She stared at him, the duvet up to her shoulders, in wide-eyed stillness. “Then I am free,” says Anna, in such a strange tone you’d think she was about to spread wings and fly out of the window or disappear up the chimney like the king of the cats.
She made an appointment to see Nirmal. Although they worked together closely, this was still appropriate behavior. KM Nirmal’s office was as private as it had ever been. The door might be ajar, but you did not pop in: if you dared, you could forget whatever you’d popped in about; it was dead meat. She was going to lay her cards on the table, no tactics, no prevarication. The key is always frank…as Mr Frank N Furter used to say.
Poole University’s lab-science buildings were, as it happened, leased units on the old science park on the Forest campus, where Anna would have been a post-grad if her first career hadn’t been derailed. As she walked up that valley that would always smell of morning—though it was so changed, so little left of the beech trees and the lawns—she felt that she was folding back the years. After many mistakes, many stupid blunders, this time she would get it right.
Anna didn’t know what Nirmal thought about her Aether papers. He was very hands-off on that. He’d become in some ways more open and approachable since his wife died, but you still hit that core of absolute reserve pretty close to the surface. She had no idea how he would react to this even more way-out suggestion.
At least the Aether was vague. This was getting down to cases.
She produced the Sungai disks, and they studied Suri’s projection together, almost in silence. Nirmal took off his eye wrap and spent some time going through the printed notes. She waited, strangely relaxed. As long as Anna Anaconda could be straightforward about things she was content, come what may. She watched Nirmal’s calm, voracious concentration as he took possession of the material and felt at home with him. We be of one blood, thou and I.
“Hmm!”
Nirmal placed the papers neatly on the desk and leaned back. He took up his varifocals and applied the tip of one earpiece, gently, rhythmically, to the center of his thin lips. The capital-H grooves around his mouth had deepened, the bones of his face stood out even more, but apart from the new glasses nothing much in his appearance had changed. KM Nirmal did not age. He looked amused.
“So! This is what was behind it all.”
Behind what? The nebulous Aether she supposed. She waited.
“If this is true, if these results are genuine indicators, then there are two questions. Where are these new creatures, Anna, the epidemic of XX human males?”
Anna nodded. “That’s one question. What’s the other?”
“If they are among us, why has nobody else announced this discovery?”
“Yes.”
“There should be clinical cases by now, many clinical cases, throughout the world. Where are they?”
“I think,” said Anna slowly, “that this isn’t Brave New World. Babies aren’t routinely genotyped…not anywhere. What Suri shows is that an exchange of genetic material, between the X and the Y chromosomes, triggered by the presence of the TY viroid, will lead to dramatic-looking change, in the chromosomes, on a stunning scale in the human population. That doesn’t mean stunning numbers of clinical cases. If Suri’s right, most of those affected might have no ‘symptoms’ at all. And, I think we are seeing an epidemic of XX males. We’ve been seeing an epidemic of XX males in fertility treatment for at least a decade. But the significance has been masked by the variety of the problems it’s caused, by the fact that fertility is frequently unaffected, and by all the other candidates for blame, in the fall in male fertility. Plus, taken globally, vast numbers of people would never be referred to an infertility clinic even if they were in trouble.”
“Very true, very reasonable—if there were no such thing as human sex chromosome research, and if no one had yet drawn our attention to the TY viroid effect. But this is no longer a case of serendipity, Anna. Your own earlier results are known. You cannot tell me that no one has found out because nobody has been looking.”
“I sat on this for years,” said Anna, “because SURISWATI’s projection is so bizarre. I want to prove entrainment. I want to show a mechanism for lateral propagation of genetic variation, as the secret engine of ‘evolution,’ as something that makes ‘evolution’ different from the model we use now. I don’t want this: it’s too sensational and in totally the wrong way. Other people may have felt the same. Maybe they’ve noticed (she thought of Miguel) something weird, and they’ve decided not to go down that path. It wouldn’t be the first time a whole science ignored experimental results, for…for all kinds of reasons. Think of Galileo.”
