Luminous

by Greg Egan

  She answered the door. I introduced myself, and showed her my ID. She seemed nervous, but not surprised.

  She said, ‘I still find it galling to have to deal with people like you.’

  ‘People like—?’

  ‘I was opposed to privatising the police force. I helped organise some of the marches.’

  She would have been fourteen years old at the time – a precocious political activist.

  She let me in, begrudgingly. The living room was modestly furnished, with a terminal on a desk in one corner.

  I said, ‘I’m investigating the bombing of Life Enhancement International. You used to work for them, up until about four years ago. Is that correct?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can you tell me why you left?’

  She repeated what I knew about the transfer of her project to the Amarillo division. She answered every question directly, looking me straight in the eye; she still appeared nervous, but she seemed to be trying to read some vital piece of information from my demeanour. Wondering if I’d traced the cobalt?

  ‘What were you doing on the North Ryde premises at two in the morning, two days before you were sacked?’

  She said, ‘I wanted to find out what LEI were planning for the new building. I wanted to know why they didn’t want me to stick around.’

  ‘Your job was moved to Texas.’

  She laughed drily. ‘The work wasn’t that specialised. I could have swapped jobs with someone who wanted to travel to the States. It would have been the perfect solution, and there would have been plenty of people more than happy to trade places with me. But no, that wasn’t allowed.’

  ‘So … did you find the answer?’

  ‘Not that night. But later, yes.’

  I said carefully, ‘So you knew what LEI were doing in Lane Cove?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How did you discover that?’

  ‘I kept an ear to the ground. Nobody who’d stayed on would have told me directly, but word leaked out, eventually. About a year ago.’

  ‘Three years after you’d left? Why were you still interested? Did you think there was a market for the information?’

  She said, ‘Put your notepad in the bathroom sink and run the tap on it.’

  I hesitated, then complied. When I returned to the living room, she had her face in her hands. She looked up at me grimly.

  ‘Why was I still interested? Because I wanted to know why every project with any lesbian or gay team members was being transferred out of the division. I wanted to know if that was pure coincidence. Or not.’

  I felt a sudden chill in the pit of my stomach. I said, ‘If you had some problem with discrimination, there are avenues you could have—’

  Mendelsohn shook her head impatiently. ‘LEI were never discriminatory. They didn’t sack anyone who was willing to move – and they always transferred the entire team; there was nothing so crude as picking out individuals by sexual preference. And they had a rationalisation for everything: projects were being regrouped between divisions to facilitate ‘‘synergistic cross-pollination’’. And if that sounds like pretentious bullshit, it was – but it was plausible pretentious bullshit. Other corporations have adopted far more ridiculous schemes, in perfect sincerity.’

  ‘But if it wasn’t a matter of discrimination … why should LEI want to force people out of one particular division—?’

  I think I’d finally guessed the answer, even as I said those words, but I needed to hear her spell it out, before I could really believe it.

  Mendelsohn must have been practising her version for non-biochemists; she had it down pat. ‘When people are subject to stress – physical or emotional – the levels of certain substances in the bloodstream increase. Cortisol and adrenaline, mainly. Adrenaline has a rapid, short-term effect on the nervous system. Cortisol works on a much longer time frame, modulating all kinds of bodily processes, adapting them for hard times: injury, fatigue, whatever. If the stress is prolonged, someone’s cortisol can be elevated for days, or weeks, or months.

  ‘High enough levels of cortisol, in the bloodstream of a pregnant woman, can cross the placental barrier and interact with the hormonal system of the developing foetus. There are parts of the brain where embryonic development is switched into one of two possible pathways, by hormones released by the foetal testes or ovaries. The parts of the brain that control body image and the parts that control sexual preference. Female embryos usually develop a brain wired with a self-image of a female body, and the strongest potential for sexual attraction towards males. Male embryos, vice versa. And it’s the sex hormones in the foetal bloodstream which let the growing neurons know the gender of the embryo, and which wiring pattern to adopt.

