by Paul McAuley
By now, she had raced ahead of her teacher’s biology lessons. She was tinkering with the development of flies, using customised splicing kits. Creating maggots that did not pupate but continued to eat and grow; maggots that pupated but did not undergo aptosis and so were not able to develop further; maggots with metabolic kinks which meant that they processed food inefficiently and grew very slowly, some able to pupate, others not. The giant maggots and developmentally challenged pupae quickly died; only half-starved, slow-growing maggots lived significantly longer than ordinary flies. The Child couldn’t tinker with her own genetic make-up because the various tools she needed – tailored viruses and micro-RNAs, splicing protocols, telomere treatments, and so on – were strictly licensed by the government. And gene wizards and green saints jealously guarded their research, especially the secrets which had extended their lives. Although the Child had sent flattering messages to various gene wizards employed by the Peixoto family, only a few had replied, and those with benign vagueness that recognised the Child’s interest but did nothing to satisfy her thirst for knowledge. So she set about educating herself, soaking up gigabytes of old, unrestricted literature on human longevity, and when her work on maggots confirmed the work of certain early pioneers, she decided that she could take one positive step towards her goal, and began to cut down her food intake.
It wasn’t easy to eat less with her ama clucking over her, but the Child discovered that she could make herself throw up after meals, with a finger down her throat at first, then, when that no longer worked because she’d lost her gag reflex, with soapy water. She didn’t do this every day. She had a strict plan, and the will to discipline herself. To take charge of her body and her destiny. She dosed herself with a complex mix of vitamins, mineral supplements and omega-3 oils spun by the hospital’s maker. She charted changes in her weight. She studied herself in the mirror every day, felt her ribs and the horns of her pelvis. She worked on her maggots and flies. She tried to devise a plan to trick Vidal Francisca into ordering splicing templates for human genes through the sugar-cane plantation’s laboratory, but she couldn’t work out how to get past the fearsome government licensing restrictions.
It was her use of the hospital maker that gave her away. One of the technicians discovered the simple programs she’d written, and told her mother; her mother confronted her, and it all came out. The dieting and the ideas about tinkering with her own genome, her plan to remain a child for ever.
Maria Hong-Owen blamed herself. For being too caught up in her work. For failing to spot her daughter’s obsession, for failing to realise that her skinniness was something more than a phase in her development. She talked with the Child about her experiments and tried to rationalise away her fears, but the Child was stubborn and refused to listen to reason, refused to accept that she was risking her health to no good purpose. They fought each other to unsatisfactory truces, the Child by turns sulky and shrill, Maria tired and headachy after working long hours in the hospital, where she spent more than half her time arguing with the hospital board about emergency measures, or with remote officials about essential supplies that had never been sent or had been lost somewhere in the supply chain, or had been hijacked by wildsiders or bandits. At last, alarmed by her daughter’s flat insistence that she knew better than anyone else about matters that she was far too young to properly understand, Maria said that she would receive some instruction from Father Caetano.
Here is one whose life is not even written in water. One we must create from first principles. A violation of our rules, yes, but necessary if we are to achieve our aims. Besides, there was a church in the little town, and so there must have been a priest or two, and we imagine this one darkly handsome, vigorous and practical, able to navigate the rapids and swift currents of the river and to hike through kilometres of forest and dead zones as he made the rounds of his extended parish.
Like so many priests in the wilderness, Father Stephanos Caetano was a Jesuit, educated in the venerable Colégio Santo Inácio in Rio de Janeiro. His work in São Gabriel da Cachoeira had not given him much opportunity for debating theological niceties, but he tried to do his best by the Child. See them now, sitting in the shaded veranda of his bungalow, talking, sipping iced lemonade made by Father Caetano’s wife, a plump homely woman who worked in the hospital’s administration, while out in the hot bright little walled garden bees and hummingbirds attend flowering bushes sparingly watered from the dwindling river.
