Life (58 page)

Ramone cocked her head and narrowed her eyes. “I don’t think so! I flatter myself,” she added with a glint of resentment, “that I’m going to be mentioned in biographies.”

“Knock it off, Ramone. If you know about my claim to fame, then you must know that I’ve been trashed. Fired by my university; denounced as a nutcase. So much for that.”

Ramone drew out a battered dayglo tobacco tin and a zippo from the pockets of a jacket too heavy for the season. “Shall I skin up? Why are you here?”

“Please. I’ve run away from home.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Spence is having an affair with his illustrator.”

“His illustrator? Huh? Oh, yeah, I know. The kiddy books. I’ve heard of them. The bastard,” said Ramone, looking pleased. “What’s her name? What’s she like?”

“Her name’s Meret, like the surrealist woman, Meret Oppenheim. Her father’s called Godfrey Hazelwood, a well known painter in his day, but she’s never gone in for what,” Anna managed not to look at the surgical table, “is known as pure art. She’s small, dainty, and very feminine. She has long red-gold hair, green eyes, and the sweetest smile.”

“D’you want me to get rid of her for you? Shall I kidnap her and torture her in a deserted house?”

“No need for that.” Anna took the joint, and drew on it gratefully. “She’s married to Charles Craft.”

“She
isn’t!
” Ramone cackled. “Charles Craft! What a fate, hahaha. Small world!”

“Isn’t it.”

Anna felt she had to make some kind of declaration, after coming all this way, but she couldn’t decide what form should it take.
Here I am. Do I stay or do I go?
“How are you, anyway? What have you been doing, since you gave up being a feminist?”

“Oh God,” said Ramone, curling her chimpanzee lip. “The feminists!”

“Lesbians, bitter housewives, and fat people,” recollected Anna, with a grin. “I don’t think you’re going to eat lunch in that town again.”

“Hahaha, I’d rather starve.” Ramone looked worried. “I did qualify the lesbians.”

“Ye-uh. You made some bullshit disclaimer that you were trashing only an unaware, full-of-shit, sexist kind of lesbian. I don’t believe the targeted group was fooled.”

“Umm… Oh well, I don’t care.” Ramone flicked ash across one of the room’s beautiful pale fur rugs. “I’m flattered you’ve been committing my press-releases to memory. I tried to read a paper of yours once…the bits in English.” She laughed. “You know what, Anna? When we first met, and I ranted about the disgusting way post-liberation women behave? Freed slaves, no political perspective, nothing but groveling, simpering opportunism. I was right, but I was fucking wrong about them being helpless. They’re everywhere. Especially over here. They’ve got no interest in leaving gender roles behind. They are out and proud shameless female supremacists, and I don’t
like
them. I used to say, women ought to be the Goths and Vandals, sweeping in to rape and pillage. Now, that’s exactly what they’re doing: and the joke’s on me.”

“At least you haven’t lost your sense of humor. I dunno, the rape and pillage has never worked for me. I’m as screwed as ever a woman scientist was.”

“Well, maybe.” Ramone gave Anna another curious look. “Since you’re here, you can explain to me what the fuss is about. As far as I get it, in about fifty or a hundred years or something, all human beings will have two X chromosomes. But about fifty percent of these human beings will be physically male and fertile, and about the other fifty per cent female, likewise. So what is so exciting about that?”

“Umm…”

“It’s bullshit, isn’t it? Nothing’s going to change.”

“Well, hmm… How much can you follow, if I try to explain? I suppose you know that in male mammals, the X and the Y chromosome don’t exchange genetic material much, because they don’t match up well. Whereas all other chromosome pairs reshuffle their genetic traits?”

Ramone rolled her eyes. “Everyone knows that. They bloody do now, anyway. I bet mammalian sex genetics is a big topic in Ulan Bator this season.”