  ‘Cortisol can interfere with this process. The precise interactions are complex, but the ultimate effect depends on the timing; different parts of the brain are switched into gender-specific versions at different stages of development. So stress at different times during pregnancy leads to different patterns of sexual preference and body image in the child: homosexual, bisexual, transsexual.

  ‘Obviously, a lot depends on the mother’s biochemistry. Pregnancy itself is stressful, but everyone responds to that differently. The first sign that cortisol might have an effect came in studies in the 1980s, on the children of German women who’d been pregnant during the most intense bombing raids of World War II, when the stress was so great that the effect showed through despite individual differences. In the nineties, researchers thought they’d found a gene which determined male homosexuality, but it was always maternally inherited – and it turned out to be influencing the mother’s stress response, rather than acting directly on the child.

  ‘If maternal cortisol, and other stress hormones, were kept from reaching the foetus, then the gender of the brain would always match the gender of the body in every respect. All of the present variation would be wiped out.’

  I was shaken, but I don’t think I let it show. Everything she said rang true; I didn’t doubt a word of it. I’d always known that sexual preference was decided before birth. I’d known that I was gay myself by the age of seven. I’d never sought out the elaborate biological details, though, because I’d never believed that the tedious mechanics of the process could ever matter to me. What turned my blood to ice was not finally learning the neuroembryology of desire. The shock was discovering that LEI planned to reach into the womb and take control of it.

  I pressed on with the questioning in a kind of trance, putting my own feelings into suspended animation.

  I said, ‘LEI’s barrier is for filtering out viruses and toxins. You’re talking about a natural substance which has been present for millions of years—’

  ‘LEI’s barrier will keep out everything they deem nonessential. The foetus doesn’t need maternal cortisol in order to survive. If LEI don’t explicitly include transporters for it, it won’t get through. And I’ll give you one guess what their plans are.’

  I said, ‘You’re being paranoid. You think LEI would invest millions of dollars just to take part in a conspiracy to rid the world of homosexuals?’

  Mendelsohn looked at me pityingly. ‘It’s not a conspiracy. It’s a marketing opportunity. LEI don’t give a shit about the sexual politics. They could put in cortisol transporters and sell the barrier as an anti-viral, anti-drug, anti-pollution screen. Or they could leave them out and sell it as all of that – plus a means of guaranteeing a heterosexual child. Which do you think would earn the most money? ’

  That question hit a nerve; I said angrily, ‘And you had so little faith in people’s choice that you bombed the laboratory so that no one would ever have the chance to decide?’

  Mendelsohn’s expression turned stony. ‘I did not bomb LEI. Or irradiate their freezer.’

  ‘No? We’ve traced the cobalt 60 to Federation Centennial.’

  She looked stunned for a moment, then she said, ‘Congratulations. Six thousand other people work there, you know. I’m obvi
ously not the only one of them who’s discovered what LEI is up to.’

  ‘You’re the only one with access to the Biofile vault. What do you expect me to believe? That having learnt about this project, you were going to do absolutely nothing about it?’

  ‘Of course not! And I still plan to publicise what they’re doing. Let people know what it will mean. Try to get the issue debated before the product appears in a blaze of misinformation.’

  ‘You said you’ve known about the work for a year.’

  ‘Yes – and I’ve spent most of that time trying to verify all the facts, before opening my big mouth. Nothing would have been stupider than going public with half-baked rumours. I’ve only told about a dozen people so far, but we were going to launch a big publicity campaign to coincide with this year’s Mardi Gras. Although now, with the bombing, everything’s a thousand times more complicated.’ She spread her hands in a gesture of helplessness. ‘But we still have to do what we can, to try to keep the worst from happening.’

  ‘The worst?’

  ‘Separatism. Paranoia. Homosexuality redefined as pathological. Lesbians and sympathetic straight women looking for their own technological means to guarantee the survival of the culture … while the religious far-right try to prosecute them for poisoning their babies … with a substance God’s been happily ‘‘poisoning’’ babies with for the last few thousand years. Sexual tourists travelling from wealthy countries where the technology is in use, to poorer countries where it isn’t.’

