Life (23 page)

Bayes’s Theorem

i

Spence and Anna stayed together. They clung to each other in the little house as days and nights went by, sole survivors of a lost world. When Anna discovered that Nirmal had not recommended her studentship be renewed for the fourth year she vitally needed, the news didn’t make much impact. Her work on the Y chromosome had been sidelined by other progress; her doctorate was unfinished and rather muddled. She had been relying on her worth, and Nirmal’s basic integrity, to sort things out; but he was within his rights. Of course he’d committed this act of revenge before the miscarriage, but nobody could talk about what he’d done in those terms, so there was no chance of Anna’s being reinstated now she wasn’t pregnant.

If this had been the first blow maybe she would have caved in. Instead, feeling something strangely like relief, she put together a resume featuring her investigation of Transferred Y. She planned that people who felt negative about Parentis would be pleased to see that she’d been doing work on something divorced from babypharming. She made applications to every institution, every company, every funding body she could think of. She’d have had a better chance if she’d stuck with Human Assisted Reproduction (Nirmal would give her a good reference, out of guilt). She didn’t want that. Out of the wreckage, she would reclaim her freedom.

After four months of this she had nothing and was looking at lab technician vacancies, because she couldn’t stand to be out of work. In the sixth month, she got a letter from Clare Gresley, the virus woman.

It was a snowy day in January, in the year Ron (m) had argued was the real start of the new millennium, in one of the short and bitter cold snaps that enlivened the lukewarm winters of those years. She took the train to Manchester and the Metro out to Clare Gresley’s address, a biotech company headquarters on the site of a former dye works. Anna didn’t know what to expect. Clare Gresley was a household name in genetic engineering—not because of the strange theory she had about evolution, but because she was a genius at breeding and tailoring viruses, the workhorses of the industry: the living machines people used to get new material into a chromosome and have it replicated along with the original code. Everyone used her viruses. Anna had seen express packets from Clare Gresley in the chill cabinet in Dr Russell’s plant lab. But she hadn’t published anything—at least, nothing Anna could find—since
A Continuous Creation,
a book Dr Russell had admired very much, and which Anna had thought was brilliant, without understanding it very well. What had Dr Gresley been doing with herself? Making her fortune in biotech, probably. It was nice that she’d written Anna a personal letter, but she must not build on that. Today would be the initial chat with the boss. After which she’d be given the forms to fill in; then
maybe
get called back to jump through more hoops. The snow clogged her footsteps as she crossed a plain of decayed concrete. She couldn’t feel her toes. She was afraid she’d found no Gresley publications because she’d been looking in the wrong places, and her ignorance would be unforgivable. What did Anna know about virology? Leafless willows and alders screened the buildings. There was a river, a slug-colored vaporous stream between beds of ice; a line of decrepit black poplars reached out knotted fingers to the sky.

Biotech didn’t take up half so much space as the monster chemical plants of the past. Nevertheless, Anna was astonished when she was directed by the receptionist to Clare Gresley’s modest door. There was no guided tour, no interviewing panel. There was just Clare, a thin fortyish woman with greying brown hair coming adrift a little from a French pleat. She did not ask Anna to sell herself. She talked about Transferred Y. She’d read the paper (Anna’s condemned maiden speech, in its current revision). It interested her. She knew Nirmal. She’d talked to him… On her desk, among heaps of clutter around a Mac and a telephone, stood a framed photograph of a grinning teenager. “My daughter,” she said, catching Anna’s curious glance. “She’s at Salford, she started last term, doing Engineering. She’s moved into hall: it’s a wrench. We’ve been a team for so long, Jonnie and I.”

Melted snow that had climbed through the holes in Anna’s boots dripped out again onto the bland corporate vinyl at her feet. Clare explained that they would share a secretary with Nitash Davidson next door, who designed nematodes. Lab tech support was also shared. That was the pattern in many companies: individual researchers serviced by the shared technicians, to cut down on the replication of standard skills. Anna began to feel excited. It almost sounded as if she was being offered a place. Then came the crunch.

“I can give you £5000 a year. Plus a small living and travel allowance.”

You can try to be prepared. But at some point, you have to be ready to leap. You have to know that this is the only chance.

“£5,500,” said Anna.

Clare pretended to do mental arithmetic.

“Done. When can you start?”

Anna hadn’t told her parents she was coming to Manchester. She turned up on their doorstep shivering and bright-eyed. “Hello Mummy. Guess what. I have a new job!” Her father got as far as the five and a half k, and told her she was insane. He was probably right. She spent the night in her old bedroom, sobering up. So this was what the personal letter meant: no money. A place to work on her doctorate, on Transferred Y, but
no money.
How did they expect you to live? Somehow, she would manage it.

