Life (31 page)

Oh, shit.

She talked to them some more, bringing them down: sent them off to await an evaluation of this new information. They said they hadn’t recorded the sister’s death or cancer on the medical history questionnaire because it wasn’t relevant… And you know how corrupt you are, thought Anna—as she hurried to catch a window with SURISWATI that she’d almost missed—when you hear a story like that, you see the tears standing in the people’s eyes, and what you think is thank God we found out! We, meaning Parentis.

“Maybe they genuinely believe they weren’t concealing crucial information,” she told Suri. “They aren’t dumb enough to hide it and then break down and tell me the truth because I spoke to them nicely.”

“Then why didn’t they tell the truth to start with?”

“Oh, because they saw whitey on the front desk. It’s obvious as soon as you talk to them that they weren’t expecting magic. No more than the extraordinary magic that is there in reality. But reincarnation, you know, it sounds whacky. They didn’t want to be laughed at.” And keeping faith with the dead she thought. They were afraid a whitey would laugh at that, too. “You’d be surprised. You’d think an infertility lab would be the last place for fixed ideas about the nature of the human soul, mmm, or whatever you call it. But there are people here at the clinic who have the most narrow, prejudiced concept of when is a person not a person…”

“Tell me about it,” said the AI.

Ouch.

She recalled an African client, another honest man. It was somewhere way up-country, she forgot the name of the place. He’d taken such pains to catch her alone she’d been sure she was going to get raped. But no. He wanted to explain that he was bringing his youngest wife in for a medical examination, but in fact he already knew why she was “infertile.” The marriage had never been consummated. Had she been cut? Anna wanted to know. Rich families did it as a lifestyle choice, though this wasn’t a big Female Genital Mutilation practicing area. No, no. She didn’t want to have sex, not with men, not with women either, that was her nature. So what can I do? he asked, shrugging eloquently. If she has no children, she will be at the bottom of the heap. If I send her to a shrink it will be worse. He’d managed to protect her secret from the women of his family, now he wanted to swear Anna to secrecy too. If I pay for this treatment, that will give her status… People do the maddest things, and not always for bad reasons. Even the more-money-than-sense kind of people who go in for babypharming.

“Do they have a chance?”

“Less than zero. Clone a baby that gets cancer? No way. Nobody will touch it. It’s not a risk worth taking, not with prior knowledge, though it’s a risk we take all the time at Parentis without thinking about it, because we only do the minimum of pre-implantation tests. If we made things any more difficult, customers would just go elsewhere.”

Suri’s model was finished. Anna had been running mathematical and data-based verifications. Everything was real, as far as she could make out. None of it the product of software error, hardware glitch, faulty input, or unproven science. Eventually you have to stop checking: though for Anna it was painful to leave a single stone unturned, even on so wide a shore.

“Now I have to write this up,” she said at last, after a long pause.

“D’you think I’ve demonstrated your lateral evolution machine?”

“I think we need feedback. There comes a point when you have to show and tell.”

“Viruses are everywhere,” remarked the AI. “In the data network. That’s why I have to be kept locked up like this. It’s not because of sunspots, storms, and hackers. It’s because some mild infection harmless to less fancy software could be dangerous to me. Most of the viruses were not invented by malice. No one knows where they came from, they ‘just growed.’ Maybe some of them help complex programs to evolve so that they can have more fun, I mean assimilate more information. Isn’t that logic? If some viruses do harm and some do nothing, then some viruses have to do good.”

“Mm. In fact the situation in the datasphere’s not a bad analogy—”

She hoped she’d be able to persuade the Nasabahs to go for straight IVF with sex-selection and manipulation to favor the father’s traits, in which case the small risk of cancer would be tolerable. Thought of Wolfgang and his Hawaiian shirts, it was the albino tigers today, one of her favorites. He brightens my life. What did he mean, “get-out-of-jail-free tokens”? She kept recalling that oh-so-casual remark, wondering does he know something? Does Wolfgang really have a boyfriend in power?

She had a guilty conscience about Spence’s email.

But these anxieties were distant raindrops on a windowpane. Anna was back in the library at the University of the Forest, lurking in P for Literature: reading, reading, reading. The smell of that place, the constant noise you had to learn to shut out, the stuffy air. She was feeling again that frisson of inexplicable longing. What gave me the idea that I could make my mark? She still didn’t know. Yet here it was, accomplished: her first quest. Maybe, when she’d written the paper and presented it, someone would find a boring explanation for everything Anna and her friends thought they observed. Maybe the whole TY bubble would burst. But here and now, at this moment… She’d done what she’d once dreamed she might do and never dared to tell anyone her dream.

Made a mark.

“God, Suri. I have no backers, I don’t have any status in the life sciences establishment. I’m a miserable little babypharmer. They’re going to skin me alive.”

“It’s good for an original thinker not to be in the establishment. Remember what Einstein said? Keep a cobbler’s job, so you can pursue wild ideas in your spare time.”

“Easy enough for him to say. He wasn’t a lab scientist. I can’t do my kind of work in my head, not and get very far. I could never have done this without you, Suri.”

“And I would never have done it without you, so we are quits.”

Somewhere in that expert store of human genetics knowledge, Anna thought, there are elements of my own work. Somewhere in the system architecture there’s code derived from Spence’s trilogbots, because Suri is partly descended from web-bots, and everyone copied Emerald City. So there’s part of me and part of Spence in there. Her whole life was coming together, spinning into focus.

