Gwyneth Jones - Life(2005)

by Anonymous Author

  "You should have him pay you in sexual favors, Annie," said Wolfgang, grimacing after the departing wunderkind. "What a lovely bottom. It's a crime what he does you for, you sad little altruist. You could trade the favors with me for some get-out-of-jail-free tokens, if you don't personally want to get between his spread cheeks."

  Nobody ever called Anna "Annie," but from Wolfgang she didn't mind. He was another whitey-wetback, in Sungai and masquerading as a clinic manager's personal assistant because (if you could believe this story, Anna did not) his sugar-daddy was a new regime politician, who had rescued him from selling his body under the bridges of Jakarta. Now that we's hit the big time, he explained, smirking, even our secret boyfriends have to be respectable.

  "Did I say spreadcheeks?" He clapped a hand to his mouth, eyes sparkling, "Oh, shocking. I meant spreadsheets, but now you'll think I meant bed sheets! My English is so poor!"

  Asian treated Wolfgang's pouting, hair-tossing persona with forbearance, because the poor strange guy did keep things running in tough conditions, you had to allow. Anna enjoyed him and admired the courage that lay behind being so provokingly out, no matter how much he made a joke of it, in the ominous and repressive mood of Sungai city. She let him stay for a while, clowning, teasing her about that cute young analyst, before sending him on his way.

  Rehearsing the worries, keeping them in mind as she moved the admin along. First in line, selfishly enough, the fear that Sungai would explode before the end of her contract. Second, that Suri's modeling would throw up something completely doo-lally. An expert system's front-end is an amalgam of persons, a composite of human experiences and skills from the best minds in the field. If it talks back to you convincingly, why not accept it as a person de facto? Fine. But virtual modeling is not the same as proof. Can't be! She had a lingering fear that Suri could be turning out self-consistent nonsense that by malign chance matched fairly closely to Anna's expectations but would collapse if you tried to reproduce it in the real.

  What interaction of the artificial synapses—random generation of images presented to the mirror in off-topic time—causes a software entity to announce I had a dream last night? And in that virtual never-never land, where sometimes the flamingoes fly over Suri's lagoon, and sometimes the lagoon flies over the flamingoes, what kind of infancy. . . ?

  Third, Spence and his moratorium.

  Wolfgang made her feel very unadventurous. It was cool that she was married; he believed you should have someone to go home to, nothing sadder than a single. What if he knew that Anna's husband was practically the only sexual partner she'd ever had, even if you counted that one time forced on her by Charles? As they swapped whitey-wetback travelers' tales, she found herself cravenly exaggerating certain episodes, or at any rate letting Wolfgang's assumptions go unchecked. She didn't want him to think she was weird.

  For Anna it had always, simply, been easier. As long as she could have sex whenever she wanted, she actively preferred to do it only with Spence. He was a friend, she trusted him. She didn't consider herself a specially moral person. She wasn't rejecting the concept of casual sex, though it always carried the risk of hurting someone. She was rejecting the aggravation. Why bother? Not as if she was cruising for some hunky-dory genes so she and Spence could exercise their superior parenting powers on the optimal baby

  Why bother, anyway. You couldn't work long in human genetics without becoming conscious of how extraordinarily alike we all are. Practically identical, interchangeable units. (So why all this fuss about cloning?) Whereas, on the other hand, individuals change within themselves every year, every month, every day under different pressures and in different circumstances. Choose one human being, arbitrarily, who suits you well enough. Stay with him, and you'll see the whole human race go by. Wolfgang would tell her, don't be so rational. You mustn't stop to think, Annie, if any of us stopped to think when would we ever take our knickers down! Don't you get carried away, ever? Nope, she never did. No matter how lustful, drunk, or otherwise intoxicated. Maybe it was because she had never fallen in love.

