Life

by Gwyneth Jones

  “What the TY viroid did was to snip a specific piece out of the Y and paste it into a specific site on the X, in a human male. Once this has happened, and been inherited, the X and the Y start to reshuffle, and in a generation or two, the Y becomes indistinguishable from a second X, with male-determining genes. But there are male-specific genes on the normal X also, anyway… Well, there’s a process called X-inactivation, to prevent a female animal—she has two Xs, remember—from getting a double dose of X gene expression, in loci where that would be damaging or lethal. The TY transformation interferes with this, in tiny but important ways. Sometimes the results will be lethal, so the pregnancy fails. Sometimes there’ll be lesser effects. This is already happening, because TY has been around longer than I thought when I first found it: it was in the germ cells, in our generation. It’s happening, and it will get worse before it gets better.”

  “So it makes getting pregnant and staying pregnant more difficult. Is this a bad thing?”

  “Everyone’s already got it. I don’t know if it’s a bad thing,” said Anna softly, “but TY is going to cause a lot of heartbreak.”

  “But the media storm says it could be the end of the line for genetically-determined patriarchy! Men become women with dicks!”

  “Or women become men with tits. You can make the words do anything you like.”

  “Holy shit,” Ramone began, absentmindedly, to roll another joint. “But if this is so momentous, how come it was so difficult for other scientists to see it?”

  “Because the original transfer involves a really tiny number of bases, in a non-coding sequence and because that’s what molecular biology is like. It’s spooky. Different people can make different things work, or can’t make them work. You can get different batches of chemicals, different culture media, that make things appear and disappear. You have to use the right protocol and the right chemicals to make the original TY effect visible. As for what happened after that, I don’t know. We did a survey, a confidential survey on samples from all over the world, and we found the TY viroid everywhere we looked. I don’t know why this result is in doubt or why the evidence is apparently invisible except to me and the poor sods on my team—”

  “It isn’t invisible anymore.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve been offline for a while, haven’t you? Two weeks ago, one of the major US genetech companies confessed they already knew about your epidemic.”

  “Really!”

  “It gets better,” Ramone grinned ghoulishly. “They’ve been trying to correct the damage, which they took to be an IVF problem. They killed a few thousand proto-rich-kid cell-masses, before they gave up. Anyway, since then, other labs have broken ranks. The Oz team is dead in the water, and TY is out and proud.” She went on rolling the joint, smirking at Anna’s expression. “But now they’re saying the death of the male chromosome isn’t going to happen, because everything depends on this virus, and this virus is going to mutate and become harmless.”

  “No.”

  “The virus isn’t going to mutate?”

  “Viroid. That’s not the way it works, that’s the old way of looking at things. The TY viroid isn’t a disease What’s happening is a situation of the Aether.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “This is where I get down from the fence. This is my idea, mine and Clare Gresley’s. Listen. For the last many years geneticists have been discovering that life is one, that DNA is common to all living things and what’s more, the same genes do the same things in widely divergent species. That’s common knowledge: you can cut an “and” from the middle of a passage in a novel, paste it into a science text, and it will do the same job. What TY gives us is experimental proof of another idea, which has been growing but has been suppressed: that the language in the textbook and in the novel are in conversation with each other right now. That the things we call species aren’t separate—they are part of a continuous fabric; that the phenomenon we call evolution is not a competition between organisms—it’s a co-operative effort, orchestrated by tiny particles going about their own concerns. And they do not respect our artificial boundaries. Our Darwinism is as observably true and fundamentally dumb as saying the sun goes round the earth… That’s what’s the big deal. Okay, now the viroid… You know how a genetic “disease” doesn’t have to be inherited? You can get, say, cystic fibrosis or a vulnerability to breast cancer from having any one of a number of happenstance glitches or unlucky combinations of glitches—?”

  “Um, yeah—” said Ramone, as one does to Anna’s explanations.

