Life (16 page)

She didn’t like being in Human Assisted Reproduction. She wanted to be building better potatoes, work that made sense for the world. Yet Lavinia had been right. Irrational, central, alluring: human genetic material had a glory about it. Sometimes, in the exacting tedium of her days, it would come to her like an epiphany that she stood within the highest sanctuary, holding the fire from heaven. In one of these moments, she turned—having sensed that someone was watching her—and found KM Nirmal standing there. Her conversations with her supervisor had been few and functional. Nirmal did not like to be tête à tête with anyone. He liked to talk at length only in meetings, where the element of personal interaction was safely diluted. He smiled, and his thin lips became beautiful. Anna knew she had not cleared the dazzled brightness from her eyes. She blushed, because it felt as if he’d read her mind.

“Sonia tells me you’ve been finding anomalies that you haven’t brought up in meetings.”

Thanks a lot, Sonia.

“There’s something I’m noticing,” she agreed. “I don’t know if it means anything.”

“Well, you must log it. With exactitude. Keep good records.”

“Of course.”

“But concentrate on the task in hand. Please. That is what I expect of you.” He touched the canister that held the contemporary male samples. “These are human lives, Anna.
Courage and ability and sighing…
Never forget that. We deal in human lives. There is nothing more important.”

She had been with Parentis for months before she noticed the sperm whales. They were on the doors, the walls, on people’s security badges. They decorated the unofficial official notepaper, courtesy of an original design by Ron Voight (f), the younger of the two post-docs. They were on post-its, fridge magnets, photos cut out of newsprint, pointillist “virtual reality” posters to infuriate the stereogramically challenged. They hung from the ceiling—Nirmal did not like this—as mobiles. When she finally saw them, Anna thought:
I have been ill!
It was another kind of epiphany. She went out and bought herself a sperm whale coffee mug.

Nirmal told Anna to prepare a paper for a postgraduate symposium, to be held at the university in the summer term. It would be her maiden speech. The private meeting in which they discussed the symposium was, in Nirmal’s usual style, very short: but he emphasized, with his rare and beautiful smile, that this was an opportunity to try her wings. Anna decided to write up her “Transferred Y” phenomenon. She had been working on it, quietly but obstinately, alongside the official project, and she was now convinced that what she saw was genuine, and genuinely puzzling.

She could have a paper on the pseudogenes in reserve, if Nirmal disapproved.

She scoured the publications, online and in print. As far as she could discover she was the only person who had observed this tiny anomaly, which wasn’t surprising since the variant was probably restricted to a certain population in a small area in France. She noticed that not much work of any kind had been done on human transposons. She tried to curb her excitement and had dreams about walking on empty space.

It was a damned fine change from the dreams she’d had after Charles had raped her.

She worked very hard but did not feel overworked. She was full of energy, adrenalin, and fear. The way she felt about Transferred Y reminded her of that wonderful sexual time with Spence, except that the point about being with Spence had been that there was no risk, only pleasure. But the feeling of being at
full stretch
was the same.

The symposium was in June, in a large science lecture hall. It was too large, for Anna’s taste, by orders of magnitude. She had known that the meeting was open to the public, but she had not foreseen a substantial audience. Perhaps all these people were friends and relations of the other postgrad maidens. Anna hadn’t thought of inviting her own parents and felt guilty. Maybe they’d have liked to be here.

She went outside, to recover her calm. She did not frequent the university much. She’d had very little contact with her academic supervisor: which suited Anna fine. If she socialized it was with the Parentis team, watching Sports tv at The Goldfish. When she went home it was to Roz, Shannon, and Graham the Rugby-playing boyfriend. She counted herself as a working stiff: not a student, simply a poorly paid lab technician. Leeds campus was high, flat, and monochrome, obedient to a different modernism and a different past: she was glad it woke no nostalgia for that wooded valley far in the south. The weather was miserable, the sky a cold and distant plane. She walked around for a while and then went to present herself to the organizers. And here I am, she thought. I’m going to give my first paper. She ran over the presentation in her mind, felt a thundering of stage fright in her belly, and tried to relax. The program said she was on late in the afternoon. Most people might have left. Good!

“Who are you again?”

“Anna Senoz. From Parentis.”

She deposited copies of her paper. The young woman had a mobile phone to her ear and was making facial gestures triggered by the voice Anna couldn’t hear.

“Well, hello Anna. I’m Lorraine. We’ve talked on the phone. Everything all right?”

“Fine.”

“Got everything you need, OHP okay for you? You’re on with Eswin Holmes and Teresa Vickramsingh, questions at the end of the three papers, hope that’s all right, we thought it would move things along better.”

