Life

by Gwyneth Jones

  “Let us be thankful,” said Lavinia dryly, “that Anna is not alarmingly well-endowed.”

  Anna stayed for an hour. When she left she took with her a copy of The Wounded Void. The idea of reading a work of modern philosophy was daunting, but if someone lends you a book it means they want to see you again: she was glad she was expected to come back. Ramone walked with her to Anna’s block, came up the stairs, and stalked indoors, sniffing around. The room seemed painfully empty and blank. Anna wondered if it was full of demons. Ramone threw herself on the bed.

  “How did you know not to lie to her?” she asked. “Like, the polite version: oh, I am totally delighted to be working side by side with Charles Shitface, and then when you said you were scared of meeting a schizophrenic. She liked that. She hates it when people don’t say what they’re thinking. She says it’s torture.”

  Anna had found Lavinia Kent’s directness relaxing. Verbal tennis with Ramone, however, was something else. “She sounds like a tough person to live with. My mother’s in educational psychology, I suppose I’ve picked up some lore.”

  “Huh?” Ramone reared up on her elbows, appalled. “Your Mum is a screw! You never told me that!”

  “You never asked. Why did you tell her I was a prodigy? That was pretty stupid, if she can’t stand untruths.”

  “It’s only emotional lies that matter.” Ramone’s face looked better without the hair, but her upper lip had the same chimpanzee, cartoon mobility. “This is a room for one,” she remarked, with dazzling insight. “You never bring anyone back, do you. I can tell. You’re getting weird, you know. You should watch yourself.”

  Which was outrageous, coming from a student who had set up house with her schizophrenic personal tutor. “I have to work now,” said Anna.

  Ramone and Anna spent the hungry winter working in the free heat and light of the crowded library, walking (Ramone had no bike, she didn’t know how to ride one), and serving as handmaidens at Dr Kent’s intellectual soirees. When she saw one of those gatherings (a-dazzle with faces from the tv and the papers that you’d never dreamed of seeing in the lined, imperfect flesh), Anna gave up being scandalized. She realized that Dr Kent was not someone the university could control and that Ramone was onto a good thing. Anyone who thinks patronage isn’t important is a fool.

  “We’re not lovers,” said Ramone—an idea that had been banished from Anna’s mind, in fact, the moment she met Lavinia. “I don’t think she’s capable of it. Sex, I mean. She gets the most paralyzing highs from the disease. Sometimes I come back and find her in a trance; she’s been locked in the same position for hours. She’s not distressed, it’s joy. Having that beats orgasms to shit, I reckon. I don’t think she’d be a sexual person, crazy or not. She isn’t the type; it’s all in the mind for her: pleasure, pain, everything.”

  Anna realized, not during the conversation but later, that Ramone was talking about herself.

  “But I love her. I really do. Like no one else, ever.”

  Anna’s debt grew inexorably, in spite of all her discipline. Ramone’s scholarship was running out, and Dr Kent was stingy when it came to handouts for her student minder. The immediate future looked tough, but for both of them the distance looked very bright. Anna planned to stay at Forest to do her doctorate in Molecular Biology. There was a Crop Improvement project, co-funded by a genetech company called PlasLife, which she hoped to join. Soon it would be the twenty-first century. She felt as if she had been promised a high purpose in that new era: a sword, a spear, a bow of burning gold. On Daz’s birthday, full of the e Daz had given her, smiling like to split her face in half, she took out a pen and wrote secretly, down by the waste pipe on the wall of a nightclub toilet cubicle, THE SIXTY DAY TROPICAL LOWLAND POTATO.

  That’s me. I’m going to be there. Feeding the world!

  Charles was no more use than a low-level infection. With they all she could not talk about work. In Ramone and Lavinia she found the audience for which she’d been pining. They bristled up like kittens meeting a vacuum cleaner, Ramone falling savagely on the crass male-supremacist jargon of genetic engineering: Lavinia comparing Anna’s chosen field to space travel, the future that never happened. But they were fascinated. They would listen, while she bitched about flaky machines or the pain of preparing slides from sliced onion embryo when the cells would not stick and the angle of the section you’d made was always wrong. Anna was patient. She would swallow her hecklers, include them into her world.

