Life

by Gwyneth Jones

  “What, already? That’s splendid. I’ll see you later, no time now.”

  “I think you should make time, Anna.”

  The mechanical voice, by stressing some sounds and drawing out others, spoke warning and suppressed but extreme excitement.

  She looked at what Suri had to show.

  “As you know, Anna, in sexual reproduction chromosomes line up together and exchange genes, so the maternal and paternal genetic traits get shuffled. This can happen because chromosomes come in similar-shaped pairs. The X chromosome gets shuffled when it’s in a female germ cell, because it has a partner X. The Y chromosome never gets involved, in normal chromosomes, because its partner is an X and too different to line up and swap bases. So the Y is a kind of genetic fossil.”

  “Yeah.” She was being shown a textbook simulation of big X and little Y joined only at the tip, the pseudoautosomal region. She wondered where this was leading.

  “Now watch. This is what happens with TY.”

  “What is that—” she whispered.

  “It’s recombination, Anna. TY allows the X and the Y to get closer. They exchange some genes; some genetic traits. Then they divide and each sperm gets an X or a Y, but reshuffled, and these Ys are bigger than before—”

  “Yeah, I can see, but are you telling me this is real—?”

  “Wait, it gets better. Now see. Another generation, maybe two: and the TY/XY sex pair lines up closer still. Poof: some more shuffling, and look what we get. A pair of chromosomes that both look like Xs. No sign of the Y. This happens sporadically in the first generation of TY inheritance. By the third, it happens every time.”

  “Get serious!”

  “I am serious.”

  Anna stared into the model, amazed beyond surprise. “Do you mean all the grandchildren in the male line of Transferred Y are going to be female?”

  “No, that’s not it. Take a closer look.”

  “That’s SRY,” Anna said shortly: touching the model with her wand to home in on the code she could not mistake. “The testes-determining gene. And SDF, and SDF2. Some of these Xs are male Xs! This is like, the fertile XX males we’ve been seeing in the clinics!”

  “As you know,” said Suri, “we believe the mammalian Y chromosome was formerly another X, differing only in a few sex-determining genes. It looks as if the TY viroid is going to restore that state. On our current estimates of TY occurrence in the population, the human Y chromosome could, effectively, disappear in a few generations.”

  “No!”

  “You know, if my name was GAIA instead of SURISWATI, I might think that wasn’t such a bad idea… Why did I say that, Anna? I know who GAIA is, but what did I mean?”

  “I think you were making a joke… Suri, I’m going to run some diagnostics.”

  “I did that! I couldn’t believe it; I did my diagnostics myself. The results are genuine. This is your lateral evolution mechanism, doing what it can do. Isn’t it cool!”

  “Suri, this is dynamite. If it stands up.”

  She ran the simulation over again, focusing in: focusing out, in such a state of shock that the wriggling hieroglyphs might have been Sanskrit, doing a Disney dance. So it had happened. SURISWATI had thrown up something crazy. What should she do? Tell Aslan? Suri did not make clinical decisions, the situation wasn’t dangerous. No need to set off any fire alarms. She could take time to think—

  If it was true at all, true in some milder, diluted form, she had hit the jackpot.

  “We can’t say anything about this in the paper, it’s too extreme.”

  “Right.”

  “Let’s see how our first publication fares, before we even hint at this…”

  She went on looking, and looking, unable to stop herself from hunting for the flaw. She didn’t miss the usual commentary, until Suri suddenly spoke again.

  “Anna, how long would it take you to pack?”

  “What?”

  “How long would it take you to pack?”

  “What do you mean?”

  A longish pause. “Like that thing with GAIA. I can say things that I don’t understand. Everyone who comes in here talks to me. I listen, and something I heard has made me ask Anna how long would it take you to pack? I think it’s important.”

  Suri’s like a child, experimenting to find gambits that trigger the most information-rich responses. Where had she picked up that question, the one that features in every favorite hair-raising expat tale? How long would it take you to pack? You have twenty-four hours to get out. Go straight to the airport… Had someone been saying, in here, that Anna Senoz was in trouble? Had someone hacked the TY files and reported her for anti-Islamic investigation of human sex chromosomes? Was it about Spence and those young activists? But no one at Parentis knew about that… She calmed herself. Don’t be melodramatic. Suri’s probably trying it on everyone: Flee, all is discovered!

