Dead Men's s Boots

‘Eugenics? That was Annie Lennox and Dave—’

Moving quickly, I slammed the box lid down on Nicky’s hand, trapping it. He yelled, but not in pain: his nerves were closed for business, so pain wasn’t a feature of the landscape for him any more. But that had made him obsessively careful about organic damage, since he knew he didn’t have the advantage of the early-warning system that the living take so much for granted. He also didn’t have self-repair: no white corpuscles, no platelets, no cell division. So where anyone still warm would have tried to snatch their hand back out of the box, Nicky froze up stiller than a startled possum.

‘Castor, enough with this stupid fucking schoolboy shit!’ he shouted. Shouting meant inflating his lungs fully and emptying them again – again, not easy for a dead man – and that meant a few moments of total silence after he was done.

I went on as though I hadn’t been interrupted.

‘Recapitulation,’ I said. ‘It’s a bankrupt concept, but it seemed sexy enough until Darwin drove a stampede of finches and Galapagos turtles through it.

‘What the fuck are you-?’

‘The idea, Nicky, is this.’ I leaned a little more weight on the box lid, and his free hand clenched as though he was considering punching me: but that’s a good way to break a knuckle, so I knew he wouldn’t. ‘Babies in the womb, so the story goes, run through all the previous stages of evolution before finally reaching full human form. It’s like Mother Nature has to scroll down through every template in the book before she can get to the human one, because that’s the one that’s most fully evolved.

‘Let go of my fucking hand, Castor!’

‘But Lombroso thought there were glitches in the program. Sometimes babies get stuck on one of the more primitive forms, he said, and instead of being born fully human they’re born with ape-like features that really belong much earlier on in the series.

‘See, he’d taken a good look around, and he’d noticed how many hardened criminals have thick, heavy brow ridges like orang-utans, or abnormally long fingers like gorillas, and he had this light-bulb moment.

I nodded towards the box. ‘That’s what John said he was doing with this stuff, if anyone asked.