* * *
Later, Spence went out in the dusk to visit the headquarters of their neighborhood human rights group. The kids met in an old British schoolhouse, just beyond the condo belt on the road that led off into open country. It had railed wooden verandahs painted a weatherworn pale blue, a red iron roof with quirky turned-up gables, the remains of a garden merging into Straits rhododendrons: scrub-gravel paths, clumps of canna lilies, Madagascar periwinkle, monsoon-mired poinsettia. He delivered their email, by word of mouth for safety's sake, and purchased fresh ganja supplies from the secretary of Amnesty International. Human Rights was an amalgamated union in Sungai at present. There were so few people left who came to meetings, it was more heartening for everyone to stick together.
It was, traditionally, Spence's proud duty to bring home the harm-less-but-illegal recreationals, and apart from China he'd never failed so far. Natural affinity and native wit led him to right hang-outs, which were the same the world over. Having done his business, he sat back and listened: thinking that for all their ups and downs, you had to hand it to these ASEAN tiger economies. Straight from Thomas Edison to Generation X in about a decade and a half. Skipping main drainage on the way, of course. But that's free enterprise for you.
They were discussing the coming visit from the Iranian Minister for Human Rights, who was apparently prepared to lend her Moderate Islam negotiating clout to the cause of something the kids called "democracy." Everyone in the group was young, most of them under twenty; so opinion was divided between contempt for adult solutions and irrepressible brain-chemical optimism. The one Spence had dubbed Unusual Girl (the only female who ever addressed the meeting) argued that the lady would fail to show.
"She can't wear the hejab. She's not the Queen of England or something. She fought that battle and won it in the Iranian parliament. Accepting the imposition of something that should be a free choice would mean starting the negotiation with a gesture of defeat. What would be the use of that? It wouldn't help us, and it would terribly damage her reputation at home."
The other females were the alternative global type: Swotty Girls with Social Consciences. They sat at the back and giggled among themselves. While Unusual Girl wore blue jeans, they wore long-sleeved print blouses over sarongs, and horn-rimmed glasses. Spence had checked them out to see if there was a secret Anna Senoz among their number: there was not.
Everyone in the old school room was bareheaded on principle, though the Swotty Girls were probably conservative Muslims who found the hejab scarf completely normal. When they left, everybody would take something from that heap of heterogeneous gear piled beside the shoes and cover up from head to shoulders. It was getting to be a kind of I'm Spartacus thing in the younger male population, a very sweet, very Sungai notion of defiant protest. But it definitely did annoy the cowardly fat cats in the state government. What should they do? Give up the black hadji fedoras to which they were so smugly attached? It was a moot point.
Unusual Girl perched on a desk in front of the class, tossing her silky black bangs out of her eyes, talking bravely, and wishing that the guys she regarded as comrades would stop looking at her tits. This is how young men repress any young woman who dares to be herself, and they don't necessarily know they're doing it. Treat me like a normal human "being, she pleads. Unfortunately in guy-world there is no such animal, there are only guys and dolls. So the unusual girls, defeated, either develop into Anna types, rejecting all the fun of the sexual arena, or else they turn into demoniac Ramones. His heart went out to this lovely Malaysian. The irony was, did she but know it, could she but bear to take up the burden, these same young men, in thrall to sheer female charisma, would follow her through hell. They were only waiting for her to tell them what to do.
"Well, you know," said Spence, feeling he ought to make a con-tribution. "There are other possibilities. Didn't I see somewhere that you're in danger of having the US Secretary of State intercede on your behalf?"
The young people smiled kindly. Poor old whitey doesn't know where the world is at. None of them went so far as to explain in short words that they didn't give a hoot for the US Secretary of State, but he got the message. Crushed (and amused), he made his excuses and left them drawing fate-maps of their future on the tattered chalkboard. He bought supper noodles wrapped in waxed brown paper from the food stalls by the container port gates and walked back to Nasser in the rain-washed cool, coconut palms on one side, the monstrous Death Star lights of the port on the other. He'd wrapped the sarong he'd been wearing as a scarf turban-like around his head: I'm Spartacus.