  “Don’t worry, Suri. It wouldn’t take me long.”

  She was supposed to meet Wolfgang for lunch in The Plaza. She filed the new model extra securely, wished Suri Happy Christmas, and left the little room.

  Lunch was fun. Wolfgang was in splendid form, sparkling and sad and entertaining: a lovely companion. They drank Australian fizz, an indulgence supposedly forbidden except to bona fide tourists, but nobody took much notice of alcohol control in the city centre. They talked shop, talked family (it was that season), avoided politics. He was wearing the turquoise shirt with the palm trees and flights of salmon pink flamingoes. Aha, thought Anna. That’s where Suri’s dream came from.

  It was her last day at work and a Thursday, meaning TGIF in any Muslim country, because tomorrow’s the sabbath. Egged on by wicked Wolfgang, Anna sent him back to report that she’d taken the afternoon off. The rain had begun again, thundering on the glass walls. Inside The Plaza everything was a dazzle of lights, delicious restaurant smells, tinsel garlands. She stood outside a men’s boutique. The mannequin in the window display sat with his head tipped back in a Noel Coward pose. He was wearing a pair of lounging pajamas in iridescent green silk, drizzled with gold in a kind of broken snowflake pattern. He didn’t look like Spence, but he reminded her of Spence, something in that naive, proud-to-be-looked-at turn of the shoulder, quirk of the lips. Wolfgang seemed to be whispering in her ear: go on Anna. For once, don’t think. For once, just take your knickers down. She went in and bought the pajamas. The salesgirl was lovely and knew exactly why Anna was making this purchase.

  The season, the roar of the rain. The sweet complicity of this human world.

  iii

  The beach lodge at Pasir Pacang was a retreat of well-judged rough comfort. There was a helicopter pad for the nobs. Lesser mortals took a boat from the dirty end of Kota Quay, up the coast to a small fishing village, and from thence proceeded by jeep. The buildings faced a bay of stainless white sand. There was virgin coral, passable surf in season, and a raft from which you could visit the nurse sharks and other curious denizens of the deep. In the secondary forest behind, there were giants, old as the hills, left standing by accident or sentiment among the new growth: like sacred hermits. Every morning the gibbons came and shrieked at dawn in a clump of bamboo outside the gates. Sometimes, there were pirates.

  The lodge itself, outwardly a traditional longhouse but luxurious inside, was fully booked. The Gaeglers were in residence, with their surly teenage son on vacation from his school in Singapore. Budi Sujatmiko, the hotshot genomic futures analyst, was there too, with a whole gang of sleek, prematurely-middle-aged Successful Young Things.

  Anna and Spence were staying in one of the beach huts. They arrived on Christmas Eve. After eating dinner in the longhouse dining room with the festive company, they faced each other, a little awkwardly—sitting cross-legged on the low square bed, covered in dark red homespun, that was almost the sole piece of furniture. Coming off the moratorium was like leaping from a high place. It was a rush.

  Spence was wearing the silk pajamas. He loved them.

  “I
feel very weird about this,” said Anna, “You see, before we did this, for a long time we’d been almost like brother and sister.”

  “Except that we used to fuck.” Spence also spoke as if he could barely remember those days, a month in the past.

  “In a functional way. But you know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean.” The monsoon seas roared quietly, mingled with faint sounds of singing and shouting. The mosquito net enclosed them in a drift of shadow.

  “What shall we do?”

  “I know. Let’s pretend I’m a hungry hyena and you’re a bone!”

  “What?”

  Ah, the sweet trouble in her face. Anna unsure, Anna hoping to be taken in hand. He was in such a glorious tremble he could hardly bear himself.

  “Sorry, it was a literary allusion.”

  “Oh, I know. Alice.”