  She introduced Ramone to statistics and mentioned Florence Nightingale.

  “Middle-class lesbian wanker,” said Ramone, obviously mollified.

  She saved up and bought a pineapple, expended a portion of the underused social budget on a half bottle of high proof vodka, and ordered them to turn down their freezer and get the liquor as cold as possible. Armed with some washing up liquid, an onion, a food mixer, and a low oven, she isolated DNA for them. The gods of lab science smiled on her, the trick worked beautifully. She spooled the magic thread onto one of Lavinia’s blue glass swizzle sticks: her audience sighed in delight.

  “That’s it. That’s the stuff.”

  “Fire from heaven,” murmured Lavinia. “Was it Schrödinger or Heisenberg who named it the aperiodic crystal? I forget.”

  “Schrödinger. In Dublin, in 1943, when he was living in Ireland to get away from the Nazis. The important thing about being aperiodic is the informational capacity. He said the difference between DNA and the regular, non-living kind of crystal is like the difference between a wallpaper pattern and a masterpiece of tapestry.”

  “Cookery, washing machines, and now tapestry weaving: the female arts.”

  “That become male when they’re highly valued,” said Ramone.“I notice the tapestry was a master piece.” She gazed at the thread of life in awe, then quickly returned to the offensive. “Of course the real thing is cloning humans. I bet scientists are already doing it, secretly. That’s the Holy Grail, human reproduction under total male control.”

  “Could be, I suppose. I’m not interested. Listen, Ramone: plants are the business. They work, the rest of us are parasites. That’s why I’m into plant biology. No offence, but human cloning is for tabloid journalists.”

  “Even so,” said Lavinia softly, “that topic will be to genetic engineering what weapons-development was to physics. Irrational, central, alluring, deadly. There will be no denatured millions of brainwashed replicants: just as there has been so far no Global Thermonuclear War. But there will be the same mysterious train of ruin.”

  “No, please. Forget it. Much more interesting things are going on at the other end of the scale. There’s a woman called Clare Gresley, who believes she’s found a whole new theory of evolution, from studying virus DNA—”

  “Something wrong with Natural Selection?” inquired Ramone wisely.

  “Well, yes.” Anna spooled more thread, it seemed endless. “A whole living world, that ‘makes sense,’ comes out of the flux and blur of genetic variation, that does not ‘make sense’ at all. It’s like the divide between the weirdness of the quantum universe and the fixed, solid macroworld. Where does the weirdness go? No one knows. Fitness isn’t everything, Ramone. By the laws of probability, quite a lot of what survives in a genome has to have zero adaptive value. Someone called Kimura pointed that out…”

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw Lavinia pick up the vodka bottle, look at it in surprise, and take a healthy swig: saw Ramone remove the bottle from the philosopher’s unresisting hand and tuck it into Anna’s shoulder bag, which was sitting on the kitchen counter. These glimpses happened: cracks, through which one glimpsed the pathology of the ménage à trois, Ramone and Lavvy and the disease. She pretended she’d seen nothing.

  “And then, in nature genes go in cohorts, not alone. They won’t move anywhere without their mates. That’s one reason why genetic modification is so frustrating and why firms like PlasLife will look for a naturally occurring improvement and steal it, if they can. You can
get something useless flourishing, because the genes for it are linked to genes that do something essential. Or because the gene that codes for the useless change in one place, does something useful elsewhere. Then the organism finds a use for the neutral thing, just by happenstance, and then the change gets selected for… Then we come along, and we say the genetic mutation was adaptive: but it wasn’t.”

  “The idols of the market place,” commented Lavinia. “One must defend the truth against them. Speak it but deny it. Speak it but deride it.”

  Ramone screwed up her cartoon features. “You mean, like, giraffes eat leaves off the tops of trees because they accidentally have long necks? Instead of the deal where they thrive because the necks are a cunning way to eat the leaves off the tops of trees?”

  “Hm… Sort of. Of course, adaptive radiation through reproductive success is still what happens, on the macro scale.”