“You don’t believe this is a mirage.”
She drew a deep breath. “I don’t know what it is. I want to do the work. I want to re-examine Suri’s evidence, and I need to conduct a survey. And try to keep what I’m doing quiet, until I know there’s something there.”
Nirmal nodded, tapping the earpiece of his glasses to his lips again. “Just so. And you want to sow these dragon’s teeth in my department, on my time.”
“Not without your advice and consent.”
“Hmm. I presume the KL SURISWATI, who or which would be your Suri’s closest relative, knew nothing of your work?”
“Nothing. The Sungai SURISWATI lived and died a stand-alone. If we could get any cooperation from Kuala Lumpur—” (Which was unlikely, in the present state of Southeast Asian politics. Nirmal nodded in acknowledgment.) “It would be useless. I couldn’t confirm or deny without doing the work over again, and then we’d have to get her results independently verified. I’d rather work without an AI, just because of the verification problem. Virtual modeling isn’t enough. We have to find the answers in real, living human cells.”
Nirmal replaced his glasses. He sheaved her papers together, put them back in their folder, ejected the XX projection from his machine, and handed the lot over the desk.
“Then do it. But—”
“In my tea breaks,” said Anna.
But her head was spinning, because there was more. She could see it in his eyes. She had seen the gleam that lit him up inside when she spoke of the secret engine of evolution—
“No,” said Nirmal, precisely. “Now we both have two jobs, because the Department must not suffer. Let’s see what you and I can do together.”
He stood, and came around the desk to see her to the door, a courtesy that he had omitted the first time they had spoken on the subject of TY and on the subject of what Anna should or should not do on KM Nirmal’s time. She still didn’t know what was going through his head. As he opened the door for her he smiled, that beautiful rare illuminating smile. “Well, Anna,” he said. “What a long strange trip it’s been.”
Jake’s mummy taught him the names of trees and the parts of flowers, how to dance the Okey Kokey, how to blow a dandelion clock, how to cook a hedgehog, what to say to snowfall, who Guy Fawkes was, and a rhyme about magpies. Jake’s daddy didn’t know these things because he didn’t come from England, but he knew everything about Steven Spielberg, John Lennon, Kurt Cobain, Lara Croft, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Mario the plumber. He knew who had written all the songs on Top of the Pops, when they were first invented. Jake believed his father must once have been mighty in the land. In the winter they went to Jumble Sales at the Salvation Army Citadel, for old sakes’ sake, though they were not poor any longer. In the summer they walked in the New Forest and visited village fetes where they bought plants (that died) and ate strange homemade cakes from pleated paper cases. In ancient little churches they sniffed the cool and beeswax air, and Jake always wrote the same thing in the Visitors’ Book: Very beautiful.
They had no time for long holidays, but once on a short break, at the beach in France, beside the creamy diamond breakers of the Atlantic, Jake asked his mummy, how do you be a scientist? Anna scooped up a handful of sand. She dug out a beach-tennis bat, laid it flat and tipped her handful onto the black surface.
�
�Count them.”
“Count what?”
“The grains of sand. Look, I’ll show you.” She flattened the heap with her palm, squared it off and divided it with the edge of a shell into twelve roughly equal patches. “Count the grains in one of those patches. Then choose another patch, and count again. When you’ve done that, we’ll add the two results together, divide the result by two, multiply it by twelve, and you’ll know approximately how many grains in one mummy’s handful. It will be different from how many there would be in a Jake’s handful: that doesn’t matter, so long as we bear it in mind. We’re going to assume, for now, that you have a representative number of unusually big and little grains, overall. When you’ve done that bit, we’ll talk about how to figure out how many mummy’s handfuls make a beach. It won’t be easy. The beach is big, it is changing all the time, and you and I may not agree on where the edges are. But we’ll have a go.”
Spence came up from the water with his bodyboard, and found the child enslaved.
“What’s going on here?”
“Science!” breathed Jake. “I’m counting the sand.”
“You’re a rotten bitch,” said Spence to his wife. “Has he been driving you that crazy?”