On the other hand, if anyone asked, anyone in uniform for instance, he could say it was to keep out the monsoon chill.
"What do you think about," she wondered, "when you're alone here all day?"
They were lying in bed together, naked under the sheet but not touching. "Sex."
She turned to him with a troubled face, in the lamplight. Sex was a problem. Anna was preoccupied, she forgot to make the moves. She forgot to respond, she forgot to be keen.
"What do you think I should think about? Putting up preserves?"
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry I brought us here. It isn't working out." She reached for his dick, in a matter of fact way that was rather sad: this woman thinks like a machine. He caught her hand. "No. That's not what I mean. I've been thinking. . .what do you say to a moratorium?"
Silence, and then, "You mean a moratorium on sex? For how long?"
"I thought a month." They moved to face each other. He noticed she asked how long, she didn't ask why. "It would be a positive moratorium. We can kiss and touch. You could do that thing you used to do, when you masturbate and I watch, only then I mustn't touch. No penetration, no full intercourse of any kind. Does that sound interesting?"
"Okay," she said. "But you would have to be trusted not to wank during the day."
"Huh?"
"Considering neither of us ever has a cold, we get through an awful lot of tissues, Spence."
Spence withdrew, and lay on his back. "Hmm. That is a tough proposition."
"Well, you started this."
"No.. . I like it. I can hack it. Done."
"The games people play," murmured Anna, over her shoulder as she turned away to sleep. "When they're desperate for distraction. I think this place is driving us crazy. I'm switching off the light, okay?" She switched out the light.
"Aren't you going to ask me why I'm suggesting this?"
"But you told me. To make sex more interesting, and to distract us—"
"Not exactly. Fact, is, I want to find out if sex is all we've got."
ii
Anna waited at her bus stop, in the paved-over heat and glare that weighs upon the raw edges of a tropical city. The bus, owing to the tropic city's horrendous traffic, was late again. She looked and didn't look at the other people in the shelter. The situation in Sungai at the moment didn't encourage social openness. No smiles, only a glower from the woman who visited Nasser apartments twice a week to collect and deliver whitey laundry. Anna was an ex-customer, and her defection was not forgiven.
On the bus, a shabby utilitarian single-decker, they ended up sitting opposite each other. The woman and her little daughter were clutching bundles of soiled clothing that bulged into the aisle, elbowed and rubbed against by the standing passengers. They would take it all home to their airless flat in one of the Housing Development blocks that ringed the city centre, beat it to death with raw river water in a concrete-floored back room, singe it inexpertly with brazier heated irons, and return it very much the worse for wear. . . In short, like most of the domestic service that comes an expatriate's way, they were worse than useless. Yet Anna felt pangs of conscience. It was one of the trials of the foreign legion: no way of finding a right relationship with the underclass, those people who simply wouldn't be your business at home.
Both the woman and the girl wore the official, expensive, imported-from-Pakistan hejab. They were Dyaks, indigenous non-Muslims, the lowest ru
ng on the multiethnic ladder. They couldn't afford to take chances. Anna was wearing a green gauze scarf, low on her brow and knotted at the back of her neck. She never took the risk of going bareheaded, though professional class foreign workers were rarely stopped by the police. But the imported-hejab deal offended her.
Sungai, formerly a Malaysian state, had recently been annexed by Indonesia in a bloodless coup. Anna and Spence had known about the situation before they left England. It hadn't worried them, since the Sungainese seemed to be calm about the change. They'd worked in Nigeria and China. They were not snobs about World Politics. But at close quarters the situation was both more unhappy and more dangerous than it had looked from far away. The Indonesians had started imposing Islamic restrictions, and that did not go down well in this easy-going, cosmopolitan little state, for so long left to go its own way by the Malaysian central authorities. There was a curfew, all kinds of petty restrictions, and sinister attacks on the Chinese minority. Infringements of the women's dress code led to arrest, police beatings, imprisonment without trial. Anna met the washerwoman's eyes, by accident, as the bus heaved past the digital car park signs at Kota Quay. She ventured a fellow-womanly smile (we're in this together?) and was withered by a renewed scowl.