  I was sickened by the vision she was painting, but I pushed on. ‘These dozen friends of yours—?’

  Mendelsohn said dispassionately, ‘Go fuck yourself. I’ve got nothing more to say to you. I’ve told you the truth. I’m not a criminal. And I think you’d better leave.’

  I went to the bathroom and collected my notepad. In the doorway, I said, ‘If you’re not a criminal, why are you so hard to track down?’

  Wordlessly, contemptuously, she lifted her shirt and showed me the bruises below her rib cage, fading, but still an ugly sight. Whoever it was who’d beaten her – an ex-lover? – I could hardly blame her for doing everything she could to avoid a repeat performance.

  On the stairs, I hit the Replay button on my notepad. The software computed the frequency spectrum for the noise of the running water, subtracted it out of the recording, and then amplified and cleaned up what remained. Every word of our conversation came through crystal clear.

  From my car, I phoned a surveillance firm and arranged to have Mendelsohn kept under twenty-four-hour observation.

  Halfway home, I stopped in a side street, and sat behind the wheel for ten minutes, unable to think, unable to move.

  * * *

  In bed that night, I asked Martin, ‘You’re left-handed. How would you feel if no one was ever born left-handed again?’

  ‘It wouldn’t bother me in the least. Why?’

  ‘You wouldn’t think of it as a kind of … genocide?’

  ‘Hardly. What’s this all about?’

  ‘Nothing. Forget it.’

  ‘You’re shaking.’

  ‘I’m cold.’

  ‘You don’t feel cold to me.’

  As we made love – tenderly, then savagely – I thought: This is our language, this is our dialect. Wars have been fought over less. And if this language ever dies out, a people will have vanished from the face of the Earth.

  I knew I had to drop the case. If Mendelsohn was guilty, someone else could prove it. To go on working for LEI would destroy me.

  Afterwards, though, that seemed like sentimental bullshit. I belonged to no tribe. Every human being possessed his or her own sexuality – and when he or she died, it died with them. If no one was ever born gay again, it made no difference to me.

  And if I dropped the case because I was gay, I’d be abandoning everything I’d ever believed about my own equality, my own identity … not to mention giving LEI the chance to announce: Yes, of course we hired an investigator without regard to sexual preference, but apparently that was a mistake.

  Staring up into the darkness, I said, ‘Every time I hear the word community, I reach for my revolver.’

  There was no response; Martin was fast asleep. I wanted to wake him, I wanted to argue it all through, there and then, but I’d signed an agreement: I couldn’t tell him a thing.

  So I watched him sleep, and tried to convince myself that, when the truth came out, he’d understand.

  * * *

  I phoned Janet Lansing, brought her up to date on Mendelsohn – and said coldly, ‘Why were you so coy? ‘‘Fanatics’’? ‘‘Powerful vested interests’’? Are there some words you have trouble pronouncing?’

  She’d clearly prepared herself for this moment. ‘I didn’t want to plant my own ideas in your head. Later on, that might have been seen as prejudicial.’

  ‘Seen as prejudicial by whom?’ It was a rhetorical question: the media, of course. By keeping silent on the issue, she’d minimised the risk of being seen to have launched a witch-hunt. Telling me to go look for homosexual terrorists might have put LEI in a very unsympathetic light, whereas my finding Mendelsohn – for other reasons entirely, despite my ignorance – would come across as proof that the investigation had been conducted without any preconceptions.

  I said, ‘You had your suspicions, and you should have disclosed them. At the very least, you should have told me what the barrier was for.’

  ‘The barrier,’ she said, ‘is for protection against viruses and toxins. But anything we do to the body has side-effects. It’s not my role to judge whether or not those side-effects are acceptable; the regulatory authorities will insist that we publicise all of the consequences of using the product – and then the decision will be up to consumers.’

  Very neat: the government would twist their arm, ‘forcing them’ to disclose their major selling point.

  ‘And what does your market research tell you?’

