Ghost Species

by James Bradley

  ‘Do you think he means what he says?’ Kate asks, once they are alone. ‘That the world can be re-engineered?’

  Jay unbuttons his shirt and hangs it on the back of a chair. ‘When you have his kind of money almost anything is possible.’

  Kate gestures at the walls, the delicate play of light upon them. Their concrete surfaces bear the imprints of the timber palings used to mould them, the effect subtly softening the geometric simplicity of the structure, making what might otherwise be cold and stark warm and organic.

  ‘With what this will cost he could do other things, though. Improve conditions in Africa or India, invest in education. Help reduce poverty.’

  ‘It’s too late for that,’ Jay counters. ‘We don’t need change in a generation, we need it now. Hell, we needed it twenty years ago. What Davis is talking about is a way of leapfrogging past all that, of creating the beginnings of a new world, one where we can do all the things you’re talking about.’

  ‘But he’s talking about making people, about playing God.’

  ‘Look at the world, what we’re doing to it. We’ve been playing God for a long time. Perhaps what Davis is doing is offering us a chance to do that consciously.’

  ‘And what will happen to these children if we make them? Who will raise them? Who’s going to teach them? Where will they belong? We both know people who won’t have kids because they don’t want to bring children into this world. How is this different?’

  ‘Because this has the potential to change everything. I mean, imagine the possibility of encountering another species. One that sees the world differently from us. Imagine what that might mean, how it might change the way we see the planet. Imagine connecting us to our deep past like that.’

  ‘Are you sure we want to be connected to that past?’ Kate asks.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We exterminated them.’

  Jay laughs. ‘Exactly! Which is all the more reason to do this. This is our chance to undo that mistake, to give them another chance. And anyway, Davis is right: imagine what we could learn from them.’

  ‘If it can even be done.’

  ‘It can be done,’ Jay says. ‘You know it can be done.’

  ‘You don’t think you’re underestimating the technical problems? Where do we get the genetic material? How do we implant it? How do we bring the child to term?’

  ‘We can work it out. With the resources Davis has at his disposal we can work anything out.’

  ‘But it isn’t just about the technical problems, is it? This is a life we’re talking about. A child.’

  ‘Davis will do it anyway,’ Jay says. ‘If we do it for him perhaps we can learn something. Perhaps we can control it.’

  She shakes her head. ‘That’s your gambit? If we don’t do it somebody else will? Really?’

  Jay stares at her for a long moment. ‘Are you sure we’re talking about the same thing here?’

  She returns his stare. ‘What?’ she asks, incredulous.

  ‘I know this isn’t a great time for you, that this can’t be easy.’

  Kate stares at him coldly.

  Aware he has overplayed his hand, Jay hesitates. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘But you know what I mean.’

  ‘Get fucked, Jay,’ she says, her voice low and hard.

  ‘I just want to be sure.’

  She glares at him.

  ‘All right,’ she says at last. ‘I’ll think about it.’

  Standing up she walks into the bathroom and, closing the door, sits down on the edge of the bath to steady herself. She is shaking, and when she closes her eyes she can taste bile in her throat. It is only when the trembling finally subsides that she stands, and, approaching the sink, brushes her teeth and washes her face, moving through these rituals wordlessly, mechanically, as if it might be possible to erase herself in their repetition. Once she is done she returns to the room and undresses in silence, aware of Jay watching her. But when she climbs into the vast expanse of bed she does not turn to face him or reach out to touch him, unwilling to let the distance between them be bridged.

  It has not always been like this between them. When they first met, seven years ago, Kate had just returned from California for an interview. She was in two minds about the job: when she left Sydney a decade earlier she had done so without regret, and the thought of returning to a place where her old life was so close at hand made her uneasy. Yet the prospect of a five-year research appointment was too attractive to pass up.

  Their first encounter was at the lecture she was required to give as part of the selection process. She was nervous, keenly aware her years away and lack of contacts had made her an outside candidate, but after deciding to emphasise her research profile by approaching the lecture relatively formally she was dismayed to realise the audience seemed to have found her cold, mechanical. Following a couple of desultory questions from the head of department and a member of the selection committee silence fell, until finally Jay spoke up with a series of queries that she quickly realised were designed to open up the discussion in a way that allowed her to seem warmer, more expansive.

  After the lecture he approached her. ‘I’m Jay,’ he said. ‘Jay Gunasekera.’ He was slim, handsome, his thick black hair stylishly cut.

  She shook his hand. ‘Thank you for that.’

  ‘Don’t worry. It’s not about you,’ he said, smiling. ‘There’s talk of funding cuts. They’re all in a panic.’

  To her surprise she found herself smiling as well. ‘Well I suppose that’s good news.’

  Somewhat to her surprise she got the position. But although she half-hoped to run into him again, she had been back in Sydney for almost a month before she bumped into him amidst the evening tide of people heading up Abercrombie Street towards Redfern station. He greeted her warmly, delightedly, and before long they were deep in conversation.

  When they disembarked at the same stop he suggested they have a drink some time, his offer so casual that it was not until later Kate realised he had been asking her out. Over the next few days she wondered about the wisdom of her decision to accept: although she had had occasional partners she was usually careful to avoid possible entanglements at work. In the end, though, she went.

