by Judith Huang
They hadn’t talked in months, maybe even years. Not properly, anyway—they had talked about curtains, about Sofia’s schedule, about taxes. Did she even know this man any more? A year later, he had disappeared.
Somehow, in her own personal mythology, they were perfect for each other the moment she met him. How this was calibrated she knew very well—the right schools, the right networks, the fact that he was one of the few other Singaporeans with her at their university. He was nice enough, and there had been something magical about the air in Boston—the cold made you want to snuggle up to someone, perhaps. She corrected herself. There must have been a time when she had been more idealistic about love.
Hadn’t they climbed the super-trees together? Hadn’t they walked the countless megacineplexes together, watching 3D movies? Hadn’t she waited for him while he slugged it out in the army for two years? Hadn’t she flown back especially from America to see him? Hadn’t their reunions been wonderful, blissful even? Why, then, in the grand scheme of things, did politics have to get in the way? Why had she frozen him out when he tried so hard to tell her that what they were doing with the Utopia Machine was elitist, was abhorrent, was wrong?
Was he in this building? She was already leaned against the wall, as though hearing his heart beat from the other side of it. Oh Pete, where are you?
Clara always knew that every problem had a solution. She sat now on her hands, trying to warm them. The vent of the air-conditioning was directly above her head, and so she did not quite know what to do about that. Not that there was much space to pace about in anyway. She leaned back, hugged her knees to herself. There were no blankets on the bunk. Hell, there was barely a mattress.
She needed to get in touch with Sofia. Or Peter. Hopefully both. She needed to get Peter to tell her what the hell was going on. What he had done with the Utopia Machine, what he had done so many years ago, why he had disappeared. She felt another pang. Had he really been stewing in prison these seven years? Yet given the sea change in his political views, was it really that surprising if jail was where he had ended up? She pushed the emotions down with the force of her will. No, she could not wallow in that now. That would be a disservice to herself, and to Sofia.
What about her little girl? What could she be up to now? Clara thought carefully. Sofia had to have been involved. She had been particularly nosy about the lab the week before all this happened. After all, Kirk had let slip about the Utopia Machine at dinner that week. And she had been asking about Kirk’s schedule, too. He had possibly let her into the lab, and that was how the machine had gone missing. Clara sighed. That would be so like Sofia, poking her nose where it didn’t belong.
So, order of business, she thought. First, try to contact Peter. Second, try to contact Sofia. Third, find out what happened to Kirk. Fourth, stay strong. Locate the Utopia Machine. Make a new console. Whatever. The list seemed long and impossible. Yet it had to be done.
What wouldn’t she give for a small scrap of paper and a pencil! Somehow, having it in her mind was less than satisfying. Years of netbox reliance meant she barely knew how to think without phrasing it for public consumption. Perhaps she would ask the guard for some paper. And perhaps she could somehow wheedle some information about Peter from him. Perhaps he was even in the building. That might make things a little more hopeful. She could not, would not despair. There was too much at stake. Curse the man she married! It was his fault their daughter was like this. It is all well and fine to be rebellious, she thought, when there isn’t a whole world at stake.
Outside the cell, the Gurkha guard shifted his weight and coughed. Clara felt her plan wither a little. She didn’t even know how to speak his language. Well, he must understand commands in English, but she knew that an impassioned plea in their language would probably be more effective. She found herself briefly wondering how they even got along in that compound of theirs she had heard of, completely isolated from the rest of the country. There was little hope for a human connection here.
Then she thought better of it. Perhaps she could do something non-verbal that would win over his trust. She wished she had something—anything, that could make a mark on something else. She didn’t even have anything sharp to cut herself with.
Suddenly she was overcome with a rush of weariness. She had lost track of the time, the first thing she had planned to keep track of. How long before she lost track of the days, too? There was no night or day in this place. Was she supposed to be sleeping or eating or shitting or waking? Who even knew?