  And this caught her, hand and eye poised in the act of scrolling another page of silent casework text. Never fallen in love with any of those attractive short-term friends through these foreign legion years. Never fallen in love with Spence, her life's companion. She wasn't the falling in love type, she accepted this about herself, that crush on Rob Fowler had been a juvenile aberration. She might once have been on the point of falling for Spence, before Lily Rose died. But it had passed. This was her normal position on the subject: nothing strange. What was that clutch of emotion, a glimpse of something whisking out of mental sight?

  Don't want to.

  I don't want to fall in love. She was surprised at the strength of it.

  What did Spence mean by this moratorium? She was prepared to be surprised, maybe he'd had masses of very discreet liaisons, but as far as she knew, as far as he'd ever told her in their long and companionable conversations, he'd been as faithful as herself. If you decided to stick with one sexual partner, it was sound practice to introduce variety in other respects. Maybe there was nothing more to it than that. Strange but true, they'd never been so alone together. There had always been other people, days crowded with incident, terrible crises, terrible sorrow, some major distraction. He was right, they needed some kind of new game. She glanced at her watch. Not even lunch-time yet.

  Better get on, and try to leave early. Traffic in Sungai was the craziest they'd seen: it was astonishing that people could be doing this, like the proverbial frog in the slow-boiling water.

  * * *

  The moratorium a big success, though it was hard to accept the halt and check when it had been so important, in the beginning, that she didn't have to hold back. This was an experience they had completely missed: deferred gratification, teenagers necking and groping and pulling away, saying to each other no, no we mustn't! Anna found that she loved being allowed to tease, to do things that she'd reckoned forbidden for as long as she'd been sexually conscious: to swank about in a state of undress, take up provocative poses, bestow hot kisses and glances, all without the slightest intention of letting him have his way. Utterly arousing to come close enough to brush her nipples across his lips, as he lay gazing at one of her performances, and then dart out of reach. To remove his hand from the waistband of her pants when they were kissing, the more arousing, the more effort it was to say no. She liked it a lot less when he did the same things to her. . . But you had to accept the rules or the game was no fun.

  Through the working days at Parentis her thoughts kept returning lustfully to Nasser apartments. She forgot to rehearse her worries and didn't stay late even if Suri was free. It made a pleasant change and was a good sign that progress on Transferred Y was in a satisfactory state, not giving her much anxiety. Yet the intensity of her reaction to that other idea nagged at her. She hadn't forgotten that he said I want to find out if sex is all we've got. It could be Spence had not meant much by this, he was given to extravagant statements that Anna often took too seriously. But whether or not he'd meant to do it, he had started something. He had made her realize that something in her positively fought against falling in love. She would give her dear companion any amount of sex, affection, trust, friendship, and loyalty, but not that self-surrender. She'd rather have a crush on a stranger. In fact, tell the truth, she'd rather be in love with anyone else in the world than with her husband.

  I don't want to be dependent in that way, on someone who is so important. I don't want my heart to leap when he comes into the room, I don't want to lead conversations around so that I can hear people speaking his name. None of that stuff. No chance. It's not safe.

  This moratorium is a Trojan horse.

  Ten days of their month had passed, and she was in the toilet at work, rinsing out her cap. It was the wash 'n go kind, meant for constant wear. Anna habitually used it not only as a contraceptive but also in place of tampons, to reduce the burden on the Nasser apartments la
ndfill and the South China Sea. The splash of blood, whirling away. . . Since Lily Rose, that first stain of red on her underwear always made her spirits plunge. It meant death, apparently, regardless of the fact that there'd been no bleeding when the baby died, on the contrary her body had refused to believe what her mind accepted, had fought valiantly against the hormone drip that was forcing the sealed entrance of the baby's citadel. . . The splash of blood whirling away, her own brisk competent scrubbing. Suddenly she heard her mother's voice: you see, it washes out. It was the first day of her first period. Mummy was quickly washing Anna's soiled knickers in cold water by hand, so the blood wouldn't set, while Anna stood by. It was the voice of a busy woman who loves you dearly but who needs you to be grown-up. She doesn't want you to cry or cling. The tone warned, like the cold comfort of those words, that Anna must not make a fuss. Anna's mother had enough to do, for God's sake, keeping it all together, without a passionate clinging older daughter.

