The baby had been in and out from under the table, muttering and driving a little red and blue dustcart around. He chose this moment to come barreling up onto Braemar’s knee. She laid her cheek against the mite’s soft dark hair.
“What if the superbeings could get you back on stream? Have you heard from Izzy recently? Does she still send pictures? How old is Bella now?”
It was nice that she remembered his story.
“That’s cruel, Braemar.”
“I’m a cruel person. I thought you knew that. Cruel and sentimental, like James Bond.”
She put Billy down, went to the dishwasher and rooted out a beaker. She filled it with juice. The little boy said thank you nicely and returned to his game. There was a window where greenery crawled in pots and trays. Braemar stood with her back to the light, her lovely face obscured.
“Okay Johnny. I won’t bother you about the aliens. Can’t we still be friends?”
A tv at the end of the room came on. The Times masthead: it must be one o’ clock. Their lead story was the Eve-riots in Russia, a heaving mass of bodies in the streets of some comfortless breeze-block city, where dirty snow lay about. Harsh policing going on.
“Silly fools,” said Braemar. “There is a state of affairs, it is the way things are. The men give the money to the women, the women give the men sex, and bring up the children. The less any woman tries to mess around with that arrangement, the happier she’ll be.”
Johnny laughed aloud. “Do you really think that’s about sex?”
He jabbed a finger at the violence. The screen, which was a good one, seemed to gobble the space around it. The sight of a boot hitting a face made your blood pump, it was truly horrible. “We’re running out of land and food and money, Brae. We’re heading for hell. Okay, we don’t know much about the visitors, but we surely need help from somewhere.”
He leaned back, and stared at the floor plan on the monitor. Big house. Big dog too. London Public Health regulations implied her pet must be more ostentatious even than it looked. That drunk had known what he was talking about. She was nothing more than a high-class, self-publicizing tart. Knowing Braemar, she’d probably hired the police rig out on the street to impress her friends.
It was nothing to Johnny how she made her way. But there was a mystery about this woman and the aliens. It had been bothering him since Fo: and probably, against his better judgement, he was going to try and get some answers.
“Is that a real dog?”
“She’s an antisense. She eats, but she doesn’t shit, isn’t that wonderful. Doesn’t come on heat, either, lucky girl. She’s based on a pedigree Doberman bitch called Keymer Sunburst Orange: I call her Trixie.”
“Hardwired?”
“No, I trained her myself. Attaque! Trixie. Attaque!”
For a split second his blood ran cold. The engineered monster leapt to its feet: and crashed onto its side, legs in the air, whining.
“A true female, you observe.”
Johnny hoped she’d missed his moment of panic. “Very witty. And if you tell her to roll over—?”
Braemar slowly grinned. “Then she dies for the queen.”
“I’ll remember that.”
She released the dog somehow; it resumed its heraldic pose.
Johnny stood up. He looked at the housebox. It was ancient, pre-coralin; and never updated.
“You’ve been plugging your phones into this, haven’t you. You shouldn’t do that. I know it works, but it’s a false economy. The Blue Clay in the phone kind of humiliates your silicon, you have to rig up some objective distance between them.” He sighed, slipped the passport into his bumbag and slung the bag on his shoulder. He couldn’t fix anything, not ever again.
“You’re leaving? Damn, I didn’t even offer you a cup of tea.”
“I have to get to work. Invite me back. I’ll try to fit you in.”
Kamla got pregnant for the first time when she was twelve, and aborted herself in a panic. Braemar was the one who found her, and comforted the blood-spattered guilty child with whatever nonsense came first to hand. Don’t be absurd, God doesn’t punish babies, it will just go back in the queue. Six months later she was pregnant again, and defiant. Braemar had taken her in, earning the undying hatred of Kamla’s mother (but that had happened long before). A teenage girl, neither clever nor specially pretty. Naturally she wanted a baby. What other prize was within her reach?
