Life (29 page)

“Yes I do! I have some live action. My cdc mutation modeling is looking very cool. Want to take a look?”

Anna put her specs on, and in the darkened view panel, there blossomed a vastly magnified 3D simulation of Transferred Y’s chemistry.

It was very beautiful.

When Anna had told Clare Gresley that she had to give up her doctorate to pursue a paying job Clare had naturally felt let down, but she’d insisted that they must publish anyway, and she’d given Anna unlimited time and all the help she needed to prepare a new Transferred Y paper. They had submitted it to a journal where Clare still had some influence. It had duly appeared and sunk without a trace. Anna had expected nothing better (though she had hoped, a little). She was wise enough in the ways of science politics to know that the association with Clare Gresley and “Continuous Creation” wouldn’t have done Transferred Y any good. The saddest thing about this episode was that Clare had written to Anna, after the paper had appeared and failed to thrive, reproaching her bitterly for having returned to the immoral business of Human Assisted Reproduction: saying she felt betrayed and deceived etc. etc. … The letter was very unfair. Clare had known that Anna was going back into infertility science, where else could she easily find a job? And it was a sad blow to lose Clare’s friendship. But it couldn’t be helped. Anna had been in Nigeria by then. She had begun a new life; the foreign legion had overtaken her. She had been determined to put the whole thing out of her mind, if not forever then at least for a long, long time.

Then to her great surprise, about a year after they’d left England, she’d started getting responses in her email to the paper, from people who had found it online and been moved to investigate. Other scientists had replicated, or partly replicated, Anna’s findings. The thing had grown. TY and traces of the TY viroid had been found (by believers) in human XY chromosomes in samples from all over the world. The topic was still too weird to be on any official agenda, but the believers exchanged email, maintained a “TY” site, and discussed their results in the corridors between presentations at respectable conferences.

If it was real, TY was exciting. The worst obstacle to the kind of genetic manipulation everyone dreamed of was still the problem of getting corrected or novel DNA to insert at the
right site
in the
right
chromosome, and nowhere else. If the TY phenomenon was real, then the viroid did exactly that kind of accurate cut and paste job. The team that managed to clone—or better, decode and synthesize—the TY viroid had a product with a terrific market future.

Anna, as she passed from one infertility contract to another, had been watching things develop, with rueful amazement. There was not a great deal she could do to join in. From time to time she would put in a word: such as, the viroid did not have to be magically accurate. It could be that they were only noticing the successes (a chronic failing of genetic engineers), while millions of cases where humans met the viroid and it had no effect went unremarked… But if the viroid was real, then it was the evolutionary aspect that interested Anna. That’s what she would have liked to investigate, if she ever had the chance.

Towards the end of the job in Tamil Nadu, when she wasn’t sure what she was going to do next, Anna had been contacted by KM Nirmal (he had been instrumental in getting her onto the Nigerian government program: his guilty conscience made him an enduring friend) and offered this clinic manager post in Sungai. She didn’t know what he was getting at, because it was basically a desk job, and she didn’t think she was old enough to retire, not yet. Then he’d pointed out that she would have access to SURISWATI for her own research. So Anna had gone to work on Spence, persuading him it was a crying shame that they’d never visited the Pacific Rim.

SURISWATI was a phenomenally powerful machine. She was fitting Anna’s TY investigation between her clinic cases and her near-market extrapolations and still turning years of effort—old style—into a matter of weeks. To add to the wonder of it all, Anna didn’t have to steal or moonlight her time with the AI. Aslan Gaegler regarded “pure research” as a necessary evil, at best. But Nirmal was a big cheese in Parentis nowadays. He was Aslan’s boss, he knew what Anna was doing, and she had his approval.

The only thing she had left to wish for was that she could be studying the viroid-mediated establishment of a dominant genetic variation just about anywhere else than the human sex-pair. Because sex-science was icky, dodgy, and it only got you into trouble. But she didn’t have the time to go looking anywhere else. She would have to leave the larger picture for other, lucky people, and stick with the vaguely distasteful example that chance had dropped into her lap. Focus! Nirmal had been so right. You have to focus, you have to accept your niche.

She gazed into the false-colored and false-dimensioned model, occasionally touching the swimming shapes with her magic computer wand, smiling unconsciously, while Suri (as if the desperately disabled genius was leaning over her shoulder now) murmured commentary, and thinking about the HPLC work she’d done on the Y in Leeds. What a contrast! 2007, it was another world. She was looking into deep space, through Galileo’s telescope: if Galileo had been able to step into the presence of Jupiter’s moons and spin them like beads on a string. And Clare was right, Clare had to be right. The envelope of breathable atmosphere around the earth is no more inert, or empty of life, than the spaces between the stars are empty of the elements of which the stars are made. All the events in the continuum of life are linked, obedient to the same pressures, dimensions, possible chemical combinations; able to communicate with each other and affect each other. It all moves together, like some impossibly intricate four dimensional kaleidoscope—

“How does it look?” asked the expert system, nervously. She was such a child.