  So you don't give her grief. You've accepted the situation, long ago.

  Anna retired to a cubicle to replace her cap. She sat on the toilet seat, feeling a little dizzy. There you have it, she thought. The none-too-surprising secret identity of the person who broke my heart. She gazed at the hygiene notices on the inside of the door, in three languages. Scrub your hands; please don't put anything down the pan except natural waste. Important things often seemed to happen to Anna in toilet cubicles. Shut in the peace of this little space, as behind closed lips and quiet eyes.

  She thought of Spence and the silence of his empty hours in Nasser apartments. Maybe he wasn't silent, maybe he sang or shouted or played music, but it was the same. Sungai had left them alone the way nowhere else had ever done: perhaps, fortuitously, just when they were ready for a major change. The locked doors opened, the emotional blocks crumbled: like a spring cleaning, once you start you find all sorts of accumulated gunk you never meant to touch is coming loose. Clear the caches, defrag the hard drive, it was about time. Her heart was beating fast, which wasn't down to menstrual hormones. She was spending all her days in a tremble and inner turmoil, with a drip-feed of pleasantly frustrated lust, the lust engineered by Spence, which had started this reaction but now soothed the rush and smoothed her tumbling progress. What is happening to me?

  Transferred Y. Spence.

  For winter's rains and ruins are over, and all that season of sorrows and sins

  How does it go?

  And in green underbrush and cover, blossom by blossom the Spring begins. . .

  * * *

  As clinic manager, Anna sometimes had to interview the clients. Parentis had given her a short course in medical counseling and thrown her in at the deep end. She was lucky she had her mother's experience to fall back on. Today she was faced with a couple, a well-dressed couple in their thirties, he in his hadji cap doing the talking, she in her white hejab and discreet business-woman makeup sitting back from the desk with watchful eyes. Their proposal was unusual. They wanted a baby who was a clone of the father, but this baby had to be a girl.

  In most cultures—except in the USA, where rich, technophile prospective parents only wanted girls—non-medical HAR customers tended to want a male child. If they had to pretend they didn't (in countries where IVF for non-medical reasons was banned, for instance), you knew they did: and you discreetly produced the goods, or Parentis wouldn't be very pleased. The techniques for male children were therefore more developed and reliable. It wouldn't be difficult to produce viable embryos using the father's cells, fix them so they would develop female, and get a successful implantation. But it was dodgy, because cloning (nuclear transfer IVF) was still pioneering, and this was certainly the first male-to-female case Parentis had met. That was why Anna had to see the Nasabahs and if possible persuade them to modify their plan.

  She hated counseling. At least in Sungai everything was in the open. The clients were paying for a private treatment because they could afford it. You could talk freely and say things plain. She chatted with them for a while, rehearsed the medical histories that were in front of her on the desk. When she saw that they were comfortable with long words, she gave them laptop screens and went into technical detail. That part was good, Anna liked to teach. But there has to be a sticky bit, or this pre-sale pitch would not be called "counseling." She reminded them that a nuclear transfer child (the word clone was never used with customers, even if the customers used it themselves) is not the same person as the single genetic parent, might not resemble the single genetic parent any more closely than a normally conceived child, and would not be, in this case, a female version of the father's self. This can be a grave disappointment.

  First, do no harm. Anna had decided that in elective HAR counseling, that means you don't soothe the customers' fears, you uncover their reservations if they have any. You make sure they know their own feelings before a baby is born who fills her parents with horror because she cost the lives of so many lost embryos or because they perceive her to be a kind of cleverly made doll.

  "You don't have to explain why you've decided to use assisted reproduction, unless your reasons are medically relevant. But there's one thing I have to make sure you understand. We can give you a little girl who will have only her father's nuclear genetic traits. But she might not be fertile. If your—er—government maintains the one-child policy for people in your tax bracket, that would mean your only child will be unable to have children of her own."

