Perfect People (2 page)

He’d been a strong kid. They’d named him after the comet because John had said he was special, that kids like him came along pretty rarely, maybe once every seventy-five years – and probably not even as often as that. Neither of them had known that he was born with a time bomb inside him.

Naomi still kept his photograph in her handbag. It showed a three-year-old boy in dungarees, with floppy blond hair all tangled up, as if he had just crawled out of a tumble dryer, teasing the camera with a big grin that showed two of his front teeth missing – knocked out when he fell off a swing.

For a long time after Halley’s death John had been unwilling – or unable – to grieve or to talk about it, and had simply buried himself in his work, his chess and his photography, going out for hours on end and in all weather with his camera, taking photographs of absolutely anything he saw, obsessively and aimlessly.

She had tried to get back into work. Through a friend in Los Angeles she’d been given a good temporary position in a PR office, but she’d quit after a couple of weeks, unable to concentrate. Without Halley, everything had seemed to her to be shallow and pointless.

Eventually they had both gone into therapy, which they had ended only a few months ago.

John said, ‘How do you feel about—’

‘Being here?’

‘Yes. Now that we are actually here.’

A tray on the dresser containing a bottle of mineral water and two glasses slid several inches across the surface then stopped.

‘It suddenly seems very real. I feel nervous as hell. You?’

He stroked her hair tenderly. ‘If at any point, honey, you want to stop—’

They had taken a huge bank loan to fund this, and had had to borrow another hundred and fifty thousand dollars on top of that, which Naomi’s mother and older sister, Harriet, in England, had insisted on lending them. The money, four hundred thousand dollars in total, had already been paid over, and it was non-refundable.

‘We made our decision,’ she said. ‘We have to move on. We don’t have to—’

They were interrupted by a rap on the door and a voice saying, ‘Housekeeping!’

The door opened and a short, pleasant-looking Filipino maid, dressed in a white jumpsuit and plimsolls, smiled at them. ‘Welcome aboard, Dr and Mrs Klaesson. I’m Leah, I’m going to be your cabin stewardess. Is there anything I can get you?’

‘We’re both feeling pretty queasy,’ John said. ‘Is there anything my wife is allowed to take?’

‘Oh sure – I get you something right away.’

‘There is?’ he said, surprised. ‘I thought there was no medication—’

The maid closed the door, then less than a minute later reappeared with two pairs of wrist bands and two tiny patches. Pulling her cuffs back, she revealed she was wearing similar bands, and then she showed them the patch behind her ear. ‘You wear these and you won’t get sick,’ she said, and showed the correct position for them.

Whether it was psychological or they really did work, Naomi couldn’t be sure, but within minutes of the maid leaving she felt a little better. At least well enough to carry on unpacking. She stood up and stared for a moment out of one of the twin portholes at the darkening ocean. Then she turned away, the sight of the waves bringing her queasiness straight back.

John turned his attention again to his laptop. They had a rule when they travelled together: Naomi unpacked and John kept out of the way. He was the world’s worst packer and an even worse unpacker. Naomi stared despairingly at the contents of his suitcase strewn all around him after his search for the adaptor. Some of his clothes were on the counterpane, some were tossed over an armchair and some lay on the floor. John peered closely at his screen, oblivious to the chaos he had caused around him.

Naomi grinned, scooping up a cluster of his ties, and shook her head. There wasn’t any point in getting angry.

John fiddled with his new wristbands and touched the patch that he had stuck behind his ear, not feeling any appreciable change in his nausea. Trying to ignore the motion of the ship, he focused on the chess game he was playing with a man called Gus Santiano, whom he’d met in a chess chatroom, and who lived in Brisbane, Australia.

He had been playing with this man for the past couple of years. They’d never met outside of cyberspace and John didn’t even know what his opponent looked like. The Aussie played mean chess, but recently he’d been taking longer and longer between moves, prolonging a hopeless position from which there was no possible coming back, for no other reason than sheer cussedness, and John, getting bored, was starting to think about finding a new opponent. Now the man had made yet another pointless move.

‘Sod you, Mr Santiano.’

John had the man in check – he was a queen, both bishops and a rook down, he didn’t have a prayer – so why the hell not just resign and have done with it? He typed out an email suggesting this, then connected his cellphone to his computer to send it. But there was no carrier signal.

Too far out to sea, he realized. There was a phone by the bed that had a satellite link to the mainland, but at nine dollars a minute, according to the instruction tag, it was too expensive. Gus Santiano would just have to wait in suspense.

He closed the chess file, and opened his email inbox to start working through the dozens of messages he’d downloaded this morning but had not yet had a chance to read, feeling panicky about how he was going to send and receive mail if they were going to remain out of cellphone range for the next month. At the University of Southern California, where he was based and ran his research laboratory, he received an average of one hundred and fifty emails a day. Today’s intake was closer to two hundred.

‘This is amazing, darling! Do you remember reading this?’

John looked up and saw she had the brochure open. ‘I was going to read it again in a minute.’

‘They have only twenty private cabins for
clients
. That’s a nice euphemism. Nice to know we’re
clients
, not
patients
.’ She read on. ‘The ship used to take five hundred passengers, now the two main decks where the cabins were are completely taken up with computers. They have
five hundred
supercomputers on board! That’s awesome! Why do they need so much computing power?’

‘Genetics requires massive number crunching. That’s part of what we’re paying for. Let me see.’

She handed him the brochure. He looked at a photograph of a long, narrow bank of blue computer casings, with a solitary technician dressed in white, checking something on a monitor. Then he flicked to the start of the brochure, and stared at the photograph he recognized instantly from the scientist’s website, from the interviews with him on television and from the numerous pictures of him that had appeared both in the scientific and the popular press. Then, although he knew most of it already, he scanned the scientist’s biography.