‘He pretends to be interested in my experiments,’ the Child told Roberto, the next day. ‘But even though I explained everything three different ways, he doesn’t really understand it.’
‘Well, I don’t really understand it either.’
‘Only because you can’t be bothered to.’
Roberto shrugged. A lanky teenager dressed in a one-piece white tracksuit and running shoes, just returned from his daily run. His wiry hair was matted with sweat; his dark skin shone. He’d always run everywhere as a kid, driven by impatience and an excess of energy that the boundaries and routines of the small town couldn’t contain, and he still ran now, at least ten kilometres a day. Besides an interest in science, he and the Child shared an ambition to escape the town and make their mark on the wider world. Roberto was already on his way. He’d aced the vestibular for the Institute of Physics at the Federal University of São Paulo, won a scholarship. In a few weeks, at the end of summer, he’d be gone, on a trajectory that the Child longed to follow.
He said, ‘Is it so bad, if all you’re doing is boring him with biology?’
‘He keeps bringing God into it.’
‘Priests have a habit of doing that.’
‘I told him about spandrels,’ she said. ‘The old idea that certain properties of organisms are accidental byproducts of function and form, just as the highly decorated spandrels between adjacent arches in cathedrals are accidents of geometry. I told him that our appreciation of beauty in all its forms, our arts, might also be spandrels.’
‘You were trying to stir him up.’
‘I was bored. I wondered if it was possible that religion was a spandrel. He said that all forms of art were ways of praising creation. And therefore, of praising the Creator. So how could I be sure, he said, that they were truly accidental?’
‘He isn’t stupid,’ Roberto said.
‘I have to see him again,’ the Child said. ‘Over and over. Until I’m turned into a good little Christian.’
‘That will take some time.’
‘And meanwhile you’ll be in São Paulo, free as a bird.’
‘Ask him about his telescope,’ Roberto said.
‘He has a telescope?’
‘A good one. Twenty-centimetre reflector. Ask him to show you the stars and planets. You’ll learn something useful, and it’ll keep him off the topic of G-O-D.’
See the Child and the priest, then, sitting on the parched lawn of the bungalow in the hot summer night, leaning over a slate that displayed the telescope’s images, directing it this way and that. Gazing at double stars and nebulae, at the Magellanic Clouds and Andromeda, watching for shooting stars, studying the Moon’s rugged face.
That summer Jupiter was as close to Earth as it ever got: the brightest star in the sky, rising like a lamp in the east. The telescope easily resolved the Galilean moons and Father Caetano told the Child the story of their discovery by the father of astronomy, Galileo Galilei: how that venerable scientist had realised that their shifting patterns meant they were not distant stars that by chance inhabited the same patch of sky as the planet, but were moons orbiting it. That if moons orbited Jupiter, Earth was not, as the Church asserted, the centre of the cosmos. Galileo, headstrong and unskilled in diplomacy, had angered the Church by publishing his ideas after explicit warnings to abandon them; he’d been forced to recant, but had been vindicated after his death, Father Caetano said, and the Church had long ago accommodated itself to his discovery, and to the discoveries of many other scientists.
This was a point he returned to over and again, one the Child had disputed before. The Church invoked absolute truths encoded in texts which could not be questioned because they proceeded from divine revelation, while all scientific theories were provisional and subject to modification and dispute as more data was gathered: absolute scientific truth was like the speed of light, a value which could be approached but never reached. And so Father Caetano’s so-called reconciliation was entirely on the terms of the Church, which cut and adjusted the truth of the world to fit into the frame of its own proclaimed truth.
But the Child was beginning to learn something about diplomacy and strategy, about when it was worth arguing a point and when it was not. So this time she kept her silence, the moment passed, and Father Caetano went on to talk about the properties of the four moons – fiery Io; Europa, with its ocean locked under a thin crust of ice; Ganymede, largest of all the moons in the Solar System, with a smaller ocean beneath a thicker crust of ice and rock; deep-frozen, battered Callisto – and the people who lived on Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, and on the moons of Saturn.
