Intrusion (21 page)

Geena nodded. ‘Milk, no sugar, thanks.’

Hugh went to the kitchen, brewed up a pot, called to Ashid, then carried two mugs through to the front room. He dragged up a trestle and another stool, and sat down.

‘Thanks.’

They sipped for a moment.

‘So … what’s this about?’

‘Um,’ said Geena. She looked around, as if for inspiration, or as if she was checking for cameras. There weren’t any. Hugh felt uneasy. He hadn’t been alone with a woman or child in an unsurveilled, unrecorded room since … Lewis, he guessed. At least Ashid was in earshot. Well, probably not, the sound of the radio almost certainly drowned their conversation out, but it was the principle. Ashid was in earshot of a scream, at least.

‘It’s funny,’ she said. ‘I’ve thought and thought about this, and now I’m here I feel, uh … ’

‘Unprepared?’ Hugh prompted.

Geena laughed, some tension dissipating. ‘Yes!’

She put the mug down on the trestle and placed her hands on her knees.

‘Tell me, Mr Morrison, is there anything
unusual
about your vision?’

‘Twenty-twenty, last time I got it checked,’ said Hugh.

What was this about? Glasses? Laser eye surgery?

‘I don’t necessarily mean your acuity,’ she said, with unnerving precision. ‘I mean … have you ever noticed that you see things a little differently from other people?’

Hugh warmed his hands around the mug. He felt cold all of a sudden. This wasn’t about marketing.

‘If you’ve looked me up,’ he said carefully, ‘you’ll know I went to university. I did a year of philosophy, and if I remember right, that’s one of the classic hard questions. Qualia, isn’t that it?’

‘Yes, but that wasn’t my question.’

‘Perhaps you should start again,’ said Hugh.

‘Yes, indeed,’ said Geena. She took a deep breath. ‘Has your wife ever mentioned a woman called Maya?’

Hugh blinked. ‘She may have done.’

Some minor incident at the nursery gate, he recollected. Hope had laughed it off, telling him very little, but he’d noticed that she’d got the bee in her bonnet about the Labour Party shortly afterwards. He’d worried, but he hadn’t pried.

‘Oh, good. Maya’s a friend of mine. She thought she could help, uh, Hope, and I think she did, for a bit, but I’ve come up with something that can help you in a big way.’

‘What makes you think we need any help? What’s this about? Are you trying to sell us something?’

‘What?’ She sounded baffled.

‘Sociology research. Sure you don’t mean market research?’

‘No, no, I really am … I’m a postgrad at Brunel, you know, in Uxbridge? And I’m doing research at SynBioTech, in Hayes.’

‘I thought you said sociology.’

‘STS … sorry, science and technology studies. I sit in on a lab and observe the engineers.’

‘Oh,’ said Hugh, ‘I know about all that. Like they’re a strange tribe.’

‘Like they’re a strange tribe,’ she said, in the tone of someone who’d heard it before.

‘And you pretend you don’t know if science works or not, yeah?’

‘Please don’t tell me the one about jumping out of a window,’ Geena said.

Hugh had been about to. He felt abashed.

‘I suppose it’s like having an unusual name,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Like Hope Abendorf.’

Hugh spluttered tea. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.

‘Pardon me,’ he said. ‘OK. One more time: can you please tell me what all this is about?’

She told him how she’d come across Hope’s name and predicament, and how her friend Maya had tried to help. He listened, with an uneasy feeling of having been watched from behind.

And then she looked away and looked back and said:

‘One thing about the fix that I know and most people don’t, Mr Morrison … there is a basis for exemption apart from the conscience clause.’

‘What!’

‘It’s buried in the miscellaneous administrative provisions, not in the primary legislation. Even the recent rulings don’t change it, they can’t because, well’ – she smiled here – ‘it’s unexpressed, so to speak. I mean, the legislation was drafted with one eye on the possibility – which the government was publicly denying at the time – that some day it might become compulsory. That’s why they built in exemptions in the first place. The main way the fix works is by correcting the expression of deleterious genes, right? It turns genes on or off, depending. Sometimes it repairs a stretch of code. It doesn’t really add or take away anything. That’s one reason why it’s acceptable even to the bloody Catholics.’