Dr Leo Dettore had been a child prodigy. Graduating magna cum laude in biology from MIT at sixteen, he then did a combined PhD MD at Stanford University, followed by biotechnology postdoctoral research at USC and then the Pasteur Institute in France, before identifying and patenting a modification of a crucial enzyme that allowed efficient high-fidelity replication of genes that made the polymerase chain reaction obsolete, and, which made him a billionaire, and for which he was made a MacArthur Fellow, and offered a Nobel Prize he would not accept, upsetting the scientific community by saying he believed all prizes were tarnished by politics.

The maverick geneticist had further upset the medical establishment by being one of the first people to start patenting human genes, and was actively battling the legislation that had subsequently reversed patents on them.

Leo Dettore was among the richest scientists in the world at this moment, and arguably the most controversial. Pilloried by religious leaders across the United States and many other countries, disbarred from practising medicine in the United States after he had publicly admitted to genetic experiments on embryos that had subsequently gone to term, he was unshakeable in his beliefs.

And he was knocking on their cabin door.

Naomi opened the door to be greeted by a tall man holding a manila envelope and wearing the white jumpsuit and plimsolls that seemed to be the ship’s standard uniform. Recognizing him instantly, John stood up.

He was surprised at just how imposing the geneticist was in the flesh, far taller than he had imagined, a good head higher than himself, six-foot-six at least. He recognized the voice also, the disarming but assertive Southern Californian accent, from the phone conversations they had had in recent months.

‘Dr Klaesson? Mrs Klaesson? I’m Leo Dettore. Hope I’m not disturbing you folks!’

The man to whom they had handed over just about every cent they had in the world, plus one hundred and fifty thousand dollars they didn’t, gave Naomi’s hand a firm, unhurried shake, fixing her eyes with his own, which were a soft grey colour, sharp and alert and sparkling with warmth. She mustered a smile back, shooting a fleeting, horrified glance at the mess of clothes all around John, desperately wishing she’d had a chance to tidy up. ‘No, you’re not disturbing us at all. Come in,’ she said.

‘Just wanted to swing by and introduce myself, and give you a bunch of stuff to read.’ The geneticist had to duck his head as he entered the cabin. ‘Great to meet you in person at last, Dr Klaesson.’

‘And you too, Dr Dettore.’

Dettore’s grip was strong, taking charge of the handshake the way he clearly took charge of everything else. John felt a moment of awkwardness between them. Dettore seemed to be signalling something in his smile, as if there was some secret pact between the two men. Perhaps an implied agreement between two scientists who understood a whole lot more what this was about than Naomi possibly could.

Except that was not the way John ever intended it should be. He and Naomi had made this decision together from day one, eyes wide open, equal partners. There was nothing he would hide from her and nothing he would twist or distort that he presented to her. Period.

Lean and tanned, with distinguished Latin looks, Leo Dettore exuded confidence and charm. His teeth were perfect, he had great hair, dark and luxuriant, swept immaculately back and tinged with elegant silver streaks at the temples. And although sixty-two years old, he could easily have passed for someone a good decade younger.

Naomi watched him carefully, looking for any chinks in his facade, trying to read this stranger to whom they were effectively entrusting their entire future, studying his face, his body language. Her instant impression was one of disappointment. He had that aura, she had noticed in her work in public relations, that only the very rich and very successful had; some almost indefinable quality that great wealth alone seemed able to buy. He looked too slick, too mediagenic, too much like a White House candidate purring for votes, too much like a captain of industry schmoozing a shareholders’ meeting. But oddly, she found the more she looked at him, the more her confidence in him grew. Despite everything, there seemed something genuine about him, as well.

She noticed his hands. He had fine fingers. Not a politician’s, nor a businessman’s, but true surgeon’s fingers, long, hairy, with immaculate nails. She liked his voice, also, finding it sincere and calming. And there was something reassuring about his sheer physical presence. Then she reminded herself, as she had done so often these past weeks, that only a couple of months ago, beneath a photograph of Leo Dettore’s face, the front cover of
Time
magazine had borne the question,
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY FRANKENSTEIN
?

‘You know,’ Dettore said, ‘I’m actually really intrigued by your work, Dr Klaesson – maybe we can talk about it some time over the next few days. I read that paper you published in
Nature
a few months back – was it the February issue?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘The
virtual dog
genes. Fascinating work.’

‘It was a big experiment,’ John said. ‘It took nearly four years.’

John had developed a computer simulation showing the evolution of a dog for one thousand generations into the future, using a set of selectors.

‘And your conclusion was that they have become so linked with humans that as we evolve the dogs will evolve too. In effect they will grow smarter as man’s domination of the planet increases. I liked that. I thought that was ingenious thinking.’

John was flattered that a scientist of Dettore’s eminence should have read his work, let alone praise it. ‘It was really the development of a few key algorithms devoted to how overcoming epistasis is the rate-limiting step in adaptation,’ he replied, modestly.

‘And you haven’t yet run a simulation on how man will evolve over the next thousand generations?’

‘That’s a whole new set of parameters. Apart from the challenge of creating the program, there isn’t that kind of computing power available for academic research at USC. I—’

Interrupting him, Dettore said, ‘I think we should talk about that. I’d be interested in giving a donation, if that would drive it forward?’

‘I’d be happy to talk about it,’ John said, excited by the thought that funding from Dettore could make a difference to his research work, but not wanting to get sidetracked at this moment. On this ship it was Naomi who was important, not his work.