Life (47 page)

Poole University’s lab-science buildings were, as it happened, leased units on the old science park on the Forest campus, where Anna would have been a post-grad if her first career hadn’t been derailed. As she walked up that valley that would always smell of morning—though it was so changed, so little left of the beech trees and the lawns—she felt that she was folding back the years. After many mistakes, many stupid blunders, this time she would get it right.

Anna didn’t know what Nirmal thought about her Aether papers. He was very hands-off on that. He’d become in some ways more open and approachable since his wife died, but you still hit that core of absolute reserve pretty close to the surface. She had no idea how he would react to this even more way-out suggestion.

At least the Aether was vague. This was getting down to cases.

She produced the Sungai disks, and they studied Suri’s projection together, almost in silence. Nirmal took off his eye wrap and spent some time going through the printed notes. She waited, strangely relaxed. As long as Anna Anaconda could be straightforward about things she was content, come what may. She watched Nirmal’s calm, voracious concentration as he took possession of the material and felt at home with him. We be of one blood, thou and I.

“Hmm!”

Nirmal placed the papers neatly on the desk and leaned back. He took up his varifocals and applied the tip of one earpiece, gently, rhythmically, to the center of his thin lips. The capital-H grooves around his mouth had deepened, the bones of his face stood out even more, but apart from the new glasses nothing much in his appearance had changed. KM Nirmal did not age. He looked amused.

“So! This is what was behind it all.”

Behind what? The nebulous Aether she supposed. She waited.

“If this is true, if these results are genuine indicators, then there are two questions. Where are these new creatures, Anna, the epidemic of XX human males?”

Anna nodded. “That’s one question. What’s the other?”

“If they are among us, why has nobody else announced this discovery?”

“Yes.”

“There should be clinical cases by now, many clinical cases, throughout the world. Where are they?”

“I think,” said Anna slowly, “that this isn’t
Brave New World.
Babies aren’t routinely genotyped…not anywhere. What Suri shows is that an exchange of genetic material, between the X and the Y chromosomes, triggered by the presence of the TY viroid, will lead to dramatic-looking change, in the chromosomes, on a stunning scale in the human population. That doesn’t mean stunning numbers of clinical cases. If Suri’s right, most of those affected might have no ‘symptoms’ at all. And, I think we
are
seeing an epidemic of XX males. We’ve been seeing an epidemic of XX males in fertility treatment for at least a decade. But the significance has been masked by the variety of the problems it’s caused, by the fact that fertility is frequently unaffected, and by all the other candidates for blame, in the fall in male fertility. Plus, taken globally, vast numbers of people would never be referred to an infertility clinic even if they were in trouble.”

“Very true, very reasonable—if there were no such thing as human sex chromosome research, and if no one had yet drawn our attention to the TY viroid effect. But this is no longer a case of serendipity, Anna. Your own earlier results are known. You cannot tell me that no one has found out because nobody has been looking.”

“I sat on this for years,” said Anna, “because SURISWATI’s projection is so bizarre. I want to prove entrainment. I want to show a mechanism for lateral propagation of genetic variation, as the secret engine of ‘evolution,’ as something that makes ‘evolution’ different from the model we use now. I don’t want
this:
it’s too sensational and in totally the wrong way. Other people may have felt the same. Maybe they’ve noticed (she thought of Miguel) something weird, and they’ve decided not to go down that path. It wouldn’t be the first time a whole science ignored experimental results, for… for all kinds of reasons. Think of Galileo.”

“You don’t believe this is a mirage.”

She drew a deep breath. “I don’t know what it is. I want to do the work. I want to re-examine Suri’s evidence, and I need to conduct a survey. And try to keep what I’m doing quiet, until I know there’s something there.”

Nirmal nodded, tapping the earpiece of his glasses to his lips again. “Just so. And you want to sow these dragon’s teeth in my department, on my time.”

“Not without your advice and consent.”

“Hmm. I presume the KL SURISWATI, who or which would be your Suri’s closest relative, knew nothing of your work?”

“Nothing. The Sungai SURISWATI lived and died a stand-alone. If we could get any cooperation from Kuala Lumpur—” (Which was unlikely, in the present state of Southeast Asian politics. Nirmal nodded in acknowledgment.) “It would be useless. I couldn’t confirm or deny without doing the work over again, and then we’d have to get her results independently verified. I’d rather work without an AI, just because of the verification problem. Virtual modeling isn’t enough. We have to find the answers in real, living human cells.”

Nirmal replaced his glasses. He sheaved her papers together, put them back in their folder, ejected the XX projection from his machine, and handed the lot over the desk.

“Then do it. But—”

“In my tea breaks,” said Anna.

But her head was spinning, because there was more. She could see it in his eyes. She had seen the gleam that lit him up inside when she spoke of the secret engine of evolution—

“No,” said Nirmal, precisely. “Now we both have two jobs, because the Department must not suffer. Let’s see what you and I can do together.”

