The Offset

by Calder Szewczak

  “But if it’s aid work you’re interested in–”

  “Please, Mum,” says Miri, cutting her off. “Do we have to talk about this?”

  Alix frowns at her daughter. “You have your whole life in front of you, Miri. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to decide what to do with it.”

  The Borlaug lies a stretch away beyond the Guildhall. It is housed in the old gothic-style palace of St Pancras. Although Miri visited it often as a child, it has been many years and she looks at it now through fresh eyes.

  The building dazzles in the hot November sun, the bright orange bricks clashing with the cool ashcrete and white timber buildings that surround it. Beyond the gothic palace stands the world’s largest scientific greenhouse, a massive complex of glass erected on the site of the old train shed. The effect is one of grandeur and opulence, which, she supposes, is only fitting. The Borlaug’s monopoly on resources exceeds even that of the pigsuits.

  Within its walls, the institute holds all manner of materials, tools and priceless equipment. Miri has, of course, been there before. She knows that nearly every room in the Borlaug is kitted out with expensive hardware: slick devices made from silicon and ceramic, brushed metal and glass. Without even taking into consideration the specialised lab equipment, the cost of all that technology – computers, phones, intercoms – could easily be enough to feed everyone in London for… how long? A week? A month? A year? Thinking about it makes her feel faintly ill.

  Alix cuts across the lobby and goes to speak to the security guard behind the counter. Miri stays frozen on the spot. On the walk over, it felt like all of London was empty but for them. Now she’s suddenly in the midst of a busy hive of activity as lab workers, technicians and couriers hurry in and out of the lobby. Her eyes follow them as they hurry about like swarming insects and her skin begins to crawl. But before the panic can build, Alix calls over and Miri clings to the sound of her name, following it through the clamour to safety.

  “Come on,” says Alix. “Special dispensation for the director’s wife. We’re being allowed in.” She nods at the security guard who hits a button on the counter, causing one of the barriers to zip open. Alix hustles Miri through, away from the busy lobby and into the Borlaug.

  It’s like crossing the threshold into another time. The effect is so powerful that for a moment Miri quite forgets her intense dislike of the place. For she is not merely entering a resplendent bygone era but, less distantly, her own past, a time when she used to visit the Borlaug as a child, brimming with pride at her clever, powerful mother. Within as without, the building has been expertly preserved and is unlike anything else in London. Pink and white stone columns run along wallpapered walls of royal blue, vermillion, gold and mustard yellow. Intricate carvings adorn every niche and alcove; lewd gargoyles leer down at them and sit incongruously alongside delicate flowers and overflowing bowls of fruit. The decadent spoils of the past.

  Alix stands beside her on the fleur-de-lis patterned carpet and together they gaze up at the ornate granite window recesses and the loud empty spaces left by paintings long since sold off, like so much of the public art during the regeneration years, to a handful of private collectors. Miri understands the building’s place as a piece of history and the well-rehearsed arguments for its preservation. All the same, it is hard to reconcile it with the run-down conditions she’s become familiar with in the last two years.

  Yet, even as she flinches away from the splendour of the place, she finds an old fondness catching at her heart. She ran down these hallways as a girl and now a hundred ghostlike child-selves dance around her. There’s the pillar with the worn-out notches that make perfect handholds for climbing, and there is the gleaming bannister she had so longed to slide down if only her mother and her courage would allow her. And there is the very place where, unsupervised for ten glorious minutes, she had dragged a red crayon all over the eggshell wallpaper. She knows it is the same place because, instead of scolding her, Jac simply dragged over the marble bust of a crumbling Angela Saini to hide the incriminating scrawl. That is the exact same bust, she is sure of it; she remembers its soft smile and arched eyebrows – a promise to keep their secret.

  Alix gently squeezes her shoulder. “If it wasn’t for your mother, none of this would be here.”