Anna lay back behind her sunglasses and picked up her book. “He asked me what it was like to be a scientist,” she explained, implacably. “So I told him.”
She was counting the sand. The days were not long enough; the nights were white pits of fall. She worked like one possessed and couldn’t sleep. Her voice shook, her hands shook. She tried to remember to be kind and helpful to her teammates, because that is essential, the lifeblood of good work; but she had the greatest of difficulty in recalling their names. It was strange to know that her boss saw this as a straight line progression. He had seen her talent, he had nurtured her, she had gone off to have her babies (as women must). Now she was back, and he was grooming her for stardom: the discovery he had seen in germ plasm, in that first Transferred Y paper, come to fruition. They were struggling in a backwater, and secrecy was imperative, true. Otherwise, everything was as it should be. All Anna’s cruel defeats and long sacrifices, Nirmal’s past injustices, simply didn’t exist. And she was happy to settle for this version, very happy. Hungering and thirsting for justice does not make the wheels go round. It just doesn’t.
She knew she was failing to keep her end up on the domestic front. It couldn’t be helped, this was a crisis. Once, when she was putting away some clean washing, she found a fresh pack of condoms in Spence’s underwear drawer. Anna and Spence hadn’t used any protection since Spence had his vasectomy. Now that Shere Khan had become successful, it was Spence’s turn to be the traveling executive: visiting bookshops and schools, staying in conference hotels. He was entitled to play away, if he liked. She sat on their bed, holding the packet and thinking, Oh well. Fair dos.
Then she put it back. She said nothing.
It was the way the fairy tale goes: the price of riches is lost contentment. Once the pressure was off, once TY was over, sorted, she would make everything right again.
As usual, Anna had not been able to make it to Jake’s school show. She always promised to try and always failed. Meret, who was always alone too (the idea of Charles coming to the Primary School Christmas/Hanukkah/Divali Concert was absurd) had saved a place for Spence in the upper hall, where infants were mewling and rows of adult haunches were overflowing the cute little tubular framed chairs. He was in a flurry because these things are so awkwardly timed. He had walked Jake to school, returned home, and managed to get himself into writing mode for about three minutes, before realizing that he had to leap up and rush out again. Such is the life. He hunkered down, uneasy about the eager way she had waved and beamed at his approach. He’d have liked to tell her not to do that, but why? Discreet about what? They were friends.
“I’ve left Chip with my mother,” she whispered. Children filed onto the stage, touching in their naive individuality of gait and expression, not yet lost to the conformity of adulthood. “I hope to God she stays off the sherry until I get home.”
Meret’s mother’s drinking problem and her father’s “eccentricities” seemed sometimes to be a joke, sometimes deadly serious. He gave her a rueful, knowing smile that covered both eventualities.
A little girl with frizzy tan bunches of hair, angled roughly at 120 degrees from the top of her head, read a drastically simplified plot summary of the “Ramayana” at a flat gallop. The finale, an energetic raid on the demon stronghold of Lanka, was an indiscriminate melee of monkey warriors and palm trees, in which a couple of monkeys (or possibly palm trees) came flying through the air and joined the audience. Obsessed Dads crawled around looking for camcorder angles… Tomkin Craft got thrown out (Tomkin invariably got thrown out, whatever the occasion) and had to stand in the corridor with a teacher on guard. Florrie took part in a dance routine about Christmas shopping. There was something deeply Midwestern about it all. It took Spence back to grade school and his Mom’s moon face, proudly beaming up at him from the front row in the gym. More carols, more routines. At last, six little children in red cassocks, white cottas, and white card ruffs trooped out, holding cardboard candles. They sang a verse of “Once In Royal David’s City,” and a small boy with brown skin and dark curls stood in front of them to read the opening passage of the gospel of St John.