  Anna imagined Wolfgang was at her shoulder, telling her don’t think, Annie. For once just feel. Which sounded as if it would break the mood (don’t think of an elephant!). But no, it worked. They caught their month’s abstinence at its peak of meaning and flavor and plundered it: racked it, wrecked it, tore it into shreds. When, exhausted, they were lying in a slick of sweat together, the room coming back from wherever it had been spinning, Spence put his hands under her buttocks, holding their joined bodies together in a strangely intense gesture, his eyes holding hers.

  “I love you.”

  “I—” She stumbled over the avowal that she’d given him so often, but never with this meaning, not to Spence or anyone else: this pure homage.

  “Say it! Say it, please.”

  “I love you.”

  They spent Christmas day on a motor launch with the Gaegler party and some more Parentis-or-parent-corporation nobs who’d turned up in the morning, cruising around the mangrove preserve trying to glimpse giant otters. Failing which the young Gaegler and Ruth Hujakul (another objectionable rich expat teen) videoed everyone relentlessly. Mrs Hujakul bravely engaged Spence in conversation. He was living out here keeping house for his British wife? He didn’t have a job himself? No Ma’am. Just idling away my time.

  “Oh,” she said. “Role reversal. Is that the…the ‘in thing’ in the UK these days?”

  What days were those? Spence was unable to cope with such depths of neoconservative denial.

  “I don’t think of it as role reversal. I think of it as natural male behavior.”

  Late in the evening they slipped away from the festive buffet, each carrying a bottle of champagne by the neck. The night was unseasonably clear. They sat by the tide line in deck chairs, passing the fizz (French, not Australian, but it didn’t taste any better to Anna) between them under the blazing southern stars. Anna brought Spence up to speed on Transferred Y.

  “So, if they’re normally fertile, why are you seeing these XX guys at your clinics?”

  “Oh… Well, they have healthy sperm, and all that. But in human female cells there’s a very complicated system—piss-poor piece of design, gaffer tape and string—to stop both X genes from expressing, in loci where it would do damage. If having the male differentiating genes on the XX disrupts that, then some of the fallout can be failure to conceive, failed pregnancies…”

  “Anyhow, sounds cool to me,” said Spence. “Women and men sharing information, getting to be more like each other, but hanging onto the differences that make life interesting. Perfect. I’ll drink to that. This is actually going to happen? Mass chromosomal cross-dressing? End of the line for Y?”

  “Nah. It’ll turn out to be one of those things where a very small sample gets wildly extrapolated. Like—someone finds a gene associated with a certain behavior in thirteen Italian rice farmers and one New York cabbie, and wow, hold the front page, we have discovered the gene for people liking cheese! An expert system can get over-excited, just like a person. When we get back to town I’ll sort it out. But there’s something in it, Spence. TY is active. It doesn’t look as though it should be, but it is. Suri’s simulation predicted that, and what she predicted has turned up in real cell cultures. Look, can I show you something?”

  She drew in ballpoint, on a festive paper napkin, using her knees for a desk. “Okay, what happens is that you get these things, a special class of enzymes, called regulatory proteins. The simplest is like a little thermostat: it starts off a reaction and then stops the reaction when the end product reaches a certain concentration. Then you get one where the presence of one of the end-products of a reaction will start that reaction off again; and there’s another kind where the chemical product of one process activates a different process, which in turn produces something that triggers the first, so they work in parallel… And then there’s a couple more. Of course, they don’t just work one at a time. Are you following this, at all?”

  “I am more than following it,” said Spence, most intrigued. “I am recognizing it.”

  He took up the napkin, and gazed at Anna’s little hieroglyphs.

  “Well whadd’ya know. This is Boolean Algebra. These are logic gates!”

  He swiftly labeled Anna’s series: NOT, AND, OR, NAND, NOR.

  “Oh,” said Anna. “Well, yes, they’re control mechanisms, like circuits in a computer. I should have said. But you recognized them, from my bumbling explanation?”

  “I sure did. How smart am I? Hahaha! Far out. Boolean Algebra, the Latin of the twenty-first century. I knew the dead language of the classic age of computers would stand me in good stead, one day. Hey, who’d a’ thought it! Molecular Biology has logic gates!”

  “Computers have regulatory proteins!”

