Life (15 page)

For the rest of her life, whenever she heard of some woman’s career blighted by sexual harassment, or a girl raped by a man who really did not feel that he was doing wrong, she would have to remember that
she,
Anna Anaconda, was partly to blame.

It was Dr Russell who had managed to get her taken on at Parentis: tender-hearted Seraphina, who could not understand what had gone wrong, but would not desert her protégée. The director of this lab, KM Nirmal, was an old friend of hers. He would be a good supervisor, an inspirational mentor, someone who would recognize Anna’s quality.

Anna had let it all happen. She knew that she was better off than she deserved to be. Her studentship was registered with Leeds university, the funding was reliable, the work involved skills that would stand her in good stead. She lived with a cheery, overweight staff nurse called Roz Brown, who needed a lodger to help pay her mortgage. Roz had pastel-sweater tendencies, a little girl of five called Shannon, and a Rugby playing boyfriend whose voice and presence made Anna cringe. But it was all right. Anna babysat Shannon, tried to save the lives of the reduced-to-clear azaleas that stood in pots on the damp back patio, and taught Roz to cook the food of well-managed poverty. At weekends she went home to Manchester, if she wasn’t needed in the lab. She had slightly more money than if she’d been investigating
solanum succulentum.
She could be clear of debt in five or six years, with care.

KM Nirmal—always Nirmal to his juniors and colleagues—was a stick-limbed individual with small hard eyes, wire-rimmed spectacles, fragile brown skin stretched tightly over his facial bones, and an almost lipless mouth between two deep grooves, like a capital H inscribed below his beak of a nose. He looked like Gandhi’s mummy and had so far shown no sign of being inspirational. At the weekly meetings, when Anna reported on her task, he would nod and make some bland remark and proceed at once to discuss other work. That was fine by Anna. The Parentis lab stood in a science park on the outskirts of Leeds. Through the windows of the sequencing lab, beyond the slabs of car-park concrete and industrial-unit walls, cloud shadows strode over the Pennines. When she looked out, to rest her eyes, the open upland sky was like a promise of freedom. One day, this would be over. One day, she might escape and get back on track.

Her work on the samples was not easy, because no matter how repetitive and automated it was, you still had to give it your full attention, hour by hour. At least, since nobody was in a hurry for her results, she could amuse herself by being as meticulous as she liked. She worked alone. When she first found her anomaly—a sequence common to the ancient Provencal DNA and to the gorilla DNA she was using as a control, that ought to hybridize with the modern Frenchmen but refused to do so—she thought she was imagining things: but it wouldn’t go away. She became a little obsessed. At the weekly meetings she said nothing: it was no problem if she spent a little time on a side issue. Anna Anaconda could always work harder. She found ways to fine-tune the pseudogene sequencing and spent the hours she saved tinkering with her puzzle. Finally she decided to get a second opinion from Sonia Blanchard, an older woman who had tried (as far as Anna could be mothered) to take the postgrad under her wing.

Sonia was a middle-aged woman who’d dropped out to bring up her children and returned to work with an easy-going attitude. She and her minions reared clone mice from embryos that had been injected with strange genes; killed them, squashed them, and spun them; extracted their eggs and sperm, gouged fresh embryos from their bellies, snipped away their testicles, all in the cause of a pharmacopoeia of cures for human infertility. The mice appeared to bear her no ill will. They liked Sonia. They seemed to listen for her voice; they were more relaxed and more active when she was in their lab.

Anna found her standing dreamily by the mouse cages, while an xx sry mouse called Harry—a transgenic female, induced to develop as an infertile male—climbed and whiskered busily between her gloved hands.

“Sonia, I’ve got a problem with my normal men.”

“Surprise me,” drawled Sonia.

“Would you have a look?”

“What would you say,” asked Sonia ruminatively, without moving, “if someone offered to turn you into a man? Temporarily, no operations, everything functional. Just for a week or two, so you could try out the equipment.”

“It sounds like a computer game. I’d say no thanks.”

“Our Harry likes it fine, don’t you love? She gives her little kit a good work-out. All to no avail, eh? She’s shooting blanks, poor lass.” The mouse clung to Sonia’s fingers, berry eyes gleaming. “Some day soon, we’ll be able to make a Harry with fertile sperm. Next thing, we’ll be injecting fertility into any male customer that still has the bits, and we won’t even need to work out what his problem was… There’s no such thing as normal, Anna. You ought to know that. Variation’s something you have to filter out: deletions, damage, bases knocked off, stuck together wrong way round, extra ones tacked on. Do you really want me to suit up?”

Spermatogenesis Factor, SGF, was the main event in Nirmal’s lab: Anna’s project was boring. Ordinarily, she’d have let it go. But her curiosity had been roused.

“I know about random variation. This is
the same
variation, over and over again.”

Sonia dumped Harry back in her cage. “Let’s have a look.”

Anti-contamination precautions in Nirmal’s lab were rigorous. Sonia dressed to match Anna, in a clean room suit, mask, gloves, and goggles.

“Tell me what I’m supposed to be looking for.”

“It’s here. You can’t get the modern sample to line up with the gorilla and the ancient Provencal DNA. Something’s missing. I’ve been getting the same result, a missing chunk of bases in the same location, in nearly every modern sample.”

