out of intellectual curiosity or hunger, Mullen had no idea. Polymath spread himself out to full wingspan; 2308 went jet black, as quickly as if her skin had been a TV screen the power had been killed on. Polymath fluttered away with a terrified squawk.
    "Don't do that, Poll,” said Mullen, “it's distracting her from the screen."
    "What does it do, this thing?” said the nurse.
    "Human babies,” muttered Mullen, “have a library of sound phrases—cry for unhappy, gurgle for happy, and so on. A one-month-old child already has a handful of things she can say, and that's instinctive, prior to the development of language. The first thing I require to do, when studying the linguistic development of a species, is find out what its instinctive instruction set is. Unfortunately, our patient seems to have two sounds only—hiss and no-hiss."
    The nurse shrugged philosophically. “She is less trouble than the other patients, Doctor Mullen."
    "Call me Liz. What's your name?"
    "Leonor."
    "Are the other patients less healthy, Leonor?"
    "Or bigger. Or more aggressive. And the Doctors spend less money with them. Most of them are dying. Do you think you can speak her language?"
    "Well, language is the problem, you see. She's a baby, as you say, and language is a learned thing. No-one's born speaking Hebrew. Not even Jesus."
    Leonor crossed herself, and Mullen had to remind herself she was in a Catholic country. “How will you make her speak, if she can only make a hiss?"
    "That's the billion dollar question. She's a completely new species, made by buggering about with genetics. Most of her doesn't seem to work too well. We're not guaranteed she's got any way of talking to us at