She thought about it for a while. She got off the bed and onto the ground. Using her finger, she traced a line in the dust on the floor. It formed a dark line, just visible. It had been a really long time since she had done any art. But she actually knew she had been good at it. Hell, she had even taken a drawing class in college during senior year, just for the heck of it and also, she had secretly hoped, as a gut course. She had got a C, much to her chagrin.
What would she draw?
Through the bars, she could see the Gurkha’s face. He was very young, perhaps in his mid-twenties at the most. He was taller than Peter, but not by much. His face was blank—probably from years of training to erase all expression from his face. She studied his face curiously. She hadn’t been this interested in another person for a long, long time. It was the quality of this place—it made you intensely focused on one thing, like a spotlight shining in a dark place.
She traced his nose first. It was not so different from Peter’s nose, she thought. A little flat on top, broad at the bottom. A well-appointed one. He had small eyes, epicanthic folds. The skin around his eyes was quite flat and smooth. Clara touched her own eyelids, feeling the gradient of them, the way her drawing professor had taught her in blind drawing. She moved to his throat—a prominent Adam’s apple, taut neck. The floor was grimy, good for her purposes. The sketch took shape dimly.
She thought she had seen him looking out of the corner of his eye. He was still consummately professional, but perhaps his interest had been piqued. When she tried to catch his eye, his gaze flickered a little, and his mouth twitched a tiny fragment.
She gave him a smile. In the light of the single bulb, the portrait was dim, but there was somehow something soft about the eyes. Not bad, she thought, for the first sketch in twenty years, probably.
Chapter 21: The Boar
Sofia looked out into the gloaming. The sun had nearly set; the undergrowth on Pulau Ubin was a blackish green, and the darkness was thickening. The ground was littered with a thick layer of brown leaves, like an old carpet of infinite depth. It crunched under their feet, giving them away with every step they took. Father Lang was lagging behind her and Uncle Kirk, so she decided to walk a little more slowly. There was something in the trees.
A snort. Sofia shivered. Uncle Kirk was right by her elbow. Sniffing sounds, something scuffling the ground in the middle distance, getting closer. It was a dark shape, low, but large. And it was coming towards them. Eyes glinted in the darkness.
Sofia bit her tongue to keep from exclaiming when it stepped into a patch of light. An enormous black boar charged straight at them. Suddenly, Uncle Kirk leapt into action. He flung himself forward, catching the wild boar by surprise. It snorted and kicked, but Uncle Kirk had it clamped down by the flanks.
“Sofia! The knife—”
Sofia scrambled to unzip her backpack. Knife…knife… Her fingers felt the sharp blade. “Ouch!” It drew a little blood, but in a second she had flung it to Uncle Kirk, who grabbed it by the handle.
The pig was snorting and squealing in terror, pawing at the ground helplessly. Uncle Kirk plunged the blade into the creature’s neck. Sofia stifled a scream as the squealing intensified and seemed to rattle the very leaves of the trees.
“Are you okay?” she cried, and examined his hand, which was bleeding. Father Lang had caught up and was also next to her.
“I’m okay,” he said, still gasping for breath. The smell of blood hung heavily in the a
ir, and the crickets suddenly sounded closer and denser.
“You’ll need something to clean that up,” said Father Lang.
“I’ll go get some water from the beach,” said Sofia, hurrying off in that direction. She didn’t really want to be near the carcass, which was attracting a large swarm of flies.
*
“Why did you kill it?” Father Lang asked Kirk, after Sofia had left them.
“It was charging at me,” panted Kirk, sweat still streaming down from his face and down onto the carcass as he carved it. “And we could use the meat. It’s not like you can get it in the supermarket here.”
“Have you killed before?”
“Yeah… Just a few times with my father. He taught me to shoot and carve, back in the States.”
“Why did you leave America?” asked Father Lang as Kirk carved the boar, carefully removing its entrails like a specimen in his laboratory.