  As they got to know each other better, she came to realise how different they are. The youngest son in a family in which academic success and the ability to handle oneself socially is celebrated, Jay has always approached life with the confidence of one who believes the world is full of possibility. In the early weeks and months of their relationship, Kate found this optimism and certainty liberating to be around, even as she worried she was failing him by being unable to share in it. In time she came to realise it was at least partly a deliberate strategy, a way of navigating a world in which he has always been, to some extent, an outsider. But as the years have passed she has also come to suspect it is also a kind of greed, an assumption others will give themselves over to him and bend to his will.

  She does not like this withholding side of herself, although she understands its source. She was thirteen when she finally understood her mother was an alcoholic. By then Kate had already taken refuge in her own abilities. Instead of friends, she had books, computers, study for tests; instead of love she found comfort in the clarity of numbers, the certainty of facts. Her mother not only didn’t understand it, she was made uneasy by her daughter’s certainty and apparent self-containment. As she grew older Kate came to understand that the times her mother appeared in her room and lay on the bed alongside her or drew a chair up beside her while she was working were not because she loved Kate – they were because she wanted Kate to love her, or at least to nourish her need to be loved. And with this understanding came contempt for all her mother’s desire for approval, the wheedling narcissism at its core.

  It was only when she left home that she finally began to feel free. Even then, of course, it wasn’t possible to entirely escape her history, or the way the gravity well of her mother’s free-as
sociating phone calls and desperate, needy presence constantly threatened to draw Kate back in. By the time Kate was in her third year of university her mother was living alone and unemployed in a flat in La Perouse, and on what would prove her last visit Kate was shocked by the sight of her, the way her skin had grown bruised and fragile, the overdyed hair, the puffiness of her once-striking features. Unable to bear the way her mother’s neediness opened her, made her vulnerable, Kate had finally excused herself and walked out the front door, never to return. Somehow that made it easier to stop answering her calls, to simply absent herself from her mother’s life, a decision she reached without ever quite trying. During her Honours year she changed her mobile number, and practised an almost monastic isolation. She abstained from social media, unwilling to submit to its shallow, greedy chatter, thereby denying her mother any of the usual avenues for finding her. Part of her understood the violence of this act, yet she could not find it in herself to regret it.

  Jay knows some of this but not all. And while she understands he often wishes she could give him more, he does not press her, or not usually. But sometimes she wonders whether she has any more to give, whether the ache inside her is a need or simply a kind of absence.

  The next morning Kate wakes to soft light. Sitting up she sees low cloud has blown in while she slept, the trees on the hillside opposite spectral in the mist. The room warm, quiet, the only sound a faint hum somewhere on the edge of hearing.

  Jay is standing by the window. Seeing she is awake he smiles as if the night before had not happened.

  ‘Davis has arranged for us to go walking with him,’ he says. ‘Then he wants us to review some of the other team’s research.’

  She nods slowly, wondering when he has received this information.

  ‘I haven’t got any walking shoes,’ she says.

  He picks up her robe and hands it to her. ‘Davis says they have boots we can borrow.’

  Once Kate is dressed they return to the room they ate in the night before. Once again, a meal is delivered to their table by a black-clad server. As he disappears back through the door at the back of the room Kate wonders whether they will continue to be cared for in this way if they agree to work on the project. The day before, as Davis had walked them through the buildings, gesturing to the labs and meeting rooms it had been like nothing she had ever seen before.

  ‘Once we’re fully staffed we should have two hundred people based here, although there will be many more working remotely. Finding housing for that many people was always going to be challenging, but we’ve got accommodation for forty on-site and we’ve commissioned housing in various places nearby to try to take some of the strain off the local economy,’ Davis said at one point, before showing them one of the water recycling plants.

  ‘We’re also completely self-sufficient,’ he said. ‘So, in the event of some kind of breakdown, the records and data stored here can be kept safe.’

  ‘Will the staff also be kept safe if there’s a breakdown?’ Kate had asked, but Davis had been unfazed.

  ‘It’s a good question. It depends on whether they’re critical to the facility’s operations or not.’

  Davis appears as they finish eating. He is in jeans again, although this time his T-shirt is emblazoned with the cover of a Velvet Underground album, its faded fabric suggesting it is original, or close to it, and his Converse have been replaced with what look like lightweight hiking boots. Not for the first time she finds herself curious about his decision to spend time here, with them, the notion of the head of a global corporation worth billions of dollars devoting so much personal energy to a project that will generate little or no revenue.

  ‘There’s some weather coming in from the south,’ he says. ‘We should be back before it arrives but we’ll need to keep an eye on it.’

  Kate doesn’t reply. Instead she watches Jay, suddenly aware of how totally he seems to have given himself over to Davis’s charm, the eagerness with which he responds to the younger man’s promptings. She can already sense the pull of this thing, the way the possibility is feeding upon itself, expanding into the world like a genie leaving its bottle. Or a contagion.

