Life

by Gwyneth Jones

  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.

  “Do they have a chance?”

  “Less than zero. Clone a baby that gets cancer? No way. Nobody will touch it. It’s not a risk worth taking, not with prior knowledge, though it’s a risk we take all the time at Parentis without thinking about it, because we only do the minimum of pre-implantation tests. If we made things any more difficult, customers would just go elsewhere.”

  Suri’s model was finished. Anna had been running mathematical and data-based verifications. Everything was real, as far as she could make out. None of it the product of software error, hardware glitch, faulty input, or unproven science. Eventually you have to stop checking: though for Anna it was painful to leave a single stone unturned, even on so wide a shore.

  “Now I have to write this up,” she said at last, after a long pause.

  “D’you think I’ve demonstrated your lateral evolution machine?”

  “I think we need feedback. There comes a point when you have to show and tell.”

  “Viruses are everywhere,” remarked the AI. “In the data network. That’s why I have to be kept locked up like this. It’s not because of sunspots, storms, and hackers. It’s because some mild infection harmless to less fancy software could
be dangerous to me. Most of the viruses were not invented by malice. No one knows where they came from, they ‘just growed.’ Maybe some of them help complex programs to evolve so that they can have more fun, I mean assimilate more information. Isn’t that logic? If some viruses do harm and some do nothing, then some viruses have to do good.”

  “Mm. In fact the situation in the datasphere’s not a bad analogy—”

  She hoped she’d be able to persuade the Nasabahs to go for straight IVF with sex-selection and manipulation to favor the father’s traits, in which case the small risk of cancer would be tolerable. Thought of Wolfgang and his Hawaiian shirts, it was the albino tigers today, one of her favorites. He brightens my life. What did he mean, “get-out-of-jail-free tokens”? She kept recalling that oh-so-casual remark, wondering does he know something? Does Wolfgang really have a boyfriend in power?

  She had a guilty conscience about Spence’s email.

  But these anxieties were distant raindrops on a windowpane. Anna was back in the library at the University of the Forest, lurking in P for Literature: reading, reading, reading. The smell of that place, the constant noise you had to learn to shut out, the stuffy air. She was feeling again that frisson of inexplicable longing. What gave me the idea that I could make my mark? She still didn’t know. Yet here it was, accomplished: her first quest. Maybe, when she’d written the paper and presented it, someone would find a boring explanation for everything Anna and her friends thought they observed. Maybe the whole TY bubble would burst. But here and now, at this moment… She’d done what she’d once dreamed she might do and never dared to tell anyone her dream.

  Made a mark.

  “God, Suri. I have no backers, I don’t have any status in the life sciences establishment. I’m a miserable little babypharmer. They’re going to skin me alive.”

  “It’s good for an original thinker not to be in the establishment. Remember what Einstein said? Keep a cobbler’s job, so you can pursue wild ideas in your spare time.”

  “Easy enough for him to say. He wasn’t a lab scientist. I can’t do my kind of work in my head, not and get very far. I could never have done this without you, Suri.”

  “And I would never have done it without you, so we are quits.”

  Somewhere in that expert store of human genetics knowledge, Anna thought, there are elements of my own work. Somewhere in the system architecture there’s code derived from Spence’s trilogbots, because Suri is partly descended from web-bots, and everyone copied Emerald City. So there’s part of me and part of Spence in there. Her whole life was coming together, spinning into focus.

  “That didn’t take me so long as I thought it would,” said the AI, perhaps bemused by Anna’s long silences. “How about if we see what happens next?”

  “What happens next?”

  “I could run the simulation through a few generations.”

  Anna hesitated. A team in China was working on the heritability of TY, using transgenic mice. In the human world, since the viroid seemed to be ubiquitous, the mechanism would be confused by repeat infection or partial infection. In the abstract, it seemed the offspring of a male TY each got half the change: the girls an extra sequence on one X, the boys a sequence missing from their Y. And then what? Some time, if all this was real, someone was going to catch one of these viroid-mediated lateral variations in active gene expression, making a measurable change in the organism’s behavior or function. TY might do that, further down the line. But she was wary.

  “Suri, I think I’m far enough out on a limb already.”

  “Come on Anna, it would be cool. There’s no coding sequence, that we know of, in the Y sequence that gets snipped, or at the site in the X where the transferred sequence gets pasted. But something is going on. We’ve found transcriptional factors in TY cell cultures, in the lab studies. Transcriptional factors, that means gene products that regulate the expression of specific other genes.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “The situation is potentially going to move again, significantly. This is from your own notes, Anna.”

  “Yeah, I know. But—”

  “We could try.”

  Anna didn’t want to push her luck but she felt so happy it seemed mean to say no, and she’d just heard the AI innocently equate assimilate information with an experience called having fun. She made her usual copies, and gave in with a smile.

  “Okay, I’ll buy it. Let’s see what happens next.”