“I ask myself that all the time,” said Kirk thoughtfully. “I never come up with the same answer. There’s always this muddle of reasons for leaving a place, isn’t there? I mean, unless you’re being chased down by the government, of course. Well, let me see—there was the fact that my research was frankly not getting anywhere. I was interested in something completely different from what I was doing my PhD in, so it wasn’t anyone’s surprise when I came up with a null hypothesis for my doctorate. That meant I couldn’t get a good tenure-track job. I was just interested in other things.”
“Experimental Theology?”
“That was part of it, but it was so difficult to get funding… Over here, it’s easy. Well, when you haven’t run afoul of the government, and are a foreigner. The Americans just didn’t understand the potential of what I was doing.” He paused to string up the carcass. “Then, there were the more…personal reasons. I mean, you know about Shanghai and Beijing. But you probably didn’t hear about what really happened in Nanjing, or in Fuzhou, or in Szechuan. I mean, what was going on at the ground level, not in the cities…”
Father Lang bowed his head in sorrow. Many in his congregation had lost friends and family and their homes in the ruthless genocides of Beijing and Shanghai. He could still not erase the endless loop of images from his mind—the horrible sores, the terrible deformities he had seen on the streams.
He remembered like it was yesterday, ministering to the twenty refugees who had, against all reason and probability, made it to Singapore by boat from the ports of Fujian, and those had only been involved in the secondary blasts. He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear about what really happened in the rural regions of Fuzhou or Szechuan or Nanjing.
Kirk continued. “Well, besides the major metropolitan bio attacks there were also more primitive techniques, you know, for the more sparsely populated regions. Terrorists were deployed—well, not terrorists, that’s just what they called them. Of course, they were mercenaries—SEALs, chain gangs of convicts, etc. They were set loose in the country. With psychotropic drugs. But worst of all were the highly modified ones. I was involved in creating those soldiers—indirectly, of course—I just wrote the basic papers in the field. The cultivation of amorality for the greater good,” he said, bitterly. “As if. Of course, I didn’t see it at the time.”
He stabbed at the pig, and dark blood spattered on the ground. “I was a coward. I didn’t want to face up to what I’d done. In fact…” His face hardened. “I didn’t know what I was doing. Until…until… I guess you could say I fell in love with one of the volunteers. And that person…changed. And that was when I realised the horror of what we’d been doing… The kind of creature we had created.”
“I don’t understand,” said Father Lang, softly. “You mean you were building a new species? Of soldiers?”
“It isn’t that surprising, is it?” asked Kirk, his voice bitter. “People have been trying for millennia. Stalin tried it. This guy…Ilya Ivanov. You heard of him? Twentieth-century Frankenstein.”
“I’m not familiar with him.”
“You’ve heard of Pavlov—you know, the guy who discovered you could make dogs drool via conditioning?”
Father Lang nodded.
“Well, he was a great admirer of Ivanov. Built his research on him. Stalin had him breed human women with male apes; he used political prisoners, dissidents…that sort of thing, so who knows, right? But he did it to create a perfect soldier—ruthless, brutal, brainless, practical. He wasn’t interested in making the new ‘socialist man’ of the Marxist tracts—I mean, who wants a bunch of Aristotles and Confuciuses running around? Recipe for disaster, really, if you ask me. Just imagine if everyone were Socrates. Or St Paul. You’d have everyone stoning everyone else, and setting fire to things, convinced they were the ones in the right. No, Stalin was far more practical. He wanted obedient, brainless, brutish soldiers at his command.”
Father Lang sputtered in disbelief. “Did he succeed?”
“Nope, he failed. So Ivanov died in Siberia. He would have been better off sticking to horse-breeding, which was how he gained his reputation in the first place. Government scientists in totalitarian regimes live precarious lives.” Kirk sighed and wiped the knife on his trouser leg. “But anyway, where the Russians failed in the twentieth century, the Americans succeeded in the twenty-first century. The problem with the Russians was that they only looked at genetics. At ‘nature’. The Americans looked to nurture in addition to having superior genetics programmes, after they finished mapping the human genome.