  ‘That’s strictly confidential.’

  I very nearly asked her: When exactly did you find out that I was gay? After you’d hired me – or before? On the morning of the bombing, while I’d been assembling a dossier on Janet Lansing, had she been assembling dossiers on all of the people who might have bid for the investigation? And had she found the ultimate PR advantage, the ultimate seal of impartiality, just too tempting to resist?

  I didn’t ask. I still wanted to believe that it made no difference: she’d hired me, and I’d solve the crime like any other, and nothing else would matter.

  * * *

  I went to the bunker where the cobalt had been stored, at the edge of Federation Centennial’s grounds. The trapdoor was solid, but the lock was a joke, and there was no alarm system at all; any smart twelve-year-old could have broken in. Crates full of all kinds of – low-level, short-lived – radioactive waste were stacked up to the ceiling, blocking most of the light from the single bulb; it was no wonder that the theft hadn’t been detected sooner. There were even cobwebs – but no mutant spiders, so far as I could see.

  After five minutes poking around, listening to my borrowed dosimetry badge adding up the exposure, I was glad to get out, whether or not the average chest X-ray would have done ten times more damage. Hadn’t Mendelsohn realised that: how irrational people were about radiation, how much harm it would do her cause once the cobalt was discovered? Or had her own – fully informed – knowledge of the minimal risks distorted her perception?

  The surveillance teams sent me reports daily. It was an expensive service, but LEI were paying. Mendelsohn met her friends openly, telling them all about the night I’d questioned her, warning them in outraged tones that they were almost certainly being watched. They discussed the foetal barrier, the options for – legitimate – opposition, the problems the bombing had caused them. I couldn’t tell if the whole thing was being staged for my benefit, or if Mendelsohn was deliberately contacting only those friends who genuinely believed that she hadn’t been involved.

  I sp
ent most of my time checking the histories of the people she met. I could find no evidence of past violence or sabotage by any of them, let alone experience with high explosives. But then, I hadn’t seriously expected to be led straight to the bomber.

  All I had was circumstantial evidence. All I could do was gather detail after detail, and hope that the mountain of facts I was assembling would eventually reach a critical mass, or that Mendelsohn would slip up, cracking under the pressure.

  * * *

  Weeks passed, and Mendelsohn continued to brazen it out. She even had pamphlets printed – ready to distribute at the Mardi Gras – condemning the bombing as loudly as they condemned LEI for its secrecy.

  The nights grew hotter. My temper frayed. I don’t know what Martin thought was happening to me, but I had no idea how we were going to survive the impending revelations. I couldn’t begin to face up to the magnitude of the backlash there’d be once ATOMIC TERRORISTS met GAY BABY-POISONERS in the daily murdochs – and it would make no difference whether it was Mendelsohn’s arrest which broke the news to the public, or her media conference blowing the whistle on LEI and proclaiming her own innocence; either way, the investigation would become a circus. I tried not to think about any of it; it was too late to do anything differently, to drop the case, to tell Martin the truth. So I worked on my tunnel vision.

  Elaine scoured the radioactive waste bunker for evidence, but weeks of analysis came up blank. I quizzed the Biofile guards, who (supposedly) would have been watching the whole thing on their monitors when the cobalt was planted, but nobody could recall a client with an unusually large and oddly shaped item, wandering casually into the wrong aisle.

  I finally obtained the warrants I needed to scrutinise Mendelsohn’s entire electronic history since birth. She’d been arrested exactly once, twenty years before, for kicking an – unprivatised – policeman in the shin, during a protest he’d probably, privately, applauded. The charges had been dropped. She’d had a court order in force for the last eighteen months, restraining a former lover from coming within a kilometre of her home. (The woman was a musician with a band called Tetanus Switchblade; she had two convictions for assault.) There was no evidence of undeclared income, or unusual expenditure. No phone calls to or from known or suspected dealers in arms or explosives, or their known or suspected associates. But everything could have been done with pay phones and cash, if she’d organised it carefully.