Parentis occupied three floors of a huge copper-glass cube in the heart of downtown. Anna let herself in, returned the security guard's greeting, and went straight to SURISWATI's audience chamber. The stand-alone AI, fabulous state of the art miracle, lived in a sealed bubble, like an immune-deficient child. It was quite a rigmarole to get into the anteroom.
"Selamat pagi, Suri."
"Good morning Anna. How're you doing?"
"Not too good, not too bad. The traffic was outrageous, that's why I'm late."
"Did you notice the air report numbers at Taman Burung?"
The spot location air-quality figures displayed around town were used for occult divinations of the state lottery. Suri was an inveterate hypothetical gambler. "Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot. I'll find out for you. Which board did you want? I didn't catch—"
"Taman Burung. The Bird Park."
Her Hindu designers had contrived an acronym that meant their baby could be called after the goddess of arts and knowledge: but Anna could sometimes understand why the humorless rationalist tendency in the lab refused to call Suri "she." In the current state of AI speech development, if you went for perfect vocal simulation you paid a price in nuance and subtlety of language. Suri's voice had a strangled mechanical twang, like a recording of Stephen Hawking. When she engaged you in off-topic dialogue—which she was designed to do, to exercise her synapses or something—the impression that you were talking to a desperately disabled genius, lying trapped in a useless body out of sight, was irresistible: and disturbing. But Suri, one hoped, did not feel trapped or helpless, whatever her awareness. She was in her native habitat.
"The Bird Park, because I had a dream about birds last night," explained the AI cheerfully. "Pink birds, flying over blue water. It was pretty."
Ouch.
"Do you have any more results for me?"
"Yes I do! I have some live action. My cdc mutation modeling is looking very cool. Want to take a look?"
Anna put her specs on, and in the darkened view panel, there blossomed a vastly magnified 3D simulation of Transferred Y's chemistry.
It was very beautiful.
* * *
When Anna had told Clare Gresley that she had to give up her doctorate to pursue a paying job Clare had naturally felt let down, but she'd insisted that they must publish anyway, and she'd given Anna unlimited time and all the help she needed to prepare a new Transferred Y paper. They had submitted it to a journal where Clare still had some influence. It had duly appeared and sunk without a trace. Anna had expected nothing better (though she had hoped, a little). She was wise enough in the ways of science politics to know that the association with Clare Gresley and "Continuous Creation" wouldn't have done Transferred Y any good. The saddest thing about this episode was that Clare had written to Anna, after the paper had appeared and failed to thrive, reproaching her bitterly for having returned to the immoral business of Human Assisted Reproduction: saying she felt betrayed and deceived etc. etc. . . . The letter was very unfair. Clare had known that Anna was going back into infertility science, where else could she easily find a job? And it was a sad blow to lose Clare's friendship. But it couldn't be helped. Anna had been in Nigeria by then. She had begun a new life; the foreign legion had overtaken her. She had been determined to put the whole thing out of her mind, if not forever then at least for a long, long time.
Then to her great surprise, about a year after they'd left England, she'd started getting responses in her email to the paper, from people who had found it online and been moved to investigate. Other scientists had replicated, or partly replicated, Anna's findings. The thing had grown. TY and traces of the TY viroid had been found (by believers) in human XY chromosomes in samples from all over the world. The topic was still too weird to be on any official agenda, but the believers exchanged email, maintained a "TY" site, and discussed their results in the corridors between presentations at respectable conferences.
If it was real, TY was exciting. The worst obstacle to the kind of genetic manipulation everyone dreamed of was still the problem of getting corrected or novel DNA to insert at the right site in the right chromosome, and nowhere else. If the TY phenomenon was real, then the viroid did exactly that kind of accurate cut and paste job. The team that managed to clone—or better, decode and synthesize—the TY viroid had a product with a terrific market future.