The young man next to Lorraine looked up. “So you’re from Parentis. Where they do the animal experiments?” He was wearing a mulberry velour jacket and a deep yellow ruffled shirt. His hair was a cockscomb of chestnut curls, his expression imperious.

Anna ignored him. “Yes, questions at the end will be fine.”

Mulberry jacket raised his voice. “I didn’t want your paper on the program. What can we learn about human beings by torturing small furry animals, exactly?”

“Quite a lot, in fact.”

“Now you’re going to tell me it’s vital medical research. Is it fuck. Human fertility treatment ought to be illegal. Look around you: do we
need
more human beings? You’re just the kind of amoral, money-loving parasite who gives science a bad name.”

“Ian,” broke in Lorraine, waving her phone at him. “Can you help Professor Reeves? They’re having trouble with the sound system.” Ian glared at Anna and left, scraping back his chair and striding off in long-legged contempt. “I’m sorry that had to happen,” apologized his colleague. “He’s a jerk. I’m sure he didn’t mean to undermine you.”

At least he didn’t fancy me, thought Anna. She’d have been far more scared if Ian had tried to flirt, although she had recovered completely from that horrible experience with Charles. But Charles must have been feeling deeply hostile to Anna on that hateful evening, so even if they don’t flirt they could still attack… A horror ran through her, turning her blood to ice water. The foyer outside the lecture hall suddenly revealed its true nature: the scuffed terrazzo floor, battered doors with panels of meshed fireproof glass, tattered fly-posting, a drinks machine with plastic cups spilling from a bin. The smell of studenthood, the stink of shame and loss, assaulted her. She went into the hall and took a place in the middle of a back row, so that Ian in the mulberry jacket couldn’t corner her. He wouldn’t be able to get her into a room by herself. She was safe.

She spent the lunch break lurking in the crowd, unmolested. In the middle of the afternoon she went down to the front and presented herself in good time. Professor Reeves of Computer Science, who was running the symposium, greeted her distractedly.

“Who are you?” His grey curly hair fizzed with anxiety.

“I’m Anna Senoz, from Parentis.”

“Good, good. Now look, er, Anna, we’re running late, it’s going to be very unfair on the last group, so could you make it short. Get through your stuff in fifteen minutes, instead of twenty. Can you do that for me, love?”

“Of course.”

“Good girl! Now where the hell’s Eswin? Anyone here seen Terry Vick?”

She scanned her pages and made instant cuts. It was better this way: hustled, badgered, no time to think. It would be no worse than talking to a nearly empty hall, the way she’d imagined. There was no one here remotely interested in Transferred Y. This was a rehearsal, harmless as practicing in front of the mirror. Her heart beat wildly, she felt like a half-fledged bird crouched on the rim of the nest:
“Ca, mon ame, il faut partir…”
Who said that? Rene Descartes, as he lay dying. My soul, we must go. But she was not dying, she was being born. She was about to join the edifice, the organism, thousands of years, to which she had given her life and heart. To speak and be heard. She checked the OHP, made sure her acetates were in order—and saw KM Nirmal, sitting erect in the middle of the front row. She hardly recognized him. He was wearing a very smart suit. She’d never seen him except in a lab coat or a shabby sports jacket. He hadn’t said a word about attending the symposium. Her head started to spin. To speak in front of Nirmal was
completely different.

She began.

That evolution is still a mysterious process, with many unsuspected byways, and perhaps she had found an example of one of these.

That her predecessors in sequencing the Y chromosome had worked like this.

That she was analyzing samples of DNA from healthy, normally fertile contemporary human males and from recovered medieval tissue.

That her technique was like this (including the tweaked modeling program).

That she had repeatedly observed an exchange of the same sequence of bases, between the Y and the X chromosomes in the modern samples. That she had found no sign of this polymorphism in human male DNA from a similar geographic location at an earlier date. (The Huit Bories samples.) Further investigation was indicated. Was there a female version of Transferred Y, passed on by affected males to their daughters?

Meanwhile here was a distinctive genetic variation, apparently fitness-neutral, that had established itself in a human population in a relatively short time. How this happened—if it was not disproven by further evidence—and whether there were other instances of the same mechanism, continued studies might reveal.

The previous speaker, Eswin Holmes (Bacteriostatic Effects of Food Preservation) had overrun his fifteen minutes a little. Therefore, after about thirteen minutes and a quarter, Professor Reeves started making urgent
wind it up!
signals. Anna wound it up. She was pleased with herself for being in control enough to do that and still more or less make sense. No one was listening, anyway—except presumably Nirmal. She dared, as she delivered her final sentence, to risk a timid glance in his direction. He was staring right at Anna, his eyes blazing with naked fury. As she watched, horrorstruck, he got to his feet, pushed his way along the row, and marched out of the hall.

There were no questions.