Life

by Gwyneth Jones

  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 near-market 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. Aslan Gaegler regarded “pure research” as a necessary evil, at best. But Nirmal was a big cheese in Parentis nowadays. He was Aslan’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) murmured 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.

  “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!”

  Aslan 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 lunchtime 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 landfill 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.
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br />   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.