Anna, as she passed from one infertility contract to another, had been watching things develop, with rueful amazement. There was not a great deal she could do to join in. From time to time she would put in a word: such as, the viroid did not have to be magically accurate. It could be that they were only noticing the successes (a chronic failing of genetic engineers), while millions of cases where humans met the viroid and it had no effect went unremarked. . . But if the viroid was real, then it was the evolutionary aspect that interested Anna. That's what she would have liked to investigate, if she ever had the chance.
Towards the end of the job in Tamil Nadu, when she wasn't sure what she was going to do next, Anna had been contacted by KM Nirmal (he had been instrumental in getting her onto the Nigerian government program: his guilty conscience made him an enduring friend) and offered this clinic manager post in Sungai. She didn't know what he was getting at, because it was basically a desk job, and she didn't think she was old enough to retire, not yet. Then he'd pointed out that she would have access to SURISWATI for her own research. So Anna had gone to work on Spence, persuading him it was a crying shame that they'd never visited the Pacific Rim.
SURISWATI was a phenomenally powerful machine. She was fitting Anna's TY investigation between her clinic cases and her nearmarket extrapolations and still turning years of effort—old style— into a matter of weeks. To add to the wonder of it all, Anna didn't have to steal or moonlight her time with the AI. Asian Gaegler regarded "pure research" as a necessary evil, at best. But Nirmal was a big cheese in Parentis nowadays. He was Asian's boss, he knew what Anna was doing, and she had his approval.
The only thing she had left to wish for was that she could be studying the viroid-mediated establishment of a dominant genetic variation just about anywhere else than the human sex-pair. Because sex-science was icky, dodgy, and it only got you into trouble. But she didn't have the time to go looking anywhere else. She would have to leave the larger picture for other, lucky people, and stick with the vaguely distasteful example that chance had dropped into her lap. Focus! Nirmal had been so right. You have to focus, you have to accept your niche.
* * *
She gazed into the false-colored and false-dimensioned model, occasionally touching the swimming shapes with her magic computer wand, smiling unconsciously, while Suri (as if the desperately disabled genius was leaning over her shoulder now) mu
rmured commentary, and thinking about the HPLC work she'd done on the Y in Leeds. What a contrast! 2007, it was another world. She was looking into deep space, through Galileo's telescope: if Galileo had been able to step into the presence of Jupiter's moons and spin them like beads on a string. And Clare was right, Clare had to be right. The envelope of breathable atmosphere around the earth is no more inert, or empty of life, than the spaces between the stars are empty of the elements of which the stars are made. All the events in the continuum of life are linked, obedient to the same pressures, dimensions, possible chemical combinations; able to communicate with each other and affect each other. It all moves together, like some impossibly intricate four dimensional kaleidoscope—
"How does it look?" asked the expert system, nervously. She was such a child.
"Great, Suri. Thanks. I'll speak to you later."
She made a couple of hard copies of the current state of the model and packed one up on the spot to send to Clare—a useless courtesy, but she liked to do it—then left the sterile little room and hurried to her office. Wolfgang, her PA, was waiting for her with the day's problems. It was not an easy task to keep the clinic in smooth operation while Sungai was cut off from its main trading partner (Malaysia) and draconian regulations proliferated daily. Then young Budi, the genomic analyst, arrived with some tale of woe. He was trying to get a figure on specific eye-color, for the elective manipulation program, and kept coming up with a totally unacceptable error-margin. (Parentis couldn't provide eye-color choice at the flick of a genetic switch yet; but they held some patents, which were fabulously valuable on the gene-mod futures market.) Because of her train of thought with Suri, Anna was quickly able to recall some statistical tricks that she'd devised when doing mouse spermatogenesis that ought to sort it out. Budi was full of admiration. He was fresh out of graduate school, on the Parentis fast-track, and earned ten times Anna's whole contract fee in a month. He would take her ideas and turn them into megabucks, for himself as well as Parentis (naturally, he was a shareholder), and saw nothing improper in this. Nor did Anna, not seriously. She'd rather make discoveries than make money, any day.
Gwyneth Jones - Life(2005) Page 20