They were Outers, descendants of rich and powerful families who had fled to the Moon to escape the ecological and political disaster of the Overturn. When Earth’s three major power blocs had turned their attention towards the Moon, the settlers had moved on, some to Mars, the rest to the moons of Jupiter, and then Saturn. The Martians had been destroyed after they’d declared war on Earth; the Outers living on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn were more peaceable, and quarantined besides by distance. They’d been living there for more than a century. Now, according to Father Caetano, there was talk of reconciliation.
‘Not because our leaders want to welcome them back to the rest of the human race, from which they exiled themselves in a selfish act of self-preservation. But because they have developed technologies that would be very useful to us in very many ways, and could make a great deal of money for people who already have too much money.’
Father Caetano talked on, explaining that many of the Outers had lost their belief in God, and thought of themselves as gods (‘with a small “g”’) because their antecedents had meddled with their genomes.
‘They claim to be smarter and kinder than we are. To be more moral. I cannot say if it is true. Certainly, they are vainer than us, to think such things of themselves. Such vanity is always a sin and an affront to God.’
‘Even if it’s true?’
Father Caetano and the Child were sitting side by side, faces lit by the slate on the table before them, with its faintly restless telescopic image of Jupiter. A bright quarter-moon was cocked above the shadows of the trees at the far end of the garden.
‘Especially if it’s true,’ Father Caetano said. ‘If you are clever and kind, you would not boast about it to those not as gifted as you. Because it would not be clever, and it certainly wouldn’t be kind. Many people don’t like the Outers for exactly that reason.’
‘But if they are cleverer, they could help us,’ the Child said.
‘Cleverness isn’t everything. Without a proper moral compass, without proper restraint, scientific enquiry can too easily lead to the creation of monsters.’
‘Have any of them ever visited Earth?’
It gave the Child a funny feeling to think that people like her were right now walking around on small icy moons in space suits, living in domed cities, tinkering with their biological destiny.
‘If you want to meet one, your best chance is to go to Brasília,’ Father Caetano said. ‘That’s where the ambassadorial missions are. They are tall and mostly pale, I hear. And must wear skeletons of metal and carbon fibre, because they grew up in places where the gravity is very weak. So they are weak too. Unable to move around by themselves. If they are gods, they must be very poor gods, I think.’
Father Caetano enjoyed his conversations with the eager young girl. He believed that her challenging mixture of naivety and sharp and original insights helped him to examine and renew his faith, and he also believed that he was doing good, that he was saving her soul from being indelibly marked by the sin of pride. We, who created him and set him in motion, believed it too. He was our agent, after all.
The Child had been so cooperative during her talks with Father Caetano that her mother decided that she should be rewarded. Once a month, Maria and a nurse from the hospital travelled upriver with Father Caetano, to visit those of his parishioners who had refused to move to São Gabriel da Cachoeira when the trouble with the wildsiders had spread from the mountains to the west. The Child could go with them on the next trip. She would help Father Caetano at the service, assist her mother at the field clinic, and be allowed to do a little botanising amongst the ruins.
Picture the Child, then, sitting in the shade of the canvas awning of a skiff making its way upriver. The nurse in front with two soldiers; Maria at the stern with Father Caetano, who was dressed in jeans and a short-sleeved shirt instead of his soutane, his eyes masked with sunglasses, the tiller of the skiff’s outboard motor tucked under his arm.
Trees pressed along both sides of the river, standing above sandbanks and stretches of crazed mud and shoals of rocks exposed by the drought. It was seven in the morning, and already hot. The sun had levered itself above the horizon an hour ago and now it glared at eye level. Unblinking, tireless. And it had only just begun its work for the day.
The Child soon grew tired of watching the black water for any sign of the River Folk. A few small birds picking along the water margin. Once a flock of parrots rose up, disturbed by the noise of the motor, flying away through green shadows like a shower of red and gold. Caymans lying on a sandbar like logs clad in armour. Otherwise, only the river and the trees and the hot sky.