Johnny’s response to the Eve-riots was childish. Of course it was about sex. Nothing in this world that wasn’t about sex, unless it was about money. And of those two, which came first? The chicken or the egg? Braemar’s fear of men, bone deep (never acknowledged anywhere but inside herself) seemed to her rational and completely normal. She was convinced that President Carlotta felt the same. But their dominion was a fact of life, if not the fact of life. One doesn’t fight facts. One puts them to use.
She sat with her chin on her hands.
She’d left Johnny alone since Africa, never tried to trace him: but here he was. Fate had brought him back. Fate, and the aliens themselves. She couldn’t, in conscience, refuse the gift a second time. She wondered if he had really given up hope of returning to his old life. Good for him, if that were true. What he’d lost did not exist anymore, and he was young to have learned that lesson. Maybe he was just sulking: Achilles in the alley. But no matter why he’d chosen to vanish and abandon his quest, he was still ridden by the demon curiosity. She could use that. She would find a way to help Clavel and Johnny, and be a fly on the wall at their reunion.
She chuckled: a wry, half silent breath of laughter. Had the boy never been in love, that he “couldn’t understand” the alien’s message? He didn’t like Braemar Wilson much, and who could blame him. But he was lonely as hell. He’d be back. Braemar smoked another cigarette, savoring the pleasures that were promised her, for another while. To have him in the same room again. To make him laugh. Treasure.
Kamla came down and heaved a theatrical sigh of relief. “He smelled of blood. What do you want a jobard like that around for?”
“He gives terrific backrubs. What do you think?”
Kamla giggled dutifully. Naturally she didn’t really believe that adults had sex. Especially not elderly members of her own family.
“Nani, can I borrow fifty ’cu?”
Braemar flashed a glance of awful warning, at the forbidden word. “No you may not. No more cosmetics. You’ll thank me later, when your friends are growing moustaches and melanomas.”
Braemar tapped softly at the green baize door. It opened. She was in a laboratory of many ages. At the small, bright, modern end the scientist was at work.
“Come and look at this.”
A passage opened before her, between benches laden with curious shaped flasks, retorts, gruesome creatures wriggling in jars; colored flames. The scientist showed her an array of tiny sausage filaments, that shimmered with different, delicate patterns.
“Look at this. Look here, and here. These strands are all from daughters of the same cell. Do you know what that is? Of course not, why do I ask. That is Cairns-Hall mutation. The cell shapes its own future, by producing some protein tailored to process any chemical stimulus I provide. Here you can see it happening, in the temporary single-strand. There is testing going on. They are thinking. Full-blown Lamarckian evolution in action, that’s what you see. And more. The ability to create a function to deal with a situation!”
The scientist believed that s/he’d invented hir peremptory “mad professor avatar.” S/he was blissfully unaware that to those who knew hir outside s/he seemed exactly the same as in life. The real person also hated personal contact, and loved virtual meetings because of the power it gave hir to switch you off.
“Would this happen in the brain, Clem? Could it work on something like a—a talent for languages?”
The scientist hissed in disapproval. “Everything has some chemical origin. Why not, maybe, though there are logical difficulties…unless they have s
ome mechanism I don’t know of for exchanging genetic material. At the moment we are studying alien tissue, not fairytales. Try to concentrate, Your Highness.”
“Sorry—”
The scientist hummed on, forgetting hir own admonition instantly. “Evolutionary timescale, pah. Your body, Highness, is built of dumb animals and vegetables. What could grow into the ‘you’ called mind is switched off nearly everywhere. Imagine, Gracious Highness, if your whole body was teeming with cells that could behave like this, another glandular system; and every cell was—I can’t be sure, but something like that you. Was a vehicle of your will. You could shed skincells that would be little tiny factories. They could keep you clean, like the colony that was mother to my world in here. They could be tools. Take a few cells, offer each a different stimulus, add some waste plastic, maybe some turds. Your intimate servants grow for you a cine-camera.”