So Anna drove over the Pennines every morning, while Spence stayed at home and worked for Emerald City. At first he was strangely happy, as long as he left the memory of Lily Rose alone. He was free of his Mom (he called her occasionally; they chatted by email). He was living in a world of his own making, and if he could have afforded to import his cat everything would have been fine. Emerald City was building a rep. It was getting so that every one of their customers had what amounted to a little software agent in there. Other bits of software ensured that these little agents, which the City called trilogbots, helped the whole system out, the best routes getting strengthened by the amount of use they got. This paid off for both the system and the individual, in speed and specificity of response. They were building a mind for the Net. They were making this mind to the tune market forces played, which in many ways was shit: but it was very cool to be at the moving edge.

It didn’t bother him that the rest of the gang were physically hanging out together in Chicago, while he was in Yorkshire. At this point in his life he liked to be alone, and he liked to be with Anna. That was it. Social contact was to be avoided if possible. He knew he was owed a bigger piece of the action. The others in the original team started calling themselves directors, while Spence was still the hired hand. He didn’t care. In an intense dialogue with Mr Acid, before that trip to Morocco, he had decided he would never have a career. He confirmed that vow with himself now. He would pay his way, pick up his own shit; above all, he would be no one’s servant and no one’s master: apart from Anna Senoz, whose loving servant and faithful master he was bound to be, until death did them part. One day Lorelei, the City’s token cyberbabe, sent him an email asking did he know he was under new management? That was how he found out that the City had been sold, and Spence with it, like a side of meat.

He went down to London wearing a suit, dreads, and the Emerald City earrings Jack Baum, senior partner of the original duo, had given each of them the day they signed up. He met some UK apparatchiks of the vast organization to which he now belonged. He was feeling defiant and angry. Technically he knew he’d been humiliated. His recourse was to act the
enfant terrible:
I don’t pay any attention to these things, I’m on a higher and a cooler plane… He sort of hoped they’d fire him but they didn’t. They didn’t make him a director either. He was sure he could find another job, but there was Anna, who had just accepted a mad work-for-nothing deal with one of her childhood heroines. Anna could not sleep nights if there was no regular money coming in, and the two of them had to look out for each other, there was no one else. So he accepted the deal they offered and became a cog in the mighty machine. A creative cog.

He wasn’t exactly happy about this.

Late one evening on the way back home, he walked down to the bar on the train and saw a face he knew. It was soft, it was pink, it was dusted as if with iron filings around the jaw. The dark hair was still standing up mussily from Charles Craft’s infantile skull: his jacket was open to display a precociously ornate waistcoat. Spence could not resist the awful temptation to say hello. They exchanged news. Spence felt impelled to mention Anna and suffered as he deserved for this stupidity, forced to observe the smirk that rose in those secretive black eyes.

“Is this your usual train?” asked Craft, full of hopeful bonhomie.

If it had been, it wasn’t any more. “I work at home, mostly.” They exchanged cards. Craft seemed cowed by Spence’s appearance. The dreads with the suit, the post-modern gangster look, had that effect. Charles detrained at Rugby. Spence went on sitting in the saloon car drinking beer, shocked to the core.

Commuting with Charles Craft! What a fate!

But the money was good.

Anna rarely took a break during the day. If she did, she spent it walking round the dye works site, usually in the rain, watching the birth of new life. She had new boots, so her feet were dry. She hated spending money on herself, now that she was financially dependent, but Spence had insisted. From the fragile shelter of a willow thicket, among the yellow-grey catkins like damp fledglings in the storm, she watched the icy sleet of March blow by and thought about Lily Rose. It worried her that she had not begun to forget. She caught herself pretending that there was a baby at home: she had to hurry home to feed the baby. She stared into shop windows, choosing toddler clothes. More than once she’d found herself at a check-out desk with a cheap toy, a rag book, and had to return the goods in confusion. Was this unhealthy? Well, too bad. It must be endured. Like pregnancy, mourning did not interfere with her work. In ways, it was
good
pain, not disabling: as if the baby, though she was dead, still had a protective power.

She said to Clare, “doesn’t the old dye works site remind you of Frodo and Sam in Ithilien?” Clare agreed. “A disheveled, dryad loveliness on the edge of Mordor, wasn’t that it?” From their first meeting they had established a warmly shared personal hinterland, which made a big change after Nirmal.

“Enjoy it while you can,” Clare added, sorrowfully. “Every year I hear mutterings. There’s no such thing as land safe from development these days, even if it’s been soaked in poison for decades. The world’s in the hands of the devils, Anna. Nothing good survives.”

Nitash Davidson, their neighbor, was an autotheologist, a term that nagged Anna. She wanted to know why it was familiar, but didn’t want to ask Nitash anything in case he tried to recruit her to the cult. One day when she found his door open she risked a closer look at his office shrine. The open-fronted box held a figure of Jesus on the cross, since it was that time of year, flanked by Lord Ganesh and a gaudy foil-wrapped chocolate egg, presumably standing for the virgin mother. The wall around was decked in handprints and inscribed
To The God Who Makes Mistakes.
Then she remembered… The flat in Pinebourne House, hung with fetishes: the three Norns. Nitash came up behind her. He tucked a sprig of fresh aspen behind the cross, touched the feet of the crucified, then his forehead and his lips.