  Mr Nasabah looked at his wife, who gave him a grave nod.

  "It's not necessary that she be fertile. She can use assisted reproduction. There is a very good reason, Dr Senoz, why we're doing this. It's not for vanity."

  Of course not, Mr Stinking Rich Person. Thought never entered my head! In this case, unusually, she believed he was telling the truth. She liked these people.

  "I'm not a doctor, just a scientist. But please go on."

  Again Mr Nasabah glanced at his wife, again she gravely, slightly, nodded. Anna had become a friend, they could tell her anything. He reached into his well-tailored jacket, brought out a wallet and produced a photograph. He handed it over. Anna looked at a grinning teenager, hair in bunches, in a faded garden.

  "You see, Dr Senoz, I had a sister."

  "My husband had a twin sister," said his wife. "She died when she was fifteen."

  "She was my other soul. You don't have to tell me, I know you can't bring her back to life. She was naturally not my identical twin. But everyone said we were extraordinarily alike, and this is the nearest thing. My family approves, my wife's family understands, and my wife, for which I can't thank her enough, has agreed to do this."

  The cobalt sky in the picture had faded to pink; there were cracks across the girl's round cheeks. Anna could see no resemblance.

  "How. . .how did she die? Was it an accident?"

  "No! It was a cancer."

  They were leaning towards her, eyes shining, eagerly speaking almost together.

  "A rare cancer; don't worry, it was not familial. Not inherited. If she was alive now she could be treated, but in those days there was no cure, it was twenty years ago—"

  "We know it could possibly happen again, but this time she would recover. We want to give her, to give all the potential she had, another chance, another chance."

  Oh. shit.

  She talked to them some more, bringing them down: sent them off to await an evaluation of this new information. They said they hadn't recorded the sister's death or cancer on the medical history questionnaire because it wasn't relevant. . . And you know how corrupt you are, thought Anna—as she hurried to catch a window with SURISWATI that she'd almost missed—when you hear a story like that, you see the tears standing in the people's eyes, and what you think is thank God we found out! We, meaning Parentis.

  "Maybe they genuinely believe they weren't concealing crucial information," she told Suri. "They aren't dumb enough to hide it and then break down and tell me the truth because I spoke to them nicely."

/>   "Then why didn't they tell the truth to start with?"

  "Oh, because they saw whitey on the front desk. It's obvious as soon as you talk to them that they weren't expecting magic. No more than the extraordinary magic that is there in reality. But reincarnation, you know, it sounds whacky. They didn't want to be laughed at." And keeping faith with the dead she thought. They were afraid a whitey would laugh at that, too. "You'd be surprised. You'd think an infertility lab would be the last place for fixed ideas about the nature of the human soul, mmm, or whatever you call it. But there are people here at the clinic who have the most narrow, prejudiced concept of when is a person not a person. . ."

  "Tell me about it," said the AI.

  Ouch.

  She recalled an African client, another honest man. It was somewhere way up-country, she forgot the name of the place. He'd taken such pains to catch her alone she'd been sure she was going to get raped. But no. He wanted to explain that he was bringing his youngest wife in for a medical examination, but in fact he already knew why she was "infertile." The marriage had never been consummated. Had she been cut? Anna wanted to know. Rich families did it as a lifestyle choice, though this wasn't a big Female Genital Mutilation practicing area. No, no. She didn't want to have sex, not with men, not with women either, that was her nature. So what can I do? he asked, shrugging eloquently. If she has no children, she will be at the bottom of the heap. If I send her to a shrink it will be worse. He'd managed to protect her secret from the women of his family, now he wanted to swear Anna to secrecy too. If I pay for this treatment, that will give her status. . . People do the maddest things, and not always for bad reasons. Even the more-money-than-sense kind of people who go in for babypharming.