  “The TY viroid is a little like that. It was an accident waiting to happen, nested in the aether, which is roughly analogous to the genome of ‘Life on Earth.’ It’s not going to go away. It’s not a disease; it’s something that was bound to happen.” Anna sighed…“It’s a devastating change for life science. It means rewriting everything, from a completely different perspective. It’s an awful prospect. And I’m the fool who rushed in, thinking people would be delighted to have their house torn down—”

  Ramone shook her head. “Well okay. Web of life, all connected, cool. It’ll never sell. The death of the male chromosome is so much sexier, hahaha.” A thought struck her, or she pretended it had just struck her. “Hey, what about us? Are we affected?”

  “I don’t know about you. I am, first generation.”

  “What about Spence?”

  “Yes. I told you. Nearly everyone is ‘infected’ by now.”

  “Have you told him?”

  “Nah. It would only piss him off. You know how he hates to be like everybody else.”

  Ramone giggled.

  “So there you go. It didn’t stop him falling for the red-headed babe.”

  “I noticed,” agreed Anna. “I take comfort in that. He may have humiliated me, but at least I know that genetic determinism is still a crock. Lovers will betray each other same as always, no matter how our chromosomes get bent out of shape.” She was ashamed of having taken a sample without Spence’s knowledge, but in those last months it had seemed as if all rules had been suspended.

  “Hey, something funny. Charles Craft is a full XX. I nicked a sample from him, too.”

  “So, basically, I was right. Nothing’s going to change,” said Ramone, when she’d finished laughing. Anna gazed at the smoke that rose delicately towards the ceiling.

  “Oh no,” breathed Ramone. “Oh, don’t tell me there’s more!”

  “I think,” said Anna slowly, “that human sexuality will be changed. This thing is not a fashionable fad, affecting only a miniscule number of people rich enough to have their kids’ genes messed about with: it’s bound to change everything, some way or other. And I think it doesn’t matter. That’s how I felt a few weeks ago; that’s how I feel again now. In the liberal world we already live as if people can choose at whim whether to take on a ‘male’ or ‘female’ lifestyle. In nature, before any of this started, many people were sexual mosaics, whether they knew it or not. In time, TY may create a situation where there are no genetic traits exclusive to ‘men’ or ‘women’: when sexual difference is in the individual, not a case of belonging to one half of the species or the other. Will that be a lot different from the way we are now? I don’t know. Frankly, I’m more concerned about whether I can get back over the Atlantic without the plane falling out of the sky. Or whether the famine in Central Asia is going to get worse. And will the bad guys in Southeast Asia start using nuclear weapons? Do you realize our Daz, the World’s Most Gorgeous Malaysian, is probably already dead?”

  “She’s supposed to be alive, in incommunicado detention.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “I know what you mean,” said Ramone, chastened and low. “It’s like the fall of the Roman Empire. This leftover we call the liberal world is irrelevant, the war zones are the shape of things to come, and the one thing you don’t want to be in a war zone or an armed camp is any kind of woman… And I used to say that too.” She reached into her jac
ket and brought out a worn, blue rabbit and hugged it, mugging at Anna owlishly over the toy’s battered ears. “Maybe it’s all part of the same thing. All part of the Transferred Y phase transition.”

  “Maybe it is. Hi, Pele. Nice to see you. I’m glad you’re still around.”

  “Pele will always be around.”

  How empty the big room seemed, and the two of them like mice in a giant’s kitchen. Ramone sighed. “Oh, well. Probably none of it will happen. Your sexual revolution viroid will fizzle out, and so-called civilization will go limping on. Anna, changing the subject because I’m getting bored, if I was to let you get away with it you would live here twenty years, wouldn’t you, and never mention the equipment.”

  “It’s your business,” said Anna.

  “Why can’t you accept that I happen to like weird sex. It is what I enjoy.”

  “What about the Canadian girl, who ended up in the nuthouse? Is that true?”

  Ramone scowled. “She’ll be in and out of nuthouses all her life. We didn’t do her any damage; I don’t care if you believe me.”

