'I think,' said Bowden slowly, 'that perhaps someone was trying to synthesise the great man so they could have him write some more great plays. Illegal and morally reprehensible, of course, but potentially of huge benefit to Shakespearean scholars everywhere. The lack of any young Shakespeares turning up makes me think this was an experiment long since abandoned.'

There was a pause as I mulled this over. Genetic cloning of entire humans was strictly forbidden – no commercial bioengineering company would dare try it, and yet no one but a large bioengineering company would have the facilities to undertake it. But if these Shakespeare clones had survived, chances were there were more. And with the real one long dead, his re-engineered other self was the only way we could unravel The Merry Wives of Elsinore.

'Doesn't this come under the jurisdiction of SO-13?' I said at last.

'Officially, yes,' conceded Bowden, 'but SO-13 is as underfunded as we are and Agent Stiggins is far too busy dealing with mammoth migrations and chimeras to have anything to do with cloned Elizabethan playwrights.'

Stiggins was the Neanderthal head of the cloning police. Legally re-engineered by Goliath, he was the ideal person to run SO-13.

'Have you spoken to him?' I asked.

'He's a Neanderthal,' he replied, 'they don't talk at all unless it's absolutely necessary. I've tried a couple of times but he just stares at me in a funny way and eats live beetles from a paper bag – yuk.'

'He'll talk to me,' I said. He would, too. I still owed him a favour for when he got me out of a jam with Flanker. 'Let's see if he's about.'

I picked up the phone, consulted the internal directory and dialled a number.

I watched as Bowden boxed up more banned books. If he was caught he'd be finished. The irony of a LiteraTec being jailed for protecting Farquitt's Canon of Love — I liked him all the more for it. No one in the Literary Detectives would knowingly harm a book. We'd all resign before torching a single copy of anything.

'Right,' I said, replacing the receiver, 'his office said there was a chimera alert in the Brunei Centre – we should be able to find him there.'

'Whereabouts in the centre?'

'If it's a chimera alert, we just follow the screams.'

20
Chimeras and Neanderthals

'The Neanderthal experiment was conceived in order to create the euphemistically entitled "medical test vessels", living creatures that were as close as possible to humans without actually being human within the context of the law. The experiment was an unparalleled success – and failure. The Neanderthal was everything that could be hoped for. A close cousin but not human, physiologically almost identical – and legally with less rights than a dormouse. But sadly for Goliath, even the hardiest of medical technicians balked at experiments conducted upon intelligent and speaking entities, so the first batch of Neanderthals were trained instead as "expendable combat units", a project that was shelved as soon as the lack of aggressive instincts in the Neanderthals was noted. They were subsequently released into the community as cheap labour and became a celebrated tax write-off. It was Homo sapiens at his least sapient.'