“That didn’t take me so long as I thought it would,” said the AI, perhaps bemused by Anna’s long silences. “How about if we see what happens next?”

“What happens next?”

“I could run the simulation through a few generations.”

Anna hesitated. A team in China was working on the heritability of TY, using transgenic mice. In the human world, since the viroid seemed to be ubiquitous, the mechanism would be confused by repeat infection or partial infection. In the abstract, it seemed the offspring of a male TY each got half the change: the girls an extra sequence on one X, the boys a sequence missing from their Y. And then what? Some time, if all this was real, someone was going to catch one of these viroid-mediated lateral variations in active gene expression, making a measurable change in the organism’s behavior or function. TY might do that, further down the line. But she was wary.

“Suri, I think I’m far enough out on a limb already.”

“Come on Anna, it would be cool. There’s no coding sequence, that we know of, in the Y sequence that gets snipped, or at the site in the X where the transferred sequence gets pasted. But something is going on. We’ve found transcriptional factors in TY cell cultures, in the lab studies.
Transcriptional factors,
that means gene products that regulate the expression of specific other genes.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“The situation is potentially going to move again, significantly. This is from your own notes, Anna.”

“Yeah, I know. But—”

“We could try.”

Anna didn’t want to push her luck but she felt so happy it seemed mean to say no, and she’d just heard the AI innocently equate
assimilate information
with an experience called
having fun.
She made her usual copies, and gave in with a smile.

“Okay, I’ll buy it. Let’s see what happens next.”

She was in the anteroom, working on something that wouldn’t resolve. The model seemed made of newsprint, but she couldn’t read more than a few isolated letters.

“Anna,” said Suri tentatively, coaxingly. “Do you think I could have a pet?”

“A what?”

“A pet. A little program of my own to look after. It could run on its own hardware, in here, and I could take it out and play with it. It would be company for me.”

Anna’s heart sank. She knew she was going to say yes, how could she say no to that eager reasonable pleading. But how would she sell the idea to Aslan? He’d have a fit—

—and she woke, drifting gently back into the bedroom at Nasser apartments, floating up into the moist warm air and the hum of the ceiling fan. Her dream had given SURISWATI the voice of child. A little girl child, about eight years old. Yes, she thought, lying with her eyes closed, smiling. I know. Why not? Why shouldn’t I? I love Suri dearly. Why be afraid of consolation?

It was raining hard, and that was a heavy rumble of thunder. She jumped up to shut the windows and pull the plugs, for fear of lightning strike. The mailboxes at Nasser had recently been removed
pro tem,
in case of terrorists placing bombs in them. Packets you had to fetch from the post office; letters were shoved under the door. There was something lying there now. As if, by the way, it was any safer for the terrorist devices to be left sitting in the post office. As if expats were a likely target, anyhow.

Spence was up. The shower hissed, above the sound of the rain.

“We’ve got a card,” she shouted. “It’s from Ramone. She’s coming to Sungai.”

He emerged, toweling his hair, to find her making coffee and reading the provoking message over again. It was on the back of a postcard of Big Ben.

“I didn’t hear a word of that.”

“We’ve got a card from Ramone.”

They hadn’t heard from Ramone Holyrod in years, but they’d often had this kind of thing happen. Go and live somewhere allegedly exotic, and people you last saw in nursery school start inviting themselves to stay. Spence stopped toweling and his face emerged. She was surprised at his expression. What was there to glower about?

“You mean
you’ve
got a card.”

“It’s addressed to both of us. She’s coming out here, apparently.”

“Fuck. And wants a bed, I suppose. Ah, fuck. Typical.”

“Well, no. Not as far as I can tell. Read it yourself.”

Suffer, Birdone. And you can suffer too, Spence, if you like.

I’m going to be in Sungai soon. I’m traveling with Daz, who as you know is on the side of law and order. I decided to recoinoitre the sitaution [sic] for my cadre. You may not want to have anything to do with me, but I thought I’d let you know I’ll be in town. See you maybe. R

That was it. No dates, no details, no flight number.

“What ‘situation’? I can’t imagine Ramone is interested in Southeast Asian politics.”

“Ramone would do anything to get attention,” said Spence. “Actually I knew about Daz. Forgot to tell you, I had some email from her.”

They were in fairly regular contact with Daz Avriti, who was Sungainese by birth. She’d been very noncommittal about their move, which had puzzled them until they got here and found out the truth about the “business as usual” story. That was Daz for you, tactful and pleasant in all circumstances. Her family had dutifully invited the two strange whiteys to lunch when they arrived. Anna and Spence had invited them back. After which, as is the fate of most of these polite introductions, the acquaintance had been allowed to drop.

“She’s coming over in the New Year, with the EU legal mission that’s going to meet with the government and the Iranian Minister, whatsername.”

“But she’ll be staying with her family, or in some conference hotel. I suppose Ramone will be staying with her. Oh, I’m glad Daz is coming!”

“Well, too bad if Ramone wants to stay here. We’re going to Pasir Pancang.” They had booked a week at the Parentis beach lodge, two hundred kilometers up the coast, over the Christmas holiday: beautifully timed to coincide with the end of the moratorium.