“What the TY viroid did was to snip a specific piece out of the Y and paste it into a specific site on the X, in a human male. Once this has happened, and been inherited, the X and the Y start to reshuffle, and in a generation or two, the Y becomes indistinguishable from a second X, with male-determining genes. But there are male-specific genes on the normal X also, anyway… Well, there’s a process called X-inactivation, to prevent a female animal—she has two Xs, remember—from getting a double dose of X gene expression, in loci where that would be damaging or lethal. The TY transformation interferes with this, in tiny but important ways. Sometimes the results will be lethal, so the pregnancy fails. Sometimes there’ll be lesser effects. This is already happening, because TY has been around longer than I thought when I first found it: it was in the germ cells, in our generation. It’s happening, and it will get worse before it gets better.”

“So it makes getting pregnant and staying pregnant more difficult. Is this a bad thing?”

“Everyone’s already got it. I don’t know if it’s a bad thing,” said Anna softly, “but TY is going to cause a lot of heartbreak.”

“But the media storm says it could be the end of the line for genetically-determined patriarchy! Men become women with dicks!”

“Or women become men with tits. You can make the words do anything you like.”

“Holy shit,” Ramone began, absentmindedly, to roll another joint. “But if this is so momentous, how come it was so difficult for other scientists to see it?”

“Because the original transfer involves a really tiny number of bases, in a non-coding sequence and because that’s what molecular biology is like. It’s spooky. Different people can make different things work, or can’t make them work. You can get different batches of chemicals, different culture media, that make things appear and disappear. You have to use the right protocol and the right chemicals to make the original TY effect visible. As for what happened after that, I don’t know. We did a survey, a confidential survey on samples from all over the world, and we found the TY viroid everywhere we looked. I don’t know why this result is in doubt or why the evidence is apparently invisible except to me and the poor sods on my team—”

“It isn’t invisible anymore.”

“What?”

“You’ve been offline for a while, haven’t you? Two weeks ago, one of the major US genetech companies confessed they already knew about your epidemic.”

“Really!”

“It gets better,” Ramone grinned ghoulishly. “They’ve been trying to correct the damage, which they took to be an IVF problem. They killed a few thousand proto-rich-kid cell-masses, before they gave up. Anyway, since then, other labs have broken ranks. The Oz team is dead in the water, and TY is out and proud.” She went on rolling the joint, smirking at Anna’s expression. “But now they’re saying the death of the male chromosome isn’t going to happen, because everything depends on this virus, and this virus is going to mutate and become harmless.”

“No.”

“The virus isn’t going to mutate?”

“Viroid. That’s not the way it works, that’s the old way of looking at things. The TY viroid isn’t a disease What’s happening is a situation of the Aether.”

“Excuse me?”

“This is where I get down from the fence. This is my idea, mine and Clare Gresley’s. Listen. For the last many years geneticists have been discovering that life is one, that DNA is common to all living things and what’s more, the same genes do the same things in widely divergent species. That’s common knowledge: you can cut an “and” from the middle of a passage in a novel, paste it into a science text, and it will do the same job. What TY gives us is experimental proof of another idea, which has been growing but has been suppressed: that the language in the textbook and in the novel are in conversation with each other
right now.
That the things we call species aren’t separate—they are part of a continuous fabric; that the phenomenon we call evolution is not a competition between organisms—it’s a co-operative effort, orchestrated by tiny particles going about their own concerns. And they do not respect our artificial boundaries. Our Darwinism is as observably true and fundamentally dumb as saying the sun goes round the earth… That’s what’s the big deal. Okay, now the viroid… You know how a genetic “disease” doesn’t have to be inherited? You can get, say, cystic fibrosis or a vulnerability to breast cancer from having any one of a number of happenstance glitches or unlucky combinations of glitches—?”

“Um, yeah—” said Ramone, as one does to Anna’s explanations.