  She was in the anteroom, working on something that wouldn’t resolve. The model seemed made of newsprint, but she couldn’t read more than a few isolated letters.

  “Anna,” said Suri tentatively, coaxingly. “Do you think I could have a pet?”

  “A what?”

  “A pet. A little program of my own to look after. It could run on its own hardware, in here, and I could take it out and play with it. It would be company for me.”

  Anna’s heart sank. She knew she was going to say yes, how could she say no to that eager reasonable pleading. But how would she sell the idea to Aslan? He’d have a fit—

  —and she woke, drifting gently back into the bedroom at Nasser apartments, floating up into the moist warm air and the hum of the ceiling fan. Her dream had given SURISWATI the voice of child. A little girl child, about eight years old. Yes, she thought, lying with her eyes closed, smiling. I know. Why not? Why shouldn’t I? I love Suri dearly. Why be afraid of consolation?

  It was raining hard, and that was a heavy rumble of thunder. She jumped up to shut the windows and pull the plugs, for fear of lightning strike. The mailboxes at Nasser had recently been removed pro tem, in case of terrorists placing bombs in them. Packets you had to fetch from the post office; letters were shoved under the door. There was something lying there now. As if, by the way, it was any safer for the terrorist devices to be left sitting in the post office. As if expats were a likely target, anyhow.

  Spence was up. The shower hissed, above the sound of the rain.

  “We’ve got a card,” she shouted. “It’s from Ramone. She’s coming to Sungai.”

  He emerged, toweling his hair, to find her making coffee and reading the provoking message over again. It was on the back of a postcard of Big Ben.

  “I didn’t hear a word of that.”

  “We’ve got a card from Ramone.”

  They hadn’t heard from Ramone Holyrod in years, but they’d often had this kind of thing happen. Go and live somewhere allegedly exotic, and people you last saw in nursery school start inviting themselves to stay. Spence stopped toweling and his face emerged. She was surprised at his expression. What was there to glower about?

  “You mean you’ve got a card.”

  “It’s addressed to both of us. She’s coming out here, apparently.”

  “Fuck. And wants a bed, I suppose. Ah, fuck. Typical.”

  “Well, no. Not as far as I can tell. Read it yourself.”

  Suffer, Birdone. And you can suffer too, Spence, if you like.

  I’m going to be in Sungai soon. I’m traveling with Daz, who as you know is on the side of law and order. I decided to recoinoitre the sitaution [sic] for my cadre. You may not want to have anything to do with me, but I thought I’d let you know I’ll be in town. See you maybe. R

  That was it. No dates, no details, no flight number.

  “What ‘situation’? I can’t imagine Ramone is interested in Southeast Asian politics.”

  “Ramone would do anything to get attention,” said Spence. “Actually I knew about Daz. Forgot to tell you, I had some email from her.”

  They were in fairly regular contact with Daz Avriti, who was Sungainese by birth. She’d been very noncommittal about their move, which had puzzled them until they got here and found out the truth about the “business as usual” story. That was Daz for you, tactful and pleasant in all circumstances. Her family had dutifully invited the two strange whiteys to lunch when they arrived. Anna and Spence had invited them back. After which, as is the fate of most of these
polite introductions, the acquaintance had been allowed to drop.

  “She’s coming over in the New Year, with the EU legal mission that’s going to meet with the government and the Iranian Minister, whatsername.”

  “But she’ll be staying with her family, or in some conference hotel. I suppose Ramone will be staying with her. Oh, I’m glad Daz is coming!”

  “Well, too bad if Ramone wants to stay here. We’re going to Pasir Pancang.” They had booked a week at the Parentis beach lodge, two hundred kilometers up the coast, over the Christmas holiday: beautifully timed to coincide with the end of the moratorium.

  “Of course we are. But none of this is ’til after we get back. Don’t panic, babe.”

  “Sorry,” said Spence. “Certain keywords disable my sense of humor. ‘Ramone’ is one.”

  It spoiled breakfast time, and yet not entirely. Their goodbye kiss made her whole body ache. By the time she reached the bus stop she wanted to call him, to tell him…to hear him breathing. Mobile phones and pagers had been banned from sale or use. If you were caught carrying one it was instant arrest. What’s anti-Islamic about using a pager? It was just another way to make people sore. Instead she stood dreaming while the rain roared down, climbed onto the bus and sat thinking of him. His grey eyes. That fugitive look of being someone in power (who would imagine Spence as dominating, it was so foreign to him); a look that came when he was sure of her desire. After a busy morning she stopped by to visit Suri: thinking of her dream. Wide awake and no longer in a sentimental mood after hours of exasperating office work, she still wasn’t ashamed of what it revealed. If I sometimes feel for Suri almost as if she’s my child, that’s my business.

  “I’ve got something interesting to show you,” said the AI’s real-life twang.