  “Of course,” said Ramone, winking at Lavinia.

  “But Weak-Factor Fitness, which is what Kimura’s idea is called, foregrounds the point that a genetic variation does not have to convey a benefit to spread through a population; there are other factors. At the nucleotide level, there’s no Darwinism, not what people think of as Darwinism, not at all.”

  “Wherever we step,” remarked Lavinia. “The solid surface breaks and we are plunged into ferment. But Anna, genetic engineering will change the world, even if I never understand a word you say. What are we going to do with all these people who no longer die of cancers, heart-disease, dementia? All the designer babies? Will we keep them in their packaging? What about the schizophrenics whose brain chemistry is altered so they remain sane? How are they to live?”

  “Can you eat it?” demanded Ramone, suddenly. “Could I eat my own?”

  “Why not?” asked Anna. She was still holding the swizzle stick. “You do eat it, all the time. You breathe it, yours and other people’s. It gets in your teeth, it gets in your hair, it lodges in your skin, it gets pulped in your digestive tract.”

  “Could I eat that?” Ramone pointed to the swizzle stick.

  “It’ll taste of washing up liquid.”

  Anna wanted to tell them that when she studied a protein separation gel the patterns she saw were astronomical, it was like a negative image of the starry sky. She was an astronomer, a cosmologist, a particle physicist: knowing events by their traces, through a chain of mathematical inference, never able to perceive her quarry directly. She wished she could make her friends understand the vast distances: which was far more important than worrying about vanity parenting or whether men or women owned the jargon. It is far away, you can’t imagine how far. We don’t exist there. They don’t direct us, no more than the stars direct human affairs. We are part of the same system, obeying the same laws, but we hardly begin to understand what the laws are. Maybe we’re still waiting for Galileo’s telescope… She was thinking, all too soon she was going to have to give up wondering about evolution and concentrate on solanum succulentum. You have to specialize, but it was a shame. But sometimes you had to drop the subject, whatever the subject was. There were demons to be placated. The three of them ate onion DNA, sharing the sacred meal lip to lip, and spoke of other things.

  At the intellectual soirees, Ramone and Anna served coffee, tea, or horrible cheap sherry, while the guests talked among themselves about the Lavinia Kent universe—the existential trinity of self, the mysterious sacrifice of consciousness—and tried to get next to Lavinia. Dr Kent was indefatigable. She taught, in a hall full of fetishes or in her own living room. She wrote, she collaborated, she kept up this punishing evening life. Alex Lyell (Alexander, which means defender of men), one of the university’s science-lions, told Anna that Dr Kent was a living saint. “Have you read her on the Fall from Grace as the splitting of the Higgs Field into asymmetry? You’d see what I mean. Her thinking is truly important. She offers us the right to awe and worship without superstition. No supernatural element, no fudging to get rid of the infinities—”

  Anna understood, and she guessed Lavinia understood it too, that the disease drew them. Lavinia’s illness, the mischievous child, seemed to sit demurely in a corner, in its best clothes. To these middle-aged postmodern professionals, all of them clever or at least powerful, the shadow of mental degeneration was more terrible than death, and there sat the monster: better than vanquished, tamed by this gentle woman, brilliant conversationalist, assimilator of shadows. One night, after Lavinia had collected the glasses and poured the dregs back into the bottle, as was her wont (you couldn’t blame her; she needed all her funds, for the decades of old age that she fully expected to spend in Bedlam), she kicked off her shoes—the black velvet steel-buckled court shoes that went with the long, shimmering black or brown velvet dresses she kept for these occasions—sat hieratic on the couch, a hand upturned on either knee: and spoke.

  A thousand martyrs I have made

  All sacrificed to my desire

  A thousand beauties have betrayed

  That languish in resistless fire

  The untamed heart to hand I brought

  And fixed the wild and wandering thought…

  “Do you have sexual fantasies, Anna?”