His eyebrow twitched at that, and his gaze flickered to the cross on her neck, but he just nodded.

‘So,’ Geena went on, ‘this usually involves changing a mutant allele back to the wild type. But there are complications. You know about sickle-cell anaemia?’

‘Sure, that’s the one that’s bad for you in some ways but protects you from malaria. Does the fix leave that one in, then?’

‘Good grief, no! It’s a very painful condition, and it doesn’t have any advantages now even in Africa. But some young hotshot in the Lords who was on the committee that drafted all the amendments had had a smattering of biology education, and he was quite exercised on this point. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and all that. So he got a line or two stuck in that stated that a good medical reason for not taking – or more to the point, because it wasn’t compulsory
then, not prescribing – the fix would be if you could show that your genome had a
beneficial
mutation.’

‘But how could you show that? How could you know?’

‘Well, exactly. In practice it would be vanishingly rare anyway. So after a bit of to-and-fro, their Lordships decided to let him have his way, assuming no doubt that this was’ – she smiled again – ‘the legislative equivalent of non-coding DNA. It’s certainly never been publicised, probably because they don’t want people coming up with nonsense claims about their beneficial mutations. Of course, people who would do that are the same people who’d in any case be exempt on the grounds of some wacky religion, so it all comes out in the wash.’

She cocked her head to one side and smiled at him, as if waiting for applause.

‘But
you
know this,’ he said, ‘because you learned it in sociology of science, or something?’

‘No, Mr Morrison. I actually found this out a couple of weeks ago, when I asked Maya to look for something like it in the Act and the administrative provisions. I just
knew
there had to be an allowance for rare but beneficial mutations. Well, I didn’t know, but I guessed. And the reason I was looking is’ – she flung out an arm, ta-da – ‘I found that you and your son have a possibly beneficial mutation.’

‘How did you find out?’

Geena looked uneasy. ‘Um, I ran some scanning programs on your genome sequences.’

‘I could figure that out for myself. You’re not supposed to do that, are you?’

‘Uh, no, but … ’

‘What I mean is, how do you know it’s beneficial?’

Geena put her empty mug down on the trestle and began waving her arms around. ‘Well, the way syn bio works is they run sims of how a gene translates into a protein; you can actually see the exact cascade, and you can predict the properties of that protein.’

‘I know that, too,’ said Hugh. He did some hand-waving of his own, at the cornices. ‘New wood. I work with it. I read the specs.’

‘Of course. I should have known. Anyway. The mutation I found – there were lots, of course, everybody has some, but they were nearly all neutral, and anyway they were already well documented, but this one wasn’t in any of the databases. It’s in the genes for the retina. Specifically, the one for rhodopsin, that’s one of the rod-and-cone components. This gene results in a rhodopsin variant that has greater sensitivity to light, including outside the visible spectrum. So – how’s your night vision, Mr Morrison?’

Hugh shrugged. ‘Good, I suppose. Can’t say I’ve ever noticed any difference from other people’s, though.’

Geena smiled. ‘Like you said, it’s a hard problem. But there must be ways of objectively testing for that, and for other sensitivities – I suspect you may be able to see a bit into the ultraviolet, for example. In any case, you have a perfect get-out card to give your wife. She doesn’t have to take the fix, and she doesn’t need to plead conscience.’

‘But she doesn’t have the mutation.’

‘No, but you do, and your son does. Who’s to say the next baby won’t?’

‘Well, there’s one problem right there,’ said Hugh. ‘The chances are fifty-fifty the baby won’t have it, and I don’t see any way of proving it one way or the other without some kind of intrusive sampling, which I don’t think Hope would go for. In fact, you can take it from me, she wouldn’t. I think it’s her squick about that sort of thing that’s behind this whole objection she has to the fix.’

‘That doesn’t matter,’ said Geena. ‘The wording of the provision is quite clear. It just has to be one of the parents, and therefore a possibility in the offspring.’