“Okay. These mobile factories, are they harmful?”
“To humans? Not so far as I can tell.” Clem’s voice smirked. “I can’t say for sure. Give me, say three hundred thousand humans. Permission to kill half of them. Let me loose. Then, I guess I might one day be able to put on the aliens’ packet ‘harmless to your health.’”
“What are they?”
The scientist chuckled. “They are big colonies of protozoa.”
Braemar was not impressed. “Yeah, like the rest of us.”
The scientist had pronounced, once and for all, that the alien invasion was not an enormous hoax, the conspiracy theory that had proved amazingly robust in certain quarters. But s/he had produced nothing useful. Some of their confederates had wondered if the aliens might melt if they stood out in the rain. Clem’d refused to research this. S/he had declined to discover a devastating allergy to housedust; or common salt, or Planet Earth’s amino acids. S/he went her own way. S/he was playing. S/he liked being the center of attention, and s/he knew they were all too ignorant to challenge hir. But Clem’s attitude problem was no longer a problem, strictly speaking. The time when they could have announced to the world that alien tissue behaved like normal biological tissue, and not the flesh of angels—and broken the cursed spell—was in the past. There’d be global panic, now, if anyone heard of what was going on here. Nobody would be grateful.
If the telepath superbeings knew everything, they hadn’t yet descended in fire and thunder on the scientist’s hideaway. Maybe this was another example of their august mercy. Their abiding love of the human race—
“Now come over here.”
Braemar looked into an open topped tank, the depth within split into two. A multicolored protean animal moved in each space.” On your left, you see yourself: a human cell. On your right, the alien. By the way, this really is you, Brae. I stole it from you, hahaha. You don’t mind?”
“Um.”
“This here (the focus moved) is what we call the nucleus. In here, the chromosomes of your mama and your papa are bound together. What God has joined and cannot be put asunder: the chymical wedding that is you. These little stray pieces are the mitochondria, traits that come from your mama alone and do not recombine. Now, see the alien.”
“It looks the same?”
“Wrong!” It was sometimes a good idea to be wrong. The scientist’s tone brightened perceptibly.” Never think in those terms, Gracious Highness. I do not call this stuff this big untidy cluster, this kitten-knitting-ball of bases, DNA. I call it alien DNA’; or aDNA. Notice the absence of any mitochondria-analogue: and there are other very great differences.”
“Sorry.”
“There is an extra-altered-phosphate group, an extra-hydroxyl-group. Making in all seven bases. The hydrogen bonds are different, which means a different configuration within the cell. It’s impossible for any informed observer to call these two the same.”
“Oh. I see.”
“But the greatest difference is this. You will know what “everybody knows.” That most of our own DNA is not genes, or is useless information. Quite untrue, but it’s a lay-person’s version. The case here is utterly other. Hardly any of what you see in the alien chromosomes is used by this individual. Not hardly any! The cell is a schizophrenic, it is in a terrible mess. Suppose, in the nucleus of one cell of yours lives one person?. Guess how many separate individuals I believe may be living in the alien cell? Guess!”
“Three?”
“Close! Between three and five million. Approximately.”
“Oh.”
“Each of them maybe as complex as you or I. Highly concentrated, very conservative, very acquisitive individuals. I suppose since they have no power to refresh their stocks by recombination, they dare not discard anything that might one day be useful. It is crowded in there, but don’t worry for our little alien. The snake pit is doped. I would say there is a chemical event—analogous to our ‘moment of conception’—forever deciding which of the threads, so to speak, is expressed.”
Conception. Braemar seized on a word that suggested something concrete.
“Do you mean you know how they reproduce?”
“I can guess how they don’t! How can I put it? This alien had no daddy.”
“Parthenogenesis.”
“Ah, long words. If I had a baby that had no daddy, that would be parthenogenesis. Leave aside a little scrappy random mutation, and external effects like the conditions inside my body, my baby would be me. If this alien had a baby. Well. There’s no reason I can see why it should not be a little Mr. Alien. But there are many more chances that it will be a different alien-person. Another one of those millions.”