  This brings Miri crashing back to the present. She wants to tell Alix that she is well aware of what Jac has done and how important she is, but that it doesn’t change anything. Her mind is made up. Before she can say anything, however, Alix beckons over a slim man in a smart suit who looks somehow familiar.

  “Hi Miri,” he says, sticking out a hand. “You probably don’t remember me–”

  Suddenly, a memory springs into Miri’s mind. She is four or five, lying stretched out on her stomach on a carpet so densely piled it feels like an iron brush against the skin of her arms, which extend bare from the short sleeves of her t-shirt. In front of her is a sheet of paper and a few crayons. She is trying to draw a picture of something mythical – an ice bear, perhaps – and it keeps coming out wrong because every time she presses the tip of the crayon to the page, the paper crumples into the carpet. When she finally does manage to straighten it out and draw a line across the page, it takes on the texture of the carpet’s rough pile. Frustrated, she grabs the paper and gets up to run through to the next room where she can hear her mother talking loudly on the phone. Before she can open the door, however, a pair of strong hands wrap around her stomach and gently pull her back before lifting her up into the air. The hands belong to a man who has a friendly face and who carries Miri with ease. When he asks her what’s wrong, she tells him about the stupid carpet and the stupid paper and the stupid crayon, and he laughs and hoists her up onto his own desk. From somewhere, he magics up a clean sheet of paper and scoops up her crayons from the floor. When she starts her drawing again, the crayon glides over the flat page just like it should.

  “I remember,” says Miri, shifting her hold on the tub to shake the man’s offered hand. “You used to watch me when Jac was too busy to do it herself.”

  Alix clicks her tongue at that but the man laughs. “One of the many perks of being your mother’s personal assistant. It was always a treat when you came into the office. You were such a cute kid.” As his eyes travel across the sores on Miri’s thin, pale face, she can almost see him thinking: what happened?

  As much as the unvoiced reproach grates on her, she doesn’t hold it against him. She knows what she looks like. But, for the first time, Miri wonders exactly what her mothers have been telling their friends and colleagues these past two years she has been gone and how much this man actually knows. In her mind’s eye, she sees Jac confessing that her own child has run away from her and she feels a vindictive stab of pleasure at the humiliation she paints on to her mother’s imagined face. Then she glances at Alix and her cheeks burn with shame.

  15

  “What’s the next logical step in lipid oxidation analysis?”

  The Archivist groans. “Surely you’ve seen enough now? There’s nothing to find. And shouldn’t you be getting home?”

  “I’m not finished. So come on, what’s next? What haven’t we done?”

  “We haven’t normalised the mass-spec output with the total absorbed carbon data,” he says, begrudgingly.

  “Right. And to do that, we’re going to need to get the statistical parameters of the biomass. Let’s start with the seasonal growth rings. Where’s the UVD?”

  He sighs and gestures behind him. “Back through here.”

  The UVD, or ultraviolet dendrochronometer, sits white and square within a glove box, connected to an OLED display on the outside. It’s a device that Jac invented herself, one that allows rapid monitoring of tree growth. When a core is loaded into the lidded rectangular slot on top of the UVD, a pattern of colourful rings appears on the display, annotated with numbers relating to the dimensions of the growth rings for the latest Greenland season and each of those preceding it.

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p; “We’ll have measured the growth rings for these cores already, you know,” says the Archivist, looking at the unique seven-character code etched into the sample capsule. “I could just look it up in the digital record. Unless you think we’ve been misusing your precious UVD.”

  Jac grimaces. If there was any upside to Miri leaving home – and she silently reprimands herself for even admitting as much – it was not having to deal with this sort of adolescent attitude. It was hard enough to take coming from Miri, but from a grown man it is entirely unbearable.

  “A child could take accurate measurements with the UVD,” she says coolly and with more than a hint of pride. Her device is elegant and simple, easy to use. “But it can’t hurt to double check. I’ll measure the growth rings by hand and we can compare them to the logged measurements.” She says this more to bait the Archivist than anything else and, judging from his expression, it works.