Hugh took a couple of steps back and rubbed his eyebrows, eyes closed tight behind his hand. Patches of false colour swirled and exploded like fireworks, behind a fading after-image of the big bay window. He wondered how much, if anything, to admit. It was only a week since he’d told it all to Hope. He didn’t feel like going through it all again with a total stranger. Come to think of it, he hadn’t told Hope everything … Maybe he should have. He felt guilty about that.

Then another point struck him with such force that he blurted it out.

‘Wait a minute!’ he said. ‘The gene’s recessive!’

‘What?’ Geena shook her head. ‘I didn’t say that. It must be a dominant allele, if it’s not in one parent but still shows up in the child.’ She frowned. ‘Do you know about this gene already?’

Hugh felt like kicking himself. He covered his confusion with a sheepish grin.

‘Sorry, just a conclusion I jumped to. I was thinking about sight, and – ah, forget it.’

‘No, no,’ Geena insisted, leaning forward on the stool. ‘What?’

‘It’s … kind of embarrassing.’

Geena made a show of peering around, hand cupped behind her ear. ‘Nobody’s listening, Mr Morrison. Except me, and I’m a scientist.’

‘That’s just it,’ said Hugh. ‘That’s why it’s embarrassing. It’s about a … superstition. Well, a traditional belief.’

‘I can cope with hearing about
traditional beliefs
, Mr Morrison.’

‘Well … where I come from, in the Highlands, there’s a traditional belief in second sight. It covers what the old parapsychologists used to call remote viewing and precognition. Except it’s pretty much involuntary. Maybe other things too, like, uh, seeing ghosts or … or the like.’ Hugh grimaced. ‘Runs in families, but in odd patterns. Skips generations, that sort of thing. When I was a callow lad, I sort of figured that the patterns were like those for a recessive gene. That’s all.’

‘Are you telling me
you
have this second sight?’ Geena sounded excited.

‘Not exactly, no.’ He shrugged. ‘Just … a speculation, is all.’

Geena slid off the stool and stepped towards him. Eyes bright, the short black hair that framed her face all aquiver.

‘Have you had any experiences that this might help explain?’

Hugh backed away, towards the door. ‘No!’

He could hear the lie himself, in the vehemence of his denial.

‘Why don’t you want to talk about it?’

‘Well, you know, it’s all hearsay. Old wives’ tales. Village rumours. Playground tittle-tattle. And it can be very damaging.’

‘Damaging? How?’

This was the bit he hadn’t even told to Hope. He nerved himself to spit it out.

‘It can lead to accusations of witchcraft.’

‘Witchcraft?’ Geena laughed in his face.

His forearms came up and his hands clawed, as if to grab her shoulders and shake her.

‘This is no laughing matter, dammit!’

He was almost shouting. He stepped back at the same moment as she recoiled from him. He took a deep breath and let his arms hang down. She looked scared.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’

‘No, I’m sorry,’ said Geena. ‘I had no idea you were so serious about it. Is it something to do with the churches up there … what do they call them, the Wee Frees or something?’

‘Not exactly,’ said Hugh. ‘It’s a bit of that and something else. The population of Lewis – that’s the island I’m from – has more or less doubled this century, after declining for a very long time. Mostly because of the wind farms and immigration, but that in itself helps to retain the native population, with jobs and opportunities and so on. And just when this turnaround was beginning – way before the wind farms, towards the end of the last century – a lot of the incomers were kind of New Age types, people who wanted to get away from the cities and open a wee craft business or start an organic farm or whatever. Some
of them were hippies, pagans, that kind of thing. Big families, kids running wild, all that. One consequence was a child abuse scandal that got fuelled by local suspicions on the part of those Wee Frees you mentioned about anyone who wasn’t a good Christian, let alone people who openly called
themselves
pagans and witches. Whatever the details of the original case – it may have been open-and-shut for all I know, it was many years ago – that kind of thing can rankle for generations. Some people in the generation
after
those pagans and witches found a way of hitting back, and a very nasty, underhand way it was too. They kept an ear to the ground for rumours of the second sight, and passed anonymous tip-offs to social services about anyone who was said to have it. On the grounds, you see, that this was an occult practice and therefore a risk indicator for satanic child abuse. They witch-hunted the locals
right back
. And of course in wee close-knit communities like that, just getting investigated is a disgrace, even if there’s nothing in it.’