Life (24 page)

“Lavinia Kent?” she asked.

“Yes! You too?”

“Sort of.”

She ought to have known. Lavinia Kent, after a hospital stay, had emerged to popular fame: a living saint for the media now, not just for the cognoscenti. And Ramone had had a book published. It was called
Praise Song For Epimetheus,
it was her doctoral thesis. There had been some hype about it, but no sign of support from Lavvy. Anna had wondered about that. She never wanted to see the rabid one again, and she presumed Ramone felt the same. (Daz had told Spence what Ramone had said about the wedding, and Spence had been unable to resist telling Anna.) Still, she had been vicariously gratified when she saw Ramone’s face on a daybreak tv show, selling the new book.
I invented her,
she thought. She’s the girl from outside my bedroom window—

How far away it all seemed, those salon evenings.

As soon as Anna was up to speed on virology, she took over a share of the routine work, filling the orders that came from every branch of biotechnology, from medical research to fish farming. Clare and Anna did the skilled machining, then the parts were passed on to the assembly line for bulk amplification. One batch of
herpes simplex,
denatured and rebuilt in the specific sites needed for a cancer therapy infusion. One tobacco mosaic stripped of its protein coat and wrapped in something customized to get past the fierce defenses of a fish-fungus. One Epstein-Barr with the special knurling, coming up. The ghosts of industry past roared and clanged around her: the stink, the flying shuttles, the spinning drill heads. Genetic engineering was easier on the ears than the old-fashioned kind, but it was making the wheels of the world go round. The ghost of a secret pride she had first known at Parentis slipped through Anna’s protective shell.

I am within the sanctuary, a different sanctuary. I am doing real work.

Transferred Y was not forgotten. Clare had good contacts. She was able to secure, cheaply, a copy of those French reproductive health survey samples and a copy of the Cameroon antenatal samples from Parentis. Two days a week Anna stepped back in time, to the world before Lily Rose. She was calling her project
An Investigation of Apparent Benign Mutagenic Action on the Human Sex Pair Chromosomes.
At first she could not replicate her Leeds results, and all seemed lost. Then she and Clare discovered that the new, improved culture medium they were using was causing the samples to behave differently. When they’d tinkered with the mix, Transferred Y appeared like magic.

“I’m
not
crazy,” breathed Anna, “It’s there, isn’t it. This is amazing.”

“Not yet,” said Clare. “Transferred Y is not amazing
yet.
Benign miscopying between the X and the Y happens. We can’t be sure that further tests won’t explain away what we seem to see. Have you thought about how or why this could be happening?”

Anna was reluctant to draw any conclusions. She’d prefer to stick to pure description, leave speculation to others. She remembered that interview with Nirmal, when the praise she desperately needed had come with a very clear price tag. Find out what the boss wants you to think…

“Um, well, I haven’t really thought?”

“I’d like to propose that you try looking for something. If you’re open to a supervisor’s suggestion.”

“Of course.”

“I see a pattern that suggests a lateral transfer. We have two locales for this mutation: one in the south of France, in an area of relatively high African immigration, and one in Francophone West Africa. Have you considered that a virus might be involved?”

Ah, right.

Clare Gresley was the virus queen. Viruses featured heavily in the way-out theory that she called
Continuous Creation.
According to Clare, viruses and viroids connected the web of life on earth: maintaining equilibrium, mediating change, sustaining the genetic homogeneity that orthodox science attributed solely to common ancestry in the far past. In her picture, virus-borne disease was the pathology of a far more significant function, and the use of viruses to mediate artificial genetic change was a “discovery” that mimicked a vast, unsuspected, natural communication and commerce between all living organisms.

Unfortunately, the lateral transfer of chunks of functional DNA from species to species, and between the individuals of a population, seemed to most people well explained by current science, and it couldn’t possibly be the missing link of evolution, because evolution didn’t have a missing link.
Continuous Creation
was dead in the water: Clare Gresley had backed a loser. That was why she was here, not making her fortune, just turning out widgets in obscurity. Anna had grasped the whole situation by now, though Clare had never spoken openly about her plight.

“Infectivity, Anna. That could be your answer.”

Infectivity was a Continuous Creation keyword: meaning chemical information (in the form of a virus) that invades an organism bringing communication, not as a threat. Anna heard the suppressed excitement in Clare’s voice, and knew that she’d met her fate. She could forget the idea that Clare, who had brought up her daughter Jonquil alone while struggling to have a science career, had taken pity on her. She could abandon the fantasy that Nirmal had fixed things for her, as a secret amends. This was why she was here: Clare had seen Transferred Y as a way to promote Continuous Creation—the boss always has an agenda. Well, she’d learned her lesson—

In the moment it took her to find the right words (lying would never come easily to Anna) it dawned on her that Clare could be right. A virally mediated mutation that took hold in a natural population without causing any effect…that would explain Transferred Y. No wonder Nirmal had been so enraged. He must have seen the connection with Clare Gresley’s doomed theory at once. But Nirmal could be wrong. Clare could be right. Anna could have found the evidence that Clare had been waiting for—

Her heart thumped. She managed to keep her voice level.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, that’s worth trying.”

Clare had been collecting viruses and viroids for years. Customers sent the creatures to her from all over the world. There was always a new strain, a new protein coat to decipher, a novel species. Managing the database of her collection occupied Clare’s every spare moment. She turned over this remarkable resource to Anna, and Anna started looking for viral traces in her Transferred Y samples.

