The Green Gene

by Peter Dickinson

  “Ah, the British genius,” said Humayan.

  “The English genius. We devote a lot of shocked space to Celtic affairs, and keep the shareholders—and the censors—happy by never breathing one hint that anything whatever could be done to improve things, except for the worse. So you’ll be a bit of a change, if Katie’s got it right. You’ve made a breakthrough about the green gene, and that landed you a job with the RRB. Right?”

  “In very general terms, but … oh, it is difficult for a foreigner like me. I am beginning to think that when I first landed in your country I spoke too freely about my work. I do not know …”

  “Sure, sure. You’d have to get an OK from R14—that’s Dick Mann’s outfit—before you gave me an interview, and Dick’d want to vet my story afterwards. The RRB is very hot on that sort of thing. But it’d be a spot of publicity for you. That never did any harm to a young scientist with his toes on the first rungs of the ladder, huh?”

  This was a very true observation. To be a household word, to have a sheaf of press-cuttings to show—oh not to the scientists on the selection committees, but perhaps to lay vice-chancellors and local businessmen who hold the purse-strings … But Humayan was still uneasy.

  “You’ll be going to the office tomorrow?” said Mr. Leary.

  “Yes, naturally.”

  “OK, you go along to R14 and see what they think. I’ll give them a ring first thing, so they’ll know what you’re talking about. My bet is they’ll jump at it—here they are, beavering away at the great Celtic Problem, bringing foreign geniuses half the way round the world to help; why shouldn’t people hear about it? Then if it’s clear with them you can nip round to my place when you come home—six too early?—and we’ll do a proper interview in peace and quiet, with no mikes in the flower-pots. Save me going to my office, unless some hothead blows up Buck House or kidnaps the French Embassy chef. See you then, then.”

  He nodded and lounged off. Before Humayan could attach himself to another group for their inspection Glenda stole up beside him. Her plate of horrible little eatables was almost empty.

  “You have done good trade,” he said.

  “Buggers have their uses. Look.”

  She flicked one of the biscuits sideways off the plate. There was a scurry of tiny limbs among the drinkers’ ankles and Want, or it might be Ought, gulped the morsel down.

  “What did he want?” she whispered. “What did he want?”

  Humayan glanced up at the basket of lobelias that dangled above his head. Was it conceivable that an RRB microphone nestled in the sopping peat?

  “He wishes to interview me,” he murmured. “But I do not …”

  “No! You’ve got to do it!”

  “Oh, why?”

  “Find out more about him. When we’ve really got him taped we’ll do him!”

  “Oh?”

  “Sneaking into our house, treating us like a brothel—and he doesn’t even love her!”

  Her hissing whisper was barely audible through the rattle of chatter. With a gesture of repulsion she tossed another biscuit down, and again the depraved little dogs pounced; but in mid-gulp the one who had snatched the morsel was retchingly sick, smothering a whole flagstone with bile-mingled crumbs and pate.

  The drinkers on the further side of this embarrassment took a second or two to notice what had happened, because they were busy with speculation about the fate of some hostage, but then a stooping young giant called an order, the group shuffled a few feet away, and a green maid emerged with a bucket and cloth and knelt to gather up the vomit.

  “Come and meet Denny and Toby,” said Glenda. “They’re our two Christian queers. They might try to nobble you to play Balthazar in their nativity play, if you’re still here at Christmas. It’s a zoned church now, so Dad has to green up to play McCaspar.”

  IV

  THE MINISTER FOR ARTS (Lord Ealing): I welcome the Noble Lord’s enquiry as it gives me the opportunity to clarify a point over which our country’s reputation for even-handed justice has been seriously and unfairly impugned. I cannot assert too strongly that the Arts Council Grants are distributed with absolute impartiality between the Celtic and Saxon sections of our community, bearing in mind the differing financial demands of different arts. That last clause is the vital one. It so happens that the Saxon culture covers a wider range of artistic endeavour than the Celtic culture. Painting, sculpture and all the visual arts have become increasingly expensive in our day, while the verbal and musical arts in which the Celts traditionally excel have remained comparatively cheap.

