nature.
Giovanni’s father, Marcantonio Casanova, had always been fond of the name, and seemed well enough equipped by fate to wear it well. He was not a tall man, but he had a handsome face and dark, flashing eyes that were definitely no handicap in the heart-melting stakes. He had made no serious attempt to live up to the name, however, accepting it as a nice joke that he found contentment in placid monogamy. His grandparents had come to Britain in the 1930s, refugees from Mussolini’s Italy, and had settled in Manchester at the height of the Depression. Marcantonio therefore came from a line of impoverished intellectuals who had been prevented by social circumstance from achieving their real potential.
Giovanni’s mother had also had no opportunity to fulfill her intellectual potential. Her maiden name was Jenny Spencer, and she had been born into the kind of respectable working-class family that would make every effort to set its sons on the road of upward social mobility, but thought that the acme of achievement for a daughter was to be an apprentice hairdresser at 16, a wife at 17 and a mother at 18. All of these expectations Jenny had fulfilled with casual ease.
The whims of genetic and environmental fortune combined to give these humble parents a uniquely gifted son, for Giovanni soon showed evidence of a marvelous intelligence beyond even the latent potentialities of his parents. Nature’s generosity was, however, restricted entirely to qualities of mind; in terms of looks and physique Giovanni was a non-starter. He was undersized, out of proportion, and had an awful complexion. A bout of measles in infancy added insult to injury by leaving his eyesight terribly impaired; astigmatism and chronic myopia combined to force him to wear spectacles that robbed his dark eyes of any opportunity they ever had to flash heart-meltingly, and made him look rather cross-eyed. His voice was high-pitched, and never broke properly when he belatedly reached puberty. His hair insisted on growing into an appalling black tangle, and he began to go thin on top when he was barely seventeen. As dozens of thoughtless people were to remark to his face, and thousands more were to think silently to themselves, he certainly didn’t look like a Casanova.
The class culture of England had proved remarkably resilient in the face of the erodent egalitarianism of the twentieth century, and bourgeois morality never did filter down to the poorer streets of Northern England, even when the old slums were demolished and new ones erected with indoor toilets and inbuilt social alienation. Where Giovanni spent his formative years, very few girls preserved their virginity past the age of fourteen, and many a boy without a CSE to his name had done sufficient research to write a PhD thesis on sexual technique by the time he was old enough to vote. This tide of covert sexual activity, however, passed Giovanni Casanova by. He was acutely conscious of the flood of eroticism that seethed all around him, and wished devoutly to be carried away by it, but to no avail.
Other ugly boys, who seemed to him as unprepossessing as himself, managed one by one to leap the first and most difficult hurdle, and subsequently gained marvelously in confidence and expertise, but Giovanni could not emulate them. His unattractiveness made things difficult, and his name added just sufficiently to his difficulties to make his task impossible, because it made even the girls who might have felt sorry for him laugh at him instead. Even the most feeble-minded of teenage girls could appreciate that there was something essentially rib-tickling about saying “no” to a Casanova.
Giovanni had started out on his journey through adolescence bogged down by self-consciousness, and by the time he was seventeen he was filled with self-loathing and incipient paranoia. By then he was already doomed to a long career as a social misfit. He was so withdrawn, having suffered such agonies from his failures, that he had completely given up talking to members of the female sex, except when forced to do so by absolute necessity.
His sanity was saved, though, because he found a haven of retreat: the world of scientific knowledge, the certainties of which contrasted so sharply with the treacherous vicissitudes of the social world. Even his teachers thought of him as a slightly unsavory freak, but they recognized that in intellectual terms he was a potential superstar. He compiled the most impressive scholarly record that his very moderate school had ever produced, and in October 2000 he went triumphantly to university to study biochemistry.
Biochemistry was the glamour science in those days, when every year that passed produced new biotechnological miracles from the laboratories of the genetic engineers. Giovanni was entranced by the infinite possibilities of the applied science, and set out to master the crafts of gene-mapping, protein design and plasmid construction. In everyday life he seemed extremely clumsy and slow of wit, but he was a very different character in the privacy of a laboratory, when he could manage the most delicate operation with absolute control, and where he had such a perfect intuition and understanding of what he was doing that he soon left his educators far behind.
In the new environment of the university, where intelligence was held in reasonably high esteem by female students, Giovanni tried tentatively to come out of his shell. He began talking to girls again, albeit with ponderous caution and unease. He helped other students with their work, and tried once or twice to move on from assistance to seduction. There was a black-haired Isabel who seemed to think him an interesting conversationalist, and a freckled Mary who even cooked a couple of meals for him because she thought he was neglecting himself, but they politely declined to enter into more intimate relationships with him. They could not think of him in such a light, and although they were prepared to consider Giovanni a friend of sorts, the boys they welcomed into their beds were of a very different type. Giovanni tried hard not to resent this, and to see their point of view. He certainly did not blame them, but the sympathy he felt for their attitude only made him more disappointed with himself, and even more sharply aware of the mockery in his name.
Transforming bacteria by plasmid engineering was passé long before Giovanni’s graduation, and he felt that the engineering of plants, although it certainly offered great opportunities for ingenuity and creativity, was not quite adventurous enough for him. He knew that his talents were sufficiently extraordinary to require something a little more daring, and so he channeled his efforts in the direction of animal engineering. His doctoral research was devoted to the development of artificial cytogene systems, which could be transplanted into animal cells without requiring disruption of the nucleus or incorporation into the chromosomal system; these made it practicable to transform specific cells in the tissues of mature metazoans, avoiding all the practical and ethical problems that still surrounded work on zygotes and embryos.
Giovanni’s early ambition was to apply this research to various projects in medical science. He produced in his imagination half a dozen strategies for conquering cancer, and a few exotic methods of combating the effects of aging. Had he stayed in pure research, based in a university, this was undoubtedly what he would have done, but the early years of the new millennium were a period of economic boom, when big biotechnology companies were headhunting talent with a rare ruthlessness. Giovanni never applied for a job or made any inquiry about industrial opportunities, but found potential employers begging to interview him in the comfort of his own home or any other place he cared to name. They sent beautiful and impeccably-manicured personnel officers to woo him with their tutored smiles and their talk of six-figure salaries. One or two were so desperate to net him that they seemed almost willing to bribe him with sexual favors, but they always stopped short of that ultimate tactic, much to his chagrin.
He was so fiercely dedicated to his work, and had such noble ideals, that he hesitated for a long time before selling out, but the temptations were too much for him in the end. He sold himself to the highest bidder—Cytotech, Inc.—and joined the brain drain to sunny California, being careful to leave most of his bank accounts in convenient European tax shelters so that he could be a millionaire before he was thirty. He had the impression that even the most ill-favored of millionaires could easily play the part of an authentic Casanova, and he could hardly wait to set himself up as a big spender.
Cytotech was heavily involved in medical research, but its dynamic company president, Marmaduke Melmoth, had different plans for this most extraordinary of hirelings. Melmoth invited Giovanni to his mansion in