  “You want to do it?” he scoffs. “When was the last time you did any manual lab work, Professor?”

  “Less of the scepticism, thank you,” she says, hoping she sounds more confident than she feels. The Archivist’s suspicions are not far off the truth. Managerial responsibilities occupy much of her time and what remains is spent courting financiers and donors, lobbying bureaucrats for favourable legislative treatment, running press to shore up the reputation of the Borlaug. Jac has conducted less and less laboratory work over the years, and this procedure is a deceptively tricky one. It’s a long time since she’s needed microcalipers – they became practically obsolete after the introduction of the UVD – and using them to take the precise hundredth-of-a-millimetre measurements requires a great deal of practice.

  Fortunately, Jac had plenty of this when she was working on the pilot project back before the UVD was invented, and she is pleased to find that the old skill quickly returns to her. She takes hold of the microcalipers and carefully rotates the thimble at one end of the barrel so that the two jaws spread apart from one another; a metal mouth opening in a slow yawn. When the tips of the jaws are lined up with the growth lines, she locks the device into place with the lever and then reads off the measurement from the bevelled edge of the thimble. She calls it out to the Archivist so he can check it against that which was originally taken using the UVD and digitally logged in the system.

  “0.955 millimetres,” he repeats. “Are you sure about that?”

  “Quite sure.”

  “Really? Because it doesn’t match what’s in the log.”

  Jac takes up the microcalipers once more and remeasures the core. 0.955 millimetres. There’s no doubt about it. She moves over from the glove box to check the records on the Archivist’s screen and sees to her consternation that he, too, is right. The digitally recorded measurement doesn’t match the one she’s taken with the microcalipers.

  “Let me try,” says the Archivist. “You can’t have done it right.”

  Jac steps aside to let him take the measurement. She can tell from the sudden drop in his shoulders that he has arrived at exactly the same result. He turns to her, open-mouthed.

  “Just make a note of it,” says Jac, her voice low. “We’ll measure the rest of the samples and compare.”

  But already her mind leaps to a new theory, a new explanation: instrument error, a fault with the UVD that’s rendered every core measurement to date inaccurate. It would certainly account for the difference in projected biomass… but if it’s true, then the consequences are too wide-reaching, too terrible to contemplate.

  They measure another core, and another, and another. Each one confirms her fear. After the sixth, the Archivist strikes triumphantly on the same theory, but Jac cuts his gloating short.

  “I’m not jumping to any conclusions until we’ve measured the lot,” she says flatly. “We need to chart this. We need to be sure.”

  “Alright then,” he says, perhaps more out of deference to process than to her. Moving with a new urgency, they work through the remaining cores in the case, measuring the samples by hand and then checking them against the UVD measurements for the same cores in the digital records.

  They are all wrong. Every single core.

  Plotting out the differences in a graph, she sees how the normal distributions for both sets of results are shifted apart. The figures are two tenths of a millimetre off, every time. Seeing the graph, the Archivist gives off a low whistle.

  “You’re really fucked now, Boltanski.”

  Jac doesn’t know what to say. There’s no protest she can make, no retort she can come up with. Her theory was right. There’s only one explanation for such a consistent difference in measurements. And what stings about that – quite aside from how it throws all the project’s results into doubt – is that the UVD is what made her career. Now, she’s starting to think its invention will be the very thing that sees her legacy go up in smoke.

  16

  Alix, it seems, is as well-known at the Borlaug as Jac must be. Everyone they pass has a warm smile for her and she greets them all by name. A few of them shoot curious looks in Miri’s direction, though if any recognise her as Jac and Alix’s daughter, they do not say.