  LORD LLANFECHAN: What about opera, bach?

  LORD EALING: I was not aware that Bach wrote opera. (Laughter.)

  R14 was like any other official department, almost. The reek of bureaucracy, so familiar to Indian nostrils, hung there strong. Only the grey-haired women who occupied the enquiry office were more smiling and polite than usual—the one who dealt with his two requests apologised gracefully when she showed him into a little side-cubicle and told him there would be a short wait. And the chairs in the cubicle were comfortable and the magazines up to date.

  And the wait was preternaturally short. Humayan had hardly opened next month’s Prism when the woman came back and led him through several large offices where clerks toiled at the endless harvest of documents and into a plush vestibule where a younger woman rose smiling from behind a small telephone switchboard.

  “This is Mr. P. Humayan,” said the first woman, pronouncing it right. “I sent an E112 through just now.”

  “That’s right,” said the second woman, smiling the same bland smile. “Please come this way, Mr. Humayan.”

  He thanked his old guide and followed the new one. In the next office a handsome young man was reading from a computer print-out into his telephone; the message appeared to concern a complex accumulator on that afternoon’s racing at Newcastle. He kissed his hand to the woman but appeared not to notice Humayan any more than if he had been her shadow. She opened another door and paused just inside; a male voice answered her query; she ushered Humayan in and left at once.

  The office was in all ways nondescript, neither large nor small, neither rich nor spare. Only the view from the window was unexpectedly bleak, a wall as featureless as the one Humayan saw from his own room in Horseman’s Yard. The man too looked nondescript, but being a man was not to be judged by the same instantaneous criteria one uses on rooms and views. He wore shirtsleeves; his tie was decorated with crossed cricket-bats and held in place by a cheap clip; he was pale and puffy, but somehow not unhealthily so; his hair had receded a little but was cut rather shorter than that of most Englishmen Humayan had met; he looked about forty-five.

  “Come in, Mr. Humayan,” he said. “I’m glad to meet you. I’ve heard a lot about you. Take a seat and tell me your problems. My name is Mann, Dick Mann, and I’m supposed to be in charge of personnel in this racket. I’m not the boss—you’ve met the Old Man, I think—but it’s my job to see he isn’t bothered with little problems. I’m a kind of trouble-shooter—if you’re trouble, I shoot you, pow!’

  His tone was jokey but his eyes were heavy with long thought and endless decisions.

  “I hope I am not trouble,” said Humayan. “I did not expect to have to bother a senior official.”

  “That’s the spirit. And you needn’t have, but I’d heard a lot about you and I wanted to meet you. Doc. Glister treating you OK, I hope.”

  “Indeed yes. He is a most considerate landlord. It was he who suggested I should apply for an RRB pass.”

  “Sod him. Anything to cause us trouble. Tarquin, is that pass for Mr. Humayan ready yet?”

  The last words were spoken into thin air. Out of thin air a voice replied, “Coming up.” A grey gadget that stood by Mr. Mann’s elbow blinked a couple of lights, fizzed and coughed. Its sputum was a rectangle of plastic that shot across Mr. Mann’s desk and stop
ped against a projecting slat of wood. Mr. Mann picked it up, looked at it casually and passed it across to Humayan.

  He was delighted with the photograph, which made him look both less depraved and less innocent than others he had had taken. The pass carried a long number in computer figures, and then his own name: Pravandragasharatipili (‘Peter’) Humayan. Finally a certification of his status as an employee of the Race Relations Board. He hesitated between asking for a copy of the photograph to send to his mother, and asking how they had known about ‘Peter’, for he was still on formal terms with his colleagues in the Laboratory. Mr. Mann misunderstood the hesitation.

  “Just the same as mine,” he said, fishing a similar rectangle from the jacket that hung on the back of his chair. “Won’t get you out of real trouble, but it’ll make the ordinary cops think twice.”