“Mmm. Could be you’ve run into a local population thing, but it’s not likely. Men are the same the world over, did your mother ever tell you? The Y’s a genetic fossil, owing to the pattern of sexual inheritance, it doesn’t get messed around much. Are you sure you’ve not been accidentally testing the same bugger over and over again?”

“The point of that French survey is that it’s individuals, each with a medical and familial profile. I’m sure as I can be. Now look at this. I think the missing bases have moved. They’ve shifted to the X chromosome. Okay, not so strange, you get illegitimate interchange between the X and the Y when they pair up for meiosis: a Y pseudogene might hybridize with part of the analogous functional X gene. But this isn’t in a gene sequence, and it’s weird to find the same chunk of Y moving to the same locale on the X, over and over again. What would do that?”

The two women stared at the glowing hieroglyphs.

“It’s that medieval DNA,” said Sonia. “I know Nirmal doesn’t trust the stuff. It’ll be contaminated?” She frowned, and looked at Anna suspiciously. “How’ve you done all this?” she demanded. “I thought you’d hardly started on the Huit Bories comparison.”

Anna blushed behind her mask. “I’ve speeded things up. I’ve improved the HPLC automation—”

“Wooee— Does Nirmal know you’ve been reprogramming his machines?”

“Oh yes. He helped me do it. We’re using a simpler algorithm—”

“Well, okay. Never mind your algorithm. Let’s have a closer look—”

“Could it be a transposon? Barbara McClintock says—”

“You’ve got Barbara McClintock on the brain.” Everyone knew about Anna and her vegetable fixation. She was close-mouthed on personal topics, always ready to talk about crop genetics. Barbara McClintock, the woman who had discovered—working on maize, long ago—that chunks of DNA could “jump” or switch around, moving from one chromosomal location to another (a concept that had led to such marvels as the sixty day tropical potato) was Anna’s idol. Sonia peered and then stood back.

“Is this relevant to your investigation?”

“Not exactly.”

“Then forget it. Put down what you were supposed to find here, you can get it from the Melbourne team’s sequencing. It doesn’t matter, Anna. Parentis is only doing the pure research bit for show. There’s nothing in it for infertility; it’s not your business.”

“Yes, but—”

Sonia scratched the back of her neck with a slick gloved finger. “I’m sure it’s an experimental artifact. Contamination. I wouldn’t your waste time over it.”

A few days later, when the two women were the last to leave at the end of a long evening’s work, Sonia came up to Anna with a fake and conscious smile. “Fancy a drink?”

They went to a pub called The Goldfish, which stood on the edge of the blasted heath of urban wilderness (supermarkets with bars on the windows, boarded up derelict houses) that surrounded the science park. Sonia chatted, telling funny stories that had reached her about the customers. The woman who brought her baby to have blue eye genes injected, genuinely believing the brown eyes flaw could easily be rectified. The other young “woman” who came along with her male partner and turned out when undressed to be physiologically male in every respect, which explained the infertility but left you wondering what went through two people’s heads…? The men, and they were not rare, who wanted more children but who clinically couldn’t be the fathers of the children they already had—

“I mean, how daft can you get? Imagine letting him pay for infertility investigation, without telling him the truth. But there you go. The biggest genetic factor in Human Assisted Reproduction is the gene for having more money than sense.”

“D’you think there’s really a problem?”

“What, you mean the infertility epidemic? Sperm count down? Nah. It’s market forces. All the people who used to accept the inevitable are out buying a solution, that’s what makes the statistics jump. Still, I’ve never had to worry about being infertile so I can’t talk. Must be a bastard; it obviously drives people potty.”

At the last moment Sonia came out with what she wanted to say. She had twice looked at her watch and declared that she would have to go, when she leaned over and put a hand on Anna’s arm. “Don’t cross Nirmal, love.”

Anna laughed. “I don’t cross anyone, I just get on with it.”

“No, I’m serious. He likes you. I’ve seen him watching you work and the way he treats you in the meetings. I’ve never seen him so interested and polite with a postgrad. But
don’t cross him,
because he won’t stand for it. D’you know what I mean?”

“I’m not sure I do.”

The crowd in front of the big screen football roared at a missed goal. Sonia automatically glanced that way, as she remarked casually: “I heard you were supposed to’ve got a brilliant first.”

Anna shrugged.

“But you didn’t because you had boyfriend trouble: and that was why you didn’t go into plant genetics, chasing up your blessed potato transposons.”

Anna thought she should practice gossiping about other people, to desensitize herself. She bit her lip and tried to look unconcerned.

“I’m not being funny, but it’s not a good idea to spend your whole time talking about some other area, as if the chief’s specialty doesn’t grab you. Concentrate on the work you’ve been given.” She shook her head, with a rueful, maternal smile. “You struck lucky, really love. If you’re ambitious, it’s probably better that you’re not in the same line as your boyfriend. Well, I could stay a bit, after all. Like another?”

“Sorry, I’m saving my pennies. I want to get out of debt.”

Sonia gave a hollow laugh.

Anna understood that she had been given a serious warning. But she was Anna Anaconda. If there was a problem, she would swallow it. She was incapable of leaving a puzzle unsolved.