  The Personal Assistant leads them through a labyrinth of halls and corridors. Opening up a perfectly unremarkable side door, he waves them through into the greenhouse and onto a low veranda that overlooks the plants of the botanical nursery. The air within is muggy, clamping thickly over Miri’s mouth and nose; it’s warm enough to make her feel a little uncomfortable beneath her heavy jumper. Alix who, up until now, has been ineffectually fanning herself with her hand, gives up all pretence of elegance and shrugs off her blouse to tie it about her waist, swiping at the sweat on the back of her neck with a balled-up handkerchief. The motion clouds the air with wild rose and poppy. Alix is wearing a loose-fitting camisole, dusky pink like her blouse, and there are dark patches of sweat beneath her armpits. After a moment – more for the camaraderie of it than anything else – Miri joins her, setting down the plastic tub before pulling her jumper over her head. As she does, there’s a crackle of static and a few flyaway strands of hair rise up from her plait. She smooths them back down with her palm and then drapes the jumper over her shoulders. When she retrieves the tub from the ground, the rat squeaks a loud protest from within. She snaps off the lid to check that it’s still alright in the heat and the rat launches itself at her, coiling its tail around her wrist. With a conciliatory scratch behind the ears, Miri gently coaxes it back into the tub.

  “I’d keep a tight hold of it if I were you,” says the Personal Assistant. “There’ll be hell to pay if that thing gets free and interferes with any of the experiments.”

  Miri thinks begrudgingly that she knows better than to let a rat loose in a greenhouse, thank you very much, but says nothing.

  The Personal Assistant directs them to the cast-iron railing at the edge of the veranda which, he says, is the best place from which to survey the workings of the greenhouse. As Miri and Alix stare around in wonder, he explains what they’re looking at, but Miri finds herself tuning in and out. Far above them stretches the vast, curving roof of the old St Pancras train shed, the panels of sheet glass green at the edges with condensation and mildew. Down below run row after endless row of isolated glass cubicles, each one containing its own unique, tightly controlled climate. A thousand miniecosystems, filled with all the complexity and particularity of a long-deforested jungle.

  A greenish glow emanates from the cubicles, and a wild explosion of plants and small trees can be seen trapped within, leaves and branches crushed against the glass. As her eyes snap from case to case, Miri sees more plants than she can name and several that look thrillingly unfamiliar. There’s a bell jar that holds a collection of agaves in eye-popping neons; a curling vine that looks a little like a tomato apart from the fact that the fruits dangling between the leaves have the hard, pleated appearance of walnuts; a tray of freshly harvested baby aubergines, their purple skins shining with iridescence.

  The Personal A
ssistant, evidently well accustomed to giving this kind of tour, adopts a conversational patter and points out the various plant specimens he thinks worthy of their attention. “And over here,” he says, “we have a special strain of pitcher plants. They’re still under development, but the progress is promising. Soon they’ll be planted across the city – an excellent way to control the neon hawker population.”

  Alix, clearly thinking of the sagittaria in her water garden and her damaged nets, gives a low ah of interest and squints out to get a better look. Miri follows her gaze. The Personal Assistant is pointing towards a clump of fleshy yellow-green tubes that sprout from a low crown that stands just proud of the soil lining the base of a wide planter. They are trumpetlike, the top cavity pointing upwards and the rim rolling away to create a lip.

  “How do they work exactly?” asks Alix.

  The Personal Assistant is all too happy to explain. “There are secretions on the lip that attract the insect. Most pitcher plants secrete nectar but that doesn’t work for the neon hawkers – it’s one of the things our team are still working on. The upper part of the pitcher is waxy and treacherous. An insect responds to the lure and lands, loses its footing and falls into the digestive fluids at the bottom of the pitcher. The walls are also lined with downward-pointing hairs that make escape practically impossible.”

  Miri is reminded of the curling red leaf and the aphid. “Like the filterweed,” she says.

  The Personal Assistant frowns at her. “Filterweed isn’t carnivorous.”

  She wants to protest, to tell him about what she saw in the holding cell at the Eye, that there must be a new mutation, but she stops herself. She doubts he’ll believe her and trying to convince him is simply not worth the effort. “Right. Sure. Guess I’m thinking of something else,” she says at last.