“The TY viroid is a little like that. It was an accident waiting to happen, nested in the aether, which is roughly analogous to the genome of ‘Life on Earth.’ It’s not going to go away. It’s not a disease; it’s something that was bound to happen.” Anna sighed… “It’s a devastating change for life science. It means rewriting everything, from a completely different perspective. It’s an awful prospect. And I’m the fool who rushed in, thinking people would be delighted to have their house torn down—”

Ramone shook her head. “Well okay. Web of life, all connected, cool. It’ll never sell. The death of the male chromosome is so much sexier, hahaha.” A thought struck her, or she pretended it had just struck her. “Hey, what about us? Are we affected?”

“I don’t know about you. I am, first generation.”

“What about Spence?”

“Yes. I told you. Nearly everyone is ‘infected’ by now.”

“Have you told him?”

“Nah. It would only piss him off. You know how he hates to be like everybody else.”

Ramone giggled.

“So there you go. It didn’t stop him falling for the red-headed babe.”

“I noticed,” agreed Anna. “I take comfort in that. He may have humiliated me, but at least I know that genetic determinism is still a crock. Lovers will betray each other same as always, no matter how our chromosomes get bent out of shape.” She was ashamed of having taken a sample without Spence’s knowledge, but in those last months it had seemed as if all rules had been suspended.

“Hey, something funny. Charles Craft is a full XX. I nicked a sample from him, too.”

“So, basically, I was right. Nothing’s going to change,” said Ramone, when she’d finished laughing. Anna gazed at the smoke that rose delicately towards the ceiling.

“Oh no,” breathed Ramone. “Oh, don’t tell me there’s
more!
”

“I think,” said Anna slowly, “that human sexuality will be changed. This thing is not a fashionable fad, affecting only a miniscule number of people rich enough to have their kids’ genes messed about with: it’s bound to change everything, some way or other. And I think it doesn’t matter. That’s how I felt a few weeks ago; that’s how I feel again now. In the liberal world we already live as if people can choose at whim whether to take on a ‘male’ or ‘female’ lifestyle. In nature, before any of this started, many people were sexual mosaics, whether they knew it or not. In time, TY may create a situation where there are no genetic traits exclusive to ‘men’ or ‘women’: when sexual difference is in the individual, not a case of belonging to one half of the species or the other. Will that be a lot different from the way we are now? I don’t know. Frankly, I’m more concerned about whether I can get back over the Atlantic without the plane falling out of the sky. Or whether the famine in Central Asia is going to get worse. And will the bad guys in Southeast Asia start using nuclear weapons? Do you realize our Daz, the World’s Most Gorgeous Malaysian, is probably already dead?”

“She’s supposed to be alive, in incommunicado detention.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“I know what you mean,” said Ramone, chastened and low. “It’s like the fall of the Roman Empire. This leftover we call the liberal world is irrelevant, the war zones are the shape of things to come, and the one thing you don’t want to be in a war zone or an armed camp is any kind of woman… And I used to say that too.” She reached into her jacket and brought out a worn, blue rabbit and hugged it, mugging at Anna owlishly over the toy’s battered ears. “Maybe it’s all part of the same thing. All part of the Transferred Y phase transition.”

“Maybe it is. Hi, Pele. Nice to see you. I’m glad you’re still around.”

“Pele will always be around.”

How empty the big room seemed, and the two of them like mice in a giant’s kitchen. Ramone sighed. “Oh, well. Probably none of it will happen. Your sexual revolution viroid will fizzle out, and so-called civilization will go limping on. Anna, changing the subject because I’m getting bored, if I was to let you get away with it you would live here twenty years, wouldn’t you, and never mention the equipment.”

“It’s your business,” said Anna.

“Why can’t you accept that I happen to like weird sex. It is what I enjoy.”

“What about the Canadian girl, who ended up in the nuthouse? Is that true?”

Ramone scowled. “She’ll be in and out of nuthouses all her life. We didn’t do her any damage; I don’t care if you believe me.”

Anna looked, deliberately, from the surgical table and its tall theater lights, to the medieval torture contraption that hung from Ramone’s bedroom wall. “What I see, I’m sorry, but what I see is complicated ways to express self-loathing.”