  Anna looked, deliberately, from the surgical table and its tall theater lights, to the medieval torture contraption that hung from Ramone’s bedroom wall. “What I see, I’m sorry, but what I see is complicated ways to express self-loathing.”

  “This is my way of dealing with my problem. And it works.”

  “Fine, it works. We agree to disagree. So what was wrong with Plan A?”

  “Plan A?”

  “Where I don’t mention that your current relationship involves gross physical abuse.”

  “Consensual. So-called ‘abuse’ that heightens emotional and physical enjoyment.”

  “If you say so.”

  Ramone had started to rub one of Pele’s threadbare ears between the finger and thumb of her right hand. Anna had seen this before: she believed the gesture was of great antiquity. “I’ve finished with them, actually. I only came back to collect my stuff. I wish I’d known you were coming, I’d have never let you in here. I’d have met you somewhere nice. Now you’ve seen this I know you’re sitting there despising me. Whenever we meet it’s at the wrong time, and I always end up looking like a jerk.”

  Anna didn’t know what to say. She wanted to hug Ramone, the way Ramone was hugging that rabbit, but the declaration that she had come over here to make was impossible in the presence of the real person: not a symbol, not a metaphor, nobody’s tall dark stranger.

  “You’re on your way back to Spence, aren’t you. You ran away from him and came to find me, but you’ve changed your mind. I knew that the moment I walked in here and saw you. I’ve been considered as a poor substitute, and rejected again.”

  “You don’t want me, Ramone,” said Anna. “You never did.”

  “Yes I do… Maybe not for long,” added the rabid one, hurriedly. “Maybe once would be fine. But I really do want you. Honest.”

  They went together into the second guest room, which was free of big apparatus. They took a couple of the fur rugs, because there were no covers on the bed and the air conditioning was chill, got naked and lay between them, and hugged and kissed and nuzzled and licked and enjoyed each other, just for once, until Pele felt quite left out.

  Now she will go back to being Most Favored Slave, thought Ramone, watching Anna’s sleep. I can’t stop her, and I don’t want to. In the prison at Kota Baru, where part of Ramone stayed forever, would TY set anyone free? It would not. In the future, when there were as many sexes as there were people (if she’d understood Anna at all), there would be prisons, there would be horrors. But what will I do with myself? Modern culture, like modern science, rejects reductionism, becomes a maze of irreducibly complex specificity…? Nah, it sounds familiar; it must have been done. How happy Spence would be, to see her facing an empty future. Well, too bad. It’s good to have these Now Voyager moments from time to time. Something will happen.

  Something different—

  She saw that lonesome road ahead, as dark and stony and hard to follow as ever. But the blackness above was riven with stars, and from now on, a fair share of those bright shining stars would have women’s faces. And this woman-hating woman was surprised to realize how happy this made her.

  Something new—

  iii

  Anna woke up wrapped in white fur and bathed in sunlight. She thought she was on an ice floe, gliding under the midnight sun. Ramone was lying beside her, wide awake. As soon as she saw Anna open her eyes, she quickly got out of bed (either to avoid renewed embraces or in case Anna did not want to renew them; we will never know). They bathed in separate bathrooms, Anna exclaiming in disbelief at the level of bizarre luxury she found in hers: staying in this apartment would indeed have been a trip. By the time she was dressed, Ramone was in the kitchen making coffee.

  “By the way,” she called. “Some of the snail mail is for you.”

  “For me? Did you say for me?”

  “What’s the matter, cloth ears? Some of the letters in my mailbox were for Anna Senoz. You must have been giving out this address as yours. I’m totally flattered.”

  “I didn’t know your address until I got here… How mysterious.”