“Great, Suri. Thanks. I’ll speak to you later.”

She made a couple of hard copies of the current state of the model and packed one up on the spot to send to Clare—a useless courtesy, but she liked to do it—then left the sterile little room and hurried to her office. Wolfgang, her PA, was waiting for her with the day’s problems. It was not an easy task to keep the clinic in smooth operation while Sungai was cut off from its main trading partner (Malaysia) and draconian regulations proliferated daily. Then young Budi, the genomic analyst, arrived with some tale of woe. He was trying to get a figure on specific eye-color, for the elective manipulation program, and kept coming up with a totally unacceptable error-margin. (Parentis couldn’t provide eye-color choice at the flick of a genetic switch yet; but they held some patents, which were fabulously valuable on the gene-mod futures market.) Because of her train of thought with Suri, Anna was quickly able to recall some statistical tricks that she’d devised when doing mouse spermatogenesis that ought to sort it out. Budi was full of admiration. He was fresh out of graduate school, on the Parentis fast-track, and earned ten times Anna’s whole contract fee in a month. He would take her ideas and turn them into megabucks, for himself as well as Parentis (naturally, he was a shareholder), and saw nothing improper in this. Nor did Anna, not seriously. She’d rather make discoveries than make money, any day.

“You should have him pay you in sexual favors, Annie,” said Wolfgang, grimacing after the departing wunderkind. “What a lovely bottom. It’s a crime what he does you for, you sad little altruist. You could trade the favors with
me
for some get-out-of-jail-free tokens, if you don’t personally want to get between his spread cheeks.”

Nobody ever called Anna “Annie,” but from Wolfgang she didn’t mind. He was another whitey-wetback, in Sungai and masquerading as a clinic manager’s personal assistant because (if you could believe this story, Anna did not) his sugar-daddy was a new regime politician, who had rescued him from selling his body under the bridges of Jakarta. Now that we’s hit the big time, he explained, smirking, even our secret boyfriends have to be respectable.

“Did I say
spreadcheeks?
” He clapped a hand to his mouth, eyes sparkling, “Oh, shocking. I meant spreadsheets, but now you’ll think I meant
bed sheets!
My English is so poor!”

Aslan treated Wolfgang’s pouting, hair-tossing persona with forbearance, because the poor strange guy did keep things running in tough conditions, you had to allow. Anna enjoyed him and admired the courage that lay behind being so provokingly out, no matter how much he made a joke of it, in the ominous and repressive mood of Sungai city. She let him stay for a while, clowning, teasing her about that cute young analyst, before sending him on his way.

Rehearsing the worries, keeping them in mind as she moved the admin along. First in line, selfishly enough, the fear that Sungai would explode before the end of her contract. Second, that Suri’s modeling would throw up something completely doo-lally. An expert system’s front-end is an amalgam of persons, a composite of human experiences and skills from the best minds in the field. If it talks back to you convincingly, why not accept it as a person
de facto?
Fine. But virtual modeling is not the same as proof. Can’t be! She had a lingering fear that Suri could be turning out self-consistent nonsense that by malign chance matched fairly closely to Anna’s expectations but would collapse if you tried to reproduce it in the real.

What interaction of the artificial synapses—random generation of images presented to the mirror in off-topic time—causes a software entity to announce
I had a dream last night?
And in that virtual never-never land, where sometimes the flamingoes fly over Suri’s lagoon, and sometimes the lagoon flies over the flamingoes, what kind of infancy…?

Third, Spence and his moratorium.

Wolfgang made her feel very unadventurous. It was cool that she was married; he believed you should have someone to go home to, nothing sadder than a single. What if he knew that Anna’s husband was practically the only sexual partner she’d ever had, even if you counted that one time forced on her by Charles? As they swapped whitey-wetback travelers’ tales, she found herself cravenly exaggerating certain episodes, or at any rate letting Wolfgang’s assumptions go unchecked. She didn’t want him to think she was weird.

For Anna it had always, simply, been
easier.
As long as she could have sex whenever she wanted, she actively preferred to do it only with Spence. He was a friend, she trusted him. She didn’t consider herself a specially moral person. She wasn’t rejecting the concept of casual sex, though it always carried the risk of hurting someone. She was rejecting the aggravation. Why bother? Not as if she was cruising for some hunky-dory genes so she and Spence could exercise their superior parenting powers on the optimal baby.

Why bother, anyway. You couldn’t work long in human genetics without becoming conscious of how extraordinarily alike we all are. Practically identical, interchangeable units. (So why all this fuss about cloning?) Whereas, on the other hand, individuals change within themselves every year, every month, every day under different pressures and in different circumstances. Choose one human being, arbitrarily, who suits you well enough. Stay with him, and you’ll see the whole human race go by. Wolfgang would tell her, don’t be
so rational.
You mustn’t stop to think, Annie, if any of us stopped to think when would we ever take our knickers down! Don’t you get carried away, ever? Nope, she never did. No matter how lustful, drunk, or otherwise intoxicated. Maybe it was because she had never fallen in love.