  The cloud that lay across the valley an hour earlier is already gone by the time they emerge, and the sun is warm on her face as they head up the hill. Davis walks fast, moving with a quick, practised stride; amidst the grass and low trees and broken stone, he looks even more boyish than he did the day before.

  Halfway up Jay quickens his pace and falls into step with Davis, Kate allows herself to drop behind, enjoying the opportunity to be alone. To the south the sky is blue, its edges curiously faded, a reminder that this is, in some real sense, the end of the world, only empty ocean separating it from the distant ice of Antarctica. To the west the sky is darker, though, heavy cloud gathering. Remembering Davis’s warning about approaching weather, and stories about careless groups of walkers trapped in the mountains by unexpected squalls, she quickens her pace.

  On the far side of the hill a series of ledges descend into a gully in which ferns grow amidst stones and tree trunks, their lushness a surprise after the alpine grasses and low scrub on the far side. The air cool, fragrant with the smell of damp and rot. Near the bottom Davis stops beside a tree.

  ‘Here,’ he says, touching the trunk. ‘What do you see?’

  Jay steps closer. ‘Some kind of lichen?’

  ‘That’s right. It’s based on a species endemic to this area, but it’s been engineered to increase its capacity to absorb CO2.’

  ‘You aren’t worried about releasing it into the environment like this?’ Kate asks.

  Davis glances at her. ‘I think we’re past the point where that’s what we should be concerned about,’ he says.

  Kate is about to reply when Jay interrupts. ‘How quickly does it grow?’ he asks, extending a hand and holding it above the trunk.

  Davis nods approval and Jay touches the plant. ‘We’ve altered its genetic clock to make it faster-growing than conventional lichens. We’re working on refining that process, but thus far we’ve sped up its spread by almost fifty percent.’

  ‘Doesn’t that mean it will out-compete the un-engineered lichens?’ Kate asks.

  ‘Probably. Although we’re looking at a project to engineer multiple species, so we can preserve as much diversity as possible.’

  Davis steps back. ‘There’s something else I want to show you.’

  He leads them along a path that winds up the opposite side of the gully. At the top of the hill a line of scrub blocks the path, but Davis pushes a branch aside and ushers them through. On the far side scrub gives way to rows of seedlings, each encircled within a cylinder of cloth and attached to some kind of sensor.

  ‘What are they?’ Jay asks.

  Davis crouches down next to the nearest of the trees. ‘A modified form of eucalypt. Super-fast-growing, with an enzyme in the structure of the wood so the cellulose sequesters twice as much CO2 as normal timber.’

  Jay kneels beside him. ‘Amazing.’

  Davis nods.

  ‘We’ve got trial plantations at about a hundred sites worldwide, and we’re working with governments to fast-track approvals. As soon as that’s done we’ll begin planting at scale.’

  ‘Will that make a difference?’ Jay asks.

  ‘It’s part of a larger strategy, but yes,’ Davis says.

  Kate stares at the rows of seedlings marching away down the slope. It is astonishing how much Davis has already achieved, and in such secrecy. Resurrected thylacines, mammoths, genetically engineered plants, a plan to re-create the conditions of the Pleistocene in Russia and Canada. How much more is there they aren’t being told? Where else has some version of this conversation taken place? Aware of a shift in temperature, a flickering of the light, she glances upward. The clouds she glimpsed earlier loom overhead, occluding the sky. A cold wind licks through the grass.

  ‘Perhaps we should get back,’ she says.

  Davis stands and glances at h
is watch. ‘I’ve been monitoring the front,’ he says. ‘We should have time. But yes.’

  As they retrace their steps Kate finds herself staring at the trees and plants around them, wondering how many of them have been altered, what other processes are taking place around her. Just below the crest of the hill she stops by a low gumtree. It has grown at an angle, its trunk leaning out into the open space of the valley. She reaches out and touches it, the smooth surface warm beneath her hand. How long has it stood here? Ten years? Twenty? A hundred? Each year spreading its seeds, reproducing itself. She has read about the networks of trees, the slow linkages of genetic memory and shared information that pass between them, connecting them into a shifting whole, the life of which spans centuries. What will it mean if Davis’s trees overtake this one, overtake all of them? Will the engineered trees do the same? And what if they do not? What will be lost? Not just these trees but an entire way of being. Grief grips her, sudden, vertiginous. From the south there is a rumble of thunder, and a drop of rain strikes her, heavy, then another, and another, until all at once it is pouring, the rain sheeting down in an icy wall.

  She turns and runs, bounding down the path. Ahead of her Jay has stopped, and is standing, staring back; as she reaches him he grabs her arm, and the two of them race on together. By the time they stumble into the entry area to find Davis waiting they are both laughing, the tension of a few minutes before wiped away by the sudden ferocity of the weather. Their faces alight, breath steaming in the sudden cold, they shake their hands and wring their hair, sending water flying.

  ‘You see how much we’ve achieved already,’ Davis says as they lean against the wall to remove their muddy boots. In the cold his skin has grown paler, his freckles standing out against it, his sandy hair plastered limply against his skull.

  ‘It’s remarkable,’ Jay says. He doesn’t look at Kate.

  ‘It’s only the beginning.’