  There was only one letter. She understood the sharpness in Ramone’s voice, because the handwriting on the large envelope was Spence’s. She opened it with trepidation, there was nothing inside but another envelope, this time University of Poole stationery. She sat down on a swollen red satin couch—

  My dear Anna,

  I take the liberty of a personal letter as the first installment of my most heartfelt apology. I am a touchy, irascible old fellow, and without my beloved wife to restrain me, too swift to avenge imaginary injuries. I believed that, careless of my department’s future, you had used us, used me, ruthlessly, knowing that our reputation would be a casualty of your premature publication, and this severely clouded my judgment on the day when we last met. Dear Anna, I will not attempt to excuse myself further. I hope and pray that envy of your achievement played no part in my hasty action. I have never known a better scientist or a more faithful colleague. As we used to say, in the old country, you are my father and my mother. Accept an old Hindu’s…

  She could read no more. The thin, spiky handwriting blurred and swam—

  “What is it?”

  “I’ve got my job back, I think.”

  “Tell them where they can stuff it,” said Ramone trenchantly, dumping two French coffee bowls on the perspex table. “There’s fuck-all to eat, so I hope you’re not hungry. Hey, Anna? Anna?”

  Anna Anaconda was crying like a baby, crying the way a baby cries when fear has passed, without restraint, rocking herself with her arms wrapped around her knees.

  “I thought nobody loved me,” she sobbed, “I thought nobody loved me!”

  Hello?

  Hi

  Anna! Where are you?

  I’m still in New York

  How are you? Where’ve you been? Have you seen the news about TY?

  I’m okay. I think I’ve about reached the point where Slothrop turns into a tree or dissipates into the zeitgeist or whatever he does.

  Please don’t turn into a tree, Anna.

  As soon as she heard his voice, all the heavy things she’d thought she wanted to say to Spence, all the lines she had honed for her day in court, vanished into nothingness.

  “I came looking for Ramone, but she wasn’t here. Then I bumped into your mother and went to stay with her, up state. Did she tell you?”

  “She didn’t, she was very righteous about not telling me, but I guessed. Did you get Nirmal’s letter? I didn’t send anything else, but he was anxious for you to have it.”

  “Yeah, I got it. Ramone was here when I got back to the city.”

  “Oh, right. How’s Ramone?”

  “Same as ever. How’s Meret?”

  A short silence, and then they both laughed.

  “We haven’t seen much of the Crafts. They’ve been in Portugal, setting up Mere
t’s parents in their new digs. They’re putting The Rectory up for sale. Charles wants a bigger place, with some land. He’s looking at Suffolk, or maybe further north.”

  Charles. My man!

  And I’m sorry, red-headed babe. But it was you or me.

  Anna leaned her cheek against the inside of the callpoint hood, thinking of Nirmal’s letter. It was good to know, from the date on it, that his change of heart seemed to have predated the upswing in TY’s fortunes. Not that this upswing was unqualified good news, because she knew what would happen. All the story would be about the sex; no one was going to pay attention to Anna’s vector of entrainment. Even within her own community, she’d have to fight like crazy to get the basic science back into the picture, and she would probably fail… If there were any future in basic science, anyway, she thought gloomily, here on the brink of the Dark Ages. But that letter… She would value that letter as highly as she liked. Nirmal didn’t have to give her back her honor, no matter how right she was. Plenty of precedents for him, if he’d refused. But he had done it of his own free will; he had led her back into the sanctuary—

  “Anna, are you still there?”

  “I’m at the airport. I’ll call you again when I know my flight.”

  The car was packed, the sky was blue. Fergie the hamster had gone to stay with Henry, the Under Tens mid-fielder. The dead and golden month of August had come around again. Time to escape from the uncertainties, the shortages and failures, of modern urban life. Live in a tent, be elective refugees, and stop worrying.

  Anna double-locked the front door and stood for a moment, as if listening.

  This house…

  Her reinstatement at the Genetics Department might prove meaningless, if the University’s financial position was as catastrophic as rumor had it. Most likely it wouldn’t turn out so bad. As Ramone said: civilization would go limping on for a while. But every time, when setting out like this, she had found herself wondering… Were she and Spence intuitively practicing, for an inevitable future that was getting very close? Maybe it really was Transferred Y that was carrying things over the brink, bringing a terrible salvation for the living world that had been under such threat from the awesome burden of human wealth and happiness.