He did okay. He remembered to SLOW IT DOWN, and once or twice—wildly daring—actually raised his eyes from the scroll. Spence blew his nose and wished he was wearing dark glasses. Finally, everyone loudly sang “So Here It Is, Merry Christmas,” and the show was over. He’d forgotten to bring a camera; he’d have to share Meret’s photos. They left together, after the photocall: out into a raw, grey afternoon. She walked along with him, grumbling—with a touch of sexual pride—about Tomkin’s awful behavior.
“Why did you choke,” she asked. “At the end. Did Jake get his words wrong?”
“Did I choke?” The degree of close attention he got from Meret sometimes tired him. “Nah, he did fine. I suppose I was thinking that the opening of John must have puzzled the punters, given the average level of Christianity around here. Most of the audience was probably wondering what the fuck, is this the Hanukkah bit?”
“You and Anna, you’re sort of Catholics, aren’t you. Do you believe in all that?”
They’d reached her car and they must part, unless she was going to come in for coffee and there was no excuse for that, no Shere Khan business. She stood dangling her keys, looking up. On a whim, he took her question seriously.
“We had Jake baptized. We go to Mass, sometimes.” How could he put it into words, this uncertain truth, that would be shameful and useless if it gave you certainty: this insubstantial, golden film over the surface of things, that makes life bearable? She probably thought life was fine…(he knew she didn’t). “I don’t believe in a God, ‘out there,’ at all. But I believe we are born to suffer and die, and that we are mysteriously redeemed; and I believe that we should love one another. That seems to cover the bases.”
They were both much moved. She touched the sleeve of his jacket, almost with reverence. “I’d better get back.”
Spence was working, alone in his room, late at night. Anna was in bed, the house was very quiet. Whatever she was doing with Transferred Y on this new burn, it was draining her. She would come home from the lab, take over Jake until bedtime, slog through a couple of hours on her departmental workload, crawl off to sleep. He didn’t know what was going on. It had been a long time since they’d had one of those fascinating, crazy conversations: Boolean Algebra, strange attractors, the nature of reality.
He was restless. Recently, he’d been to visit Mr Frank N Furter, to purchase fresh supplies of contraband raw hashish—the pungent, sticky real thing, by far superior to legal stuff, cannabis-laced cancer sticks. How times change. Frank had been with the current beautiful girlfriend for several years: they had a mortgage. Recreational drugs were no longer his main business
. He had property in the town and was negotiating positively with the IRS over certain discrepancies in years gone by.
Spence had almost broached his big problem, sitting in Frank’s kitchen—a kitchen more spotless than ever, still occupied by the menagerie—a rat (though not Keefer), cockatiels swooping, cats underfoot, Betty the iguana, and Jade the parrot—same as ever. But Frank was not the same. He spoke of leaving all this, waving a hand to indicate not his pets but the raffish, heaving coastal conurbation. Angela was looking at early retirement. They were thinking of Scotland, on a grouse moor. Early retirement, my God.
Ah well, too bad. Spence was getting too old to have a guru.
…“It was a hot, still day, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The sea and sky were so drunk with sunshine they could do nothing but lie there helpless. The pirates had brought a tank of baby eels to the heart of the Sargasso Sea, for as you know, eels are born in that strange, weedy patch of calm in the middle of the ocean. These particular baby eels were a pharming venture, whereby the pirates hoped to make their fortune. It is well known that hardly anybody eats eels by choice, people will even prefer the andouillette, but this was going to change when Shere Khan’s transgenic eels hit the market, tasting of blueberry ice cream and crème de menthe liqueur. Rafe Rackstraw, from the crow’s nest, yelled “Ship Ahoy!” And Fiona McLeod, the pirate with a rude tattoo of Sean Connery that she was always wanting to show you, yelled out “That’s confirmed on the scanner, Ma’am.” Shere Khan was not averse to the distraction, as NASDAQ figures on the recent performance of biotechs were poor. The ship was a strange one, a three-masted schooner, bare of sail, her sides crusted with barnacles. She was so old a ship, so old, that you would think to see her mainmast turn into a tree again, and blossom like the rose. Her name, as far as they could read it among the shellfish, seemed to be The Pride of Whitby. And her crew was a crew of dead men…”
Life Page 33