The cunning wheeze of using “standard” technicians to cut down on staff meant that researchers had to do anything remotely specialized themselves: there was no project team to share the load. But luck was with them. It was only a couple of months before they could say, with reasonable confidence, that they had found something. They began to discover fragments of something resembling a virus, possibly some relation of the ubiquitous
herpes simplex,
the cold sore virus. (Clare didn’t agree with the conventional naming or ordering of virus species, but she admitted them to be useful shorthand,
pro tem.)
Anna’s next task was to culture this unknown strain to see if she could induce the TY phenomenon in the sex-pair chromosomes of uninfected living cells—finicky, delicate clumps of living human cells (there were no mass produced mice to be sacrificed in Clare Gresley’s lab)—a kind of work she had never done before. It was tough going, tough but good.

Anna resisted Clare’s pessimism about the state of the world. Yes, okay, a culture of brutal self interest was destroying life on earth. But would Clare feel so sad about the great dying, without the added sting of personal failure…? People are still happy, life can still be good. Thinking like that, she would remember with a shock that
she was unhappy herself,
that she had lost her baby and would never cease to mourn; and then the permanent sorrow, etched in the back of Clare’s eyes, frightened her. Is that going to be me? Yet sometimes—as the road across the Pennines flew beneath her wheels in the early morning, or at evening as she stepped into the car, going home to Spence and their little house, the young moon in a blue sky and one star (actually Venus) below it—she would be transfixed by joy. Tears would start in her eyes, she could only think,
I love you so much!

You, meaning the world, meaning everything…

Transferred Y was her refuge and her passion. But her soul had grown richer, stranger, stronger. She was in love with the world: the world that included, deeply woven and never to be lost, the death of her child.

Spence got round to telling her that he’d had Lily Rose baptized. So they were out about it with each other. Good luck to those well-padded enough to need no shelter, but most people cling to
something,
once they’ve noticed how much grief there is in the world. Anna and Spence need not be ashamed to join the majority. Catholicism, tarnished mess, had the advantage that it didn’t tell you there was something wrong with
you
if you weren’t smug and happy. It allowed people to suffer. “I feel I know you better,” he said, after this conversation. And the sex was still good. Well, to tell the truth, the sex was mechanical these days, but declared wonderful, for old time’s sake.

They didn’t do much socializing—which Spence had started to miss—because of Anna’s insanely long hours. When he went to London he would hang out with Rosey and Wol, and Marnie and the current toyboy. There was Simon Gough in Sheffield, and sometimes, rarely, he and Anna would go out with Roz and Graham, or some of the old Parentis gang. It wasn’t a bad life.

He was reading a fat hardback biography of Keats that someone had abandoned in his room in Woods, back in first year. Because he only read it on the train he wasn’t getting through it very fast. It was a winter’s day, the beginning of another year. There were grim developments in the world and a brutal gap in the New York skyline that made him wince every time he saw it; but that was a reflex. He’d got into the habit of caring very little what went on beyond the narrow, weary confines of his life. History is not my business. The line from London to Leeds was routed through the ugliest face of the English landscape. One dirty-looking dormitory town followed another, separated by swathes of dingy agribusiness. He was tired. He wanted a drink but couldn’t be arsed to go down to the buffet car and the aisle trolley didn’t appear to be rolling. He was not getting off on Keats’s biographer, but he needed something to control the mental fidgets that always plagued him on this return journey. He kept his eyes trucking from word to word.
A pet lamb in a sentimental farce.
You couldn’t help but like someone who’d describe the failure of his first hopes that way. You could feel the sharp wit and raw distress, bleeding through the years.

He read.

“Ethereal thing(s) may at least be thus real, divided into three heads—Things real—things semi-real—and no things. Things real—such as existences of Sun Moon & Stars and passages of Shakespeare—Things semi-real such as Love, the Clouds & which require a greeting of the Spirit to make them wholly exist—and Nothings which are made Great and dignified by the ardent pursuit. Which by the by stamps the burgundy mark on the bottles of our Minds, insomuch as they are able to ‘consecrate what’er they look upon…’”

A wash of dread fell through his mind, like the shadow of a manta ray dropping through blue water. He didn’t know what was happening. Then he realized that he was back in the sluice room or whatever that place was in the hospital. He was holding Lily Rose in his arms, and a voice he didn’t recognize but he had always known was saying to him
you’re as well-qualified as I am.
But she was dead, she was a piece of meat. The tiny child who lived in his mind had never been anything but meat. Wriggling meat inside Anna, then dead meat. There was no Lily Rose. She had never existed, except in that Spence himself had called her up, created her out of nothingness. He had to let her go, dismiss the phantom, or he was a pet lamb in a sentimental farce.

He put the biography away, zippered his case, and got off the train. He must have done these things because he found himself standing clutching his bag among strangers, the train to Leeds sailing away. He walked up and down, he stopped and stared at the ballast between the tracks, in a state of horrible, bewildering agitation. His little girl, this tiny girl bundled up in woollies, trotting by his side… He had never told Anna, had never brought himself to confess how concrete the little ghost had become, growing instead of fading. Now she had to go, he had to tear her up and throw her away. He had been using Lily Rose’s imaginary existence as a crutch, secretly knowing that when he was stronger he would dump her into non-existence again. That had been his position: same as his attitude to religion. Believe it if you need it, and if that means you use the crutch lifelong, well why not? But why this panic, this shaking horror? It came to him that he was being told (that letter of Keats had slammed the idea into his head) that the reality of such things depends on the observer. This doesn’t make Lily Rose less real, it’s just the truth, the very truth, you make her be, she lives in you. He felt dizzy and sick. He felt as if he had been led through the mysteries of Eleusis. Lily Rose lives, if I can handle knowing that I am her creator, that Godhead is in me… He walked up and down, shuddering in the terrible rush of this vision: thinking, ah God, poor God, how do you stand this, you poor bastard.