  He tossed his own pass across. Humayan studied it politely; the code number began with a different set of digits, and the photograph was a few years old, taken at a time when Mr. Mann had possessed harder lines in his features and perhaps softer in his soul.

  “Oh, I am quite satisfied,” said Humayan, passing it back. “Thank you very much. You were extremely quick.”

  “Oh don’t thank me—thank the big machine. My mate down in the basement, you know. Does all my thinking for me.”

  “Yes,” said Humayan, “that is a very impressive computer. The best I have ever worked with.”

  “Bloody well ought to be,” said Mr. Mann. “What it cost us in dollars! There’s only one like it in the country, at the Treasury, working out everybody’s tax, and balance-of-payment trends, and God knows what. Now, you asked my harem out there something about a newspaper interview. That right?”

  “Well, I wished to ask someone’s advice. I met yesterday a journalist who also lives in Horseman’s Yard …”

  “Frank,” interrupted Mr. Mann. “Yes, I’ve been talking to him. He’s about top at his job, much less wild in print than he is in speech—you’re just his sort of story. Do you want me to say yes or no?”

  Humayan was put out, but tried not to show it. Of course he was delighted by the idea of an interview with a top journalist on a world-famous paper, but for professional reasons it was important that the interview should be thrust upon him and not sought out.

  “I am indifferent,” he said. “I wish to help the Glisters to remain on good terms with their neighbours. I do not wish to be a mystery man. But nor do I wish to impede my own work.”

  “Or the work of the Board?” said Mr. Mann, grinning.

  “Of course, of course.”

  “Let’s talk about your work for a minute. Are they treating you OK up there? Like your room? We can easily have you shifted.”

  “When my work goes well I am happy. When it goes badly I am miserable. It does not matter where I do it. Last Saturday afternoon, sitting at my bare table in my little room at Horseman’s Yard and looking at a wall like that one, I made a useful breakthrough. I am not boasting. That is just an example. My work went well. I was happy.”

  “Tell me about that bit.”

  “Oh, it is a very technical piece of statistics.”

  “Try. Mind if I take a tape? I know a bit of statistics—have to in my job—but I’ll probably need to go through it several times.”

  Humayan explained in the simplest terms of which the material admitted. Mr. Mann followed him surprisingly far for a layman.

  “Well, thanks for cutting out the jargon,” he said as he clicked the recorder off. “A lot of boffins would have wrapped that up in clouds of verbiage. Not that you needed to—I doubt if I’ll be able to sort it out however often I play that tape through. Where does it get us?”

  “Its virtues are negative. Effectively it keeps us where we are, by preventing us from slipping back. As I study this problem I find it becomes increasingly complex; this piece of work allows me to treat what appeared to be a whole new group of unrelated variables as having mathematical links with a previous group of variables.”

  “But your original discovery still holds water?”

  “Oh yes, of course. This is the usual way with scientific knowledge. There comes the flash—so!—like lightning in the collied night; for that instant you can see the landscape ahead, and it remains sharp on your retina after the flash is gone. But even so you, and the others who follow you, have to grope your way forward until there is another flash, seen probably by someone else. Newton saw such a flash. Einstein. I too, P. P. Humayan. Now I am groping, but I know in which direction to grope.”

  This was an almost word-for-word crib of his old Director’s address to first-year research students—indeed Humayan had often wondered what a night looked like when it was collied.

  “Fine,” said Mr. Mann. “Now, I don’t expect anybody’s said this to you, Pete. We learn to be a flannel-mouthed bunch in this building, because we know anything we say is going to be picked up and chucked back at us by left-wing creeps, so we wrap it up nice and soft. You’re really here to do two jobs: first there’s the business of forecasting population trends—the Old Man spoke to you about that, I think, and it is important. But it’s long-term. I mean, we’d like to know, but my guess is it might be twenty, thirty years before we run into another jump in the green chart—and by then we’ll have people—the people who matter—conditioned to PNPC.”

  Humayan made a baffled noise.