  They laughed, and toasted each other.

  “Well anyway, I was telling you—” said Anna, unable to leave an idea unfinished. “We’ve found regulatory proteins in TY cultures, which means transcription is happening, some way, even though these aren’t coding sequences… This proves that the TY viroid does something; it doesn’t just sit there like a scrap of biochemical litter—”

  She sighed. “I wish I could get Clare to talk to me. I’m on the brink of proving, maybe, that her theory is right. She won’t. I’ve had her opinions on TY relayed back to me by other people. She thinks it’s a Darwinist rip-off of her big idea: because, in my version the virosphere and the other organisms are not co-operating for the common good. The whole, beautiful homeostasis thing just growed like Topsy. It isn’t for anything, It just is… That’s not good enough for Clare. She’s been pushed around for too long; she doesn’t want a compromise; she wants the peace and co-operation theory to ANNIHILATE those planet-wrecking Stupid Darwinism bastards. Just wipe them off the face of the earth. Ironic, huh?”

  Phosphorescent foam gleamed along the shore—

  “Oh, it’s a battlefield Spence. One side says everything’s connected; the other side says no, no, every organism for itself. If I’m not careful, poor Transferred Y is going to get caught in the crossfire. I’m certainly not going to use Suri’s latest findings. Not in any form. I’m not going to tell anyone about that. You mustn’t, either.”

  “My lips are sealed. But why not, honey?”

  Fleetingly, she wondered what Spence’s own karyotype would reveal… She didn’t want to know. Spence was Spence.

  “Because it’s about sex, and that means trouble. Worse than Continuous Creation, even. There are significant people in life science who would react very poorly, although they’d never admit they were personally upset about the daft ‘death of the male chromosome’ aspect. I’m going to have to tiptoe around them.” Suddenly she laughed. “God! Listen to me! Worrying about how the great and the good will react to my world-changing publication! Anna Senoz, the babypharm office manager… Pinch me someone, wake me up.”

  “You’re not dreaming,” said Spence tenderly. “You hit the jackpot. And you deserve it.”

  There was a burst of activity at the main lodge. Jeeps were being summoned to carry departing guests to the helipad. They both looked over in that direction.

  “What
are the bosses all doing here, anyway?”

  “Dunno. I’d like to think they were sorting out the clingfilm crisis. As Wolfgang says, IVF is like drug running. Without a supply of decent clingfilm, what can you do? Where can you put things?… Fat chance. I suspect they might be discussing a withdrawal from Sungai. There’s no shortage of customers, but political unrest is a spook. The company doesn’t like it.”

  “Hope nothing happens before the end of your job.”

  The Gaegler party left; Budi’s party left. Spence and Anna had Pasir Pancang to themselves. There was native black rice pudding and banana for breakfast, instead of platters of eggs, bacon, fruit, and pastries; fried potatoes and chili greens with a few prawns at other meals. The beer supply ran out, which was sad, but the staff became much more human. Hassan the gatekeeper regaled them with stories about the pirates: unromantic pirates who visited these isolated bays to rob and rape and murder with little fear of reprisal. The cook’s baby played with Spence, while her mother sat on the hut’s verandah and gossiped with Anna.

  On New Year’s Eve Spence revealed a secret treat. “Want to do some Class A tonight?”

  “You haven’t got any.”

  “Oh yes I have.”

  “Where on earth—?”

  Revealing the secret involved a slightly awkward confession.

  “From Daz. She’s already in town. She dropped by last Thursday while you were at work. Brought us a Christmas present.”

  “Why’dn’t you tell me Daz was here!”

  “Because I wanted to have you to myself,” he said—with a look so candid and vulnerable that it frightened her. She couldn’t stand much of this mood. Yet while it lasted she would never be able to say no, enough, let’s get back down to earth. They swallowed the pills in their hut, after they’d eaten their chips and greens, and went to walk by the sea. It was an extraordinarily still evening, overcast and soft-aired. Anna kept watching the horizon. “I hope the pirates don’t arrive.”

  “They won’t. Is it coming up on you?”

  “It’s coming up. Let’s go back to our room and have a drink.”