  “When I was a little girl,” said Anna. “I used to have fantasies about shitting. They featured a very handsome, muscular man, partly naked: I think it was Superman from off the tv. He would be tied down and strapped up by the baddies, and he had to shit, beautiful streams of fat turds. It was lovely, I don’t know why. I think he was meant to be myself but I displaced it… This must have been until I was about eight.”

  “I had orgasmic fantasies about food,” announced Ramone. “Sausages and chocolate bars, alive and running up for me to eat them.”

  Lavinia and Anna glanced at each other: of course Ramone was lying.

  “But there was a friend of my Mum and Dad’s. They used to say: he doesn’t mean any harm, keep out of his way. I had fantasies about him all right. I used to imagine he’d made me pregnant. He only groped me. I knew that wasn’t enough to do the damage but it didn’t help. It was like I had a big maggot in my belly, wriggling. Yecch. That’s why I’m never going to have children.”

  “What if you accidentally got pregnant? Would you have an abortion?”

  “No, I wouldn’t do that.” snapped Ramone.

  “Huh? But if you hate the idea of—”

  “Abortion is a slave’s option.” Ramone scowled. “It’s not an issue because I’m never going to get pregnant. I’m not going to get myself sterilized, I just know it’s never going to happen. But if by any chance it did, I’d stick it out, because I’m important. My potential is important. If women are to be the people, then what they produce—their blood, their babies—has to be over-valued. We have to stop apologizing, oh please excuse me, I made a mess, I’ll clear it up. If I were a man I would say my seed is important, and how different that would sound. Bastards.”

  “What about you, Anna?” wondered Lavinia. “Would you abort?”

  “If I had to,” said Anna—and heard her mother’s voice from those hard early years: clipped, contained, enduring. Anna’s mother: always tired, never exhausted, bearing everything. “But Ramone, what if you had a scan and the baby was hideously deformed?”

  “Oh yeah, the be-cruel-to-be-kind argument. I don’t believe it. I don’t even like kids, but I don’t see why it shouldn’t have its little nine months in womb-world. Have the baby, let it be born, and let it die. That’s the answer.”

  “Great. Radical feminist aligns with the Christian Right Fundamentalists. Ramone you’d say anything to make yourself sound off-the-wall.”

  “I am childless and virginal,” said Lavinia. “Except for the disease. My confessors invite me to confide my sexual fantasies, I have none. Like Teresa of Avila, Catherine of Siena, Hildegard of Bingen: I refer my voices and visions to the doctors of my church, the church of mental disease. When they imply that my visions cannot be true visions, since they are not sexual, I don’t ar
gue with them, though they are calling me a charlatan. I never let them tell me that I am crazy when they can’t cope with what I say, sane when they can. That way madness lies.”

  So they would sit together, passing the eye of speech from hand to hand like the three Norns in a winter cave; sipping thick cool vegetable juice. Ramone and Lavinia shared Anna’s conversational style—lengthy, perseverant, more like a successive presentation of gifts than the normal undergraduate horse-trading: and Anna had found a niche. If she could have got on better with Charles, she would have been perfectly happy.

  In finals term, their lab project (a footnote in the investigation of onion anti-fungal defenses) was still incomplete. As luck would have it, Anna’s share of the work had turned out well. Charles couldn’t get his sequencing right. Anna kept after him—partly because of her insensate, disinterested drive and partly because no matter what anybody said about the minor importance of this thing to their results, she wanted a perfect score. It was like a computer game. Getting through level one without missing a target is not the challenge. It’s the starting point. Her father’s experience went deep in her: telling her that the world is harsh and there are no second chances. Charles sulked. To coax him into compliance she was forced to spend time in his company: go to the bar with him, have coffee with him. She did not like doing this. Charles would try to flirt, by “casual” touches, and by tacking compliments onto the end of his strut-my-stuff: which was ridiculous. You’re a brainless teacher’s pet, I’m the one who’s in charge around here, great tits by the way… A couple of times she politely reminded him that he had a girlfriend. Didn’t work. She grew inured and ignored his advances. Finally, she had the brilliant idea that she would do his sequencing herself. They would write everything up together and present the work jointly. That would be okay. Dr Russell and Guy had already suggested full collaboration as a solution to the problem.