At last, the river narrowed and cliffs rose up on either side, casting everything into deep shadow, and the skiff was thrusting up a ladder of muscular currents pouring between big wet rocks. Pausing in pools of water stilled by backwash as if to gather itself, pushing on. The Child held on to her bench as the little craft juddered and bounced and slewed; the nurse, a woman barely twice the Child’s age, squeaked and flung her arms around one of the soldiers. At last the skiff breasted the last of the rapids and unzipped a creamy wake along the middle of the river. The cliffs fell back and the skiff rounded a wide bend and the ruins of Santo João do Rio Negro spread across the far shore.
The town had been built two hundred years ago, funded by a Chinese corporation that had planted huge tracts of genetically modified hardwood trees. Felled trees had been rafted downriver to the town’s sawmills, and timber had been transported east along a broad highway driven straight through the forest. All that had ended in the great upheaval of the Overturn. The R&R Corps had demolished the sawmills and warehouse sheds along the waterfront, but had left the rest of the town alone. Much of it had long since returned to nature. Avenues and squares and parks choked with scrub and weeds. Apartment blocks and houses empty shells, every window broken, roofs collapsed, concrete crumbling from rusting rebar. Most had fallen into mounds of rubble overgrown by bushes and vines and pioneer trees, lumpy tracts of secondary growth burned by the drought, but a few blocks behind the waterfront had been colonised and partly rebuilt by indigenous people who had never left the area, or who had returned after the Overturn, helped by government initiatives of the past century. Not to repopulate the Amazon basin as before, but to establish small, ecologically sustainable communities that would help the R&R Corps to rewild the ecosystem, turn dead zones into grassland, and grassland into rainforest.
Mass was held in the open air, in a space cleared from scrub. A block of stone shaped and carved by the townspeople served as an altar; the congregation, mostly old men and women, sat on the hard red earth. The Child rang the bell that told the congregation when to stand and when to sit, held the little tray under the chin of each communicant so that not a crumb of the Host would fall on the ground; then, while Father Caetano heard confessions, she helped her mother and the nurse at their cl
inic.
When the last patient had been dealt with, Maria told her daughter that they had an hour before the skiff left – they could look for specimens in the ruins. The Child knew that this was a ploy to flatter and placate her, but the chance to explore was too good to refuse.
See Maria and the Child walking away from the river, down a path beaten through tall dry grasses towards a cluster of ruined apartment buildings. It was late in the afternoon, and very hot. The sky white with dust. The sun blazing down. The tinny surf of cicadas all around. One of the soldiers followed them, his carbine slung upside down over his shoulder, his camo gear blending with the brittle browns and yellows of the grass.
Vines curtained the ruins; bushes and small trees gripped the tops of walls. Everything dead and dry, seared by the sun. Little lizards flicked away over tumbled blocks of concrete, no different from the lizards in the hospital compound. A perfectly ordinary buzzard circled overhead.
The Child discovered a mosaic mural behind a curtain of withered vines and used a handful of dry grass to brush away dirt, revealing a stylised whale spouting amongst blue waves. Underneath it, picked out in white tesserae, was a date: Agosto 2032. More than a century and a half ago. She tried to imagine herself standing on that very same spot in a hundred and fifty years. It wasn’t impossible. Many gene wizards and green saints were older than that now. Then she tried to imagine returning in a thousand and a half years . . .
The young soldier cleared his throat, said that it was time to go back. The Child’s protests were half-hearted. She would have liked to have reached the line of green trees that ran in a straight line a few blocks away, but she was hot and tired, and felt oppressed by the deep sense of time locked in the ruins, of the dead past all around her. Everything we have comes from the dead. We take so much from them, and never thank them, and they sink into obscurity, nameless, numberless, forgotten. She was beginning to understand that to refuse that fate was no easy task.