The sexless, disembodied voice became dreamy.
“The most incomprehensible thing about this universe is the fact that I can understand it. Albert Einstein said that. Alien, but not. Of course, the bases have to be like ours, this is decided by elemental factors, time, gravity, molecular bonds. Still it’s so remarkable: so near and yet so far.”
The image in the tank changed. “This is human adenine, the fiery humor. Touch it, put your hands on, touch your own anger.”
Braemar ignored the suggestion. She’d been boobytrapped in here before.
“Isn’t it vanishingly unlikely,” she wondered. “That they should be so like us? Surely it means maybe they were human, a very long time ago?”
The scientist laughed. Hahaha, Clem’s usual mechanical cackle.
“When the galaxy was seeded by the Gods with humanoid sentients? Don’t you believe it. The chemicals are God. They decide everything. Don’t you like my new joke? We are made of the five humors: watery, fiery, airy, earthy, and the one the Aristotelians called ‘quintessence.’ Adenine is the base that in its functions, suggests aggression, appetite. Therefore, fire.”
“Could we possibly get back to the Cairns-Hurt mutations?”
“Cairns-Hall!” The scientist must never be HUSTLED. “Enough! I have no news for you, nothing you can understand. Everything I say to you, I have to talk in bad analogy, baseless surmise. This isn’t easy work, I don’t have a big fancy laboratory, I don’t have robotics. These things keep dying. I cannot make them build me an alien. I need that trigger, and where is it? Then you ask me, how does their telepathy work? You ask me, prove that what they did to the smart machines is not magic. Get out of my lab! Get out before I blow you sky high!”
Braemar returned to New Cross Gate. She peeled off her headset and gloves, pulled the printout and began to read, rubbing her brow and chewing her lip. She found it marginally easier to make sense of this stuff on her own. Her outboard monitor held nothing but a government health warning. You are entering a computer generated environment. Remember that nothing you see or touch or hear is real. Too bloody right, when you were dealing with Clem Stewart.
Beneath it, another message appeared.
ii
On the stairs in the house in New Cross, there was a picture that Johnny didn’t like. It was large and plain. I
t showed a kind of cot or cradle standing in an empty attic. The grain of the wooden floorboards was crudely clear, there was nothing else in the picture but a shaft of light. The title was Parsifal 1, the artist someone called Anselm Kiefer. It was a copy. The original, he gathered, was fairly famous. But to Johnny it always seemed that the baby in the cradle (the baby suggested by the cradle) had to be dead. He would avert his eyes, coming up the fine wide stairway: remembering Brae’s child who had died. Remembering Bella, the scar that hurt sometimes when he was tired.
It was a time when the kuss die hande chivalry of deep continental Europe once more defined a woman’s place in the world. In Brit polite society any professional woman, especially if she was single or divorced, had to be careful. A woman working in the media was barely respectable: it was assumed that she had to be using her sexual favors in some way. But as that drunk had told him, “the Samaritan” had her niche. Her smart friends would gather every Wednesday for an evening of refined karaoke, and a little sedate role-play after supper.
The mood of Braemar’s London had been set by the ’04. There was no order in the cosmos anymore, only the shocking certainty that anything can happen; and a proliferation of fortune-telling theories. People were waiting for the next global disaster, because catastrophes were normal now. It could be the apocalyptic floods, it could be another massive lava flow. Popular science said the ’04 could well have marked the start of a devastating series. Anything would do. The neighbor star that goes nova and drenches Earth in killer radiation, the giant asteroid on a collision course; the new and unstoppable mutated virus, the Night Of The Living Dead. This was the world that had abandoned live action movies, stayed away in droves from the holo-films that had replaced them. Cartoon emotion was the favored artistic expression. Classic animation, the more primitive the better, the stylish art form. Drama was too slow, too ordered: completely unlike nature.
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