“A cocktail of psychotropic drugs. Makes your skin crawl, makes you want to rip it off when you stop taking it, which makes the brutes all the more motivated. Also, they have virtual-reality killing games piped into their consciousness from birth, so that’s all they know, really. They’re incredibly efficient.” There was a note of bitter admiration in Kirk’s voice.
Father Lang stared at the dead pig. All of a sudden, vomit welled up in his throat and hot tears in his eyes. He gagged, and then bent on all fours on the sand. Kirk looked up, alarmed by the choking noise, and rushed to his side.
“Geez, Father, I’m so sorry! I…I…” Kirk looked around wildly. “Here, have some water…”
Father Lang was still sputtering on the ground. His stomach had been empty, so he didn’t throw up much. But the bitterness laced his mouth, the bile tracing its path down his gullet. He felt Kirk’s arm steady him. He brushed it off, and walked briskly into the jungle, not looking back at the white man.
Kirk stared after him, the knife forgotten in his hand.
*
Sofia emerged from the bushes, holding a small coconut shell with water in it. She handed it to Uncle Kirk, who cleaned his wound up silently.
That night, they feasted on boar.
They trekked to a secluded beach, wild boar in tow. Father Lang got the campfire going with dried leaves and sticks. Sofia never ceased to be amazed at the resourcefulness of the priest. “Where’d you learn to do that?” she asked, fascinated, watching the sparks kindle.
“I pick up stuff here and there,” he laughed, but wouldn’t explain any further when she asked. They dried their things, thankful for the heat. As the sun set, the island actually became quite chilly.
Sofia wolfed down the meat. It wasn’t terribly well cooked, so it tasted quite rubbery and in parts, raw, and they didn’t have much in the way of spices to flavour it, but it was really good to have a square meal, especially after three days. The last time she had had anything substantial was at Ah Tan’s, and that had been poor fare compared with what she was used to.
When they were done, Sofia sighed in satisfaction and stretched herself out on the sand. It was rough sand, not like the kind you got in the Canopies, which was smooth and silky, and almost certainly not actual sand. But somehow Sofia liked the rough feel to it. She looked up into the sky. She could see the little trails the pods and low-flying satellites were making, but, to her surprise, she could also see quite a few stars. She hadn’t been able to see a single one (except maybe Venus, which was n
ot a star) on the mainland. She pointed up. “Look! Stars….”
Uncle Kirk’s ears picked up. He joined her, sprawling out on his back.
“Wow, I haven’t seen so many in a really long time,” he said, his voice laced with regret. “Of course, I could have just gone to one of the telescopes, but I never had the time… Damn, sometimes you just forget the point of your work, huh. When I was a kid, back in Amherst, I used to star-gaze all the time.”
“Tell me a bit more about your work,” said Father Lang.
“Well, I’m a biophysicist,” said Uncle Kirk. “I know, people don’t use that term very often. But that’s what I do.”
“Why ‘bio’?” asked Father Lang curiously.
“It’s a long story,” said Uncle Kirk with a bitter laugh. “You see, the unspoken scandal about physics is that we are actually talking about human beings. We forget instantly when we say the word ‘physics’ that we are not just talking about the little invisible particles that no one has really seen, or even just about humongous galaxies and universes that we also don’t actually see. We are talking about us. Because we are, after all, composed of those mysterious particles that physicists study. And that is something most physicists would be the first to block out, because they are distrustful of the quasi-religious weird-ass mumbo jumbo that issues forth from anything at the quantum level, and prefer to think of themselves as rational beings. This is why I’ve been trying to coin the word Biophysics, but it simply hasn’t caught on, even after years of campaigning. It makes getting funding very troublesome.”
“That’s really interesting,” said Father Lang.