He stood, and came around the desk to see her to the door, a courtesy that he had omitted the first time they had spoken on the subject of TY and on the subject of what Anna should or should not do on KM Nirmal’s time. She still didn’t know what was going through his head. As he opened the door for her he smiled, that beautiful rare illuminating smile. “Well, Anna,” he said. “What a long strange trip it’s been.”

Jake’s mummy taught him the names of trees and the parts of flowers, how to dance the Okey Kokey, how to blow a dandelion clock, how to cook a hedgehog, what to say to snowfall, who Guy Fawkes was, and a rhyme about magpies. Jake’s daddy didn’t know these things because he didn’t come from England, but he knew everything about Steven Spielberg, John Lennon, Kurt Cobain, Lara Croft, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Mario the plumber. He knew who had written all the songs on Top of the Pops, when they were first invented. Jake believed his father must once have been mighty in the land. In the winter they went to Jumble Sales at the Salvation Army Citadel, for old sakes’ sake, though they were not poor any longer. In the summer they walked in the New Forest and visited village fetes where they bought plants (that died) and ate strange homemade cakes from pleated paper cases. In ancient little churches they sniffed the cool and beeswax air, and Jake always wrote the same thing in the Visitors’ Book:
Very beautiful.

They had no time for long holidays, but once on a short break, at the beach in France, beside the creamy diamond breakers of the Atlantic, Jake asked his mummy, how do you be a scientist? Anna scooped up a handful of sand. She dug out a beach-tennis bat, laid it flat and tipped her handful onto the black surface.

“Count them.”

“Count what?”

“The grains of sand. Look, I’ll show you.” She flattened the heap with her palm, squared it off and divided it with the edge of a shell into twelve roughly equal patches. “Count the grains in one of those patches. Then choose another patch, and count again. When you’ve done that, we’ll add the two results together, divide the result by two, multiply it by twelve, and you’ll know approximately how many grains in one
mummy’s handful.
It will be different from how many there would be in a
Jake’s handful:
that doesn’t matter, so long as we bear it in mind. We’re going to assume, for now, that you have a representative number of unusually big and little grains, overall. When you’ve done that bit, we’ll talk about how to figure out how many
mummy’s handfuls
make a beach. It won’t be easy. The beach is big, it is changing all the time, and you and I may not agree on where the edges are. But we’ll have a go.”

Spence came up from the water with his bodyboard, and found the child enslaved.

“What’s going on here?”

“Science!” breathed Jake. “I’m counting the sand.”

“You’re a rotten bitch,” said Spence to his wife. “Has he been driving you
that
crazy?”

Anna lay back behind her sunglasses and picked up her book. “He asked me what it was like to be a scientist,” she explained, implacably. “So I told him.”

She was counting the sand. The days were not long enough; the nights were white pits of fall. She worked like one possessed and couldn’t sleep. Her voice shook, her hands shook. She tried to remember to be kind and helpful to her teammates, because that is
essential,
the lifeblood of good work; but she had the greatest of difficulty in recalling their names. It was strange to know that her boss saw this as a straight line progression. He had seen her talent, he had nurtured her, she had gone off to have her babies (as women must). Now she was back, and he was grooming her for stardom: the discovery he had seen in germ plasm, in that first Transferred Y paper, come to fruition. They were struggling in a backwater, and secrecy was imperative, true. Otherwise, everything was as it should be. All Anna’s cruel defeats and long sacrifices, Nirmal’s past injustices, simply didn’t exist. And she was happy to settle for this version, very happy. Hungering and thirsting for justice does not make the wheels go round. It just doesn’t.

She knew she was failing to keep her end up on the domestic front. It couldn’t be helped, this was a crisis. Once, when she was putting away some clean washing, she found a fresh pack of condoms in Spence’s underwear drawer. Anna and Spence hadn’t used any protection since Spence had his vasectomy. Now that Shere Khan had become successful, it was Spence’s turn to be the traveling executive: visiting bookshops and schools, staying in conference hotels. He was entitled to play away, if he liked. She sat on their bed, holding the packet and thinking,
Oh well.
Fair dos.

Then she put it back. She said nothing.

It was the way the fairy tale goes: the price of riches is lost contentment. Once the pressure was off, once TY was
over, sorted,
she would make everything right again.

As usual, Anna had not been able to make it to Jake’s school show. She always promised to try and always failed. Meret, who was always alone too (the idea of Charles coming to the Primary School Christmas/Hanukkah/Divali Concert was absurd) had saved a place for Spence in the upper hall, where infants were mewling and rows of adult haunches were overflowing the cute little tubular framed chairs. He was in a flurry because these things are so awkwardly timed. He had walked Jake to school, returned home, and managed to get himself into writing mode for about three minutes, before realizing that he had to leap up and rush out again. Such is the life. He hunkered down, uneasy about the eager way she had waved and beamed at his approach. He’d have liked to tell her not to do that, but why? Discreet about what? They were friends.