  “Post Natal Population Control,” explained Mr. Mann. “But don’t you worry about it, Pete—it’ll probably never come to that. I know it sounds a nasty idea, but it’s always been Nature’s way, hasn’t it? You’ve seen it back home?”

  Humayan nodded, remembering the burning ghats.

  “OK,” said Mr. Mann. “Now all that side of it’s important—forecasting trends, I mean—but it’s not something I need to know now. What I really want from you, or from you and a few other guys, is a way of reaching accurate criteria of who is or isn’t a Celt, regardless of the colour of their skins. In this country we’ve been spared the Cape Coloured problem they have in SA. We’ve got no mulattos. You’re either white or green. At first that looked like a blessing, but it isn’t, because why? Because it means we’ve got a lot of crypto-Celts walking around in white skins.”

  “But …”

  “Wait a bit, Pete. I know what you’re going to say. You’re not a geneticist. I know you’re not. But ultimately this is a statistical problem. When the Good Lord divides the sheep from the goats, he’s not going to go messing around with each animal’s life history. He’ll know a goat when he sees one and he’ll say, ‘Right, you lot, stand over there.’ That’s what I want—a way of telling Celts from Saxons, in large batches, regardless of the colour of their skins. We don’t want this to develop into a colour problem, do we?”

  “I suppose not,” said Humayan vaguely. His mind was already occupied with the problem that had been posed him. The Director had certainly spoken in the vaguest terms of the problem of forecasting population trends, but had implied (as Directors tend to) that Humayan’s work here was to be pure science, knowledge for its own sake. Being a pragmatic fellow he had doubted this, but had not enquired further at the time; he knew quite well that fairly soon some quiet organiser would slip into the Laboratory to ask how his work was going and whether his chair was comfortable, and at the same time tell him what his results were expected to be. That is the manner of research projects, only Mr. Mann’s demands were going to be difficult to link in any way to the work he was actually doing, and intended to go on doing.

  “There will be a lot of variables,” he said.

  “Sure, sure,” said Mr. Mann, “but governments have their uses. You tell us where, and maybe we can fix some of those variables for you.”

  He prodded his index finger on to his desk, as if pinning a variable through its abdomen. Then he laughed.

  “If this was a fascist country like Frank and
the Doc make out, we could simply say it was a problem of racial purity, and start breeding back to pure strains—you’ve seen those stinking little dogs of his?”

  “They are not much of a recommendation for the process of breeding back,” said Humayan, surprised by Mr. Mann’s knowledge of the Glister household and the animosity in his tone. Mr. Mann must have sensed the doubt.

  “OK,” he said, rising. “I’m very glad to have you pulling for us, Pete. You let me know as soon as you come up with anything I can use. And listen, anything you want—more data, ten thousand ear-measurements—and you can’t get it through the Lab or on your budget, let me know. If you say it’s got a bearing, I’ll have men out on the streets measuring ears that very afternoon. OK?”

  “Thank you,” said Humayan gravely. It would be gratifying to be able to set this facility in motion, but at the moment he could think of no conceivable use for ear-measurements.

  “You may think your work’s academic,” said Mr. Mann, moving towards the door with him. “But to us it’s not, I tell you. We’ve got the situation all buttoned down, as of now—these bombs you hear, the odd kidnapping, that’s just letting off steam. But if the pressure builds up much more, then pow! We’ll have the Thames foaming with blood, just like old Enoc says. Doc Glister played you that record?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” said Humayan automatically.

  Half his mind was busy with aspects of the wholly impractical problem Mr. Mann had posed him, and the other half purring with gratification at the attentions shown to him by this important official. Only when the door was open and the hands reaching for each other did he remember what he had come for.

  “This interview?” he said.

  “That’s OK,” said Mr. Mann. “It’s a free country, and you can talk to anyone you want, within reason, within reason. Just don’t let the RRB down. If you say something a bit out of place, we can always put it right for you before it’s printed, but it’s easier not to have to. You’ll find Frank’s damned sharp, but he’s got his heart in the right place—I think. So long, Pete. I’ve got a slab of work waiting, but we’ll have another chat when things ease up.”